Americans talk about our collosal historical screwups all the time. Maybe just not to the rest of the world. Try mentioning slavery, native americans, manifest destiny or a dozen other historical topics on any college campus in the country and you'll immediately be mobbed by young people demanding justice and chaining themselves to building. Unless the interpretation of our history you are referring to is that of the 1950s or before, you don't understand the US. Take a look at some more recent scholarship, including the work of Zinn, Foner and Forrest McDonald. The only people still pushing the saccharine sweet George Washington is Hollywood. We justly celebrate his strong points (but for his forbearance, the US would have become a monarchy) but are well aware of his weaknesses (slave owner.) You've got to stop watching TV/movies and read some books.
That said, if you understand how modern democratic governments work, you know that the US can't give lip service to ignoring IP protection. But, in fact, it doesn't do a heck of a lot to enforce it in the developing world. Look at Microsoft in China. Go to India and see how easy it is to buy pirated software. Look at the response of the American government to efforts by countries around the world (including Canada:) ) to reduce drug costs by buying generics (a policy approved by the Clinton administration for Africa.) Brazil threatened to ignore US IP and, I believe, will get substantial concessions not to ditch the whole IP framework.
You forget that, as sovereigns, countries choose which laws to enforce within their own boundaries. If Brazil were to turn a blind eye to domestic companies violating US IP to manufacture affordable AIDS medication, you would hardly hear a squawk from the US. It's only when Brazil makes a big deal about nullifying the IP laws that the US feels it has to respond -- it's just a negotiating tactic on Brazil's part anyway: why else would they draw attention to it?
In short, I believe that developing countries can do to the US exactly what the US did to the developed countries of 100 years ago: ignore their IP protection, and get the exact same response as the US did: annoyance.
Of course, there's more to life and, especially politics, than making money. Every once in a while people think of things like the anticipated lifestyle of their grandchildren and the wisdom of overreliance on products produced where the country has little or no control.
I have heard that Japan subsidises its rice industry, despite the resulting higher costs. It still makes sense.
Spoken like a true economist. While true that, pari passu, tariffs simply create inefficiency a la Ricardo, the poster is correct that the US has, at times, succesfully used tariffs to protect and nurture local industry. The several tariffs implemented in the early to mid nineteenth century are an excellent case in point. While they had their unfortunate side effects (like creating an atmosphere that prevented the amicable settlement of the slavery question) they are widely believed to have allowed the US to enter the world stage as a manufacturing power in opposition to the Brits' continuing mercantilism.
The same is true in the past 30 years in aircraft, for instance, in Europe. IMHO, American dominance through sunk capital (including learning costs) and government support (mainly through defense spending) would never have been overcome without European support of Airbus.
Now, if you really are an economist, you are either going to ask me for proof or cite studies showing what I have just said is wrong. I can only respond by saying that sometimes things are clearer before you do the regression on megabytes of low-precision, politically-motivated data and appealing to some other economist of the non-Economist school for support.
Reminds me of Edward Abbey's thoughts on throwing empty beer cans out of the window while driving on the highway. He didn't consider it polluting because the land was already blighted by the highway.
Well, big companies don't keep their books in a big, green book anymore. They have large complicated accounting systems with lots of interconnecting modules. For Sullivan to look at draft reports, determine how much less in expenses he needed to make the wall street number, weigh the increase of capitalizing some costs against the decrease of the additional amortization that this causes, decide on the (probably) hundreds of changes needed, determine the appropriate subledger, write up the journal entries and then find a terminal where he could log into the system and hand-enter these entries all by himself or with just one or two people helping him seems unlikely.
What seems likely would be him looking at the draft report, looking an underling in the eye and saying 'I think you should have capitalized a billion dollars of these line charges.' and the underling goes and has his department figure it out and do it. Meanwhile the underling rationalizes it by saying to himself 'GAAP is so darned vague on this point. It certainly could be interpreted that way.' and the underling's underlings say to themselves 'Our bosses are a bunch of morons who don't understand GAAP. Oh well, it's their asses on the line, not mine.'
I think there is more than greed going on. Look at Worldcom... you can say that the guys at the very top were motivated by greed to grossly mischaracterize their expenses, but what about the other 100 people in accounting who *had* to know that the numbers were being put in the wrong place? (I don't believe the CFO *by himself* could move numbers that large around without many other people knowing it, from the Controller on down to the guy doing the journal entries.)
