Recording artists from major labels now put their songs on youtube for free and still sell copies. Why they are still getting bent out of shape over file sharing is beyond me.
They're not. The middle-men, i.e., the RIAA, is the one getting bent out of shape.
Yeah, same here. If normal people have to band together by the thousands just to compete on equal footing with these megacorporations with their lawyer brigades, then maybe it's time we examined the inequity of the justice system in this country.
This will never stop as long as anyone wants their music, wants it now, and is willing to pay for it.
As long as this bullshit continues, the number of people willing to pay for it will decline year after year. Something like 70% of people think sharing music with family and friends is socially acceptable, and this is after a decade of busting college kids and stay at home moms for millions of dollars in copyright infringement cases.
Back in the 90's the RIAA could bury their head in the sand and say that most people "didn't know" what they were doing is illegal. There are going to be some bitter, bitter tears on that day when they finally realize that it's not that people "don't know", it's that they "don't care". When the community at large has no moral compunction with stiffing you, it's probably time to examine your own part in why that is.
When a law makes the actions of the majority of the population criminal, then it's not the population that is the problem, it is the law itself.
I stopped buying music completely. Now I just buy band merchandise and go to shows as often as I can. I figure the bands I care about get a far bigger piece of that then their iTunes or Amazon sales...
If you'd click his links, you'd see that they're totally accurate, and also widely accepted practices within the industry. Do you know why all the big stars get a piece of the gross income instead of a piece of the net income? Because, on paper, every movie has lost money, regardless.
Once you hear that such films as Rain Man, Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and the Tim Burton Batman "lost money" according to their studios bullshit accounting practices, it's hard to take any of their claims of "lost revenue" due to piracy seriously.
Piracy is only illegal because the law says copying and distributing music is illegal.
Exactly. I remember reading of a US study here on/. concerning sharing music being socially acceptable (I can't fucking find it no matter what I search, so here's the link to the Danish one) that found that something like 70% of people did not see anything wrong with sharing music with family and friends. The study I'd read dialed it down even further into more specific scenarios, but that one statistic stood out.
My point is, if the vast majority of people have no moral issues sharing music online, then perhaps it's not the people that are the problem, but the law itself. The laws are supposed to reflect the social mores of the day, are they not?
Also no-one needs TPB to distribute their personally created music.. Even if your band can't afford the miniscule hosting fees you can just host the torrent file; the whole point of bittorrent is it doesn't need sites like TPB.
Nobody needs anything in this world but food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. The point is, people use The Pirate Bay to distribute legitimately, the number of hits that it gets (according to Alexa, the 206th most visited site in the world) make it worthwhile to put things there for distribution.
Just because you'd rather throw the baby out with the bathwater doesn't mean the rest of us want to. You don't think the RIAA would cream their jeans if they could just stop all music sharing on the internet, legit or not? You don't think they would abuse their power if given the chance? Come on. They themselves have gotten busted for the same shit.
With two copies for redundancy. Don't use cloud solutions because I don't trust them. Well, unless you count mailing shit to myself and using Gmail as a cloud backup solution, anyway.
As another former CompUSA employee, I have to agree. Towards the end, just before the liquidation, the emphasis on TAP (their extended warranty program) reached almost hysterical levels. I suspect it was due to the fact that it was the highest margin thing we sold in the store (most people never even used the warranty they'd bought), but I wonder if the higher-ups, since they knew that we were going to be folding soon, wanted to soak up as much extra cash before they announced they were liquidating as possible. I do remember about 2-3 months before liquidation we were told to ship large amounts of store inventory (brand new shit, at least a dozen pallets worth from our store) down to some bizarre redistribution center in Mexico. We joked that it was some sort of Mexican drug trafficking scheme or something, but then when we got word that the liquidation was going down, it made sense, Carlos Slim was probably hiding it down there so it wouldn't get sucked up in the bankruptcy.
Of course, we employees heard after it hit the news. Not that we didn't suspect, given that Christmas was right around the corner and we'd gotten shit for Christmas freight compared to other years, but we didn't officially find out until, I shit you not, a bunch of security guards showed up to make sure us employees weren't going to start looting the place. We didn't even know why the hell they were even there for like an hour until finally the word filtered down from corporate and we found out we were all out of a job.
Honestly, though, after that it was a fucking blast. Nobody gave a shit about anything anymore, so everybody was chill in a way I'd never experienced in that place (after all the ranting about TAP and Sirius and XM and Tech Labor and all that shit they were constantly on our ass to push), and it was like a carnival for a couple months. Got a ton of shit pretty damn cheap, too, our liquidator representative was pretty fucking cool. Cleaning up fixtures netted all sorts of buried treasure, AOL disks, ancient computer parts, sales brochures for Windows 98...it was kinda fun for a computer enthusiast.
