Well, Jon, I find it ironic that you spend an entire article talking about "Open Media" while castigating the "Closed Media" for what? Talking about itself.
And what would you call a site like Themestream that lets anybody post anything they want and then pays them a dime a hit (during its 'preview'; will probably drop to two cents a hit afterward) for it? Open, because anyone can write for it? Closed, because it pays them by the popularity of what they write?
By and large, I think this article continues a trend I've already noted in your work of telling us what we already know. By and large, we're already net-savvy people, Jon. I think that many of the people who regularly bash you find your articles like this to be quite patronizing. --
Re:HERE HERE! Not an Intellectual Movie! Still FUN
on
Review: 'Titan A.E.'
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· Score: 2
Not all Hallmark Hall of Fame presentations are intellectual.
The 10th Kingdom, for example.
Too bad it won't play properly on DVD-ROM drives... --
Oh PAYPAL.. Another lamb ready for slaughter. How long before the expenses and fraud catch up with PayPal? Talk about a zero sum gain business. Speaking of "lets just throw some money down the toilet", how about dialpad.com, how long can that last?
Well, I don't know about Dialpad's revenue model, but they certain seem to get used a lot, and they own their own fiber-optic network so they're not paying premium phone rates to someone else for it...so they might just be doing all right after all.
But as for PayPal, I can tell you right now they must be making scads of money off the thing. PayPal's one of the most popular auction-payment services ever...which means a whole lot of money is passing through their coffers every day. Do you think they don't float interest off of that money?
Furthermore, they just introduced a "business account" system, where they provide additional services to those who want them, while taking up to 2.5% of those transactions. They were certainly attractive enough to be bought out by the X.com full-service Internet bank within just a few months of their creation.
Trust me on this--banks have little tricks of making money off of things that would cause you or I to scratch our heads. They wouldn't be providing this service if they didn't think it would make them a bundle. --
The e-literature website Mind's Eye has an interesting model. You have multiple ways to pay for a story, including buying it by credit card (their prices are quite reasonable; most short stories are 35-70 cents each) or reading it interspersed with banner ads. Their story-serving system is smart, too; no ad-view, no further content-loading. I hope that sites don't start using this tech in general; Mind's Eye's use of it is legitimate and one with which I cannot argue (they have to be paid for their content somehow; if you don't like banner ads, you can charge it), but if sites started thinking they were "entitled" to banner ad revenue, that could be a problem. --
I've heard that there is actually a mug-manufacturing company that will set up to sell mugs with logos of any website/webjournal/whathaveyou on it, and the webjournal owner takes a cut of the profit. I don't know the name or location just at the moment, but I know some of my journal-writing friends have been considering using it. (If someone knows who I'm talking about, tag it on in a follow-up?) --
PayPal just came out with a business upgrade to its account for people who want to use it, offering various additional gimmicks for a 1.9-2.5% transaction fee. Included among those gimmicks are the ability to integrate payment acceptance into websites. And you know, since there are no minimum transaction amounts with PayPal (you could pay as little as a penny if you wanted), I bet people would be willing to "tipclick". I know I'd rather pay Userfriendly or Sluggy Freelance a nickel of my own money than have to take the time to click a banner ad to help him out. (For that matter, Sluggy has been considering an ad-free paid subscription model in addition to its ad-studded regular one for those who want to cut the ads and help out at the same time.)
Now that I think about it, I sort of wish I could put a tipjar on some of my Themestream articles, like the one about Jon Katz, but I think that might be a violation of contract or something. But at least they pay me a dime a hit, and they don't seem to have any banner ads so far (I imagine they might add them once they get out of their trial period, though). (That's another way individual authors, at least, could make money off the web, I suppose...)
Another interesting new model built on similar ground to the Street Performers' Protocol is the Storytellers' Bowl, which is going to accept PayPal and publish stories on a supported-by-patron-donation basis. I'm really looking forward to its launch.
And by the way, for whoever wrote the copy quoted in the story blurb--Junkbuster isn't new; it's been around for several years at least. --
For an example of this, look at the site that certain members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Association are putting together, the Storytellers' Bowl. The idea is that pre-completed works will be published serially, each new installment coming out free for all to read, download, copy, pass around on Gnutella, etc. as soon as would-be readers have kicked in enough money. They'll be using the PayPal person-to-person payment system for contributions. It's being discussed now on an SFFnet newsgroup.