One unethical person generally can't do much wrong in a corporation (they are set up that way - mainly to avoid things like embezzlement); that person must convince many other people to act unethically. These are the people that ethics courses might help.
The guy who is making a ton of money by lieing *knows* he is acting unethically and acts anyway. The people who are helping and probably not making much money probably are simply doing what they are told or have been drawn down the slippery slope from right to grey to wrong. If they had a stronger sense of right, wrong and grey they might *not* do what they are told when what they are told to do is wrong.
This is absolutely true. But we have struck a balance between the producers and consumers of IP that has worked pretty well for a pretty long time. Digital media came along and upset the balance. Then the DMCA came along to compensate and *really* upset the balance. That's why it's bad.
I think most people on this board want reasonable protection of copyright, but unfair protection that only benefits the very large media companies is not in our best interests.
1. Bertelsmann said they would buy the company for $9 million plus forgiveness of debt (of some $83 million) 2. Bertelsmann claimed their bid was worth the sum of the two (clearly not true since Bertelsmann would never have received 100 cents on the dollar for the debt - the bid was worth closer to $9.2 - $9.3 million by my reckoning) 3. The RIAA claimed that Bertelsmann's mischaracterization of the bid dissuaded other bidders and thus made the process unfair 4. The judge agreed and threw out the only existing bid (!) 5. Napster had to shut down - the RIAA got exactly what it wanted.
It seems that the judge didn't understand the purpose of the bankruptcy code: to save businesses that could be saved by allowing them to restructure their obligations. Instead he had the company forsake their only bid and shut down; this outcome was so predictable that I have to wonder what the judge was thinking. It would be easy to believe he deliberately misinterpreted the law to favor of the RIAA, but that can't be it because he is a Delaware judge, not a California one.
Of course, the point is moot because Bertelsmann post-Middlehoff probably would have abandoned the assets once purchased anyway.
Maybe so, but it's like a nuclear weapon. You don't have to use it, and don't really want to because the fallout would contaminate you, but the very existence of it is a formidable and chilling threat.
I do send my money... to the EFF and the ACLU (much as I am conflicted over the latter.) I hope they spend it wisely.
But, it seems that there are probably more than a million people who read/. (your user # is 588k, and there are probably 3 times as many lurkers as registered users, although many of the registered user #s are probably dormant.) In a Senate/House race, even 1/50th of that number is a lot of votes.
All the congressman would use the money for is to buy votes; why not give him the votes directly?
Since/.-ers seem pretty unified on a few issues (the DMCA, the Sonny Bono Increased Profits Act, etc), maybe someone who knows how to do this could organize a friend/foe list around those topics? I will do it myself if people identify the issues and tells me how to find voting records.
There must also be some way of finding the arch-villains: the people who sponsored the legislation or killed friendly legislation in committee. Is anyone out there a Washington expert?
One of the things I like about this article is that he tells us who to support if we agree: Rep. Rick Boucher, Democrat of Virginia. One of the things I hate about most news items is that they always attribute actions to "Congress" or "a group of Congressmen." How are we supposed to be a representative democracy unless we know who to credit and who to blame?
So, Virginians, Vote Boucher!
And let's always credit the good guys and demonize the bad guys by name, party affiliation and voting district!
I believe most/.ers realize Scandinavia is way ahead in wireless, not because the US is more rural (Finland has a *far* lower population density than the US: 15 people/km^2 v. 30/km^2 in the US) but because your government has encouraged the industry. The US press took note of this fact long ago (soda machines activated by cellphones! Finnish kids getting enlarged thumbs!) I think Americans are just more interested in their countrymen's doings than in the doings of others.
I am always a bit confused by these postings from non-Americans: doesn't the Finnish media pay more attention to things when they happen in Finland? Hard for me to tell because when in Scandinavia I can only read the English-language papers. It does seem the Brits pay an awful lot of attention to things that affect only them (the Royals, cricket, the Pound - oops, sorry), but that just seems natural.
