as we evolve as a society we will find a way to interact economically with each other in a billion person city the way we did when we had a town of 20 and we knew everyone
1. Scale Mayfield to a billion residents 2. ??? 3. Commune!
She's even agreed to tell the story to any American media outlet (which means she's willing to go to jail so people can know), as long as the outlet agrees to tell the whole story, and not edit it to hide the truth.
So why not put her entire story and all the evidence on the internet?
If she wanted 'the whole story' out there, she certainly doesn't need the media. Not if she's willing to go to jail. And the US media -has- covered her story; her site even links to those articles. They just aren't taking her up on the offer to break her gag order (and neither has the TimesOnline). So I'm inclined to think there's more to her 'offer' to tell her story than just a concern that the truth be set free. Perhaps her 'whole unedited story' has a price tag attached and is light on hard evidence?
So what the MI needs to find, and soon, is some other revenue stream. Personally, I could well see them turn from distributors to marketing assistants
It's pretty clear that the useful members of the Recording Industry will wind up just fine when it all shakes out. Solid PR and Marketing people will remain, as will talented engineers and producers. Regardless of how music is created or distributed - people will pay money to make sure it sounds as good as it can, and to get the word out.
The only people at risk, are those who exist solely due the monopolized distribution channel. And I don't think there will be a place in the 'new music industry' for them. Not in any recognizable form.
The reason they ROT13'd filenames was because those services started filtering out files named with the proper artist/song title.
In the end, filenames aren't copyrightable, so you can't 'encrypt' a filename and then complain that anyone filtering your traffic is violating the DMCA by descrambling the title. They wouldn't even be right in a technical sense. (Much less any sense that wouldn't get laughed out of court)
Even the suggestion of putting a unique work into a given data stream and then 'DRMing' the transmission is laughable. You can't just draw a dirty picture or write a short manifesto on the front of a photocopied version of a novel - and pretend that changes the nature of what you've done.
Also worth keeping in mind: the RIAA has their goon squads downloading torrents, and tracking the people they connect to. So the people torrent downloaders would be trying to hide their data from - are exactly the people they are explicitly handing that data to. No amount of encryption will help any lame 'DMCA' argument in that case. They're giving the receiver explicit permission to crack that packet open and take the data inside.
As for ISP traffic-shaping - encryption is a short-term workaround at best. Long-term, ISPs will move to whitelisting, where every 'unauthorized' packet or TCP connection is downgraded or worse. Remember - the traffic they're out to stop is all traffic they haven't co-opted and approved of. Comcast won't lose any sleep over deprioritizing some great new protocol. If they happen to smother it in its sleep by rendering it useless to 90% of the market - all the better from their standpoint. New protocols tend to be disruptive to entrenched (monetized) traffic.
More likely it's a full suite of apps that will leverage a connection back to the google mothership.
Let's not forget this is Google. They never bothered with the Google desktop OS, Google browser or Google PC that everyone was certain they had in development. And frankly, a Google Phone OS offered to Verizon is a non-starter. We all know that. Verizon are the king of crippling hardware with their horrible OS and then charging users to re-enable features. There's no way they're going to hand over their iron grip on CDMA hardware/software. Certainly not to Google, who may just turn into a deadly serious direct competitor following the 700mhz auction.
But a package of apps that Verizon can charge users to install and use to sell data plans? A package of apps that lets Verizon close ground on the iPhone while it develops its own (crippled) (monetized) solutions? That sounds a bit more reasonable all around.
There are more people with more disposable income to buy software and art than ever before in history. Just because everyone who wants to make a comfortable living as a creative can't yet do so, does not mean there hasn't been progress.
Every single moment in the post-industrial society has not devalued human beings. It's devalued automatons.
E.g. Industrialized farming didn't devalue farmers. It only devalued people whose only skill was picking fruit. At the same time, it invented a previously non-existent pool of valued workers who could invent/build and maintain those planting, clearing and harvesting machines. And it opened up new industries for other still-valued workers to branch out into. (subsistence farmers don't need marketing people, accountants, engineers or IT, but Tractor manufacturers do) And that's all without considering the expanded markets for those products, shipping and it's related industries, the chemical and biological sciences, etc.
