All things considered, if a site scores high in search results because it has the most relevant results, I'm okay with scrolling down past the ads that I ignore.
But that's the point. All else is not equal. If the only site the algorithm thinks is at all relevant to your query is full of ads, I expect it will still be on the first page of results. But if there are ten sites that are all about equally relevant, and half of them are full of spam, wouldn't you prefer the spam-free ones to be first?
Plus, if the spammers get pushed down in the rankings then with any luck they'll stop spamming and thereby go back to where they were before in the rankings, resulting solely in a reduction in the amount of annoying crap on the internet.
No. Sorry, but that's just not true. I am talking there about the number of people who actually get to enjoy the work, without regard to how they obtain it, and about who is actually paying for it. Neither argument implies anything about hypothetical sales.
You started talking about "shares" of the production cost and then dividing it between the people who get the work. The problem is that the number of people who get the work is not independent of whether piracy exists. The denominator is not fixed unless you falsely equate copies with lost sales. The more you raise the price the pirates previously paying $0 have to pay, the fewer of them will be willing to pay it before choosing to go without, and the more you have to raise it again. By the time you're finished you end up with a price in the same neighborhood as it was in the presence of piracy, just with far fewer people getting a copy.
Which tells us that people who like music/movies/games tend to be people who like music/movies/games. That's hardly surprising.
It proves more than that. It proves that the people who pirate also buy, i.e. it isn't the case that there is a population of honest citizens who are on net forced to pay more by a population of freeloaders because each of the "freeloaders" is represented -- even overrepresented -- in the population of honest citizens.
If you want to count people who pirate a work initially but then buy it as people who paid and not pirates, I'm happy to count the numbers that way. When we know for a fact that, for example, some games have 90+% piracy rates, I think calling it a 50/50 split between those who ultimately pay for the game and those who don't is still very generous to the pirate side.
That isn't what I'm talking about. It isn't that every game that gets pirated is ultimately purchased by the same pirate. It's that the same pirate bought some other game, and some of the pirates of the game the first pirate paid for then went and paid for the game the first pirate pirated. If piracy was not possible, then the pirates generally would have just gone without the pirated games in favor of solely the ones legitimately purchased, rather than having spent tens of thousands of dollars for the hundreds of games that are only downloaded because they're "free" -- because the pirates don't all have tens of thousands of dollars, they only have on the order of the several hundred dollars that they actually spent.
No-one really has an exactly fixed amount of disposable income to spend on media, other than a relatively small group who are really hard up and don't have much to spend on anything at all. People choose to spend money on a takeaway dinner rather than the DVD they're going to watch over dinner, or to go to see a live music gig rather than spend the same money downloading the tracks legally or buying the DVD of the show, or to buy high-end home cinema equipment to watch their Blu-Rayson rather than the Blu-Rays themselves. I find it very hard to believe that anyone who has the kind of equipment a lot of these people are buying and the kind of spare time to enjoy that much content doesn't also have enough money to pay for the content itself.
Obviously it isn't the case that piracy has no effect on the market whatsoever, but that isn't the question. The question is whether the effect is so large as to have a substantial impact on the incentive to create new works and justify the sort of measures that would be necessary to reduce piracy to substantially below its current level.
In addition to that, having some effect on the market does not even necessarily imply that the effect is negative: If someone who pirates a lot of movies decides that it's worth it for them to invest in a home theater system, then having done so they may find that they now prefer to spend the night in watching movies rather than going out to a restaurant, and end up spending their restauran
I don't know. I mean sure, you'll never see the officers of an undiversified coal company go on TV and admit to the damage coal is causing to the environment, or offer to compensate its victims out of the company's profits or to shut down their operations until the damage can be avoided. But there are ways that corporations-as-entities, when they're run by high-minded people, can Do The Right Thing.
The fight against SOPA and PIPA is a great example: It's blatantly obvious to anyone that real people are against the bills. Nothing stops the tech companies from saving their political capital for some other issue and letting Hollywood get what they want, or from going to Hollywood and negotiating to drop their opposition in exchange for some quid pro quo. But the tech companies also have the option of siding with real people and opposing the other corporations in Hollywood, which is what they've done. They didn't have to do that. So as I said, give credit where credit is due -- failing to support those who fight for your rights can easily result in there being no one willing to fight for you in the next round.
Even so, the five honest people have paid twice an equal share for the work and the five freeloaders have paid no share.
This falls directly into the 1 pirated copy = 1 lost sale fallacy. It isn't a case of there being ten copies made no matter what and the existence of piracy determining whether the breakdown is $10 for everyone or $20 for some and $0 for the others. Repeated studies have shown that people who pirate the most material also buy the most. If those people are already spending substantially all of their disposable income buying media, they don't somehow get more disposable income that can be diverted into the pockets of artists just by preventing them from engaging in piracy. They just don't watch as many movies.