Did you read the article? The main point wasn't organization, it was collective, emergent behaviour. For example, Prince William being mobbed by young ladies as he visits a pub, or the military abandoning command and control in favor of a statistical type of attack (ie. change the point totals assigned to target and it will probably attract more fire, depending on what decisions individuals make). This is exactly the opposite of organization in the way you mean it: the ability of the few to represent the diffuse will of many to defeat a much larger enemy through careful planning and intelligent execution.
I don't think Microsoft will be beaten by our unthinking, uncoordinated action. If you want something else to prevail, I think you need someone to coordinate the action.
As to "the dictatorship from Washington DC to Geneva", I really think you should read the article. It wasn't about that.
As an aside, I was surprised it was modded as insightful also, I intended it as humorous.
That's true! Maybe that's why HP ended up not doing the deal... $18 billion, can you imagine? The PwCC partners must be pulling their hair out having missed that opportunity! Although, since I believe HP proposed an all stock deal and HP's stock price is down by 50% from a year ago, in a way the price has only dropped 60%, from $9b to $3.5b, and now they're getting mostly cash.
They picked it up cheap, if you assume all the revenue is coming over. Integration of professional services firms is never easy.
Earnings per share shouldn't go down in the medium-term because PwCC/Monday was profitable and IBM is paying mostly in cash. In the short-term, though, IBM will probably take a big charge to restructure their own consulting organization (by restructure I mean fire many people, of course) and make PwCC fire many people as well.
Right. I worked for one of these orgs too, and since the accountants had more votes in the partnership and held the managing partner positions, they called all the shots. The consultants just got to complain about it and threaten to go elsewhere. Remember Accenture's multi-year fight to get out from under the thumb of AA? It was only resolved through *big* payments from Accenture to AA, and then only after bitter arbitration.
From Accenture's IPO prospectus:
"Until August 7, 2000, we had contractual relationships with Andersen Worldwide and Arthur Andersen under certain agreements whereby we and our "member firms," which are now our subsidiaries, on the one hand, and Arthur Andersen and its member firms, on the other hand, were two stand-alone business units linked through various member firm agreements to Andersen Worldwide, a single coordinating entity. On December 17, 1997, the Accenture member firms requested binding arbitration of claims that Andersen Worldwide and the member firms of Arthur Andersen, among other things, had breached or failed to perform material obligations owed to the Accenture member firms under the member firm agreements.
"On August 7, 2000, the parties to the arbitration were notified that the tribunal appointed by the International Chamber of Commerce in its final award, dated July 28, 2000, had ruled that Andersen Worldwide had breached its material obligations under the member firm agreements and that the Accenture member firms were excused from any further obligations to Andersen Worldwide and Arthur Andersen as of August 7, 2000. Under the terms of the final award, Accenture, and each of the member firms comprising it, was required to cease using the Andersen name or any derivative thereof, no later than December 31, 2000. On January 1, 2001, we began to conduct business under the name Accenture.
"On December 19, 2000, Andersen Worldwide and Arthur Andersen LLP, on behalf of themselves and all other Arthur Andersen member firms, partners, shareholders and others, and Accenture Partners, S.C. and Accenture LLP, on behalf of themselves and all other Accenture member firms, partners, shareholders and others, executed a binding memorandum of understanding agreement to settle and resolve all existing and potential disputes among the parties concerning the implementation of the final award and the separation of the Accenture member firms from Andersen Worldwide and Arthur Andersen, including the discharge and release of all obligations of parties under the terminated member firm agreements between the Accenture member firms and Andersen Worldwide. The memorandum of understanding agreement provided for the parties to enter into a number of definitive agreements with respect to services, subleases, releases and indemnities and to finalize other arrangements among the parties. It also contained provisions for specified uses by Accenture of its former name. On March 1, 2001, Accenture, Andersen Worldwide and Arthur Andersen completed implementation of the memorandum of understanding agreement by executing releases and indemnities, finalizing other arrangements among the parties and entering into services agreements..."
Agree on most points: I didn't buy a CD for two years (and I am a pretty big music fan) because the prices were so high and times were tough. Read an article on a couple of bands, downloaded a few songs, went to the record store and bought $80 of CDs that day.
Then I ripped them onto my Nomad Jukebox. I don't have a portable CD player. If I couldn't rip the CDs, I couldn't listen to them (except in front of my computer) and wouldn't buy them.
