Linus, I think, chose to license the Linux kernel under the GPL because he believed in GNU's basic founding principles
Linus has written that if the BSD effort had been ready a year sooner he probably wouldn't have developed Linux. Not that he regrets doing so, of course!
I suspect he chose the GPL because he needed something and it was already worked out and he was smart enough to realise that a working license in the hand beats wasting time trying to be a lawyer. A lot of people I've talked to chose the GPL for that reason, actually.
There's certainly people for whom the GPL is key, and wouldn't "do a complete 180", so the issue is still academic. But the GPL wasn't quite the slam-dunk you're making it.
They'd do way better calling it something like blogs.sco.com... it's not like they've got any kind of plausible deniability going for them. At least they could try and sound like they had a clue.
I mean, even Microsoft knows which way the wind's blowing.
First, I'm sure we agree on one point: people who submitted code to Linux because it was GPL-ed must have their intentions respected, so the whole question of relicensing Linux is academic. But I don't think that GPL vs BSD is enough to make an enormous difference... there's all kinds of other reasons that people have gone with Linux, starting with the fact that Linus is a hell of a nice guy (when he's not flaming about microkernels) and that rare bird: someone who's as good with people as he is with code. Without his leadership and example as much as his coding skills it wouldn't have taken off anywhere near as well as it did.
what incentive does a large comany have to return it's modifications back into the free version as opposed to just saying FU, I have my fork.
Well, there's the value of the open-source development model itself. Do you trust the open model, or do you believe that a closed source version would end up out-competing you? If you trust the process, there's no reason not to take that last step into the void.
Look, I've been writing code and giving it away for decades. There was a game I wrote, and a few utilities, in some of the 4.1BSD tapes. Stuff I wrote back in the '80s is floating around all over the place, including most Linux distros.
For a while I released stuff as shareware, or under 'non-commercial' licenses, but by the end of the '80s I was back out of that dubious shelter and enjoying the rain.
Given the amount of stuff Microsoft picked up from BSD, I wouldn't be shocked to find some of it in NT. There probably isn't... I'm a small fish in that pond... but it's not out of the question. Some other utilities and libraries I've written have gone into commercial products, and I know there's code of mine in the Panther source tree.
How would you feel if someone took your work, made a change or two and sold it as their own?
The $612 million dollars quoted is a suggested figure representing the kind of cost a commercial company would have to take on to develop an identical operating system kernel.
I'll do it for $50K. It'll be ready as soon as I can do a global search-and-replace on this copy of the FreeBSD source tree. Unless you want the Linux name on it, there's really not much point in licensing the actual kernel, and if you do... well... doesn't matter how much you pay to develop a Linux clone it won't have the name on it.
In other words, this is the crux of the biscuit:
The value of the Linux kernel code and Linux branding, [...] would quite probably exceed this figure of $612 million by a sizeable percentage.
Indeed.
Netscape was bought by AOL at a price tag of $4.2 billion dollars
And they promptly discarded most of the existing code and started over with a new rendering engine: what they ended up buying was the name. Similarly, if someone's looking for a BSD-licensed Linux what they're really looking to get out of it is the name... if they just want a kernel they can get one a lot cheaper.
Let's see, if Linus and Alan and the rest of the big names all got together and put their own code in the pot, and you left out all the GPL-ed contributions from third parties, kind of like a Net-2 release of Linux...
I guess you could put something together that was about like a ten year old Slackware release. It'd take a couple of years to replace the missing bits. I think you'd be better off keeping this in mind: "If 386bsd had been ready one year earlier, I'd probably not have started on linux at all, but used bsd instead - although I'm very happy with how it all turned out." -- Linus Torvalds, December 1992. There's already a BSD-licensed kernel you can have, gratis, and it works rather nicely indeed.
I kind of doubt that CherryOS will provide full access to the video card, which pretty much rules out Quartz.
I would hope it would just pass OpenGL straight through to the video card. That's about the only way it could even hope to get anything like reasonable performance: get the GPU to do as much of the heavy lifting as possible, because it's running at full speed instead of trying to convert each 3-operand PPC instruction to the corresponding 2-3 x86 2-operand instructions, which then get converted to Ghu only knows how many Pentium or AMD internal instructions...
the iBot, Dean Kamen's wheelchair [...] actually has a purpose
Which is why it's being sold by a real company with an actual profit motive and targeted marketing and realistic sales goals and other non-visionary characteristics.
