I'm intrigued by your use of allmusic as the measurement. And I mean that in a purely positive way.
I've always been interested by the fact that the top50 music listing on Amazon, for "Pop" music, regularly features some really baby-boomer / retiree stuff. Michael Bublé, Diana Krall, Bonnie Raitt, Faith Hill, Rod Stewart, Mark Knopfler, etc. These are not "top 40" to me in the sense that when I look at the actual Billboard top 40, it tends to feature Jay-Z much more than the likes of Bonnie frikkin' Raitt. I think most sites which sell the most music online will tend to lean more towards an older clientele and I'm not sure why that is. Maybe MySpace should have a similar feature (unless they do, I don't visit that site very often.) I'd wager their list would be much, much different, and possibly more interesting anyway.
My feeling is that it's probably true that people needed to "stock up" on the stuff they either already had, or wish they had in terms of a "library", and that lately they're more likely just checking stuff out.
As an aside, there was a rather brilliant interview with Nettwerk's Terry McBride in Wired's music issue (August / September.) He proposes that each artist should essentially "be their own label", benefiting directly from the efforts to record and release an album. Needless to say this is a groundbreaking point of view for anyone in the major label industry. He's actually making that happen too, and with some very high-profile artists (Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies.)
They discovered you can use the same methods used in the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle to scan cylinder recordings which are too brittle to be played by traditional means. The results of those experiments are pretty astounding.
The only "notice" the "John Does" get is a vague letter from their ISP, along with copies of an ex parte discovery order and a subpoena, indicating that an order has already been granted against them: i.e., instead of receiving notice that the RIAA is applying for an order, they instead are notified that they have already lost the motion, without ever even having known of its existence.
And later:
They are not given copies of (i) the summons and complaint, (ii) the papers upon which the Court granted the ex parte discovery order, or (iii) the court rules needed to defend themselves. Most recipients of this "notice" do not even realize that it means that there is a lawsuit against them. None of the recipients of the "notice" have any idea what they are being sued for, or what basis the Court had for granting the ex parte discovery order and for allowing the RIAA to obtain a subpoena.
He was never "served" this charge in the first place, nor have any of these high-profile cases against what appear to be largely innocent, unassuming individuals. He was only contacted by the settlement facility long after the RIAA decided he had already "been served".
This is without question the most crooked legal tactics I have ever seen in my life. In my opinion, the time for a class-action suit against the RIAA and each of the major distributors it represents is long overdue. I would love to see someone with deep pockets take that one on.
Having said that: of course piracy is rampant. But holy crap people. Legal precedent! Due Process! Yadda yadda yadda!
You know what would be a "compelling physical product?" CD's for $5.00.
Indeed! "Compelling" is the word they seem to gloss over.
What surprises me about this shift is that the music industry is so narrowly focused on one use of the DVD, a use which very tightly follows how CD's already operate. High quality master, medium quality ripped files, possibly some visual extras. Ta da. CD's already do this, but they're considered less "secure" by the music biz bean counters.
What excited me about DVD as a format when it was first released is that it was meant to be a pretty broad delivery platform. When it was first announced I was still working in the music industry and I mentioned to several people at one very major label that it would be awesome to see this format, with its much larger capacity, used to sell entire artist collections on one disc (merely one example.) You could fit the entire catalog of Jimi Hendrix on one DVD with better audio specs than a CD, and include all kinds of extras like behind the scenes photos (viewable while the music played, also printable for those who wanted a hard copy), interview footage or audio, full size album graphics, etc. They could also feature a "greatest hits" mode that plays only the top singles from that entire artist's repertoire.
Nobody is thinking outside the box when it comes to the DVD as a consumer format. You could also sell that DVD compilation for approx. $20 or so (USD) and still make a hefty profit, even given the current climate in the music industry. It's much cheaper to produce than a box set and the benefits would be massive, and the labels could for once be seen as some sort of innovator.
Of course: major labels are so money-hungry that they would never see that suggestion as a beneficial move, even though it's the kind of thing that would sell like hotcakes to people who even already own CD's by the same artist. If they want to make the move to using DVD as the standard, I'm definitely for it if they start coming up with ideas like that. But they aren't. And they won't.
Anyone who thinks of DRM as a "feature" is out of their mind. DRM of any sort is a huge pain in the ass. Just give us our content, and give it to us in ways where we feel like we're getting some value for our money. The product they're currently describing sounds like another price upgrade from CD's (which many people already feel are not worth the money.) It's doomed from the start if that's how they're going to approach it.
if he became disbarred, lost his fandom, and studies were released proving that there is no link between videogames and violence... that would be a fate for him worse than death.
You mean a report like this one? [Violent Video Games: Myths, Facts, and Unanswered Questions, written by Craig A. Anderson, PhD, Psychology.]
In a nutshell it purports:
- Violent videogames lead to increased aggressive behavior and thoughts - High exposure to these games has been linked to delinquency, fighting at school, and violent criminal behavior - Studies with college students have consistently found increased aggression after exposure to clearly unrealistic and fantasy violent video games. - The effect is probably much more widespread than his report implies, just due to sample sizes.
It's an interesting read.
I am not anti-videogames, or even anti-violent-videogames. Just that there are dozens of these reports around. Seeing consistent violence, cartoonish or otherwise, does have an effect on people, especially young people. It's just that it's not often (yet) that it's manifested in someone's actual outward behavior.
Also: Thompson is a Moron. Or at least sounds like one.
Several of the emails I received feature this line in the body text:
YOU CANNOT PARTICIPATE IN ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES and expect to get away with it.
So... but it's okay to forge headers, right? And use a botnet to flood my inbox with this crap, right? A botnet which was built by writing a virus that would turn an unsuspecting user's computer into a zombie so you could pump out more of this crap like a frikkin' coward from some bunker in the midwest. That part is totally a-okay right?
News flash for pathetic spammers like these ones: The whole point was: we didn't want to hear from you idiot spammers in the first place. Period. We attempted unsubscribing and you didn't unsubscribe us. In fact most of you spammed us even harder. You didn't take our collective "no" for an answer. Now that we had a new outlet for our "no" to be sent to you, as an apparent last resort, you're calling what we're doing "illegal?!?!"
The number would only accept "valid format" numbers or the call would be ended. It also featured a horrendous computer-generated and obviously fake greeting.
One guy on that site managed to build an automated randomized seeder once he figured out what a "valid format" card type was. Pretty impressive actually!:)
You may be half right on some of those. It's important to note that "she" (McLachlan) is not the one actually starting it. However she is among the artists who support it.
First: most of those artists are either on the Nettwerk label (McLachlan) or are managed or co-managed by Nettwerk (LaVigne, BNL, McLachlan, Raine Maida, Kreviazuk, Sum41). That makes it pretty obvious that two things are actually happening:
1) The artists, while feeling pretty hosed about how much rampant downloading is still going on, are not so hard-hit by that action that they feel outraged.
2) They do actually have some say about this since they are money-making artists on predominantly major-distributed labels.
I think that second point is key. Every major label artist, by that I mean one signed directly to an international major label, featuring international mass distribution, has either remained silent about this issue or has been so outspoken against downloading in particular that they've greatly damaged their fanbase ([cough]Metallica[/cough].)
Yes, most of these artists are on independent labels (biggest exceptions: Lavigne is on Arista, BNL are on Warner.) However that does not exclude them from major international distributorship (Nettwerk is distributed by EMI. Sloan is distributed by Sony / BMG. Most of the others have major distributors for their releases.) Whether you like Avril Lavigne's music or not, she is a top-five-selling artist who has joined this group of artists to make it known: she still doesn't agree with the tactics her major label is claiming to represent by suing her fans.
