Not to be overly negative, but I'd just like to point out that all of the articles you cited are from 1999. There's some information in them that's interesting from a historical perspective, but not much that's practically useful.
A homegrown content management system is really simple with todays scripting/filesystems/XML.
No offense, Malakai, but it's pretty clear that you've never worked on any kind of asset management system. It's a much harder problem than you give credit for. I write asset management systems for a living, so I've had a bit of experience here. A friend of mine, who now works with me, worked at ILM last year and this past spring; he was a compositor. I've talked to him for hours about ILM's asset management system. It's entirely home-grown. If anybody can do it right, you'd think ILM could. But my friend says that it's immensely frustrating in a lot of ways.
The things that were brought up in the article about Media 360 are not new; these are the same problems that all asset management system have to deal with. The biggest one being, of course, that, from the perspectives of the artists, it's easier not to use the system than it is to use it.
I'm amazed they stumbled on this, and even more amazed they payed for the Informix product (didn't IBM buy them, and drop that product anyhow?).
Informix spun the Media 360 product off into its own company, called Ascential. I've heard some ugly rumors about the health of that venture, but I probably shouldn't say anything specific.
That's funny. On mine-- right this second-- I'm using XEmacs, GCC, and XFree86 to work on a new GTK application, Tomcat for Java servlets development, Outlook for talking to the idiots^Wcolleagues on the business side of things, and Maya for playing with a dynamics simulation in the background while I compile. Oh, and OmniWeb for posting this.
I didn't realize that all I was supposed to be using was my iPod. Better shut some stuff down....
Why the heck didn't Apple come out with a Windows version in the first place?
There have been several replies already, but no one has yet pointed out that Apple isn't in the business of selling iPods. They sell Macs. And your assertion that people won't buy a Mac just to get an iPod is demonstrably false. I know two people who did just that. They're really into music and they love their MP3 collections. They were in the market for new laptops anyway. One chose an iBook and the other a TiBook, both solely on the existence of iPod.
If there had been iPod software for Windows, both of those guys would have bought Windows laptops instead. Although they probably would have been as happy with them....
Are you breathing right now? How much did you pay for all this air?
If the air I'm breathing were rightfully the property of another, then your questions might make a kind of sense. As it is, I'm not sure I see your point.
There is also something else I want to know : is making profit equivalent to stealing?
Nope. Behold this fantastic bauble. I will sell it to you for $10. Here is your bauble, and I take my $10. We just conducted a transaction. I got $10, and you got your bauble. Neither of us took anything from another without permission.
The fact that I bought that same bauble two stalls over for $3 is not relevant. I conducted one transaction (a bauble for $3), and then I conducted another transaction ($10 for a bauble). Neither of those transactions was stealing, because both of them involved getting something in exchange for something else with the consent of both parties.
Taking a proft is not stealing.
This mean that, yes, downloading MP3 is stealing. It is stealing the control someone has over you.
Um... no. Downloading is stealing music. Don't confuse the music itself with either (a) the bits or the media that instantiate it, or (b) the rights of the owner over it. You copied the file (the bits or the media) in violation of copyright (the rights of the owner). But what you actually stole was the music itself.
I understand that everyone should be rewarded for having an idea but I'm really against the concept of owning an idea.
There's a difference between an idea like ``E = mc^2'' or ``oil can be refined from rocks'' and an idea like ``Ice Ice Baby'' or ``The Bridges of Madison County.'' The first two are abstract ideas, or inventions. The last two are creative efforts. Creative efforts have creators, and therefore they have owners. Inventions have inventors or discoverers, who have an entirely different relationship with their ideas than creators have.
In fact, if I'm stronger than you, it means that my morality is the right one.
Your ideas about morality are pretty strange. I'm not sure you understand what the word actually means. At the very least, we're talking about two different and incompatible concepts. I'm not sure further discussion of this topic would be useful for us unless we can come to an understanding of the subject matter first.
I am, however, having fascinating discussions with Sobrique and moongha. May I suggest that you try reading this thread, or this one?
There's latency, and then there's relativity. When the server receives the time request, it takes the current timestamp and puts it in a network packet, which then trickles down the wire to the client. The client receives the packet and then knows what time it was at the server. That's latency. If you're NTP'ing over a dial-up connection from a distant server, the latency can be a second or more in worst cases. (NTP may have features to compensate for this; I couldn't say.)
Relativity affects the rate at which time runs for two observers in different inertial frames. It doesn't affect synchronization directly; if you ignore or compensate for latency, you can synchronize two clocks in different reference frames. But the clocks will start to drift apart immediately due to the different rates at which time passes in the two frames.