I thought it was often more difficult to develop Macintosh applications because more of the API's are hidden away and not for developers to see
Mac OS X is pretty damned open. XML configuration files, an open-source kernel (!), free IDE, the native compiler is gcc, the API is extensively documented, and there are extensive tools for reading the class libraries and interfaces shipped in the developer's kit.
What really sucks is people who write [Java|C#|C++|Lisp|...] programs that run slower than shell scripts because they get lost in a twisty maze of inherited methods and end up with their view object having a method that forces a refresh of a list of objects in a box that ends up calling that method on the original object unless the object's position hasn't changed, so every time you resize the box it does a very slow and painful iterative balancing act to get the layout right... but they never notice because they're developing it on a 3 GHz Pentium IV...
Not that I'm bitter or anything, I just want an object system that includes a mandatory test on a Pentium 100 before the packaging tool will link it in with the production runtime. If it also involves painful but not dangerous voltages applied to sensitive organs if they try to skip this step it'd be a bonus.
How exactly is Java "OO from the ground up"?
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Java's primitive types are not objects. There's no reason they couldn't have been (compilers that generated efficient arithmetic code from high level components date back to the '70s) but they're not... which means you have to drop down to C-style types over and over again.
It hinders programming efficiency, and it hinders code efficiency: any place where primitive types can be used, the compiler can infer that primitive code can be generated, any place it can't you'd have had to use object types... but the compiler is MUCH smarter about figuring where casts need to be than average (or even above-average) programmers.
Smalltalk is "OO from the ground up". Java is "OO from the Integer up".
You can't buy music from mycokemusic walmart sympatico real msn napster virgin etc. etc.
That's like saying I can't buy music from Tower Records or Wherehouse 'cos I live in Mud Puddle Texas and it's half an hour drive to a town that even has a Borders. Who cares? If there's anything I can't get from Borders I can buy it online... it's not going to kill me if it takes a few days for UPS to get my CD here.
On the other hand I don't have a deadbolt or burglar bars and I haven't bothered to lock my door in six months.
A label presumably has the resources to pay professional forensic musicologists to determine whether a given sequence of notes is part of a song that has ever been on the Billboard Top 100.
If they went through this ridiculous makework they'd find that every song has themes or lyrics in common with hundreds of other songs. "Sorry, you gotta change 'Broken Wings', it's got a conflict with 'Blackbird'".
How can an independent singer-songwriter know for sure that he's not subconsciously copying an existing copyrighted song?
Tell me, was anyone who bought, sold copies of, or was involved in the production and distribution of "My Sweet Lord" found guilty of anything? Am I responsible for the publisher of a song using pirated software in its production, a performer playing music on a stolen piano, a studio using the proceeds from drug deals to pay for their equipment? Was a copy of "My Sweet Lord" purchased from Tower Records somehow more legitimate than a comp copy handed to you by George Harrison himself?
This has nothing to do with DRM: if Mike Pianoman accidentally lifts a theme from Joe Nobody's demo reel, how does it matter whether he's released it through iTMS or by putting an MP3 or an OGG on his website? It doesn't, of course, this whole issue is a red herring.
You mean, the MP3 patent? I'm using iTunes, so that's between Apple and Fraunhofer, and so far as I know they're solid. Or are you talking about the software the artists used... that's a pretty abstract issue from here: you might as well ask whether I've verified that they're not using a pirated copy of their mixing software.
what about the copyrights that songwriters hold on the underlying musical works?
Um, say what? Songwriters aren't artists?
I suppose there might be a few covers I've downloaded in my iTunes Library, but if I've got any music where the performer isn't the only artist who holds a copyright on the work, and the songwriter hasn't given permission, it's because I don't know all the music in the world. Almost all my library is instrumental, at least half is older than the Mickey Mouse deadline, and the rest are so far as I know are original works. About the only pieces I can think of that might be dubious are the recordings from my daughter's high school concerts.
I've purchased 41 songs from iTunes, some of those are covers: Bobby Mc Ferrin, Henry Mancini, "The Pink Panther Theme"; Miles Davis, Joaquín Rodrigo, "Concierto de Aranjuez"; maybe half a dozen I can identify from the ID3 tags... am I safe to assume that all the copyrights on these are legitimate and all the right people have been paid?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the copyrights on Scott Joplin's works have expired. Gershwin's are still valid, I believe, but I bought "An American in Paris" from iTMS and the rest are from a CD... right here. Same with Copland.