If it were a smaller artist - say: Harvey Danger, who actually allowed full on torrent files of their album to be released with no restrictions whatsoever last year - the attention payed to that motive is slight, and the response is usually "Big deal, who's heard of them? What difference will that make?"
I get the feeling that this is more likely a management / publishing mandate, with some artist buy-in. Nettwerk also handles or has a great deal to say about the publishing for all of these artists.
Interesting development. Maybe we'll finally get the music industry that consumers actually want, instead of this cat and mouse crap. Anything that goes a step or two towards evening the playing field when it comes to this industry is definitely a good thing. The last thing we need (which we have now) is another five Nickelbacks getting mass airplay on radio and then hearing them and their label and agents complaining that sales are down strictly because of downloading.
I was wondering when someone would chime in with the old Atari's.:)
I was actually trained on an Atari 800XL at my high school. They had those and several Apple//e's. Hard to believe that those computers (especially//e's) remained such mainstay household computing devices for so long. The thing that blew me away about the Atari's were games like Rescue from Fractalus and Ball Blazer (those are horrible titles but they were excellent games at the time, and miles ahead of any console game.)
My school also had a punchcard machine which tapped into the University's mainframe. (I don't recall the model on that. Punchcard usage was restricted to certain classes.) I learned BASIC from several books before getting in front of my first computer. Nerrrrdy.
This thread makes me remember the weird stuff that computer companies thought you needed as part of your user interface. The Atari floppy drives made different sounds when booting up and reading / writing. (They made it through the speaker of your TV. Insane.) The Macs were the first ones I'd seen with a distinct startup sound. Apple Coco's had a weird sort of gap while waiting for the tape carrier tone to "catch". Kind of weird things to remember but it's interesting. I think it gave them a bit of personality.
That and the patterns people would get into with multiple floppies and one drive.
First computer I owned was a Mac Quadra 600AV. I leeched computer time off of employers and friends. Never made enough to own a computer until then.
I am not a doctor, nor do I work in the medical field. However I do know people - people in Seattle even - who do work in that industry.
While it's very easy to say something like "Just don't use Windows / Microsoft products" on a site like Slashdot, that statement ignores a rather obvious issue. Exactly how much professional-level medical software is out there for Mac OS? Or Linux. I can tell you the answer to that. Zero. None. Most hospital patient tracking systems originated on DOS and then Windows computers. These are industry standard programs and have been the baseline software for the medical industry for something like 20 years now. You don't just say "You should ditch windows, that's irresponsible of you." Take a second and think of how long it would take to switch over just one hospital to a new OS and having the appropriate software running to take care of things like patient history, billing, insurance tracking, vendor management, security, etc. Now keep in mind that hospitals all around the world - not just the US - have a well-established software base that runs on, you guessed it, Windows and it becomes a bit more difficult just tell a hospital (an industry) "Stop using M$ products."
If a patient moves from Seattle to Los Angeles, their new doctor is expecting the exact same types of files on that patient, readable by the same software. So is that patient's insurance company. So are paramedics who may need to quickly assess a patient's history for things like drug allergies, etc. So are pharmacists.
I agree that Windows is a non-secure and a horrible environment to open to the Intarweb, but let's be honest here. An individual can make the decision "I hate M$ office etc. and I want something better." (And they should.) A professional industry could say that but it's a lot harder to implement that kind of change. And I doubt anyone could easily suggest alternatives at this stage. Maybe that's a good point, though. Industry-standard software of a highly professional nature *should* probably be created for an OS like Linux, or OSX, or anything besides just windows.
I'm being horribly general here but it's not a simple thing to solve just by wiping a hard drive and putting a shiny distro of Debian on instead. How that system is used besides its networking security features is a much bigger deal than protecting against any misguided adware infection. There are known ways of protecting a Windows system and they should be employed.
It's the RIAA's fault because they represent labels who have performed the following questionable or outright illegal actions (in no particular order)
- Paying radio stations in cocaine / sports cars / tens of thousands of dollars to make sure a single gets played 12 - 22 times a day every day for four months, ensuring a "reasonable" debut for an artist who nobody has ever heard of - and sometimes artists they have. This practice has been criticized and even litigated in the past (the 1950's and 1980's most notably) with little abatement in this practice.
- Ensuring that CD's remained in a $17 - $22 price range from [literally, no joke] 1983 to the present, despite the fact that literally anyone will tell you that the reasonable retail price for a CD should more likely be around $9, max. (Note that the price outside of North America is usually substantially higher.) LP's and Cassettes were priced around the $7-$9 range range when CD's were introduced (1982). Even with inflation there is literally ZERO reason for a CD to be "on sale" at $16 or so.
- Ensuring that their artists - even the ones who pull in the lion's share of profits for a label - only earn a maximum of $0.70 per cd sold (and not returned), yet making sure that that same artist is the one responsible for paying for the $100,000+ video they just made which will be played precisely one (1) time on your alleged music video station of choice.
- Continuing to take major percentages of money from the sales of any possible merchandise an artist can make while on the road, including the sales of T-shirts, cd's, posters, etc. at the show's merch booth. (Note: this is one of the only ways an artist actually stands to make more money in terms of a major record deal.)
- Failing to offer any consumer, anywhere, any sort of online alternative that actually makes financial sense. People know that digital files to not require things like packaging or shipping costs. Yet a song on iTunes = $1. That is flatly ridiculous. I don't get artwork, liner notes or anything else - I get the song. It's also not a high-quality version of the recording. My guess, that's worth $0.50 at the very most.
Why labels have been dragging their feet since the introduction of the MP3 is beyond me. Maybe lawsuits were part of their actual overall marketing plan for 2000 - 2015. I don't know. Either way: the RIAA knows all of the abovementioned points. They should be brought to bear on the actual fiscal facts of this situation. We as consumers have been putting up with this crap for decades, not just since the introduction of the internet.
In my opinion, especially the Santagelo case proves that the labels and the RIAA are well aware that they are on the cusp of breaching the law themselves. They back away when barked at loudly enough. My hope is that real justice is served and copyright law is examined in much greater detail in the courts. Artists are getting screwed anyway, no need for the labels to make out like it's our duty to correct that.
Where I live (Toronto) it costs me [on average] $12.00 for me to see a movie with no snacks / beverage. Usually per-person it's $14 each. I tend to want to support a theatre because I'm aware of the economics of how it is running a theatre, so I do buy popcorn. The theatre essentially makes zero dollars (or pretty close) by bidding on even a surefire movie. They tend to make all their money from sales of popcorn and soda. This is why a medium popcorn costs $5 (or so) and a medium soda (large enough to dock your jet skis in) costs $4. Most theatres do *not* make any profit from any ancilliary restaurant like a Taco Bell on the premises. That's purely rent. (Speaking strictly from several articles I have read on this topic in Canada.)
The issue I have lately has less to do with idiot yahoos jabbering away on cellphones or the price of popcorn and more to do with the fact that in Toronto (at least) and Canada (at large) the same guy who sold me popcorn one week can be running the actual projection unit the next. I have seen first reels upside down. I have seen first reels with no sound. I have seen a movie projected halfway down the screen. These people are imbeciles. I am not alone in my disdain. This is unacceptable and greatly detracts from anything resembling an entertainment experience.
If I pay what it costs to see Eterenal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the theatre, with my date, it costs me a total of $13x2 for tickets plues large popcorn ($5) plus two medium sodas ($8) = $26.
I bought the extended DVD when it came out and it was $23. I can buy decent popcorn and soda for a total of $4. (ie: $27) I payed marginally more for the DVD experience, but I saved an unimaginable amount, plus I can watch it numerous times, plus I get numerous extras. When I play the DVD there is little question of who is setting up the presentation of the video. The disc is way more pro than any projewtionist I've been subected to since 1997. Guaranteed.