Now here's the cool thing. According to general relativity-- actually, according to my vague recollection of general relativity from a college semester more than ten years ago-- gravity affects the rate at which time passes in a reference frame. In other words, time runs more quickly in a high gravity field relative to a lower gravity field.
It's pretty well known that the local force of gravity varies measurably over the Earth's surface. Depending on where you are, the local force of gravity may be higher or lower.
So if you wanna get accurate, pick an NTP server in a region with a similar local G to yours.
HHOS.;-)
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face it, you're never going to not be able to download music. There's always some IRC channel or some FTP or some whatever
Which is exactly why I'm very much in favor of strong crypto. The music (and other media) piracy problem goes away if we use strong crypto. Weak crypto solutions like CSS are clearly insufficient, and cause more problems than they solve.
What we really need is an open-source collaborative project to build a strong media encryption system. It's a great technical challenge, difficult and fun, and it would solve a significant problem in the world if done right. Who's going to open the Sourceforge account for us?
I think you're missing the point of Web Services completely I'm afraid. Web Services will have a massive impact on business to business systems. Web Services provide a common language (well, the words..) and medium for systems to talk to each other.
The system-to-system aspect of web services technology has already been pointed out to me. When I wrote the post to which you replied, I hadn't thought of that.
But I don't think you're right about everything you said. Web services technology gives us nothing that we haven't had before with any number of other distributed computing systems. CORBA does everything that web services technology does. CORBA is great for solving certain types of problems, but it didn't change the world. Web services technology is almost certainly going to go down the same path. In fact, even through all of this discussion I still fail to see what web services technology provides that CORBA doesn't.
Hmm, maybe it's just pedantry, but what if person X didn't pay for it either? Let's say he really DID steal a CD from Tower Records, or got a free promotional copy from the artist. Is it different?
I don't think so. If you take it all the way back up the chain, you either find that somebody (a) paid for a CD, or (b) was given a CD by the owner of the music in question, or (c) stole the music in question directly from the owner. How person X got his CD is irrelevant. What's relevant is that person Y made a copy when he had no right to do so.
The problem I have with the statement, "It's a theft of value" is that "theft" implies that the original possessor of the value no longer has it, which is clearly not true
This is our fundamental disagreement, then. The words ``stealing'' or ``theft'' do not imply that the original possessor no longer has something. Whether the original possessor has it or not never comes into it. The act of theft occurs when you acquire something that you have no right to acquire. The means by which you acquire it don't (or is it ``doesn't?'') matter.
If you walked into a store and shoplifted a CD, you'd be stealing two things: the CD itself-- the atoms, basically-- and the music on it-- the bits. Copying the CD and returning it to your friend means that you're only stealing the bits, but not the atoms. That's admittedly less wrong than stealing both, but it's still stealing.
In order to see this from my point of view, you're going to have to let go of your assumption that the act of theft requires an act of deprivation. That's not necessarily true.
And, for the record, economics is not a zero-sum game. Just ask your lawyer if he's ever billed two clients simultaneously while doing research on a matter of law to see what I mean.
First things first. I don't take kindly to being told how I should feel about anything, or what my morals should be.
I don't mean to be insulting, but that's what morality is. It's a set of rules that tell you how you should feel under various circumstances. If you don't feel that stealing music is wrong, then either (a) your moral sense is flawed, or (b) your beliefs are fundamentally different from mine. As I've explained at length elsewhere, I think the idea that stealing is wrong is so fundamental to every culture that your belief on that matter shouldn't be different from mine. It's a normative value judgment on my part, and I stand by it. It's nothing personal, though.
Also, what's with, "for that's what it is, stealing"? Last I checked, stealing means the victim no longer has the item in question.
Again, this is the crux of our disagreement. Stealing has nothing to do-- in the deep, cultural, moral sense-- with depriving anybody of anything. It has to do with taking something for nothing, regardless of the circumstances. The law may use the idea of deprivation to define theft, but we're no longer talking about legal versus illegal. We're talking about right versus wrong, so the broad definition of stealing applies.
My wife proposed an idea which would probably be hell to implement, but at least gets you thinking. The idea is that copyright (or patent) lasts until you make a certain amount of money, or a certain amount of time, whichever came first.
But copyright isn't about money. It's about control. I, as the author of this comment, have certain inherent rights regarding this comment. I can say how it should be used, and by whom, and in what context. You can't use this comment without my permission, except in certain strictly limited and carefully defined ways. My right to control this comment lasts until I die, or until I transfer it to somebody else.
