In most of America, only two companies are allowed to run wires into your home, the local telco monopoly and the local cable monopoly. The existence of the cable and telco monopolies is responsible for the problem. As long as that's the case, you're just arguing about the best way to manage the ripoff. Any regulatory scheme, at best, simply minimizes the ripoff. At worst, it leads to the two companies having undue influence over regulators.... and indirectly gives the regulators vast power to regulate and monitor private communication.
My own feeling is that the very idea of regulated telecommunications is inconsistent with the First Amendment. I don't think it could be any plainer. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for the court decision.
Just because an organization is "non-profit" doesn't mean that it always operates charitably. As with any organization, whether it be commercial, charitable or governmental, its primary goal as an organization is to become a bigger and to have more money pass through its hands. Blue Cross is a perfect example... if you worked at Blue Cross or a private insurer, you'd notice very little difference in the way they operate.
ARC is free to use the logo the same as it always has, but selling licenses to use it is pretty cheeky. I'm sure that ARC enforces their own trademarks just as fervently as JNJ does.
Thew only dupes are the people who read these articles and believe the iPhone has been hacked.
When somebody successfully installs an application, then it's been hacked. Until that's achieved, all this stuff is like home runs during batting practice. An impressive display of skill, but it doesn't count.
Not to stick up for machine voting, or the older alternatives. But I've never seen anybody run a test against the established voting systems, and the supporting systems by which humans handle the votes. The voter registration system is so open to manipulation that it's basically meaningless.
I hate to go out on a limb here, but my guess is that the entire election system is incredibly insecure, and that there has been vote fraud going on for decades. New voting machines won't make it any better or any worse. Machines don't manipulate elections, people do.
Here's how I know that it matters. Two local bands I used to know. One had a fairly well-known but unrecorded local hit. There were no record deals involved, nobody had signed anything, ASCAP/BMI had no claim to it. It just got known through the club circuit.
The other band wanted to cover the song. Nobody would have stopped them, but they absolutely wouldn't do it without permission from the guys who wrote it. They just felt it was right, and I've never encountered a musician who felt otherwise.
Don't assume that I'm defending all IP law (it's mostly awful). But this principle of owning your work seems pretty ingrained into the psyche of most artists. The challenge is to find a better way of handling the law.
>> What makes you think the musicians ever see a dime?
Well, they tell me they do.
In any case, I'm sure the middlemen grab more than their fair share. As in all of the music biz, a very few artists collect the vast majority of royalties, and many non-artists get their hands on the money in between. I've seen plenty of artists' earnings go up other people's noses, no argument there.
But this article was just a typical case of a cheapskate business that didn't want to pay. I mean, they weren't paying the performers, either. The fees all told would have been less than $1000/year. If they had entertainment two nights a week, that's 10 bucks a show. Just another sleazy Florida business trying to do things on the cheap. If you can't find a way to earn 10 bucks a show (and maybe a few for the actual performers you cheap prick), maybe it's, um, not a viable business idea?
This has been how it's worked for decades. ASCAP/BMI are assigned the public performance rights to songs, and they can be very thorough about collecting from everybody owes them. In the past, they've even harrassed companies where the employees played music in areas that could be heard by the public. Own a small retail store and play CD's in the background? Then you owe them a licensing fee.
While ASCAP/BMI can be very heavy-handed, I have to say that it's hardly the worst aspect of IP law. The good part of the arrangement is that a band can perform whatever cover songs they want, and licensing is the club owner's responsibility. And, y'know, if you write a song and somebody else performs it, you ought to get paid.
The bad part is that the convenience of uniting all the performance rights under a single umbrella creates an overly powerful organization.
I dunno.... imagine two PC's; one has a default Vista installation, and the other has undetectable malware that periodically contacts its creator. Is there really any difference between them?
>> your telling me that NO companies would love to have an advertising spot in that now vacant space?
Apparently, that's the case. Understand how most of these deals work: most likely XM pays a syndication fee to O&A, and in exchange they get to carry the show (including O&A's advertisements), and XM would get some advertising slots of their own to sell. They also hope to gain subscribers from the deal.
As far as I can tell, XM is having no luck selling their own ads, which shouldn't surprise anybody. They offer no particular targeting (if you wanted to sponsor O&A, you'd probably call O&A or a local radio station, not XM). XM started with the model that they could sell advertising AND subscriptions, but it isn't working out that way. Subscription fees limit the listener base, which in turn is spread out over 200 channels.