Theatres, despite the fact I understand the fiscal structure and want to support them, are losing me. Rapidly.
Entertainment Weekly has had several very insightful articles pointing to this very annoyance. I believe in a few more years we won't even go to theatres. It might be less interesting socially but holy man do I ever welcome it.
As a user who has attempted to completely replace both Mac OS (at the time v.9.2) and Windows (numerous flavors) with Linux I would have to call total bullshit on this. Linux is great if you want to do purely programmatic work, and if you want to do serious online work of any sort including setting up a server, running your own email, doing higher-level work in terms of code, development or troubleshooting. As a "typical computer user" setup however I think it has a ways to go, but that "ways" could be eaten up within in the next several years.
Killer App #1 that Linux has yet to conquer: Photoshop. From a user interface and overall quality point of view "the Gimp" is simply no replacement. Show me one working, paid graphic arts professional who is using the Gimp versus Photoshop in their daily life and I'll eat every word I'm typing. That user does not exist. The paintbrushes alone in Photoshop kick the ENTIRE ASS of the Gimp. Gimp is okay for supersimple graphic manipulation but that is it. Beyond resizing and cropping the Gimp is useless to me and even there it takes me way longer to do than in even the oldest version I have of Photoshop. (v.3.0) Add in things like tectures or patterns and the Gimp has a long way to go. I don't mean to discount the developers of that software but this is a pretty crucial thing to me converting 100%.
Word processing, sure, fine, no question. Maybe even spreadsheet work - though I still give Excel the edge there. But for things like graphical work or even some otherwise basic things like (for God's sake) wireless networking with industry-standard cards: Linux falls super-short. I have what would generically be considered an industry-standard laptop wireless card which no computer (and I'm coming up on five I've tested it with) will work with in numerous flavors of linux (Redhat, Mandriva, Suse, or Debian using all manner of ndiswrapper histrionics.) Those same computers running *any* flavor of Windows [virus-laden though they may eventually become] have ZERO problem running this card. That is a crucial distinction to Joe Average User. Joe User does not want to have to come across an error which disallows the use of something as basic as his/her soundcard just to view a flash website. This kind of thing happens all the time in Linux.
I am not necessarily pro-Windows, or even pro-OSX (though it is pretty close to what I'd consider a completely consumer-friendly OS, despite its lack of overall software variety - hello more games!) but I am not yet pro-Linux for these reasons. As I say it would probably take a mere handful of years for this to change. Which I welcome. I hope it's sooner than later. Linux overall is a much more efficient system.
What baffles me the most is that M (for mature) is rated as being for customers "17 and older", while AO is for customers "18 and older." That's not a huge difference. One year. What does a 17 year old not know that an 18 year old is suddenly an expert at these days? Especially since I regularly get my ass handed to me by 16 years olds (or younger) on many online games, I fail to see how a rating system would make any sort of difference to a game like this. If I'm 16, I'll probably find the means to get this game one way or the other.
Also: there isn't any nudity in this game (not even, specifically, in the hot coffee segment where one would expect it.) It's quite obviously cartoonishly presented. I can understand the uproar over Manhunt, which is by comparison very detailed and brutally violent. But this is to my mind one of the most ridiculous "debacles" I've ever heard of. Anyone who assumes that a game named "Grand Theft Auto" is for teenagers is living in a fantasy world. Why it takes a sticker saying "AO" versus "M" to drive this home is beyond me. Does this mean I can make a game called "Assassinate The President" or "Serial Rapist" and expect the rating to determine whether Walmart will carry it or not?
And where are the freakin' parents? Out carjacking?
> the RIAA sought amnesty from laws regarding DOS attacks, so that they could DOS "known pirates"
The RIAA may not be *actually* DDOS'ing P2P as far as the specific technical definition of it, but they *are* flooding it with millions of bogus versions of popular songs using a service called OverPeer (mentioned here numerous times in the past.)
Pretty much every new major release on any P2P network now returns in the millions (literally) of bogus results. It can cause your computer to hang frequently while the app attempts to handle the overload of results. Why is this an issue? Because for example several artists have songs with the same name, many of which are actually public domain. If you are looking for an artist with a song title that a major release also has: you're still out of luck, even though you're technically legally allowed to download that song. Thanks again, RIAA! (Well: and labels, since they're the ones who wanted this technology in place.)
It's virtually the same as DDOS'ing in my opinion. But maybe that's just me.
Actually the pity and irony is: they're more likely two distinct, separate, exclusive board meetings. One for hardware, one for music label. (and technically a third for movie studio / multimedia label.) Note: I am not speaking from experience, merely word of mouth feedback. IANASE (I am not a Sony Employee.)
Sony, the electronics manufacturer, has its own agenda. Sony Music (now officially Sony-BMG Music) has an obvious other agenda. This gets worse too, because the Japanese company doing all the real innovation in design of electronics products, etc. has next to no contact with the US / North American one. Some products trickle down, yes, but not nearly as many of the 'cool' ones they put out in Japan.
Wired had a fantastic article almost two years ago now called The Civil War Inside Sony. Definitely worth a read.
One should not confuse the two (electronics manufacturer and music label.) Just because you see the "Sony" brand on an mp3 player doesn't mean at ALL that Sony Music had anything to do with it.
If the company was really smart they would co-brand Sony electronics products with Sony music artists. That's the biggest no brainer ever and they have yet to do anything like this. (Not that I would buy a "Jennifer Lopez MP3 player" but I'm sure somebody would.)
> The nature of the internet being borderless, at least for now, makes it interesting how the law will be applied in such cases.
The law, at least as far as I understand what was described in the article, has to do with this sequence of events:
- Phisher builds website purporting to be US bank / US company, but is obviously not - Phisher site captures sensitive customer information purported to be from that US bank / US company - Since the victims of that crime are alleged to be customers of US bank / US company, that means the US bank / company can sue whoever it was, wherever they live in the world, since that is against the law of the land where that company is located. (the US.)
I think it's a good first step, but surely there must be international law dealing with international fraud that doesn't need to be tampered with to take these unscrupulous idiots to court over it. I have a feeling that international law may have much higher thresholds (ie: theft over $10,000 or something like that) which might make the international law route less appealing to the likes of CitiBank / Washington Mutual.
The faster they shut these idiots down the better, though, so law / bills are not really what I would go for. But hey: whatever works.:)
I believe at the time Napster was finally shut down (early 2000? or so?) Fanning was claiming to be working on pattern recognition technology in tandem with several researchers. Not metadata / tag reading, actual waveform pattern matching. This is because they wanted to circumvent someone putting up a Metallica song by naming it as a John Denver song. (for example.) Whether that's what Snocap ultimately turns out to be is unknown obviously but I'd still be interested to see what it is at least.
I agree: as long as it's an open-source "I'll name that track whatever I want" system, then no there wouldn't be any accuracy at all.
I think people are vastly missing the point here. (Surprise.)
The idea with Napster was that Fanning *always* said that he wanted to work with the music labels. The labels (and the RIAA) unfortunately hated his idea so they sued him out of existence. In my opinion, that was a mistake. The oldskool Napster would have been a fantastic method of tracking and eventually reimbursing labels, publishers and musicians. It was the first effective music distribution network. So no: he's never been "pimping himself out to both sides of the fence." The idea was that he always wanted Napster to become the leading legitimate online distribution method.
Snocap monitors the contents of files being traded on current P2P networks (they don't say who but we could guess) and then reports that information back to a central server to monitor how often a file (of any type) has been traded and downloaded. That data can then be turned into invoices and sent to ISP's and their customers.
