The problem is that, like so many other things, music runs right up into a fundamental problem with capitalism.
Part of the idea of capitalism is that people should buy the products that generate the most value for them. But with music, that's paradoxical, because until you've heard a song you don't know how much you like it; and once you have heard it, you've already consumed entertainment value from it.
If someone was brought up in a vacuum, they'd try randomly until they hit on an artist they like and then just keep buying stuff by that artist - no point taking risks with their money. Yet if they get info from anywhere else, payola comes in.
> That's what Britney would be in say.. 70 > years, the way they keep extending these God > damned copyrights. > So what if they spent 10 billion dollars to > market that bitch? Other industries (like drug > firms/whatever) spent a lot to develop > products too, they don't get protection as > ridiculous as these (thankfully)
That's what I think the next step will be, though.
Instead of finding a Britney Spears, they'll create Britney Spears as a marketing figure first, and then hire a singer/actress to play her.
When she gets old, they just grab a new Britney who looks similar and transfer all the marketing material.
Better yet, the actress playing Britney can't leave the record company, because if she does, she isn't Britney anymore. Britney would become the record company's copyrighted character.
No. They have a point. The problem is that, right now, it's not quite clear where innovation is actually able to come from:
* Open source projects have trouble innovating, because they don't pay. That means the people who work on them have to make money somewhere else, which means they can't devote 100% of their energy to innovating the open source.
* Commercial projects have just as much trouble innovating, because they HAVE to pay, which means they have to sell. Since the vast majority of users are "alright jack" with the existing functionality of their computer, innovative apps are a hard sell.
It's a kicker. Want to write an innovative art package? You either Open Source it and have it sit idle on SourceForge because it has no prestige and no-one wants to put in the time, or you make it commercial and watch as it fails to sell because everyone already has their copy of Photoshop.
> Yet the price point is fixed. This ensures > that only the best of the best games make a > signifigant profit. And those games *do* > profit, even if there is some, or a lot of > piracy.
Actually, the price point [i]isn't[/i] fixed by the software companies - it's fixed because they [i]have[/i] to charge that much in order to get the game onto store shelves. The shops won't put it up unless they get their cut, and if the price is too low, they don't.
One thing to point out is that the Congestion Charge was really about ENVIRONMENTAL concerns.
Go buy a hybrid car in the UK. Not only do you get exemption from the congestion charge, but the government actually PAY YOU one thousand pounds towards the cost of car.
The real problem, though, is that London is a BIG place. London is not just Zone 1, the central areas. Even towards the edges there, the tubes and busses are starting to thin out seriously. Even by Zone 2, there are internal rail services (full National Rail, not tube).
Also, bear in mind that the ridiculous cost of property in London is forcing people to commute. Even seen the Bakerloo entrance on Paddington station at 8:30 in the morning? They have to shut gates across it to control the crowds.
Combine that with the insane attitude in all countries that commuting is a leisure activity and you've got a general mess.
What I think we really need is a congestion charge.. CHARGED TO THE DESTINATION. That will encourage firms and shops not to require their employees or customers to drive.
Many other cities in the South-East UK have cameras too. Reading is full of them, for instance, and I think Manchester is too.
However, the bulk of cameras in stores are not to catch thieving customers but to catch *employees*. There are decent gangs of shoplifters in the UK who operate by getting jobs in stores, with seemingly good qualifications, and then lifting from the till or waving accomplices through without taking payment for goods. With chain stores it's quite hard, but a lot of them are franchises, which are more easily invaded..
The funniest bit of this is that, if the judge decides that the Grokstar case DOES set a precedent for this, RIAA themselves could be prosecuted for barratry (bringing hopeless lawsuits simply to harass the targets and cost them money)
> The situation you describe is one where the > art clearly is of lesser value than the > marketing. If he "can't" negotiate, then it > means that the business person can do without > the art. If that wasn't the case, the artist > could simply say, "You need to give me X, or > I'm done", and the business person would have > to capitulate.
The business person can always do without the art, because there are plenty of other artists who all need business people to get rewarded. Sure, it could be superior quality art, but there are still a relatively large number of artists capable of producing that.
> But by soliciting several people and letting > them compete, you win.
However, doing this is a business skill and since we just established that our artist doesn't have that...
> If you invented the most delicious cola ever > made, then you can share it, and success is > likely to find you.
That isn't true. If you invent the most delicious cola ever made, then no customers will find out that it is delicious, because they will carry on buying Coke and Pepsi like they always have.
You only have to look at what happened in the UK with Virgin Cola - marketed by Richard Branson, who was a highly skilled businessman. It wasn't the world's most delicious cola - although I personally preferred it to Coke, but that's pretty much irrelevant. But when it failed, it was found out that most people had never even tasted it - so if it had been the world's most delicious cola, most people would not have noticed.
> The pessimistic model about capitalism seems > to imply that there's only room for one > company, but that's not the case.
No. But a strong goal of capitalism is to reward successful companies with money that enables them to become even more successful. This means that over time the barrier to compete with them rises and rises. Sooner or later a point will be reached where it is so high that no new entrant to the market can possibly contemplate it. At that point things start to go wrong, because the company (or companies) no longer have to maximise efficiency provided it is still blocking competition.
There is no Wendy's in the UK, but there are McDonalds', Burger King and KFC. They do not compete in any meaningful sense anymore, and the "location problem" has meant that very few other fast food places exist or survive.
> It may be that their higher UK markups reflect > a higher cost of entry into the market in the > UK.
Let me put this into perspective: it was reported in UK nationals previously that a website selling train tickets for the Channel Tunnel first asks what currency you wish to buy in. If you select dollars, then the prices charged are under half those that you are charged if you select pounds sterling. The company does not have a US subsidiary with cheaper costs; it's the same firm either way.