The fact that not everyone here is paying their fair share is a concept any five year old can understand.
This makes the assumption that "people who pay" and "people who pirate" are not overlapping sets. If everyone buys one album for every four they pirate, clearly none of the customers can have been cheated on net since they're engaged in symmetrical activities. And as long as there is diversity in the albums that each person buys (rather than they all buying the same ones and pirating the same ones), all the artists still get paid. The difference is that with piracy everybody gets five times as many albums given the same amount of disposable income.
That fact that if everyone behaved as the freeloaders did then there would be no way for the artists to make money is a concept any five year old can understand.
But they don't -- otherwise there would be a 100% piracy rate, and there isn't.
However, once anyone has performed that work for the first time, the cat is out of the bag.
Again, you're making the "what happens if there is a 100% piracy rate" argument. Why is that relevant when there isn't?
If you want to see what effect this is having on entire industries, just look at PC gaming... what's left of it, that is. Most of the gaming market today is on consoles.
That hardly proves that the reason for that is piracy. There are a laundry list of reasons why developers and users might prefer consoles to PCs: Guaranteed consistent hardware specs, promotion by console makers, the fact that the primary PC gaming OS maker also makes consoles and has no reason to promote Windows over XBOX, that consoles are better adapted to certain games (bigger screens and standardized game controllers), etc. The network effects thing is also big: A console is much cheaper than a PC fast enough to play games with "high production values", so games like that will always be made for at least consoles to reach the customers whose PCs aren't fast enough. But if almost all demanding games are available for the console then customers lose a large incentive to upgrade their PCs to be fast enough to play them, which snowballs into exactly what you're describing: The most demanding games aren't made for the PC because the minority of PC owners with PCs fast enough to play the game also have consoles and the bulk of them will buy the console version if no PC version exists, so there is insufficient ROI in making a PC port that will primarily just convert sales of the console version to sales of the PC version.
I don't disagree that the amount of programmer time consumed is substantial, maybe even outweighing the lawyers, but that isn't because of any lack of work for the lawyers.
The problem is that just implementing the take down process isn't the half of it. As soon as you do, you start getting notices -- and a huge number of them are totally fraudulent. A company can just throw all their customers under the bus by blindly executing all of the fraudulent take downs, and many of them do. But even that doesn't get you out of bringing in the lawyers, because periodically one of the fraudulent take downs becomes the subject of public outrage and you have to ask the lawyers about the legal risks of reinstating the material in a way that could cause you to lose the safe harbor in order to weigh it against the PR cost of looking like a lazy censorship-endorsing jackass. And if you want to avoid that PR cost preemptively rather than having to respond after the fact, it would cost even more, because you would have to send facially questionable take down requests to the lawyers for their review. (Granted I'm not aware of anyone who actually does this, but that's kind of proving the point: The cost of the lawyers is so high that it's prohibitive -- website operators are more willing to kick their customers in the tender bits and suffer public outrage than pay the lawyers to minimize the number of mistakes, because the cost of the latter is that high.)
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of abundant high-quality work created by people who have rent to pay.
OK, let's take this argument, because I keep hearing it and I don't understand it.
Yes, obviously if 100% of people who listen to music pirate it and 0% ever go to a live show etc. then there will be no financial incentive to create new music. But those numbers are preposterous and totally counter to reality.
So let's ignore the preposterous 100% piracy rate, let's consider the actual rate of piracy that occurs today. And it really doesn't matter what the exact percentage is, because the question we need to be asking is not what the rate is, or how it can be changed, but whether it needs to be changed.
So the argument goes that because of piracy, artists won't be able to profit from their works and will stop producing them. Well, with today's level of piracy, artists continue to profit from their works, and continue to produce new works. So... what's the trouble then? Why is piracy such a dire problem if musicians continue to make a living and new music continues to be produced?
The flurry of activity against SOPA was an aberration.
Certainly it was a break from the historical trend, but it remains to be seen whether it was a one-time thing or the start of a new trend.
Recall that the reason this garbage has historically been passed is that the old media companies use their media platforms to influence the voters to favor the candidates who do their bidding. On Wednesday we learned that the new media companies can do the same thing. And the new media companies have a lot more money to pile on top of their influence.
Of course, there is the risk that we would just be trading one corporate master for another, but not necessarily. The new media companies act a lot less like a cartel than the old media companies; they can only work together effectively if there is a consensus policy position and there can generally only be that if they're in the right. But even in the alternative, given the choice between Sergey Brin and Rupert Murdoch, is anybody really stupid enough to want Rupert Murdoch?
Have you ever heard the expression "you get what you expect"?