It's baloney when they say this lowers music sales. Maybe for college students who would have just taped their friends' CDs anyway, but not overall. It's the crazy price of the CDs that impacts sales.
The only two points I disagree on are: the split of revenue between label and artist. It ain't any of my business and not really part of this debate (you can't really believe you're fighting for artist compensation by not paying for music, after all). And the DOS on the RIAA - they don't care. As someone pointed out, their job is to draw criticism away from the people really making the decisions: the record companies themselves. A DOS on the RIAA is pointless.
When I was a kid and we would call my grandparents in Florida, they would always say "this must be costing you a fortune!" Well, no, not since they broke up Ma Bell and gave us some competition. A few more minutes on the phone with my grandparents, to me, is worth having a few extra area codes.
It's not so bad here in the US as reading Slashdot would make it seem. There's actually a pretty strong thread of populism in all of our national politicians' actions. The very existence of antitrust actions shows that. They only try to slip in favors to their big contributors when they think noone is watching, like in the tax code or in FCC regulations.
Luckily, there has been the survival of the 'virtuous man' concept in that many Supreme Court justices take pride in their independence and often act counter to the policies of those who appointed them. So the legislative branch will often void actions that are clearly out-of-bounds.
Like Churchill said, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
Economists often describe monopolies as entities that have more than a 70% or so market share. This is where the inefficiencies of monopoly rents seem to start kicking in.
So, although 'monopoly' technically means a single seller, it has been used in a broader sense for the last 100 or so years.
Nationwide fiber-optic networks going for pennies on the dollar! Worldcom's price/book ratio is only 0.08 right now. That means you can buy the company Bernie Ebbers so lovingly assembled for only eight cents per dollar of net assets.
So, if anybody has $4.4 billion to spare, email me and we can be oligopolists too!
It basically says this point is untried and unclear. It does say "the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act shelters consumers from being sued over music they copy at home for their use. Furthermore -- and this is where the law gets ambiguous -- the act also may protect consumers from being sued over music they copy for their friends, legal experts say."
Of course, I wouldn't pay USA Today $500/hour to represent me in court:).
Slashdot Mirror
Americans talk about our collosal historical screwups all the time. Maybe just not to the rest of the world. Try mentioning slavery, native americans, manifest destiny or a dozen other historical topics on any college campus in the country and you'll immediately be mobbed by young people demanding justice and chaining themselves to building. Unless the interpretation of our history you are referring to is that of the 1950s or before, you don't understand the US. Take a look at some more recent scholarship, including the work of Zinn, Foner and Forrest McDonald. The only people still pushing the saccharine sweet George Washington is Hollywood. We justly celebrate his strong points (but for his forbearance, the US would have become a monarchy) but are well aware of his weaknesses (slave owner.) You've got to stop watching TV/movies and read some books.
:) ) to reduce drug costs by buying generics (a policy approved by the Clinton administration for Africa.) Brazil threatened to ignore US IP and, I believe, will get substantial concessions not to ditch the whole IP framework.
That said, if you understand how modern democratic governments work, you know that the US can't give lip service to ignoring IP protection. But, in fact, it doesn't do a heck of a lot to enforce it in the developing world. Look at Microsoft in China. Go to India and see how easy it is to buy pirated software. Look at the response of the American government to efforts by countries around the world (including Canada
You forget that, as sovereigns, countries choose which laws to enforce within their own boundaries. If Brazil were to turn a blind eye to domestic companies violating US IP to manufacture affordable AIDS medication, you would hardly hear a squawk from the US. It's only when Brazil makes a big deal about nullifying the IP laws that the US feels it has to respond -- it's just a negotiating tactic on Brazil's part anyway: why else would they draw attention to it?
In short, I believe that developing countries can do to the US exactly what the US did to the developed countries of 100 years ago: ignore their IP protection, and get the exact same response as the US did: annoyance.
Of course, there's more to life and, especially politics, than making money. Every once in a while people think of things like the anticipated lifestyle of their grandchildren and the wisdom of overreliance on products produced where the country has little or no control.
I have heard that Japan subsidises its rice industry, despite the resulting higher costs. It still makes sense.
