Apparently even the poster didn't RTFA. From the submission:
called Near Field Communication, that could be a threat to Bluetooth.
But in the article it states clearly:
While NFC will handle identification of users through RFID, it appears that wireless protocols such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi will still be used for the data transfer.
"NFC won't replace Bluetooth or infrared. This is a new paradigm based on touching, and it will complement these existing wireless technologies," a NFC spokesman explained.
I agree that WP was a day late, and a dollar short with it's windows offerings, and that simple fact was the reason for its downfall. That being said:
Reveal Codes, is only a useful feature if the product does not behave as expected. Reveal codes helped people force the program to do what it wanted to do, because occasionally the program didn't *do* what it wanted them to do. And in the real world, this problem has largely gone away. With a WYSIWYG display you simply do not have the issues that you had when you had to guess how your document would print.
But you still have issues with *why the fuck* Word is making the page/line/paragraph look like it does. It does me absolutely no good to see a borked format if I can't figure out why it is borked. Behaving as expected != correctly displaying WYSIWYG. Reveal Codes was an absolute god-send, and a feature I still miss from good old WP5.1. (As an example, inserting/editting text just after some formatted text, say a subscript, is a pain in the ass.)
And that describes Words dominance. It was, and arguably is, the most powerful word processor, with fully custimizable UI depending on the needs, skill, and tasks of the user. This generated, possibly, the longest most sustained growth in productivity in human history.
Um, I think maybe, just maybe, you are overstating the global/cultural benefit of one bloated piece of software.
Sampling only produces an estimation of behavior. If the sample group isn't representative of the whole, then the estimate won't be either.
Yep, but with large populations the only thing you can ever have is an estimation of behavior. The great thing about this situation is that you can sample as much as you want, to get whatever level of accuracy you prefer.
What happens if I create a tune that only 100 people worldwide decide to download and listen to, but none are part of the sample group? I would get nothing.
But if you had a song that only 100 people downloaded, then your actual amount of the pot would round to $0.00 anyway.
Sampling is fine for determining what "most" people are listening to, but it fails to reward the fringes.
Again, with the high availability of data you can sample enough to reflect the meaningful fringes, those who would actually get money from this scheme.
Well, my point is not to compare this system with iTunes. My point is that $5/month still doesn't beat free. If people don't support 99c/song, they won't support $5/month either.
People do support $.99/song, iTunes seems to be doing reasonably well. $5/month would likely be more appealing (people greatly prefer flat rates to itemized rates for most things), likely be cheaper for many users (thats 5 songs, or 1 album/2 months), and again, big thing here, have a much greater selection. This is a basic disagreement between us, I think people use p2p largely out of lack of real viable alternative, you believe a desire for free music is the motivation.
I guess voting would be useless if it was based on sampling and was susceptible to as much fraud as P2P statistics are. As for sampling - last presidential election exit polls? Howard Dean this year? This cannot be compared to counting ballots where errors are mechanical (and can be recounted) rather than simply remain unknown
Last presidential exit polls are actually a good point, on how close to reality sampling can be. The exit polls were extremely close, so close the networks called it one way, then the other, then back again. In reality, the difference (at least the "official" difference) in votes was, indeed, tiny. The point that has not been made, at least not in any mainstream press I've come across, is that if you were to take the exact same ballots, have the exact same people count them again, you would come out with a different number then 530-whatever it was. Do it a third time, and a fourth, and you would *not* have the same number twice. When counting anything with numbers in the millions, a difference of 500 is completely statistically insignificant. Errors may be mechanical (or clerical, or systemic), but they will always be present. As for Dean, it is well known that the Iowa system (caucuses) are difficult to gauge as they involve a much greater level of participation than primaries do. Beyond that, if you looked at post-caucus polls, you'd see they are very much in line with the results. Measurements before an event as changable as that are going to differ from the actual results, but polls at the same time will be much more accurate.
This scares me - accounting done with statistics and sampling. Admittedly, this could be more efficient on a large enough data sample, putting smaller bands/labels at a huge disadvantage, while analysing mostly RIAA-related data.