Notice I didn't say anything about money there. Making money off of this comment-- say, publishing it and selling copies-- is only tangentially related to my copyright over this comment. If you copy my comment without my permission, you're both wrong in a moral sense and also breaking the law, whether or not I'm handing out copies of this comment for sale. Heck, I could put a copy of this comment under every windshield wiper at the grocery store and still sue you for copyright infringement if you use it without my permission.
So it's about control of the use and distribution of one's work or ideas. When you put it in those terms, suddenly it makes complete sense that copyright should work exactly the way it does now: you retain your copyright for as long as you live, plus a little more, unless you voluntarily give it up. This is only appropriate. It's your work or ideas, so you have the right to say who can use it and how.
(Of course, the idea gets complex when you talk about copyrights held by companies, which have no natural lifespan. I won't pretend to have all the answers on that subject. But it seems reasonable to me that a corporation-- say, Disney-- should have the right to control its creations-- say, Mickey Mouse-- for a reasonable amount of time-- say, the lifetime of the corporation. But the devil is in the details, alas.)
There is no particular reason why the economy must work this way.
First of all, economics isn't always a zero-sum game. The fact that person X still has his CD after person Y copied it doesn't change the fact that a transaction has taken place. Value-- in the form of the digital music stored on person X's CD-- has been received by person Y. In person X's case, he paid to receive that value. Person Y didn't. Person Y committed an act that is economically equivalent to walking out of a Tower Records with the CD under his coat. It's theft of value, whether or not that value has a material component.
Furthermore, as I've pointed out elsewhere, the creation of intellectual property is very much governed by economic forces. If the profit motive can't offer a sufficient reward for efforts, people will stop creating works like movies and such. A starving artist may write poetry, but he'll never make The Magnificent Ambersons. If you take away a person's ability to make money from his art-- by reducing the economic value of an electronic copy of that art to zero-- you're removing one of the key motives to make that sort of art in the first place. That would be bad.
If I copy the CD but leave it with the original owner, they still have everything they had before, and I had more than I have. There is a significant difference.
The difference isn't as important as the similarity, and the similarity is a moral issue. You're still getting something for nothing, and that's not right. Whenever you receive something from somebody-- except in the case of gifts, of course-- you should give something in return. That's not a law, but it's a moral compulsion. Stealing music by downloading it without paying for it-- for that's what it is, stealing-- is just plain wrong, and it should feel wrong to you.
Arguments about whether it should be legal or illegal should not lose sight of the fact that it's wrong.
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I've said it before and I'll say it again. A strong but fair copy protection scheme would put this whole argument to rest. Let the movie studios release their films (and the record companies their CDs) in a secure format that can be played as often as you want, but that cannot be copied under any circumstances. I'm sure the Slashdot Masses will rise up in anger at this idea, but the truth is that it'd be a pretty sweet state of affairs.
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That bit about knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions has little to do with this discussion.
Of course, you're right. I was annoyed at what I'd been reading, and I reacted rudely. I apologize.
Realize I'm not an advocate of piracy. I pay for my movies. I pay for my software. I think the people who put their hearts and souls into their work deserve to get paid. But for every person who shares my adoration for spending money, there are a hundred people who would rather be freeloaders.
Then is it safe to assume that you support copy protection technologies like JVC's D-Theater? In my opinion, building strong encryption into digital media storage formats is the only way we're ever going to be able to sustain a healthy entertainment economy. And, as we've discussed, a healthy entertainment economy is the only way we'll continue to enjoy the quality and quantity of loud noises and bright lights that we all love so much.
Gosh, I feel like going home and giving my TV a great big hug.
And as for my ``your argument is full of shit'' comment, I was really referring to the part where you said that the RIAA and MPAA are going to go out of business because you can't make money in entertainment any more. That's specifically what I disagree with. If the current state of affairs were to continue, then the entertainment economy probably would collapse, just as you say. But I don't think this state of affairs will continue. The recent, rampant anarchy will be replaced by secure but fair copy protection technologies like D-Theater. Your DVD player won't be obsolete exactly, because it'll still play all the DVDs you ever bought. But the studios will only release new movies in copy protected formats.
Tell me, who gets hurt when I download that new Britney Spears song?
You do. Ugh.
All kidding aside, you're just wrong, for reasons that I guess I won't be able to explain to you. Taking something without paying for it is wrong. In this case, it also happens to be illegal. If you would acknowledge that it's wrong, and that you shouldn't do it, but that you do it anyway, then you and I could see eye-to-eye. I have no problem at all with hypocrites. I'm a huge hypocrite myself in a lot of ways.* But I do have a problem with people who can't seem to understand basic issues of right and wrong. That saddens and disturbs me.