Despite all the publicity about corporations having to do what's best for the shareholders, corporate executives have wide latitude in how they go about it. They can be as heroic or Machiavellian as they like. Keep painting them as soulless empty suits who never do anything outside of their own self interest and I'm sure they'll continue to take you up on it. Personally, I prefer to give credit where credit is due.
the likelihood of you being introduced to musicians you enjoy is directly proportional to the assurance they have of their talent being rewarded.
No, it isn't. Some works would be produced without any government incentive. If enjoyable music was produced in direct proportion to the government incentive, there would be none produced without a government incentive, which is contra to reality. Moreover, it would mean that you could increase the monopoly indefinitely and continue getting an indefinite proportional increase in good music, which is likewise untrue: If you provide enough incentive that an artist is already producing as many works as he reasonably can, additional incentive will not produce additional works. Providing too much incentive can even cause excellent artists to decide that they have sufficient wealth that earning more would not noticeably improve their quality of life, and then choose to retire to the beach rather than producing more works.
If this is prevalent on an industry-wide basis, no musicians get promoted, all you get is the contrived fluffy garbage we hear today.
Contrived fluffy garbage is not created by a lack of incentive. It is created by the nature of the market. It will always be more profitable to market one album that sells ten million copies than to market a thousand albums that each sell on average ten thousand copies. The only albums that will sell ten million copies are contrived fluffy garbage. So that is what the marketing companies promote.
The way you eliminate the garbage is by increasing competition. You have to break the cartel, and antitrust clearly isn't interested in doing it. If instead of having a couple dozen albums heavily promoted by a small handful of labels, you had a couple hundred albums moderately promoted by a few dozen unassociated distributors, the distributors would promote "good" music because each promoted album would be expected to make fewer sales (tens of thousands rather than millions), which would mean that an album without widespread appeal but that would still sell the expected number of copies would be just as desirable to the label as the latest pop crap. But the only way you break the cartel without antitrust is by the existing players dying out and being replaced by more, newer, smaller entities. Which is what the internet enables, if we can prevent it from being destroyed for long enough for the dinosaurs to die off.
The MAFIAA has the lobbying power to get laws written, and they will be written in direct proportion to the aggressiveness of short-sighted pro-piracy advocates like yourself, since they lend excellent argument for tougher copyright laws.
The MAFIAA does not require anti-MAFIAA rhetoric in order to bribe Congress. Piracy is not the reason for the laws they want, it is just the excuse. The reason they want the laws is to destroy prospective new competitors to their traditional distribution cartels. Take away piracy and they will only find a different excuse.
They're rich assholes with deep government connections, and you're openly advocating the failure of their business. How did you expect them to react?
Well, to be perfectly honest it would be quite nice if they would react by going out of business and being replaced by newer, smaller, less corrupt entities that provide the same service more efficiently and leaving the lion's share of the profits for the actual artists.
There never are. If there are ever "that many cases" then the entire justice system will collapse -- look at the War on Drugs. We can't afford the first one, much less another one like it.
But lawyers do more than litigate. Want to guess how many cumulative lawyer-hours have been spent world-wide complying with the DMCA takedown process? First it has to be implemented on every website. So you take the time it requires for one website and you multiply it by tens of thousands. Then every investment bank and venture capitalist has to evaluate the measures taken by each website to factor it in when deciding whether to invest in that company, both to evaluate whether the company will incur legal liability and in determining whether the act of complying with have an effect on the business. (For example, they have to consider whether there exist competing foreign websites where users can be expected to flee if fraudulent take downs are issued repeatedly by abusive content holders against the site complying with US law.) Then the content industry lawyers have to do their side of the same process, figuring out how to issue as many fraudulent take downs as quickly as possible without getting slapped by the courts. Then the lawyers at the various websites (as well as the EFF et al) have to evaluate whether any facet of the industry's brazen disregard for fair use and due process can be mitigated in any way (even if it never leads to litigation). Then the lawyers at the investment banks and VCs have to reevaluate their initial estimates once they realize the actual level of abuse that occurs, etc.
The world-wide bottom line is probably somewhere in the millions of lawyer-hours.
It may be for the best: Any driver capable of ignoring the street signs indicating a one way street is in need of having their license revoked, and that is the sort of thing that police take notice of (unlike various other, equally dangerous things that bad drivers do on a regular basis).
Changing a few entries in map data is unlikely to make anyone choose it or not (since no one is likely to notice). By contrast, accusing a competitor of doing so is far more likely to make it into the media and cause damage to the company's reputation, which provides a substantial disincentive for that company to have actually intentionally tried to damage the competing product and risk the accusation.
Of course, it also provides a substantial incentive for the competitor (whether Microsoft or OSM itself) to make the accusation, regardless of whether it's true, only partially true, or completely fabricated. So if you want to look at the incentives, it seems more likely that the accusation is bullshit than not, because there is a far greater incentive to make the accusation than there is to actually screw up the data.