Well since that is how most biologic, behavioral & psychological research is done, we've already decided it is a worthwhile methodology, scary as it may feel. Done correctly, it only puts extremely minor bands at a small disadvantage (and they already are at a disadvantage in the current system in which they gain no benefit at all from p2p). You do have a huge dataset you can work from, which actually improves discrimination of smaller aspects of the data.
Well, it's kind of related to this though. Legislative branch is there to ensure fair, and free market competition with some rules for all to obey. They shouldn't get involved in setting up a socialist wealth redistribution systems. What if I want to market my songs and sell them for $5 each, while my neighbor doesn't want to market himself and is satisfied if he gets 25c/song download? This type of system would be unfair restraint of trade by assuming all songs are made equal. It's simply wrong.
Then you can do so. This does not prevent you from selling anything in anyway you want, it simply acknowledges that p2p trading will occur. You can sell your $5 songs, and get nothing from the p2p trading, or you can get something from the p2p trading. You can label it a 'socialist wealth redistribution' system all you want, but the current landscape is a 'wealth loss' system. The problem I have with your preferred method is that it still does not address the issue of p2p distribution. Sure, kill the riaa, get rid of price-fixing, etc etc, but p2p is still going to be an important part of music distribution, and unless you deal with it, an illegal method at that. Why not leverage this system that is quite well suited for media distribution?
I don't see a point of such service since such commercial "opt-in" centralized services, like iTunes, are already available. If iTunes cannot deal with the problem, how can this imaginary system? "There will always be people who participate in copyright infringement" is not a good answer - since that's the status quo now; i.e. that new system won't change that in any significant way.
If you think iTunes & legal $5/mo P2P are even close to equivalent you aren't looking very closely. In terms of price & available selection alone they are on completely different planes. That is like saying 'since we have Greyhound busses, why do we need cars?' The choice between iTunes, $1 a pop, very limited selection, DRM (minimal, but still there)'ed music vs $0, illegal, nearly unlimited selection, DRMless, poor to good quality, poor to good speed P2P is hardly anywhere close to $0, illegal, nearly unlimited selection, DRMless, poor to good quality, poor to good speed P2P vs. $5/mo, legal, nearly unlimited selection, DRMless, poor to good quality, poor to good speed P2P. One of the major benefits of P2P is the extensive collections available, iTunes doesn't even come close.
As for "there will always be people who infringe...," that is true. Period. The point of any system is to minimize them by making a system that most people find acceptable. iTunes is a good step in that direction (albeit iTunes itself is only a method for selling hardware), but I submit this proposal is an even further step. More people would be willing to pay for the benefits of this system, and fewer would resort to infringement.
Who said intentionally? Some people don't care about artist name, some don't care about song names, others don't care about any names, only categories.
I would bet those are the minority. A quick search of kazaa, for example, seems to suggest that *most* of the content does have at least song name & artist (correct or not). Beyond that, the error in labelling is very possibly uniform across bands/genres/whichever breakdown you want, or if not, is empirically determinable by sampling a some subset out there. There will obviously be error in measurement, just like there is for any other largescale measurement...one we readily accept in everyday life (you think the vote count of 5 million ballots has an error anywhere close to 537?)
As for measuring, another post deals with that. Sampling is a science much used in everyday life by anyone wanting city/nation/society wide information. As for fraud, yes, a system is susceptible to tampering. That hardly invalidates the idea, or else voting would be pretty useless. You deal with it by protection & prevention.
Movies & software are actually ancillary to this proposal. As also mentioned in the article, those industries are dealing better than riaa. The applicability to entirely different fields will naturally involve changes to the system. For a music distribution method, that is irrelevant.
Sampling how? How can you sample a song located on someone else's network unless you download it first? Then you are in the business of downloading and sampling every possible filename.extention variation of every song available on any P2P network - I don't know who wrote that proposal but that's impossible, especially when that "sampling" goes in the way of calculating accurate and timely counts to divide the revenues. Above I already replied to the claims of accuracy that they would have me believe their system would have.