Are we really so wistful for the days of backbreaking menial subsistence farming that we're willing to rewrite history to mark it the apex of 'human' development?
Every step from the industrial society to now has placed more and more emphasis on what it is to be quintessentially human. It's the jobs that are effectively an insult to human intellectual capacity and potential that have been trimmed out - those that reduce human beings to specialized beasts of burden - and in their place, new, more challenging jobs have arisen.
I know that it seriously sucks to be the guy who's only known fruit-picking, line-work or needless paper-shuffling when that job finally evaporates -- I've seen it happen to people I know and love. But the benefit to our society overall has been immeasurably positive for the transition (which is why we should absolutely invest in sponsored retraining for people whose industries disappear from underneath them). That poor guy's children will live in a world that will demand they be that much more than just a strong back and a weak will. And that's a beautiful thing to anyone concerned with the plight of the human spirit.
Granted, that's not the result of every individual advancement or downsizing. But when you step back to the societal view, that's where technology has been taking us.
I've been having the same problems on and off over the last couple weeks.
Problem is, I never thought to dig into it as my connection is regularly 'comcastic' (pejorative) during peak hours. I'm not sure if you should consider yourself lucky or unlucky that you can actually tell the difference between their incompetence and malice.
Assuming intelligence agencies are intelligent, it should follow that if their efforts were trivially detected, it would be because they weren't trying to avoid detection. Given that misdirecting attention is easily as effective as 'blending in', this seems a perfectly reasonable alternative.
So while this clearly isn't the best potential use for microUAVs indirect information gathering, that's not to say that getting a few spotted implies incompetence at the highest levels.
Perhaps the dragonfly 'bug' never really worked and they were simply flying a micro drone clumsily over the crowd to distract people from more-traditional surveillance or hijinx. (planting a bug, disrupting a handoff, etc)
Maybe their current 'bug' of choice is a cockroach, scorpion or rat and they'd rather condition people to look 'up', when checking for micro-drones. (Do dragonflies even have a suitable habitat range across the countries we're focused on?)
Perhaps the dragonfly has become the preferred model of enemy surveillance. It would then help to raise awareness to indirectly harm their efforts. (producing an actual 'captured' drone would be more effective, but would involve either our admission that we're better than dragonflies, or an admission that someone else is beyond the US technologically.)
Perhaps the latest kit is beyond this. In which case the best technology would be used on the highest priority targets and these dragonfly 'bugs' have just filtered down to less-essential targets (and would therefore likely be operated by less-savvy, less-intelligent agents).
Disclaimer: I'm not actually suggesting dragonfly bugs were used in any of these roles at any of those rallies. I'm just jumping in on the thought experiment. I personally find it improbable that anything that attracts attention within a modern crowd would go completely un-photographed. The idea that this happened above several crowds and we don't have so much as bigfoot-quality cellphone pics serves as the most effective debunking.
The included games are on a disc. And most Live Arcade titles are ~50MB - so you can get a decent number on a memory card.
Though Microsoft definitely should have bundled this thing with a 4GB flash drive. That'd be what? $30 for them? It's easily covered under the money they've made on keeping the 360 overpriced.
American teens would contribute apps that interest American teens. It's not only unlikely that such apps would interest a child in a developing nation, it's downright implausible that such apps would be well-coded enough to cleanly port to a different language/culture.
American teens would code things that would sync to their already-connected lives, whereas a proper OLPC project would seek to replace those things. Would a ten-year-old African child really care about yet-another twitter/blogger/flickr/picasa sync/upload app? Would they be able to make sense of the inevitable western GUI assumptions that stand in contrast to the rest of the SugarOS?
Serious developers have a far better chance at making universally useful apps - and they're not going to be slowed down by an extra two-hundred tax-deductible dollars.
The canned solutions include precalculated light maps, mostly-static light sources and level designs that are carefully constructed to limit overdraw. The push for raytracing is more about removing the drawbacks of the current 'solutions', than notably improving eye candy.
E.g. raytracing solutions will free up developers to implement more-dynamic scenes, more-dynamic lights and level designs where buildings and cities aren't glorified mazes where 90% of the architecture is an impenetrable facade. (Sure, some titles feature those sorts of things now - but they're expensive tricks, with severely limited implementation)
The only reason this is coming up at all is because of Intel's Larabee GPU, which is being built and sold as the device that will bring real-time raytracing to the desktop.
