Not if I have a custom-built kernel. Having all those configuration options is great, but a lot of them don't compile or don't work with other options. Since I couldn't replicate a set of configuration options that worked I had to use some modules that were compiled for a different kernel.
Before long OIDs became popular, I could manually go in and clean up the registry. Now I don't have a hope in hell. Still, I find that most OS's do just fine as long as you don't frig with them. I've had one PC running NT4 for 4 years now and it still mostly works, except the APM suspend BSODs one time in 3 and I have to follow a convoluted series of steps whenever I use PPPoE. The secret is to just leave it alone. Don't install new software that you don't need and don't mess with the system configuration unless you write down every single thing you change.
My Linux box has different problems, but plenty of cruft. I have some scripts that I run every now and then to clean up the mess. The lib/modules directory got messed up the day I installed it, and I still can't replicate some of the modules I need so I have to manually install some old ones. Such is life.
Yes there are two better ones... 1) Have such good product that people will want it regardless (Assumes you don't have competition) Or 2) Have such a good product that word of mouth spreads and people buy it
Uhh, those aren't "advertising methods". Neither of those requires any advertising at all, and they certainly don't explain how iVillage is going to make money.
if you shuffle a 52 card deck perfectly 7 times (divide the deck exactly in half, always have the top half drop the first card, drop exactly one card after another) then you end up with the original order of the deck. Given a deck of n cards, how many shuffles are required for the same effect?
Okay, I give up. I can see how a fair shuffle can be regarded as a multiplication by two mod 51 for any given card (since the first card in the deck and the last card are both zeros). The loop starting at 1 (second card in the deck) goes: 1,2,4,8,16,32,13,26. So after 7 shuffles it seems like the card that was originally at position 1 will be in position 26. What gives?
I believe your confusing public/private with symetric/asymetric. Public/Private terminology is used with asymetric enryption techinques like RSA, but not witrh symetric techniques like AES or DES.
I most certainly am not. Do a little research and you will find that the terms "public key cryptography" and "private key cryptography" are commonly used to refer to asymmetric and symmetric encryption respectively. E.g. see result of google search.
I didn't really think there was any need for anything better than 128 bit encryption. It would take a lot of factoring that is practically impossible by human standards to figure out the key for a 32 bit encrypted code, and this site [stack.nl] seems to tell me that 128 bit encryption is nearly impossible to break by any standards.
128-bit private key encryption is considered virtually unbreakable. 128-bit public key encryption is not. AES is an example of private key encryption; RSA is an example of public key encryption.
Could you elaborate more on the "reverse log" problem... If you know the base and the result of [Log x], whats the problem?
The OP got his terminology wrong. It's the discrete log problem that's hard.
Pick a number (e.g. 3.81482), plug it into your calculator and press e^x (result = 45.36874). Now it's easy to get back the original number by using the "ln" key. But imagine instead that you only had the fractional portion of the result (.36874). Now it's next to impossible to figure out what the original number was. The discrete log problem is basically the same this, but using discrete arithmetic instead of real arithmetic.
how can [piracy] benefit both the people AND the software makers?
Seems kind of unlikely, doesn't it. Perhaps if a benevolent alien race someday visits Earth and rewards the founders of those companies that allow piracy for educational purposes with a vial containing a potion of eternal youth... bet you never thought about that! (Hey, you can't prove it won't happen.)
Some details would be nice. Did the LAN have no password, was the password easy to crack, or was there some other kind of security flaw? If he went all around the city, trying to brute force the password on every wireless LAN he could find, then I doubt he has a legal leg to stand on. If he simply powered on his laptop and noticed he had link, that's different.
If you want to argue tautologies about how people always do what's in their best interests, etc., go ahead. But you're not describing standard market economic models unless actions are motivated by profits and regulated by prices.