* Not with respect to downloading MP3s, though. I was on an MP3 kick for a while about three years ago, but I quickly got bored with it. The music was all of absurdly low quality, and it was more trouble than it was worth to find and download stuff I liked. So I ditched all of the pirated stuff and ripped my collection of 300+ CDs at high bit rate instead, and ran cables to wire my server (upstairs) into my stereo (downstairs). It's about nine days of music on continuous random shuffle. Much better than the crap I got off of Napster. Ugh.
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Okay, so we're basically talking about quality. Music recorded in a studio with decent gear sounds better than the same music recorded in Phil's garage with a couple of $40 mics and a four-track mixer. Sure, you can go overboard, spending hundreds of thousands on take after take and track upon track. But sometimes the results of that work pay off and you get something really terrific. Would you want to live in a world where no music like that ever gets made because nobody can afford to make it?
On the other side of the spectrum, we've got orchestral music. That stuff is pretty slim as audio engineering goes, but you've still gotta get a hundred musicians or more together in an acoustically neutral room for several hours. There's no way to do that for pocket change, period.
Music is expensive to make. Good music-- by which I mean music of high production quality that's a real pleasure to listen to-- even more so. All the PCs in the world will do nothing to change that.
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He then went on to describe how he used tools like Lightwave3D on a bunch of PCs to produce the special effects for Babylon 5, and that by using PC technology he was able to produce the show for less per episode than the networks paid....
But this isn't new at all. You can always get it done more cheaply (down to a certain minimum cost, of course) if you're willing to cut corners in the production process. Stracican'tspellit's choice was to sacrifice quality for cost. The show may have had tons of quality in other areas-- I never saw more than about four episodes, so I have no opinion-- but the special effects looked like ass. Thus was money saved.
But not every movie or TV show is a special effects vehicle. Sometimes it's a lot harder to cut costs without really eating into the quality of your project. Can you get away with using a less expensive (and probably less experienced) actor? How about filming on a soundstage instead of on location? What if the soundstage itself is too expensive? Can you shoot the whole thing in your house?
My point is that quality work costs money, even if you're economical. Hell, The Blair Witch Project was just a couple of kids running around in the woods with video cameras, and it still cost $35,000 to make. Can't cut your budget much more closely than that.
Better watch with the Christian insults, they can be surprisingly vicious.
I didn't say ``Christian'' at any point, and also there was no insult intended; I meant it literally. You may not like the kind of music that you can get for free, from a church or anywhere else. You can either listen for free and take what you can get, or you can pay to get exactly what you want. No middle ground, I'm afraid.
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The people who actually care about about art for art's sake won't stop creating.
You can't make The Godfather without money, and lots of it. That money has to come from somewhere. While it's possible that people might give the next Coppola enough cash to make his masterpiece out of the goodness of their hearts, common sense and history tell us that it's pretty damn unlikely.
Let's take a small-scale example. Nobody is making 3D movies any more. Why? Because it's too expensive, and you can't recoup your investment with ticket sales. This wasn't caused by piracy or anything like it, but simply by audience disinterest. The result, though, is the same. No more 3D movies.
The same thing will happen if it becomes impossible for movie studios to recoup their investments due to piracy. They'll stop making movies. If you think it won't happen, I believe you've being naive.
Just because I can't afford all those CDs, should I not be allowed to listent to music? [...] And don't tell me to listen to the radio, because radio sucks ass.
Well... um... yes. If you don't want to listen to free music, and you don't want to (or can't) pay for music, then you don't get any music. That how a capitalist market economy works.
I guess you could make the case that being deprived of music is a moral wrong, and try to get somebody with money to back a charity for people who can't afford music. A church would probably be willing to help you out, but I'm not sure you'd care for their selection.
Slashdot Mirror
I would use rsync inside ssh to automatically sync to a referance machine.
How do you plan to install software or preload libraries using rsync?
Rather than going through the agony of installing sshd on each and every client computer....
Not to be pedantic, but each and every client computer already has sshd on it. It's a part of OS X.
Not to be overly negative, but I'd just like to point out that all of the articles you cited are from 1999. There's some information in them that's interesting from a historical perspective, but not much that's practically useful.
A homegrown content management system is really simple with todays scripting/filesystems/XML.