Then there's the Alternative section. Folks who label themselves like that tend to be doing all their own work. I suppose there might be covers of works I'm not familiar with buried there, or in my Jazz collection, or there might be a few performers putting covers up without mentioning they're not the composer. I can't be 100% sure, but I just don't have much interest in the kind of music that's likely to be an unauthorised cover or performance of a copyrighted work.
Or is there something else I should be worried about that you're not telling me?
I think you're protesting to the wrong person, or you misunderstood me. The message I was responding to said "the only people "unjustly" affected are the very small crowd of people who don't watch TV at all, but who do have a computer, albeit one incapable of watching Internet broadcast streams". I entirely agree with you... whether the computer is capable of watching broadband video streams or not shouldn't matter, because the purpose of a computer is not "watching broadband streams".
TV tuners, sure. A tuner is designed specifically for recieving TV. If that includes things like DVD players with tuners, so be it... if there are no DVD players without, there will be once the fee's added on. If they want to be able to stream their public TV over the Internet, then they need to charge for it explicitly. I'll bet they wouldn't need to charge anything like 18 Euros a month for access to get more money from the service than they get from the few TV-free housholds with decent computers.
This way, the only people "unjustly" affected are the very small crowd of people who don't watch TV at all, but who do have a computer, albeit one incapable of watching Internet broadcast streams.
Wrong.
People who don't watch TV at all, but who do have a computer, whether it's capable of watching broadcast streams or not. Why? Because you can't buy a computer today for which that's not true.
I don't watch TV more than a couple of times a year, and I would be quite happy to go to a friend's house for those times. This is pretty unusual for my generation, but it's only moderately unusual for my parents' and getting that way for my children's.
Yet if I lived in Germany I'd be charged a pretty substantial TV fee, how is that just? The only rationale I can see is that it's to my benefit if the programming my neighbors watch is less commercialised... and I'd agree with that, but then I'd be getting that benefit if I had no TV at all. Shouldn't this be handled through property tax or from general revenue in that case?
People don't know what 'architecture' means, so it's no surprise that someone would come up with that kind of comment.
What they're really a fan of is the market that makes it profitable for Intel and AMD to spend outrageous amounts of resources to make the hoary old x86 run so fast, by building chips with better architectures that emulate the x86.
I don't think it would be useful for AMD to make their internal architecture public. As I understand it, it's VLIW, so you'd need to recompile your code every time a new version came out. Intel is allegedly using a RISC-style vertical microcode, so it may be possible for them to keep compatibility at the microcode level at least within a couple of generations, but since they have the luxury of redesigning the internal architecture with each generation it's likely you'd still need to recompile for performance as you have to on the IA64/Itanium.
What I wish is that when Intel bought their share of the Alpha from DEC they'd done what they did when they bought the StrongARM from DEC. They simply labelled the next generation the "Intel XScale" and everyone's forgotten where it came from. They could have simply relabelled the next generation Alpha the "Intel AXP" or something, and pretty soon everyone would think of it as an Intel chip. Remember that until it got Compaqted it stayed at or near the top of the performance charts pretty much for its whole life, despite having a tiny fraction of the resources the x86 architecture has had to play with.
Let's assume that right now, the top 100 artists signed exclusively to iTunes.
I think you may be misunderstanding what I posted. I wrote: "when online music gets too big they won't be able to pull their catalog from the online music market as a whole". Obviously they have a lot of leverage right now because online music sales are a tiny percent of the total, so they could pull out of the whole business without it having any significant impact on their bottom line. But that's not going to remain the case, so they're planning for that day.
So they want to cut down any tall poppies, like iTunes. The problem is, that's not enough. They need more control than that.
To survive, long term, they need to keep the catalog side of the online music business fragmented. Otherwise, once the online music business is big enough a small label that has contracts with enough online music providers could cut a significantly better deal with a big name and still make an outrageous profit, and still provide enough sales that the artist is better off with just their online revenues.
when and if Apple gets too big, the labels could simply refuse to provide their vast catalog of music
Yes, yes, that's exactly the leverage they would apply to knock down the tall poppies.
What I'm talking about is, when online music gets too big, whether it's iTunes and the seven dwarves or a dozen companies with no more than 20% of the market each, they won't be able to pull their catalog from the online music market as a whole. It'd be too much of their business.
At that point any small label... whether a traditional label, an artist co-op, or something invented for the purpose... will have access to the same market on comparable terms to the big labels. Any of them would give an artist just as much access online as the biggest label.