Anyway, c'est la vie. Best Buy was just hanging on anyway. The days of the big box electronics retailer are over. It's all Walmart and Amazon now. Don't know if that's a good thing or not...
That's all well and good, but most != all. Therefore, the statement:
And nobody ever installs Windows, themselves, either, on a notebook.
is inaccurate.
And what does "work out of the box"? Even an Apple device requires setup, linking to your various accounts, removing crap that isn't needed, and all of that when you boot it up for the first time. Maybe not as much adware bullshit as a typical vendor Windows install, but then again, I consider iTunes itself to be adware bullshit, and that's built right the fuck in to OSX and can't even be removed, so there's no clear advantage there, either. Before you get your panties in a twist, I'm not hating on Apple, I'm pointing out that "working out of the box" is subjective. No matter what you buy, you're going to spend time configuring it.
That's all well and good, but from Firefox versions 2.0 to 3.6 (or 3.7?), it never was a problem. Whatever they changed when they went to version 4 caused a world of problems, and I wasn't the only one (although I admit there are few people with crossfire builds so there aren't many of us).
Either way, ATI blamed Adobe and Firefox, Firefox blamed Adobe and ATI, and Adobe blamed Firefox and ATI, so I was screwed no matter what. It was either stay at Firefox 3.6, dump a video card (yeah, that's a reasonable solution, considering it worked just fine with literally everything else, to include previous versions of Firefox), or switch to Chrome, which has never had this issue, from day one.
Maybe the Firefox crew should ask the Chrome crew how they're able to make theirs work.
b) Chrome doesn't fucking break everything every upgrade!
I have to agree with this. Despite Chrome's background updates, I haven't woken up and launched it to find half of my plugins are dead. Nor have I had to turn compatibility check off or any of the other coaxing I've needed to do to get my FF plugins working.
I've been told in the past that a large part of the compatibility breaking is due to add-on developers, not Firefox itself (something about writing the add-on to ignore a version incompatibility), but either way, the net result is the same.
Admittedly, I can't speak as to the last couple years or so, because starting at Firefox 4, the combination of Flash, two ATI video cards in crossfire, and Firefox has resulted in regular, yet completely unpredictable BSoD's, and everyone I've ever talked to in support has pointed to a fault with one of the other two parties and said there's nothing they can do. Upgrading to 5 didn't help, and upgrading to 6 didn't help as well. That's when I uninstalled Firefox for good. Chrome has never done that, even with Flash, and even with hardware acceleration turned on.
Now that Chrome has AdBlock Plus and ScriptNO and all of the other plugin equivalents I care about, I no longer pine for Firefox.
And nobody ever installs Windows, themselves, either, on a notebook.
Boy I hope that's sarcasm. Otherwise I fear I must question my own existence, as I've done just that many, many times.
Who in their right mind would leave the factory installation of windows on a notebook in the first place if they didn't have to? Why spend 2 hours cleaning all the adware bullshit off of it, searching the web to see what the hell half the start-up programs even are ("Gee, do I needkdjsdksjhdjsh.exe to run on startup? What about eroiuerrurrjkffl.exe???"), missing shit, and all of that, when you can spend 45 minutes doing a fresh install of Windows and then maybe another 45 minutes doing updates/driver installs and have a clean machine with all that bullshit removed from the get go?
Step one on any new notebook I buy is always a fresh install of windows. I don't play that "recovery disk" bullshit.
I know it used to be a lot more difficult in the past to find drivers and shit for notebooks, but it's really not that bad anymore. Certainly not in my own experiences.
Ditto. One benefit of having a name almost as common as "John Smith" is that the signal-to-noise ratio is far too high for anyone to really know what is actually a legitimate hit or one of the other thousands of "John Smiths" in the world. Plus, I happen to share my name with several very famous people, ranging from musicians to professional athletes to actors, so you're going to have to do some serious digging to find a hit that's not related to one of them. Certainly nothing within the first dozen pages on Google (and that's just when I gave up)...
Funny, when I was a kid I always used to think my name was boring and wanted to change it to something more unique and memorable. Sure am glad I didn't now...
You mean your Comcast ToS don't already preclude doing that on residential accounts? A friend of mine on Charter got hammered by them for running a media server off of his residential line (and allowing too many people access), they cut him off and told him to either lose the server or upgrade to a commercial account at twice the monthly cost. Didn't take long, either...
Either way, given that these corporations can force us to give up our right to sue, let alone anything else, I'm sure there are plenty of provisions within the Comcast ToS that specifically state you can't do anything they don't like, no matter what that is, from now until the end of time.
