Well, in my case it does. I haven't bought a new CD since Napster. I can't say how many I would have bought if music wasn't available online, but it's certainly more than zero. So, illegal file sharing has certainly cost them SOME money.
They're not being bled by legal downloads. The legal downloads aren't costing them anything, only the illegal ones are. (I'm assuming a lot here, including that downloading free music from non-RIAA bands doesn't negatively impact sales of RIAA bands. This doesn't really matter though, becuase you're looking to pick a fight where one clearly was not intended.)
Wait, how exactly is the boycott that you've been on for 8 years, which has nothing to do with DRM or rootkits, having an impact now? Did your boycott force Sony to add the rootkit which led to the current situation?
I'm confused. I think I've got temporal issues with your point.
"Widespread lawbreaking indicates a problem with the laws, and not with the crime."
Do you really think that argument holds water? Would you consider the 12,000 murders each year in the United States widespread? If that number isn't high enough, what about the 90,000 rapes? Still not high enough, what about 1.1 million car thefts? Suddenly the numbers are looking pretty widespread and yet I don't think anyone would argue there's a problem with laws against murder, rape or car theft. Want to get even higher? How about the 2.1 million burglaries and 2.2 million assaults?
At what point does a crime start becoming widespread? If murder were at the same rate as copyright infringement, would you argue that both were bad laws, neither were bad laws, or only one?
I have to admit, the Movie Bot was pretty good. It gave a list of local theaters showing a particular movie much faster than I could have gotten the information over the web. Not only that, it was in a clear text-only format. Nice.
The shopping buddy I have no use for, but the movie one was pretty good.
And how, exactly, does the fact that they're donating money indicate that they're not in it for the publicity? Corporations donate money all the time to events for the publicity.
(I don't think that Coors really has much of an opinion on that free Cher concert, and yet they donated money to it... and oddly enough they had a big banner over the stage... who would have thought!)
What does he have to say about unessential liberties for a lot of permanent safety?
Nobody is ever going to argue Franklin's statement, the real debate is about what's "essential", what's "little" and what's "temporary". This observation has nothing to do with the keylogger thing you're commenting on, it's an unrelated thought.
I like bigger screens. When I bought my laptop four years ago I got the biggest screen available at the time. The thing is a tall beast, but it's not widescreen. I don't want widescreen. Widescreen forces me to use more width, when in reality I never need more width, I only ever need more height. Never am I reading a webpage and think, "Damn, if only this computer were a little wider."
The worst part is, all the good new laptops are being made with widescreen because little Jane going off to college wants to watch DVDs. I don't want to watch DVDs on my computer, I'll do that on the TV. I want to use it as a computer, and computer need height.
I just wish some laptop companies would keep the big non-widescreen models around. It's sad.
"But instead, companies would cooperate on innovation, and compete on service. There would still be more and more money because there are more and more people and they all want service."
First off, what service? They hand you a bottle of pills, there's no service here. Either the pills work or they don't, the whole "service" that they provide is in the R&D.
Second, without patents, what's to stop Joe's Pharma Company from not investing anything in R&D, waiting until the big boys did all the grunt work, and then producing the pill and selling it for less than the competitors (he can sell it for less, because he didn't have to pay anything for R&D). Assuming your answer is that nothing will prevent this, please explain to me why the companies will bother to continue to invest in R&D when all the benefit will go to their competitors?
That's sort of true, definitely true in the short term, but you've got to look at the issue from a long term point of view as well. The system we've currently established is that drug manufacturers outlay a truly phenomenal amount of money to develop and test any particular drug. They do this on the assumption that they will, in the future, be able to charge good money for the results of their research. If they can't charge for it in the future, there's no incentive for them to develop new drugs today.
Now, one country destroying one patent is not going to eliminate the profit incentive for the drug developers. And in a situation where the drugs are badly needed (I don't know how true that is in Taiwan, but my guess is that since the disease doesn't affect people yet the answer is not very) there's a moral calculus that has to go into making this sort of decision. Is it worth it to hand out free drugs today at the possible cost of not having drugs to hand out at any cost in the future?
You're going to have to look at every individual situation and decide if the tradeoff is worthwhile.
Do you think the current phantom bird flue pandemic is worth risking future drug development over? I'd say you'd have a much better argument for taking away that patents on AIDs drugs than bird flu drugs.
Well, yeah, but with eminent domain you need pay the market value for what your taking. Since there's already a market value for the drug, one which Taiwan refused to pay, you'll need to come up with another justification.