So let's say online music is half the market. Mike Bigname signs with Joes Music and Bait Shop for their new release. Instead of Monopoly Records getting 75% of the sales and passing 10% on to Mike, he's giving Joe 10% and keeping 65%. Joe gets more money from that one release than from his last ten years combined bait-music-and-boat-rental business, so he's happy. Mike's getting more than three times the royalties he got from his last album, so he's happy. The online music people are happy, because they know they'll have more leverage when they renew their contract with Monopoly Records.
Monopoly Records isn't happy, of course. But what can they do? Well, they can try and control things now, before it gets that far. But about the only option I see is for them to fragment the online music industry by label, so each provider is basically a sock puppet for "their" label. If they can't do that they can only keep the online music business dependent on their catalog by keeping the online music business as a whole from getting too big.
Ah, yes, sorry, I missed stage 2. Of course if they have MAC in hardware, they control the horizontal, they control the vertical, and we can't even adjust our sets.
Shell namespace extensions allow Windows Explorer to give you a file-folder view of resources that aren't in the filesystem. They're not, however, filesystems at the OS level. You can't get UNC paths to the objects, when you open them the shell copies the data over and then runs the program on that copy.
This is actually good, from a security point of view, given Microsoft's ill-advised "security zones" design in the HTML control. It means that an exploit can't pass a UNC path to a remote object in a file:/// URL and have Internet Explorer or Outlook trust it because it's "local".
Apple's equivalent mechanism (for FTP, for example) actually mounts the remote resource in the file system. This is a lot more powerful, but there is a potential for exploits... mitigated by the lack of the same kind of integration between Safari and Finder.
This might even lead to DRMed content to be usable on open platforms!
DRMed content is already as compatible with open platforms (I assume you mean something like "open systems" or "open source operating systems") as it will ever be.
The essence of open systems is open interfaces and protocols. If the interfaces and protocols are standardised or publically documented, you can implement your own version of an application that interfaces with them, open source, closed source, or something in between, that doesn't matter.
What does this mean for DRM?
Right off, this means you can't have an open-source DRM-capable application, because if the end-user can get the source code to the application they can modify it to save the output from the decryption process in a non-encrypted form.
It also means that you can't use all but the weakest DRM under an open-source operating system, because the operating system mediates the application's access to the hardware, so you can intercept the decoded output from the application and save it.
The only way to have strong DRM and an open-systems environment is to have a sealed media translator in the audio and video hardware. Then the A/V hardware performs the decryption. In which case it doesn't matter what platform you're on, all the media player application does is provide a storage service for a dedicated music or video player that's embedded in the A/V card.
So unless you're using a Creative Audigy it doesn't matter what your operating system is, you won't be able to play WMA++ files. And pretty soon, you'll need a monitor with a DRM-enabled digital video input and digital speakers that exchange keys with the A/V card to play DRM media.
Then Microsoft will come out with the Palladium scheme again, and you'll be able to play your music and videos under Windows Media Player Trusted Edition on Trusted Hardware, and Creative will start selling cheaper WinAudio cards that don't need the expensive sealed and boobytrapped DRM module, but they only work with Windows... and then they'll quit selling regular DRM modules because there's not enough market...
And we'll be back where we are now, except that it'll be even harder to convince people they can switch to open source operating systems, because open source DRM can't ever be trusted so open source operating systems will be even less able to play DRMed media than they are now.
Most of my downloads have no DRM at all, but they're perfectly legal. They're in MP3 format direct from the artists.
some labels have complained [Apple] has priced tracks too low, making it difficult for them to make a profit
Most of the 99c I pay to iTunes goes to the label, and their marginal cost for that purchase is zero. As near as I can tell, the only people making a profit from iTMS are the labels. And it's not at all certain that they'd make more profit at a higher price: they may make more money at a lower price, and they must know it... they're smart enough to have learned basic economics.
So, yes, it's all about control... but it's not necessarily about making more money directly from music sales. They want to make sure they are the ones pulling the strings so that online music distribution doesn't give artists a way to bypass the labels, and keep most of the 99c you pay iTMS for themselves.
If one service ever got popular enough, major artists could sign directly to Apple and sell their music WITHOUT signing to a major label!
And they think they're going to stop that from happening by cutting the heads off the tall poppies?
Once online distribution gets big enough, all you'll need is *one* non-major label contracting with a significant fraction of the online distributors and that label will *be* a major.
The only way the music industry could pull themselves out of this is to start their own services and refuse to contract with any independents like Apple. And if they do that, it doesn't matter whether Apple uses "industry standard DRM" or not: they have to fuck Apple, AOL, Real, the whole shooting match or lose.