I personally think this is a keen idea, and I'm all afire to support it, especially since it's likely to result in more stuff from the Deed of Paksenarrion universe by Elizabeth Moon. --
Try checking the Sigma Designs news server, at news.sigmadesigns.com. I seem to recall seeing some mention of that, and that it was intended for computer monitor viewing, or something. --
There's actually a company called Rhinopoint that's doing something similar to this--paying people's ISP fees if they agree to answer a survey a month. Nationwide ISP Pro-USA is one of their partners in this, and I get my dialup internet access free as a result. (Good for all platforms--Windows, Mac, and Linux!) --
Don't forget the abortive copy-protected MP4 music format that some rap group tried releasing their music in a year or so ago. It didn't stand for anything at the time--they just meant it to be MP3 incremented by 1. --
Yes, I did watch it recently; I even wrote a lengthy review of it which can be found in the Internet Movie Database's listing for the film.
Lupin is called "Wolf" in the Streamline dub of the film because Monkey Punch never bothered to get permission from the Leblanc estate before creating his Lupin III character. He was called all sorts of odd things in the American translations of the '90s. But he was never called Agent Wolf...and he's back to Lupin (pronounced Loo-PAHN in the dub) in the Manga version. --
I've heard via Anime on DVD that "Urban Vision is DVD-bound with Vampire Hunter D sometime later this summer, and if sales go well on this big cult title it may give them the push to do more discs."
I don't know if that will include Streamline's dub or not, but it probably will include subtitles and the Japanese audio track, unless for some reason they couldn't get the rights. --
Re:Grave of the Fireflies / Hotaru no haka
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 2
Ironic that you should mention Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro in the same post; they were originally shown together in Japan as a double-feature. --
Re:You just don't understand...
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 2
"Agent Wolf"??? What anime have you been watching?
Castle of Cagliostro deals with the adventures of Arsène Lupin III, the grandson of the original Arsène Lupin (hero of the novels by Maurice Leblanc). There's a whole lot of other Lupin III anime, and most of it's pretty good, but only some is by Miyazaki. --
The books would have been better than the TV series, but for their many glaring inaccuracies. See the McKinney FAQ, compiled by subscribers to the Robotech mailing lists, for more information. --
Re:What about Princess Mononoke?
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 2
Well, there's the niggling little fact that it's not on DVD yet, and his question seemed slanted toward those...:)
And I'd suggest anything by Miyazaki, too, but about the only work of his that's on DVD yet is Castle of Cagliostro. (Which is easily one of the best anime movies of all time, by the way, and hit Express.com's top-ten list the first week it was out, selling out over 2500 copies in just a couple weeks.)
The original Bubblegum Crisis is another good one, though you might be advised to wait for the re-pressing/additional disc set that's due out one of these days; the first set, being a relatively early DVD issuance, had some problems.
And hey, if someone can suggest The Matrix as anime, then I feel more than entitled to suggest Tampopo. It's Japanese live-action comedy (like anime except not animated!), and deals with another geek staple--ramen noodles. (It's a "noodle western," a parody of/homage to all the samurai movies/westerns of bygone days.) It's probably the best movie ever made that you've likely never heard of.
There are so many good anime, and I'm at least fond of most of them. A good place to check for tips is AnimeOnDVD; it has an "Essential Anime" section that hits a lot of the classics. --
Interestingly, some people (including a fairly well-known SF/fantasy novelist) are working up an idea to sell stories and other material on sort of a "Storyteller's Bowl" system, similar to the Street Performer Protocol. The discussion is going on over on sff.people.storytellers right now, and a website will be up at some point, as soon as they have the site transferred over to their domain host. --
Allow me to call your attention back to part of the interview--specifically, to the line I've highlighted in bold.
But I should also say that we are, we're also, this is going to sound -- make sure you don't edit this! -- we're also, I know this is going to sound like we're full of ourselves, but I know we're also quite smart.
Get it?
Besides, if it had been edited and cleaned up, then everyone would have been ragging on it being the lawyers speaking, not Lars. This way you can be pretty darned sure it's the genuine article. --
...for coming through with a great interview. Even if you can't agree with some things he says, he definitely had some good answers there, and if he rambled a bit from time to time, well, that just goes to show it's authentic, not a scripted party line. I think on the whole he did a pretty good job here. --
Their are legitimate uses for napster and people who use the service for legal files. That their are legitimate uses for the service is enough to warrent its continued existance. Maybe you would like to make IRC illegal since it can be used to trade files. Or maybe we should make FTPs illegal because many people use that transfer protocal to trade warez?
