To me, free speech is a basic form of property rights. Government can't tell me what I can do with my body and how I use it, when I am on my property or on public land. I believe that speech is part of that use -- a basic view of property rights.
I don't think speech should be protected, I think it should just be a given that you can say what you want on your land or on public land. The minute you cross onto my land, I can shut you up.
All fine and good, except only half the project is content producers banding together to create stronger technical protections and hardware to enforce it. The problematic half is them banding together to pressure for the passage of laws mandating that every TV contain these technologies, criminalizing hacking them etc etc. So the libertarian "let the market decide if it wants DRM" dream is, well, a dream.
Right now, they rely on the DMCA and other stupid laws to protect their BADLY WRITTEN DRM. If they want stronger DRM, they have to realize they can't rely on laws to protect bad programming.
I personally wouldn't buy a proprietary media format, but if consumers do, then producers should be free to make whatever they want. I believe that competition will let the cream rise to the top.
I don't believe in copyright either, but, due to its legal side, DRM is like copyright only worse. You may not believe in fair use, but copyright with fair use is less repugnant than copyright without it.
Let's ignore copyright for a moment and look at the most restrictive protections on content not using the law: subscriptions. Many writers (including myself) have private subscription newsletters that people pay to receive. They could copy these newsletters (and some do) the majority don't -- they want the information and they don't want many others knowing about it. I look at some of the US$1000 per year newsletters I used to subscribe to and I never saw them hitting the public eye.
The same is true with any information. You can sell information that is valuable, and you can sell information that isn't. If it doesn't have much value, you have to make your money by offering it to the widest audience at the lowest price. $2 for a TV show per person (x10,000) versus $1000 for an investment newsletter (x20) is the same money. Which has a bigger market, and which is more valuable?
Copyright can't change simple economics. If you make a product that is good quality and people want to see more, they'll pay for it. If they don't care about it, they won't.
I feel the FCC is one of the most unconstitutional organizations in the Federal government today.
The FCC is basically the big media conglomerates arm in government, creating an extremely high cost of entry in media markets, preventing smaller companies or individuals from trying to compete. The days when we needed the FCC are over -- we have so many different ways to communicate that we don't need any regulation over those systems. Any regulation that takes 5 years to create will be superceded by competitive companies finding loopholes (or bribing their way past restrictions).
Even the old belief that airwaves are limited and should be regulated is bunk. Interference from large broadcasters is a myth. Ever wonder how your house can have 3 cell phones, 3 cordless phones and 15 wireless accessories work together? It isn't the FCC that's helping this situation, it is manufacturers working with one another so they can all compete.
The telephone company is dead -- as WiFi or faster wireless bandwidth is made available, even cell phones will be antiquated. I can imagine a near-future of open bandwidth, frequency-hopping competitive technologies that walk all over each other yet don't conflict. The more power you want to broadcast, the more energy you'll need to do so. If some large radio tower company wanted to block EVERY FREQUENCY for hundreds of miles, do you know how much it would cost them? Look at just the FM radio spectrum -- they couldn't afford it. A 50,000 watt radio station broadcasting at one tiny sliver of a frequency has a HUGE electric bill. The only way you could stay in business is with advertisers, and who wants to be affiliated with a company that burns everyone's communications?
Without the FCC, we'd see thousands or tens of thousands of community broadcasters. Picture Mr. Universe versus 10,000 mosquitos. Who would win?
If the FCC regulates the Internet, we'll find ways to get around it. The user can obfuscate transmitted information faster than our government can decode it. If they find quick ways to decode it, we'll find other ways to hide information within information. The FCC can attempt to regulate the Internet, but it will be a failure. Information has found freedom, and there is no stopping it. 6 year olds are using google, 72 year olds are using Skype. Can a government "of the People, by the People and for the People" go against the People any long?
I'm ready to make an effigy of the FCC and burn it. Are you?
Actually, I love big productions. My lady and I go to other cities all over the world to see them live, and we attend film festivals to see them first.
When Serenity came out in theaters, I liked the plot so much I went 4 times (x2). When the DVD came out yesterday, I bought one copy for myself and 6 for presents. Yet when Serenity was released on ThePirateBay, I downloaded it until I could buy it. Why did I pay Joss Whedon and Universal for their DVD? Because I wanted to support their FUTURE efforts, not their past ones.
Nothing prevents content producers from protecting their creations in a free market. I'd say you have a good argument up to 1995 or so, but with the Internet, content producers can completely control their own content with zero laws. All they have to do is create stronger encryption standards, get together and make hardware that follows it, and they're there. That's what they're doing here. I am completely fine with content creators doing this -- I don't believe in copyright so I don't believe in fair use.
The consumers will also be fine with DRM. It will only succeed if it meets the needs of all parties. If it doesn't, another format will succeed. You can't stop entertainment, but you can stop those who don't allow every party to profit from the transaction.
And the only want to stop the bleeding is to make more profits... come on man, you know that.