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Linus, I think, chose to license the Linux kernel under the GPL because he believed in GNU's basic founding principles
Linus has written that if the BSD effort had been ready a year sooner he probably wouldn't have developed Linux. Not that he regrets doing so, of course!
I suspect he chose the GPL because he needed something and it was already worked out and he was smart enough to realise that a working license in the hand beats wasting time trying to be a lawyer. A lot of people I've talked to chose the GPL for that reason, actually.
There's certainly people for whom the GPL is key, and wouldn't "do a complete 180", so the issue is still academic. But the GPL wasn't quite the slam-dunk you're making it.
They'd do way better calling it something like blogs.sco.com ... it's not like they've got any kind of plausible deniability going for them. At least they could try and sound like they had a clue.
I mean, even Microsoft knows which way the wind's blowing.
First, I'm sure we agree on one point: people who submitted code to Linux because it was GPL-ed must have their intentions respected, so the whole question of relicensing Linux is academic. But I don't think that GPL vs BSD is enough to make an enormous difference... there's all kinds of other reasons that people have gone with Linux, starting with the fact that Linus is a hell of a nice guy (when he's not flaming about microkernels) and that rare bird: someone who's as good with people as he is with code. Without his leadership and example as much as his coding skills it wouldn't have taken off anywhere near as well as it did.
what incentive does a large comany have to return it's modifications back into the free version as opposed to just saying FU, I have my fork.
Well, there's the value of the open-source development model itself. Do you trust the open model, or do you believe that a closed source version would end up out-competing you? If you trust the process, there's no reason not to take that last step into the void.
Look, I've been writing code and giving it away for decades. There was a game I wrote, and a few utilities, in some of the 4.1BSD tapes. Stuff I wrote back in the '80s is floating around all over the place, including most Linux distros.
For a while I released stuff as shareware, or under 'non-commercial' licenses, but by the end of the '80s I was back out of that dubious shelter and enjoying the rain.
Given the amount of stuff Microsoft picked up from BSD, I wouldn't be shocked to find some of it in NT. There probably isn't... I'm a small fish in that pond... but it's not out of the question. Some other utilities and libraries I've written have gone into commercial products, and I know there's code of mine in the Panther source tree.
How would you feel if someone took your work, made a change or two and sold it as their own?
I feel pretty good about it, actually.
The $612 million dollars quoted is a suggested figure representing the kind of cost a commercial company would have to take on to develop an identical operating system kernel.
I'll do it for $50K. It'll be ready as soon as I can do a global search-and-replace on this copy of the FreeBSD source tree. Unless you want the Linux name on it, there's really not much point in licensing the actual kernel, and if you do... well... doesn't matter how much you pay to develop a Linux clone it won't have the name on it.
In other words, this is the crux of the biscuit:
The value of the Linux kernel code and Linux branding, [...] would quite probably exceed this figure of $612 million by a sizeable percentage.
Indeed.
Netscape was bought by AOL at a price tag of $4.2 billion dollars
And they promptly discarded most of the existing code and started over with a new rendering engine: what they ended up buying was the name. Similarly, if someone's looking for a BSD-licensed Linux what they're really looking to get out of it is the name... if they just want a kernel they can get one a lot cheaper.
Let's see, if Linus and Alan and the rest of the big names all got together and put their own code in the pot, and you left out all the GPL-ed contributions from third parties, kind of like a Net-2 release of Linux...
I guess you could put something together that was about like a ten year old Slackware release. It'd take a couple of years to replace the missing bits. I think you'd be better off keeping this in mind: "If 386bsd had been ready one year earlier, I'd probably not have started on linux at all, but used bsd instead - although I'm very happy with how it all turned out." -- Linus Torvalds, December 1992 . There's already a BSD-licensed kernel you can have, gratis, and it works rather nicely indeed.
I kind of doubt that CherryOS will provide full access to the video card, which pretty much rules out Quartz.
I would hope it would just pass OpenGL straight through to the video card. That's about the only way it could even hope to get anything like reasonable performance: get the GPU to do as much of the heavy lifting as possible, because it's running at full speed instead of trying to convert each 3-operand PPC instruction to the corresponding 2-3 x86 2-operand instructions, which then get converted to Ghu only knows how many Pentium or AMD internal instructions...
the iBot , Dean Kamen's wheelchair [...] actually has a purpose
Which is why it's being sold by a real company with an actual profit motive and targeted marketing and realistic sales goals and other non-visionary characteristics.