As long as you fill it with tons of ads, that's cool with me. I love slashvertisements! Maybe you can even couch a few of them in "product reviews"? That may squeak a few more ads in front of people, what do you say?
Probably because a) he didn't want to have to answer to anyone else (or share profits), and b) he didn't care about the risks (or wasn't worried about them).
I mean, I was surprised at the Kim Dotcom raid, but only because the raids were successful and Megaupload got nuked off the 'net. Up until this point, pretty much everything the MAFIAA has done to stem file sharing has been like fighting the hydra; cut one head off, two grow in it's place. The Pirate Bay has been thumbing their noses at the MAFIAA for how many years now?
Granted, Megaupload can't have been nearly as nimble as The Pirate Bay given the fact that they were hosting petabytes worth of shit as opposed to a bunch of torrents and magnet links, so it's not like Kim Dotcom could just server hop all over the globe like they at TPB do. Based on Kim's lifestyle, he really seemed to think he was some sort of modern day Tony Montana, slinging pirated files instead of cocaine. This probably contributed to his downfall as much as anything else. I mean, there's no point in busting someone that doesn't have anything to lose, right?
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Recording artists from major labels now put their songs on youtube for free and still sell copies. Why they are still getting bent out of shape over file sharing is beyond me.
They're not. The middle-men, i.e., the RIAA, is the one getting bent out of shape.
The internet has basically eroded their hold on distribution and they're fucking pissed off about it. The whole "stealing from artists" line is just propaganda, the RIAA has been fucking stealing from artists since it's inception. Here's a suit from just a few years ago that, using their own calculations when going after individual copyright-infringers, found $6 BILLION in damages due to piracy by the CRIA (the Canadian wing of the RIAA). They later settled for $45 million, less than 1% of the original damages.
And then there's their latest legal arguments. In their case against Redigi, the RIAA argued that an MP3 downloaded from the internet was not owned, it was licensed, and therefore First Sale Doctrine did not apply. That's nothing new; we've heard that argument a billion times. The funny part is, while that case with Redigi was being argued, the RIAA was being sued for not paying disco group Sister Sledge their contracted royalties. See, they were contracted to receive a small percentage of "sales" revenue, and a higher percentage of "licensing" revenue. The RIAA, in a fit of irony it seems, argued that the music they sell online isn't licensed, it's sold, and thus, the group was not due the higher percentage of royalties for their online music 'sales'.
So, according to the RIAA, music sold online is both licensed and sold, depending on whichever argument justifies their thievery in open court.
Anyone defending these fucking assholes should have their head examined.
Yeah, same here. If normal people have to band together by the thousands just to compete on equal footing with these megacorporations with their lawyer brigades, then maybe it's time we examined the inequity of the justice system in this country.
Of course, that'll never happen.
This will never stop as long as anyone wants their music, wants it now, and is willing to pay for it.
As long as this bullshit continues, the number of people willing to pay for it will decline year after year. Something like 70% of people think sharing music with family and friends is socially acceptable, and this is after a decade of busting college kids and stay at home moms for millions of dollars in copyright infringement cases.
Back in the 90's the RIAA could bury their head in the sand and say that most people "didn't know" what they were doing is illegal. There are going to be some bitter, bitter tears on that day when they finally realize that it's not that people "don't know", it's that they "don't care". When the community at large has no moral compunction with stiffing you, it's probably time to examine your own part in why that is.
When a law makes the actions of the majority of the population criminal, then it's not the population that is the problem, it is the law itself.
I stopped buying music completely. Now I just buy band merchandise and go to shows as often as I can. I figure the bands I care about get a far bigger piece of that then their iTunes or Amazon sales...
If you'd click his links, you'd see that they're totally accurate, and also widely accepted practices within the industry. Do you know why all the big stars get a piece of the gross income instead of a piece of the net income? Because, on paper, every movie has lost money, regardless.
Once you hear that such films as Rain Man, Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and the Tim Burton Batman "lost money" according to their studios bullshit accounting practices, it's hard to take any of their claims of "lost revenue" due to piracy seriously.
And it's not limited to the MPAA, either. The RIAA argued that Limewire caused them $75 TRILLION in damages. How does anybody credibly believe anything that comes out of these guys mouths?
Piracy is only illegal because the law says copying and distributing music is illegal.
Exactly. I remember reading of a US study here on /. concerning sharing music being socially acceptable (I can't fucking find it no matter what I search, so here's the link to the Danish one) that found that something like 70% of people did not see anything wrong with sharing music with family and friends. The study I'd read dialed it down even further into more specific scenarios, but that one statistic stood out.