This and several similar research projects at Intel exist solely to develop tools and heuristics for game developers - to make it easier for Intel to urge them into supporting their new product. My guess is they're going to position these chips as a panacea for next-gen consoles. We can expect to see alot more 'news' like this, talking up their ability to accelerate physics, AI and animation.
If ala carte pricing ever happens, the only affordable channels will be the popular ones, and all the niche channels will cease to exist, or be prohibitively expensive
The whole idea of paying for a 'channel', let alone a block of channels is on its way out. IPTV is going to force everything to go per-show ala carte and attempting to charge for shows will go the same way as attempting to charge for online news 'subscriptions'. Some shows will get away with it, for a little while; some will get away with charging for an 'upgraded' service; but everything will have a $0 option before long.
So, as you point out, it doesn't really matter which mess we get in the short term. Either way we'll all wind up paying more, for less, the way we always do when there's a local monopoly on service.
The only thing that will ever truly bring change is more bandwidth to the home. Even then we'll still be overpaying for our data lines - but at least the content end will have competition.
What good is it if you host it on a central server anyway?
As good as making any mod for a game-engine that you have no real rights to. It'd be good for tinkering, marketing and not much else. It sounds more like an attempt to birth a true graphical MUD scene than a second-life/VRML thing.
So this goes right against what they said earlier, and it requires a special client after all (browsers are, as we know... clients).
Yeah, but the client specs are (allegedly)* open. So the client shouldn't be any more 'special' than browsers themselves. Sure, it's not a web browser, but you could still roll your own: junk behavior you don't like, port to whatever OS or device you want: Linux, Mac, iPhone, maemo, S60, PSP, etc. Hell, you could add native metaplace handling to Firefox.
*(personally, I wonder about that. A real open-standards client implies we can write one that round-files all the marketing. I wonder how that's going to shake out.)
But you know what the best part of an open-standards client is? It becomes trivial to reverse engineer a server to do whatever you want, however you want. Write your own server with whatever you want and just feed the standard data streams back to the client.
Because it's designed to serve -several- devices on that 4.8Gb bus and needs to not bottle-neck the much-faster solid state disks that will be commonly available in the next couple of years? To say nothing of handling the ever-increasing size and speed of digital still and vid cameras, scanners and print jobs of the current and near-future.
The question is why, oh why, are artists in other genres so utterly threatened by the concept that it might be.
Basic insecurity - and one really good question.
With videogames as a recognized Art form what established Artists know and do becomes cloudy, just as the value of great scenery artists was questioned by the rise of great scenery photographers. Prior to photography it was simply understood that a great painter had value, because he could render an emotionally powerful image. With photographers on the scene, painters had to step back and answer questions they'd never had to ask before. They finally came to realize they weren't diminished by photographers - but that was after quite a bit of resistance and denial.
But more than anything, what challenges the Art establishment is the idea that videogames don't work like other forms.
Traditional artists present meticulously crafted fixed pieces that convey some emotional truth they find in the world. The basic strength of interactive art is its ability to convey emotional truth through the rules of simulation; allowing Art to emerge from play. Rather than beat us over the head by showing or telling us what happens when life goes astray for one carefully constructed protagonist, games have the ability to let us experience it; to react to our choices, to our struggle against increasing odds as we run headlong in the wrong direction until we hopefully find the wisdom and truth in turning around.
It's this core feature of interactivity that raises the same questions for every fixed-form artist that photographers raised of painters and that movie-makers raised of the theatre. And so we reach the one really good question: Is a game that can exhibit Art more like a song, or an instrument?
Because interactivity also requires that we can fuck it all up, wander in circles and fail. While that's not too different from someone giving up on "Finnegan's Wake" halfway through, it raises the question of whether the inaccessible is still Art. Because when most people simply can't see our Art, we ought give a moment's thought to whether we're striding around in the buff.
As gamers we rightly shouldn't care whether a scifi author, movie critic or anyone else deigns to validate our preferred medium. They're more barometers of their generation than gatekeepers of meaning. If they come around, it will be long after gaming has proven itself.
