I can't see courts finding that a sale via. iTunes is for the purpose of duplication rather than for the purpose of listening. 2 years ago the store hit the 10billion mark for songs sold. Has there ever even been a single one whose intent was redistribution?
I can understand that artists don't like the small fraction of revenue they get from digital music sales. It is very frustrating for a still successful artists, that the label makes lots of money long after there are no promotional costs. But this lawsuit is nonsense.
First off in general Apple's role in the phone business is similar to their role in the laptop business, They put together a good package of other people's chips. Apple is moving towards getting involved more low end but they aren't right now. I think the hardware on the Apple phones is rather good, but no question if you consider retail rather than subsidized cost, the Android phones from a hardware perspective are almost always a better value because of the margin.
But they do however make their own OS and they do however have their own service infrastructure. That's ultimately the appeal of the product.
Absolutely. Just like laptops the speed of hardware improvements will outstrip the demand for better hardware at that cost. I'd assume about a decade from now smart phones will likely be much cheaper. On the other hand I'm not sure why prices should fall faster. Smart phones and related technologies like tables, already represent about 100% of the demand on most of the parts. It is going to require new technologies to create new parts built in new factories.
I'm not sure about your legal claims. I think the 16h amendment, in terms of intent grants the federal government broad taxation rights. But I'll agree that's a bit of a stretch. If not, states and local government have the right to tax property, they all and the federal government has transfer arrangements with the states. I think the legal issue can be gotten around by theoretically having the states tax the property.
As for mark to market and overvaluation... You absolutely would be able to claim losses, much more aggressively than today because you wouldn't have to worry about the games where people create an offsetting loss and gain, realize the loss and hold the gain.
As far as appraisal on $500 artwork, no one is going to do that. There likely would be some sort of "personal property exemption" which covers say $500k per person. Only if there was reason to suspect that your estate exceeded that would the government audit.
As far as forcing sale. Yes that is precisely what it would do. It would force people who had lots of unrealized gains to borrow against them and pay taxes or sell. I agree. As far as creating an incentive not to tax assets... US stock would be tax regardless. The dividend simply gets taxed if not held by a US taxpayer. As far as US taxpayers exporting their money completely, fine they aren't doing business in the US they shouldn't pay US tax.
As far as one off deflation effects. The tax would hit the wealthy, I don't see how that would have much impact on real economic activity. If it did, monetary stimulus can counter that sort of financial shock.
As for your comment about the government and capital. Right now the US suffers from a substantial lack of public investment. Bridges, roads, dams, energy infrastructure and education. I see no evidence the government couldn't easily invest trillions quite well. But that is more of a spending issue than a where to raise revenue issue.
On the wholesale level they do. They break these things out. Most of the carriers have minor carriers that buy services from their wholesale division that you can bring your own phone to. Like Virgin for Sprint. Some of the companies, are playing around with marketing their own prepaid plans that have the same economics.
Mostly though people don't tend to take into account factors like that marketing increases without a contract and the subsidies are less than people think they are.
What supports the high prices is state of the art screens, state of the art CPUs, state of the art battery, state of the art memory chips. Smart phones are very high end hardware, like laptops were in the late 80s - early 90s.
Now consider that from a mobile telecoms perspective. How about if I buy the phones direct from say 'Foxconn' install Android, brand them as my phones and pocket the profit margin, hmm, screw bloody apple.
There aren't 3rd party iPhones. If they want to offer iPhones they have to deal Apple.
By far the most profitable solution for them, is to supply their own branded device, made by contractors and delivered direct to end users. With android that is now a real possibility.
The only company with very high margins in the phone business that does meaningful volume is Apple. The margin isn't there for Android. They are happy to let the device manufacturers worry about the complexity of devices and OSes in exchange for a few percentage points.
The article is just wrong. iPhone subsidy is about $2 / mo higher than for Android, RIM and Windows. All Smart phone users are profitable. iPhone users tend to buy more premium plans, spend more on accessories....
This article is just isn't true. There is about $50 per 2 years difference in the subsidy for Apple vs. RIM, Windows, and Android. That's real money but it doesn't kill the margins. Right now the carriers are moving huge numbers of people over to smart phones, but they account for the smart phone subsidy as an immediate loss. The subsidy issue will go away once the number of smart phones stabilizes which should be in about 3 years.
As far as the infrastructure improvements that's a much bigger problem. And certainly Apple is driving that since it drives up data usage. And the move away from unlimited is because the new generations of smart phones use much more data.