I thought it was often more difficult to develop Macintosh applications because more of the API's are hidden away and not for developers to see
Mac OS X is pretty damned open. XML configuration files, an open-source kernel (!), free IDE, the native compiler is gcc, the API is extensively documented, and there are extensive tools for reading the class libraries and interfaces shipped in the developer's kit.
What really sucks is people who write [Java|C#|C++|Lisp|...] programs that run slower than shell scripts because they get lost in a twisty maze of inherited methods and end up with their view object having a method that forces a refresh of a list of objects in a box that ends up calling that method on the original object unless the object's position hasn't changed, so every time you resize the box it does a very slow and painful iterative balancing act to get the layout right... but they never notice because they're developing it on a 3 GHz Pentium IV...
Not that I'm bitter or anything, I just want an object system that includes a mandatory test on a Pentium 100 before the packaging tool will link it in with the production runtime. If it also involves painful but not dangerous voltages applied to sensitive organs if they try to skip this step it'd be a bonus.
Java's primitive types are not objects. There's no reason they couldn't have been (compilers that generated efficient arithmetic code from high level components date back to the '70s) but they're not... which means you have to drop down to C-style types over and over again.
It hinders programming efficiency, and it hinders code efficiency: any place where primitive types can be used, the compiler can infer that primitive code can be generated, any place it can't you'd have had to use object types... but the compiler is MUCH smarter about figuring where casts need to be than average (or even above-average) programmers.
Smalltalk is "OO from the ground up". Java is "OO from the Integer up".
You can't buy music from mycokemusic walmart sympatico real msn napster virgin etc. etc.
That's like saying I can't buy music from Tower Records or Wherehouse 'cos I live in Mud Puddle Texas and it's half an hour drive to a town that even has a Borders. Who cares? If there's anything I can't get from Borders I can buy it online... it's not going to kill me if it takes a few days for UPS to get my CD here.
On the other hand I don't have a deadbolt or burglar bars and I haven't bothered to lock my door in six months.
A label presumably has the resources to pay professional forensic musicologists to determine whether a given sequence of notes is part of a song that has ever been on the Billboard Top 100.
If they went through this ridiculous makework they'd find that every song has themes or lyrics in common with hundreds of other songs. "Sorry, you gotta change 'Broken Wings', it's got a conflict with 'Blackbird'".
How can an independent singer-songwriter know for sure that he's not subconsciously copying an existing copyrighted song?
Tell me, was anyone who bought, sold copies of, or was involved in the production and distribution of "My Sweet Lord" found guilty of anything? Am I responsible for the publisher of a song using pirated software in its production, a performer playing music on a stolen piano, a studio using the proceeds from drug deals to pay for their equipment? Was a copy of "My Sweet Lord" purchased from Tower Records somehow more legitimate than a comp copy handed to you by George Harrison himself?
This has nothing to do with DRM: if Mike Pianoman accidentally lifts a theme from Joe Nobody's demo reel, how does it matter whether he's released it through iTMS or by putting an MP3 or an OGG on his website? It doesn't, of course, this whole issue is a red herring.
Even ignoring the patent issues
... right here. Same with Copland.
You mean, the MP3 patent? I'm using iTunes, so that's between Apple and Fraunhofer, and so far as I know they're solid. Or are you talking about the software the artists used... that's a pretty abstract issue from here: you might as well ask whether I've verified that they're not using a pirated copy of their mixing software.
what about the copyrights that songwriters hold on the underlying musical works?
Um, say what? Songwriters aren't artists?
I suppose there might be a few covers I've downloaded in my iTunes Library, but if I've got any music where the performer isn't the only artist who holds a copyright on the work, and the songwriter hasn't given permission, it's because I don't know all the music in the world. Almost all my library is instrumental, at least half is older than the Mickey Mouse deadline, and the rest are so far as I know are original works. About the only pieces I can think of that might be dubious are the recordings from my daughter's high school concerts.
I've purchased 41 songs from iTunes, some of those are covers: Bobby Mc Ferrin, Henry Mancini, "The Pink Panther Theme"; Miles Davis, Joaquín Rodrigo, "Concierto de Aranjuez"; maybe half a dozen I can identify from the ID3 tags... am I safe to assume that all the copyrights on these are legitimate and all the right people have been paid?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the copyrights on Scott Joplin's works have expired. Gershwin's are still valid, I believe, but I bought "An American in Paris" from iTMS and the rest are from a CD
Then there's the Alternative section. Folks who label themselves like that tend to be doing all their own work. I suppose there might be covers of works I'm not familiar with buried there, or in my Jazz collection, or there might be a few performers putting covers up without mentioning they're not the composer. I can't be 100% sure, but I just don't have much interest in the kind of music that's likely to be an unauthorised cover or performance of a copyrighted work.