At the same time, we should care whether people outside the hardcore niche 'get' our art. Any art form that aims to please only its close circle of devotees and critics is diving headlong into irrelevance. So it's helpful to come up for air from time to time and see whether we're striking true emotional chords in the general audience.
And it never hurts to see whether the general audience can find the B button.;)
1. The new work is an exact, complete copy of the original, and simple copyright rules apply.
Ringtones aren't complete copies - but even abbreviated copies enjoy the copyright protection on the original work.
2. The new work is a derivative of the original work and cannot be distributed without permission from the original copyright holder.
Which we agree they are not - they're not a variation on the recording (remix), nor an extension of the recording (recut), nor a re-recording by another artist (cover), etc.
3. The new work is completely independent and the original copyright holder has no claim to make against it.
Which they most certainly are not. Furthermore, That interpretation would mean anyone could make and sell ringtones of any song anywhere. The RIAA would be furiously suing, lobbying and protesting a ruling that was anywhere close to that.
If a ringtone isn't a derivative work, then yes, we can make them all we want (provided we have a legit copy of the song to start with). But no, we can't distribute them, for the same reason we can't distribute the original song. Their not being derivatives doesn't mean they aren't covered under copyright, it just means they're covered under the original song's copyright. The RIAA liked this, because it meant they could whore out any track they had mechanical rights to, as ringtone fodder, without having to renegotiate anything with the artists.
Tabs are different because they're a separate fixed form (written vs recorded) reproduced in whole (vs a slice of the original recording); it's the same for sheets in general and lyrics. (something the RIAA has been slow to come down on, but it'll happen. Just as soon as they figure out how to monetize a lyrics database.
Also, I would like to say that the concern about performing rights is a joke. Sure, performance rights have been used by ASCAP to shake down businesses that play music for their customers and the occasional giant outdoor party. (e.g. annual block party) But the idea that someone would use a 30 second ringtone to 'perform' a song for an audience is absurd on its face.
The purpose of the ringtone is to be heard by the phone's owner. In the bizarre edge cases where people make ringtones of entire songs and play them, on purpose, to entertain a crowd is no different than people using an ipod, boombox or music-playing phone to do the same, right now. There is clearly no need to cut ASCAP in on all ringtone sales for the same reason there is no need to cut them in on all CD sales. ASCAP is likely just so used to getting whatever they want with a nasty legal brief or two that they honestly think it's worth their lawyers fees to take a shot.
Buying the touch means throwing away the phone, camera and bluetooth to save a hundred dollars.... A hundred dollars that you'll now need to spend for even a -crappy- bluetooth camera phone. So the end monetary result is that, at best, you will have put off your $100 outlay for a crappy bluetooth camera phone until your next contract renewal - or more likely, you're going to wind up spending more.
So you've thrown away the advantage of simplifying down to one device in your pocket, for effectively 0 dollars, in exchange for... what? A physically large PMP with a proprietary internet platform that lacks the storage to leverage its screen? It's a gimmick that only makes sense to people for whom AT&T is a non-option -and- are ok with buying a comparatively large and expensive flash PMP.
Apple pretty much guaranteed this thing wouldn't touch iPhone sales when they gimped the features and storage.
Slashdot Mirror
2. ???
3. Commune!
If she wanted 'the whole story' out there, she certainly doesn't need the media. Not if she's willing to go to jail.
And the US media -has- covered her story; her site even links to those articles. They just aren't taking her up on the offer to break her gag order (and neither has the TimesOnline). So I'm inclined to think there's more to her 'offer' to tell her story than just a concern that the truth be set free. Perhaps her 'whole unedited story' has a price tag attached and is light on hard evidence?
So why doesn't Nokia charge me for all the apps they add to my n800?
The only people at risk, are those who exist solely due the monopolized distribution channel. And I don't think there will be a place in the 'new music industry' for them. Not in any recognizable form.
The reason they ROT13'd filenames was because those services started filtering out files named with the proper artist/song title.
In the end, filenames aren't copyrightable, so you can't 'encrypt' a filename and then complain that anyone filtering your traffic is violating the DMCA by descrambling the title. They wouldn't even be right in a technical sense. (Much less any sense that wouldn't get laughed out of court)
Even the suggestion of putting a unique work into a given data stream and then 'DRMing' the transmission is laughable. You can't just draw a dirty picture or write a short manifesto on the front of a photocopied version of a novel - and pretend that changes the nature of what you've done.