Mark to market can't just be for stocks it would have to be for any kind of investment property, at the very least. Otherwise, you simply create incentives for stocks to convert their capital gains off, like converting it into bond interest or acting as a derivative against a bond risk. We could safely have laws avoiding mark to market on primary residence, though honestly it might make sense to apply it there as well.
Anyway in general I think it is a great idea for making the tax system far more fair.
a) Very few drug crimes are prosecuted in federal courts, most are handled at the state level. That being said mandatory minimums are a disaster. Blacks are not disproportionately involved in drugs though so while drug penalties are bad they aren't creating a racial disparity.
b) Actually it is both the lawyer and the individual. For example is the accused willing to cooperate with the police or not. Also what gets said early on, can have a huge effect on sentencing. For example misleading the police with false information during the investigative stage or being belligerent. Also families and the community play a big role here. For example in a mid sized drug crime a judge or prosecutor might be very willing to move towards a low plea combined with a private rehab. But someone has to step up and pay for rehab. A huge percentage of minor crimes are dismissed during arraignment via. some sort of community response. Faith based probation supervision organization can create earlier and more successful parole.
d) Juveniles are not adjudicated for most crimes. Again that's not tremendously impactful on numbers, though I'd like to ban the practice all together.
I actually think far from getting worse they are getting better. The police are much more supervised today and rules are much stricter. Most of the complaints people have would have been far worse 20 years ago or especially 40 years ago.
Black males 18-35 have high incarceration rates. This comes more from getting sentenced to imprisonment. They actually have fairly low charge rates. The problems with black males are:
a) They commit violent crimes that often result in sentence or lengthy sentence. b) They don't tend to plea down successfully. They don't work the system well. c) They tend to have other characteristics that lead to increased sentencing like dropping out of school d) They are likely subject to discrimination in terms of plea agreements and sentencing.
That's different than the original claim about police officers and the amount their activities are checked.
There is noway long term the police aren't doing to have to use a system with changing keys. On the other hand there are lots of commercial key systems where keys change regularly but each device gets an encrypted version of the key sent to them individually (i.e. each device also has a fully private key for itself). I don't see any reason that couldn't be implemented in radio.
There is a good reason to give preference to the press. The police press acts as a quasi-governmental agency. They help facilitate police operations by informing the public and rallying support in exchange for information. Our government because it is limited depends on quasi-governmental agencies to act as bridges.
They don't have military-like armaments. When is the last time you saw a police department break up a drug gang with a cruise missile or an attack helicopter. What they do have are weapons one step above what the criminals had. And that is important, when the police don't have an armament advantage but just a numerical advantage there is a real tendency for a confrontation to turn into a genuine battle, for example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout ).
As for pay being ridiculous, police pay is in line with lots of civil service jobs, and the pay is not ridiculous. Where America has a pay problem is in the finance sector and the medical sector. As for immunity from prosecution, they are likely the most prosecuted in the country. They have a dedicated investigative arm focused on them. On the other hand there is broad public awareness that they deal with non-cooperation on a regular basis, and in complex and often dangerous situations people make lots of mistakes.
The police in the course of investigations turn up a lot of material about private individuals that is never made public. There is good reason not to make everything public.
Besides, I don't see where the police are headed recently. Frankly, police officers have been more responsive to the public and done the best job of balancing various concerns I've seen in decades. I don't see any float in the local police departments towards anything but a higher degree of public responsibility.
The system you are describing is very close to what exists for the PSTN. For the cable operators the problem is the system isn't setup that way. You and your neighbor have to get the same cable signal. The in place equipment doesn't support multiple sources. Where we do have multiple sources is on the internet consumption side. Where the cable operators act like your line providers and service providers like Hulu or Spotify sell services over their lines. The cable operators are regulated while the service providers aren't.
So again you are describing the system we have.
In terms of modems and rural areas. Americans have been heavily subsidizing broadband. Close to 100% of the country now has access to a broadband solution locally. There is lower uptake (people who don't have any internet) among the non English speaking, highly religious and uneducated though that can be fixed respectively by: outreach, whitelist only service and subsidy. As far as business, business are mainly using VOIP, with larger ones using voice over MPLS. They are don't use POTS lines. There is still quite a bit of T1 over copper in more rural areas but that's not really the PSTN in a meaningful sense.
Honestly what you keep asking for is close to what we have. Without providing a basket of services (i.e. cable television at a markup for cable and FIOS ) there might not be the economic incentive to provide the internet. And of course those services work well together. So other than practicality, yeah the government is doing that.
