10 years might be a little short, because there's always the second wave of "nostalgia" sales 15-20 years later, when 30-somethings start tuning to radios that play what they listened to as teens, and young kids hear it and get into it as well. (Thank God we finally moved beyond the retro Disco movement, though.)
Of course, you could argue that these retro trends are mostly fueled by the media companies who own the old album patents, and come at the expense of those who are creating new music. Maybe your 10-year idea ain't so bad after all.
If you photocopy a book that I wrote, I lose a royalty payment. That's the problem.
Yes it is a problem, but it's not theft, it's unauthorized reproduction.
Why? If I am a musician, you are taking something that I have spent many hours on
I am a musician. I am firmly of the opinion that as long as I am making money, some pimple-faced teen downloads all my songs off Napster, just to show what an 31337 warez kid he is, it doesn't affect me at all, because that kid would not have bought my stuff anyway... and now he might want to when he grows up and starts making money.
The vast majority of musicians are doing it as a second job, playing anywhere they can find gigs on weekends, or performing for free as church organists, choirs, and what-not. When you talk about people who actually make a living selling their own music without a day job, you are talking about maybe less than 1% of professional artists... artists who mostly got there by luck (Kenny G) or by their connections (Lenny Kravitz). The industry has zero interest in a stuggling band like Greazy Meal unless they think that they have a shot at being superstars. The laws that are in place now do nothing to enrich the lives of the vast majority of artists, while turning the lucky handful (and the record companies that make them stars) into millionairs.
J.S. Bach, arguably one of the greatest music composers ever, did not make a living off publications of what he wrote. He was a church musician, and gave a great wealth of music to the world, and not one cent of "royalties" ever changed hands over his works. IMHO, Bach was a hero, and Lars Ulrich is a greedy little bastard. Sorry if that bothers you, but I gotta call 'em like I see 'em.
Theft is when you take something away from me. The result is that you now I have it, and I don't anymore.
The correct term is COPYRIGHT VIOLATION. It is the difference between photocopying all your O'Reilly books when you are not around vs. swiping them off your desk and taking them home without telling you. Both are illegal, but they are not both examples of theft.
A copyright is an artificial construct, not an actual civil right. Up until fairly recently in history, there was no such thing as copyright. For example, Mozart wrote variations on Haydn's work, published & sold them, and never payed Haydn a dime. Under current US law, Haydn could sue for violation of copyright, and you would be calling Mozart a thief... but for most of the history of the world, this is how art evolved. For another example, look at how many public-domain blues riffs keep getting re-used ("Mannish Boy" by Muddy Waters and "Bad to the Bone" by Lonesome George both use the same hook... and neither of them wrote it).
We are long-overdue for copyright reform. Step one would be to roll back copyright so it expires within 10-20 years of the death of the author. Another good reform would be to expand "fair use" to include everything short of SELLING (or marketing for profit, like Napster hoped to) a nearly-exact duplication of the work. If groups like the RIAA continue to act like dicks over "IP", they may force the rest of us into pushing for such reforms. (People who have been following know that Sen. Orin Hatch of Utah made some thinly veiled threats to act along such lines, and his stock with me went way up for what he had to say.)
Okay, first of all, I did not say I was copying music. I have never used napster, or any other tool like it.
Secondly, how many million times to people need to point out to people like you that copying data and stealing objects are not the same thing? If I take your photograph, I'm not stealing your soul. Likewise, if I photocopy a book that you own a copy of, you lose nothing.
To equate copyright violation with theft is silly hyperbole.
Finally, the Napster CEO was talking about the huge overhead costs that would be involved in preventing all non-legitimate music from being copied. It might just barely be technically possible, but no company could afford to do it, not because of the lost "eyeballs" from would-be pirates going elsewhere, but because of the infrastructure costs of such a system.
All of this has nothing to do with my point, which is that anybody who actually makes a living writing three-chord rock anthems or hip-hop tracks should learn to appreciate just how good they have it and stop worrying about a few dumb warez kids swapping "kid rock" dubs that they don't even get around to listening to.