A few years ago, the two satellite companies outbid each other for these shows as if they were dot-com startups. Now, they're choking under the obligation, and they want to get out of it. I'm not gonna shed a tear for any of these guys... maybe they're being treated unfairly, but they benefited handsomely when they got fat deals in the first place. This is just the other side of the satellite radio bubble.
Who the hell was advertising on XM? All I hear is ads for gotomypc.com and for other XM shows.
Uncensored only means it's uncensored by the FCC over the F word and topless titty (which, admittedly, isn't a big problem on the radio). But anybody who you sign a contract with is gonna maintain some editorial control over what you do, and if you suddenly started spouting Nazi propaganda, they wouldn't want to be associated with you. Now, we're currently undergoing one of those public hysterias over shock radio, so everybody is hypersensistive, and it's an overreaction in one sense. But....
Mostly what's going on is that shock radio has jumped the shark. It's going out of style, and this is what it looks like. Imus caught some heat, and it turned out he had some listeners but no loyal fans to defend him. Stern went to Sirius and a fraction of his audience followed. It's not that the radio stations are becoming more censorious, it's just that the shows are now disposable, they don't make enough money anymore to make it worth the hassle.
The shares won't move until some results are in. If this increases EMI's download sales (as I suspect it will), then it'll likely spread to other companies.
Remember, if Apple doesn't have the costs associated with DRM, so they're probably giving EMI a larger cut on the non-DRM sales. Add in the $.30 premium, and their margin might be almost 30-50% higher than on non-DRM sales. And probably *much* larger margins than CD sales.
The most fundamental problem for the labels remains the fact that their ability to promote new talent is significantly diminished, and may never return. In all the fuss over merchandising, nobody seems to have noticed this.
Yeah, but they want to sell the songs. Apple could probably make more money by selling you 20-30 DRM-less songs than by selling you an iPod. Maybe it would take 100 songs, I dunno. But using a proprietary store to leverage iPod sales is a losing strategy.
In fact, if they could sell DRM-free songs through iTunes, they'd probably sell more iPods.
Understand, it's only a matter of time before MySpace starts selling unprotected downloads, and that'll be a HUGE threat, both to iTunes and the major labels.
Apple sells iPods because they're well-designed, they have a nice responsive interface, and they have lots of accessories available. I know lots of people who have iPods, some who have bought at iTunes; but I don't know a single person who says they bought an iPod so they could shop for DRM-protected songs at the iTunes store.
I've studied economics far beyond the level of an introductory course taught by grad students. Monopoly is defined by barriers to competition, not by having a large market share or a fleeting competitive advantage. Even Marx didn't believe in the staying power of monopolies, notwithstanding the fact that most marxists do.
You think Jobs is proposing to eliminate DRM out of generosity? You think Apple's board of directors is worried about losing their "monopoly"? Why did Apple's stock go up on the news? Apple knows that they have to offer a better product in the future, because if they don't, somebody else will. Sony, by contrast, tried to leverage their 100% share of the early VCR market, and got their asses kicked.
And what exactly does Apple have a monopoly on, anyway? There are dozens of players out there, lots and lots of music stores, not to mention plenty of places where you can legally get music for free. The only download I've bought for my iPod came via Rhapsody->CD->MP3, the rest came from CD's or legal MP3 downloads or from friends' bands. They all play on any brand of player. Where's the monopoly?
The thing is, the online music industry is in its infancy. Having a "monopoly" over it at this stage is meaningless. Jobs knows that he can better profit by expanding the market and taking whatever piece he can get competitively.
Seems to me that DRM currently prevents more iTunes sales than it creates.
The contractual requirements highlight the problem of distributed secrets, which is basically what compromised CSS, and seems to be a weakness in the HD-DVD scheme, too.
Give him credit, he's willing to sell the iPod on its own merits, and doesn't need the music store to lock you in. Any way you cut it, the iPod will be more desirable (read: more profitable) if the store ISN'T encumbered by DRM.
It would also eliminate a whole bunch of security programmers from the distribution chain, which would benefit everybody except the programmers.
Cables and accessories are the items that'll make me head to Wal-Mart, especially if I'm in a hurry. Say what you want about them, everybody other retailer wants to fatten their margins on overpriced on cables & accessories. I hate when they do that. I needed an HDMI cable quickly recently; WM had one for $30, when no other retailer around had anything under $50. I suspect $40 of it is for the packaging. Same thing when I needed some cheap speaker stands.... $29.95 at WM for the same Atlantic stands that everybody else sold for $50-$60.
If you have time to shop around, you can find perfectly good HDMI cables for $15-$20. Fry's usually has 'em, often hidden in the geek aisles, away from the TV's.