Or is there something else I should be worried about that you're not telling me?
Does an internet TV fee seem reasonable for this?
I think you're protesting to the wrong person, or you misunderstood me. The message I was responding to said "the only people "unjustly" affected are the very small crowd of people who don't watch TV at all, but who do have a computer, albeit one incapable of watching Internet broadcast streams". I entirely agree with you... whether the computer is capable of watching broadband video streams or not shouldn't matter, because the purpose of a computer is not "watching broadband streams".
TV tuners, sure. A tuner is designed specifically for recieving TV. If that includes things like DVD players with tuners, so be it... if there are no DVD players without, there will be once the fee's added on. If they want to be able to stream their public TV over the Internet, then they need to charge for it explicitly. I'll bet they wouldn't need to charge anything like 18 Euros a month for access to get more money from the service than they get from the few TV-free housholds with decent computers.
This way, the only people "unjustly" affected are the very small crowd of people who don't watch TV at all, but who do have a computer, albeit one incapable of watching Internet broadcast streams.
Wrong.
People who don't watch TV at all, but who do have a computer, whether it's capable of watching broadcast streams or not. Why? Because you can't buy a computer today for which that's not true.
I don't watch TV more than a couple of times a year, and I would be quite happy to go to a friend's house for those times. This is pretty unusual for my generation, but it's only moderately unusual for my parents' and getting that way for my children's.
Yet if I lived in Germany I'd be charged a pretty substantial TV fee, how is that just? The only rationale I can see is that it's to my benefit if the programming my neighbors watch is less commercialised... and I'd agree with that, but then I'd be getting that benefit if I had no TV at all. Shouldn't this be handled through property tax or from general revenue in that case?
Or else they made the Kessel run in less than 40 light years.
People don't know what 'architecture' means, so it's no surprise that someone would come up with that kind of comment.
What they're really a fan of is the market that makes it profitable for Intel and AMD to spend outrageous amounts of resources to make the hoary old x86 run so fast, by building chips with better architectures that emulate the x86.
I don't think it would be useful for AMD to make their internal architecture public. As I understand it, it's VLIW, so you'd need to recompile your code every time a new version came out. Intel is allegedly using a RISC-style vertical microcode, so it may be possible for them to keep compatibility at the microcode level at least within a couple of generations, but since they have the luxury of redesigning the internal architecture with each generation it's likely you'd still need to recompile for performance as you have to on the IA64/Itanium.
What I wish is that when Intel bought their share of the Alpha from DEC they'd done what they did when they bought the StrongARM from DEC. They simply labelled the next generation the "Intel XScale" and everyone's forgotten where it came from. They could have simply relabelled the next generation Alpha the "Intel AXP" or something, and pretty soon everyone would think of it as an Intel chip. Remember that until it got Compaqted it stayed at or near the top of the performance charts pretty much for its whole life, despite having a tiny fraction of the resources the x86 architecture has had to play with.
Let's assume that right now, the top 100 artists signed exclusively to iTunes.
I think you may be misunderstanding what I posted. I wrote: "when online music gets too big they won't be able to pull their catalog from the online music market as a whole". Obviously they have a lot of leverage right now because online music sales are a tiny percent of the total, so they could pull out of the whole business without it having any significant impact on their bottom line. But that's not going to remain the case, so they're planning for that day.
So they want to cut down any tall poppies, like iTunes. The problem is, that's not enough. They need more control than that.
To survive, long term, they need to keep the catalog side of the online music business fragmented. Otherwise, once the online music business is big enough a small label that has contracts with enough online music providers could cut a significantly better deal with a big name and still make an outrageous profit, and still provide enough sales that the artist is better off with just their online revenues.
when and if Apple gets too big, the labels could simply refuse to provide their vast catalog of music
Yes, yes, that's exactly the leverage they would apply to knock down the tall poppies.
What I'm talking about is, when online music gets too big, whether it's iTunes and the seven dwarves or a dozen companies with no more than 20% of the market each, they won't be able to pull their catalog from the online music market as a whole. It'd be too much of their business.
At that point any small label... whether a traditional label, an artist co-op, or something invented for the purpose... will have access to the same market on comparable terms to the big labels. Any of them would give an artist just as much access online as the biggest label.