With that information, he could then approach organizations like ASCAP or BMI, who already get similar information from BDI and other broadcast monitoring services, and use that information for charting purposes and for reimbursement to publishers. BDI charges for this service, and so could Snocap. Since file downloads are a mixture of a broadcast and an "owned goods" model, it's not being welcomed by the likes of ASCAP either but there are likely tons of other options in terms of billing / invoicing services for this kind of monitoring. Remember: This was *always* the plan for the original Napster.
You can be "sick of" hearing Shawn Fanning's name all the time but the bottom line is he did have a legitimate plan for Napster to begin with which was summarily shut down by the record labels (who it likely would have benefited immensely had they followed it through its course.)
I think Snocap is a potentially good idea for many reasons. Mostly because I do enjoy the current methodology of the numerous P2P products out there, and also because having worked in the industry, it takes a long time to get your hands on the kind of data which something like Snocap could provide. Snocap could inevitably replace Soundscan if it was proven to be both secure and reliable enough.
If Fanning didn't do this it's questionable just how long it would take for an existing music industry company to do so.
Or perhaps in the meantime he can work for Ronnie's burger bar, or on a building site, or as a motorcycle courier - there are plenty of jobs around to take while you look for something better.
I think that answer is actually quite misguided, and I speak as someone who very nearly went bancrupt while hunting for work.
I have been fortunate enough to have worked in several industries before turning to web development, then database work, then server maintenance, etc. Before that I worked in the music industry - for over 15 years, in many facets - and before that I worked your typical crappy retail jobs.
The problem with saying "Just get a regular 'Joe' job, there are tons of them out there" is that when you try to do that when you now have a resume that is clearly all over the map: you're considered "overqualified", or "not a good fit." Or much more frequently that your skills in those jobs are out of date, that you don't have any "recent" experience in the field you're applying for. My feeling is: there's a reason we spend so much time pursuing these careers of ours. It is not so we can take a step backwards, as nice as that might sometimes be in the name of keeping a roof over your head.
I'm not in the position of some people where they have more than one mouth to feed, so in that sense I've had a great deal more freedom in terms of quickly relocating if needed, or taking a bit of a pay cut or a lower position, etc., if needed just to secure the position. (Any position.) Unfortunately - and this is from experience, and re-writing and repositioning my resume so that some portion of experience fits the bill - it is nowhere near as easy as "just going out and getting an 'ordinary' job."
Having said that: no I would never work for spammers. I spend too much energy trying to stop them to ever be able to restrain myself if I were in any kind of interview situation.:)
> I'm sorry, but if you're downloading Brittney Spears or something like that, > you have no excuse. Pay The Man.
I would strongly disagree. In fact my feeling is more one of: if you're downloading Joe amateur musician, you have no excuse. If you're downloading Britney Spears, I would have to say that that downloaded should be considered a definite Loss Leader for Vibe / BMG Music, since they're the ones who already spent the hundreds of thousands of dollars on the marketing and promotion of that album. That model is one which virtually automatically generates the millions of copies sold. The day a Britney Spears is no longer able to release a CD on a major label is the day that we know for a fact that everybody is downloading music illegitimately. The fact that she continues to regularly chart within the top 10 on Billboard, and we're talking typically in the tens of millions of copies sold, is proof enough that they have nothing to worry about.
It's worth mentioning that the last Eminem CD, the Eminem Show, was sent to retailers early because there was a worry that the advance download traffic on Kazaa, etc., of the entire album would cause the opening day sales to be less than stellar. Instead it debuted at #1, selling over 800,000 copies. I don't think any of us need to ever worry that any artist at that level of public exposure is ever going to be "hurt" by music downloading. Quite the opposite. If I'm starting a band today, and we have great songs, sure we might get a little following - which would be great. But we as a new group should simply never expect to earn any kind of living by selling CD's. In fact I think it might be worthwhile to just consider CD's a 100% giveaway if you're a fledgling artist.
I wrote an article for my website about exactly this type of blanket licensing back in 2001. [That sounds boastful but I'm not trying to be. I'm just really excited that this is actually being put forward by someone with way more spotlight and legitimacy in the copyright world.] I hope it does happen because it would level the playing field somewhat. Meantime I support artists mostly by seeing them perform live these days.
Support the little guys. Don't support a major distributor. They make more money from a failing single at radio than most artists can earn in seven years of trying to get signed.
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Re:i used to think that until about 3 years ago
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The Way the Music Died
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· Score: 2, Informative
> what i find incredible is if you go to these places you can > buy "our" (usa/uk) music everywhere, and yet the most you > get in a music store here is a pathetic little "world" > section, that in no way reflects what the people there are > actually listening to. why is this? are we (as a race of > white caucasion middle class brits/americans) so close > minded? what the %*^%& has gone wrong?!
I used to think that was the actual reason until I started asking about the licensing of Japanese music. The issue has a lot more to do with foreign labels and their wish to make the highest return on investment when licensing a recording. I can't buy Shena Ringo in any store in North America because it would cost them $50 to bring in a single copy, thanx to the crazy tarriffs, fees, taxes, etc. involved. The reason it's actually that high is also that in Japan: the labels charge 3800 (close to $40USD) yen for a CD and will license accordingly. So yeah a lot of the "Western" (ie: North America and Europe) titles are all that get considered as "Import". I live in Canada so the extent of most "World" sections is mostly latin music, and not a very wide variety of that.
If I had a credit card (and I don't, nor do I really ever want one again) I would go to cdjapan.co.jp or any number of other overseas websites, but I do get charged through the nose. And that's why.
This is something I really hoped that legalized downloading would settle but apparently not. The same number of megabytes of data for some reason cost me $1.19 canadian via Napster, but costs someone in the UK over 1 UK pound. (Which is $2.45 canadian.) That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of and a key reason I hope that the whole music publishing industry has a massive turnaround.
> Maybe someone could even write a script to spam the scammers into oblivion:)
I have actually been writing little javascript forms since last October to send 200 fake, randomized entries to a spammer's recipient form, then refresh itself and send another 200, etc. I left one running all day by accident and didn't notice the hit on my CPU at all. That felt great! I easily sent hundreds of thousands of fake entries to one phisher. I've written several for as many spam forms as I could figure out. Once you realize they only use javascript to check any values it's a total free-for all.
Anyway yes: people like myself are doing this. I've sent some scripts to friends so that we each hit them at different times. Pretty good system so far. I also notice that several of the phishers I hit (notably Paypal phishers) have weak servers and also move their domains around a lot. I'd like to think that my efforts are causing them to do this much more often.
> 250 million dollars is only 0.0078 % of 32 billion dollars.
I find it interesting to note that when I was actually working in the mainstream music industry, it was touted as being a $40 billion dollar a year industry. That's North American figures. And this was anytime from 1994 - 1999 that I kept hearing that exact figure.
Yes their fiscal decreases have been significant since then, but they like to focus on the one element they can't control: downloading. (And in this case "they" refers to the RIAA but more importanly the actual labels.
Consider also that (only one example) prior to 1999, A&M and PolyGram were completely distinct companies. Now they're amalgamated into Universal (and in fact A&M may not even officially exist anymore.) They laid off literally tens of thousands of people during that megamerger and you never heard them 'complaining' about any shortfalls. It was 'a growing process.' Now that it's something that they didn't personally come up with in the hopes that it would still mean a year-end write-off: they're mad.
Again: Universal / PolyGram / A&M are just one example (albeit the biggest.)
I could mention however many (literally) hundreds of artists were also dropped in that merger but I think you get the point.