As for introducing the students to people who were successful.. I'm not sure that would work, given the tone of their conversation. What they were talking about was people who had not gone to University, or who had left it, who were now being paid huge amounts whereas they, who were "stuck" doing in the "normal way", would never make that much. Most of the time the reason why was nothing to do with work quality but market conditions (the time frame was around the trailing edge of the dot-Bomb and they were CS students)
Strange that the last round of games I played on my PC were Oasis, Pipeline Plus, Touhou Youyoume, Eternal Fighter Zero, Deadeye, Elastomania, Troid, and Anarchy Online. Why? 'Cos I can start then whenever I want without having to fumble for a CD.
> Having business skill is an asset like being > able to produce a good work.
Except that it becomes an overpoweringly good asset, because EVERYONE needs it in order to get reward from the market for ANYTHING else they are doing.
> If someone has > the ability to produce a superior product, and > the other has the ability to market and sell > it in a superior fashion, they should work > together to create and sell it.
Which also inevitably results in the person who produced the product getting screwed over - usually by being payed a flat or per-hour fee for the work, while the business person gets the per-purchase fee from the market.
I've heard of many people - and personally known at least one excellent graphic artist - who were on the point of giving up completely because they were sick of being payed a couple of hundred or a couple of grand for a work and then having the people who marketed it driving around in Porsches because *they* got paid via a sales cut.
"Why not negotiate for it then?" Because they can't. Without the business guy, they can't make any money at all; and *all* business guys know this, so it's no use going to a different one.
> Your "operational fallacy" is not applicable > to capitalsm. Only those who produce > marginally better work require business skills > to capitalize on it; those who produce > superior work attract those who will help them > market it, or succeed despite themselves due > to the superiority of their product. The > appeal to authority doesn't make that any less > true.
Those who "help them to market it" tend to screw them over - because, by definition, if they needed help then the artisan had poor business skills and won't spot when he's being screwed.
The superiority of product doesn't matter if customers don't pay attention to find out how superior it is. Suppose you invented the most delicious cola ever made, superior to any on the market.. well, you see the problem.
> can "get ahead" if they're inclined to do so is > to beat the system. Instead of beating it by > providing more people with a cheaper, better > product and winning in the market,
The problem with capitalism is that firms *don't* beat it that way - or, if they do, they beat it once and then relax and start grabbing whatever they can get.
We already have it in the UK where firms put big mark-ups on products for the UK compared to the US. If selling "cheap, good" products is the way to win, why would they put their prices up, given that they're not losing money at the US price?
> That's not meant to be ad hominem, but I've > heard this sort of irrational denigration of > capitalism before, and it usually turns out > the person putting it forth feels they got > burned by a system that doesn't value them > properly.
Well, it isn't - I don't have a problem with my job. But in my job, I have a lot of contact with students and young people, and many of them seem to have the attitude that the option of starting their own business should be taken about as seriously as flying with the fairies. This in turn demoralises them heavily, as their belief is that they just have to get lucky on what their employer chooses to pay them, because no matter how good they got, there's always someone else as good. I do not think that people should have those attitudes in a healthy capitalism; and, because those attitudes will later shape their behaviour and that behaviour will result in a business slowdown, I think their existance should be addressed.
> high according to whom? You, in your all >-knowing omniscience? The fact is, a ton of > people start businesses every year under those > circumstances, and they obviously disagree. It > all comes down to: if you're not going > bankrupt when you fail utterly, then who WILL > bear the risk if it's not you?
I'm not saying that someone else should bear the risk. I'm saying the risk should be less.
> Again, this sounds just fabricated. "outbid on > every billboard"? What, one company bought up > every billboard around? Sounds pretty > expensive. And then the business could have > taken their message to radio, or local cable > TV. No business can afford to monopolize all > advertising. That just sounds idiotic.
No. But established businesses can outbid small ones on every possible form of marketing, and there's enough established businesses already that it's perfectly possible they'll buy it all. Note that it does not matter which market those established businesses are in, because advertising streams are the same.
> So the local grocery failed. They were > outcompeted; if your remote competitor > offering a bus service is all it takes to > drive your business under, your days are > numbered. Maybe they should go into business > offering a bus service instead.
You miss the point. The only possible advantage they could have gotten on their competitor - local location - was crushed, but this process did not increase efficiency because the bus service was terminated immediately afterwards.
> Capitalism can't "artifically insert" needs. > Everyone is free to do what they want with > their money and labor. It's communism and > it's "planned economy" which creates artifical > supply and demand -- which is why it fails > miserably.
Your original point in this thread was that communism forces people to give things away, which is obviously bad. But the problem is that capitalism also forces those who lack "business skill" to either give that work away (because they can't get into business to sell it) or get a far lesser reward than they normally would (by selling it to someone who does have "business skill" and who takes a big cut). Since having "business skill" is by no means connected to being able to do good works to sell.
It's simply John Gall's Operational Fallacy writ large. Indeed, he stated it himself: "The idea was that those who produced good work would accumulate more tokens. In fact, the people who accumulate the most tokens are the people who are good at accumulating tokens."
> No, it doesn't. It ensures that idiots with > bad ideas who are convinced they are good > don't introduce enormous market > inefficiencies. "Give everyone a shot" sounds > like a great egalitarian principle, but it > isn't. Plus: two heads are better than one. If > you think your idea is great, super; but if > everyone you show it to looks at it and > decides it won't work... why are you right and > they're wrong?
That's alright. But most of the time, new ideas aren't turned down for that reason. They're turned down because the potential sponsor says, "we're making money now, so why should we want to take a risk no you?".
Anyway, a free market - as you have said - means that anyone can offer their goods and services. They have the right to fail on their own merits because people do not want to buy them, not because somebody else THINKS that people would not want to buy them. (Insert Beatles example)
> Bullshit. My father started two successful > businesses;
Previous generation. These problems are related to the last 10-20 years.