To put it another way, "free market economics" does not describe all human behaviour, but Game Theory does. In game theory you are more likely to describe rewards and costs in terms of points, but it is easy to equate "points" with dollars. In game theory, free market economics rules because everyone acts in his own best interest, but altruistic behaviour can still emerge (you just have to assign a point value to that "warm fuzzy feeling"). Are you serious? This proves the opposite. It proves that in an unregulated market, monopolists can emerge that can't be dislodged by any competing firm.
Exactly. OSS fits the definition of a monopoly as far as I can tell. Selling software below cost is predatory pricing. Forcing the software to be free as in beer is price fixing. (The Stallman argument that you can make money by selling free software is laughable.)
Someone once posted on Slashdot by stating that OSS was a free market force and they had the nerve to state that "Adam Smith would be proud." For the record, here is what Adam Smith actually said:
Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it...He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
A group of people actively coordinating an economic revolution is not an invisible hand.
The best part about OSS is that it can't be used to restrict the freedom of others, and that it can't be corrupted as easily as Communism itself. Human nature shows that Communism often becomes a dictatorship, but it is hard to see how OSS can become proprietary software.
I dunno. Maybe you could make that argument for the BSD license, but not for the GPL.
Proprietary software limits the user's freedom. BSD license doesn't limit anyone's freedom, including the vendor's freedom to limit the user's freedom. GPL preserves the user's freedom, but limits the vendor's freedom to limit the user's freedom.
You can't give everyone absolute freedom (and enforce it) because one person's freedom to do X is always going to conflict with someone else's freedom to do Y.
Actually most professional musicians does not get paid by recording CDs
I think we know that already. This point only been stated about a billion times on Slashdot before, although it always gets modded up to +5, insightful (sometimes multiple times in the same thread), so I guess it's good for karma whoring.
- they get paid by performing music at clubs and other venues.
Actually, most of those people hardly make any money performing. A lot of them have a full time job and they play music in their spare time.
Let's look at what the OP said:
None of the professional musicians I know (and I know quite a few, session & orchestral players) would record music and give it away.
Do you think all the bands out there who are getting ripped off by the labels wanted to give their music away for free? Of course not. They signed a contract thinking they were going to make money but they didn't. That makes them far more likely to sell their music through an alternate channel (e.g. a personal website) than to GPL it.
I EgoSurf every now and again just to see what turns up. The list has remained fairly constant for a while now. Mostly harmless work-related technical discussions plus a few articles I wrote back in college. However, this story made me recheck my search results and I was amazed to discover that they have changed quite drastically recently. Either the search engines have become more sophisticated or a lot of sites have recently opened themselves up to the bots.
There's a bunch of stuff from 5-6 years ago that was never linked until now. Most shocking is the fact that the #3 hit on my name is a posting which implies that I am a Nazi sympathizer. It was always there before, but suddenly someone (who was defending me) linked to it and it zipped up to the top of the Google rankings.
Plus it looks like the search engines have started doing substring matching within e-mail addresses. A somewhat embarrassing e-mail that I sent a long time ago recently surfaced. I didn't include my name, but it was a substring of the e-mail address I used at the time.
Another amusing discovery is the fact that "legitimate" news sites have referenced my work. Back in college when I wanted to write a story about something, I would search the web to gather a lot of information about that topic. Then I would take that research and use it to write a story with my own personal slant. But now I have become "so-and-so's biggest critic" by a "professional" news site that obviously uses the same technique of researching stories.
The problem with this article, as well as the original Worldcom estimate, is that they assume linear growth. In reality, the demand for Internet bandwidth grows and shrinks with the economy in general.
Excuse me? Doesn't the statement that Internet traffic doubles every hundred days presume exponential growth? Maybe you mean that their assumption was wrong because it assumed constant growth.
Civil disobedience is a statement -- the action is secondary, a way of showing that you're serious. Unless you're prepared to notify all relevant authorities of just exactly which laws you're breaking and why, don't pretend to be doing it for the sake of freedom.