Ya know, when a computer programmer knocks out a small application that took less than 20 hours or so, we call that FREEWARE. He/she throws it out to freshmeat or some other ftp site and hopes that somebody will like it enough to send a postcard to say thanks.
Singer/songwriters, on the other hand, have this notion that coming up with a pretty good 3-and-a-half minute song (which is really in ABABCBB[fade] format, so we are talking about maybe 72 bars of actual music written, with a poem to sing on top of it), that they should somehow have the world laid at their feet for it.
Let me be the first to say to the person that wrote "Hit Me Baby, One More Time" for Brittany Spears, if even you got one thin dime for that lump of crap you were massively overpaid!
Seeing as the typical beginning songwriter is making $10 an hour at their day job schlepping coffee at Starbucks, if they make anything over $200 off the royalties on their song they are coming out way ahead for doing something they love, and have no right to complain about 12-year-old kids dubbing tapes or downloading MP3's without paying for them.
When Katz said "...media corporations, who now virtually own popular culture...", it struck me as really funny, because the media corporations are the ones who created popular culture in the first place. Do you really think some southern cracker trying to cover Muddy Waters would have ever become "The King", if it wasn't for a massive record company pumping Elvis out of every radio in America?
Okay, that's twice now that a post I put up with a score of 1 was marked down as being "Overrated" when no moderation was done to it.
I can accept being legitimately moderated down. If this bozo had said I was "off topic", because they didn't think it was funny (it was pretty silly), that would at least make a little sense.
Important clue, kiddo: It can't be Overrated if nobody rated it.
On the positive side, thanks for inspiring a new.sig file for me.
If you were willing to wire it to a larger gadget, like a laptop, what would make more sense would be an even smaller device - lense and button only - with everything else on a box that clips to your belt. Then you could have a pretty darn high-res camera that would do exactly what you are talking about, on something the size of a lapel microphone.
Okay, I don't want to go on a bad moderation rant here, but how does a brief, sarcastic quip, even one that is not all that funny, posted at one (no +1 bonus used) and not moderated up or down by anybody, get marked as "Overrated"!?!?!?
You could have marked it as "Flamebait", if you thought I was being mean... or maybe "Off Topic", if you failed to notice that I was pointing out that a non-proprietary storage system would have made the camera as big as all the other ones out there... you might even have marked it "Redundant", if you read the posts out of order and thought that somebody beat me to this observation... but "Overrated"? By whom?
There's a checkout girl at my local supermarket named "Meta". Her boomer partents gave her a prefix for a name. They didn't even let her have a whole word!
Fortunately, she has a good sense of humor about it.
"My puppy was 5 inches tall last year, and ten inches tall now. I need a bigger doghouse, because it will be almost seven feet tall in three years, and bigger than my house two years later."
That would almost be a valid argument if you couldn't run the same software on a Compaq as a HP as a Gateway.
If you are comparing the success of the Macintosh platform against Windows, then yes. Putting asside the debate over whether all M$ systems are the same animal, then the MacOS is a distant second in the market, and might get knocked down to third by Linux if/when the Red Hat install app becomes a little less crappy.
If you are discussing the success of Apple Computer as a business which sells computers, then stacking "Apple" against "everybody else" is just plain silly. Apple is a steady top-six performer, and there are a lot of PC makers who would love their kind of numbers (not to mention their margins).
From what I have read, the reason MacOS X will not be supported on G3-ified boxes is because of the graphics hardware issue.
MacOS X uses vector graphics for its GUI, which offloads all that screen-drawing effort to the video card, freeing up the CPU(s) to be even more outrageously fast. Since Apple started putting in beefy video cards in their Macs with the old beige G3, anything released prior to that will not be officially supported.
For those who were asking, even the oldest iMac will run OS X, and it will indeed be an amazingly cheap alternative to a Sun box, for the companies that have outgrown Linux on a PIII, but don't have ten grand sitting around.
(Kind of reminds me of that Dodge Durango commercial. "perfectly positioned between the toys and the tanks".)