Also worth keeping in mind: the RIAA has their goon squads downloading torrents, and tracking the people they connect to. So the people torrent downloaders would be trying to hide their data from - are exactly the people they are explicitly handing that data to. No amount of encryption will help any lame 'DMCA' argument in that case. They're giving the receiver explicit permission to crack that packet open and take the data inside.
As for ISP traffic-shaping - encryption is a short-term workaround at best. Long-term, ISPs will move to whitelisting, where every 'unauthorized' packet or TCP connection is downgraded or worse. Remember - the traffic they're out to stop is all traffic they haven't co-opted and approved of. Comcast won't lose any sleep over deprioritizing some great new protocol. If they happen to smother it in its sleep by rendering it useless to 90% of the market - all the better from their standpoint. New protocols tend to be disruptive to entrenched (monetized) traffic.
or something similarly pedestrian.
More likely it's a full suite of apps that will leverage a connection back to the google mothership.
Let's not forget this is Google. They never bothered with the Google desktop OS, Google browser or Google PC that everyone was certain they had in development. And frankly, a Google Phone OS offered to Verizon is a non-starter. We all know that. Verizon are the king of crippling hardware with their horrible OS and then charging users to re-enable features. There's no way they're going to hand over their iron grip on CDMA hardware/software. Certainly not to Google, who may just turn into a deadly serious direct competitor following the 700mhz auction.
But a package of apps that Verizon can charge users to install and use to sell data plans?
A package of apps that lets Verizon close ground on the iPhone while it develops its own (crippled) (monetized) solutions?
That sounds a bit more reasonable all around.
There are more people with more disposable income to buy software and art than ever before in history.
Just because everyone who wants to make a comfortable living as a creative can't yet do so, does not mean there hasn't been progress.
That looks like a flawed assumption to me.
Every single moment in the post-industrial society has not devalued human beings. It's devalued automatons.
E.g. Industrialized farming didn't devalue farmers. It only devalued people whose only skill was picking fruit.
At the same time, it invented a previously non-existent pool of valued workers who could invent/build and maintain those planting, clearing and harvesting machines. And it opened up new industries for other still-valued workers to branch out into. (subsistence farmers don't need marketing people, accountants, engineers or IT, but Tractor manufacturers do) And that's all without considering the expanded markets for those products, shipping and it's related industries, the chemical and biological sciences, etc.
Are we really so wistful for the days of backbreaking menial subsistence farming that we're willing to rewrite history to mark it the apex of 'human' development?
Every step from the industrial society to now has placed more and more emphasis on what it is to be quintessentially human. It's the jobs that are effectively an insult to human intellectual capacity and potential that have been trimmed out - those that reduce human beings to specialized beasts of burden - and in their place, new, more challenging jobs have arisen.
I know that it seriously sucks to be the guy who's only known fruit-picking, line-work or needless paper-shuffling when that job finally evaporates -- I've seen it happen to people I know and love. But the benefit to our society overall has been immeasurably positive for the transition (which is why we should absolutely invest in sponsored retraining for people whose industries disappear from underneath them). That poor guy's children will live in a world that will demand they be that much more than just a strong back and a weak will. And that's a beautiful thing to anyone concerned with the plight of the human spirit.
Granted, that's not the result of every individual advancement or downsizing.
But when you step back to the societal view, that's where technology has been taking us.
I've been having the same problems on and off over the last couple weeks.
Problem is, I never thought to dig into it as my connection is regularly 'comcastic' (pejorative) during peak hours.
I'm not sure if you should consider yourself lucky or unlucky that you can actually tell the difference between their incompetence and malice.
Nice to know Google has a 95-year plan.
Assuming intelligence agencies are intelligent, it should follow that if their efforts were trivially detected, it would be because they weren't trying to avoid detection. Given that misdirecting attention is easily as effective as 'blending in', this seems a perfectly reasonable alternative.
So while this clearly isn't the best potential use for microUAVs indirect information gathering, that's not to say that getting a few spotted implies incompetence at the highest levels.