I totally agree. It really bugs me that file "sharing" advocates try to frame the issue in terms of civil disobedience when all the while they are trying to develop a more distributed and more anonymous systems that is immune from lawsuits. At least Perens has the guts to try to turn himself into a test case.
I figure most Slashdot readers have heard the story before and know it's an urban legend. The funny thing is the recipe on the Neiman Marcus website (the link you posted) is different than the one I found via a random Google search. Not only has the story changed with each telling, but so has the recipe. I'd like to know which one is the genuine fake!!
You can't have an open-source cookbook without the ever-famous Nieman Marcus cookie recipe:
2 cups butter 4 cups flower 2 tsp. soda 2 cups sugar 5 cups blended oatmeal** 24 oz. chocolate chips 2 cups brown sugar 1 tsp. salt 1 8oz. Hershey Bar (grated) 4 eggs 2 tsp. baking powder 3 cups chopped nuts (your choice) 2 tsp. vanilla
** measure oatmeal and blend in a blender to a fine powder. Cream the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla; mix together with flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and soda. Add chocolate chips, Hershey Bar and nuts. Roll into balls and place two inches apart on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Makes 112 cookies.
Most musicians do not ever make enough to support themselves under the current system. One-hit-wonders have just about zero chance of breaking even, let alone making any money. Even somewhat large acts (like the Goo Goo Dolls), and huge acts (TLC) will often wind up completely screwed by the record companies. The current system doesn't do *anything* for anyone except the people who are leeching off of those who actually make the music. Removing the recording industry will not harm the majority of musicians in any way
I am fully aware that musicians get ripped off by the major labels. However, I don't that justifies the mob rule solution of declaring that music should be free for all. Nike shoes may be made by child labour in Indonesia, but if you are concerned about that then your correct action is to boycott Nike shoes, not steal Nike shoes.
I would like to see all of the following happen:
1. Bands to read the fine print of contracts and show them to a lawyer before signing their life away. 2. New bands to do some research on music industry economics. Read the Courtney Love rant then decide if you want to sign with a label. 3. Governments to nullify grossly unfair contract provisions, such as the 7 album clause. 4. Bands who don't sign with major labels to empower themselves using the Internet: setup their own web sites, sell CDs/tracks at whatever price they wish, offer sample tracks for free download, offer sample tracks which may be shared, put tracks on MP3.com, etc. 5. Governments to continue to shut down illegal use of file sharing systems, such as Napster, Kazaa, etc.
When a system has a flaw you don't have to throw out the whole system. In this case, the Internet can be both profoundly bad and profoundly good for musicians. If they throw off the shackles of their RIAA oppressors only to be screwed by the general public then it's out of the frying pan and into the fire. But if they can use the Internet as a means of cutting out the middleman, then we can effect social progress without having to resort to anarchy or communism.
Just because someone wants to do something for a living (musician, Russian translator), doesn't mean they will get justly rewarded. Life sucks. No-one owes you anything. If I could change the whoe economic system, I would, but until then, people will unfairly get shafted.
Okay, let me clarify what I said earlier. People who are good at what they do deserve a chance to make good money when their product is in high demand. Let's not kid ourselves. Music is in high demand, and I'm sure Russian-English translation services probably aren't.
Your average major label band may not be making a fortune, but they sure as hell ain't starving in the street. Many of them even seem to find the money to support a drug habit. We've all heard how artists are getting ripped off by the labels, but Lextra's solution is to make sure they are completely destitute. Now is that fair?
Clever users will also note that you can tunnel this over just about any port you want. Make this an encrypted tunnel and no filter in the world will detect it.
Unless the filter just blocks all encrypted connections to unknown sites.
And I don't ask anyone to work for free. If the artist doesn't want to produce music, that's fine. But the market has spoken and the market will no longer pay for the digital representation of a song. I'm part of that market and will continue to pay the current market price for sound recordings: zero.