That's my take, as well. Of course, I doubt MS wants to kill Parallels so much as they want to maintain control of the platform. If (when?) lots of people start running virtualized Windows on their Macs, it will undermine MS's leverage with hardware vendors.
Microsoft seems to be playing a lot of defense these days.
Well, it should make for some interesting ad targeting.
Let's see, we'll just dial here... Nine One One... Send..... "ring, ring... Your call will be connected shortly. Did you know, Kidde fire extinguishers come with a full lifetime guarantee...."
ARRGGHHH!
Hmmm, try again. Let's call a Corvette dealer.... dial the number here.... "ring, ring.... Your call will be connected shortly. Did you know that you can order Viagra from the privacy and comfort of your home? Press 69* for more information."
"... supporters for Net Neutrality, will most likely take command of Internet policy"
Think about it, how could "command of Internet policy" equate to freedom, unless the "commanders" refrain from using their power? Which, in Washington, is sacrilege. Even the "smaller government" Republicans forgot about that once they had power.
Liberals don't pass laws to solve problems that might arise in the future. Leftists do that. This is not a comment on the election; just because R's are sleazy doesn't mean that D's are not. Wake the fuck up, and realize that you're being conned by big business into supporting something, simply because other businesses are against it. The companies that are pushing this legislation, even though I like them, are NOT trying to preserve our freedom, they're trying to enhance their profits.
Preventing hypothetical problems is one of Washington's oldest tricks. They pass a law, the problem never arises, and they say, "See, it worked." Stop falling for it.
"The remarkable centrality of carbon dioxide means that dealing with the threat of warming fits in with a great variety of preexisting agendas--some legitimate, some less so: energy efficiency, reduced dependence on Middle Eastern oil, dissatisfaction with industrial society (neopastoralism), international competition, governmental desires for enhanced revenues (carbon taxes), and bureaucratic desires for enhanced power."
Heh. Thanks for the link, although it reminds me of some really terrible CEO/CFO types I've known. Spending money to maintain obsolete stuff inevitably leads to a death spiral of increasing costs and decreasing returns.
Slashdot Mirror
In most of America, only two companies are allowed to run wires into your home, the local telco monopoly and the local cable monopoly. The existence of the cable and telco monopolies is responsible for the problem. As long as that's the case, you're just arguing about the best way to manage the ripoff. Any regulatory scheme, at best, simply minimizes the ripoff. At worst, it leads to the two companies having undue influence over regulators.... and indirectly gives the regulators vast power to regulate and monitor private communication.
My own feeling is that the very idea of regulated telecommunications is inconsistent with the First Amendment. I don't think it could be any plainer. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for the court decision.
Just because an organization is "non-profit" doesn't mean that it always operates charitably. As with any organization, whether it be commercial, charitable or governmental, its primary goal as an organization is to become a bigger and to have more money pass through its hands. Blue Cross is a perfect example... if you worked at Blue Cross or a private insurer, you'd notice very little difference in the way they operate.
ARC is free to use the logo the same as it always has, but selling licenses to use it is pretty cheeky. I'm sure that ARC enforces their own trademarks just as fervently as JNJ does.
Thew only dupes are the people who read these articles and believe the iPhone has been hacked.
When somebody successfully installs an application, then it's been hacked. Until that's achieved, all this stuff is like home runs during batting practice. An impressive display of skill, but it doesn't count.
Not to stick up for machine voting, or the older alternatives. But I've never seen anybody run a test against the established voting systems, and the supporting systems by which humans handle the votes. The voter registration system is so open to manipulation that it's basically meaningless.
I hate to go out on a limb here, but my guess is that the entire election system is incredibly insecure, and that there has been vote fraud going on for decades. New voting machines won't make it any better or any worse. Machines don't manipulate elections, people do.
Here's how I know that it matters. Two local bands I used to know. One had a fairly well-known but unrecorded local hit. There were no record deals involved, nobody had signed anything, ASCAP/BMI had no claim to it. It just got known through the club circuit.
The other band wanted to cover the song. Nobody would have stopped them, but they absolutely wouldn't do it without permission from the guys who wrote it. They just felt it was right, and I've never encountered a musician who felt otherwise.
Don't assume that I'm defending all IP law (it's mostly awful). But this principle of owning your work seems pretty ingrained into the psyche of most artists. The challenge is to find a better way of handling the law.
>> What makes you think the musicians ever see a dime?
Well, they tell me they do.
In any case, I'm sure the middlemen grab more than their fair share. As in all of the music biz, a very few artists collect the vast majority of royalties, and many non-artists get their hands on the money in between. I've seen plenty of artists' earnings go up other people's noses, no argument there.