Perhaps the dragonfly 'bug' never really worked and they were simply flying a micro drone clumsily over the crowd to distract people from more-traditional surveillance or hijinx. (planting a bug, disrupting a handoff, etc)
Maybe their current 'bug' of choice is a cockroach, scorpion or rat and they'd rather condition people to look 'up', when checking for micro-drones. (Do dragonflies even have a suitable habitat range across the countries we're focused on?)
Perhaps the dragonfly has become the preferred model of enemy surveillance. It would then help to raise awareness to indirectly harm their efforts. (producing an actual 'captured' drone would be more effective, but would involve either our admission that we're better than dragonflies, or an admission that someone else is beyond the US technologically.)
Perhaps the latest kit is beyond this. In which case the best technology would be used on the highest priority targets and these dragonfly 'bugs' have just filtered down to less-essential targets (and would therefore likely be operated by less-savvy, less-intelligent agents).
Disclaimer: I'm not actually suggesting dragonfly bugs were used in any of these roles at any of those rallies. I'm just jumping in on the thought experiment. I personally find it improbable that anything that attracts attention within a modern crowd would go completely un-photographed. The idea that this happened above several crowds and we don't have so much as bigfoot-quality cellphone pics serves as the most effective debunking.
The included games are on a disc.
And most Live Arcade titles are ~50MB - so you can get a decent number on a memory card.
Though Microsoft definitely should have bundled this thing with a 4GB flash drive.
That'd be what? $30 for them? It's easily covered under the money they've made on keeping the 360 overpriced.
Exactly.
Valve re-evaluating episodic gaming is like me re-evaluating my relationship with Salma Hayek.
American teens would contribute apps that interest American teens.
It's not only unlikely that such apps would interest a child in a developing nation, it's downright implausible that such apps would be well-coded enough to cleanly port to a different language/culture.
American teens would code things that would sync to their already-connected lives, whereas a proper OLPC project would seek to replace those things. Would a ten-year-old African child really care about yet-another twitter/blogger/flickr/picasa sync/upload app? Would they be able to make sense of the inevitable western GUI assumptions that stand in contrast to the rest of the SugarOS?
Serious developers have a far better chance at making universally useful apps - and they're not going to be slowed down by an extra two-hundred tax-deductible dollars.
The canned solutions include precalculated light maps, mostly-static light sources and level designs that are carefully constructed to limit overdraw. The push for raytracing is more about removing the drawbacks of the current 'solutions', than notably improving eye candy.
E.g. raytracing solutions will free up developers to implement more-dynamic scenes, more-dynamic lights and level designs where buildings and cities aren't glorified mazes where 90% of the architecture is an impenetrable facade.
(Sure, some titles feature those sorts of things now - but they're expensive tricks, with severely limited implementation)
The only reason this is coming up at all is because of Intel's Larabee GPU, which is being built and sold as the device that will bring real-time raytracing to the desktop.
This and several similar research projects at Intel exist solely to develop tools and heuristics for game developers - to make it easier for Intel to urge them into supporting their new product. My guess is they're going to position these chips as a panacea for next-gen consoles. We can expect to see alot more 'news' like this, talking up their ability to accelerate physics, AI and animation.
So, as you point out, it doesn't really matter which mess we get in the short term.
Either way we'll all wind up paying more, for less, the way we always do when there's a local monopoly on service.
The only thing that will ever truly bring change is more bandwidth to the home.
Even then we'll still be overpaying for our data lines - but at least the content end will have competition.
*(personally, I wonder about that. A real open-standards client implies we can write one that round-files all the marketing. I wonder how that's going to shake out.)
But you know what the best part of an open-standards client is?
It becomes trivial to reverse engineer a server to do whatever you want, however you want.
Write your own server with whatever you want and just feed the standard data streams back to the client.
Because it's designed to serve -several- devices on that 4.8Gb bus and needs to not bottle-neck the much-faster solid state disks that will be commonly available in the next couple of years? To say nothing of handling the ever-increasing size and speed of digital still and vid cameras, scanners and print jobs of the current and near-future.