And with that statement you debunk two arguments: yours and another of the prevailing sentiments on Slashdot. Firstly, the market has not spoken; the mob has spoken. Do you consider "the market" to be so broad as to encompass theft? I may just go out and buy me a Porche (which I have conveniently valued at $0).
Secondly, for all the people bitching about how the artists aren't being fairly compensated, the reason is that there is a huge glut of wannabe musicians out there. The labels know that if you don't want to sign away 90% of your royalties to get a contract, there are 100 other bands out there that will. I know they won't get 260 gigs a year. I know there are expenses. There are also expenses involved in getting a 4, 6, or 8-year education for those careers that require it. And we all have to eat, too, whether at home or on the road.
We all have to eat, but most of us don't eat in restaurants every day. It's expensive (unless you want to eat complete crap). And to be a musician, you have to learn to play an instrument. I know some punk bands brag about how little they practice, but the bands I like are composed of very talented musicians. Heck, some of them even went to university to get a degree in music. My point? Where is it written that musicians should earn a lot of money? There are a ton of jobs where the people earn peanuts. Many people can't even make ends meet, but they still go to work and do their job.
People who are good at what they do deserve a chance to make good money. You have organized it such that even a successful band will barely break even. And for the privilege of making peanuts, they have to literally live on the road. That's just crazy. Just as there are people who love to write code and make it open source and free for everyone--and many of these projects are arguably better than those which cost $300 off the shelf--there will be musicians that will create good music (arguably better than Britney Spears) and make little or no money doing it. Heck, if you consider their time they might even lose money... just like open-source programmers.
Well I happen to think that the GPL is a communist plot and open source contributors are idealistic dupes, but at least free software advocates (mostly) don't advocate stealing proprietary software. If free music advocates simply made equally good music and allowed people to copy it that would be defensible, but consumers are greedy and they want all the best music for free. If you remember, that's all Lars Ulrich said anyway: I don't mind if bands want to allow people to share their music, but no one ever asked us if we wanted to participate.
And no, I don't think the music out there would be as good if it was impossible to make a living as a professional musician. Britney Spears would probably continue to do quite well, seeing as she is a performer and is capable of filling stadiums. The one who gets screwed is the guy who writes her songs, which is a shame because I thought some of them were quite well written.
* Artist gets money, users have less incentive for piracy.
If you read the data that is supplied along with the article you will see that the vast majority of people don't care about the issue of supporting the artists as opposed to the labels (51% vs. 53% believe that music download sights need to compensate the labels/artists). For teens there is a slightly wider gap (7%), but teens care less than any other age group about compensating either party.
I think the problem is, perhaps, musicians have gotten it in their heads that they're somehow entitled to earning millions of dollars like Phil Collins. Well, I have a goal of making as much as Bill Gates but yet I only earned $50k last year.
Well I, for one, doubt that you really have that goal. Assuming you have any experience and education, you're silly to work for that little. But I guess there's always the lottery...
Your economics are seriously fucked. Assuming a band can actually get 260 gigs a year (sounds easy, doesn't it), you're not allowing them any expenses. They have to buy a tour bus, hire a driver and a manager (to get them the 260 gigs), somehow buy and repair their instruments and amps, eat in restaurants all the time, etc.
You're offering musicians an opportunity to live on the road, away from their families (I guess they can always sleep with the groupies), sleeping in a bus (I don't see any money in there for hotels), and all for only $50k per year minus expenses. Then, in whatever little free time you leave them, they have to write and record songs (at their expense) so freeloaders like you can download them off the Internet.
I read an article yesterday which stated that bands such as Linkin Park payed $75,000 to appear on the OzFest tour last year. I can probably dig up a link to the article if you like.
Slashdot Mirror
Not if I have a custom-built kernel. Having all those configuration options is great, but a lot of them don't compile or don't work with other options. Since I couldn't replicate a set of configuration options that worked I had to use some modules that were compiled for a different kernel.