Sampling = looking at a small subset of a population to infer information about the population as a whole. To know the average weight of an african swallow, the number of people who wear seatbelts, or the number of trees in Aspen, CO, you don't count every titmouse, person, or tree. There are
Boy, you don't get statistics, do you? Sampling is fine, given a large enough sample size (which is far, far smaller than 'everyone everywhere'). This kind of distribution is ideally suited as you have a very large number of transactions, and the ability to monitor as large a percentage as you need for whatever precision you desire.
The problem is that I cannot see how the money can be divided amongst the rights holders in a reasonable way.
Sit on a big pipe and inspect x% of the p2p packets going through you. Randomly (anonymously) search the collections of x% of p2p users' shared directories. Done. This is much better than for blank media, as you actually have access to all the data that is being moved. Sampling is a very researched statistical field.
How can anyone know what I download or copy?
If you think no one can know *exactly* what you are downloading (save maybe from freenet or somesuch that 0.001% of the population really make use of), you are deluding yourself. The major reasons it isn't done are cost & lack of interest by those in position to do it, not inability.
Re: point 2, as mentioned in the proposal, you can legislate it into being. Re point 3, could you explain what those new solutions are? The websites are extremely lacking in any real information. It's all great to say 'everyone gets paid,' but how will it actually work?
Why wouldn't they simply keep using Kazaa, Morpheus or whatever they are using now without paying $5/month?
Because for $5 a month, you are 1. supporting the music you care about and 2. not in danger of being attacked by rabidly litigious riaa stormtroopers. There will always be people who participate in copyright infringement, that isn't avoidable. The point is to try and bring the masses into a system that is reasonable to everyone.
Not to mention how they would determine who is an "artist," not that only music gets shared online - how about software and movies?
Most people don't mislabel their mp3s or wmas or aacs on purpose, why would they? If that kind of fraud appears, it would be easy to simply actualy listen to a sampling and determine the %age of fraud. If you RTFA you'd note that they specifically address the movies/software aspect (these industries are not suffering as badly, are adapting to the new technology better, and have been less litigious..plus there is nothing to prevent this strategy from working with movies & software as well.).
What if people encode their files in different formats, bitrates, and with different encoders? Who would you trust to do the count - the RIAA cartel?
What if? Again, in the article, they suggest a sampling technique be used to estimate popularity, and that it be done by a non-profit group (in the vein of ASCAP, BMI & SESAC, organizations designed for a similar problem of new technology and music 'pirates,' that seem to have worked out reasonably well for the past half century)
The rest of your post assumes the RIAA is doing the counting, which is not the case. For the time being they will have the power with regards to artists and contracts, just as they do now. However, once this collective licensing system is in place, some of the RIAA's dominance will decrease, and that can't be bad. The article even suggests that this collective license might need to be legislatively started, perhaps even make it a compulsive license.
As for independent artists, they are benefited by ASCAP, etc just as much as major label artists are, IIRC you need no major label affiliation to participate. This would be just as true with the file-sharing collective license.
Sure, it would have been easier if he had done what was asked. However in this country we have the rights to not do so (at least in circumstances such as these). The fact that the officer and Nevada say otherwise is really the problem. The 'but its not a big deal' argument is dangerous as it leads to an eroding of basic rights that have been around since the country began. For now it's handing over an ID, but what happens when it comes to, say, cavity searches? Where do you draw the line? Fortunately for us, the line was drawn a long time ago so we only have to worry about making sure it doesn't start slipping.
So say I have a bike, not a car, I can't use the freeways at all (excepting a few small stretches that are specifically allowed), aren't I being just as discriminated against?
It's the fact that you choose to drive alone (or that I choose to only ride a bike) that is preventing you from using the lanes. Your own examples show that there are plenty of services the state provides that require many choices to be made in order to gain any benefit. Once you choose to have kids, you'll be able to use that HOV lane as well as get the benefit of public schools, shouldn't you be as upset about schools as you are about the HOV lanes?
Oh come on, one of advantages of the net is that you are able to pick and choose where to go and what to do. It is perhaps the most interactive medium available, one in which you *can* ignore the crap if you want. I seriously doubt very much of the good content that you pine for is unavailable. The dilution effect certainly has had an effect, but that does not mean you can't still use the good stuff out there.
