Here's what I sent (paraphrased from the discussion below - sorry if your quote is uncredited, sue me:P)
Regarding your article "MP3 Is Possible Culprit In CD Sales Slump", you neglected to mention four important facts.
1) CDs still cost the same as they did 10 years ago, even while their cost of production has gone down astronomically.
2) The RIAA has already played this game twice with us before. The first time, they said cassettes were killing vinyl. The second time, they pointed their fingers at used CDs.
3) According to the RIAA itself sales for the 15-25 group have been decreasing EVERY year since 1988.
4) The RIAA isn't what I would called unbiased espicially wrt mp3s.
Finally (and this is my opinion)
5) There is less worth buying. Year after year of mergers and consolidation have left commercial music a smear of homogenous crap.
And to quote the head of another monstrously slow-to-adapt, clueless megaconglomerate:
"The Middle Man Must Add Value."
Record companies have been ignoring this rule for at least 3 decades. Time for their just desserts.
Firstly, a trademark is not IP. This is a well beaten horse.
Secondly, the GPL is not based on IP. This is also a well beaten horse.
The GPL does depend heavily on copyrights, but only to PROTECT itself from copyright law itself.
Even your most rabidly hypothetical anti-IP FSF geek (who would demand that copyright law be eradicated at well) has a point: If there were no copyrights, there would no need for GPL in the first place.
his viewpoint that IP is a bad idea is a complete crock. IP provides a POWERFUL incentive to create. Go to Amazon.com and look at their variety. How much of that would exist without royalties to the hardworking authors? 0.01%.
Once again, don't confuse IP from copyrights. I am willing to concede copyrights as a method to ACKNOWLEDGE the authorship of a certain product, and to prevent co-opting the product itself for commercial profit.
On top of that, there are other ways to make money in an information economy that are not from government enforced handouts. Tech support. Service. Paid code development for a specific MATERIAL product. Distribution. Marketing. The list goes on and on. On top of that, there are huge advantages to the free flow of ideas that far outweigh these knee-jerk "I'm afraid of the dark" phobias about your welfare source drying up. As the world economy moves away from material goods and towards an information based economy (read: development costs -> 100%, distribution costs -> 0%), those of you who cannot find other ways to make money and instead decide leech off of the fruits of government-enforced monopolies will eventually be doomed.
Look at the Open Source movement - how much of that would exist without Copyright laws? Zilch. Open Source depends on authors being sure their code won't be commercially coopted - enforced by Copyright Laws?
The copyleft protects GPL'd code from copyrights and shrink-wrap, binary licences, not the other way around. It is these same moronic licensing restrictions which allow commercial interests to
1) Hijack the code 2) Resell it to you for whatever they want
But most importantly 3) Prevent others from selling it to you for less, or gasp, even worse, for free.
This is competition? I think not. This is at best government enforced monopoly, and at worst an outright handout. If #2 and #3 don't scream monopoly to you I don't know how to reach you.
What Pharmaceutical company is going to invest the $1 billion needed to bring a nw drug to market if they know withing weeks it will be mass produced and imported back into the US by a third world low cost producer?
Most good (read: well respected) pharmaceutical companies immediately release valuable medical data to the community. This is how science works and progresses. If your hypothetical company came up with a cure for cancer, and the cure itself could be mass produced for pennies, are you saying it is moral for said pharmaceutical company to hold the world hostage and demand royalty payments at their whim? Keep in mind, I am not even talking about a FAIR royalty payment. How does $1 billion per pill sound? Remeber, they can charge whatever they want, because nobody else can legally make it. That doesn't sound like progress to me either.
The modern era makes copying easy, and the value of the physical implementation of 'software' in the broadest sense nearly zero. How are we going to be sure that the best and brightest amoung us are encouraged to make use of their talents if not by IP????
Rest assured the best and the brightest will always use their talents. The only question is: do they have a standard of living that allows them to persue their goals? Is there enough of an economy left without IP to support them? I, for one, think so. If you can't think of ways to make a living w/o IP you aren't thinking hard enough.
If in the hypothetical utopian future, EVERYTHING is a form of information, and all "products" dont have this scarcity problem, will you still maintain we need to artificially enforce some arbitrary hack to make them LOOK like they are scarce? To what end, exactly?
Honestly, I think its a matter of semantics. To me, a "material good" implies its a physical object that can't be in two places at the same time. Clearly, software, information, and ideas dont belong in this category. Someday, if we ever get matter compilers (ala Diamond Age) all of this era's niggling over copying information will look like a schoolyard fistfight.
But, thats not why I'm here. Here's a piece whos info im not completely sure of, but is a good story nonetheless.
Turns out the patent office did something unexpectedly good once:
They saved lives by issuing Colt a patent for the original single action revolver in 1836.