-a
Before long OIDs became popular, I could manually go in and clean up the registry. Now I don't have a hope in hell. Still, I find that most OS's do just fine as long as you don't frig with them. I've had one PC running NT4 for 4 years now and it still mostly works, except the APM suspend BSODs one time in 3 and I have to follow a convoluted series of steps whenever I use PPPoE. The secret is to just leave it alone. Don't install new software that you don't need and don't mess with the system configuration unless you write down every single thing you change.
My Linux box has different problems, but plenty of cruft. I have some scripts that I run every now and then to clean up the mess. The lib/modules directory got messed up the day I installed it, and I still can't replicate some of the modules I need so I have to manually install some old ones. Such is life.
-a
Yes there are two better ones...
1) Have such good product that people will want it regardless (Assumes you don't have competition)
Or 2) Have such a good product that word of mouth spreads and people buy it
Uhh, those aren't "advertising methods". Neither of those requires any advertising at all, and they certainly don't explain how iVillage is going to make money.
-a
if you shuffle a 52 card deck perfectly 7 times (divide the deck exactly in half, always have the top half drop the first card, drop exactly one card after another) then you end up with the original order of the deck. Given a deck of n cards, how many shuffles are required for the same effect?
Okay, I give up. I can see how a fair shuffle can be regarded as a multiplication by two mod 51 for any given card (since the first card in the deck and the last card are both zeros). The loop starting at 1 (second card in the deck) goes: 1,2,4,8,16,32,13,26. So after 7 shuffles it seems like the card that was originally at position 1 will be in position 26. What gives?
-a
What happens if you don't know the base? ^_^
If the base is kept secret then it's not public key crypto any more, is it.
I guess the other reply proves that you can't moderate and post to the same conversation, even if you post as AC.
-a
I believe your confusing public/private with symetric/asymetric. Public/Private terminology is used with asymetric enryption techinques like RSA, but not witrh symetric techniques like AES or DES.
I most certainly am not. Do a little research and you will find that the terms "public key cryptography" and "private key cryptography" are commonly used to refer to asymmetric and symmetric encryption respectively. E.g. see result of google search.
-a
I didn't really think there was any need for anything better than 128 bit encryption. It would take a lot of factoring that is practically impossible by human standards to figure out the key for a 32 bit encrypted code, and this site [stack.nl] seems to tell me that 128 bit encryption is nearly impossible to break by any standards.
128-bit private key encryption is considered virtually unbreakable. 128-bit public key encryption is not. AES is an example of private key encryption; RSA is an example of public key encryption.
-a
Could you elaborate more on the "reverse log" problem... If you know the base and the result of [Log x], whats the problem?
The OP got his terminology wrong. It's the discrete log problem that's hard.
Pick a number (e.g. 3.81482), plug it into your calculator and press e^x (result = 45.36874). Now it's easy to get back the original number by using the "ln" key. But imagine instead that you only had the fractional portion of the result (.36874). Now it's next to impossible to figure out what the original number was. The discrete log problem is basically the same this, but using discrete arithmetic instead of real arithmetic.
-a
how can [piracy] benefit both the people AND the software makers?
Seems kind of unlikely, doesn't it. Perhaps if a benevolent alien race someday visits Earth and rewards the founders of those companies that allow piracy for educational purposes with a vial containing a potion of eternal youth... bet you never thought about that! (Hey, you can't prove it won't happen.)
-a
Some details would be nice. Did the LAN have no password, was the password easy to crack, or was there some other kind of security flaw? If he went all around the city, trying to brute force the password on every wireless LAN he could find, then I doubt he has a legal leg to stand on. If he simply powered on his laptop and noticed he had link, that's different.
-a
If you want to argue tautologies about how people always do what's in their best interests, etc., go ahead. But you're not describing standard market economic models unless actions are motivated by profits and regulated by prices.