How about this? I see a phone, fax and mailing address for each of their locations. I find it hard to believe that if you send a FedEx with ATTN: Legal Department you won't get a response.
It seems completely understandable how they wouldn't offer an easily-findable email address, since doing so would immediately result in a thousand emails a minute containing profanity and death threats because the personal website of John Smith #2945 is not on the first page of search results for "John Smith" etc., which would make it useless to someone with a legitimate issue because their email would get lost in a thousand pages of noise.
It is becoming apparent that the reason you think as you do is that you have no idea how patents work.
Do you honestly not understand that a product can simultaneously be highly innovative and allegedly infringe a third party's patent? Hint: Nothing is 100% new. Everything builds on what came before. You can have a product with a thousand innovative features and all it takes is a single one more that happens to have already existed and been patented by a third party to have it declared as infringing and removed from the market.
Except that, on the other side of the litigation, those lawsuits are protecting profits and ability to recoup R&D investment. The lawsuits reduce the incentives to make marginally innovative products or direct copies, as in the Samsung suits, but increase the incentives to make highly innovative products. The greater the innovation, the more likely to defend an infringement suit.
There is a whole list of flaws in your argument:
For one thing, no amount of innovation can eliminate or even substantially reduce the likelihood of litigation -- litigation comes from vague, numerous, overbroad patents. I assume the original iPhone was sufficiently innovative for your tastes, but that didn't stop them from getting sued by then-incumbents. As that example proves, creating a more innovative product may increase your chances of getting sued, because if the new product starts taking over the market then the incumbent players may turn to litigation out of desperation.
The sort of "innovation" you're talking about -- the kind that comes through a team of lawyers telling the engineers what they have to design around -- is nothing like the innovation that anybody wants to promote. It is nothing but a highly wasteful effort at reinventing the wheel. It directs the finite time and effort of engineering talent to doing the same thing in a slightly different way, rather than putting it toward actually doing something new.
In addition to that, the alleged increase in innovation on the part of the company initiating the litigation is nowhere in evidence. Apple continues to remain highly profitable notwithstanding the alleged copying, so there is no want for revenues to fund future R&D. More than that, the competition is what requires them to actually continue producing new innovative products -- if a company can keep its competitors' products off the market with patents then it doesn't need to spend anything more on its own R&D until the patents expire. Competitors continually producing better products mean that everyone has to keep R&D fully funded in order to stay ahead of the curve -- it forces innovative companies to stay innovative rather than innovating once and then litigating forever after.
GP's claim was "holding back innovation." Now, if he had said, "constant litigation is holding back sales," then he'd be absolutely right.
Don't be a pedant. "Holding back sales" obviously holds back innovation, both by making the innovative improvements in the Samsung product unavailable to the market and by reducing by the expected amount of litigation expenses the financial incentive for prospective competitors to build innovative new products.
So the source of the information is not some unknown blog with an unknown level of bias, it's the competitor's blog with an obvious and strong bias. That's much better then.
If some McDonalds somewhere in the world is serving people maggoty burgers, the parent company is going to want to know who and shut them down right away.
Of course they will. But how do you know what is going on here when the only side we've heard from is the complaining side, and this is probably the first that Google Corporate is hearing of it?
Whenever you read a story like this, the first question you have to ask is whether it looks like a part of a smear campaign by Microsoft or another competitor. Did the authors contact Google to get their side of the story? Maybe they actually do have a deal with Mocality and right hand at Mocality doesn't know what the left hand is doing. They're certainly being gigantic dicks by taking the issue to publication first, before calling up the people who they're accusing to get all the facts and possibly have whatever problematic activity shut down right away.
I don't see how that is any excuse to become a cowering, silent minority. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, so if we aren't getting what we want, we need to squeak louder.
OK, so call Casey up and tell him why you voted for him last time and why you might just not vote for him next time if he continues to support PIPA and if the Republicans decide to field a candidate less batshit than Santorum.
The key is not voting for a Democrat instead of a Republican or vice versa. By the time of the general election it's too late.
The primaries are what matter. In most cases, the reason you only have a choice between an imbecile and a turd sandwich is because the Republican primary chose an imbecile and the Democratic primary chose a turd sandwich. You can pretty well bet that there were candidates running in those primaries that would do you better -- certainly you have a better chance of that with six candidates running in a primary than with two running in the general election. On top of that, because fewer people vote in primaries, your vote counts for more when you do.
Slashdot Mirror
Extensions can't be Firefox's killer feature if they make it eat all of your RAM.
We live in a world where 8GB of RAM costs $50. I'm not sure how much I actually care whether Firefox uses 500MB vs. 2GB anymore.
Of course, you've got to feel sorry for the poor bastard who still has a 2GHz Pentium 4 with less RAM than a Galaxy Tab.