And this is bad?
Profit is not evil. Profit isn't even financial. Profit only means gaining something for yourself.
Every time we interact with other people, we generally profit. You pay $2 for a hot dog, and both parties profit. The seller gains $2 and you gain a hot dog. Mutual satisfaction.
Financial profit doesn't always mean financial gain, either. Individuals and companies need profits to cover any future shortfalls. Profits are used to expand research and development, hire new people, and service old customers.
I don't even see a problem with price gouging. If a catastrophe happens in a given market, I expect (and would gladly pay) for any temporary "gouging." Imagine a gas station that normally receives 100 gallons a week (to keep it easy). Imagine them selling the gas for $2 to stay competitive with other stations. Now, they see a major problem in gas supply -- they may not get gas for 4 weeks. They have 200 gallons in their reserves, but they still have to pay the landlord, the employees, the utilities and the regulatory costs of staying in business. They won't be getting gas for 4 weeks, so they can only sell 50 gallons a week before they run out. Their overhead stays the same, so those 50 gallons won't sell for $2 a gallon, they might sell for $5 or $6 per gallon, leaving a massive profit, but none of that profit is a gain.
Profits are GOOD, and profits are equitable. The only time you trade with another against your will is when you pay a thief who is holding a gun to your head, or when you pay government, who will eventually hold a gun to your head if you don't.
Actually, I'm disgruntled over government because I've never seen anything for my tax dollars. I don't see a safer place to live (police), I don't see my savings leading to a strong retirement (federal reserve destroying the dollar), I don't see quality roads (gas tax), I don't see good schools (property taxes). Everything they've done with my money has led to fewer choices, higher prices and worse service.
As to my failing business, it is one business among 7 that I own and operate. One business won't ruin my life, but it does hurt me. I don't care about the money, I care about my employees that have to be let go, I care about my customers who won't get good service and a great product line. I could go into debt to save the business, but I don't believe in debt or the banking cartels, so I won't do that. I could start over, but all that will happen is that the state will take and no one will profit from the business.
My time spent on my other 6 will make up for the loss, but it doesn't mean I have to be happy watching a very profitable business go under from paperwork redtape.
Those familiar with my anti-copyright stance will see in this example how terrible copyright legislation is for content creation. The intent of copyright (to give authors a certain time-limited protection over what they create) has been destroyed, and is now controlled solely by a few massive corporations that control almost every form of media.
UDI is the final step in allowing them to control the old media formats (TV and radio generally). It WILL happen, as Congress and those who control the old formats fail to see that they're outdated and no one cares.
The Internet blew up, in my opinion, based entirely on people's ability to be heard and to hear others. You're seeing millions of bloggers who write freely in order to be heard, not in order to sell their thoughts by coercing others not to copy them. You see people quoted (not always being referenced either), you see people copying and re-posting, and you're seeing massive "piracy" of every copywritten work. Copyright not only failed, but ignoring it created the biggest form of media in literally years. The Internet is at least two orders of magnitude bigger than all the old-media productions in all of history, combined.
What is the next step? Major media companies will continue to restrict content, and billions of small content creates will get together in tiny groups and capture that market. Podcasting is replacing the radio for a small percentage today, but in 10 years where will radio be? It will be an overregulated monopoly that no one listens to because it attempts to target too broad a market.
TV and cable will be another forgotten phenomenon, at least in the way we watch it today. Hundreds of channels of regulated media can not compete with millions of vidcasts, especially as production qualities go up.
Look, folks, DRM doesn't matter. Communists wanted everyone equal, libertarians wanted everyone free. The Internet offers both side a solution that could never come from law or regulation or mandates -- people able to meet one another's needs, disregarding borders and laws and restrictions that we faced for hundreds of years.
DRM? Go for it, big producers. I'm finding new forms of entertainment every day, and it doesn't come in a pretty package and it isn't advertised by beautiful people.
As an anarchocapitalist, my opinion leads me to prefer complete freedom over tyranny. Would I accept a middle ground? Probably. Would I fight for a middle ground? No way.
Everywhere I go, I see how regulations stifle everyone, and they don't even know it. Do you know how many people continue to work for half or a quarter of their true value because they're afraid of the regulations of starting a business? I'm losing a million dollar a year business because of excessive paperwork requirements that conflict with one another. That's a million dollars (gross) that I'm losing over paperwork.
I could care less what side you align yourself with, all I see from either side is the desire to control ME and take care of their FRIENDS. This is true at the city level, at the state level and at the federal level. One of my own family members is an authoritarian bully and they laugh constantly at how they've trampled out the competition to what they do. That's government -- nepotism and cronyism that pretends to help the public. No thanks, I'll pass.
Come on. The left side banned smoking on private property in various local towns. The left side mandates who I marry -- they're just as guilty as the right in saying I can only marry one person, or that marriage puts a higher tax burden on my household, or that marriage has to be accepted by the State.