"...but Apple is doing their best to make sure that the end user will NEVER have to see the BSD side of things, unless he wants to.
This is true of the OS, but I doubt that it will be formally enforced with apps. However, I think you are on to something here.
Just as the UNIX culture has an ethic of doing the Right Thing when writing software, mostly centered around maximizing efficiency and portability of code, the culture of Mac gurus have very strong opinions about well-designed code, particularilly in the area of making your user interface logical, simple, and seamlessly consistant with the conventions of the MacOS.
A good example of thier fury was MS-Word version 6.
In spite of the massive hatred of DOS and anything else to do with Redmond, Word 5 was the most popular word processor for the Mac ever. It had been, since the very first version, designed specifically for the Mac, and clung tight to the reccomendation the of GUI cannon that was coming out of Cupertino throughout the late 80's and early 90's.
When M$ came to version 6, they decided that what Mac users really wanted was interoperability with the Windows box they had at work, so instead of adding Word6 features to the Mac version of Word5, they did a crufty port of Word6 for Windows to the MacOS, complete with Windowsy dialog boxes and button bars. Some of it even used the old windows code, with translators copied into the Mac system folder during installation. Even the Word Macro viruses were cross-platform transparent.
The backlash was epic in scale.
Macophiles ourtright refused to "upgrade", and if they did give up their Word5, it was to switch vendors to Word Perfect For Mac or Nissus Writer. Some of them even switched to heavy-duty page-layout apps, like PageMaker or Quark, rather than deal with the steaming pile of crap that Word6 was quickly discovered to be.
Microsoft eventually recovered when they release Office98, but only because they are Microsoft. A small company that made such a huge misstep would probably never be heard from again.
My advice to *n?x vendors who want to reach a wider audience by porting their C app to the Mac platform would be to either bone up on Mac GUI conventions, or else perhaps contact a MUG and find a Mac code geek who is willing to work with you on it.
GUI's rely on pattern recognition, while CLI's rely on memory (i.e., click on "find" instead of typing a grep command).
The disadvantages of each tend to be overstated during Holy Wars, but the jist of it boils down to this:
GUI's have a tendency to limit options for the sake of simplicity and eat more processor cycles. CLI's create less load on your system and don't have to worry about being pretty, but if you forget the exact -Option that you need for a command, productivity stops while you read MAN pages and O'Reilly books.
IMHO, most GUI's absolutely suck. MacOS has always been the GIU that sucks the least, in that it has all the simplicity for the luser that you get from a shell-built option screen, but the rewards of spending time learning how deep the rabbit hole goes are actually way beyond what most non-mac geeks tend to assume.
I will grant that if you are a Linux or Windows guru, the Macintosh Way looks incredibly unappealing from the outside, but if you were to spend the kind of hours learning the Mac's more obscure abilities that you spent learning sed and awk (or M$-SQL, to use a Windows example), you would probably dig it.
Amiga and Be zealots are free to ignore every word I said here. There's just no reasoning with you people. (I'm just kidding. Please put the gun down and I will let you tell me all about CPU efficiency and how sadly misguided I am.)
The beauty of GNU and the various "open" licenses is that if you have an app that is good enough and meets a need, you really just need to get the thing to work on MacOS X, then somebody who likes it from the Mac camp will probably build a more Mac-ish front end for it, and everybody will be happy. (Especially ESR, who seems to love nothing more than open source success stories; anything to sell a few more copies of "Cathedral..." to business managers and marketroids.)
Your goal should be to defeat the RIAA, not to reduce their profits.
I'm perfectly fine with the idea of every last card-carrying member of the RIAA being milti-billionaires, as long as they keep their noses out of my directory files.
Unfortunately, the CD head of my DVD player can't read the cheapies when I burn music on them, nor can about half of the CD players out there. (Oddly enough, it is usually the crappy low-end players that work with cheap burned CD's, while a lot of hi-fi gear balks at them.)
What does the RIAA gain if Napster goes under? Nothing... at least not directly.
However, this lawsuit just might bully Napster (or some other company that tries to spring up from their ashes) into giving them a slice. That's what the RIAA really wants: a taste of the action.