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I'm intrigued by your use of allmusic as the measurement. And I mean that in a purely positive way.
I've always been interested by the fact that the top50 music listing on Amazon, for "Pop" music, regularly features some really baby-boomer / retiree stuff. Michael Bublé, Diana Krall, Bonnie Raitt, Faith Hill, Rod Stewart, Mark Knopfler, etc. These are not "top 40" to me in the sense that when I look at the actual Billboard top 40, it tends to feature Jay-Z much more than the likes of Bonnie frikkin' Raitt. I think most sites which sell the most music online will tend to lean more towards an older clientele and I'm not sure why that is. Maybe MySpace should have a similar feature (unless they do, I don't visit that site very often.) I'd wager their list would be much, much different, and possibly more interesting anyway.
My feeling is that it's probably true that people needed to "stock up" on the stuff they either already had, or wish they had in terms of a "library", and that lately they're more likely just checking stuff out.
As an aside, there was a rather brilliant interview with Nettwerk's Terry McBride in Wired's music issue (August / September.) He proposes that each artist should essentially "be their own label", benefiting directly from the efforts to record and release an album. Needless to say this is a groundbreaking point of view for anyone in the major label industry. He's actually making that happen too, and with some very high-profile artists (Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies.)
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That would be this guy:
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/
However that was extremely experimental and not what anyone would call even medium quality.
Of more interest is the research being done by the library of congress and the Berkeley physics department.
http://www.primidi.com/2004/04/19.html
They discovered you can use the same methods used in the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle to scan cylinder recordings which are too brittle to be played by traditional means. The results of those experiments are pretty astounding.
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And later:
He was never "served" this charge in the first place, nor have any of these high-profile cases against what appear to be largely innocent, unassuming individuals. He was only contacted by the settlement facility long after the RIAA decided he had already "been served".
This is without question the most crooked legal tactics I have ever seen in my life. In my opinion, the time for a class-action suit against the RIAA and each of the major distributors it represents is long overdue. I would love to see someone with deep pockets take that one on.
Having said that: of course piracy is rampant. But holy crap people. Legal precedent! Due Process! Yadda yadda yadda!
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You know what would be a "compelling physical product?" CD's for $5.00.
Indeed! "Compelling" is the word they seem to gloss over.
What surprises me about this shift is that the music industry is so narrowly focused on one use of the DVD, a use which very tightly follows how CD's already operate. High quality master, medium quality ripped files, possibly some visual extras. Ta da. CD's already do this, but they're considered less "secure" by the music biz bean counters.
What excited me about DVD as a format when it was first released is that it was meant to be a pretty broad delivery platform. When it was first announced I was still working in the music industry and I mentioned to several people at one very major label that it would be awesome to see this format, with its much larger capacity, used to sell entire artist collections on one disc (merely one example.) You could fit the entire catalog of Jimi Hendrix on one DVD with better audio specs than a CD, and include all kinds of extras like behind the scenes photos (viewable while the music played, also printable for those who wanted a hard copy), interview footage or audio, full size album graphics, etc. They could also feature a "greatest hits" mode that plays only the top singles from that entire artist's repertoire.
Nobody is thinking outside the box when it comes to the DVD as a consumer format. You could also sell that DVD compilation for approx. $20 or so (USD) and still make a hefty profit, even given the current climate in the music industry. It's much cheaper to produce than a box set and the benefits would be massive, and the labels could for once be seen as some sort of innovator.
Of course: major labels are so money-hungry that they would never see that suggestion as a beneficial move, even though it's the kind of thing that would sell like hotcakes to people who even already own CD's by the same artist. If they want to make the move to using DVD as the standard, I'm definitely for it if they start coming up with ideas like that. But they aren't. And they won't.
Anyone who thinks of DRM as a "feature" is out of their mind. DRM of any sort is a huge pain in the ass. Just give us our content, and give it to us in ways where we feel like we're getting some value for our money. The product they're currently describing sounds like another price upgrade from CD's (which many people already feel are not worth the money.) It's doomed from the start if that's how they're going to approach it.
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if he became disbarred, lost his fandom, and studies were released proving that there is no link between videogames and violence... that would be a fate for him worse than death.
You mean a report like this one? [Violent Video Games: Myths, Facts, and Unanswered Questions, written by Craig A. Anderson, PhD, Psychology.]
In a nutshell it purports:
- Violent videogames lead to increased aggressive behavior and thoughts
- High exposure to these games has been linked to delinquency, fighting at school, and violent criminal behavior
- Studies with college students have consistently found increased aggression after exposure to clearly unrealistic and fantasy violent video games.
- The effect is probably much more widespread than his report implies, just due to sample sizes.
It's an interesting read.
I am not anti-videogames, or even anti-violent-videogames. Just that there are dozens of these reports around. Seeing consistent violence, cartoonish or otherwise, does have an effect on people, especially young people. It's just that it's not often (yet) that it's manifested in someone's actual outward behavior.
Also: Thompson is a Moron. Or at least sounds like one.
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You have just crystallized what I have been thinking about this issue. Thanks for being so succinct. Hear hear!
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Several of the emails I received feature this line in the body text:
YOU CANNOT PARTICIPATE IN ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES and expect to get away with it.
So... but it's okay to forge headers, right? And use a botnet to flood my inbox with this crap, right? A botnet which was built by writing a virus that would turn an unsuspecting user's computer into a zombie so you could pump out more of this crap like a frikkin' coward from some bunker in the midwest. That part is totally a-okay right?
News flash for pathetic spammers like these ones: The whole point was: we didn't want to hear from you idiot spammers in the first place. Period. We attempted unsubscribing and you didn't unsubscribe us. In fact most of you spammed us even harder. You didn't take our collective "no" for an answer. Now that we had a new outlet for our "no" to be sent to you, as an apparent last resort, you're calling what we're doing "illegal?!?!"
Spammers are retarded.
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> So, what if you enter a random number with random PIN.
? t=6697
:)
Actually there is a website out there that looked into one of these for Chase Bank in the past several weeks:
http://www.thescambaiter.com/forum/showthread.php
The number would only accept "valid format" numbers or the call would be ended. It also featured a horrendous computer-generated and obviously fake greeting.
One guy on that site managed to build an automated randomized seeder once he figured out what a "valid format" card type was. Pretty impressive actually!
Phishers are scum. I hope they catch these ones.
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You may be half right on some of those. It's important to note that "she" (McLachlan) is not the one actually starting it. However she is among the artists who support it.
First: most of those artists are either on the Nettwerk label (McLachlan) or are managed or co-managed by Nettwerk (LaVigne, BNL, McLachlan, Raine Maida, Kreviazuk, Sum41). That makes it pretty obvious that two things are actually happening:
1) The artists, while feeling pretty hosed about how much rampant downloading is still going on, are not so hard-hit by that action that they feel outraged.
2) They do actually have some say about this since they are money-making artists on predominantly major-distributed labels.
I think that second point is key. Every major label artist, by that I mean one signed directly to an international major label, featuring international mass distribution, has either remained silent about this issue or has been so outspoken against downloading in particular that they've greatly damaged their fanbase ([cough]Metallica[/cough].)
Yes, most of these artists are on independent labels (biggest exceptions: Lavigne is on Arista, BNL are on Warner.) However that does not exclude them from major international distributorship (Nettwerk is distributed by EMI. Sloan is distributed by Sony / BMG. Most of the others have major distributors for their releases.) Whether you like Avril Lavigne's music or not, she is a top-five-selling artist who has joined this group of artists to make it known: she still doesn't agree with the tactics her major label is claiming to represent by suing her fans.