The left = right = authoritarian. Neither side understands the word freedom, and neither side can.
I'm always blown away by how the Internet security market works and self-correct itself without any regulation.
A major web site has a flaw. White hat and black hat "hackers" find that flaw, exploit it, and either abuse it or let the web site know about it. The web programmers go in and close the exploit because it affects how their customers use the service and could open them up to some liability.
This is the way the free market works. I'm a huge fan of how quickly the Internet (anthropomorphically) adapts to the changing needs of the billion of users. Some exploits that aren't fixed by the owners of code are fixed by third parties -- sometimes for profit and sometimes for free. Before we can even write one law to attempt to solve problems, others are already attacking the problems.
I'd like to see it stay this way. Every time we move forward to create legislation to protect the end user (see CAN-SPAM and a myriad of other laws), we see failure time and again. The loopholes in the laws make them irrelevant quickly, and all we get out of that is wasted money and wasted time.
Let the growth and expansion occur freely. We'll see some bad times (new viruses and new spam exploits) but we'll see those fixed in short order. If they don't get fixed, why is the Internet still chugging along and growing every day?
And if you think "leftist" is synonymous with "pro-authoritarian", you haven't paid attention to the last 200 years of history.
Explain.
In my experience, those who consider themselves part of the "left" are the same people who want to tell me how to conduct my businesses, how much money I have to give to charity through taxation, and who I congregate with on my private property. All the processes that the "left" (and the "right") have for making a better society come out of coercion followed by jail for those who don't listen. This is authoritarian. How am I wrong?
Actually, I am very interested in hearing more about this. If you want to take it to e-mail, feel free to e-mail me about where Standard Oil raised prices.
I feel their "manipulations" were completely legal. The journalist credited with starting the takedown of SO was Ida Tarbell, who was the daughter of an uncompetitive oil producer who went bankrupt.
Every thing I've researched with Standard Oil shows them lowering prices. The only times I see people complaining in the media back then were the muckrakers who were personally hurt by bad business decisions -- not by practices that were uncompetitive. The way to compete is to become efficient, not to become stagnant. Standard Oil's competitors had every chance to compete but they didn't work as hard as Rockefeller.
By the way, I found numerous errors in my little sister's history books regarding Standard Oil. I'm not sure how much I trust any book that quotes the journalists back then, especially ones like Tarbell who were just angry competitors.
Anyway, I'd love to hear where SO raised prices and gouged consumers, I can't find any proof or information alluding to that theory.
I hate using the terms left and right -- they're both just authoritarians. If you really feel the mass media isn't pro-authoritarian, then you aren't paying attention to the realities of the market control mechanisms. Radio, TV even newspaper companies are heavily regulated, licensed and subsidized by public policy and definitely have reason to support the regime in control -- no matter what party it is.
The Austrians at Mises use some terms I don't necessarily agree with, but their research and theory are both solid, IMO.
As digital cameras finally catch up to analog ones (or have they?) I see more need for memory based storage over hard drives. Try to take 8 megapixel uncompressed photographs as quickly as you can with an analog camera, and even the fastest hard drives with the biggest write-cache will choke. Hard drives require more memory, can't hold up to banging and shaking, and just don't cut it for heavy duty use in any environment.
Will hard drives stay ahead of memory? Maybe for the time being -- but there is a limitation to how cheap they can go, IMHO. They're adding more data per inch, they're making them slightly faster in read/write speeds, and they're definitely becoming cheap, but there will soon be a day that memory drives will overtake hard drives in price. You have more companies working on memory technologies than on hard drive technologies, and that competition will aid in making magnetic storage obsolete.
I'm not saying my opinion is correct, but I'm one who has faith in research and development, and I know that magnetic storage is so-1970. Even 2D memory storage is about 10 years outdated. What is next? The replacment for both, and it isn't 20 years away.
I've replied to the Standard Oil "monopoly" on slashdot so often, I think I may need to write a standard reply, haha:)
Standard Oil was a "monopoly" by lowering prices so low using techniques that the competition couldn't match. They lowered oil prices from 60 cents to 8 cents per gallon, a boon for consumers and for production and manufacturing. The only ones complaining were their powerful competitors, and this is why government got involved. Before the end of the government investigation, Standard was nearly destroyed by a new competitor: gasoline. Rockefeller knew how to make oil efficiently, and the old producers didn't. Don't call that a monopoly, call it efficient. Isn'y your fear of monopoly from prices goes UP not DOWN?
The margins are too low, the capitol needed is too high, and the technology too expensive to develop independently (and a minefield of patents to negotiate.)
Yeah, patents have nothing to do with government over-regulating.
One point you missed is a very important one: these companies might be on the verge of death, and when a market disappears, you see many companies trying to stay alive by merging.