Spoken like a true economist. While true that, pari passu, tariffs simply create inefficiency a la Ricardo, the poster is correct that the US has, at times, succesfully used tariffs to protect and nurture local industry. The several tariffs implemented in the early to mid nineteenth century are an excellent case in point. While they had their unfortunate side effects (like creating an atmosphere that prevented the amicable settlement of the slavery question) they are widely believed to have allowed the US to enter the world stage as a manufacturing power in opposition to the Brits' continuing mercantilism.
The same is true in the past 30 years in aircraft, for instance, in Europe. IMHO, American dominance through sunk capital (including learning costs) and government support (mainly through defense spending) would never have been overcome without European support of Airbus.
Now, if you really are an economist, you are either going to ask me for proof or cite studies showing what I have just said is wrong. I can only respond by saying that sometimes things are clearer before you do the regression on megabytes of low-precision, politically-motivated data and appealing to some other economist of the non-Economist school for support.
Well, big companies don't keep their books in a big, green book anymore. They have large complicated accounting systems with lots of interconnecting modules. For Sullivan to look at draft reports, determine how much less in expenses he needed to make the wall street number, weigh the increase of capitalizing some costs against the decrease of the additional amortization that this causes, decide on the (probably) hundreds of changes needed, determine the appropriate subledger, write up the journal entries and then find a terminal where he could log into the system and hand-enter these entries all by himself or with just one or two people helping him seems unlikely.
What seems likely would be him looking at the draft report, looking an underling in the eye and saying 'I think you should have capitalized a billion dollars of these line charges.' and the underling goes and has his department figure it out and do it. Meanwhile the underling rationalizes it by saying to himself 'GAAP is so darned vague on this point. It certainly could be interpreted that way.' and the underling's underlings say to themselves 'Our bosses are a bunch of morons who don't understand GAAP. Oh well, it's their asses on the line, not mine.'
I think there is more than greed going on. Look at Worldcom... you can say that the guys at the very top were motivated by greed to grossly mischaracterize their expenses, but what about the other 100 people in accounting who *had* to know that the numbers were being put in the wrong place? (I don't believe the CFO *by himself* could move numbers that large around without many other people knowing it, from the Controller on down to the guy doing the journal entries.)
One unethical person generally can't do much wrong in a corporation (they are set up that way - mainly to avoid things like embezzlement); that person must convince many other people to act unethically. These are the people that ethics courses might help.
The guy who is making a ton of money by lieing *knows* he is acting unethically and acts anyway. The people who are helping and probably not making much money probably are simply doing what they are told or have been drawn down the slippery slope from right to grey to wrong. If they had a stronger sense of right, wrong and grey they might *not* do what they are told when what they are told to do is wrong.
This is absolutely true. But we have struck a balance between the producers and consumers of IP that has worked pretty well for a pretty long time. Digital media came along and upset the balance. Then the DMCA came along to compensate and *really* upset the balance. That's why it's bad.
I think most people on this board want reasonable protection of copyright, but unfair protection that only benefits the very large media companies is not in our best interests.
My take on the legal maneuvering was this:
1. Bertelsmann said they would buy the company for $9 million plus forgiveness of debt (of some $83 million)
2. Bertelsmann claimed their bid was worth the sum of the two (clearly not true since Bertelsmann would never have received 100 cents on the dollar for the debt - the bid was worth closer to $9.2 - $9.3 million by my reckoning)
3. The RIAA claimed that Bertelsmann's mischaracterization of the bid dissuaded other bidders and thus made the process unfair
4. The judge agreed and threw out the only existing bid (!)
5. Napster had to shut down - the RIAA got exactly what it wanted.
It seems that the judge didn't understand the purpose of the bankruptcy code: to save businesses that could be saved by allowing them to restructure their obligations. Instead he had the company forsake their only bid and shut down; this outcome was so predictable that I have to wonder what the judge was thinking. It would be easy to believe he deliberately misinterpreted the law to favor of the RIAA, but that can't be it because he is a Delaware judge, not a California one.
Of course, the point is moot because Bertelsmann post-Middlehoff probably would have abandoned the assets once purchased anyway.
Maybe so, but it's like a nuclear weapon. You don't have to use it, and don't really want to because the fallout would contaminate you, but the very existence of it is a formidable and chilling threat.
I do send my money... to the EFF and the ACLU (much as I am conflicted over the latter.) I hope they spend it wisely.