If it were a smaller artist - say: Harvey Danger, who actually allowed full on torrent files of their album to be released with no restrictions whatsoever last year - the attention payed to that motive is slight, and the response is usually "Big deal, who's heard of them? What difference will that make?"
I get the feeling that this is more likely a management / publishing mandate, with some artist buy-in. Nettwerk also handles or has a great deal to say about the publishing for all of these artists.
Interesting development. Maybe we'll finally get the music industry that consumers actually want, instead of this cat and mouse crap. Anything that goes a step or two towards evening the playing field when it comes to this industry is definitely a good thing. The last thing we need (which we have now) is another five Nickelbacks getting mass airplay on radio and then hearing them and their label and agents complaining that sales are down strictly because of downloading.
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I was wondering when someone would chime in with the old Atari's. :)
//e's. Hard to believe that those computers (especially //e's) remained such mainstay household computing devices for so long. The thing that blew me away about the Atari's were games like Rescue from Fractalus and Ball Blazer (those are horrible titles but they were excellent games at the time, and miles ahead of any console game.)
I was actually trained on an Atari 800XL at my high school. They had those and several Apple
My school also had a punchcard machine which tapped into the University's mainframe. (I don't recall the model on that. Punchcard usage was restricted to certain classes.) I learned BASIC from several books before getting in front of my first computer. Nerrrrdy.
This thread makes me remember the weird stuff that computer companies thought you needed as part of your user interface. The Atari floppy drives made different sounds when booting up and reading / writing. (They made it through the speaker of your TV. Insane.) The Macs were the first ones I'd seen with a distinct startup sound. Apple Coco's had a weird sort of gap while waiting for the tape carrier tone to "catch". Kind of weird things to remember but it's interesting. I think it gave them a bit of personality.
That and the patterns people would get into with multiple floppies and one drive.
First computer I owned was a Mac Quadra 600AV. I leeched computer time off of employers and friends. Never made enough to own a computer until then.
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I am not a doctor, nor do I work in the medical field. However I do know people - people in Seattle even - who do work in that industry.
While it's very easy to say something like "Just don't use Windows / Microsoft products" on a site like Slashdot, that statement ignores a rather obvious issue. Exactly how much professional-level medical software is out there for Mac OS? Or Linux. I can tell you the answer to that. Zero. None. Most hospital patient tracking systems originated on DOS and then Windows computers. These are industry standard programs and have been the baseline software for the medical industry for something like 20 years now. You don't just say "You should ditch windows, that's irresponsible of you." Take a second and think of how long it would take to switch over just one hospital to a new OS and having the appropriate software running to take care of things like patient history, billing, insurance tracking, vendor management, security, etc. Now keep in mind that hospitals all around the world - not just the US - have a well-established software base that runs on, you guessed it, Windows and it becomes a bit more difficult just tell a hospital (an industry) "Stop using M$ products."
If a patient moves from Seattle to Los Angeles, their new doctor is expecting the exact same types of files on that patient, readable by the same software. So is that patient's insurance company. So are paramedics who may need to quickly assess a patient's history for things like drug allergies, etc. So are pharmacists.
I agree that Windows is a non-secure and a horrible environment to open to the Intarweb, but let's be honest here. An individual can make the decision "I hate M$ office etc. and I want something better." (And they should.) A professional industry could say that but it's a lot harder to implement that kind of change. And I doubt anyone could easily suggest alternatives at this stage. Maybe that's a good point, though. Industry-standard software of a highly professional nature *should* probably be created for an OS like Linux, or OSX, or anything besides just windows.
I'm being horribly general here but it's not a simple thing to solve just by wiping a hard drive and putting a shiny distro of Debian on instead. How that system is used besides its networking security features is a much bigger deal than protecting against any misguided adware infection. There are known ways of protecting a Windows system and they should be employed.
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> In any case, how is it the RIAA's fault?
It's the RIAA's fault because they represent labels who have performed the following questionable or outright illegal actions (in no particular order)
- Paying radio stations in cocaine / sports cars / tens of thousands of dollars to make sure a single gets played 12 - 22 times a day every day for four months, ensuring a "reasonable" debut for an artist who nobody has ever heard of - and sometimes artists they have. This practice has been criticized and even litigated in the past (the 1950's and 1980's most notably) with little abatement in this practice.
- Ensuring that CD's remained in a $17 - $22 price range from [literally, no joke] 1983 to the present, despite the fact that literally anyone will tell you that the reasonable retail price for a CD should more likely be around $9, max. (Note that the price outside of North America is usually substantially higher.) LP's and Cassettes were priced around the $7-$9 range range when CD's were introduced (1982). Even with inflation there is literally ZERO reason for a CD to be "on sale" at $16 or so.
- Ensuring that their artists - even the ones who pull in the lion's share of profits for a label - only earn a maximum of $0.70 per cd sold (and not returned), yet making sure that that same artist is the one responsible for paying for the $100,000+ video they just made which will be played precisely one (1) time on your alleged music video station of choice.
- Continuing to take major percentages of money from the sales of any possible merchandise an artist can make while on the road, including the sales of T-shirts, cd's, posters, etc. at the show's merch booth. (Note: this is one of the only ways an artist actually stands to make more money in terms of a major record deal.)
- Failing to offer any consumer, anywhere, any sort of online alternative that actually makes financial sense. People know that digital files to not require things like packaging or shipping costs. Yet a song on iTunes = $1. That is flatly ridiculous. I don't get artwork, liner notes or anything else - I get the song. It's also not a high-quality version of the recording. My guess, that's worth $0.50 at the very most.
Why labels have been dragging their feet since the introduction of the MP3 is beyond me. Maybe lawsuits were part of their actual overall marketing plan for 2000 - 2015. I don't know. Either way: the RIAA knows all of the abovementioned points. They should be brought to bear on the actual fiscal facts of this situation. We as consumers have been putting up with this crap for decades, not just since the introduction of the internet.
In my opinion, especially the Santagelo case proves that the labels and the RIAA are well aware that they are on the cusp of breaching the law themselves. They back away when barked at loudly enough. My hope is that real justice is served and copyright law is examined in much greater detail in the courts. Artists are getting screwed anyway, no need for the labels to make out like it's our duty to correct that.
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Where I live (Toronto) it costs me [on average] $12.00 for me to see a movie with no snacks / beverage. Usually per-person it's $14 each. I tend to want to support a theatre because I'm aware of the economics of how it is running a theatre, so I do buy popcorn. The theatre essentially makes zero dollars (or pretty close) by bidding on even a surefire movie. They tend to make all their money from sales of popcorn and soda. This is why a medium popcorn costs $5 (or so) and a medium soda (large enough to dock your jet skis in) costs $4. Most theatres do *not* make any profit from any ancilliary restaurant like a Taco Bell on the premises. That's purely rent. (Speaking strictly from several articles I have read on this topic in Canada.)
The issue I have lately has less to do with idiot yahoos jabbering away on cellphones or the price of popcorn and more to do with the fact that in Toronto (at least) and Canada (at large) the same guy who sold me popcorn one week can be running the actual projection unit the next. I have seen first reels upside down. I have seen first reels with no sound. I have seen a movie projected halfway down the screen. These people are imbeciles. I am not alone in my disdain. This is unacceptable and greatly detracts from anything resembling an entertainment experience.
If I pay what it costs to see Eterenal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the theatre, with my date, it costs me a total of $13x2 for tickets plues large popcorn ($5) plus two medium sodas ($8) = $26.
I bought the extended DVD when it came out and it was $23. I can buy decent popcorn and soda for a total of $4. (ie: $27) I payed marginally more for the DVD experience, but I saved an unimaginable amount, plus I can watch it numerous times, plus I get numerous extras. When I play the DVD there is little question of who is setting up the presentation of the video. The disc is way more pro than any projewtionist I've been subected to since 1997. Guaranteed.