You are far too young for the 'things used to be so much better when i was young' shtick. Yes the net is used for commercial endeavors, and for anonymous child porn trading, but it is also the greatest information resource in the history of the world. With google and little bit of creative searching, you can get by with a minimum of chaff in your wheat.
That's just it, they are so only because we have tried to shoehorn them into a legal system built for physical property. Copyright is not a natural right, it is one that is created by the government. No one can deny that physical property is very different from "intellectual property," (which is a horrible term). Laws that work for a physical object do not directly translate into something as etheral as an idea. Because of that, we've tried to come up with a system that treats ideas as different than physical property, that system being copyright, patent, and to some degree trademark.
There is a difference between theft of a physical property, and copyright infringement. I am being pedantic about that because it matters. It is an easy heuristic to simplify copyright infringement = theft, but doing so ignores the issues specific to the former. I think everyone would benefit from a better understanding of the system, and, with any luck, find a more equitable way of dealing with it.
It seems odd that stealing a CD is a minor crime, while one instance of copyright infringement can be a $150,000 fine. If you want to say copyright infringement = theft, then each CD you steal form the local wherehouse music should net you ~ $1.5 million (assuming 10 songs per cd) fine.
Different people listen to different quantities of music. Someone who downloads 500 songs per year will therefore make the government pay 500 times as much money to the artists than the guy who only downloads one song.
Yup, and some people drive on the interstates more than others. The police spend more time protecting some people than others. This argument, while factually true, has not prevented the gov't from funding resources that have widely disparate levels of usage.
If there is no cost incurred to the user for downloading a song, many people will download huge numbers of songs, many of which will simply get thrown away. A song with an attractive name might get many downloads, even if no onne likes it.
True, people will download a lot, though i would bet the aggregate distribution won't be that far off a realtistic estimate. As for having a good song title, that just becomes part of being successful...no different than having a well designed cd cover, good production value, or a hot lead singer.
There would be no way to track exchange of songs. If the songs have no DRM-like restrictions, than I can give a copy to my friend, an no one will no about it, so the ratings won't increase correspondingly.
This is true, but in a compulsory license scheme, the motivation to download a song legitimately combined with the ease of doing so means trading would not have that much value. If I give a friend a mix now, the artist hopes that friend will buy an album due to the new exposure. This is just as true (substituting download for buy) in a compulsory scheme. In fact, I would submit that in a compulsory world, the likelihood of downloading a song i just heard on a friends mix would be much greater than the likelihood i go buy the cd. In the former case, the effort is damn painless, in the latter it is painful to the tune of $15 or so.
Even though distribution costs are small on the internet someone still needs to supply the servers from which songs are downloaded before they are shared. As it would be impossible to do this profitably when one could just get the songs from a P2P service, this too would have to be run with taxpayer dollars.
Ok, 0.01% of the compulsory license fee (be it tax, levy, whatever) is used to pay for bandwidth and servers. Problem solved.
Most people of the free world--especially Americans--are mistrustful of the government interfering in markets, especially when it come to effectively monopolizing information markets as public goods. This belief is certainly not just superstitious, and it prevails regardless of how noble the intent of such schemes. Therefore, it would be damn hard to drum up popular support for such an initiative.
Um, I'm not so sure. Ask the american public if it trusts the recording industry effectively monopolizing information markets. I'd be willing to bet that a large proportion of the population would be happy with a small tax increase and "free" music unencumbered by the RIAA. Popular support for bitchslaping the recording industry seems to be pretty strong.
The arguments above are just one example of how totally free exchange of intellectual property simply can not provide the producer with fair compensation. The idea is almost a contradiction itself.
Most of the above arguments aren't very good examples. And actually, the free exchange of intellectual property can & does provide the producers with compensation (fair is very subjective qualifier) in another field. The majority of research science is funded by governmental grants, and absolutely requires the exchange of the intellectual property product. Plenty of scientists make a living doing basic (or applied) research, the free exchange of their work being integral to their continued success. Why not have a similar system for musicians? Both are talents limited to a small subset of the population, both are endeavours that benefit humanity as a whole, why not treat both similarly?