But this article was just a typical case of a cheapskate business that didn't want to pay. I mean, they weren't paying the performers, either. The fees all told would have been less than $1000/year. If they had entertainment two nights a week, that's 10 bucks a show. Just another sleazy Florida business trying to do things on the cheap. If you can't find a way to earn 10 bucks a show (and maybe a few for the actual performers you cheap prick), maybe it's, um, not a viable business idea?
This has been how it's worked for decades. ASCAP/BMI are assigned the public performance rights to songs, and they can be very thorough about collecting from everybody owes them. In the past, they've even harrassed companies where the employees played music in areas that could be heard by the public. Own a small retail store and play CD's in the background? Then you owe them a licensing fee.
While ASCAP/BMI can be very heavy-handed, I have to say that it's hardly the worst aspect of IP law. The good part of the arrangement is that a band can perform whatever cover songs they want, and licensing is the club owner's responsibility. And, y'know, if you write a song and somebody else performs it, you ought to get paid.
The bad part is that the convenience of uniting all the performance rights under a single umbrella creates an overly powerful organization.
I dunno.... imagine two PC's; one has a default Vista installation, and the other has undetectable malware that periodically contacts its creator. Is there really any difference between them?
Puddles? My interpretation is that the Martians peed their pants when they saw us coming.
>> your telling me that NO companies would love to have an advertising spot in that now vacant space?
Apparently, that's the case. Understand how most of these deals work: most likely XM pays a syndication fee to O&A, and in exchange they get to carry the show (including O&A's advertisements), and XM would get some advertising slots of their own to sell. They also hope to gain subscribers from the deal.
As far as I can tell, XM is having no luck selling their own ads, which shouldn't surprise anybody. They offer no particular targeting (if you wanted to sponsor O&A, you'd probably call O&A or a local radio station, not XM). XM started with the model that they could sell advertising AND subscriptions, but it isn't working out that way. Subscription fees limit the listener base, which in turn is spread out over 200 channels.
A few years ago, the two satellite companies outbid each other for these shows as if they were dot-com startups. Now, they're choking under the obligation, and they want to get out of it. I'm not gonna shed a tear for any of these guys... maybe they're being treated unfairly, but they benefited handsomely when they got fat deals in the first place. This is just the other side of the satellite radio bubble.
Who the hell was advertising on XM? All I hear is ads for gotomypc.com and for other XM shows.
Uncensored only means it's uncensored by the FCC over the F word and topless titty (which, admittedly, isn't a big problem on the radio). But anybody who you sign a contract with is gonna maintain some editorial control over what you do, and if you suddenly started spouting Nazi propaganda, they wouldn't want to be associated with you. Now, we're currently undergoing one of those public hysterias over shock radio, so everybody is hypersensistive, and it's an overreaction in one sense. But....
Mostly what's going on is that shock radio has jumped the shark. It's going out of style, and this is what it looks like. Imus caught some heat, and it turned out he had some listeners but no loyal fans to defend him. Stern went to Sirius and a fraction of his audience followed. It's not that the radio stations are becoming more censorious, it's just that the shows are now disposable, they don't make enough money anymore to make it worth the hassle.
The shares won't move until some results are in. If this increases EMI's download sales (as I suspect it will), then it'll likely spread to other companies.
Remember, if Apple doesn't have the costs associated with DRM, so they're probably giving EMI a larger cut on the non-DRM sales. Add in the $.30 premium, and their margin might be almost 30-50% higher than on non-DRM sales. And probably *much* larger margins than CD sales.
The most fundamental problem for the labels remains the fact that their ability to promote new talent is significantly diminished, and may never return. In all the fuss over merchandising, nobody seems to have noticed this.
Yeah, but they want to sell the songs. Apple could probably make more money by selling you 20-30 DRM-less songs than by selling you an iPod. Maybe it would take 100 songs, I dunno. But using a proprietary store to leverage iPod sales is a losing strategy.
In fact, if they could sell DRM-free songs through iTunes, they'd probably sell more iPods.
Understand, it's only a matter of time before MySpace starts selling unprotected downloads, and that'll be a HUGE threat, both to iTunes and the major labels.
Apple sells iPods because they're well-designed, they have a nice responsive interface, and they have lots of accessories available. I know lots of people who have iPods, some who have bought at iTunes; but I don't know a single person who says they bought an iPod so they could shop for DRM-protected songs at the iTunes store.