Theatres, despite the fact I understand the fiscal structure and want to support them, are losing me. Rapidly.
Entertainment Weekly has had several very insightful articles pointing to this very annoyance. I believe in a few more years we won't even go to theatres. It might be less interesting socially but holy man do I ever welcome it.
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As a user who has attempted to completely replace both Mac OS (at the time v.9.2) and Windows (numerous flavors) with Linux I would have to call total bullshit on this. Linux is great if you want to do purely programmatic work, and if you want to do serious online work of any sort including setting up a server, running your own email, doing higher-level work in terms of code, development or troubleshooting. As a "typical computer user" setup however I think it has a ways to go, but that "ways" could be eaten up within in the next several years.
Killer App #1 that Linux has yet to conquer: Photoshop. From a user interface and overall quality point of view "the Gimp" is simply no replacement. Show me one working, paid graphic arts professional who is using the Gimp versus Photoshop in their daily life and I'll eat every word I'm typing. That user does not exist. The paintbrushes alone in Photoshop kick the ENTIRE ASS of the Gimp. Gimp is okay for supersimple graphic manipulation but that is it. Beyond resizing and cropping the Gimp is useless to me and even there it takes me way longer to do than in even the oldest version I have of Photoshop. (v.3.0) Add in things like tectures or patterns and the Gimp has a long way to go. I don't mean to discount the developers of that software but this is a pretty crucial thing to me converting 100%.
Word processing, sure, fine, no question. Maybe even spreadsheet work - though I still give Excel the edge there. But for things like graphical work or even some otherwise basic things like (for God's sake) wireless networking with industry-standard cards: Linux falls super-short. I have what would generically be considered an industry-standard laptop wireless card which no computer (and I'm coming up on five I've tested it with) will work with in numerous flavors of linux (Redhat, Mandriva, Suse, or Debian using all manner of ndiswrapper histrionics.) Those same computers running *any* flavor of Windows [virus-laden though they may eventually become] have ZERO problem running this card. That is a crucial distinction to Joe Average User. Joe User does not want to have to come across an error which disallows the use of something as basic as his/her soundcard just to view a flash website. This kind of thing happens all the time in Linux.
I am not necessarily pro-Windows, or even pro-OSX (though it is pretty close to what I'd consider a completely consumer-friendly OS, despite its lack of overall software variety - hello more games!) but I am not yet pro-Linux for these reasons. As I say it would probably take a mere handful of years for this to change. Which I welcome. I hope it's sooner than later. Linux overall is a much more efficient system.
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What baffles me the most is that M (for mature) is rated as being for customers "17 and older", while AO is for customers "18 and older." That's not a huge difference. One year. What does a 17 year old not know that an 18 year old is suddenly an expert at these days? Especially since I regularly get my ass handed to me by 16 years olds (or younger) on many online games, I fail to see how a rating system would make any sort of difference to a game like this. If I'm 16, I'll probably find the means to get this game one way or the other.
Also: there isn't any nudity in this game (not even, specifically, in the hot coffee segment where one would expect it.) It's quite obviously cartoonishly presented. I can understand the uproar over Manhunt, which is by comparison very detailed and brutally violent. But this is to my mind one of the most ridiculous "debacles" I've ever heard of. Anyone who assumes that a game named "Grand Theft Auto" is for teenagers is living in a fantasy world. Why it takes a sticker saying "AO" versus "M" to drive this home is beyond me. Does this mean I can make a game called "Assassinate The President" or "Serial Rapist" and expect the rating to determine whether Walmart will carry it or not?
And where are the freakin' parents? Out carjacking?
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> the RIAA sought amnesty from laws regarding DOS attacks, so that they could DOS "known pirates"
The RIAA may not be *actually* DDOS'ing P2P as far as the specific technical definition of it, but they *are* flooding it with millions of bogus versions of popular songs using a service called OverPeer (mentioned here numerous times in the past.)
Pretty much every new major release on any P2P network now returns in the millions (literally) of bogus results. It can cause your computer to hang frequently while the app attempts to handle the overload of results. Why is this an issue? Because for example several artists have songs with the same name, many of which are actually public domain. If you are looking for an artist with a song title that a major release also has: you're still out of luck, even though you're technically legally allowed to download that song. Thanks again, RIAA! (Well: and labels, since they're the ones who wanted this technology in place.)
It's virtually the same as DDOS'ing in my opinion. But maybe that's just me.
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I bet their internal board meetings are a riot.
Actually the pity and irony is: they're more likely two distinct, separate, exclusive board meetings. One for hardware, one for music label. (and technically a third for movie studio / multimedia label.) Note: I am not speaking from experience, merely word of mouth feedback. IANASE (I am not a Sony Employee.)
Sony, the electronics manufacturer, has its own agenda. Sony Music (now officially Sony-BMG Music) has an obvious other agenda. This gets worse too, because the Japanese company doing all the real innovation in design of electronics products, etc. has next to no contact with the US / North American one. Some products trickle down, yes, but not nearly as many of the 'cool' ones they put out in Japan.
Wired had a fantastic article almost two years ago now called The Civil War Inside Sony. Definitely worth a read.
One should not confuse the two (electronics manufacturer and music label.) Just because you see the "Sony" brand on an mp3 player doesn't mean at ALL that Sony Music had anything to do with it.
If the company was really smart they would co-brand Sony electronics products with Sony music artists. That's the biggest no brainer ever and they have yet to do anything like this. (Not that I would buy a "Jennifer Lopez MP3 player" but I'm sure somebody would.)
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> The nature of the internet being borderless, at least for now, makes it interesting how the law will be applied in such cases.
:)
The law, at least as far as I understand what was described in the article, has to do with this sequence of events:
- Phisher builds website purporting to be US bank / US company, but is obviously not
- Phisher site captures sensitive customer information purported to be from that US bank / US company
- Since the victims of that crime are alleged to be customers of US bank / US company, that means the US bank / company can sue whoever it was, wherever they live in the world, since that is against the law of the land where that company is located. (the US.)
I think it's a good first step, but surely there must be international law dealing with international fraud that doesn't need to be tampered with to take these unscrupulous idiots to court over it. I have a feeling that international law may have much higher thresholds (ie: theft over $10,000 or something like that) which might make the international law route less appealing to the likes of CitiBank / Washington Mutual.
The faster they shut these idiots down the better, though, so law / bills are not really what I would go for. But hey: whatever works.
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I believe at the time Napster was finally shut down (early 2000? or so?) Fanning was claiming to be working on pattern recognition technology in tandem with several researchers. Not metadata / tag reading, actual waveform pattern matching. This is because they wanted to circumvent someone putting up a Metallica song by naming it as a John Denver song. (for example.) Whether that's what Snocap ultimately turns out to be is unknown obviously but I'd still be interested to see what it is at least.
I agree: as long as it's an open-source "I'll name that track whatever I want" system, then no there wouldn't be any accuracy at all.
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I think people are vastly missing the point here. (Surprise.)
The idea with Napster was that Fanning *always* said that he wanted to work with the music labels. The labels (and the RIAA) unfortunately hated his idea so they sued him out of existence. In my opinion, that was a mistake. The oldskool Napster would have been a fantastic method of tracking and eventually reimbursing labels, publishers and musicians. It was the first effective music distribution network. So no: he's never been "pimping himself out to both sides of the fence." The idea was that he always wanted Napster to become the leading legitimate online distribution method.
