> Yes, since you are free not to work for that > company.
Except if an illegal practice is commercially a good idea, all other companies will be doing it too. (And if it wasn't commercially a good idea, your company wouldn't have been doing it in the first place.)
> You are free to start your own company that > has a saner work schedule for your employees.
Not when existing companies have used control over distribution networks to kill free enterprise in the industry.
It's pretty obvious that what they're doing is preparing to send this out to smaller companies on the basis that it won't get read, and that the firm will be too scared not to sign because they don't fully comprehend what's going on.
Look at the above one: it says you can "license them via other agencies". That sounds like you have to call up an agency, pay a fee, etc.. not that the license is free and you can just download stuff. Who's going to bother to check?
It's another Chilling Effects issue. The legal profession urgently needs to address this (it's to their benefit to address it - more challenges to Chills means more money for their lawyers!)
Really? I can only think of a few movies that get watched over and over again for long periods: kid's movies and the occasional super classic. Most other things fade in and out of fashion just like everything else.
But I think it's more likely that the porn industry does it because porn sells so easily. The best bit is that it doesn't need to advertise - people who want porn, don't have to be told to want it, and when they go to the porn store they just look through what's on the shelves. Now, I can't personally see why music could also wind up working that way, but there probably is a reason.
> And, also, please stop pretending that it's > because the RIAA and MPAA are fighting the > Internet or computers or modern technology. > Last time I checked, Outkast just went > platinum from online mp3 sales. iTunes sells > millions of songs per year, online. The RIAA > and MPAA have no problem with modern > technology. But they need to make sure it > works in such a way that it doesn't enable > unrestricted piracy.
The RIAA and MPAA aren't opposing modern technology. They're opposing modern technology *that might screw up their distribution system*.
iTunes, etc are just selling the same songs that the RIAA do. If you write a song and want to sell it, you can't upload it onto iTunes. You can do so on a file-sharing network.
They don't want that. If you can do that, you don't need a publisher. If you don't need a publisher, publishers can't shaft you with "sign or abandon your career" contracts.
Now, sure, suing people who are known and documented to have pirated commercial works isn't directly part of preventing it. But, using smackdown lawsuit threats, where no evidence is ever presented or judged, could easily be being done for the chilling effect ("X shared illegal files and got a forced settlement.. I'm sharing only legal files, but if they get my IP address off a filesharing network, what's stopping them forcing a settlement on me too, given that they never need to show evidence to a court?").
Equally, just about every copy protection scheme proposed by the RIAA or MPAA has at some point involved restricting the set of people or companies who can produce media the public can play, to those who have passed some kind of approval process which is controlled either by them or by another firm which has no interest in facilitating open distribution.
Look at the original example. The indies are paying $100,000 a year to the stations, and the record companies are paying a total of $30m a year to the indies!
So it's pretty obvious that, if the music firms weren't benefitting, they could just pay each of the radio stations $200,000 a year *NOT* to follow any indie's playlist. They wouldn't be able to buy play of their own songs, that would break the law; they would just, effectively, be paying the station for NOT using promoters. Bad deal for them? Doubt it - if people still wanted to hear their songs, they'd get them played for a fraction of the price they'd pay the indies.
But no. They refuse, because as much as they may feel put-upon by the indies, at the end of the day it's a *good* thing for them that the cost of doing business is inflated - because it keeps anyone else from doing business.
It only applies to software. The same logic doesn't work for music, because every piece of music is different. There are no two pieces of music that relate to each other the same way OpenOffice and MSOffice do.
> The majority, it seems, have been brainwashed > by government into believing that success is > achieved through coercion, not personal > achievement.
Somewhat strange then that the majority *do not* live in communist/socialist countries.
> Just because your money is going to end up in > rich peoples' pockets is no excuse to steal. > If that mindset catches on then the poor > people have no hope to get paid and one day > become that rich person.