Will hard drives be on the desktop in 1 year? Probably. 2 years? Still looks good. 5 years? I'm not so sure. My buddy has a 2GB and a 4GB SD card. Nearly 100% of my data is held on someone else's server, so I am happily using my 6GB hard drive and my 4 2GB SD cards for things I need locally. In fact, now that I have 150kbps-600kbps everywhere I go (T-Mobile's EDGE network combined with WiFi service plans), I don't see any need for storing data on a hard drive.
Will mega-ISPs need hard drives? Absolutely. Yet hard drives can be one of the biggest bottlenecks for huge-bandwidth websites. It is far easier to stream data from memory than from magnetic media.
What does all this babbling mean? I think the hard drive manufacturers see the writing on the wall. Even with 60TB hard drives, memory is quickly catching up, and prices are quickly dropping. I'll be very surprised if we see hard drives in 20 years.
The lady and I play this fun game on our drives. It basically starts with me saying something insightful or interesting or funny, and then she thinks about what I said and she replies with something contextual to what I said.
Imagine it is like slashdot, but without moderation and only between two or 3 people. I had a feeling it would supplement and even replace gaming and web forums, but I don't think it will catch on.
If you try it some time, remember that is might be trademarked or patented, so be cautious who you do it around.
Combines don't always combine to become more powerful, in fact companies usually combine to save their asses.
This merger isn't about making more profits -- it is about cutting the bleeding that has occured now that hard drive space is a commodity. How many hard drive companies did we have 10 years ago versus today? Do you recall all the companies that are gone now?
How can you look at the prices of hard drives versus the number of companies and see a problem? You're pushing me to think you want regulations added to prevent these merges, but I'm happily buying 300GB hard drives for under $100 and I'm very happy.
I don't see any anti-trust here -- corporations are finding their bottom lines chopped up by excess banking and taxing regulations, excess overhead caused by mandated insurance regulations and excess pension costs caused by excess investment regulations. The more we regulate, the more we see the number of companies in a given market trend towards 1.
Don't neglect the realities of being a corporation in a world that tries to overcontrol many companies in order to subsidize the few. Hard drive companies have one of the biggest problems in balancing cost versus quality.
We've lost MANY hard drive companies over the years. So what? Hard drives are CHEAPER than ever, and we will likely see hard drives get even cheaper than that as companies combine and become more efficient.
If only 2 companies remain and they start to gouge consumers, give it about 2 weeks before investors who see an opportunity come in and bring competition back to prior levels. I don't believe that monopolies are more than temporary unless they are given the power of monopoly through government licensing and regulations.
OSC has repeatedly come under attacks for not being politically correct. His writing style, characters and some deep beliefs in his stories seem to bring new enemies to the battle.
I personally could care less about his personal religion or what he thinks of gays or blacks or chefs. It doesn't matter to me -- he doesn't seem to have any opinion of me, so I'll just let him write.
And write he does. Ender's Game really was such a key element in my youth and I know it was the same of many of my friends. I don't want to see the book destroyed by a bad movie, with everything deemed negative scrubbed out. I don't see any major movie production house doing the right job with the movie(s), and I don't see any kids being able to replace Ender in my head. My lady and I "battle" over what Ender and the other characters look like. We both believe the movie would likely be better as a 3D or anime cartoon than an actual live action movie. Can anyone here actually stand to watch kids on TV?
That is the magic of the books -- you think, you read and you think some more. As I've aged over the years, the books are still on my main shelf in our library. I've read them recently and still find great insight into the little things.
Here's an idea: leave it be. Movies today are trash, and there is very little that comes out that is worth watching. Hell, for decades a common response was "it wasn't as good as the book" and I say let's not stop repeating that.
OSC, you have a lot of money and millions of fans. Warner Brothers, you're a monster of a company, more concerned with protecting your non-physical intellectual and creative property that you've licensed than with concern over producing quality goods at a quality price on a regular basis.
Up until about 1998 I co-owned a video/film production company in Chicago. I met many talented college writers who could have performed miracles had they had distribution. The Internet is that distribution.
If you feel that we won't have more amazing indie flicks as the Internet youth mature, you'll be surprised. As technology allows individuals to do the work of 4 or 5 people, and as chromakey gets more transparent allowing actors in completely different parts of the world to be part of the same scene, we're going to see very competitive indie films in the near future.
And rightfully so, why should you get to profit from someone else's art?)
I don't believe in the idea of protecting a thought or an idea. I believe in physical property rights as the only right one can have in any situation. I believe that human rights come from this physical property right, and I have no problem with theft of ideas or thought behind art. The bands that I've produced (financially) I've asked to not copyright their music and only charge for the medium, not the content. They've made decent money on tour (charging for the service, not the music) and selling merchandise (the physical product not the logo or content).
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To me, free speech is a basic form of property rights. Government can't tell me what I can do with my body and how I use it, when I am on my property or on public land. I believe that speech is part of that use -- a basic view of property rights.
I don't think speech should be protected, I think it should just be a given that you can say what you want on your land or on public land. The minute you cross onto my land, I can shut you up.