/. (your user # is 588k, and there are probably 3 times as many lurkers as registered users, although many of the registered user #s are probably dormant.) In a Senate/House race, even 1/50th of that number is a lot of votes.
But, it seems that there are probably more than a million people who read
All the congressman would use the money for is to buy votes; why not give him the votes directly?
Since /.-ers seem pretty unified on a few issues (the DMCA, the Sonny Bono Increased Profits Act, etc), maybe someone who knows how to do this could organize a friend/foe list around those topics? I will do it myself if people identify the issues and tells me how to find voting records.
There must also be some way of finding the arch-villains: the people who sponsored the legislation or killed friendly legislation in committee. Is anyone out there a Washington expert?
One of the things I like about this article is that he tells us who to support if we agree: Rep. Rick Boucher, Democrat of Virginia. One of the things I hate about most news items is that they always attribute actions to "Congress" or "a group of Congressmen." How are we supposed to be a representative democracy unless we know who to credit and who to blame?
So, Virginians, Vote Boucher!
And let's always credit the good guys and demonize the bad guys by name, party affiliation and voting district!
I believe most /.ers realize Scandinavia is way ahead in wireless, not because the US is more rural (Finland has a *far* lower population density than the US: 15 people/km^2 v. 30/km^2 in the US) but because your government has encouraged the industry. The US press took note of this fact long ago (soda machines activated by cellphones! Finnish kids getting enlarged thumbs!) I think Americans are just more interested in their countrymen's doings than in the doings of others.
I am always a bit confused by these postings from non-Americans: doesn't the Finnish media pay more attention to things when they happen in Finland? Hard for me to tell because when in Scandinavia I can only read the English-language papers. It does seem the Brits pay an awful lot of attention to things that affect only them (the Royals, cricket, the Pound - oops, sorry), but that just seems natural.
What do you think?
Did you read the article? The main point wasn't organization, it was collective, emergent behaviour. For example, Prince William being mobbed by young ladies as he visits a pub, or the military abandoning command and control in favor of a statistical type of attack (ie. change the point totals assigned to target and it will probably attract more fire, depending on what decisions individuals make). This is exactly the opposite of organization in the way you mean it: the ability of the few to represent the diffuse will of many to defeat a much larger enemy through careful planning and intelligent execution.
I don't think Microsoft will be beaten by our unthinking, uncoordinated action. If you want something else to prevail, I think you need someone to coordinate the action.
As to "the dictatorship from Washington DC to Geneva", I really think you should read the article. It wasn't about that.
As an aside, I was surprised it was modded as insightful also, I intended it as humorous.
LOL!
That's true! Maybe that's why HP ended up not doing the deal... $18 billion, can you imagine? The PwCC partners must be pulling their hair out having missed that opportunity! Although, since I believe HP proposed an all stock deal and HP's stock price is down by 50% from a year ago, in a way the price has only dropped 60%, from $9b to $3.5b, and now they're getting mostly cash.
It has happened. We have become ants.
They picked it up cheap, if you assume all the revenue is coming over. Integration of professional services firms is never easy.
Earnings per share shouldn't go down in the medium-term because PwCC/Monday was profitable and IBM is paying mostly in cash. In the short-term, though, IBM will probably take a big charge to restructure their own consulting organization (by restructure I mean fire many people, of course) and make PwCC fire many people as well.
My prediction? 1+1=1 here.
Blue Monday.
Right. I worked for one of these orgs too, and since the accountants had more votes in the partnership and held the managing partner positions, they called all the shots. The consultants just got to complain about it and threaten to go elsewhere. Remember Accenture's multi-year fight to get out from under the thumb of AA? It was only resolved through *big* payments from Accenture to AA, and then only after bitter arbitration.
From Accenture's IPO prospectus:
"Until August 7, 2000, we had contractual relationships with Andersen Worldwide and Arthur Andersen under certain agreements whereby we and our "member firms," which are now our subsidiaries, on the one hand, and Arthur Andersen and its member firms, on the other hand, were two stand-alone business units linked through various member firm agreements to Andersen Worldwide, a single coordinating entity. On December 17, 1997, the Accenture member firms requested binding arbitration of claims that Andersen Worldwide and the member firms of Arthur Andersen, among other things, had breached or failed to perform material obligations owed to the Accenture member firms under the member firm agreements.