Ummm, in case you missed it - if you are always giving your money to those who are already rich (because being rich allows them to produce more) then likewise the poor people have no hope to get paid and become that rich person.
> Third, to everything there are consequences. > If someone feels that their creations - > whatever they might be - are being taken from > them without whatever they consider to be > adequate recompense, they may well stop > creating things. A band, an engineer, a > chemist, a geneticist. If you promote a > culture of theft, you will, I think, lose out > on some very sweet fruit.
Hmmm. Interesting.
By that logic, there shouldn't be any musicians working, nor any academic researchers, nor any programmers - because they don't get to name their salary.
Sure. The problem, however, is that once you've fixed it, you have to shout louder than Microsoft to let people know that you've fixed it. Shout louder than Microsoft? Good luck.
And, sadly, doing this would not violate the GPL at all as long as the broken Linux was given away. As far as I'm aware the GPL doesn't specify any minimum quality requirement for permitted distribution. The type of attack described is, actually, a very real possibility and something which should be guarded against.
> I don't see that this strategy would expand > beyond people emulating the masters if they > ever figured out the code. No one wants to > willingly be the late entrants in a pyramid > scheme.
Well, one thing I can think of is writing a program which remembers the opponent's moves in previous games it has played and replays them to new opponents to see what the results are...
> Surely the "worrying lack of understanding" is > someone so close to the issue not recognising > the difference between property theft and > copyright infringement.
They might do better to think about why the Average Joe doesn't think there's anything wrong with copyright infringement.
The answer is simple: it's because the same industry has constantly devalued the effort of music authors. Shows like Pop Idol have suggested that anyone who looks good and can dance can become a pop star, forget about actually writing the music or working.
I've said it before, I know, but I'll say it again. Show pop stars on TV *working* rather than holidaying glamorously and they'll be much more empathy for them and understanding of IP laws.
> Music is/not/ "*your* personal property". You > do/not/ in the traditional/buy/ music any > more. You license it. This has been the case > for several decades already.
Your PC and iPod are, however, your personal property.
And I have never seen any CDs with a license agreement on them - they may exist, but I have not seen them. I doubt they'd exist though because, if they did, you could escape the license by taping off the radio.
> Well, if YOU hav decades worth of CD's in your > collection, your spouse, your kids, your > brothers, sisters and close friends can use > said CD's under Fair Use... that 20 gig iPod > suddenly seems easy to fill up, as you have > the same access to their collections of music..
Unless Denmark has a *very* strange Fair Use rule I doubt very much that this is the case.
If you're thinking "it must be OK for me to copy the CD because I could have just gone round my relative/friend's house and listened to it whenever I like" then that doesn't wash.. listening to it doesn't create a copy.
Well, I think there's a very good argument that one way of fixing the situation would be to add a requirement to patents such as the one that copyright already has - that you have to enforce it by legal action, or lose it.
This would cause an end to the "war chest" game that the large companies now play, where they all violate each others' patents in exchange for being allowed to violate each others' patents. That would force them against software patents.
> Consider: If someone had patented DNS, each > DNS query might chalk up a micropayment in the > patent holders' account. That's a serious > benefit for the patentholder.
Except that what would actually have happened is that everyone would have switched to handing out numerical IP addresses to save the money of those who want to visit their sites. For those who didn't, there would be BBSes where people posted the numerical IP addresses of popular sites. Then the DNS company would sue them for infringing their copyright on information in the DNS database, and..
> If you made your living from being a > professional musician, you would have a better > perspective on this. Most people with regular > jobs get paid in full for the 40-hour week's > work they do at the end of every two weeks or > every month at the most. But recording artists > and songwriters don't get that opportunity. > Typically a musician who writes a song has to > collect a modest amount of money each year > over many years. Hopefully he writes a lot of > successful songs and they add up to a decent > living. It's not anything like being an IT > worker.