> Your life isn't ruined if your business fails. > You declare bankruptcy, possibly make payments > on a debt, and move on. If there wasn't a cost > of failure, then everyone would be starting > businesses to get ahead, and the market would > be grossly inefficient for it.
A cost of failure which requires you to declare bankruptcy is far too high. And it does not require a gutting risk: the cost of failure would always be wasting your time, when you could have made more money working elsewhere.
> This reflects the way the world is. If I want > to buy a machine to make pizzas so I can open > a pizza place, it costs money for the machine. > If I want labor, someone has to pay my > employees.
THAT's not the problem - that's perfectly fair. What is a problem is when you find you can't buy any site for your pizza place, not because you can't afford it, but because all the business lots in town are owned by existing companies who will only rent or sell them to existing successful firms. The problem is when you can't buy that pizza oven because existing successful pizza firms buy the same oven brand and have driven the price up to stop others getting them.
> What kind of "attention" are you talking > about?
They do not get customers because the customers do not know about them. I have seen an independant shop selling exactly the same sougt-after product as a chain store, but at a lower price and with more stock, and getting no sales because people didn't know it existed. And why didn't they know it existed? Because the chain store could outbid them on every billboard, and on the lot with walk-by.
If a business fails because there is something wrong with what it's doing, that's OK. But when it gets to the stage where there is a whole seperate skill involved in participating in the market, seperate from the skill of doing the work necessary to produce the good or service that you are taking to market, you are looking at no more freedom.
> the competition is too strong for them;
Exactly. In markets where a leader is established already, there is no free market because the competition can crush any newcomer. And that does not mean that the competition get more efficent, as normally they go back to normal once the newcomer is gone.
There have been cases of that here where somebody has opened a local grocery store in a town. Then, the out-of-town supermarket has started operating a free bus service for customers, to take away the 'local' advantage. When the grocery store folded, the bus was instantly withdrawn, and the people in the town were left without any groceries. So the supermarket crushed an attempt to solve a local problem.
or they are undercapitalized and underestimated the amount of money needed to get to profitability; or the
> It wasn't free to build the supermarket; why > should the shelf space be free? (Although it > is in some types of stores)
Well, exactly. The market isn't free, and can't be, so it's a fallacy for capitalism to assume that it is.
> People who have done good works can sell them, > by buying their way into the market.
Not necessarily. The cost is usually far too great.
> If their product is compellingly good, they > can borrow money or seek investment to buy > their way into the market if need be;
Which means they have to seek approval from another before being allowed to sell stuff. That breaks the free market and thus breaks capitalism.
> they can also work for someone else and save > in order to buy into the market.
In the vast majority of jobs, no matter how hard you work you'll never have enough within a lifetime.
> That's different from people being unwilling > to do what is necessary to GET the capital - > which often includes things like putting their > house up as collateral, taking out big loans, > saving for years while working hard and > spending less.
Nope - it's not just unwillingness. For example, most people would only be able to do these things once in a lifetime, and if they failed, would be devastated. What kind of "free" market is it that only gives you one go and ruins your life if you fail?
> The fact is, most people don't have the > ability or vision to produce good products. > 90% of all small businesses fail in the first > 5 years. That's why people prefer to not take > risks.
90% of small businesses fail because they do not get attention equal to that of running businesses. Half the time this is because they are blocked by another business which controls market access and which "doesn't want to take risks".
> The world does not work by the best giving > away their talents; profit is a reward for > sharing talent. Just as famous artists sell > their works for vast sums of money, so too > should amazing skilled artisans of their > trade.
Sure. But far too many of those "amazing skilled artisans" are finding that they have no hope of getting money for their work, because the distribution and retail network is already locked down or requires big money to get involved in. And the big money is very often in the hands of competitors (who got started earlier, before this situation arose - usually just because they were born earlier). Think they're going to sponsor you? Heh.
Linux has been around for a long time, and it took a long while to get popular. There is no way that it could have reached its current popularity if it had been sold. If Linux had been sold then.. well, you know what happened to BeOS. Until an OS breaks the applications barrier it's always just going to be a geek thing for experimentation, and nobody would pay for one of those; and if Linux hadn't been open source chances are there would not have been scope for experimentation.
> The problem of communism is that it _forces_ > giving. That's the big problem with it.
That is true. But as we see in the modern day, a seriously involved capitalism can _force_ giving as well - because the market process necessary to get rewarded for that work inevitably becomes so snarled up (mandatory high-cost advertising, picky distributors and publishers, locked down retailers, two-tier media, etc.) that participating in it ceases to be a free choice - usually, it requires the cooperation of a person or firm who's already rich.
This "snarling up" is inevitable in a capitalist system, because it's a good tactic for firms to block competition. The fundamental problem is that capitalism assumes a "free market" which never existed; delivery was never free, shelf space was never free, customer attention was never free, and even bandwidth was never free. (The as-in-speech vs. as-in-beer argument does not apply because things like delivery and shelf space have no concept of "freedom as in speech".)
Thus, people who have done good works are forced to give them away because the market is effectively not open to them.
> Whereas if you look at open source, its > express intention is to REPLACE commercial > software. RMS believes that his mission is to > provide a free alternative to every major > piece of software, > and eventually to make commercial software > development unviable.
How is this different from what MS or other companies would want to do?
Bear in mind that innovation is slowing down in almost all applications software. It will not be long before - indeed, it could probably be done right now - MS can fire all of its development staff and just keep selling the same Office XP. I have yet to meet a business that hadn't stopped at Office 2000.
Likewise with other firms. What does Photoshop CS have over the previous version? Uhhhh... ummm... banknote detection?