No offense, Malakai, but it's pretty clear that you've never worked on any kind of asset management system. It's a much harder problem than you give credit for. I write asset management systems for a living, so I've had a bit of experience here. A friend of mine, who now works with me, worked at ILM last year and this past spring; he was a compositor. I've talked to him for hours about ILM's asset management system. It's entirely home-grown. If anybody can do it right, you'd think ILM could. But my friend says that it's immensely frustrating in a lot of ways.
The things that were brought up in the article about Media 360 are not new; these are the same problems that all asset management system have to deal with. The biggest one being, of course, that, from the perspectives of the artists, it's easier not to use the system than it is to use it.
I'm amazed they stumbled on this, and even more amazed they payed for the Informix product (didn't IBM buy them, and drop that product anyhow?).
Informix spun the Media 360 product off into its own company, called Ascential. I've heard some ugly rumors about the health of that venture, but I probably shouldn't say anything specific.
2e9 is a short form of 2 * 10^9, ya know...
Really? No, I didn't know. Ooooops....
Total price tag: around $2 billion (that's 2e9, in case your definition of billion is different).
Man, what a bargain! Over two thousand man years of effort for only $1,024!
Of course, the poster meant 10e9, not 2e9. Or 2e30, I guess, but I'm assuming 10e9.
yeah,but that's all you can use...
That's funny. On mine-- right this second-- I'm using XEmacs, GCC, and XFree86 to work on a new GTK application, Tomcat for Java servlets development, Outlook for talking to the idiots^Wcolleagues on the business side of things, and Maya for playing with a dynamics simulation in the background while I compile. Oh, and OmniWeb for posting this.
I didn't realize that all I was supposed to be using was my iPod. Better shut some stuff down....
I already said this to an AC, but I feel dumb for getting that backwards. Thanks for correcting me.
;-)
My only excuse is that it was really late, and I was dazzled by the fireworks.
Why the heck didn't Apple come out with a Windows version in the first place?
There have been several replies already, but no one has yet pointed out that Apple isn't in the business of selling iPods. They sell Macs. And your assertion that people won't buy a Mac just to get an iPod is demonstrably false. I know two people who did just that. They're really into music and they love their MP3 collections. They were in the market for new laptops anyway. One chose an iBook and the other a TiBook, both solely on the existence of iPod.
If there had been iPod software for Windows, both of those guys would have bought Windows laptops instead. Although they probably would have been as happy with them....
Oh, that's right. I stand corrected, and I feel silly for not remembering that. Thanks.
Are you breathing right now? How much did you pay for all this air?
If the air I'm breathing were rightfully the property of another, then your questions might make a kind of sense. As it is, I'm not sure I see your point.
There is also something else I want to know : is making profit equivalent to stealing?
Nope. Behold this fantastic bauble. I will sell it to you for $10. Here is your bauble, and I take my $10. We just conducted a transaction. I got $10, and you got your bauble. Neither of us took anything from another without permission.
The fact that I bought that same bauble two stalls over for $3 is not relevant. I conducted one transaction (a bauble for $3), and then I conducted another transaction ($10 for a bauble). Neither of those transactions was stealing, because both of them involved getting something in exchange for something else with the consent of both parties.
Taking a proft is not stealing.
This mean that, yes, downloading MP3 is stealing. It is stealing the control someone has over you.
Um... no. Downloading is stealing music. Don't confuse the music itself with either (a) the bits or the media that instantiate it, or (b) the rights of the owner over it. You copied the file (the bits or the media) in violation of copyright (the rights of the owner). But what you actually stole was the music itself.
I understand that everyone should be rewarded for having an idea but I'm really against the concept of owning an idea.
There's a difference between an idea like ``E = mc^2'' or ``oil can be refined from rocks'' and an idea like ``Ice Ice Baby'' or ``The Bridges of Madison County.'' The first two are abstract ideas, or inventions. The last two are creative efforts. Creative efforts have creators, and therefore they have owners. Inventions have inventors or discoverers, who have an entirely different relationship with their ideas than creators have.
In fact, if I'm stronger than you, it means that my morality is the right one.
Your ideas about morality are pretty strange. I'm not sure you understand what the word actually means. At the very least, we're talking about two different and incompatible concepts. I'm not sure further discussion of this topic would be useful for us unless we can come to an understanding of the subject matter first.
I am, however, having fascinating discussions with Sobrique and moongha. May I suggest that you try reading this thread, or this one?
There's latency, and then there's relativity. When the server receives the time request, it takes the current timestamp and puts it in a network packet, which then trickles down the wire to the client. The client receives the packet and then knows what time it was at the server. That's latency. If you're NTP'ing over a dial-up connection from a distant server, the latency can be a second or more in worst cases. (NTP may have features to compensate for this; I couldn't say.)