Sure. But you have to bear in mind that the musician has a big advantage there: he doesn't have to continuously work in order to continuously earn money. Sure, he would probably like to carry on writing songs to earn more money, but he doesn't have to. He can go and try something else with no risk, because the songs he's already written will carry on earning.
On the other hand, an IT or other worker has to keep rolling up for work every day, or their money supply will halt instantly. If they want to try something else, then they've just got to shoehorn it in after the day's work and commute, which usually means that they abandon the attempt.
Nobody is saying that musicians should be deprived of the money for their work. What they are saying is that limits should be put on that special privilege of being able to get paid while not doing work in the present. Nobody else has that, not even creative workers who do their work for a boss. Saying that you cannot be paid now for work you did more than 50 years ago seems eminently reasonable given that most people are only paid for the work they did a month ago.
The reason is simple: you can't get much substitution involved when it comes to copyrighted works. If Dell annoy you, you can go buy a Simply PC instead. If Microsoft get on your wick, you can use Linux.
But if all your friends are talking about "Pirates of The Caribbean", you can't decide you don't like Disney and thus go watch some other pirate film. Well, you can, but it won't enable you to join in those conversations. The films might be similar, but they're not the same.
Copyright production firms, more than anything else, are selling the product or brand far more than the producer. People will buy a new Britney CD, but they won't buy a new Sony CD!
Slashdot Mirror
Why weren't they coding too?
I thought they were supposed to have "worked their way up", after all.
> Yes, since you are free not to work for that
> company.
Except if an illegal practice is commercially a good idea, all other companies will be doing it too. (And if it wasn't commercially a good idea, your company wouldn't have been doing it in the first place.)
> You are free to start your own company that
> has a saner work schedule for your employees.
Not when existing companies have used control over distribution networks to kill free enterprise in the industry.
Sure - but if they fire you for "not getting work done on time", who's likely to hire you with something like that on your reference?
Sure.
It's pretty obvious that what they're doing is preparing to send this out to smaller companies on the basis that it won't get read, and that the firm will be too scared not to sign because they don't fully comprehend what's going on.
Look at the above one: it says you can "license them via other agencies". That sounds like you have to call up an agency, pay a fee, etc.. not that the license is free and you can just download stuff. Who's going to bother to check?
It's another Chilling Effects issue. The legal profession urgently needs to address this (it's to their benefit to address it - more challenges to Chills means more money for their lawyers!)
> Not really the same as music or "legit" movies.
Really? I can only think of a few movies that get watched over and over again for long periods: kid's movies and the occasional super classic. Most other things fade in and out of fashion just like everything else.
But I think it's more likely that the porn industry does it because porn sells so easily. The best bit is that it doesn't need to advertise - people who want porn, don't have to be told to want it, and when they go to the porn store they just look through what's on the shelves. Now, I can't personally see why music could also wind up working that way, but there probably is a reason.
> And, also, please stop pretending that it's
> because the RIAA and MPAA are fighting the
> Internet or computers or modern technology.
> Last time I checked, Outkast just went
> platinum from online mp3 sales. iTunes sells
> millions of songs per year, online. The RIAA
> and MPAA have no problem with modern
> technology. But they need to make sure it
> works in such a way that it doesn't enable
> unrestricted piracy.
The RIAA and MPAA aren't opposing modern technology. They're opposing modern technology *that might screw up their distribution system*.
iTunes, etc are just selling the same songs that the RIAA do. If you write a song and want to sell it, you can't upload it onto iTunes. You can do so on a file-sharing network.
They don't want that. If you can do that, you don't need a publisher. If you don't need a publisher, publishers can't shaft you with "sign or abandon your career" contracts.
Now, sure, suing people who are known and documented to have pirated commercial works isn't directly part of preventing it. But, using smackdown lawsuit threats, where no evidence is ever presented or judged, could easily be being done for the chilling effect ("X shared illegal files and got a forced settlement.. I'm sharing only legal files, but if they get my IP address off a filesharing network, what's stopping them forcing a settlement on me too, given that they never need to show evidence to a court?").