All fine and good, except only half the project is content producers banding together to create stronger technical protections and hardware to enforce it. The problematic half is them banding together to pressure for the passage of laws mandating that every TV contain these technologies, criminalizing hacking them etc etc. So the libertarian "let the market decide if it wants DRM" dream is, well, a dream.
Right now, they rely on the DMCA and other stupid laws to protect their BADLY WRITTEN DRM. If they want stronger DRM, they have to realize they can't rely on laws to protect bad programming.
I personally wouldn't buy a proprietary media format, but if consumers do, then producers should be free to make whatever they want. I believe that competition will let the cream rise to the top.
I don't believe in copyright either, but, due to its legal side, DRM is like copyright only worse. You may not believe in fair use, but copyright with fair use is less repugnant than copyright without it.
Let's ignore copyright for a moment and look at the most restrictive protections on content not using the law: subscriptions. Many writers (including myself) have private subscription newsletters that people pay to receive. They could copy these newsletters (and some do) the majority don't -- they want the information and they don't want many others knowing about it. I look at some of the US$1000 per year newsletters I used to subscribe to and I never saw them hitting the public eye.
The same is true with any information. You can sell information that is valuable, and you can sell information that isn't. If it doesn't have much value, you have to make your money by offering it to the widest audience at the lowest price. $2 for a TV show per person (x10,000) versus $1000 for an investment newsletter (x20) is the same money. Which has a bigger market, and which is more valuable?
Copyright can't change simple economics. If you make a product that is good quality and people want to see more, they'll pay for it. If they don't care about it, they won't.
I feel the FCC is one of the most unconstitutional organizations in the Federal government today.
The FCC is basically the big media conglomerates arm in government, creating an extremely high cost of entry in media markets, preventing smaller companies or individuals from trying to compete. The days when we needed the FCC are over -- we have so many different ways to communicate that we don't need any regulation over those systems. Any regulation that takes 5 years to create will be superceded by competitive companies finding loopholes (or bribing their way past restrictions).
Even the old belief that airwaves are limited and should be regulated is bunk. Interference from large broadcasters is a myth. Ever wonder how your house can have 3 cell phones, 3 cordless phones and 15 wireless accessories work together? It isn't the FCC that's helping this situation, it is manufacturers working with one another so they can all compete.
The telephone company is dead -- as WiFi or faster wireless bandwidth is made available, even cell phones will be antiquated. I can imagine a near-future of open bandwidth, frequency-hopping competitive technologies that walk all over each other yet don't conflict. The more power you want to broadcast, the more energy you'll need to do so. If some large radio tower company wanted to block EVERY FREQUENCY for hundreds of miles, do you know how much it would cost them? Look at just the FM radio spectrum -- they couldn't afford it. A 50,000 watt radio station broadcasting at one tiny sliver of a frequency has a HUGE electric bill. The only way you could stay in business is with advertisers, and who wants to be affiliated with a company that burns everyone's communications?
Without the FCC, we'd see thousands or tens of thousands of community broadcasters. Picture Mr. Universe versus 10,000 mosquitos. Who would win?
If the FCC regulates the Internet, we'll find ways to get around it. The user can obfuscate transmitted information faster than our government can decode it. If they find quick ways to decode it, we'll find other ways to hide information within information. The FCC can attempt to regulate the Internet, but it will be a failure. Information has found freedom, and there is no stopping it. 6 year olds are using google, 72 year olds are using Skype. Can a government "of the People, by the People and for the People" go against the People any long?
I'm ready to make an effigy of the FCC and burn it. Are you?
Actually, I love big productions. My lady and I go to other cities all over the world to see them live, and we attend film festivals to see them first.
When Serenity came out in theaters, I liked the plot so much I went 4 times (x2). When the DVD came out yesterday, I bought one copy for myself and 6 for presents. Yet when Serenity was released on ThePirateBay, I downloaded it until I could buy it. Why did I pay Joss Whedon and Universal for their DVD? Because I wanted to support their FUTURE efforts, not their past ones.
Nothing prevents content producers from protecting their creations in a free market. I'd say you have a good argument up to 1995 or so, but with the Internet, content producers can completely control their own content with zero laws. All they have to do is create stronger encryption standards, get together and make hardware that follows it, and they're there. That's what they're doing here. I am completely fine with content creators doing this -- I don't believe in copyright so I don't believe in fair use.
The consumers will also be fine with DRM. It will only succeed if it meets the needs of all parties. If it doesn't, another format will succeed. You can't stop entertainment, but you can stop those who don't allow every party to profit from the transaction.
And the only want to stop the bleeding is to make more profits ... come on man, you know that.
And this is bad?
Profit is not evil. Profit isn't even financial. Profit only means gaining something for yourself.
Every time we interact with other people, we generally profit. You pay $2 for a hot dog, and both parties profit. The seller gains $2 and you gain a hot dog. Mutual satisfaction.