;-)
Relativity affects the rate at which time runs for two observers in different inertial frames. It doesn't affect synchronization directly; if you ignore or compensate for latency, you can synchronize two clocks in different reference frames. But the clocks will start to drift apart immediately due to the different rates at which time passes in the two frames.
Now here's the cool thing. According to general relativity-- actually, according to my vague recollection of general relativity from a college semester more than ten years ago-- gravity affects the rate at which time passes in a reference frame. In other words, time runs more quickly in a high gravity field relative to a lower gravity field.
It's pretty well known that the local force of gravity varies measurably over the Earth's surface. Depending on where you are, the local force of gravity may be higher or lower.
So if you wanna get accurate, pick an NTP server in a region with a similar local G to yours.
HHOS.
face it, you're never going to not be able to download music. There's always some IRC channel or some FTP or some whatever
Which is exactly why I'm very much in favor of strong crypto. The music (and other media) piracy problem goes away if we use strong crypto. Weak crypto solutions like CSS are clearly insufficient, and cause more problems than they solve.
What we really need is an open-source collaborative project to build a strong media encryption system. It's a great technical challenge, difficult and fun, and it would solve a significant problem in the world if done right. Who's going to open the Sourceforge account for us?
I think you're missing the point of Web Services completely I'm afraid. Web Services will have a massive impact on business to business systems. Web Services provide a common language (well, the words..) and medium for systems to talk to each other.
The system-to-system aspect of web services technology has already been pointed out to me. When I wrote the post to which you replied, I hadn't thought of that.
But I don't think you're right about everything you said. Web services technology gives us nothing that we haven't had before with any number of other distributed computing systems. CORBA does everything that web services technology does. CORBA is great for solving certain types of problems, but it didn't change the world. Web services technology is almost certainly going to go down the same path. In fact, even through all of this discussion I still fail to see what web services technology provides that CORBA doesn't.
Hmm, maybe it's just pedantry, but what if person X didn't pay for it either? Let's say he really DID steal a CD from Tower Records, or got a free promotional copy from the artist. Is it different?
I don't think so. If you take it all the way back up the chain, you either find that somebody (a) paid for a CD, or (b) was given a CD by the owner of the music in question, or (c) stole the music in question directly from the owner. How person X got his CD is irrelevant. What's relevant is that person Y made a copy when he had no right to do so.
The problem I have with the statement, "It's a theft of value" is that "theft" implies that the original possessor of the value no longer has it, which is clearly not true
This is our fundamental disagreement, then. The words ``stealing'' or ``theft'' do not imply that the original possessor no longer has something. Whether the original possessor has it or not never comes into it. The act of theft occurs when you acquire something that you have no right to acquire. The means by which you acquire it don't (or is it ``doesn't?'') matter.
If you walked into a store and shoplifted a CD, you'd be stealing two things: the CD itself-- the atoms, basically-- and the music on it-- the bits. Copying the CD and returning it to your friend means that you're only stealing the bits, but not the atoms. That's admittedly less wrong than stealing both, but it's still stealing.
In order to see this from my point of view, you're going to have to let go of your assumption that the act of theft requires an act of deprivation. That's not necessarily true.
And, for the record, economics is not a zero-sum game. Just ask your lawyer if he's ever billed two clients simultaneously while doing research on a matter of law to see what I mean.
First things first. I don't take kindly to being told how I should feel about anything, or what my morals should be.
I don't mean to be insulting, but that's what morality is. It's a set of rules that tell you how you should feel under various circumstances. If you don't feel that stealing music is wrong, then either (a) your moral sense is flawed, or (b) your beliefs are fundamentally different from mine. As I've explained at length elsewhere, I think the idea that stealing is wrong is so fundamental to every culture that your belief on that matter shouldn't be different from mine. It's a normative value judgment on my part, and I stand by it. It's nothing personal, though.
Also, what's with, "for that's what it is, stealing"? Last I checked, stealing means the victim no longer has the item in question.
Again, this is the crux of our disagreement. Stealing has nothing to do-- in the deep, cultural, moral sense-- with depriving anybody of anything. It has to do with taking something for nothing, regardless of the circumstances. The law may use the idea of deprivation to define theft, but we're no longer talking about legal versus illegal. We're talking about right versus wrong, so the broad definition of stealing applies.