How is that possible, you ask?
Well, apparently, at the time of the patent there were several other pistol designers working on designs for a multishot, cartridge based pistol. Colt beat all of them to the punch with their wildly sucessful single-action revolver, and promptly patented it.
The basic revolver design was a good one, and all the other designers recognized it immediately. However, it was not without problems. It would jam. The chamber would get misaligned with the barrel. The barrel needed constant cleaning. The barrel would get hot, and further mess things up. Several different inventors came up with several modifications to the existing design, but since they were all basically revolvers, they fell under Colt's patent. They were are superb examples of engineering innovation, and yet they could not be sold, because they were all basically revolvers.
Colt by now had a virtual monopoly on revolvers, since nobody else could make them, and any dolt would recognize that single-shot pistols were no match for Colt's design. However, the patent meant that no better revolver would emerge for 20 years! (the life of the patent). Thank god. For 20 years people were forced to use Colt's original design, sans improvements, since Colt had absolutely no incentive to fix the problems with their original revolver.
Thank you patent office for yet another success story.
Of course, you never hear this in the history books, and everybody knows that the patent office encourages innovation, right?
Dont comment until you've actually read the code
on
Wired on Kipling
·
· Score: 1
The accuracy of the seed doesn't have to be terribly high. From looking at the code, i'm guessing that 3.14 is sufficient. The next iteration is a UCHAR for gods sake (i.e. mod 256).
You need to learn a little history. Bill Gates was the first one to realize you could make money by sending hobbiests cease-and-desist-big-foot letters in the Altair days. What was their crime? Hacking at "Bill's" (actually its looking more and more like Paul Allen's actual WORK) BASIC interpreter and giving away modifications and the source for (gasp) free.
This shows that Paul Allen and Gates both had a FINE grasp of OSS principals before any of you were warezing apple ][ proggies via 300 baud acoustic couplers.
Too bad Gates followed the $$$ rather than code quality.
The next step was to blatantly rip off other people's work (done in good faith, all in their free time) and then SELL it.
The rest, as they say is history.
Well done Bill!
Bill's only actual claim to being "in the right place at the right time" is that he had millions of suckers (like you) willing to buy into his Make Money Fast scheme, and at the same time, willing to believe that what he did was for the good of computing. Please.
Bank robbers' success is probably more dependant on timing than Gates'.
Slashdot Mirror
broken mailto
:P)
Here's what I sent (paraphrased from the discussion below - sorry if your quote is uncredited, sue me
Regarding your article "MP3 Is Possible Culprit In CD Sales Slump", you neglected to mention four important facts.
1) CDs still cost the same as they did 10 years ago, even while their cost of production has gone down astronomically.
2) The RIAA has already played this game twice with us before. The first time, they said cassettes were killing vinyl. The second time, they pointed their fingers at used CDs.
3) According to the RIAA itself sales for the 15-25 group have been decreasing EVERY year since 1988.
4) The RIAA isn't what I would called unbiased espicially wrt mp3s.
Finally (and this is my opinion)
5) There is less worth buying. Year after year of mergers and consolidation have left commercial music a smear of homogenous crap.
And to quote the head of another monstrously slow-to-adapt, clueless megaconglomerate:
"The Middle Man Must Add Value."
Record companies have been ignoring this rule for at least 3 decades. Time for their just desserts.
Firstly, a trademark is not IP. This is a well beaten horse.
Secondly, the GPL is not based on IP. This is also a well beaten horse.
The GPL does depend heavily on copyrights, but only to PROTECT itself from copyright law itself.
Even your most rabidly hypothetical anti-IP FSF geek (who would demand that copyright law be eradicated at well) has a point: If there were no copyrights, there would no need for GPL in the first place.
his viewpoint that IP is a bad idea is a complete crock. IP provides a POWERFUL incentive to create. Go to Amazon.com and look at their variety. How much of that would exist without royalties to the hardworking authors? 0.01%.
Once again, don't confuse IP from copyrights. I am willing to concede copyrights as a method to ACKNOWLEDGE the authorship of a certain product, and to prevent co-opting the product itself for commercial profit.
On top of that, there are other ways to make money in an information economy that are not from government enforced handouts. Tech support. Service. Paid code development for a specific MATERIAL product. Distribution. Marketing. The list goes on and on. On top of that, there are huge advantages to the free flow of ideas that far outweigh these knee-jerk "I'm afraid of the dark" phobias about your welfare source drying up. As the world economy moves away from material goods and towards an information based economy (read: development costs -> 100%, distribution costs -> 0%), those of you who cannot find other ways to make money and instead decide leech off of the fruits of government-enforced monopolies will eventually be doomed.