Financial profit doesn't always mean financial gain, either. Individuals and companies need profits to cover any future shortfalls. Profits are used to expand research and development, hire new people, and service old customers.
I don't even see a problem with price gouging. If a catastrophe happens in a given market, I expect (and would gladly pay) for any temporary "gouging." Imagine a gas station that normally receives 100 gallons a week (to keep it easy). Imagine them selling the gas for $2 to stay competitive with other stations. Now, they see a major problem in gas supply -- they may not get gas for 4 weeks. They have 200 gallons in their reserves, but they still have to pay the landlord, the employees, the utilities and the regulatory costs of staying in business. They won't be getting gas for 4 weeks, so they can only sell 50 gallons a week before they run out. Their overhead stays the same, so those 50 gallons won't sell for $2 a gallon, they might sell for $5 or $6 per gallon, leaving a massive profit, but none of that profit is a gain.
Profits are GOOD, and profits are equitable. The only time you trade with another against your will is when you pay a thief who is holding a gun to your head, or when you pay government, who will eventually hold a gun to your head if you don't.
I hope you're not being sarcastic :) Why post anonymously?
Good post, nonetheless. I concur with it, even if was intended to be sarcastic for some reason.
Actually, I'm disgruntled over government because I've never seen anything for my tax dollars. I don't see a safer place to live (police), I don't see my savings leading to a strong retirement (federal reserve destroying the dollar), I don't see quality roads (gas tax), I don't see good schools (property taxes). Everything they've done with my money has led to fewer choices, higher prices and worse service.
As to my failing business, it is one business among 7 that I own and operate. One business won't ruin my life, but it does hurt me. I don't care about the money, I care about my employees that have to be let go, I care about my customers who won't get good service and a great product line. I could go into debt to save the business, but I don't believe in debt or the banking cartels, so I won't do that. I could start over, but all that will happen is that the state will take and no one will profit from the business.
My time spent on my other 6 will make up for the loss, but it doesn't mean I have to be happy watching a very profitable business go under from paperwork redtape.
Those familiar with my anti-copyright stance will see in this example how terrible copyright legislation is for content creation. The intent of copyright (to give authors a certain time-limited protection over what they create) has been destroyed, and is now controlled solely by a few massive corporations that control almost every form of media.
UDI is the final step in allowing them to control the old media formats (TV and radio generally). It WILL happen, as Congress and those who control the old formats fail to see that they're outdated and no one cares.
The Internet blew up, in my opinion, based entirely on people's ability to be heard and to hear others. You're seeing millions of bloggers who write freely in order to be heard, not in order to sell their thoughts by coercing others not to copy them. You see people quoted (not always being referenced either), you see people copying and re-posting, and you're seeing massive "piracy" of every copywritten work. Copyright not only failed, but ignoring it created the biggest form of media in literally years. The Internet is at least two orders of magnitude bigger than all the old-media productions in all of history, combined.
What is the next step? Major media companies will continue to restrict content, and billions of small content creates will get together in tiny groups and capture that market. Podcasting is replacing the radio for a small percentage today, but in 10 years where will radio be? It will be an overregulated monopoly that no one listens to because it attempts to target too broad a market.
TV and cable will be another forgotten phenomenon, at least in the way we watch it today. Hundreds of channels of regulated media can not compete with millions of vidcasts, especially as production qualities go up.
Look, folks, DRM doesn't matter. Communists wanted everyone equal, libertarians wanted everyone free. The Internet offers both side a solution that could never come from law or regulation or mandates -- people able to meet one another's needs, disregarding borders and laws and restrictions that we faced for hundreds of years.
DRM? Go for it, big producers. I'm finding new forms of entertainment every day, and it doesn't come in a pretty package and it isn't advertised by beautiful people.
Yeah, that and the person in the back usually starts spewing GNAA indoctrination.
Which is why I'm not a right winger either :)
As an anarchocapitalist, my opinion leads me to prefer complete freedom over tyranny. Would I accept a middle ground? Probably. Would I fight for a middle ground? No way.
Everywhere I go, I see how regulations stifle everyone, and they don't even know it. Do you know how many people continue to work for half or a quarter of their true value because they're afraid of the regulations of starting a business? I'm losing a million dollar a year business because of excessive paperwork requirements that conflict with one another. That's a million dollars (gross) that I'm losing over paperwork.
I could care less what side you align yourself with, all I see from either side is the desire to control ME and take care of their FRIENDS. This is true at the city level, at the state level and at the federal level. One of my own family members is an authoritarian bully and they laugh constantly at how they've trampled out the competition to what they do. That's government -- nepotism and cronyism that pretends to help the public. No thanks, I'll pass.
Come on. The left side banned smoking on private property in various local towns. The left side mandates who I marry -- they're just as guilty as the right in saying I can only marry one person, or that marriage puts a higher tax burden on my household, or that marriage has to be accepted by the State.