Snocap monitors the contents of files being traded on current P2P networks (they don't say who but we could guess) and then reports that information back to a central server to monitor how often a file (of any type) has been traded and downloaded. That data can then be turned into invoices and sent to ISP's and their customers.
With that information, he could then approach organizations like ASCAP or BMI, who already get similar information from BDI and other broadcast monitoring services, and use that information for charting purposes and for reimbursement to publishers. BDI charges for this service, and so could Snocap. Since file downloads are a mixture of a broadcast and an "owned goods" model, it's not being welcomed by the likes of ASCAP either but there are likely tons of other options in terms of billing / invoicing services for this kind of monitoring. Remember: This was *always* the plan for the original Napster.
You can be "sick of" hearing Shawn Fanning's name all the time but the bottom line is he did have a legitimate plan for Napster to begin with which was summarily shut down by the record labels (who it likely would have benefited immensely had they followed it through its course.)
I think Snocap is a potentially good idea for many reasons. Mostly because I do enjoy the current methodology of the numerous P2P products out there, and also because having worked in the industry, it takes a long time to get your hands on the kind of data which something like Snocap could provide. Snocap could inevitably replace Soundscan if it was proven to be both secure and reliable enough.
If Fanning didn't do this it's questionable just how long it would take for an existing music industry company to do so.
$0.02
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Or perhaps in the meantime he can work for Ronnie's burger bar, or on a building site, or as a motorcycle courier - there are plenty of jobs around to take while you look for something better.
:)
I think that answer is actually quite misguided, and I speak as someone who very nearly went bancrupt while hunting for work.
I have been fortunate enough to have worked in several industries before turning to web development, then database work, then server maintenance, etc. Before that I worked in the music industry - for over 15 years, in many facets - and before that I worked your typical crappy retail jobs.
The problem with saying "Just get a regular 'Joe' job, there are tons of them out there" is that when you try to do that when you now have a resume that is clearly all over the map: you're considered "overqualified", or "not a good fit." Or much more frequently that your skills in those jobs are out of date, that you don't have any "recent" experience in the field you're applying for. My feeling is: there's a reason we spend so much time pursuing these careers of ours. It is not so we can take a step backwards, as nice as that might sometimes be in the name of keeping a roof over your head.
I'm not in the position of some people where they have more than one mouth to feed, so in that sense I've had a great deal more freedom in terms of quickly relocating if needed, or taking a bit of a pay cut or a lower position, etc., if needed just to secure the position. (Any position.) Unfortunately - and this is from experience, and re-writing and repositioning my resume so that some portion of experience fits the bill - it is nowhere near as easy as "just going out and getting an 'ordinary' job."
Having said that: no I would never work for spammers. I spend too much energy trying to stop them to ever be able to restrain myself if I were in any kind of interview situation.
$0.02
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> I'm sorry, but if you're downloading Brittney Spears or something like that,
> you have no excuse. Pay The Man.
I would strongly disagree. In fact my feeling is more one of: if you're downloading Joe amateur musician, you have no excuse. If you're downloading Britney Spears, I would have to say that that downloaded should be considered a definite Loss Leader for Vibe / BMG Music, since they're the ones who already spent the hundreds of thousands of dollars on the marketing and promotion of that album. That model is one which virtually automatically generates the millions of copies sold. The day a Britney Spears is no longer able to release a CD on a major label is the day that we know for a fact that everybody is downloading music illegitimately. The fact that she continues to regularly chart within the top 10 on Billboard, and we're talking typically in the tens of millions of copies sold, is proof enough that they have nothing to worry about.
It's worth mentioning that the last Eminem CD, the Eminem Show, was sent to retailers early because there was a worry that the advance download traffic on Kazaa, etc., of the entire album would cause the opening day sales to be less than stellar. Instead it debuted at #1, selling over 800,000 copies. I don't think any of us need to ever worry that any artist at that level of public exposure is ever going to be "hurt" by music downloading. Quite the opposite. If I'm starting a band today, and we have great songs, sure we might get a little following - which would be great. But we as a new group should simply never expect to earn any kind of living by selling CD's. In fact I think it might be worthwhile to just consider CD's a 100% giveaway if you're a fledgling artist.
I wrote an article for my website about exactly this type of blanket licensing back in 2001. [That sounds boastful but I'm not trying to be. I'm just really excited that this is actually being put forward by someone with way more spotlight and legitimacy in the copyright world.] I hope it does happen because it would level the playing field somewhat. Meantime I support artists mostly by seeing them perform live these days.
Support the little guys. Don't support a major distributor. They make more money from a failing single at radio than most artists can earn in seven years of trying to get signed.
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> what i find incredible is if you go to these places you can
> buy "our" (usa/uk) music everywhere, and yet the most you
> get in a music store here is a pathetic little "world"
> section, that in no way reflects what the people there are
> actually listening to. why is this? are we (as a race of
> white caucasion middle class brits/americans) so close
> minded? what the %*^%& has gone wrong?!
I used to think that was the actual reason until I started asking about the licensing of Japanese music. The issue has a lot more to do with foreign labels and their wish to make the highest return on investment when licensing a recording. I can't buy Shena Ringo in any store in North America because it would cost them $50 to bring in a single copy, thanx to the crazy tarriffs, fees, taxes, etc. involved. The reason it's actually that high is also that in Japan: the labels charge 3800 (close to $40USD) yen for a CD and will license accordingly. So yeah a lot of the "Western" (ie: North America and Europe) titles are all that get considered as "Import". I live in Canada so the extent of most "World" sections is mostly latin music, and not a very wide variety of that.
If I had a credit card (and I don't, nor do I really ever want one again) I would go to cdjapan.co.jp or any number of other overseas websites, but I do get charged through the nose. And that's why.
This is something I really hoped that legalized downloading would settle but apparently not. The same number of megabytes of data for some reason cost me $1.19 canadian via Napster, but costs someone in the UK over 1 UK pound. (Which is $2.45 canadian.) That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of and a key reason I hope that the whole music publishing industry has a massive turnaround.
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> Maybe someone could even write a script to spam the scammers into oblivion :)
I have actually been writing little javascript forms since last October to send 200 fake, randomized entries to a spammer's recipient form, then refresh itself and send another 200, etc. I left one running all day by accident and didn't notice the hit on my CPU at all. That felt great! I easily sent hundreds of thousands of fake entries to one phisher. I've written several for as many spam forms as I could figure out. Once you realize they only use javascript to check any values it's a total free-for all.
Anyway yes: people like myself are doing this. I've sent some scripts to friends so that we each hit them at different times. Pretty good system so far. I also notice that several of the phishers I hit (notably Paypal phishers) have weak servers and also move their domains around a lot. I'd like to think that my efforts are causing them to do this much more often.
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> 250 million dollars is only 0.0078 % of 32 billion dollars.
I find it interesting to note that when I was actually working in the mainstream music industry, it was touted as being a $40 billion dollar a year industry. That's North American figures. And this was anytime from 1994 - 1999 that I kept hearing that exact figure.
Yes their fiscal decreases have been significant since then, but they like to focus on the one element they can't control: downloading. (And in this case "they" refers to the RIAA but more importanly the actual labels.
Consider also that (only one example) prior to 1999, A&M and PolyGram were completely distinct companies. Now they're amalgamated into Universal (and in fact A&M may not even officially exist anymore.) They laid off literally tens of thousands of people during that megamerger and you never heard them 'complaining' about any shortfalls. It was 'a growing process.' Now that it's something that they didn't personally come up with in the hopes that it would still mean a year-end write-off: they're mad.
Again: Universal / PolyGram / A&M are just one example (albeit the biggest.)
I could mention however many (literally) hundreds of artists were also dropped in that merger but I think you get the point.
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