My point is, if the vast majority of people have no moral issues sharing music online, then perhaps it's not the people that are the problem, but the law itself. The laws are supposed to reflect the social mores of the day, are they not?
Also no-one needs TPB to distribute their personally created music.. Even if your band can't afford the miniscule hosting fees you can just host the torrent file; the whole point of bittorrent is it doesn't need sites like TPB.
Nobody needs anything in this world but food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. The point is, people use The Pirate Bay to distribute legitimately, the number of hits that it gets (according to Alexa, the 206th most visited site in the world) make it worthwhile to put things there for distribution.
Just because you'd rather throw the baby out with the bathwater doesn't mean the rest of us want to. You don't think the RIAA would cream their jeans if they could just stop all music sharing on the internet, legit or not? You don't think they would abuse their power if given the chance? Come on. They themselves have gotten busted for the same shit.
Even the music of the birds!
I'm still trying to find the part where he's being funny. From what I've seen, his assessment is totally accurate.
With two copies for redundancy. Don't use cloud solutions because I don't trust them. Well, unless you count mailing shit to myself and using Gmail as a cloud backup solution, anyway.
As another former CompUSA employee, I have to agree. Towards the end, just before the liquidation, the emphasis on TAP (their extended warranty program) reached almost hysterical levels. I suspect it was due to the fact that it was the highest margin thing we sold in the store (most people never even used the warranty they'd bought), but I wonder if the higher-ups, since they knew that we were going to be folding soon, wanted to soak up as much extra cash before they announced they were liquidating as possible. I do remember about 2-3 months before liquidation we were told to ship large amounts of store inventory (brand new shit, at least a dozen pallets worth from our store) down to some bizarre redistribution center in Mexico. We joked that it was some sort of Mexican drug trafficking scheme or something, but then when we got word that the liquidation was going down, it made sense, Carlos Slim was probably hiding it down there so it wouldn't get sucked up in the bankruptcy.
Of course, we employees heard after it hit the news. Not that we didn't suspect, given that Christmas was right around the corner and we'd gotten shit for Christmas freight compared to other years, but we didn't officially find out until, I shit you not, a bunch of security guards showed up to make sure us employees weren't going to start looting the place. We didn't even know why the hell they were even there for like an hour until finally the word filtered down from corporate and we found out we were all out of a job.
Honestly, though, after that it was a fucking blast. Nobody gave a shit about anything anymore, so everybody was chill in a way I'd never experienced in that place (after all the ranting about TAP and Sirius and XM and Tech Labor and all that shit they were constantly on our ass to push), and it was like a carnival for a couple months. Got a ton of shit pretty damn cheap, too, our liquidator representative was pretty fucking cool. Cleaning up fixtures netted all sorts of buried treasure, AOL disks, ancient computer parts, sales brochures for Windows 98...it was kinda fun for a computer enthusiast.
Anyway, c'est la vie. Best Buy was just hanging on anyway. The days of the big box electronics retailer are over. It's all Walmart and Amazon now. Don't know if that's a good thing or not...
What about rural America? Half the people in this country are still on fucking dial-up.
That's all well and good, but most != all. Therefore, the statement:
And nobody ever installs Windows, themselves, either, on a notebook.
is inaccurate.
And what does "work out of the box"? Even an Apple device requires setup, linking to your various accounts, removing crap that isn't needed, and all of that when you boot it up for the first time. Maybe not as much adware bullshit as a typical vendor Windows install, but then again, I consider iTunes itself to be adware bullshit, and that's built right the fuck in to OSX and can't even be removed, so there's no clear advantage there, either. Before you get your panties in a twist, I'm not hating on Apple, I'm pointing out that "working out of the box" is subjective. No matter what you buy, you're going to spend time configuring it.
That's all well and good, but from Firefox versions 2.0 to 3.6 (or 3.7?), it never was a problem. Whatever they changed when they went to version 4 caused a world of problems, and I wasn't the only one (although I admit there are few people with crossfire builds so there aren't many of us).
Either way, ATI blamed Adobe and Firefox, Firefox blamed Adobe and ATI, and Adobe blamed Firefox and ATI, so I was screwed no matter what. It was either stay at Firefox 3.6, dump a video card (yeah, that's a reasonable solution, considering it worked just fine with literally everything else, to include previous versions of Firefox), or switch to Chrome, which has never had this issue, from day one.
Maybe the Firefox crew should ask the Chrome crew how they're able to make theirs work.
b) Chrome doesn't fucking break everything every upgrade!