FTP is used for transferring other things than illegal files. So is HTTP, heck, so is Gnutella, some. Napster is used strictly and solely to trade MP3s. And the vast majority of MP3s that are traded are ripped commercial music. You cannot deny that; you just can't.
Speaking in terms of simple economics, there was almost no demand for a means to trade legal MP3s back and forth like that. If they were legal, then you could just put them up on a plain and simple webpage or FTP for people to download, with no fear of legal repercussions. Illegal MP3s, on the other hand, had to be hidden behind multitudinous pop-up-window-spawning sites, or IRC 'bots, or other means, to prevent the legal people from finding them, and there was simply no good way to swap them back and forth easily. So, there was plenty of demand for an easier way to trade them. When someone produced a way to supply that demand, naturally everybody hopped on it.
By your definition we also need to make it illegal to own a vcr because it is mainly used to make copies of copyrighted content. We also need to throw all the people who sell ciggarette papers in jail because we know that most people use those to smoke pot, not tobacco.
That's a straw man. Unlike Napster, those items have legitimate uses that make up a substantial fraction (e.g., more than.001%) of their total use. No matter how you slice it, no matter how you try to rant and rave and whine and build up a case out of thin air, Napster does not.
News Flash. If something is used for illegal purposes 99,999 out of 100,000 times it is used, it is perfectly justifiable to ban it on the strength of that 99,999. The one legitimate user can find other means. (And yes, I admit to making those numbers up. They're conservative estimates, I imagine the actual truth to be at least a couple more powers of ten in my favor.) --
The problem that I have with the lawsuit and the way people are taking it is that Napster is not to blame. Napster is just a service it's some of the people using it that are breaking the law.
What color is the sky on your planet? As much as Napster tries to blush and flutter its eyelids and say, "Golly! We never intended our service to be used for illegal MP3-trading! We thought there were enough people out there who wanted to trade only legitimate MP3s that it would be worth writing software and forming a corporation!" the idea is just so ridiculous that a judge would have trouble controlling his laughter enough to render a decision.
We do not want a situation were service providers must monitor what their users are doing so that they can be sure they won't be sued.
Oh, do get real. Napster is only an ISP in its own mind, through tortuous legal prestidigitation that surely won't stand up to a minute's determined scrutiny. Not only that...coming from the cultural background that it did, offering the features that it does, Napster could only have been created with the intent of promoting this kind of piracy. There's just no way around it.
You cannot create a service intended primarily for illegal uses and then defend it by claiming that it could be used legally. That won't fly.
That not only brings up privacy issues it will cost any type of service provider money policing its users. The next step is to sue ISP's for allowing people to post mp3s.
Guess what? When the RIAA comes across websites where people have posted MP3s, they inform the ISP under the DMCA to take it down or they will sue. Back before the whole Napster thing, there were articles about how they were starting to use web spiders to try to track these people down. --
The purpose of Napster is to facilitate legal activity, just like the purpose of the Network Neighborhood is to facilitate the legal activity of authorized data transfer and file sharing. The actions of Napsters' users no more reflect on Napster then the actions of someone who robs a bank and uses a Ford as a getaway car reflect on the Ford Motor Company.
What color is the sky on your planet?
I like using Napster, I really do, but a more proper analogy would be Ford making a bulletproof, high-speed sports car with a stealth mode, and advertising it as being "perfect for those summer getaways, wink wink nudge nudge." Sure, it could be used for legitimate purposes, and probably would be by some. But with that particular combination of features, it becomes laughably obvious to anyone who looks at it for more than five seconds what it was really intended for.
Sure, there are some MP3s out there that are meant to be legitimately swapped around. But the vast majority of MP3s available, and hence that are traded by Napster, are illegal. I've used Napster since shortly after it came out, and I can count all the "legit" MP3s I've seen in all that time on the fingers of both hands. There's just no way around that, and if anyone tries to tell a judge that Napster was meant for strictly legal purposes they'll be laughed right out of the court.
Napster's creator had to know what people would use it for when he created it. He couldn't coin such an astoundingly killer application without having at least that many smarts. In fact, I seem to recall it having been created to facilitate trading MP3s of all kinds because all the websites for that purpose stank.
Suppose someone started a dynamite or firearm factory and gave them out for free to anyone who wanted them? Could he get off the hook by claiming, "But I only made it to facilitate the legal purposes of clearing stumps or hunting. I'm not responsible for how other people use it"? --
Slashdot Mirror
And what would you call a site like Themestream that lets anybody post anything they want and then pays them a dime a hit (during its 'preview'; will probably drop to two cents a hit afterward) for it? Open, because anyone can write for it? Closed, because it pays them by the popularity of what they write?