It's really hard to argue that when Cingular goes out of business because the Government offers free wireless service, that's the result of a "capitalist economy." Now, if they go out of business because another company offers free wireless access, that's capitalist. You weren't specific.
I assumed he meant 60km^2, but even then, the UK is 244,820 square kilometers big. Dividing 244,820 by 60 gets you 4,081 airships to cover all of the UK. That's hardly a handful.
This does, of course, reduce the number of arguments I can make about the legitimacy of downloading TV shows without paying for them... which is a down side.
It's just the LCD screen... the camera still works fine, right? You'll just need to use the viewfinder if the LCD happens to bonk out at an important moment. It's really not too tragic.
If the company has enough capital, they could always go ahead and handle one end of the chicken/egg problem themselves. Lets say they deal with Nokia to pay for the installation of the receiver into every phone being sold by Nokia in Britain. Sure, they'll have to kick out $15 per phone, but lets say they sell a million phones... it's $15,000,000 to get a huge user base plus all the advertising that we assume they'll cram into the box.
I'm not sure it's unfeasable, they'd just need to bankroll the beginning.
If there were a system organized where everybody could upload one bit of a copyrighted TV show or movie and facilitate the file being transferred, then yes, even one bit of information would be contraband as much as the whole.
Of course, if you really uploading only one bit of data, we could dicker about the actual point of finding that illegal. But again, when you're sending it to people online, it's not like you claim you're only giving it to your friend, or you're only allowing someone to do research, or only giving access to soeone who already has the right to watch the thing. You're giving it to anybody and anybody who asks. It's like making a dvd copy and sending it to everybody in the country.
Why would uploading a whole episode be different from uploading a portion of the episode? If it's wrong to upload the whole thing, it's just as wrong to upload half, or a quarter, of the whole. Especially considering bittorrent when you have no idea where the file is going to. It's not like you're giving it to a librarian or a researcher.
Slashdot Mirror
They are un-American.
Small Gods was fantastic.
Well, in my case it does. I haven't bought a new CD since Napster. I can't say how many I would have bought if music wasn't available online, but it's certainly more than zero. So, illegal file sharing has certainly cost them SOME money.
They're not being bled by legal downloads. The legal downloads aren't costing them anything, only the illegal ones are. (I'm assuming a lot here, including that downloading free music from non-RIAA bands doesn't negatively impact sales of RIAA bands. This doesn't really matter though, becuase you're looking to pick a fight where one clearly was not intended.)
I'm fairly certain the picture of the guy vomiting does not accurately reflect the reviewer's gastro-intestinal state after reading the book.
Wait, how exactly is the boycott that you've been on for 8 years, which has nothing to do with DRM or rootkits, having an impact now? Did your boycott force Sony to add the rootkit which led to the current situation?
I'm confused. I think I've got temporal issues with your point.
I'm sorry, when did MS lose the browser battle?
"Widespread lawbreaking indicates a problem with the laws, and not with the crime."
Do you really think that argument holds water? Would you consider the 12,000 murders each year in the United States widespread? If that number isn't high enough, what about the 90,000 rapes? Still not high enough, what about 1.1 million car thefts? Suddenly the numbers are looking pretty widespread and yet I don't think anyone would argue there's a problem with laws against murder, rape or car theft. Want to get even higher? How about the 2.1 million burglaries and 2.2 million assaults?
At what point does a crime start becoming widespread? If murder were at the same rate as copyright infringement, would you argue that both were bad laws, neither were bad laws, or only one?
Oh, stats from here by the way.
I have to admit, the Movie Bot was pretty good. It gave a list of local theaters showing a particular movie much faster than I could have gotten the information over the web. Not only that, it was in a clear text-only format. Nice.
The shopping buddy I have no use for, but the movie one was pretty good.
You may all flame away now.
And how, exactly, does the fact that they're donating money indicate that they're not in it for the publicity? Corporations donate money all the time to events for the publicity.
(I don't think that Coors really has much of an opinion on that free Cher concert, and yet they donated money to it... and oddly enough they had a big banner over the stage... who would have thought!)
What does he have to say about unessential liberties for a lot of permanent safety?
Nobody is ever going to argue Franklin's statement, the real debate is about what's "essential", what's "little" and what's "temporary". This observation has nothing to do with the keylogger thing you're commenting on, it's an unrelated thought.