The left = right = authoritarian. Neither side understands the word freedom, and neither side can.
I'm always blown away by how the Internet security market works and self-correct itself without any regulation.
A major web site has a flaw. White hat and black hat "hackers" find that flaw, exploit it, and either abuse it or let the web site know about it. The web programmers go in and close the exploit because it affects how their customers use the service and could open them up to some liability.
This is the way the free market works. I'm a huge fan of how quickly the Internet (anthropomorphically) adapts to the changing needs of the billion of users. Some exploits that aren't fixed by the owners of code are fixed by third parties -- sometimes for profit and sometimes for free. Before we can even write one law to attempt to solve problems, others are already attacking the problems.
I'd like to see it stay this way. Every time we move forward to create legislation to protect the end user (see CAN-SPAM and a myriad of other laws), we see failure time and again. The loopholes in the laws make them irrelevant quickly, and all we get out of that is wasted money and wasted time.
Let the growth and expansion occur freely. We'll see some bad times (new viruses and new spam exploits) but we'll see those fixed in short order. If they don't get fixed, why is the Internet still chugging along and growing every day?
And if you think "leftist" is synonymous with "pro-authoritarian", you haven't paid attention to the last 200 years of history.
Explain.
In my experience, those who consider themselves part of the "left" are the same people who want to tell me how to conduct my businesses, how much money I have to give to charity through taxation, and who I congregate with on my private property. All the processes that the "left" (and the "right") have for making a better society come out of coercion followed by jail for those who don't listen. This is authoritarian. How am I wrong?
Actually, I am very interested in hearing more about this. If you want to take it to e-mail, feel free to e-mail me about where Standard Oil raised prices.
I feel their "manipulations" were completely legal. The journalist credited with starting the takedown of SO was Ida Tarbell, who was the daughter of an uncompetitive oil producer who went bankrupt.
Every thing I've researched with Standard Oil shows them lowering prices. The only times I see people complaining in the media back then were the muckrakers who were personally hurt by bad business decisions -- not by practices that were uncompetitive. The way to compete is to become efficient, not to become stagnant. Standard Oil's competitors had every chance to compete but they didn't work as hard as Rockefeller.
By the way, I found numerous errors in my little sister's history books regarding Standard Oil. I'm not sure how much I trust any book that quotes the journalists back then, especially ones like Tarbell who were just angry competitors.
Anyway, I'd love to hear where SO raised prices and gouged consumers, I can't find any proof or information alluding to that theory.
I hate using the terms left and right -- they're both just authoritarians. If you really feel the mass media isn't pro-authoritarian, then you aren't paying attention to the realities of the market control mechanisms. Radio, TV even newspaper companies are heavily regulated, licensed and subsidized by public policy and definitely have reason to support the regime in control -- no matter what party it is.
The Austrians at Mises use some terms I don't necessarily agree with, but their research and theory are both solid, IMO.
As digital cameras finally catch up to analog ones (or have they?) I see more need for memory based storage over hard drives. Try to take 8 megapixel uncompressed photographs as quickly as you can with an analog camera, and even the fastest hard drives with the biggest write-cache will choke. Hard drives require more memory, can't hold up to banging and shaking, and just don't cut it for heavy duty use in any environment.
Will hard drives stay ahead of memory? Maybe for the time being -- but there is a limitation to how cheap they can go, IMHO. They're adding more data per inch, they're making them slightly faster in read/write speeds, and they're definitely becoming cheap, but there will soon be a day that memory drives will overtake hard drives in price. You have more companies working on memory technologies than on hard drive technologies, and that competition will aid in making magnetic storage obsolete.
I'm not saying my opinion is correct, but I'm one who has faith in research and development, and I know that magnetic storage is so-1970. Even 2D memory storage is about 10 years outdated. What is next? The replacment for both, and it isn't 20 years away.
I've replied to the Standard Oil "monopoly" on slashdot so often, I think I may need to write a standard reply, haha :)
Standard Oil was a "monopoly" by lowering prices so low using techniques that the competition couldn't match. They lowered oil prices from 60 cents to 8 cents per gallon, a boon for consumers and for production and manufacturing. The only ones complaining were their powerful competitors, and this is why government got involved. Before the end of the government investigation, Standard was nearly destroyed by a new competitor: gasoline. Rockefeller knew how to make oil efficiently, and the old producers didn't. Don't call that a monopoly, call it efficient. Isn'y your fear of monopoly from prices goes UP not DOWN?
A few VERY INSIGHTFUL monopoly links:
http://www.mises.org/story/621
http://www.mises.org/story/1371
The margins are too low, the capitol needed is too high, and the technology too expensive to develop independently (and a minefield of patents to negotiate.)
Yeah, patents have nothing to do with government over-regulating.
One point you missed is a very important one: these companies might be on the verge of death, and when a market disappears, you see many companies trying to stay alive by merging.