To put it another way, "free market economics" does not describe all human behaviour, but Game Theory does. In game theory you are more likely to describe rewards and costs in terms of points, but it is easy to equate "points" with dollars. In game theory, free market economics rules because everyone acts in his own best interest, but altruistic behaviour can still emerge (you just have to assign a point value to that "warm fuzzy feeling").
Are you serious? This proves the opposite. It proves that in an unregulated market, monopolists can emerge that can't be dislodged by any competing firm.
Exactly. OSS fits the definition of a monopoly as far as I can tell. Selling software below cost is predatory pricing. Forcing the software to be free as in beer is price fixing. (The Stallman argument that you can make money by selling free software is laughable.)
Someone once posted on Slashdot by stating that OSS was a free market force and they had the nerve to state that "Adam Smith would be proud." For the record, here is what Adam Smith actually said: A group of people actively coordinating an economic revolution is not an invisible hand.
-a
The best part about OSS is that it can't be used to restrict the freedom of others, and that it can't be corrupted as easily as Communism itself. Human nature shows that Communism often becomes a dictatorship, but it is hard to see how OSS can become proprietary software.
I dunno. Maybe you could make that argument for the BSD license, but not for the GPL.
Proprietary software limits the user's freedom. BSD license doesn't limit anyone's freedom, including the vendor's freedom to limit the user's freedom. GPL preserves the user's freedom, but limits the vendor's freedom to limit the user's freedom.
You can't give everyone absolute freedom (and enforce it) because one person's freedom to do X is always going to conflict with someone else's freedom to do Y.
-a
Actually most professional musicians does not get paid by recording CDs
I think we know that already. This point only been stated about a billion times on Slashdot before, although it always gets modded up to +5, insightful (sometimes multiple times in the same thread), so I guess it's good for karma whoring.
- they get paid by performing music at clubs and other venues.
Actually, most of those people hardly make any money performing. A lot of them have a full time job and they play music in their spare time.
Let's look at what the OP said: Do you think all the bands out there who are getting ripped off by the labels wanted to give their music away for free? Of course not. They signed a contract thinking they were going to make money but they didn't. That makes them far more likely to sell their music through an alternate channel (e.g. a personal website) than to GPL it.
-a
I EgoSurf every now and again just to see what turns up. The list has remained fairly constant for a while now. Mostly harmless work-related technical discussions plus a few articles I wrote back in college. However, this story made me recheck my search results and I was amazed to discover that they have changed quite drastically recently. Either the search engines have become more sophisticated or a lot of sites have recently opened themselves up to the bots.
There's a bunch of stuff from 5-6 years ago that was never linked until now. Most shocking is the fact that the #3 hit on my name is a posting which implies that I am a Nazi sympathizer. It was always there before, but suddenly someone (who was defending me) linked to it and it zipped up to the top of the Google rankings.
Plus it looks like the search engines have started doing substring matching within e-mail addresses. A somewhat embarrassing e-mail that I sent a long time ago recently surfaced. I didn't include my name, but it was a substring of the e-mail address I used at the time.
Another amusing discovery is the fact that "legitimate" news sites have referenced my work. Back in college when I wanted to write a story about something, I would search the web to gather a lot of information about that topic. Then I would take that research and use it to write a story with my own personal slant. But now I have become "so-and-so's biggest critic" by a "professional" news site that obviously uses the same technique of researching stories.
-a
The problem with this article, as well as the original Worldcom estimate, is that they assume linear growth. In reality, the demand for Internet bandwidth grows and shrinks with the economy in general.
Excuse me? Doesn't the statement that Internet traffic doubles every hundred days presume exponential growth? Maybe you mean that their assumption was wrong because it assumed constant growth.
-a
Civil disobedience is a statement -- the action is secondary, a way of showing that you're serious. Unless you're prepared to notify all relevant authorities of just exactly which laws you're breaking and why, don't pretend to be doing it for the sake of freedom.