If you program a computer to create a copyrightable work, then yes, you can copyright the results yourself - provided it was your computer, and you wrote the program without infringing any other copyrights.
However, I don't believe the "infinite monkeys" argument would be upheld by any reasonable judge. Amongst other things, you'd have to get people to listen to all of your generated music, otherwise they'd be able to claim parallel development. Since this would take hours, most people will not be prepared to do it, and you can't force them to.
Well, I suppose you could record the whole thing with every note played for only a millisecond, creating a "squawk", and then play that in public. But it'd be easy to argue that people weren't really 'hearing' the individual notes if they're that short.
A better bet would be this. Announce that you have created a Global Database of Digital Property, which contains all possible digital works. Offer to send it out on DVD to anyone who wishes it. The content of the DVD includes a program which allows the database serial number of any piece of digital work to be extracted from that work and stored in a file; and then, a program that will input a serial number work and write the appropriate work from the database into a file.
You can probably already see where this is going. The "serial number" generator simply copies the entire work - after all, if it's digital, it can be treated as a huge number, and saving that huge number to a file will produce a file identical to the original work. The "database extractor" takes blocks of the file, searches a database file to find identical blocks (ie, the 16th possible digital work is that represented by the bits of the number 16) and outputs them to a file.
Of course, if anyone tries to reverse-engineer them, you point out that you designed that system to make it hard for people to illegally obtain copyrighted works by getting the serial numbers for works they didn't own, and thus it's copy protection and reverse-engineering it is DMCA actionable.
I really think this is doomed to failure, and I'd be really sad if it succeeds.
Because the whole thing is about DISEMPOWERING people. Everything is about the nebulous "copyright holder". Obviously people are going to wind up scoffing at a law that disempowers them with no apparant benefit to themselves. (Even the "if you keep breaking copyright no one will be able to make money so there will be no IP produced" no longer holds in many cases, ESPECIALLY that of software)
If you want to teach kids to respect copyright, do the following:
- Help them create their own creative works. Show them that they have some small value. They don't have to be great, just something they can be proud of. Don't teach them, or let them pick up, the "talented" / "not talented" division meme. (Which is completely unproven to be true, and even if it was, you could never know someone was untalented within their lifetime.)
- Show the people who they know and admire *working*. People would respect pop singers a lot more if they saw them engaged in actual labour rather than just dancing around on streets and going shopping. And don't say "they don't labour" because they do - even if they don't write the songs, that pop video is probably the best of 50 takes, and that's tedious for anyone to do. And you can show the people who *do* write the songs, doing so.
The problem is that "democracy" means rule by the people - in other words, you'd have to have referenda on everything. Most folks agree that this would be pretty impractical.
But "representative democracy" changes the meaning of the word fundamentally. Now, it's no longer the case that the people have the power. Instead, the people decide who gets the power.
Yet this is a major distinction. Think about a plutocracy. Plutocracy is any form of government where the people who have the most money get the power. But here's the important point: the definition says nothing about *how* they get the power, or how the decision to give the power to them as made. If they happen to get the power through being voted for, that doesn't change the fact that it's still a plutocracy. If people are happening to vote for the people with the most money (and thus the most media coverage), they create a plutocracy.
Likewise, if people always vote for the party that their family has always voted for, they create an oligarchy.
The idea that "the people can rule in a representative democracy by forming parties and getting involved" is also a lie - the current system, whereby the party that has the most votes still gets in even if the majority of votes were for other parties (but not for the same other party), basically ensures that only the established parties ever have a hope of getting power. It makes it impossible to "work your way up" because, if you're not already at the top, you get nowhere.
There's no need to violate privacy any more than it already is in order to stop terrorism, nor to do it in unreasonable ways.
All of the "anti-terrorism" privacy arguments tend to hinge on how xxxx communication method "could be used to plan terrorism", "could be used to set up terrorist actions", yadda yadda yadda.
All of which is totally irrelevant if the terrorists a) can't get the weapons, or b) can't then use them in public to kill people.
a) doesn't require anything other than voluntary breaches of privacy which the vast majority would consider reasonable. b) doesn't breach privacy at all, since a public act by definition can't be subject to privacy.
The whole basis of using criminals' plans to "target" law enforcement is a shaky one. Law enforcement needs to be everywhere, all the time - otherwise criminals will inevitably learn the prediction strategies and work around them.
The big music companies can't be forced to block-license their output. They do it for radio stations because it's in their interest to have their songs played in a context where a) large numbers of people can hear them, and b) if their song isn't playing, someone else's would be.
Neither of these applies to individual downloads. The fact you're listening to their song doesn't mean that large numbers of people will hear it. And, if you want to hear a particular song and find it isn't available for online download, it isn't particularly likely that you'll run off and buy another song which IS available for online download. (Unless you're an EFF protestor, but that's too small a group.) And if you say "if it isn't available for legal download I'll pirate it" then they'll call for the handcuffs brigade. It's ridiculous to suggest that the suggestion for addressing the devaluation of a law should be backed by the threat of breaking that law.
Nor do either of these apply to "internet radio stations" where there are far too many for any one to have significant coverage.
> It may encourage "fun now" design, but what > you would ultimately see in the game is > players who follow a strict walkthrough guide > on how to get the best whatever in the least > amount of time.
If you keep the world changing dynamically, a walkthrough becomes impossible.
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The problem is that, like so many other things, music runs right up into a fundamental problem with capitalism.
Part of the idea of capitalism is that people should buy the products that generate the most value for them. But with music, that's paradoxical, because until you've heard a song you don't know how much you like it; and once you have heard it, you've already consumed entertainment value from it.
If someone was brought up in a vacuum, they'd try randomly until they hit on an artist they like and then just keep buying stuff by that artist - no point taking risks with their money. Yet if they get info from anywhere else, payola comes in.