Of course, if/when open file-sharing formats like Gnutella start popping up everywhere, it will probably prevent Napster (or some other company, if Napster goes under) from sustaining itself, and the RIAA will be SOL.
If you really want to strike a blow against the RIAA, don't bother with a boycott (the RIAA is an artist's guild, not a record company). Instead, do whatever you can to support and promote tools like Gnutella.
Slashdot Mirror
I like to chuckle at the antics of Ratbert as much as the next guy, but don't turn to comic strip writers as sources of research.
Of course, you could argue that these retro trends are mostly fueled by the media companies who own the old album patents, and come at the expense of those who are creating new music. Maybe your 10-year idea ain't so bad after all.
Yes it is a problem, but it's not theft, it's unauthorized reproduction.
Why? If I am a musician, you are taking something that I have spent many hours on
I am a musician. I am firmly of the opinion that as long as I am making money, some pimple-faced teen downloads all my songs off Napster, just to show what an 31337 warez kid he is, it doesn't affect me at all, because that kid would not have bought my stuff anyway... and now he might want to when he grows up and starts making money.
The vast majority of musicians are doing it as a second job, playing anywhere they can find gigs on weekends, or performing for free as church organists, choirs, and what-not. When you talk about people who actually make a living selling their own music without a day job, you are talking about maybe less than 1% of professional artists... artists who mostly got there by luck (Kenny G) or by their connections (Lenny Kravitz). The industry has zero interest in a stuggling band like Greazy Meal unless they think that they have a shot at being superstars. The laws that are in place now do nothing to enrich the lives of the vast majority of artists, while turning the lucky handful (and the record companies that make them stars) into millionairs.
J.S. Bach, arguably one of the greatest music composers ever, did not make a living off publications of what he wrote. He was a church musician, and gave a great wealth of music to the world, and not one cent of "royalties" ever changed hands over his works. IMHO, Bach was a hero, and Lars Ulrich is a greedy little bastard. Sorry if that bothers you, but I gotta call 'em like I see 'em.
Theft is when you take something away from me. The result is that you now I have it, and I don't anymore.
The correct term is COPYRIGHT VIOLATION. It is the difference between photocopying all your O'Reilly books when you are not around vs. swiping them off your desk and taking them home without telling you. Both are illegal, but they are not both examples of theft.
A copyright is an artificial construct, not an actual civil right. Up until fairly recently in history, there was no such thing as copyright. For example, Mozart wrote variations on Haydn's work, published & sold them, and never payed Haydn a dime. Under current US law, Haydn could sue for violation of copyright, and you would be calling Mozart a thief... but for most of the history of the world, this is how art evolved. For another example, look at how many public-domain blues riffs keep getting re-used ("Mannish Boy" by Muddy Waters and "Bad to the Bone" by Lonesome George both use the same hook... and neither of them wrote it).
We are long-overdue for copyright reform. Step one would be to roll back copyright so it expires within 10-20 years of the death of the author. Another good reform would be to expand "fair use" to include everything short of SELLING (or marketing for profit, like Napster hoped to) a nearly-exact duplication of the work. If groups like the RIAA continue to act like dicks over "IP", they may force the rest of us into pushing for such reforms. (People who have been following know that Sen. Orin Hatch of Utah made some thinly veiled threats to act along such lines, and his stock with me went way up for what he had to say.)
Secondly, how many million times to people need to point out to people like you that copying data and stealing objects are not the same thing? If I take your photograph, I'm not stealing your soul. Likewise, if I photocopy a book that you own a copy of, you lose nothing.
To equate copyright violation with theft is silly hyperbole.
Finally, the Napster CEO was talking about the huge overhead costs that would be involved in preventing all non-legitimate music from being copied. It might just barely be technically possible, but no company could afford to do it, not because of the lost "eyeballs" from would-be pirates going elsewhere, but because of the infrastructure costs of such a system.