I felt the same way about the media player options for windows for a long time. While winamp2 is great for a player, what i really wanted was a reasonable library manager for a large collection. Just yesterday while reading an article on here, I saw someone recommending Virtuosa. Although I've only played with it for an evening, I'm impressed. It is the first one I've tried that has managed to even come close to iTunes' management capabilities (& speed). I don't think it deals with iPods, but at least i can manage a large collection on my windows system now.
And ya know, this is the thing about Apple...they make things that just work well. iTunes (& the even other iLife parts), the iPod, the tibook i'm typing this on, they are all engineered extremely well. Yes i can pick nits, and yes it isn't cheap, but in my mind the quality is well beyond the rest, and completely worth it. Ok, fanboy mode off.
They love to read; they spend time with friends; they do all sorts of stuff. So I swear by this: Television is a waste of time.
Get off your damn high horse. Television has plenty of crap on it, but that doesn't mean the medium sucks. There's plenty ofcrappublishedinbook format too. People who argue this 'television sucks' focus on the crap and ignore the quality stuff out there.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
-Ted
I'm pretty sure that's been done a few times over.
-Ted
called Near Field Communication, that could be a threat to Bluetooth.
But in the article it states clearly:
While NFC will handle identification of users through RFID, it appears that wireless protocols such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi will still be used for the data transfer.
"NFC won't replace Bluetooth or infrared. This is a new paradigm based on touching, and it will complement these existing wireless technologies," a NFC spokesman explained.
-Ted
Reveal Codes, is only a useful feature if the product does not behave as expected. Reveal codes helped people force the program to do what it wanted to do, because occasionally the program didn't *do* what it wanted them to do. And in the real world, this problem has largely gone away. With a WYSIWYG display you simply do not have the issues that you had when you had to guess how your document would print.
But you still have issues with *why the fuck* Word is making the page/line/paragraph look like it does. It does me absolutely no good to see a borked format if I can't figure out why it is borked. Behaving as expected != correctly displaying WYSIWYG. Reveal Codes was an absolute god-send, and a feature I still miss from good old WP5.1. (As an example, inserting/editting text just after some formatted text, say a subscript, is a pain in the ass.)
And that describes Words dominance. It was, and arguably is, the most powerful word processor, with fully custimizable UI depending on the needs, skill, and tasks of the user. This generated, possibly, the longest most sustained growth in productivity in human history.
Um, I think maybe, just maybe, you are overstating the global/cultural benefit of one bloated piece of software.
-Ted
Yep, but with large populations the only thing you can ever have is an estimation of behavior. The great thing about this situation is that you can sample as much as you want, to get whatever level of accuracy you prefer.
What happens if I create a tune that only 100 people worldwide decide to download and listen to, but none are part of the sample group? I would get nothing.
But if you had a song that only 100 people downloaded, then your actual amount of the pot would round to $0.00 anyway.
Sampling is fine for determining what "most" people are listening to, but it fails to reward the fringes.
Again, with the high availability of data you can sample enough to reflect the meaningful fringes, those who would actually get money from this scheme.
-Ted
People do support $.99/song, iTunes seems to be doing reasonably well. $5/month would likely be more appealing (people greatly prefer flat rates to itemized rates for most things), likely be cheaper for many users (thats 5 songs, or 1 album/2 months), and again, big thing here, have a much greater selection. This is a basic disagreement between us, I think people use p2p largely out of lack of real viable alternative, you believe a desire for free music is the motivation.
I guess voting would be useless if it was based on sampling and was susceptible to as much fraud as P2P statistics are. As for sampling - last presidential election exit polls? Howard Dean this year? This cannot be compared to counting ballots where errors are mechanical (and can be recounted) rather than simply remain unknown
Last presidential exit polls are actually a good point, on how close to reality sampling can be. The exit polls were extremely close, so close the networks called it one way, then the other, then back again. In reality, the difference (at least the "official" difference) in votes was, indeed, tiny. The point that has not been made, at least not in any mainstream press I've come across, is that if you were to take the exact same ballots, have the exact same people count them again, you would come out with a different number then 530-whatever it was. Do it a third time, and a fourth, and you would *not* have the same number twice. When counting anything with numbers in the millions, a difference of 500 is completely statistically insignificant. Errors may be mechanical (or clerical, or systemic), but they will always be present. As for Dean, it is well known that the Iowa system (caucuses) are difficult to gauge as they involve a much greater level of participation than primaries do. Beyond that, if you looked at post-caucus polls, you'd see they are very much in line with the results. Measurements before an event as changable as that are going to differ from the actual results, but polls at the same time will be much more accurate.