By and large, I think this article continues a trend I've already noted in your work of telling us what we already know. By and large, we're already net-savvy people, Jon. I think that many of the people who regularly bash you find your articles like this to be quite patronizing.
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The 10th Kingdom, for example.
Too bad it won't play properly on DVD-ROM drives...
--
But as for PayPal, I can tell you right now they must be making scads of money off the thing. PayPal's one of the most popular auction-payment services ever...which means a whole lot of money is passing through their coffers every day. Do you think they don't float interest off of that money?
Furthermore, they just introduced a "business account" system, where they provide additional services to those who want them, while taking up to 2.5% of those transactions. They were certainly attractive enough to be bought out by the X.com full-service Internet bank within just a few months of their creation.
Trust me on this--banks have little tricks of making money off of things that would cause you or I to scratch our heads. They wouldn't be providing this service if they didn't think it would make them a bundle.
--
The e-literature website Mind's Eye has an interesting model. You have multiple ways to pay for a story, including buying it by credit card (their prices are quite reasonable; most short stories are 35-70 cents each) or reading it interspersed with banner ads. Their story-serving system is smart, too; no ad-view, no further content-loading. I hope that sites don't start using this tech in general; Mind's Eye's use of it is legitimate and one with which I cannot argue (they have to be paid for their content somehow; if you don't like banner ads, you can charge it), but if sites started thinking they were "entitled" to banner ad revenue, that could be a problem.
--
I've heard that there is actually a mug-manufacturing company that will set up to sell mugs with logos of any website/webjournal/whathaveyou on it, and the webjournal owner takes a cut of the profit. I don't know the name or location just at the moment, but I know some of my journal-writing friends have been considering using it. (If someone knows who I'm talking about, tag it on in a follow-up?)
--
Now that I think about it, I sort of wish I could put a tipjar on some of my Themestream articles, like the one about Jon Katz, but I think that might be a violation of contract or something. But at least they pay me a dime a hit, and they don't seem to have any banner ads so far (I imagine they might add them once they get out of their trial period, though). (That's another way individual authors, at least, could make money off the web, I suppose...)
Another interesting new model built on similar ground to the Street Performers' Protocol is the Storytellers' Bowl, which is going to accept PayPal and publish stories on a supported-by-patron-donation basis. I'm really looking forward to its launch.
And by the way, for whoever wrote the copy quoted in the story blurb--Junkbuster isn't new; it's been around for several years at least.
--
For an example of this, look at the site that certain members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Association are putting together, the Storytellers' Bowl. The idea is that pre-completed works will be published serially, each new installment coming out free for all to read, download, copy, pass around on Gnutella, etc. as soon as would-be readers have kicked in enough money. They'll be using the PayPal person-to-person payment system for contributions. It's being discussed now on an SFFnet newsgroup.
I personally think this is a keen idea, and I'm all afire to support it, especially since it's likely to result in more stuff from the Deed of Paksenarrion universe by Elizabeth Moon.
--
"Follow the electronic nose! It always knows!"
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Try checking the Sigma Designs news server, at news.sigmadesigns.com. I seem to recall seeing some mention of that, and that it was intended for computer monitor viewing, or something.
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If Shadowrun were real, then Jon Katz really could be a troll!
This explains everything!
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There's actually a company called Rhinopoint that's doing something similar to this--paying people's ISP fees if they agree to answer a survey a month. Nationwide ISP Pro-USA is one of their partners in this, and I get my dialup internet access free as a result. (Good for all platforms--Windows, Mac, and Linux!)
--
Hmmm...I should get me one of those...
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Don't forget the abortive copy-protected MP4 music format that some rap group tried releasing their music in a year or so ago. It didn't stand for anything at the time--they just meant it to be MP3 incremented by 1.
--
Lupin is called "Wolf" in the Streamline dub of the film because Monkey Punch never bothered to get permission from the Leblanc estate before creating his Lupin III character. He was called all sorts of odd things in the American translations of the '90s. But he was never called Agent Wolf...and he's back to Lupin (pronounced Loo-PAHN in the dub) in the Manga version.
--
I don't know if that will include Streamline's dub or not, but it probably will include subtitles and the Japanese audio track, unless for some reason they couldn't get the rights.
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Ironic that you should mention Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro in the same post; they were originally shown together in Japan as a double-feature.