Look at the Open Source movement - how much of that would exist without Copyright laws? Zilch. Open Source depends on authors being sure their code won't be commercially coopted - enforced by Copyright Laws?
The copyleft protects GPL'd code from copyrights and shrink-wrap, binary licences, not the other way around. It is these same moronic licensing restrictions which allow commercial interests to
1) Hijack the code
2) Resell it to you for whatever they want
But most importantly
3) Prevent others from selling it to you for less, or gasp, even worse, for free.
This is competition? I think not. This is at best government enforced monopoly, and at worst an outright handout. If #2 and #3 don't scream monopoly to you I don't know how to reach you.
What Pharmaceutical company is going to invest the $1 billion needed to bring a nw drug to market if they know withing weeks it will be mass produced and imported back into the US by a third world low cost producer?
Most good (read: well respected) pharmaceutical companies immediately release valuable medical data to the community. This is how science works and progresses. If your hypothetical company came up with a cure for cancer, and the cure itself could be mass produced for pennies, are you saying it is moral for said pharmaceutical company to hold the world hostage and demand royalty payments at their whim? Keep in mind, I am not even talking about a FAIR royalty payment. How does $1 billion per pill sound? Remeber, they can charge whatever they want, because nobody else can legally make it. That doesn't sound like progress to me either.
The modern era makes copying easy, and the value of the physical implementation of 'software' in the broadest sense nearly zero. How are we going to be sure that the best and brightest amoung us are encouraged to make use of their talents if not by IP????
Rest assured the best and the brightest will always use their talents. The only question is: do they have a standard of living that allows them to persue their goals? Is there enough of an economy left without IP to support them? I, for one, think so. If you can't think of ways to make a living w/o IP you aren't thinking hard enough.
If in the hypothetical utopian future, EVERYTHING is a form of information, and all "products" dont have this scarcity problem, will you still maintain we need to artificially enforce some arbitrary hack to make them LOOK like they are scarce? To what end, exactly?
Honestly, I think its a matter of semantics. To me, a "material good" implies its a physical object that can't be in two places at the same time. Clearly, software, information, and ideas dont belong in this category. Someday, if we ever get matter compilers (ala Diamond Age) all of this era's niggling over copying information will look like a schoolyard fistfight.
But, thats not why I'm here. Here's a piece whos info im not completely sure of, but is a good story nonetheless.
Turns out the patent office did something unexpectedly good once:
They saved lives by issuing Colt a patent for the original single action revolver in 1836.
How is that possible, you ask?
Well, apparently, at the time of the patent there were several other pistol designers working on designs for a multishot, cartridge based pistol. Colt beat all of them to the punch with their wildly sucessful single-action revolver, and promptly patented it.
The basic revolver design was a good one, and all the other designers recognized it immediately. However, it was not without problems. It would jam. The chamber would get misaligned with the barrel. The barrel needed constant cleaning. The barrel would get hot, and further mess things up. Several different inventors came up with several modifications to the existing design, but since they were all basically revolvers, they fell under Colt's patent. They were are superb examples of engineering innovation, and yet they could
not be sold, because they were all basically revolvers.
Colt by now had a virtual monopoly on revolvers, since nobody else could make them, and any dolt would recognize that single-shot pistols were no match for Colt's design. However, the patent meant that no better revolver would emerge for 20 years! (the life of the patent). Thank god. For 20 years people were forced to use Colt's original design, sans improvements, since Colt had absolutely no incentive to fix the problems with their original revolver.
Thank you patent office for yet another success story.
Of course, you never hear this in the history books, and everybody knows that the patent office encourages innovation, right?
The accuracy of the seed doesn't have to be terribly high. From looking at the code, i'm guessing that 3.14 is sufficient. The next iteration is a UCHAR for gods sake (i.e. mod 256).
You need to learn a little history. Bill Gates was the first one to realize you could make money by sending hobbiests cease-and-desist-big-foot letters in the Altair days. What was their crime? Hacking at "Bill's" (actually its looking more and more like Paul Allen's actual WORK) BASIC interpreter and giving away modifications and the source for (gasp) free.
This shows that Paul Allen and Gates both had a FINE grasp of OSS principals before any of you were warezing apple ][ proggies via 300 baud acoustic couplers.
Too bad Gates followed the $$$ rather than code quality.
The next step was to blatantly rip off other people's work (done in good faith, all in their free time) and then SELL it.
The rest, as they say is history.
Well done Bill!
Bill's only actual claim to being "in the right place at the right time" is that he had millions of suckers (like you) willing to buy into his Make Money Fast scheme, and at the same time, willing to believe that what he did was for the good of computing. Please.
Bank robbers' success is probably more dependant on timing than Gates'.