This scares me - accounting done with statistics and sampling. Admittedly, this could be more efficient on a large enough data sample, putting smaller bands/labels at a huge disadvantage, while analysing mostly RIAA-related data.
Well since that is how most biologic, behavioral & psychological research is done, we've already decided it is a worthwhile methodology, scary as it may feel. Done correctly, it only puts extremely minor bands at a small disadvantage (and they already are at a disadvantage in the current system in which they gain no benefit at all from p2p). You do have a huge dataset you can work from, which actually improves discrimination of smaller aspects of the data.
Well, it's kind of related to this though. Legislative branch is there to ensure fair, and free market competition with some rules for all to obey. They shouldn't get involved in setting up a socialist wealth redistribution systems. What if I want to market my songs and sell them for $5 each, while my neighbor doesn't want to market himself and is satisfied if he gets 25c/song download? This type of system would be unfair restraint of trade by assuming all songs are made equal. It's simply wrong.
Then you can do so. This does not prevent you from selling anything in anyway you want, it simply acknowledges that p2p trading will occur. You can sell your $5 songs, and get nothing from the p2p trading, or you can get something from the p2p trading. You can label it a 'socialist wealth redistribution' system all you want, but the current landscape is a 'wealth loss' system. The problem I have with your preferred method is that it still does not address the issue of p2p distribution. Sure, kill the riaa, get rid of price-fixing, etc etc, but p2p is still going to be an important part of music distribution, and unless you deal with it, an illegal method at that. Why not leverage this system that is quite well suited for media distribution?
-Ted
If you think iTunes & legal $5/mo P2P are even close to equivalent you aren't looking very closely. In terms of price & available selection alone they are on completely different planes. That is like saying 'since we have Greyhound busses, why do we need cars?' The choice between iTunes, $1 a pop, very limited selection, DRM (minimal, but still there)'ed music vs $0, illegal, nearly unlimited selection, DRMless, poor to good quality, poor to good speed P2P is hardly anywhere close to $0, illegal, nearly unlimited selection, DRMless, poor to good quality, poor to good speed P2P vs. $5/mo, legal, nearly unlimited selection, DRMless, poor to good quality, poor to good speed P2P. One of the major benefits of P2P is the extensive collections available, iTunes doesn't even come close.
As for "there will always be people who infringe...," that is true. Period. The point of any system is to minimize them by making a system that most people find acceptable. iTunes is a good step in that direction (albeit iTunes itself is only a method for selling hardware), but I submit this proposal is an even further step. More people would be willing to pay for the benefits of this system, and fewer would resort to infringement.
Who said intentionally? Some people don't care about artist name, some don't care about song names, others don't care about any names, only categories.
I would bet those are the minority. A quick search of kazaa, for example, seems to suggest that *most* of the content does have at least song name & artist (correct or not). Beyond that, the error in labelling is very possibly uniform across bands/genres/whichever breakdown you want, or if not, is empirically determinable by sampling a some subset out there. There will obviously be error in measurement, just like there is for any other largescale measurement...one we readily accept in everyday life (you think the vote count of 5 million ballots has an error anywhere close to 537?)
As for measuring, another post deals with that. Sampling is a science much used in everyday life by anyone wanting city/nation/society wide information. As for fraud, yes, a system is susceptible to tampering. That hardly invalidates the idea, or else voting would be pretty useless. You deal with it by protection & prevention.
Movies & software are actually ancillary to this proposal. As also mentioned in the article, those industries are dealing better than riaa. The applicability to entirely different fields will naturally involve changes to the system. For a music distribution method, that is irrelevant.