What do you see as the advantage of the ban over what we have now with the wholesale retail system for cell? For landlines I agree there is a huge problem with LECs, but as you mentioned that's already regulated. Honestly I'm fine with the PSTN just being a legacy system rotting over the next generation. It simply lacks far too many capabilities.
As for IPV4 and dual stack. I agree we are going to go to dual stack. Then of course V4 addresses get pooled while V6 are free are permanent and finally v4 becomes an extra cost service. There is going to be a lot of systems that needs v4 for years and need to expand. Getting people to give up v4 will not be easy.
The constraint is congress. The president is being given emergency powers which so far are being used rather narrowly. Under George Bush they were being used more widely but certainly not in an arbitrary fashion. Further there are constraints like the cabinet. The fact is the American people and the congress keep trying to move away from rule of law... for example a complete unwillingness to setting up a reasonable court system to handle people in Guantinom
I agree with you that the level of emergency powers being given the president is scary and does threaten the notion of idea of rule of law. As of yet, the amount that is being done domestically that is questionable has been small. The situation is bad but structurally the US multiple fallbacks. I mean ultimately 3/4s of the states can vote to disband the federal government.
There is no term "civil contempt" in US law. It exists in English law. The term in context "The protections in the constitution are for criminal law. They don't apply to civil law" was clearly about a civil trial. Or you don't know what you talking about at all.
I'd say perhaps you should do a better job pretending.
Actually that is not quite true. The judge can require you to answer why you won't answer a question, or require you to answer a question off the record and then determine whether to admit it. The thing is, that forcing you to admit things under threat of contempt can effectively get you immunity so defendants quite often want to be compelled.
In this case the woman: a) Plead not guilty meaning she agreed to cooperate with the cort. b) did stuff that looks bad e) encrypted her files d) challenged the judge's ability to force her to hand it over. e) when she lost claimed she doesn't remember the passkey.
What you are arguing is point (d). That was tried and she lost.
What you can do is actively cooperate in other parts of the investigation and thus make it seem likely to the judge that you are not in fact lying about the fact that the drives were not encrypted. Or you can plead guilty / nolo contendere to the original crime and not have to hand over evidence.
Yes you can successfully do perfectly legal things that are weird that in combination with bad luck will get convicted of crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
You have it backwards. It is a license in either case according to the record companies. It is the artists alleging a sale.
I can't see courts finding that a sale via. iTunes is for the purpose of duplication rather than for the purpose of listening. 2 years ago the store hit the 10billion mark for songs sold. Has there ever even been a single one whose intent was redistribution?
I can understand that artists don't like the small fraction of revenue they get from digital music sales. It is very frustrating for a still successful artists, that the label makes lots of money long after there are no promotional costs. But this lawsuit is nonsense.
First off in general Apple's role in the phone business is similar to their role in the laptop business, They put together a good package of other people's chips. Apple is moving towards getting involved more low end but they aren't right now. I think the hardware on the Apple phones is rather good, but no question if you consider retail rather than subsidized cost, the Android phones from a hardware perspective are almost always a better value because of the margin.
But they do however make their own OS and they do however have their own service infrastructure. That's ultimately the appeal of the product.
Absolutely. Just like laptops the speed of hardware improvements will outstrip the demand for better hardware at that cost. I'd assume about a decade from now smart phones will likely be much cheaper. On the other hand I'm not sure why prices should fall faster. Smart phones and related technologies like tables, already represent about 100% of the demand on most of the parts. It is going to require new technologies to create new parts built in new factories.
You are raising a lot of points here.
I'm not sure about your legal claims. I think the 16h amendment, in terms of intent grants the federal government broad taxation rights. But I'll agree that's a bit of a stretch. If not, states and local government have the right to tax property, they all and the federal government has transfer arrangements with the states. I think the legal issue can be gotten around by theoretically having the states tax the property.
As for mark to market and overvaluation... You absolutely would be able to claim losses, much more aggressively than today because you wouldn't have to worry about the games where people create an offsetting loss and gain, realize the loss and hold the gain.
As far as appraisal on $500 artwork, no one is going to do that. There likely would be some sort of "personal property exemption" which covers say $500k per person. Only if there was reason to suspect that your estate exceeded that would the government audit.
As far as forcing sale. Yes that is precisely what it would do. It would force people who had lots of unrealized gains to borrow against them and pay taxes or sell. I agree. As far as creating an incentive not to tax assets... US stock would be tax regardless. The dividend simply gets taxed if not held by a US taxpayer. As far as US taxpayers exporting their money completely, fine they aren't doing business in the US they shouldn't pay US tax.