All things considered, if a site scores high in search results because it has the most relevant results, I'm okay with scrolling down past the ads that I ignore.
But that's the point. All else is not equal. If the only site the algorithm thinks is at all relevant to your query is full of ads, I expect it will still be on the first page of results. But if there are ten sites that are all about equally relevant, and half of them are full of spam, wouldn't you prefer the spam-free ones to be first?
Plus, if the spammers get pushed down in the rankings then with any luck they'll stop spamming and thereby go back to where they were before in the rankings, resulting solely in a reduction in the amount of annoying crap on the internet.
No. Sorry, but that's just not true. I am talking there about the number of people who actually get to enjoy the work, without regard to how they obtain it, and about who is actually paying for it. Neither argument implies anything about hypothetical sales.
You started talking about "shares" of the production cost and then dividing it between the people who get the work. The problem is that the number of people who get the work is not independent of whether piracy exists. The denominator is not fixed unless you falsely equate copies with lost sales. The more you raise the price the pirates previously paying $0 have to pay, the fewer of them will be willing to pay it before choosing to go without, and the more you have to raise it again. By the time you're finished you end up with a price in the same neighborhood as it was in the presence of piracy, just with far fewer people getting a copy.
Which tells us that people who like music/movies/games tend to be people who like music/movies/games. That's hardly surprising.
It proves more than that. It proves that the people who pirate also buy, i.e. it isn't the case that there is a population of honest citizens who are on net forced to pay more by a population of freeloaders because each of the "freeloaders" is represented -- even overrepresented -- in the population of honest citizens.
If you want to count people who pirate a work initially but then buy it as people who paid and not pirates, I'm happy to count the numbers that way. When we know for a fact that, for example, some games have 90+% piracy rates, I think calling it a 50/50 split between those who ultimately pay for the game and those who don't is still very generous to the pirate side.
That isn't what I'm talking about. It isn't that every game that gets pirated is ultimately purchased by the same pirate. It's that the same pirate bought some other game, and some of the pirates of the game the first pirate paid for then went and paid for the game the first pirate pirated. If piracy was not possible, then the pirates generally would have just gone without the pirated games in favor of solely the ones legitimately purchased, rather than having spent tens of thousands of dollars for the hundreds of games that are only downloaded because they're "free" -- because the pirates don't all have tens of thousands of dollars, they only have on the order of the several hundred dollars that they actually spent.
No-one really has an exactly fixed amount of disposable income to spend on media, other than a relatively small group who are really hard up and don't have much to spend on anything at all. People choose to spend money on a takeaway dinner rather than the DVD they're going to watch over dinner, or to go to see a live music gig rather than spend the same money downloading the tracks legally or buying the DVD of the show, or to buy high-end home cinema equipment to watch their Blu-Rayson rather than the Blu-Rays themselves. I find it very hard to believe that anyone who has the kind of equipment a lot of these people are buying and the kind of spare time to enjoy that much content doesn't also have enough money to pay for the content itself.
Obviously it isn't the case that piracy has no effect on the market whatsoever, but that isn't the question. The question is whether the effect is so large as to have a substantial impact on the incentive to create new works and justify the sort of measures that would be necessary to reduce piracy to substantially below its current level.
In addition to that, having some effect on the market does not even necessarily imply that the effect is negative: If someone who pirates a lot of movies decides that it's worth it for them to invest in a home theater system, then having done so they may find that they now prefer to spend the night in watching movies rather than going out to a restaurant, and end up spending their restauran
I don't know. I mean sure, you'll never see the officers of an undiversified coal company go on TV and admit to the damage coal is causing to the environment, or offer to compensate its victims out of the company's profits or to shut down their operations until the damage can be avoided. But there are ways that corporations-as-entities, when they're run by high-minded people, can Do The Right Thing.
The fight against SOPA and PIPA is a great example: It's blatantly obvious to anyone that real people are against the bills. Nothing stops the tech companies from saving their political capital for some other issue and letting Hollywood get what they want, or from going to Hollywood and negotiating to drop their opposition in exchange for some quid pro quo. But the tech companies also have the option of siding with real people and opposing the other corporations in Hollywood, which is what they've done. They didn't have to do that. So as I said, give credit where credit is due -- failing to support those who fight for your rights can easily result in there being no one willing to fight for you in the next round.
Even so, the five honest people have paid twice an equal share for the work and the five freeloaders have paid no share.
This falls directly into the 1 pirated copy = 1 lost sale fallacy. It isn't a case of there being ten copies made no matter what and the existence of piracy determining whether the breakdown is $10 for everyone or $20 for some and $0 for the others. Repeated studies have shown that people who pirate the most material also buy the most. If those people are already spending substantially all of their disposable income buying media, they don't somehow get more disposable income that can be diverted into the pockets of artists just by preventing them from engaging in piracy. They just don't watch as many movies.