With videogames as a recognized Art form what established Artists know and do becomes cloudy, just as the value of great scenery artists was questioned by the rise of great scenery photographers. Prior to photography it was simply understood that a great painter had value, because he could render an emotionally powerful image. With photographers on the scene, painters had to step back and answer questions they'd never had to ask before. They finally came to realize they weren't diminished by photographers - but that was after quite a bit of resistance and denial.
But more than anything, what challenges the Art establishment is the idea that videogames don't work like other forms.
Traditional artists present meticulously crafted fixed pieces that convey some emotional truth they find in the world. The basic strength of interactive art is its ability to convey emotional truth through the rules of simulation; allowing Art to emerge from play. Rather than beat us over the head by showing or telling us what happens when life goes astray for one carefully constructed protagonist, games have the ability to let us experience it; to react to our choices, to our struggle against increasing odds as we run headlong in the wrong direction until we hopefully find the wisdom and truth in turning around.
It's this core feature of interactivity that raises the same questions for every fixed-form artist that photographers raised of painters and that movie-makers raised of the theatre. And so we reach the one really good question:
Is a game that can exhibit Art more like a song, or an instrument?
Because interactivity also requires that we can fuck it all up, wander in circles and fail. While that's not too different from someone giving up on "Finnegan's Wake" halfway through, it raises the question of whether the inaccessible is still Art. Because when most people simply can't see our Art, we ought give a moment's thought to whether we're striding around in the buff.
As gamers we rightly shouldn't care whether a scifi author, movie critic or anyone else deigns to validate our preferred medium. They're more barometers of their generation than gatekeepers of meaning. If they come around, it will be long after gaming has proven itself.
At the same time, we should care whether people outside the hardcore niche 'get' our art. Any art form that aims to please only its close circle of devotees and critics is diving headlong into irrelevance. So it's helpful to come up for air from time to time and see whether we're striking true emotional chords in the general audience.
And it never hurts to see whether the general audience can find the B button.
Yes, No.
If a ringtone isn't a derivative work, then yes, we can make them all we want (provided we have a legit copy of the song to start with). But no, we can't distribute them, for the same reason we can't distribute the original song. Their not being derivatives doesn't mean they aren't covered under copyright, it just means they're covered under the original song's copyright. The RIAA liked this, because it meant they could whore out any track they had mechanical rights to, as ringtone fodder, without having to renegotiate anything with the artists.
Tabs are different because they're a separate fixed form (written vs recorded) reproduced in whole (vs a slice of the original recording); it's the same for sheets in general and lyrics. (something the RIAA has been slow to come down on, but it'll happen. Just as soon as they figure out how to monetize a lyrics database.
Also, I would like to say that the concern about performing rights is a joke. Sure, performance rights have been used by ASCAP to shake down businesses that play music for their customers and the occasional giant outdoor party. (e.g. annual block party) But the idea that someone would use a 30 second ringtone to 'perform' a song for an audience is absurd on its face.
The purpose of the ringtone is to be heard by the phone's owner. In the bizarre edge cases where people make ringtones of entire songs and play them, on purpose, to entertain a crowd is no different than people using an ipod, boombox or music-playing phone to do the same, right now. There is clearly no need to cut ASCAP in on all ringtone sales for the same reason there is no need to cut them in on all CD sales. ASCAP is likely just so used to getting whatever they want with a nasty legal brief or two that they honestly think it's worth their lawyers fees to take a shot.
But will it take sales -away- from the iPhone?
That was the question.
The people the Touch makes sense for are precisely those for whom the iPhone is a non-starter.
Buying the touch means throwing away the phone, camera and bluetooth to save a hundred dollars. ... A hundred dollars that you'll now need to spend for even a -crappy- bluetooth camera phone.
... what? A physically large PMP with a proprietary internet platform that lacks the storage to leverage its screen?
So the end monetary result is that, at best, you will have put off your $100 outlay for a crappy bluetooth camera phone until your next contract renewal - or more likely, you're going to wind up spending more.
So you've thrown away the advantage of simplifying down to one device in your pocket, for effectively 0 dollars, in exchange for
It's a gimmick that only makes sense to people for whom AT&T is a non-option -and- are ok with buying a comparatively large and expensive flash PMP.
Apple pretty much guaranteed this thing wouldn't touch iPhone sales when they gimped the features and storage.