Sampling how? How can you sample a song located on someone else's network unless you download it first? Then you are in the business of downloading and sampling every possible filename.extention variation of every song available on any P2P network - I don't know who wrote that proposal but that's impossible, especially when that "sampling" goes in the way of calculating accurate and timely counts to divide the revenues. Above I already replied to the claims of accuracy that they would have me believe their system would have.
Sampling = looking at a small subset of a population to infer information about the population as a whole. To know the average weight of an african swallow, the number of people who wear seatbelts, or the number of trees in Aspen, CO, you don't count every titmouse, person, or tree. There are
-Ted
Sit on a big pipe and inspect x% of the p2p packets going through you. Randomly (anonymously) search the collections of x% of p2p users' shared directories. Done. This is much better than for blank media, as you actually have access to all the data that is being moved. Sampling is a very researched statistical field.
How can anyone know what I download or copy?
If you think no one can know *exactly* what you are downloading (save maybe from freenet or somesuch that 0.001% of the population really make use of), you are deluding yourself. The major reasons it isn't done are cost & lack of interest by those in position to do it, not inability.
-Ted
-Ted
Because for $5 a month, you are 1. supporting the music you care about and 2. not in danger of being attacked by rabidly litigious riaa stormtroopers. There will always be people who participate in copyright infringement, that isn't avoidable. The point is to try and bring the masses into a system that is reasonable to everyone.
Not to mention how they would determine who is an "artist," not that only music gets shared online - how about software and movies?
Most people don't mislabel their mp3s or wmas or aacs on purpose, why would they? If that kind of fraud appears, it would be easy to simply actualy listen to a sampling and determine the %age of fraud. If you RTFA you'd note that they specifically address the movies/software aspect (these industries are not suffering as badly, are adapting to the new technology better, and have been less litigious..plus there is nothing to prevent this strategy from working with movies & software as well.).
What if people encode their files in different formats, bitrates, and with different encoders? Who would you trust to do the count - the RIAA cartel?
What if? Again, in the article, they suggest a sampling technique be used to estimate popularity, and that it be done by a non-profit group (in the vein of ASCAP, BMI & SESAC, organizations designed for a similar problem of new technology and music 'pirates,' that seem to have worked out reasonably well for the past half century)
The rest of your post assumes the RIAA is doing the counting, which is not the case. For the time being they will have the power with regards to artists and contracts, just as they do now. However, once this collective licensing system is in place, some of the RIAA's dominance will decrease, and that can't be bad. The article even suggests that this collective license might need to be legislatively started, perhaps even make it a compulsive license.
As for independent artists, they are benefited by ASCAP, etc just as much as major label artists are, IIRC you need no major label affiliation to participate. This would be just as true with the file-sharing collective license.
-Ted
Well, duh, unless the TAD's use the MUK's to adjust their GIP's response vector. WTF?
-Ted
-Ted
It's the fact that you choose to drive alone (or that I choose to only ride a bike) that is preventing you from using the lanes. Your own examples show that there are plenty of services the state provides that require many choices to be made in order to gain any benefit. Once you choose to have kids, you'll be able to use that HOV lane as well as get the benefit of public schools, shouldn't you be as upset about schools as you are about the HOV lanes?
-Ted
-Ted
-Ted
You are far too young for the 'things used to be so much better when i was young' shtick. Yes the net is used for commercial endeavors, and for anonymous child porn trading, but it is also the greatest information resource in the history of the world. With google and little bit of creative searching, you can get by with a minimum of chaff in your wheat.
-Ted
-Ted
-Ted
*Ahem*
-Ted
That's just it, they are so only because we have tried to shoehorn them into a legal system built for physical property. Copyright is not a natural right, it is one that is created by the government. No one can deny that physical property is very different from "intellectual property," (which is a horrible term). Laws that work for a physical object do not directly translate into something as etheral as an idea. Because of that, we've tried to come up with a system that treats ideas as different than physical property, that system being copyright, patent, and to some degree trademark.
There is a difference between theft of a physical property, and copyright infringement. I am being pedantic about that because it matters. It is an easy heuristic to simplify copyright infringement = theft, but doing so ignores the issues specific to the former. I think everyone would benefit from a better understanding of the system, and, with any luck, find a more equitable way of dealing with it.