"On August 7, 2000, the parties to the arbitration were notified that the tribunal appointed by the International Chamber of Commerce in its final award, dated July 28, 2000, had ruled that Andersen Worldwide had breached its material obligations under the member firm agreements and that the Accenture member firms were excused from any further obligations to Andersen Worldwide and Arthur Andersen as of August 7, 2000. Under the terms of the final award, Accenture, and each of the member firms comprising it, was required to cease using the Andersen name or any derivative thereof, no later than December 31, 2000. On January 1, 2001, we began to conduct business under the name Accenture.
"On December 19, 2000, Andersen Worldwide and Arthur Andersen LLP, on behalf of themselves and all other Arthur Andersen member firms, partners, shareholders and others, and Accenture Partners, S.C. and Accenture LLP, on behalf of themselves and all other Accenture member firms, partners, shareholders and others, executed a binding memorandum of understanding agreement to settle and resolve all existing and potential disputes among the parties concerning the implementation of the final award and the separation of the Accenture member firms from Andersen Worldwide and Arthur Andersen, including the discharge and release of all obligations of parties under the terminated member firm agreements between the Accenture member firms and Andersen Worldwide. The memorandum of understanding agreement provided for the parties to enter into a number of definitive agreements with respect to services, subleases, releases and indemnities and to finalize other arrangements among the parties. It also contained provisions for specified uses by Accenture of its former name. On March 1, 2001, Accenture, Andersen Worldwide and Arthur Andersen completed implementation of the memorandum of understanding agreement by executing releases and indemnities, finalizing other arrangements among the parties and entering into services agreements..."
Agree on most points: I didn't buy a CD for two years (and I am a pretty big music fan) because the prices were so high and times were tough. Read an article on a couple of bands, downloaded a few songs, went to the record store and bought $80 of CDs that day.
Then I ripped them onto my Nomad Jukebox. I don't have a portable CD player. If I couldn't rip the CDs, I couldn't listen to them (except in front of my computer) and wouldn't buy them.
It's baloney when they say this lowers music sales. Maybe for college students who would have just taped their friends' CDs anyway, but not overall. It's the crazy price of the CDs that impacts sales.
The only two points I disagree on are: the split of revenue between label and artist. It ain't any of my business and not really part of this debate (you can't really believe you're fighting for artist compensation by not paying for music, after all). And the DOS on the RIAA - they don't care. As someone pointed out, their job is to draw criticism away from the people really making the decisions: the record companies themselves. A DOS on the RIAA is pointless.
When I was a kid and we would call my grandparents in Florida, they would always say "this must be costing you a fortune!" Well, no, not since they broke up Ma Bell and gave us some competition. A few more minutes on the phone with my grandparents, to me, is worth having a few extra area codes.
It's not so bad here in the US as reading Slashdot would make it seem. There's actually a pretty strong thread of populism in all of our national politicians' actions. The very existence of antitrust actions shows that. They only try to slip in favors to their big contributors when they think noone is watching, like in the tax code or in FCC regulations.
Luckily, there has been the survival of the 'virtuous man' concept in that many Supreme Court justices take pride in their independence and often act counter to the policies of those who appointed them. So the legislative branch will often void actions that are clearly out-of-bounds.
Like Churchill said, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
Economists often describe monopolies as entities that have more than a 70% or so market share. This is where the inefficiencies of monopoly rents seem to start kicking in.
So, although 'monopoly' technically means a single seller, it has been used in a broader sense for the last 100 or so years.
Or just act like one.
Nationwide fiber-optic networks going for pennies on the dollar! Worldcom's price/book ratio is only 0.08 right now. That means you can buy the company Bernie Ebbers so lovingly assembled for only eight cents per dollar of net assets.
So, if anybody has $4.4 billion to spare, email me and we can be oligopolists too!
Don't laugh at me... this USA Today article was the first google that wasn't propaganda: Music-copying laws often shield consumers.
:).
It basically says this point is untried and unclear. It does say "the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act shelters consumers from being sued over music they copy at home for their use. Furthermore -- and this is where the law gets ambiguous -- the act also may protect consumers from being sued over music they copy for their friends, legal experts say."
Of course, I wouldn't pay USA Today $500/hour to represent me in court