Equally, just about every copy protection scheme proposed by the RIAA or MPAA has at some point involved restricting the set of people or companies who can produce media the public can play, to those who have passed some kind of approval process which is controlled either by them or by another firm which has no interest in facilitating open distribution.
Probably not, as the suit mentions that the cartridges "derived no benefit from the Toner Loading Program".
By writing software for a console, you would be deriving benefit from its firmware and standard libraries.
Yea, exactly.
Look at the original example. The indies are paying $100,000 a year to the stations, and the record companies are paying a total of $30m a year to the indies!
So it's pretty obvious that, if the music firms weren't benefitting, they could just pay each of the radio stations $200,000 a year *NOT* to follow any indie's playlist. They wouldn't be able to buy play of their own songs, that would break the law; they would just, effectively, be paying the station for NOT using promoters. Bad deal for them? Doubt it - if people still wanted to hear their songs, they'd get them played for a fraction of the price they'd pay the indies.
But no. They refuse, because as much as they may feel put-upon by the indies, at the end of the day it's a *good* thing for them that the cost of doing business is inflated - because it keeps anyone else from doing business.
Please. That's a dead-on analysis of the problem.
BUT..
It only applies to software. The same logic doesn't work for music, because every piece of music is different. There are no two pieces of music that relate to each other the same way OpenOffice and MSOffice do.
> The majority, it seems, have been brainwashed
> by government into believing that success is
> achieved through coercion, not personal
> achievement.
Somewhat strange then that the majority *do not* live in communist/socialist countries.
> Just because your money is going to end up in
> rich peoples' pockets is no excuse to steal.
> If that mindset catches on then the poor
> people have no hope to get paid and one day
> become that rich person.
Ummm, in case you missed it - if you are always giving your money to those who are already rich (because being rich allows them to produce more) then likewise the poor people have no hope to get paid and become that rich person.
> Third, to everything there are consequences.
> If someone feels that their creations -
> whatever they might be - are being taken from
> them without whatever they consider to be
> adequate recompense, they may well stop
> creating things. A band, an engineer, a
> chemist, a geneticist. If you promote a
> culture of theft, you will, I think, lose out
> on some very sweet fruit.
Hmmm. Interesting.
By that logic, there shouldn't be any musicians working, nor any academic researchers, nor any programmers - because they don't get to name their salary.
> If it's GPLed, we'd just fix it.
Sure. The problem, however, is that once you've fixed it, you have to shout louder than Microsoft to let people know that you've fixed it. Shout louder than Microsoft? Good luck.
And, sadly, doing this would not violate the GPL at all as long as the broken Linux was given away. As far as I'm aware the GPL doesn't specify any minimum quality requirement for permitted distribution. The type of attack described is, actually, a very real possibility and something which should be guarded against.
> I don't see that this strategy would expand
> beyond people emulating the masters if they
> ever figured out the code. No one wants to
> willingly be the late entrants in a pyramid
> scheme.
Well, one thing I can think of is writing a program which remembers the opponent's moves in previous games it has played and replays them to new opponents to see what the results are...
> Surely the "worrying lack of understanding" is
> someone so close to the issue not recognising
> the difference between property theft and
> copyright infringement.
They might do better to think about why the Average Joe doesn't think there's anything wrong with copyright infringement.
The answer is simple: it's because the same industry has constantly devalued the effort of music authors. Shows like Pop Idol have suggested that anyone who looks good and can dance can become a pop star, forget about actually writing the music or working.
I've said it before, I know, but I'll say it again. Show pop stars on TV *working* rather than holidaying glamorously and they'll be much more empathy for them and understanding of IP laws.
Actually, they don't (and possibly never did).
All they do is to keep a record of all the houses that *don't* have TV licenses (very few) and then check them randomly.
You know, I can't help be amused by the fact that one of the Slashdot autolinks from this story is:
'Best Deals: The Courts"
So if you need to go shopping for a judge..