The fact that not everyone here is paying their fair share is a concept any five year old can understand.
This makes the assumption that "people who pay" and "people who pirate" are not overlapping sets. If everyone buys one album for every four they pirate, clearly none of the customers can have been cheated on net since they're engaged in symmetrical activities. And as long as there is diversity in the albums that each person buys (rather than they all buying the same ones and pirating the same ones), all the artists still get paid. The difference is that with piracy everybody gets five times as many albums given the same amount of disposable income.
That fact that if everyone behaved as the freeloaders did then there would be no way for the artists to make money is a concept any five year old can understand.
But they don't -- otherwise there would be a 100% piracy rate, and there isn't.
However, once anyone has performed that work for the first time, the cat is out of the bag.
Again, you're making the "what happens if there is a 100% piracy rate" argument. Why is that relevant when there isn't?
If you want to see what effect this is having on entire industries, just look at PC gaming... what's left of it, that is. Most of the gaming market today is on consoles.
That hardly proves that the reason for that is piracy. There are a laundry list of reasons why developers and users might prefer consoles to PCs: Guaranteed consistent hardware specs, promotion by console makers, the fact that the primary PC gaming OS maker also makes consoles and has no reason to promote Windows over XBOX, that consoles are better adapted to certain games (bigger screens and standardized game controllers), etc. The network effects thing is also big: A console is much cheaper than a PC fast enough to play games with "high production values", so games like that will always be made for at least consoles to reach the customers whose PCs aren't fast enough. But if almost all demanding games are available for the console then customers lose a large incentive to upgrade their PCs to be fast enough to play them, which snowballs into exactly what you're describing: The most demanding games aren't made for the PC because the minority of PC owners with PCs fast enough to play the game also have consoles and the bulk of them will buy the console version if no PC version exists, so there is insufficient ROI in making a PC port that will primarily just convert sales of the console version to sales of the PC version.
I don't disagree that the amount of programmer time consumed is substantial, maybe even outweighing the lawyers, but that isn't because of any lack of work for the lawyers.
The problem is that just implementing the take down process isn't the half of it. As soon as you do, you start getting notices -- and a huge number of them are totally fraudulent. A company can just throw all their customers under the bus by blindly executing all of the fraudulent take downs, and many of them do. But even that doesn't get you out of bringing in the lawyers, because periodically one of the fraudulent take downs becomes the subject of public outrage and you have to ask the lawyers about the legal risks of reinstating the material in a way that could cause you to lose the safe harbor in order to weigh it against the PR cost of looking like a lazy censorship-endorsing jackass. And if you want to avoid that PR cost preemptively rather than having to respond after the fact, it would cost even more, because you would have to send facially questionable take down requests to the lawyers for their review. (Granted I'm not aware of anyone who actually does this, but that's kind of proving the point: The cost of the lawyers is so high that it's prohibitive -- website operators are more willing to kick their customers in the tender bits and suffer public outrage than pay the lawyers to minimize the number of mistakes, because the cost of the latter is that high.)
No MAFIAA lawyer can have a soul.
Certainly not. But recall that we also end up consuming the time of lawyers at the EFF and certain tech companies, and some of them have souls.
Think again.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of abundant high-quality work created by people who have rent to pay.
OK, let's take this argument, because I keep hearing it and I don't understand it.
Yes, obviously if 100% of people who listen to music pirate it and 0% ever go to a live show etc. then there will be no financial incentive to create new music. But those numbers are preposterous and totally counter to reality.
So let's ignore the preposterous 100% piracy rate, let's consider the actual rate of piracy that occurs today. And it really doesn't matter what the exact percentage is, because the question we need to be asking is not what the rate is, or how it can be changed, but whether it needs to be changed.
So the argument goes that because of piracy, artists won't be able to profit from their works and will stop producing them. Well, with today's level of piracy, artists continue to profit from their works, and continue to produce new works. So... what's the trouble then? Why is piracy such a dire problem if musicians continue to make a living and new music continues to be produced?
The flurry of activity against SOPA was an aberration.
Certainly it was a break from the historical trend, but it remains to be seen whether it was a one-time thing or the start of a new trend.
Recall that the reason this garbage has historically been passed is that the old media companies use their media platforms to influence the voters to favor the candidates who do their bidding. On Wednesday we learned that the new media companies can do the same thing. And the new media companies have a lot more money to pile on top of their influence.
Of course, there is the risk that we would just be trading one corporate master for another, but not necessarily. The new media companies act a lot less like a cartel than the old media companies; they can only work together effectively if there is a consensus policy position and there can generally only be that if they're in the right. But even in the alternative, given the choice between Sergey Brin and Rupert Murdoch, is anybody really stupid enough to want Rupert Murdoch?