> That's what Britney would be in say.. 70
> years, the way they keep extending these God
> damned copyrights.
> So what if they spent 10 billion dollars to
> market that bitch? Other industries (like drug
> firms/whatever) spent a lot to develop
> products too, they don't get protection as
> ridiculous as these (thankfully)
That's what I think the next step will be, though.
Instead of finding a Britney Spears, they'll create Britney Spears as a marketing figure first, and then hire a singer/actress to play her.
When she gets old, they just grab a new Britney who looks similar and transfer all the marketing material.
Better yet, the actress playing Britney can't leave the record company, because if she does, she isn't Britney anymore. Britney would become the record company's copyrighted character.
Ummmm..
Copyright term is 50 years. Are you suggesting that your song is going to be successful for the first time, 50 years AFTER it's been released?
> The virus..YES!
> The worm.. YES!
Sorry, but that's just unwarranted. Viruses and Worms existed on UNIX back while Microsoft were still selling Multiplan.
No. They have a point. The problem is that, right now, it's not quite clear where innovation is actually able to come from:
* Open source projects have trouble innovating, because they don't pay. That means the people who work on them have to make money somewhere else, which means they can't devote 100% of their energy to innovating the open source.
* Commercial projects have just as much trouble innovating, because they HAVE to pay, which means they have to sell. Since the vast majority of users are "alright jack" with the existing functionality of their computer, innovative apps are a hard sell.
It's a kicker. Want to write an innovative art package? You either Open Source it and have it sit idle on SourceForge because it has no prestige and no-one wants to put in the time, or you make it commercial and watch as it fails to sell because everyone already has their copy of Photoshop.
> Yet the price point is fixed. This ensures
> that only the best of the best games make a
> signifigant profit. And those games *do*
> profit, even if there is some, or a lot of
> piracy.
Actually, the price point [i]isn't[/i] fixed by the software companies - it's fixed because they [i]have[/i] to charge that much in order to get the game onto store shelves. The shops won't put it up unless they get their cut, and if the price is too low, they don't.
One thing to point out is that the Congestion Charge was really about ENVIRONMENTAL concerns.
Go buy a hybrid car in the UK. Not only do you get exemption from the congestion charge, but the government actually PAY YOU one thousand pounds towards the cost of car.
The real problem, though, is that London is a BIG place. London is not just Zone 1, the central areas. Even towards the edges there, the tubes and busses are starting to thin out seriously. Even by Zone 2, there are internal rail services (full National Rail, not tube).
Also, bear in mind that the ridiculous cost of property in London is forcing people to commute. Even seen the Bakerloo entrance on Paddington station at 8:30 in the morning? They have to shut gates across it to control the crowds.
Combine that with the insane attitude in all countries that commuting is a leisure activity and you've got a general mess.
What I think we really need is a congestion charge.. CHARGED TO THE DESTINATION. That will encourage firms and shops not to require their employees or customers to drive.
Oh, and btw, you don't have to register an Oyster card - it's entirely legal to have one without giving your name and address if you want to.
Many other cities in the South-East UK have cameras too. Reading is full of them, for instance, and I think Manchester is too.
However, the bulk of cameras in stores are not to catch thieving customers but to catch *employees*. There are decent gangs of shoplifters in the UK who operate by getting jobs in stores, with seemingly good qualifications, and then lifting from the till or waving accomplices through without taking payment for goods. With chain stores it's quite hard, but a lot of them are franchises, which are more easily invaded..
The funniest bit of this is that, if the judge decides that the Grokstar case DOES set a precedent for this, RIAA themselves could be prosecuted for barratry (bringing hopeless lawsuits simply to harass the targets and cost them money)
> The situation you describe is one where the
> art clearly is of lesser value than the
> marketing. If he "can't" negotiate, then it
> means that the business person can do without
> the art. If that wasn't the case, the artist
> could simply say, "You need to give me X, or
> I'm done", and the business person would have
> to capitulate.
The business person can always do without the art, because there are plenty of other artists who all need business people to get rewarded. Sure, it could be superior quality art, but there are still a relatively large number of artists capable of producing that.
> But by soliciting several people and letting
> them compete, you win.
However, doing this is a business skill and since we just established that our artist doesn't have that...
> If you invented the most delicious cola ever
> made, then you can share it, and success is
> likely to find you.
That isn't true. If you invent the most delicious cola ever made, then no customers will find out that it is delicious, because they will carry on buying Coke and Pepsi like they always have.
You only have to look at what happened in the UK with Virgin Cola - marketed by Richard Branson, who was a highly skilled businessman. It wasn't the world's most delicious cola - although I personally preferred it to Coke, but that's pretty much irrelevant. But when it failed, it was found out that most people had never even tasted it - so if it had been the world's most delicious cola, most people would not have noticed.
> The pessimistic model about capitalism seems
> to imply that there's only room for one
> company, but that's not the case.
No. But a strong goal of capitalism is to reward successful companies with money that enables them to become even more successful. This means that over time the barrier to compete with them rises and rises. Sooner or later a point will be reached where it is so high that no new entrant to the market can possibly contemplate it. At that point things start to go wrong, because the company (or companies) no longer have to maximise efficiency provided it is still blocking competition.
There is no Wendy's in the UK, but there are McDonalds', Burger King and KFC. They do not compete in any meaningful sense anymore, and the "location problem" has meant that very few other fast food places exist or survive.
> It may be that their higher UK markups reflect
> a higher cost of entry into the market in the
> UK.
Let me put this into perspective: it was reported in UK nationals previously that a website selling train tickets for the Channel Tunnel first asks what currency you wish to buy in. If you select dollars, then the prices charged are under half those that you are charged if you select pounds sterling. The company does not have a US subsidiary with cheaper costs; it's the same firm either way.