It seems odd that stealing a CD is a minor crime, while one instance of copyright infringement can be a $150,000 fine. If you want to say copyright infringement = theft, then each CD you steal form the local wherehouse music should net you ~ $1.5 million (assuming 10 songs per cd) fine.
-Ted
Um, isn't putting pieces together in a novel, useful way kind of the main part of inventing?
-Ted
Yup, and some people drive on the interstates more than others. The police spend more time protecting some people than others. This argument, while factually true, has not prevented the gov't from funding resources that have widely disparate levels of usage.
If there is no cost incurred to the user for downloading a song, many people will download huge numbers of songs, many of which will simply get thrown away. A song with an attractive name might get many downloads, even if no onne likes it.
True, people will download a lot, though i would bet the aggregate distribution won't be that far off a realtistic estimate. As for having a good song title, that just becomes part of being successful...no different than having a well designed cd cover, good production value, or a hot lead singer.
There would be no way to track exchange of songs. If the songs have no DRM-like restrictions, than I can give a copy to my friend, an no one will no about it, so the ratings won't increase correspondingly.
This is true, but in a compulsory license scheme, the motivation to download a song legitimately combined with the ease of doing so means trading would not have that much value. If I give a friend a mix now, the artist hopes that friend will buy an album due to the new exposure. This is just as true (substituting download for buy) in a compulsory scheme. In fact, I would submit that in a compulsory world, the likelihood of downloading a song i just heard on a friends mix would be much greater than the likelihood i go buy the cd. In the former case, the effort is damn painless, in the latter it is painful to the tune of $15 or so.
Even though distribution costs are small on the internet someone still needs to supply the servers from which songs are downloaded before they are shared. As it would be impossible to do this profitably when one could just get the songs from a P2P service, this too would have to be run with taxpayer dollars.
Ok, 0.01% of the compulsory license fee (be it tax, levy, whatever) is used to pay for bandwidth and servers. Problem solved.
Most people of the free world--especially Americans--are mistrustful of the government interfering in markets, especially when it come to effectively monopolizing information markets as public goods. This belief is certainly not just superstitious, and it prevails regardless of how noble the intent of such schemes. Therefore, it would be damn hard to drum up popular support for such an initiative.
Um, I'm not so sure. Ask the american public if it trusts the recording industry effectively monopolizing information markets. I'd be willing to bet that a large proportion of the population would be happy with a small tax increase and "free" music unencumbered by the RIAA. Popular support for bitchslaping the recording industry seems to be pretty strong.
The arguments above are just one example of how totally free exchange of intellectual property simply can not provide the producer with fair compensation. The idea is almost a contradiction itself.
Most of the above arguments aren't very good examples. And actually, the free exchange of intellectual property can & does provide the producers with compensation (fair is very subjective qualifier) in another field. The majority of research science is funded by governmental grants, and absolutely requires the exchange of the intellectual property product. Plenty of scientists make a living doing basic (or applied) research, the free exchange of their work being integral to their continued success. Why not have a similar system for musicians? Both are talents limited to a small subset of the population, both are endeavours that benefit humanity as a whole, why not treat both similarly?
And ya know, this is the thing about Apple...they make things that just work well. iTunes (& the even other iLife parts), the iPod, the tibook i'm typing this on, they are all engineered extremely well. Yes i can pick nits, and yes it isn't cheap, but in my mind the quality is well beyond the rest, and completely worth it. Ok, fanboy mode off.
-Ted
They love to read; they spend time with friends; they do all sorts of stuff. So I swear by this: Television is a waste of time.
Get off your damn high horse. Television has plenty of crap on it, but that doesn't mean the medium sucks. There's plenty of crap published in book format too. People who argue this 'television sucks' focus on the crap and ignore the quality stuff out there.
It is akin to saying 'CDs suck' because the local Wherehouse music has a rack full of NSync. If you are unhappy with the programs you watch, find better programs. There are plenty of good, entertaining, moving, educational shows on television.
Crappy TV rots brains about the same amount as crappy romance novels, or teeny bopper pop, or Gigli. Don't identify the medium with only its dregs.
-Ted