Only if you're measuring by souls rather than the traditional dollars.
Publicly traded corporations are not heroic
Have you ever heard the expression "you get what you expect"?
Despite all the publicity about corporations having to do what's best for the shareholders, corporate executives have wide latitude in how they go about it. They can be as heroic or Machiavellian as they like. Keep painting them as soulless empty suits who never do anything outside of their own self interest and I'm sure they'll continue to take you up on it. Personally, I prefer to give credit where credit is due.
the likelihood of you being introduced to musicians you enjoy is directly proportional to the assurance they have of their talent being rewarded.
No, it isn't. Some works would be produced without any government incentive. If enjoyable music was produced in direct proportion to the government incentive, there would be none produced without a government incentive, which is contra to reality. Moreover, it would mean that you could increase the monopoly indefinitely and continue getting an indefinite proportional increase in good music, which is likewise untrue: If you provide enough incentive that an artist is already producing as many works as he reasonably can, additional incentive will not produce additional works. Providing too much incentive can even cause excellent artists to decide that they have sufficient wealth that earning more would not noticeably improve their quality of life, and then choose to retire to the beach rather than producing more works.
If this is prevalent on an industry-wide basis, no musicians get promoted, all you get is the contrived fluffy garbage we hear today.
Contrived fluffy garbage is not created by a lack of incentive. It is created by the nature of the market. It will always be more profitable to market one album that sells ten million copies than to market a thousand albums that each sell on average ten thousand copies. The only albums that will sell ten million copies are contrived fluffy garbage. So that is what the marketing companies promote.
The way you eliminate the garbage is by increasing competition. You have to break the cartel, and antitrust clearly isn't interested in doing it. If instead of having a couple dozen albums heavily promoted by a small handful of labels, you had a couple hundred albums moderately promoted by a few dozen unassociated distributors, the distributors would promote "good" music because each promoted album would be expected to make fewer sales (tens of thousands rather than millions), which would mean that an album without widespread appeal but that would still sell the expected number of copies would be just as desirable to the label as the latest pop crap. But the only way you break the cartel without antitrust is by the existing players dying out and being replaced by more, newer, smaller entities. Which is what the internet enables, if we can prevent it from being destroyed for long enough for the dinosaurs to die off.
The MAFIAA has the lobbying power to get laws written, and they will be written in direct proportion to the aggressiveness of short-sighted pro-piracy advocates like yourself, since they lend excellent argument for tougher copyright laws.
The MAFIAA does not require anti-MAFIAA rhetoric in order to bribe Congress. Piracy is not the reason for the laws they want, it is just the excuse. The reason they want the laws is to destroy prospective new competitors to their traditional distribution cartels. Take away piracy and they will only find a different excuse.
They're rich assholes with deep government connections, and you're openly advocating the failure of their business. How did you expect them to react?
Well, to be perfectly honest it would be quite nice if they would react by going out of business and being replaced by newer, smaller, less corrupt entities that provide the same service more efficiently and leaving the lion's share of the profits for the actual artists.
There aren't that many cases
There never are. If there are ever "that many cases" then the entire justice system will collapse -- look at the War on Drugs. We can't afford the first one, much less another one like it.
But lawyers do more than litigate. Want to guess how many cumulative lawyer-hours have been spent world-wide complying with the DMCA takedown process? First it has to be implemented on every website. So you take the time it requires for one website and you multiply it by tens of thousands. Then every investment bank and venture capitalist has to evaluate the measures taken by each website to factor it in when deciding whether to invest in that company, both to evaluate whether the company will incur legal liability and in determining whether the act of complying with have an effect on the business. (For example, they have to consider whether there exist competing foreign websites where users can be expected to flee if fraudulent take downs are issued repeatedly by abusive content holders against the site complying with US law.) Then the content industry lawyers have to do their side of the same process, figuring out how to issue as many fraudulent take downs as quickly as possible without getting slapped by the courts. Then the lawyers at the various websites (as well as the EFF et al) have to evaluate whether any facet of the industry's brazen disregard for fair use and due process can be mitigated in any way (even if it never leads to litigation). Then the lawyers at the investment banks and VCs have to reevaluate their initial estimates once they realize the actual level of abuse that occurs, etc.
The world-wide bottom line is probably somewhere in the millions of lawyer-hours.
It may be for the best: Any driver capable of ignoring the street signs indicating a one way street is in need of having their license revoked, and that is the sort of thing that police take notice of (unlike various other, equally dangerous things that bad drivers do on a regular basis).
Easy - to discredit OpenStreetMap.
Changing a few entries in map data is unlikely to make anyone choose it or not (since no one is likely to notice). By contrast, accusing a competitor of doing so is far more likely to make it into the media and cause damage to the company's reputation, which provides a substantial disincentive for that company to have actually intentionally tried to damage the competing product and risk the accusation.