I've studied economics far beyond the level of an introductory course taught by grad students. Monopoly is defined by barriers to competition, not by having a large market share or a fleeting competitive advantage. Even Marx didn't believe in the staying power of monopolies, notwithstanding the fact that most marxists do.
You think Jobs is proposing to eliminate DRM out of generosity? You think Apple's board of directors is worried about losing their "monopoly"? Why did Apple's stock go up on the news? Apple knows that they have to offer a better product in the future, because if they don't, somebody else will. Sony, by contrast, tried to leverage their 100% share of the early VCR market, and got their asses kicked.
And what exactly does Apple have a monopoly on, anyway? There are dozens of players out there, lots and lots of music stores, not to mention plenty of places where you can legally get music for free. The only download I've bought for my iPod came via Rhapsody->CD->MP3, the rest came from CD's or legal MP3 downloads or from friends' bands. They all play on any brand of player. Where's the monopoly?
The thing is, the online music industry is in its infancy. Having a "monopoly" over it at this stage is meaningless. Jobs knows that he can better profit by expanding the market and taking whatever piece he can get competitively.
Seems to me that DRM currently prevents more iTunes sales than it creates.
The contractual requirements highlight the problem of distributed secrets, which is basically what compromised CSS, and seems to be a weakness in the HD-DVD scheme, too.
Give him credit, he's willing to sell the iPod on its own merits, and doesn't need the music store to lock you in. Any way you cut it, the iPod will be more desirable (read: more profitable) if the store ISN'T encumbered by DRM.
It would also eliminate a whole bunch of security programmers from the distribution chain, which would benefit everybody except the programmers.
Considering how Apple's stock reacted to the announcement, Cisco ask for some backdated options.
Cables and accessories are the items that'll make me head to Wal-Mart, especially if I'm in a hurry. Say what you want about them, everybody other retailer wants to fatten their margins on overpriced on cables & accessories. I hate when they do that. I needed an HDMI cable quickly recently; WM had one for $30, when no other retailer around had anything under $50. I suspect $40 of it is for the packaging. Same thing when I needed some cheap speaker stands.... $29.95 at WM for the same Atlantic stands that everybody else sold for $50-$60.
If you have time to shop around, you can find perfectly good HDMI cables for $15-$20. Fry's usually has 'em, often hidden in the geek aisles, away from the TV's.
That's my take, as well. Of course, I doubt MS wants to kill Parallels so much as they want to maintain control of the platform. If (when?) lots of people start running virtualized Windows on their Macs, it will undermine MS's leverage with hardware vendors.
Microsoft seems to be playing a lot of defense these days.
Somebody should translate those Scientology texts into Mapuzugun. Then sell it to SCO.
Well, it should make for some interesting ad targeting.
Let's see, we'll just dial here... Nine One One... Send..... "ring, ring... Your call will be connected shortly. Did you know, Kidde fire extinguishers come with a full lifetime guarantee...."
ARRGGHHH!
Hmmm, try again. Let's call a Corvette dealer.... dial the number here.... "ring, ring.... Your call will be connected shortly. Did you know that you can order Viagra from the privacy and comfort of your home? Press 69* for more information."
"... supporters for Net Neutrality, will most likely take command of Internet policy"
Think about it, how could "command of Internet policy" equate to freedom, unless the "commanders" refrain from using their power? Which, in Washington, is sacrilege. Even the "smaller government" Republicans forgot about that once they had power.
Liberals don't pass laws to solve problems that might arise in the future. Leftists do that. This is not a comment on the election; just because R's are sleazy doesn't mean that D's are not. Wake the fuck up, and realize that you're being conned by big business into supporting something, simply because other businesses are against it. The companies that are pushing this legislation, even though I like them, are NOT trying to preserve our freedom, they're trying to enhance their profits.
Preventing hypothetical problems is one of Washington's oldest tricks. They pass a law, the problem never arises, and they say, "See, it worked." Stop falling for it.
"U.S. Government Prepares For Vista"
I didn't realize Vista would include an upgrade path from Windows 3.x.
"The remarkable centrality of carbon dioxide means that dealing with the threat of warming fits in with a great variety of preexisting agendas--some legitimate, some less so: energy efficiency, reduced dependence on Middle Eastern oil, dissatisfaction with industrial society (neopastoralism), international competition, governmental desires for enhanced revenues (carbon taxes), and bureaucratic desires for enhanced power."
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg15n2g.html
Heh. Thanks for the link, although it reminds me of some really terrible CEO/CFO types I've known. Spending money to maintain obsolete stuff inevitably leads to a death spiral of increasing costs and decreasing returns.