All of this has nothing to do with my point, which is that anybody who actually makes a living writing three-chord rock anthems or hip-hop tracks should learn to appreciate just how good they have it and stop worrying about a few dumb warez kids swapping "kid rock" dubs that they don't even get around to listening to.
Does the new CEO of HP look as hot in person as she does in that "garage" commercial?
Singer/songwriters, on the other hand, have this notion that coming up with a pretty good 3-and-a-half minute song (which is really in ABABCBB[fade] format, so we are talking about maybe 72 bars of actual music written, with a poem to sing on top of it), that they should somehow have the world laid at their feet for it.
Let me be the first to say to the person that wrote "Hit Me Baby, One More Time" for Brittany Spears, if even you got one thin dime for that lump of crap you were massively overpaid!
Seeing as the typical beginning songwriter is making $10 an hour at their day job schlepping coffee at Starbucks, if they make anything over $200 off the royalties on their song they are coming out way ahead for doing something they love, and have no right to complain about 12-year-old kids dubbing tapes or downloading MP3's without paying for them.
When Katz said " ...media corporations, who now virtually own popular culture...", it struck me as really funny, because the media corporations are the ones who created popular culture in the first place. Do you really think some southern cracker trying to cover Muddy Waters would have ever become "The King", if it wasn't for a massive record company pumping Elvis out of every radio in America?
A pretty damn good point. I'll settle down now.
I can accept being legitimately moderated down. If this bozo had said I was "off topic", because they didn't think it was funny (it was pretty silly), that would at least make a little sense.
Important clue, kiddo: It can't be Overrated if nobody rated it.
On the positive side, thanks for inspiring a new .sig file for me.
If you were willing to wire it to a larger gadget, like a laptop, what would make more sense would be an even smaller device - lense and button only - with everything else on a box that clips to your belt. Then you could have a pretty darn high-res camera that would do exactly what you are talking about, on something the size of a lapel microphone.
You could have marked it as "Flamebait", if you thought I was being mean... or maybe "Off Topic", if you failed to notice that I was pointing out that a non-proprietary storage system would have made the camera as big as all the other ones out there... you might even have marked it "Redundant", if you read the posts out of order and thought that somebody beat me to this observation... but "Overrated"? By whom?
Fortunately, she has a good sense of humor about it.
Yea, if it had a full-sized CD-RW unit built into it, it would be the best pocket camera ever!
No, you just managed to post a lot of interesting stuff on this thread. Take it as a compliment that I am nitpicking you so much. :)
"My puppy was 5 inches tall last year, and ten inches tall now. I need a bigger doghouse, because it will be almost seven feet tall in three years, and bigger than my house two years later."
If you are comparing the success of the Macintosh platform against Windows, then yes. Putting asside the debate over whether all M$ systems are the same animal, then the MacOS is a distant second in the market, and might get knocked down to third by Linux if/when the Red Hat install app becomes a little less crappy.
If you are discussing the success of Apple Computer as a business which sells computers, then stacking "Apple" against "everybody else" is just plain silly. Apple is a steady top-six performer, and there are a lot of PC makers who would love their kind of numbers (not to mention their margins).
Having used LinuxPPC a little, I gotta agree. I like running Linux on my PC's, but the Mac version lags behind it.
Personally I only recomend it to Mac bigots who use Linux at work or school and don't want to buy a second box at home.
Then again, what kind of freak learns both MacOS and Linux and then only wants to own one computer? :)
MacOS X uses vector graphics for its GUI, which offloads all that screen-drawing effort to the video card, freeing up the CPU(s) to be even more outrageously fast. Since Apple started putting in beefy video cards in their Macs with the old beige G3, anything released prior to that will not be officially supported.
For those who were asking, even the oldest iMac will run OS X, and it will indeed be an amazingly cheap alternative to a Sun box, for the companies that have outgrown Linux on a PIII, but don't have ten grand sitting around.
(Kind of reminds me of that Dodge Durango commercial. "perfectly positioned between the toys and the tanks".)
This is true of the OS, but I doubt that it will be formally enforced with apps. However, I think you are on to something here.