As far as one off deflation effects. The tax would hit the wealthy, I don't see how that would have much impact on real economic activity. If it did, monetary stimulus can counter that sort of financial shock.
As for your comment about the government and capital. Right now the US suffers from a substantial lack of public investment. Bridges, roads, dams, energy infrastructure and education. I see no evidence the government couldn't easily invest trillions quite well. But that is more of a spending issue than a where to raise revenue issue.
I'll give you a counter example, Dell. Dell was a high margin business that expanded share at the cost of margin.
On the wholesale level they do. They break these things out. Most of the carriers have minor carriers that buy services from their wholesale division that you can bring your own phone to. Like Virgin for Sprint. Some of the companies, are playing around with marketing their own prepaid plans that have the same economics.
Mostly though people don't tend to take into account factors like that marketing increases without a contract and the subsidies are less than people think they are.
What supports the high prices is state of the art screens, state of the art CPUs, state of the art battery, state of the art memory chips. Smart phones are very high end hardware, like laptops were in the late 80s - early 90s.
There aren't 3rd party iPhones. If they want to offer iPhones they have to deal Apple.
The only company with very high margins in the phone business that does meaningful volume is Apple. The margin isn't there for Android. They are happy to let the device manufacturers worry about the complexity of devices and OSes in exchange for a few percentage points.
The article is just wrong. iPhone subsidy is about $2 / mo higher than for Android, RIM and Windows. All Smart phone users are profitable. iPhone users tend to buy more premium plans, spend more on accessories....
You aren't subsidizing anything
This article is just isn't true. There is about $50 per 2 years difference in the subsidy for Apple vs. RIM, Windows, and Android. That's real money but it doesn't kill the margins. Right now the carriers are moving huge numbers of people over to smart phones, but they account for the smart phone subsidy as an immediate loss. The subsidy issue will go away once the number of smart phones stabilizes which should be in about 3 years.
As far as the infrastructure improvements that's a much bigger problem. And certainly Apple is driving that since it drives up data usage. And the move away from unlimited is because the new generations of smart phones use much more data.
Mark to market can't just be for stocks it would have to be for any kind of investment property, at the very least. Otherwise, you simply create incentives for stocks to convert their capital gains off, like converting it into bond interest or acting as a derivative against a bond risk. We could safely have laws avoiding mark to market on primary residence, though honestly it might make sense to apply it there as well.
Anyway in general I think it is a great idea for making the tax system far more fair.
a) Very few drug crimes are prosecuted in federal courts, most are handled at the state level. That being said mandatory minimums are a disaster. Blacks are not disproportionately involved in drugs though so while drug penalties are bad they aren't creating a racial disparity.
b) Actually it is both the lawyer and the individual. For example is the accused willing to cooperate with the police or not. Also what gets said early on, can have a huge effect on sentencing. For example misleading the police with false information during the investigative stage or being belligerent.
Also families and the community play a big role here. For example in a mid sized drug crime a judge or prosecutor might be very willing to move towards a low plea combined with a private rehab. But someone has to step up and pay for rehab. A huge percentage of minor crimes are dismissed during arraignment via. some sort of community response.
Faith based probation supervision organization can create earlier and more successful parole.
d) Juveniles are not adjudicated for most crimes. Again that's not tremendously impactful on numbers, though I'd like to ban the practice all together.
I actually think far from getting worse they are getting better. The police are much more supervised today and rules are much stricter. Most of the complaints people have would have been far worse 20 years ago or especially 40 years ago.
Black males 18-35 have high incarceration rates. This comes more from getting sentenced to imprisonment. They actually have fairly low charge rates. The problems with black males are:
a) They commit violent crimes that often result in sentence or lengthy sentence.
b) They don't tend to plea down successfully. They don't work the system well.
c) They tend to have other characteristics that lead to increased sentencing like dropping out of school
d) They are likely subject to discrimination in terms of plea agreements and sentencing.
That's different than the original claim about police officers and the amount their activities are checked.
There is noway long term the police aren't doing to have to use a system with changing keys. On the other hand there are lots of commercial key systems where keys change regularly but each device gets an encrypted version of the key sent to them individually (i.e. each device also has a fully private key for itself). I don't see any reason that couldn't be implemented in radio.
There is a good reason to give preference to the press. The police press acts as a quasi-governmental agency. They help facilitate police operations by informing the public and rallying support in exchange for information. Our government because it is limited depends on quasi-governmental agencies to act as bridges.