I like bigger screens. When I bought my laptop four years ago I got the biggest screen available at the time. The thing is a tall beast, but it's not widescreen. I don't want widescreen. Widescreen forces me to use more width, when in reality I never need more width, I only ever need more height. Never am I reading a webpage and think, "Damn, if only this computer were a little wider."
The worst part is, all the good new laptops are being made with widescreen because little Jane going off to college wants to watch DVDs. I don't want to watch DVDs on my computer, I'll do that on the TV. I want to use it as a computer, and computer need height.
I just wish some laptop companies would keep the big non-widescreen models around. It's sad.
"But instead, companies would cooperate on innovation, and compete on service. There would still be more and more money because there are more and more people and they all want service."
First off, what service? They hand you a bottle of pills, there's no service here. Either the pills work or they don't, the whole "service" that they provide is in the R&D.
Second, without patents, what's to stop Joe's Pharma Company from not investing anything in R&D, waiting until the big boys did all the grunt work, and then producing the pill and selling it for less than the competitors (he can sell it for less, because he didn't have to pay anything for R&D). Assuming your answer is that nothing will prevent this, please explain to me why the companies will bother to continue to invest in R&D when all the benefit will go to their competitors?
That's sort of true, definitely true in the short term, but you've got to look at the issue from a long term point of view as well. The system we've currently established is that drug manufacturers outlay a truly phenomenal amount of money to develop and test any particular drug. They do this on the assumption that they will, in the future, be able to charge good money for the results of their research. If they can't charge for it in the future, there's no incentive for them to develop new drugs today.
Now, one country destroying one patent is not going to eliminate the profit incentive for the drug developers. And in a situation where the drugs are badly needed (I don't know how true that is in Taiwan, but my guess is that since the disease doesn't affect people yet the answer is not very) there's a moral calculus that has to go into making this sort of decision. Is it worth it to hand out free drugs today at the possible cost of not having drugs to hand out at any cost in the future?
You're going to have to look at every individual situation and decide if the tradeoff is worthwhile.
Do you think the current phantom bird flue pandemic is worth risking future drug development over? I'd say you'd have a much better argument for taking away that patents on AIDs drugs than bird flu drugs.
Well, yeah, but with eminent domain you need pay the market value for what your taking. Since there's already a market value for the drug, one which Taiwan refused to pay, you'll need to come up with another justification.
It's really hard to argue that when Cingular goes out of business because the Government offers free wireless service, that's the result of a "capitalist economy." Now, if they go out of business because another company offers free wireless access, that's capitalist. You weren't specific.
I assumed he meant 60km^2, but even then, the UK is 244,820 square kilometers big. Dividing 244,820 by 60 gets you 4,081 airships to cover all of the UK. That's hardly a handful.
What's the highest Slashdot UID these days?
You think 99% of the public knows how to balance a budget? Maybe you're not aware of these things called credit cards...
This does, of course, reduce the number of arguments I can make about the legitimacy of downloading TV shows without paying for them... which is a down side.
It's just the LCD screen... the camera still works fine, right? You'll just need to use the viewfinder if the LCD happens to bonk out at an important moment. It's really not too tragic.
Nobody even made fun of you. You should have just let it go and nobody would have noticed.
If the company has enough capital, they could always go ahead and handle one end of the chicken/egg problem themselves. Lets say they deal with Nokia to pay for the installation of the receiver into every phone being sold by Nokia in Britain. Sure, they'll have to kick out $15 per phone, but lets say they sell a million phones... it's $15,000,000 to get a huge user base plus all the advertising that we assume they'll cram into the box.
I'm not sure it's unfeasable, they'd just need to bankroll the beginning.
If there were a system organized where everybody could upload one bit of a copyrighted TV show or movie and facilitate the file being transferred, then yes, even one bit of information would be contraband as much as the whole.
Of course, if you really uploading only one bit of data, we could dicker about the actual point of finding that illegal. But again, when you're sending it to people online, it's not like you claim you're only giving it to your friend, or you're only allowing someone to do research, or only giving access to soeone who already has the right to watch the thing. You're giving it to anybody and anybody who asks. It's like making a dvd copy and sending it to everybody in the country.
Why would uploading a whole episode be different from uploading a portion of the episode? If it's wrong to upload the whole thing, it's just as wrong to upload half, or a quarter, of the whole. Especially considering bittorrent when you have no idea where the file is going to. It's not like you're giving it to a librarian or a researcher.