Of course, it also provides a substantial incentive for the competitor (whether Microsoft or OSM itself) to make the accusation, regardless of whether it's true, only partially true, or completely fabricated. So if you want to look at the incentives, it seems more likely that the accusation is bullshit than not, because there is a far greater incentive to make the accusation than there is to actually screw up the data.
How about this? I see a phone, fax and mailing address for each of their locations. I find it hard to believe that if you send a FedEx with ATTN: Legal Department you won't get a response.
It seems completely understandable how they wouldn't offer an easily-findable email address, since doing so would immediately result in a thousand emails a minute containing profanity and death threats because the personal website of John Smith #2945 is not on the first page of search results for "John Smith" etc., which would make it useless to someone with a legitimate issue because their email would get lost in a thousand pages of noise.
It is becoming apparent that the reason you think as you do is that you have no idea how patents work.
Do you honestly not understand that a product can simultaneously be highly innovative and allegedly infringe a third party's patent? Hint: Nothing is 100% new. Everything builds on what came before. You can have a product with a thousand innovative features and all it takes is a single one more that happens to have already existed and been patented by a third party to have it declared as infringing and removed from the market.
Except that, on the other side of the litigation, those lawsuits are protecting profits and ability to recoup R&D investment. The lawsuits reduce the incentives to make marginally innovative products or direct copies, as in the Samsung suits, but increase the incentives to make highly innovative products. The greater the innovation, the more likely to defend an infringement suit.
There is a whole list of flaws in your argument:
For one thing, no amount of innovation can eliminate or even substantially reduce the likelihood of litigation -- litigation comes from vague, numerous, overbroad patents. I assume the original iPhone was sufficiently innovative for your tastes, but that didn't stop them from getting sued by then-incumbents. As that example proves, creating a more innovative product may increase your chances of getting sued, because if the new product starts taking over the market then the incumbent players may turn to litigation out of desperation.
The sort of "innovation" you're talking about -- the kind that comes through a team of lawyers telling the engineers what they have to design around -- is nothing like the innovation that anybody wants to promote. It is nothing but a highly wasteful effort at reinventing the wheel. It directs the finite time and effort of engineering talent to doing the same thing in a slightly different way, rather than putting it toward actually doing something new.
In addition to that, the alleged increase in innovation on the part of the company initiating the litigation is nowhere in evidence. Apple continues to remain highly profitable notwithstanding the alleged copying, so there is no want for revenues to fund future R&D. More than that, the competition is what requires them to actually continue producing new innovative products -- if a company can keep its competitors' products off the market with patents then it doesn't need to spend anything more on its own R&D until the patents expire. Competitors continually producing better products mean that everyone has to keep R&D fully funded in order to stay ahead of the curve -- it forces innovative companies to stay innovative rather than innovating once and then litigating forever after.
GP's claim was "holding back innovation." Now, if he had said, "constant litigation is holding back sales," then he'd be absolutely right.
Don't be a pedant. "Holding back sales" obviously holds back innovation, both by making the innovative improvements in the Samsung product unavailable to the market and by reducing by the expected amount of litigation expenses the financial incentive for prospective competitors to build innovative new products.
So the source of the information is not some unknown blog with an unknown level of bias, it's the competitor's blog with an obvious and strong bias. That's much better then.
If some McDonalds somewhere in the world is serving people maggoty burgers, the parent company is going to want to know who and shut them down right away.
Of course they will. But how do you know what is going on here when the only side we've heard from is the complaining side, and this is probably the first that Google Corporate is hearing of it?
Whenever you read a story like this, the first question you have to ask is whether it looks like a part of a smear campaign by Microsoft or another competitor. Did the authors contact Google to get their side of the story? Maybe they actually do have a deal with Mocality and right hand at Mocality doesn't know what the left hand is doing. They're certainly being gigantic dicks by taking the issue to publication first, before calling up the people who they're accusing to get all the facts and possibly have whatever problematic activity shut down right away.
we are still a vocal, tiny minority.
I don't see how that is any excuse to become a cowering, silent minority. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, so if we aren't getting what we want, we need to squeak louder.
OK, so call Casey up and tell him why you voted for him last time and why you might just not vote for him next time if he continues to support PIPA and if the Republicans decide to field a candidate less batshit than Santorum.
The key is not voting for a Democrat instead of a Republican or vice versa. By the time of the general election it's too late.
The primaries are what matter. In most cases, the reason you only have a choice between an imbecile and a turd sandwich is because the Republican primary chose an imbecile and the Democratic primary chose a turd sandwich. You can pretty well bet that there were candidates running in those primaries that would do you better -- certainly you have a better chance of that with six candidates running in a primary than with two running in the general election. On top of that, because fewer people vote in primaries, your vote counts for more when you do.