As for introducing the students to people who were successful.. I'm not sure that would work, given the tone of their conversation. What they were talking about was people who had not gone to University, or who had left it, who were now being paid huge amounts whereas they, who were "stuck" doing in the "normal way", would never make that much. Most of the time the reason why was nothing to do with work quality but market conditions (the time frame was around the trailing edge of the dot-Bomb and they were CS students)
Yea, the CD thing is a serious pain in the ass.
Strange that the last round of games I played on my PC were Oasis, Pipeline Plus, Touhou Youyoume, Eternal Fighter Zero, Deadeye, Elastomania, Troid, and Anarchy Online. Why? 'Cos I can start then whenever I want without having to fumble for a CD.
> Having business skill is an asset like being
> able to produce a good work.
Except that it becomes an overpoweringly good asset, because EVERYONE needs it in order to get reward from the market for ANYTHING else they are doing.
> If someone has
> the ability to produce a superior product, and
> the other has the ability to market and sell
> it in a superior fashion, they should work
> together to create and sell it.
Which also inevitably results in the person who produced the product getting screwed over - usually by being payed a flat or per-hour fee for the work, while the business person gets the per-purchase fee from the market.
I've heard of many people - and personally known at least one excellent graphic artist - who were on the point of giving up completely because they were sick of being payed a couple of hundred or a couple of grand for a work and then having the people who marketed it driving around in Porsches because *they* got paid via a sales cut.
"Why not negotiate for it then?" Because they can't. Without the business guy, they can't make any money at all; and *all* business guys know this, so it's no use going to a different one.
> Your "operational fallacy" is not applicable
> to capitalsm. Only those who produce
> marginally better work require business skills
> to capitalize on it; those who produce
> superior work attract those who will help them
> market it, or succeed despite themselves due
> to the superiority of their product. The
> appeal to authority doesn't make that any less
> true.
Those who "help them to market it" tend to screw them over - because, by definition, if they needed help then the artisan had poor business skills and won't spot when he's being screwed.
The superiority of product doesn't matter if customers don't pay attention to find out how superior it is. Suppose you invented the most delicious cola ever made, superior to any on the market.. well, you see the problem.
> can "get ahead" if they're inclined to do so is
> to beat the system. Instead of beating it by
> providing more people with a cheaper, better
> product and winning in the market,
The problem with capitalism is that firms *don't* beat it that way - or, if they do, they beat it once and then relax and start grabbing whatever they can get.
We already have it in the UK where firms put big mark-ups on products for the UK compared to the US. If selling "cheap, good" products is the way to win, why would they put their prices up, given that they're not losing money at the US price?
> That's not meant to be ad hominem, but I've
> heard this sort of irrational denigration of
> capitalism before, and it usually turns out
> the person putting it forth feels they got
> burned by a system that doesn't value them
> properly.
Well, it isn't - I don't have a problem with my job. But in my job, I have a lot of contact with students and young people, and many of them seem to have the attitude that the option of starting their own business should be taken about as seriously as flying with the fairies. This in turn demoralises them heavily, as their belief is that they just have to get lucky on what their employer chooses to pay them, because no matter how good they got, there's always someone else as good. I do not think that people should have those attitudes in a healthy capitalism; and, because those attitudes will later shape their behaviour and that behaviour will result in a business slowdown, I think their existance should be addressed.
> high according to whom? You, in your all
>-knowing omniscience? The fact is, a ton of
> people start businesses every year under those
> circumstances, and they obviously disagree. It
> all comes down to: if you're not going
> bankrupt when you fail utterly, then who WILL
> bear the risk if it's not you?
I'm not saying that someone else should bear the risk. I'm saying the risk should be less.
> Again, this sounds just fabricated. "outbid on
> every billboard"? What, one company bought up
> every billboard around? Sounds pretty
> expensive. And then the business could have
> taken their message to radio, or local cable
> TV. No business can afford to monopolize all
> advertising. That just sounds idiotic.
No. But established businesses can outbid small ones on every possible form of marketing, and there's enough established businesses already that it's perfectly possible they'll buy it all. Note that it does not matter which market those established businesses are in, because advertising streams are the same.
> So the local grocery failed. They were
> outcompeted; if your remote competitor
> offering a bus service is all it takes to
> drive your business under, your days are
> numbered. Maybe they should go into business
> offering a bus service instead.
You miss the point. The only possible advantage they could have gotten on their competitor - local location - was crushed, but this process did not increase efficiency because the bus service was terminated immediately afterwards.
> Capitalism can't "artifically insert" needs.
> Everyone is free to do what they want with
> their money and labor. It's communism and
> it's "planned economy" which creates artifical
> supply and demand -- which is why it fails
> miserably.
Your original point in this thread was that communism forces people to give things away, which is obviously bad. But the problem is that capitalism also forces those who lack "business skill" to either give that work away (because they can't get into business to sell it) or get a far lesser reward than they normally would (by selling it to someone who does have "business skill" and who takes a big cut). Since having "business skill" is by no means connected to being able to do good works to sell.
It's simply John Gall's Operational Fallacy writ large. Indeed, he stated it himself: "The idea was that those who produced good work would accumulate more tokens. In fact, the people who accumulate the most tokens are the people who are good at accumulating tokens."
> No, it doesn't. It ensures that idiots with
> bad ideas who are convinced they are good
> don't introduce enormous market
> inefficiencies. "Give everyone a shot" sounds
> like a great egalitarian principle, but it
> isn't. Plus: two heads are better than one. If
> you think your idea is great, super; but if
> everyone you show it to looks at it and
> decides it won't work... why are you right and
> they're wrong?