They don't have military-like armaments. When is the last time you saw a police department break up a drug gang with a cruise missile or an attack helicopter. What they do have are weapons one step above what the criminals had. And that is important, when the police don't have an armament advantage but just a numerical advantage there is a real tendency for a confrontation to turn into a genuine battle, for example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout ).
As for pay being ridiculous, police pay is in line with lots of civil service jobs, and the pay is not ridiculous. Where America has a pay problem is in the finance sector and the medical sector. As for immunity from prosecution, they are likely the most prosecuted in the country. They have a dedicated investigative arm focused on them. On the other hand there is broad public awareness that they deal with non-cooperation on a regular basis, and in complex and often dangerous situations people make lots of mistakes.
The police in the course of investigations turn up a lot of material about private individuals that is never made public. There is good reason not to make everything public.
Besides, I don't see where the police are headed recently. Frankly, police officers have been more responsive to the public and done the best job of balancing various concerns I've seen in decades. I don't see any float in the local police departments towards anything but a higher degree of public responsibility.
The system you are describing is very close to what exists for the PSTN. For the cable operators the problem is the system isn't setup that way. You and your neighbor have to get the same cable signal. The in place equipment doesn't support multiple sources. Where we do have multiple sources is on the internet consumption side. Where the cable operators act like your line providers and service providers like Hulu or Spotify sell services over their lines. The cable operators are regulated while the service providers aren't.
So again you are describing the system we have.
In terms of modems and rural areas. Americans have been heavily subsidizing broadband. Close to 100% of the country now has access to a broadband solution locally. There is lower uptake (people who don't have any internet) among the non English speaking, highly religious and uneducated though that can be fixed respectively by: outreach, whitelist only service and subsidy. As far as business, business are mainly using VOIP, with larger ones using voice over MPLS. They are don't use POTS lines. There is still quite a bit of T1 over copper in more rural areas but that's not really the PSTN in a meaningful sense.
Honestly what you keep asking for is close to what we have. Without providing a basket of services (i.e. cable television at a markup for cable and FIOS ) there might not be the economic incentive to provide the internet. And of course those services work well together. So other than practicality, yeah the government is doing that.
What do you see as the advantage of the ban over what we have now with the wholesale retail system for cell? For landlines I agree there is a huge problem with LECs, but as you mentioned that's already regulated. Honestly I'm fine with the PSTN just being a legacy system rotting over the next generation. It simply lacks far too many capabilities.
As for IPV4 and dual stack. I agree we are going to go to dual stack. Then of course V4 addresses get pooled while V6 are free are permanent and finally v4 becomes an extra cost service. There is going to be a lot of systems that needs v4 for years and need to expand. Getting people to give up v4 will not be easy.
The constraint is congress. The president is being given emergency powers which so far are being used rather narrowly. Under George Bush they were being used more widely but certainly not in an arbitrary fashion. Further there are constraints like the cabinet. The fact is the American people and the congress keep trying to move away from rule of law... for example a complete unwillingness to setting up a reasonable court system to handle people in Guantinom
I agree with you that the level of emergency powers being given the president is scary and does threaten the notion of idea of rule of law. As of yet, the amount that is being done domestically that is questionable has been small. The situation is bad but structurally the US multiple fallbacks. I mean ultimately 3/4s of the states can vote to disband the federal government.
There is no term "civil contempt" in US law. It exists in English law. The term in context "The protections in the constitution are for criminal law. They don't apply to civil law" was clearly about a civil trial. Or you don't know what you talking about at all.
I'd say perhaps you should do a better job pretending.
Actually that is not quite true. The judge can require you to answer why you won't answer a question, or require you to answer a question off the record and then determine whether to admit it. The thing is, that forcing you to admit things under threat of contempt can effectively get you immunity so defendants quite often want to be compelled.
In this case the woman:
a) Plead not guilty meaning she agreed to cooperate with the cort.
b) did stuff that looks bad
e) encrypted her files
d) challenged the judge's ability to force her to hand it over.
e) when she lost claimed she doesn't remember the passkey.
What you are arguing is point (d). That was tried and she lost.
What you can do is actively cooperate in other parts of the investigation and thus make it seem likely to the judge that you are not in fact lying about the fact that the drives were not encrypted. Or you can plead guilty / nolo contendere to the original crime and not have to hand over evidence.
Yes you can successfully do perfectly legal things that are weird that in combination with bad luck will get convicted of crimes.