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Castle of Cagliostro deals with the adventures of Arsène Lupin III, the grandson of the original Arsène Lupin (hero of the novels by Maurice Leblanc). There's a whole lot of other Lupin III anime, and most of it's pretty good, but only some is by Miyazaki.
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The books would have been better than the TV series, but for their many glaring inaccuracies. See the McKinney FAQ, compiled by subscribers to the Robotech mailing lists, for more information.
--
And I'd suggest anything by Miyazaki, too, but about the only work of his that's on DVD yet is Castle of Cagliostro . (Which is easily one of the best anime movies of all time, by the way, and hit Express.com's top-ten list the first week it was out, selling out over 2500 copies in just a couple weeks.)
The original Bubblegum Crisis is another good one, though you might be advised to wait for the re-pressing/additional disc set that's due out one of these days; the first set, being a relatively early DVD issuance, had some problems.
And hey, if someone can suggest The Matrix as anime, then I feel more than entitled to suggest Tampopo . It's Japanese live-action comedy (like anime except not animated!), and deals with another geek staple--ramen noodles. (It's a "noodle western," a parody of/homage to all the samurai movies/westerns of bygone days.) It's probably the best movie ever made that you've likely never heard of.
There are so many good anime, and I'm at least fond of most of them. A good place to check for tips is AnimeOnDVD; it has an "Essential Anime" section that hits a lot of the classics.
--
Interestingly, some people (including a fairly well-known SF/fantasy novelist) are working up an idea to sell stories and other material on sort of a "Storyteller's Bowl" system, similar to the Street Performer Protocol. The discussion is going on over on sff.people.storytellers right now, and a website will be up at some point, as soon as they have the site transferred over to their domain host.
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Besides, if it had been edited and cleaned up, then everyone would have been ragging on it being the lawyers speaking, not Lars. This way you can be pretty darned sure it's the genuine article.
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...for coming through with a great interview. Even if you can't agree with some things he says, he definitely had some good answers there, and if he rambled a bit from time to time, well, that just goes to show it's authentic, not a scripted party line. I think on the whole he did a pretty good job here.
--
Speaking in terms of simple economics, there was almost no demand for a means to trade legal MP3s back and forth like that. If they were legal, then you could just put them up on a plain and simple webpage or FTP for people to download, with no fear of legal repercussions. Illegal MP3s, on the other hand, had to be hidden behind multitudinous pop-up-window-spawning sites, or IRC 'bots, or other means, to prevent the legal people from finding them, and there was simply no good way to swap them back and forth easily. So, there was plenty of demand for an easier way to trade them. When someone produced a way to supply that demand, naturally everybody hopped on it.
That's a straw man. Unlike Napster, those items have legitimate uses that make up a substantial fraction (e.g., more thanNews Flash. If something is used for illegal purposes 99,999 out of 100,000 times it is used, it is perfectly justifiable to ban it on the strength of that 99,999. The one legitimate user can find other means. (And yes, I admit to making those numbers up. They're conservative estimates, I imagine the actual truth to be at least a couple more powers of ten in my favor.)
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You cannot create a service intended primarily for illegal uses and then defend it by claiming that it could be used legally. That won't fly.
Guess what? When the RIAA comes across websites where people have posted MP3s, they inform the ISP under the DMCA to take it down or they will sue. Back before the whole Napster thing, there were articles about how they were starting to use web spiders to try to track these people down.--
I like using Napster, I really do, but a more proper analogy would be Ford making a bulletproof, high-speed sports car with a stealth mode, and advertising it as being "perfect for those summer getaways, wink wink nudge nudge." Sure, it could be used for legitimate purposes, and probably would be by some. But with that particular combination of features, it becomes laughably obvious to anyone who looks at it for more than five seconds what it was really intended for.
Sure, there are some MP3s out there that are meant to be legitimately swapped around. But the vast majority of MP3s available, and hence that are traded by Napster, are illegal. I've used Napster since shortly after it came out, and I can count all the "legit" MP3s I've seen in all that time on the fingers of both hands. There's just no way around that, and if anyone tries to tell a judge that Napster was meant for strictly legal purposes they'll be laughed right out of the court.
Napster's creator had to know what people would use it for when he created it. He couldn't coin such an astoundingly killer application without having at least that many smarts. In fact, I seem to recall it having been created to facilitate trading MP3s of all kinds because all the websites for that purpose stank.
Suppose someone started a dynamite or firearm factory and gave them out for free to anyone who wanted them? Could he get off the hook by claiming, "But I only made it to facilitate the legal purposes of clearing stumps or hunting. I'm not responsible for how other people use it"?
--