That's alright. But most of the time, new ideas aren't turned down for that reason. They're turned down because the potential sponsor says, "we're making money now, so why should we want to take a risk no you?".
Anyway, a free market - as you have said - means that anyone can offer their goods and services. They have the right to fail on their own merits because people do not want to buy them, not because somebody else THINKS that people would not want to buy them. (Insert Beatles example)
> Bullshit. My father started two successful
> businesses;
Previous generation. These problems are related to the last 10-20 years.
> Your life isn't ruined if your business fails.
> You declare bankruptcy, possibly make payments
> on a debt, and move on. If there wasn't a cost
> of failure, then everyone would be starting
> businesses to get ahead, and the market would
> be grossly inefficient for it.
A cost of failure which requires you to declare bankruptcy is far too high. And it does not require a gutting risk: the cost of failure would always be wasting your time, when you could have made more money working elsewhere.
> This reflects the way the world is. If I want
> to buy a machine to make pizzas so I can open
> a pizza place, it costs money for the machine.
> If I want labor, someone has to pay my
> employees.
THAT's not the problem - that's perfectly fair. What is a problem is when you find you can't buy any site for your pizza place, not because you can't afford it, but because all the business lots in town are owned by existing companies who will only rent or sell them to existing successful firms. The problem is when you can't buy that pizza oven because existing successful pizza firms buy the same oven brand and have driven the price up to stop others getting them.
> What kind of "attention" are you talking
> about?
They do not get customers because the customers do not know about them. I have seen an independant shop selling exactly the same sougt-after product as a chain store, but at a lower price and with more stock, and getting no sales because people didn't know it existed. And why didn't they know it existed? Because the chain store could outbid them on every billboard, and on the lot with walk-by.
If a business fails because there is something wrong with what it's doing, that's OK. But when it gets to the stage where there is a whole seperate skill involved in participating in the market, seperate from the skill of doing the work necessary to produce the good or service that you are taking to market, you are looking at no more freedom.
> the competition is too strong for them;
Exactly. In markets where a leader is established already, there is no free market because the competition can crush any newcomer. And that does not mean that the competition get more efficent, as normally they go back to normal once the newcomer is gone.
There have been cases of that here where somebody has opened a local grocery store in a town. Then, the out-of-town supermarket has started operating a free bus service for customers, to take away the 'local' advantage. When the grocery store folded, the bus was instantly withdrawn, and the people in the town were left without any groceries. So the supermarket crushed an attempt to solve a local problem.
or they are undercapitalized and underestimated the amount of money needed to get to profitability; or the
> It wasn't free to build the supermarket; why
> should the shelf space be free? (Although it
> is in some types of stores)
Well, exactly. The market isn't free, and can't be, so it's a fallacy for capitalism to assume that it is.
> People who have done good works can sell them,
> by buying their way into the market.
Not necessarily. The cost is usually far too great.
> If their product is compellingly good, they
> can borrow money or seek investment to buy
> their way into the market if need be;
Which means they have to seek approval from another before being allowed to sell stuff. That breaks the free market and thus breaks capitalism.
> they can also work for someone else and save
> in order to buy into the market.
In the vast majority of jobs, no matter how hard you work you'll never have enough within a lifetime.
> That's different from people being unwilling
> to do what is necessary to GET the capital -
> which often includes things like putting their
> house up as collateral, taking out big loans,
> saving for years while working hard and
> spending less.
Nope - it's not just unwillingness. For example, most people would only be able to do these things once in a lifetime, and if they failed, would be devastated. What kind of "free" market is it that only gives you one go and ruins your life if you fail?
> The fact is, most people don't have the
> ability or vision to produce good products.
> 90% of all small businesses fail in the first
> 5 years. That's why people prefer to not take
> risks.
90% of small businesses fail because they do not get attention equal to that of running businesses. Half the time this is because they are blocked by another business which controls market access and which "doesn't want to take risks".
> The world does not work by the best giving
> away their talents; profit is a reward for
> sharing talent. Just as famous artists sell
> their works for vast sums of money, so too
> should amazing skilled artisans of their
> trade.
Sure. But far too many of those "amazing skilled artisans" are finding that they have no hope of getting money for their work, because the distribution and retail network is already locked down or requires big money to get involved in. And the big money is very often in the hands of competitors (who got started earlier, before this situation arose - usually just because they were born earlier). Think they're going to sponsor you? Heh.
Linux has been around for a long time, and it took a long while to get popular. There is no way that it could have reached its current popularity if it had been sold. If Linux had been sold then.. well, you know what happened to BeOS. Until an OS breaks the applications barrier it's always just going to be a geek thing for experimentation, and nobody would pay for one of those; and if Linux hadn't been open source chances are there would not have been scope for experimentation.
> The problem of communism is that it _forces_
> giving. That's the big problem with it.
That is true. But as we see in the modern day, a seriously involved capitalism can _force_ giving as well - because the market process necessary to get rewarded for that work inevitably becomes so snarled up (mandatory high-cost advertising, picky distributors and publishers, locked down retailers, two-tier media, etc.) that participating in it ceases to be a free choice - usually, it requires the cooperation of a person or firm who's already rich.
This "snarling up" is inevitable in a capitalist system, because it's a good tactic for firms to block competition. The fundamental problem is that capitalism assumes a "free market" which never existed; delivery was never free, shelf space was never free, customer attention was never free, and even bandwidth was never free. (The as-in-speech vs. as-in-beer argument does not apply because things like delivery and shelf space have no concept of "freedom as in speech".)
Thus, people who have done good works are forced to give them away because the market is effectively not open to them.
> Whereas if you look at open source, its
> express intention is to REPLACE commercial
> software. RMS believes that his mission is to
> provide a free alternative to every major
> piece of software,
> and eventually to make commercial software
> development unviable.
How is this different from what MS or other companies would want to do?