> Music is /not/ "*your* personal property". You /not/ in the traditional /buy/ music any
> do
> more. You license it. This has been the case
> for several decades already.
Your PC and iPod are, however, your personal property.
And I have never seen any CDs with a license agreement on them - they may exist, but I have not seen them. I doubt they'd exist though because, if they did, you could escape the license by taping off the radio.
> Well, if YOU hav decades worth of CD's in your .. that 20 gig iPod
> collection, your spouse, your kids, your
> brothers, sisters and close friends can use
> said CD's under Fair Use.
> suddenly seems easy to fill up, as you have
> the same access to their collections of music..
Unless Denmark has a *very* strange Fair Use rule I doubt very much that this is the case.
If you're thinking "it must be OK for me to copy the CD because I could have just gone round my relative/friend's house and listened to it whenever I like" then that doesn't wash.. listening to it doesn't create a copy.
Well, I think there's a very good argument that one way of fixing the situation would be to add a requirement to patents such as the one that copyright already has - that you have to enforce it by legal action, or lose it.
This would cause an end to the "war chest" game that the large companies now play, where they all violate each others' patents in exchange for being allowed to violate each others' patents. That would force them against software patents.
Which would only be the case if software patents had to include source code.
> Consider: If someone had patented DNS, each
> DNS query might chalk up a micropayment in the
> patent holders' account. That's a serious
> benefit for the patentholder.
Except that what would actually have happened is that everyone would have switched to handing out numerical IP addresses to save the money of those who want to visit their sites. For those who didn't, there would be BBSes where people posted the numerical IP addresses of popular sites. Then the DNS company would sue them for infringing their copyright on information in the DNS database, and..
Yea, and $10000 is ridiculous for anyone else.
I mean, do you have $10000 lying around to spend on writing a game that probably isn't going to recoup that?
It's ridiculous to even call these games independant. Someone must have put up the money for them to have had that much to spend.
At least this year they don't seem to have anything stupid like Savage: The Battle For Newearth (budget $100,000+) considered an "indie" game.
> If you made your living from being a
> professional musician, you would have a better
> perspective on this. Most people with regular
> jobs get paid in full for the 40-hour week's
> work they do at the end of every two weeks or
> every month at the most. But recording artists
> and songwriters don't get that opportunity.
> Typically a musician who writes a song has to
> collect a modest amount of money each year
> over many years. Hopefully he writes a lot of
> successful songs and they add up to a decent
> living. It's not anything like being an IT
> worker.
Sure. But you have to bear in mind that the musician has a big advantage there: he doesn't have to continuously work in order to continuously earn money. Sure, he would probably like to carry on writing songs to earn more money, but he doesn't have to. He can go and try something else with no risk, because the songs he's already written will carry on earning.
On the other hand, an IT or other worker has to keep rolling up for work every day, or their money supply will halt instantly. If they want to try something else, then they've just got to shoehorn it in after the day's work and commute, which usually means that they abandon the attempt.
Nobody is saying that musicians should be deprived of the money for their work. What they are saying is that limits should be put on that special privilege of being able to get paid while not doing work in the present. Nobody else has that, not even creative workers who do their work for a boss. Saying that you cannot be paid now for work you did more than 50 years ago seems eminently reasonable given that most people are only paid for the work they did a month ago.
Because they DON'T need to.
The reason is simple: you can't get much substitution involved when it comes to copyrighted works. If Dell annoy you, you can go buy a Simply PC instead. If Microsoft get on your wick, you can use Linux.
But if all your friends are talking about "Pirates of The Caribbean", you can't decide you don't like Disney and thus go watch some other pirate film. Well, you can, but it won't enable you to join in those conversations. The films might be similar, but they're not the same.
Copyright production firms, more than anything else, are selling the product or brand far more than the producer. People will buy a new Britney CD, but they won't buy a new Sony CD!