My wife proposed an idea which would probably be hell to implement, but at least gets you thinking. The idea is that copyright (or patent) lasts until you make a certain amount of money, or a certain amount of time, whichever came first.
But copyright isn't about money. It's about control. I, as the author of this comment, have certain inherent rights regarding this comment. I can say how it should be used, and by whom, and in what context. You can't use this comment without my permission, except in certain strictly limited and carefully defined ways. My right to control this comment lasts until I die, or until I transfer it to somebody else.
Notice I didn't say anything about money there. Making money off of this comment-- say, publishing it and selling copies-- is only tangentially related to my copyright over this comment. If you copy my comment without my permission, you're both wrong in a moral sense and also breaking the law, whether or not I'm handing out copies of this comment for sale. Heck, I could put a copy of this comment under every windshield wiper at the grocery store and still sue you for copyright infringement if you use it without my permission.
So it's about control of the use and distribution of one's work or ideas. When you put it in those terms, suddenly it makes complete sense that copyright should work exactly the way it does now: you retain your copyright for as long as you live, plus a little more, unless you voluntarily give it up. This is only appropriate. It's your work or ideas, so you have the right to say who can use it and how.
(Of course, the idea gets complex when you talk about copyrights held by companies, which have no natural lifespan. I won't pretend to have all the answers on that subject. But it seems reasonable to me that a corporation-- say, Disney-- should have the right to control its creations-- say, Mickey Mouse-- for a reasonable amount of time-- say, the lifetime of the corporation. But the devil is in the details, alas.)
fuck recording labels, they're nothing more than a bunch of gang rapists.
You know, hyperbole is really not a very good way to make your argument. Even if you're right, you end up sounding wrong.
There is no particular reason why the economy must work this way.
First of all, economics isn't always a zero-sum game. The fact that person X still has his CD after person Y copied it doesn't change the fact that a transaction has taken place. Value-- in the form of the digital music stored on person X's CD-- has been received by person Y. In person X's case, he paid to receive that value. Person Y didn't. Person Y committed an act that is economically equivalent to walking out of a Tower Records with the CD under his coat. It's theft of value, whether or not that value has a material component.
Furthermore, as I've pointed out elsewhere, the creation of intellectual property is very much governed by economic forces. If the profit motive can't offer a sufficient reward for efforts, people will stop creating works like movies and such. A starving artist may write poetry, but he'll never make The Magnificent Ambersons. If you take away a person's ability to make money from his art-- by reducing the economic value of an electronic copy of that art to zero-- you're removing one of the key motives to make that sort of art in the first place. That would be bad.
If I copy the CD but leave it with the original owner, they still have everything they had before, and I had more than I have. There is a significant difference.
The difference isn't as important as the similarity, and the similarity is a moral issue. You're still getting something for nothing, and that's not right. Whenever you receive something from somebody-- except in the case of gifts, of course-- you should give something in return. That's not a law, but it's a moral compulsion. Stealing music by downloading it without paying for it-- for that's what it is, stealing-- is just plain wrong, and it should feel wrong to you.
Arguments about whether it should be legal or illegal should not lose sight of the fact that it's wrong.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. A strong but fair copy protection scheme would put this whole argument to rest. Let the movie studios release their films (and the record companies their CDs) in a secure format that can be played as often as you want, but that cannot be copied under any circumstances. I'm sure the Slashdot Masses will rise up in anger at this idea, but the truth is that it'd be a pretty sweet state of affairs.
That bit about knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions has little to do with this discussion.
Of course, you're right. I was annoyed at what I'd been reading, and I reacted rudely. I apologize.
Realize I'm not an advocate of piracy. I pay for my movies. I pay for my software. I think the people who put their hearts and souls into their work deserve to get paid. But for every person who shares my adoration for spending money, there are a hundred people who would rather be freeloaders.
Then is it safe to assume that you support copy protection technologies like JVC's D-Theater? In my opinion, building strong encryption into digital media storage formats is the only way we're ever going to be able to sustain a healthy entertainment economy. And, as we've discussed, a healthy entertainment economy is the only way we'll continue to enjoy the quality and quantity of loud noises and bright lights that we all love so much.
Gosh, I feel like going home and giving my TV a great big hug.
And as for my ``your argument is full of shit'' comment, I was really referring to the part where you said that the RIAA and MPAA are going to go out of business because you can't make money in entertainment any more. That's specifically what I disagree with. If the current state of affairs were to continue, then the entertainment economy probably would collapse, just as you say. But I don't think this state of affairs will continue. The recent, rampant anarchy will be replaced by secure but fair copy protection technologies like D-Theater. Your DVD player won't be obsolete exactly, because it'll still play all the DVDs you ever bought. But the studios will only release new movies in copy protected formats.