I have to agree with this. Despite Chrome's background updates, I haven't woken up and launched it to find half of my plugins are dead. Nor have I had to turn compatibility check off or any of the other coaxing I've needed to do to get my FF plugins working.
I've been told in the past that a large part of the compatibility breaking is due to add-on developers, not Firefox itself (something about writing the add-on to ignore a version incompatibility), but either way, the net result is the same.
Admittedly, I can't speak as to the last couple years or so, because starting at Firefox 4, the combination of Flash, two ATI video cards in crossfire, and Firefox has resulted in regular, yet completely unpredictable BSoD's, and everyone I've ever talked to in support has pointed to a fault with one of the other two parties and said there's nothing they can do. Upgrading to 5 didn't help, and upgrading to 6 didn't help as well. That's when I uninstalled Firefox for good. Chrome has never done that, even with Flash, and even with hardware acceleration turned on.
Now that Chrome has AdBlock Plus and ScriptNO and all of the other plugin equivalents I care about, I no longer pine for Firefox.
And nobody ever installs Windows, themselves, either, on a notebook.
Boy I hope that's sarcasm. Otherwise I fear I must question my own existence, as I've done just that many, many times.
Who in their right mind would leave the factory installation of windows on a notebook in the first place if they didn't have to? Why spend 2 hours cleaning all the adware bullshit off of it, searching the web to see what the hell half the start-up programs even are ("Gee, do I need kdjsdksjhdjsh.exe to run on startup? What about eroiuerrurrjkffl.exe???"), missing shit, and all of that, when you can spend 45 minutes doing a fresh install of Windows and then maybe another 45 minutes doing updates/driver installs and have a clean machine with all that bullshit removed from the get go?
Step one on any new notebook I buy is always a fresh install of windows. I don't play that "recovery disk" bullshit.
I know it used to be a lot more difficult in the past to find drivers and shit for notebooks, but it's really not that bad anymore. Certainly not in my own experiences.
To be fair, they lost my ad views long ago, as has pretty much every other website on the net.
Hooray for adblock and scriptblocker!
Yeah, I know, I'm "stealing the web". Let me count how many sleepless nights I've had over that....uh....how do you count to zero, again?
Ditto. One benefit of having a name almost as common as "John Smith" is that the signal-to-noise ratio is far too high for anyone to really know what is actually a legitimate hit or one of the other thousands of "John Smiths" in the world. Plus, I happen to share my name with several very famous people, ranging from musicians to professional athletes to actors, so you're going to have to do some serious digging to find a hit that's not related to one of them. Certainly nothing within the first dozen pages on Google (and that's just when I gave up)...
Funny, when I was a kid I always used to think my name was boring and wanted to change it to something more unique and memorable. Sure am glad I didn't now...
You mean your Comcast ToS don't already preclude doing that on residential accounts? A friend of mine on Charter got hammered by them for running a media server off of his residential line (and allowing too many people access), they cut him off and told him to either lose the server or upgrade to a commercial account at twice the monthly cost. Didn't take long, either...
Either way, given that these corporations can force us to give up our right to sue, let alone anything else, I'm sure there are plenty of provisions within the Comcast ToS that specifically state you can't do anything they don't like, no matter what that is, from now until the end of time.
As long as you fill it with tons of ads, that's cool with me. I love slashvertisements! Maybe you can even couch a few of them in "product reviews"? That may squeak a few more ads in front of people, what do you say?
Something tells me getting contacted from an Apple email saying that they want to render the software useless is not going to get past that.
Why would Apple do that? They have their own police to get it for them.
What happens when these vulnerabilities are fixed and the kits become useless?
Then they throw you in the clink until you decrypt it for them.
America! Fuck Yeah!!
What's the worst that could happen?
I just accidentally my underwear.
Probably because a) he didn't want to have to answer to anyone else (or share profits), and b) he didn't care about the risks (or wasn't worried about them).
I mean, I was surprised at the Kim Dotcom raid, but only because the raids were successful and Megaupload got nuked off the 'net. Up until this point, pretty much everything the MAFIAA has done to stem file sharing has been like fighting the hydra; cut one head off, two grow in it's place. The Pirate Bay has been thumbing their noses at the MAFIAA for how many years now?
Granted, Megaupload can't have been nearly as nimble as The Pirate Bay given the fact that they were hosting petabytes worth of shit as opposed to a bunch of torrents and magnet links, so it's not like Kim Dotcom could just server hop all over the globe like they at TPB do. Based on Kim's lifestyle, he really seemed to think he was some sort of modern day Tony Montana, slinging pirated files instead of cocaine. This probably contributed to his downfall as much as anything else. I mean, there's no point in busting someone that doesn't have anything to lose, right?