So let's say online music is half the market. Mike Bigname signs with Joes Music and Bait Shop for their new release. Instead of Monopoly Records getting 75% of the sales and passing 10% on to Mike, he's giving Joe 10% and keeping 65%. Joe gets more money from that one release than from his last ten years combined bait-music-and-boat-rental business, so he's happy. Mike's getting more than three times the royalties he got from his last album, so he's happy. The online music people are happy, because they know they'll have more leverage when they renew their contract with Monopoly Records.
Monopoly Records isn't happy, of course. But what can they do? Well, they can try and control things now, before it gets that far. But about the only option I see is for them to fragment the online music industry by label, so each provider is basically a sock puppet for "their" label. If they can't do that they can only keep the online music business dependent on their catalog by keeping the online music business as a whole from getting too big.
Ah, yes, sorry, I missed stage 2. Of course if they have MAC in hardware, they control the horizontal, they control the vertical, and we can't even adjust our sets.
Shell namespace extensions allow Windows Explorer to give you a file-folder view of resources that aren't in the filesystem. They're not, however, filesystems at the OS level. You can't get UNC paths to the objects, when you open them the shell copies the data over and then runs the program on that copy.
... mitigated by the lack of the same kind of integration between Safari and Finder.
This is actually good, from a security point of view, given Microsoft's ill-advised "security zones" design in the HTML control. It means that an exploit can't pass a UNC path to a remote object in a file:/// URL and have Internet Explorer or Outlook trust it because it's "local".
Apple's equivalent mechanism (for FTP, for example) actually mounts the remote resource in the file system. This is a lot more powerful, but there is a potential for exploits
This might even lead to DRMed content to be usable on open platforms!
DRMed content is already as compatible with open platforms (I assume you mean something like "open systems" or "open source operating systems") as it will ever be.
The essence of open systems is open interfaces and protocols. If the interfaces and protocols are standardised or publically documented, you can implement your own version of an application that interfaces with them, open source, closed source, or something in between, that doesn't matter.
What does this mean for DRM?
Right off, this means you can't have an open-source DRM-capable application, because if the end-user can get the source code to the application they can modify it to save the output from the decryption process in a non-encrypted form.
It also means that you can't use all but the weakest DRM under an open-source operating system, because the operating system mediates the application's access to the hardware, so you can intercept the decoded output from the application and save it.
The only way to have strong DRM and an open-systems environment is to have a sealed media translator in the audio and video hardware. Then the A/V hardware performs the decryption. In which case it doesn't matter what platform you're on, all the media player application does is provide a storage service for a dedicated music or video player that's embedded in the A/V card.
So unless you're using a Creative Audigy it doesn't matter what your operating system is, you won't be able to play WMA++ files. And pretty soon, you'll need a monitor with a DRM-enabled digital video input and digital speakers that exchange keys with the A/V card to play DRM media.
Then Microsoft will come out with the Palladium scheme again, and you'll be able to play your music and videos under Windows Media Player Trusted Edition on Trusted Hardware, and Creative will start selling cheaper WinAudio cards that don't need the expensive sealed and boobytrapped DRM module, but they only work with Windows... and then they'll quit selling regular DRM modules because there's not enough market...
And we'll be back where we are now, except that it'll be even harder to convince people they can switch to open source operating systems, because open source DRM can't ever be trusted so open source operating systems will be even less able to play DRMed media than they are now.
popularise legal downloads among consumers
Most of my downloads have no DRM at all, but they're perfectly legal. They're in MP3 format direct from the artists.
some labels have complained [Apple] has priced tracks too low, making it difficult for them to make a profit
Most of the 99c I pay to iTunes goes to the label, and their marginal cost for that purchase is zero. As near as I can tell, the only people making a profit from iTMS are the labels. And it's not at all certain that they'd make more profit at a higher price: they may make more money at a lower price, and they must know it... they're smart enough to have learned basic economics.
So, yes, it's all about control... but it's not necessarily about making more money directly from music sales. They want to make sure they are the ones pulling the strings so that online music distribution doesn't give artists a way to bypass the labels, and keep most of the 99c you pay iTMS for themselves.
If one service ever got popular enough, major artists could sign directly to Apple and sell their music WITHOUT signing to a major label!
And they think they're going to stop that from happening by cutting the heads off the tall poppies?
Once online distribution gets big enough, all you'll need is *one* non-major label contracting with a significant fraction of the online distributors and that label will *be* a major.
The only way the music industry could pull themselves out of this is to start their own services and refuse to contract with any independents like Apple. And if they do that, it doesn't matter whether Apple uses "industry standard DRM" or not: they have to fuck Apple, AOL, Real, the whole shooting match or lose.