Just as the UNIX culture has an ethic of doing the Right Thing when writing software, mostly centered around maximizing efficiency and portability of code, the culture of Mac gurus have very strong opinions about well-designed code, particularilly in the area of making your user interface logical, simple, and seamlessly consistant with the conventions of the MacOS.
A good example of thier fury was MS-Word version 6.
In spite of the massive hatred of DOS and anything else to do with Redmond, Word 5 was the most popular word processor for the Mac ever. It had been, since the very first version, designed specifically for the Mac, and clung tight to the reccomendation the of GUI cannon that was coming out of Cupertino throughout the late 80's and early 90's.
When M$ came to version 6, they decided that what Mac users really wanted was interoperability with the Windows box they had at work, so instead of adding Word6 features to the Mac version of Word5, they did a crufty port of Word6 for Windows to the MacOS, complete with Windowsy dialog boxes and button bars. Some of it even used the old windows code, with translators copied into the Mac system folder during installation. Even the Word Macro viruses were cross-platform transparent.
The backlash was epic in scale.
Macophiles ourtright refused to "upgrade", and if they did give up their Word5, it was to switch vendors to Word Perfect For Mac or Nissus Writer. Some of them even switched to heavy-duty page-layout apps, like PageMaker or Quark, rather than deal with the steaming pile of crap that Word6 was quickly discovered to be.
Microsoft eventually recovered when they release Office98, but only because they are Microsoft. A small company that made such a huge misstep would probably never be heard from again.
My advice to *n?x vendors who want to reach a wider audience by porting their C app to the Mac platform would be to either bone up on Mac GUI conventions, or else perhaps contact a MUG and find a Mac code geek who is willing to work with you on it.
The disadvantages of each tend to be overstated during Holy Wars, but the jist of it boils down to this:
GUI's have a tendency to limit options for the sake of simplicity and eat more processor cycles. CLI's create less load on your system and don't have to worry about being pretty, but if you forget the exact -Option that you need for a command, productivity stops while you read MAN pages and O'Reilly books.
IMHO, most GUI's absolutely suck. MacOS has always been the GIU that sucks the least, in that it has all the simplicity for the luser that you get from a shell-built option screen, but the rewards of spending time learning how deep the rabbit hole goes are actually way beyond what most non-mac geeks tend to assume.
I will grant that if you are a Linux or Windows guru, the Macintosh Way looks incredibly unappealing from the outside, but if you were to spend the kind of hours learning the Mac's more obscure abilities that you spent learning sed and awk (or M$-SQL, to use a Windows example), you would probably dig it.
Amiga and Be zealots are free to ignore every word I said here. There's just no reasoning with you people. (I'm just kidding. Please put the gun down and I will let you tell me all about CPU efficiency and how sadly misguided I am.)
The beauty of GNU and the various "open" licenses is that if you have an app that is good enough and meets a need, you really just need to get the thing to work on MacOS X, then somebody who likes it from the Mac camp will probably build a more Mac-ish front end for it, and everybody will be happy. (Especially ESR, who seems to love nothing more than open source success stories; anything to sell a few more copies of "Cathedral..." to business managers and marketroids.)
I'm perfectly fine with the idea of every last card-carrying member of the RIAA being milti-billionaires, as long as they keep their noses out of my directory files.
Unfortunately, the CD head of my DVD player can't read the cheapies when I burn music on them, nor can about half of the CD players out there. (Oddly enough, it is usually the crappy low-end players that work with cheap burned CD's, while a lot of hi-fi gear balks at them.)
What does the RIAA gain if Napster goes under? Nothing... at least not directly.
However, this lawsuit just might bully Napster (or some other company that tries to spring up from their ashes) into giving them a slice. That's what the RIAA really wants: a taste of the action.
Of course, if/when open file-sharing formats like Gnutella start popping up everywhere, it will probably prevent Napster (or some other company, if Napster goes under) from sustaining itself, and the RIAA will be SOL.
If you really want to strike a blow against the RIAA, don't bother with a boycott (the RIAA is an artist's guild, not a record company). Instead, do whatever you can to support and promote tools like Gnutella.