That's what I'm expecting.
Tell me, who gets hurt when I download that new Britney Spears song?
You do. Ugh.
All kidding aside, you're just wrong, for reasons that I guess I won't be able to explain to you. Taking something without paying for it is wrong. In this case, it also happens to be illegal. If you would acknowledge that it's wrong, and that you shouldn't do it, but that you do it anyway, then you and I could see eye-to-eye. I have no problem at all with hypocrites. I'm a huge hypocrite myself in a lot of ways.* But I do have a problem with people who can't seem to understand basic issues of right and wrong. That saddens and disturbs me.
* Not with respect to downloading MP3s, though. I was on an MP3 kick for a while about three years ago, but I quickly got bored with it. The music was all of absurdly low quality, and it was more trouble than it was worth to find and download stuff I liked. So I ditched all of the pirated stuff and ripped my collection of 300+ CDs at high bit rate instead, and ran cables to wire my server (upstairs) into my stereo (downstairs). It's about nine days of music on continuous random shuffle. Much better than the crap I got off of Napster. Ugh.
Okay, so we're basically talking about quality. Music recorded in a studio with decent gear sounds better than the same music recorded in Phil's garage with a couple of $40 mics and a four-track mixer. Sure, you can go overboard, spending hundreds of thousands on take after take and track upon track. But sometimes the results of that work pay off and you get something really terrific. Would you want to live in a world where no music like that ever gets made because nobody can afford to make it?
On the other side of the spectrum, we've got orchestral music. That stuff is pretty slim as audio engineering goes, but you've still gotta get a hundred musicians or more together in an acoustically neutral room for several hours. There's no way to do that for pocket change, period.
Music is expensive to make. Good music-- by which I mean music of high production quality that's a real pleasure to listen to-- even more so. All the PCs in the world will do nothing to change that.
He then went on to describe how he used tools like Lightwave3D on a bunch of PCs to produce the special effects for Babylon 5, and that by using PC technology he was able to produce the show for less per episode than the networks paid....
But this isn't new at all. You can always get it done more cheaply (down to a certain minimum cost, of course) if you're willing to cut corners in the production process. Stracican'tspellit's choice was to sacrifice quality for cost. The show may have had tons of quality in other areas-- I never saw more than about four episodes, so I have no opinion-- but the special effects looked like ass. Thus was money saved.
But not every movie or TV show is a special effects vehicle. Sometimes it's a lot harder to cut costs without really eating into the quality of your project. Can you get away with using a less expensive (and probably less experienced) actor? How about filming on a soundstage instead of on location? What if the soundstage itself is too expensive? Can you shoot the whole thing in your house?
My point is that quality work costs money, even if you're economical. Hell, The Blair Witch Project was just a couple of kids running around in the woods with video cameras, and it still cost $35,000 to make. Can't cut your budget much more closely than that.
I am not taking anything from anyone.
Ah, but you are. But that's another conversation.
Better watch with the Christian insults, they can be surprisingly vicious.
I didn't say ``Christian'' at any point, and also there was no insult intended; I meant it literally. You may not like the kind of music that you can get for free, from a church or anywhere else. You can either listen for free and take what you can get, or you can pay to get exactly what you want. No middle ground, I'm afraid.
The people who actually care about about art for art's sake won't stop creating.
You can't make The Godfather without money, and lots of it. That money has to come from somewhere. While it's possible that people might give the next Coppola enough cash to make his masterpiece out of the goodness of their hearts, common sense and history tell us that it's pretty damn unlikely.
Let's take a small-scale example. Nobody is making 3D movies any more. Why? Because it's too expensive, and you can't recoup your investment with ticket sales. This wasn't caused by piracy or anything like it, but simply by audience disinterest. The result, though, is the same. No more 3D movies.
The same thing will happen if it becomes impossible for movie studios to recoup their investments due to piracy. They'll stop making movies. If you think it won't happen, I believe you've being naive.
Just because I can't afford all those CDs, should I not be allowed to listent to music? [...] And don't tell me to listen to the radio, because radio sucks ass.
Well... um... yes. If you don't want to listen to free music, and you don't want to (or can't) pay for music, then you don't get any music. That how a capitalist market economy works.
I guess you could make the case that being deprived of music is a moral wrong, and try to get somebody with money to back a charity for people who can't afford music. A church would probably be willing to help you out, but I'm not sure you'd care for their selection.
Your other option is to hum.