I totally agree. It really bugs me that file "sharing" advocates try to frame the issue in terms of civil disobedience when all the while they are trying to develop a more distributed and more anonymous systems that is immune from lawsuits. At least Perens has the guts to try to turn himself into a test case.
-a
I figure most Slashdot readers have heard the story before and know it's an urban legend. The funny thing is the recipe on the Neiman Marcus website (the link you posted) is different than the one I found via a random Google search. Not only has the story changed with each telling, but so has the recipe. I'd like to know which one is the genuine fake!!
-a
You can't have an open-source cookbook without the ever-famous Nieman Marcus cookie recipe:
2 cups butter
4 cups flower
2 tsp. soda
2 cups sugar
5 cups blended oatmeal**
24 oz. chocolate chips
2 cups brown sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 8oz. Hershey Bar (grated)
4 eggs
2 tsp. baking powder
3 cups chopped nuts (your choice)
2 tsp. vanilla
** measure oatmeal and blend in a blender to a fine powder. Cream the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla; mix together with flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and soda. Add chocolate chips, Hershey Bar and nuts. Roll into balls and place two inches apart on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Makes 112 cookies.
THIS IS A TRUE STORY!!!
-a
Most musicians do not ever make enough to support themselves under the current system. One-hit-wonders have just about zero chance of breaking even, let alone making any money. Even somewhat large acts (like the Goo Goo Dolls), and huge acts (TLC) will often wind up completely screwed by the record companies. The current system doesn't do *anything* for anyone except the people who are leeching off of those who actually make the music. Removing the recording industry will not harm the majority of musicians in any way
I am fully aware that musicians get ripped off by the major labels. However, I don't that justifies the mob rule solution of declaring that music should be free for all. Nike shoes may be made by child labour in Indonesia, but if you are concerned about that then your correct action is to boycott Nike shoes, not steal Nike shoes.
I would like to see all of the following happen:
1. Bands to read the fine print of contracts and show them to a lawyer before signing their life away.
2. New bands to do some research on music industry economics. Read the Courtney Love rant then decide if you want to sign with a label.
3. Governments to nullify grossly unfair contract provisions, such as the 7 album clause.
4. Bands who don't sign with major labels to empower themselves using the Internet: setup their own web sites, sell CDs/tracks at whatever price they wish, offer sample tracks for free download, offer sample tracks which may be shared, put tracks on MP3.com, etc.
5. Governments to continue to shut down illegal use of file sharing systems, such as Napster, Kazaa, etc.
When a system has a flaw you don't have to throw out the whole system. In this case, the Internet can be both profoundly bad and profoundly good for musicians. If they throw off the shackles of their RIAA oppressors only to be screwed by the general public then it's out of the frying pan and into the fire. But if they can use the Internet as a means of cutting out the middleman, then we can effect social progress without having to resort to anarchy or communism.
-a
Just because someone wants to do something for a living (musician, Russian translator), doesn't mean they will get justly rewarded. Life sucks. No-one owes you anything. If I could change the whoe economic system, I would, but until then, people will unfairly get shafted.
Okay, let me clarify what I said earlier. People who are good at what they do deserve a chance to make good money when their product is in high demand. Let's not kid ourselves. Music is in high demand, and I'm sure Russian-English translation services probably aren't.
Your average major label band may not be making a fortune, but they sure as hell ain't starving in the street. Many of them even seem to find the money to support a drug habit. We've all heard how artists are getting ripped off by the labels, but Lextra's solution is to make sure they are completely destitute. Now is that fair?
-a
Clever users will also note that you can tunnel this over just about any port you want. Make this an encrypted tunnel and no filter in the world will detect it.
Unless the filter just blocks all encrypted connections to unknown sites.