Will hard drives be on the desktop in 1 year? Probably. 2 years? Still looks good. 5 years? I'm not so sure. My buddy has a 2GB and a 4GB SD card. Nearly 100% of my data is held on someone else's server, so I am happily using my 6GB hard drive and my 4 2GB SD cards for things I need locally. In fact, now that I have 150kbps-600kbps everywhere I go (T-Mobile's EDGE network combined with WiFi service plans), I don't see any need for storing data on a hard drive.
Will mega-ISPs need hard drives? Absolutely. Yet hard drives can be one of the biggest bottlenecks for huge-bandwidth websites. It is far easier to stream data from memory than from magnetic media.
What does all this babbling mean? I think the hard drive manufacturers see the writing on the wall. Even with 60TB hard drives, memory is quickly catching up, and prices are quickly dropping. I'll be very surprised if we see hard drives in 20 years.
Actually, they do.
You can get it from this place, but you have to get it yourself.
I've been telling Google for years to add Girls.Google.Com.
Or is that Girls.Oogle.com?
The lady and I play this fun game on our drives. It basically starts with me saying something insightful or interesting or funny, and then she thinks about what I said and she replies with something contextual to what I said.
Imagine it is like slashdot, but without moderation and only between two or 3 people. I had a feeling it would supplement and even replace gaming and web forums, but I don't think it will catch on.
If you try it some time, remember that is might be trademarked or patented, so be cautious who you do it around.
Combines don't always combine to become more powerful, in fact companies usually combine to save their asses.
This merger isn't about making more profits -- it is about cutting the bleeding that has occured now that hard drive space is a commodity. How many hard drive companies did we have 10 years ago versus today? Do you recall all the companies that are gone now?
How can you look at the prices of hard drives versus the number of companies and see a problem? You're pushing me to think you want regulations added to prevent these merges, but I'm happily buying 300GB hard drives for under $100 and I'm very happy.
I don't see any anti-trust here -- corporations are finding their bottom lines chopped up by excess banking and taxing regulations, excess overhead caused by mandated insurance regulations and excess pension costs caused by excess investment regulations. The more we regulate, the more we see the number of companies in a given market trend towards 1.
Don't neglect the realities of being a corporation in a world that tries to overcontrol many companies in order to subsidize the few. Hard drive companies have one of the biggest problems in balancing cost versus quality.
We've lost MANY hard drive companies over the years. So what? Hard drives are CHEAPER than ever, and we will likely see hard drives get even cheaper than that as companies combine and become more efficient.
If only 2 companies remain and they start to gouge consumers, give it about 2 weeks before investors who see an opportunity come in and bring competition back to prior levels. I don't believe that monopolies are more than temporary unless they are given the power of monopoly through government licensing and regulations.
OSC has repeatedly come under attacks for not being politically correct. His writing style, characters and some deep beliefs in his stories seem to bring new enemies to the battle.
I personally could care less about his personal religion or what he thinks of gays or blacks or chefs. It doesn't matter to me -- he doesn't seem to have any opinion of me, so I'll just let him write.
And write he does. Ender's Game really was such a key element in my youth and I know it was the same of many of my friends. I don't want to see the book destroyed by a bad movie, with everything deemed negative scrubbed out. I don't see any major movie production house doing the right job with the movie(s), and I don't see any kids being able to replace Ender in my head. My lady and I "battle" over what Ender and the other characters look like. We both believe the movie would likely be better as a 3D or anime cartoon than an actual live action movie. Can anyone here actually stand to watch kids on TV?
That is the magic of the books -- you think, you read and you think some more. As I've aged over the years, the books are still on my main shelf in our library. I've read them recently and still find great insight into the little things.
Here's an idea: leave it be. Movies today are trash, and there is very little that comes out that is worth watching. Hell, for decades a common response was "it wasn't as good as the book" and I say let's not stop repeating that.
OSC, you have a lot of money and millions of fans. Warner Brothers, you're a monster of a company, more concerned with protecting your non-physical intellectual and creative property that you've licensed than with concern over producing quality goods at a quality price on a regular basis.
Up until about 1998 I co-owned a video/film production company in Chicago. I met many talented college writers who could have performed miracles had they had distribution. The Internet is that distribution.
If you feel that we won't have more amazing indie flicks as the Internet youth mature, you'll be surprised. As technology allows individuals to do the work of 4 or 5 people, and as chromakey gets more transparent allowing actors in completely different parts of the world to be part of the same scene, we're going to see very competitive indie films in the near future.
And rightfully so, why should you get to profit from someone else's art?)
I don't believe in the idea of protecting a thought or an idea. I believe in physical property rights as the only right one can have in any situation. I believe that human rights come from this physical property right, and I have no problem with theft of ideas or thought behind art. The bands that I've produced (financially) I've asked to not copyright their music and only charge for the medium, not the content. They've made decent money on tour (charging for the service, not the music) and selling merchandise (the physical product not the logo or content).
Anarchocapitalism.