Bear in mind that innovation is slowing down in almost all applications software. It will not be long before - indeed, it could probably be done right now - MS can fire all of its development staff and just keep selling the same Office XP. I have yet to meet a business that hadn't stopped at Office 2000.
Likewise with other firms. What does Photoshop CS have over the previous version? Uhhhh... ummm... banknote detection?
If you program a computer to create a copyrightable work, then yes, you can copyright the results yourself - provided it was your computer, and you wrote the program without infringing any other copyrights.
However, I don't believe the "infinite monkeys" argument would be upheld by any reasonable judge. Amongst other things, you'd have to get people to listen to all of your generated music, otherwise they'd be able to claim parallel development. Since this would take hours, most people will not be prepared to do it, and you can't force them to.
Well, I suppose you could record the whole thing with every note played for only a millisecond, creating a "squawk", and then play that in public. But it'd be easy to argue that people weren't really 'hearing' the individual notes if they're that short.
A better bet would be this. Announce that you have created a Global Database of Digital Property, which contains all possible digital works. Offer to send it out on DVD to anyone who wishes it. The content of the DVD includes a program which allows the database serial number of any piece of digital work to be extracted from that work and stored in a file; and then, a program that will input a serial number work and write the appropriate work from the database into a file.
You can probably already see where this is going. The "serial number" generator simply copies the entire work - after all, if it's digital, it can be treated as a huge number, and saving that huge number to a file will produce a file identical to the original work. The "database extractor" takes blocks of the file, searches a database file to find identical blocks (ie, the 16th possible digital work is that represented by the bits of the number 16) and outputs them to a file.
Of course, if anyone tries to reverse-engineer them, you point out that you designed that system to make it hard for people to illegally obtain copyrighted works by getting the serial numbers for works they didn't own, and thus it's copy protection and reverse-engineering it is DMCA actionable.
I really think this is doomed to failure, and I'd be really sad if it succeeds.
Because the whole thing is about DISEMPOWERING people. Everything is about the nebulous "copyright holder". Obviously people are going to wind up scoffing at a law that disempowers them with no apparant benefit to themselves. (Even the "if you keep breaking copyright no one will be able to make money so there will be no IP produced" no longer holds in many cases, ESPECIALLY that of software)
If you want to teach kids to respect copyright, do the following:
- Help them create their own creative works. Show them that they have some small value. They don't have to be great, just something they can be proud of. Don't teach them, or let them pick up, the "talented" / "not talented" division meme. (Which is completely unproven to be true, and even if it was, you could never know someone was untalented within their lifetime.)
- Show the people who they know and admire *working*. People would respect pop singers a lot more if they saw them engaged in actual labour rather than just dancing around on streets and going shopping. And don't say "they don't labour" because they do - even if they don't write the songs, that pop video is probably the best of 50 takes, and that's tedious for anyone to do. And you can show the people who *do* write the songs, doing so.
No, he's right.
The problem is that "democracy" means rule by the people - in other words, you'd have to have referenda on everything. Most folks agree that this would be pretty impractical.
But "representative democracy" changes the meaning of the word fundamentally. Now, it's no longer the case that the people have the power. Instead, the people decide who gets the power.
Yet this is a major distinction. Think about a plutocracy. Plutocracy is any form of government where the people who have the most money get the power. But here's the important point: the definition says nothing about *how* they get the power, or how the decision to give the power to them as made. If they happen to get the power through being voted for, that doesn't change the fact that it's still a plutocracy. If people are happening to vote for the people with the most money (and thus the most media coverage), they create a plutocracy.
Likewise, if people always vote for the party that their family has always voted for, they create an oligarchy.
The idea that "the people can rule in a representative democracy by forming parties and getting involved" is also a lie - the current system, whereby the party that has the most votes still gets in even if the majority of votes were for other parties (but not for the same other party), basically ensures that only the established parties ever have a hope of getting power. It makes it impossible to "work your way up" because, if you're not already at the top, you get nowhere.
With respect, it's rubbish.
There's no need to violate privacy any more than it already is in order to stop terrorism, nor to do it in unreasonable ways.
All of the "anti-terrorism" privacy arguments tend to hinge on how xxxx communication method "could be used to plan terrorism", "could be used to set up terrorist actions", yadda yadda yadda.
All of which is totally irrelevant if the terrorists a) can't get the weapons, or b) can't then use them in public to kill people.
a) doesn't require anything other than voluntary breaches of privacy which the vast majority would consider reasonable. b) doesn't breach privacy at all, since a public act by definition can't be subject to privacy.
The whole basis of using criminals' plans to "target" law enforcement is a shaky one. Law enforcement needs to be everywhere, all the time - otherwise criminals will inevitably learn the prediction strategies and work around them.
But it was a stupid letter.
The big music companies can't be forced to block-license their output. They do it for radio stations because it's in their interest to have their songs played in a context where a) large numbers of people can hear them, and b) if their song isn't playing, someone else's would be.
Neither of these applies to individual downloads. The fact you're listening to their song doesn't mean that large numbers of people will hear it. And, if you want to hear a particular song and find it isn't available for online download, it isn't particularly likely that you'll run off and buy another song which IS available for online download. (Unless you're an EFF protestor, but that's too small a group.) And if you say "if it isn't available for legal download I'll pirate it" then they'll call for the handcuffs brigade. It's ridiculous to suggest that the suggestion for addressing the devaluation of a law should be backed by the threat of breaking that law.
Nor do either of these apply to "internet radio stations" where there are far too many for any one to have significant coverage.
> It may encourage "fun now" design, but what
> you would ultimately see in the game is
> players who follow a strict walkthrough guide
> on how to get the best whatever in the least
> amount of time.
If you keep the world changing dynamically, a walkthrough becomes impossible.