-a
And I don't ask anyone to work for free. If the artist doesn't want to produce music, that's fine. But the market has spoken and the market will no longer pay for the digital representation of a song. I'm part of that market and will continue to pay the current market price for sound recordings: zero.
And with that statement you debunk two arguments: yours and another of the prevailing sentiments on Slashdot. Firstly, the market has not spoken; the mob has spoken. Do you consider "the market" to be so broad as to encompass theft? I may just go out and buy me a Porche (which I have conveniently valued at $0).
Secondly, for all the people bitching about how the artists aren't being fairly compensated, the reason is that there is a huge glut of wannabe musicians out there. The labels know that if you don't want to sign away 90% of your royalties to get a contract, there are 100 other bands out there that will.
I know they won't get 260 gigs a year. I know there are expenses. There are also expenses involved in getting a 4, 6, or 8-year education for those careers that require it. And we all have to eat, too, whether at home or on the road.
We all have to eat, but most of us don't eat in restaurants every day. It's expensive (unless you want to eat complete crap). And to be a musician, you have to learn to play an instrument. I know some punk bands brag about how little they practice, but the bands I like are composed of very talented musicians. Heck, some of them even went to university to get a degree in music.
My point? Where is it written that musicians should earn a lot of money? There are a ton of jobs where the people earn peanuts. Many people can't even make ends meet, but they still go to work and do their job.
People who are good at what they do deserve a chance to make good money. You have organized it such that even a successful band will barely break even. And for the privilege of making peanuts, they have to literally live on the road. That's just crazy.
Just as there are people who love to write code and make it open source and free for everyone--and many of these projects are arguably better than those which cost $300 off the shelf--there will be musicians that will create good music (arguably better than Britney Spears) and make little or no money doing it. Heck, if you consider their time they might even lose money... just like open-source programmers.
Well I happen to think that the GPL is a communist plot and open source contributors are idealistic dupes, but at least free software advocates (mostly) don't advocate stealing proprietary software. If free music advocates simply made equally good music and allowed people to copy it that would be defensible, but consumers are greedy and they want all the best music for free. If you remember, that's all Lars Ulrich said anyway: I don't mind if bands want to allow people to share their music, but no one ever asked us if we wanted to participate.
And no, I don't think the music out there would be as good if it was impossible to make a living as a professional musician. Britney Spears would probably continue to do quite well, seeing as she is a performer and is capable of filling stadiums. The one who gets screwed is the guy who writes her songs, which is a shame because I thought some of them were quite well written.
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* Artist gets money, users have less incentive for piracy.
If you read the data that is supplied along with the article you will see that the vast majority of people don't care about the issue of supporting the artists as opposed to the labels (51% vs. 53% believe that music download sights need to compensate the labels/artists). For teens there is a slightly wider gap (7%), but teens care less than any other age group about compensating either party.
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I think the problem is, perhaps, musicians have gotten it in their heads that they're somehow entitled to earning millions of dollars like Phil Collins. Well, I have a goal of making as much as Bill Gates but yet I only earned $50k last year.
Well I, for one, doubt that you really have that goal. Assuming you have any experience and education, you're silly to work for that little. But I guess there's always the lottery...
Your economics are seriously fucked. Assuming a band can actually get 260 gigs a year (sounds easy, doesn't it), you're not allowing them any expenses. They have to buy a tour bus, hire a driver and a manager (to get them the 260 gigs), somehow buy and repair their instruments and amps, eat in restaurants all the time, etc.
You're offering musicians an opportunity to live on the road, away from their families (I guess they can always sleep with the groupies), sleeping in a bus (I don't see any money in there for hotels), and all for only $50k per year minus expenses. Then, in whatever little free time you leave them, they have to write and record songs (at their expense) so freeloaders like you can download them off the Internet.
I don't thinks so!!!
-a
I read an article yesterday which stated that bands such as Linkin Park payed $75,000 to appear on the OzFest tour last year. I can probably dig up a link to the article if you like.
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