The amount of money being sought is the maximum amount allowed by law. This is for punitive and compensatory damages. It seems to me that $150,000 per song is rediculous, but this number came out of Washington, not out of the RIAA.
Sorry, I should have said "poor U.S. legislators." Basically I agree with Larry Lessig's contention that the U.S. government's policy of "do nothing", relying solely on the market to build and keep broadband neutral, has failed.
The U.S. government's inaction in the face of a clear market failure has left the U.S. far behind Japan, South Korea, and a growing number of other nations. As a result there are new business opportunities in these countries that won't exist for a long time in the U.S., "Internet TV" being one of them.
8mbps ADSL connections over in Japan are extremely common with 12mbps starting to be introduced.
Actually, most ADSL customers here have already gotten their free upgrade to 12mbps. And now a lot of people are moving to fiber: 100mbps for about US$30 a month. Note that fiber to the home is available even in rural areas like Fukui prefecture, so claims that this is due solely to higher population density are simply false--the incredible disparity is mostly the result of poor US legislation.
It's unfortunate that what he stands up for is often unconstitutional. Think restrictions on political speech in the campaign finance reform legislation. What part of "Congress shall make no law..." are they having trouble with?
Ah yes, our beloved First Amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of capitalism, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom to own speech, or the press; or the right of corporations to pay the government for a redress of grievances."
How can a virtual economy ever have something that is truly valuable?
If you bothered to read any of this guy's papers, you would understand exactly how. "Value" is not an intrinsic quality of some object or idea. Things have value only because they are important for one reason or another to some group of people. But Castronova puts it better than I can:
"[E]conomists believe that it is the practical actions of people, and not abstract arguments, that determine the social value of things. One does not study the labor market because work is holy and ethical; one does it because the conditions of work mean a great deal to a large number of ordinary people. By the same reasoning, economists and other social scientists will become more interested in... virtual worlds as they realize that such places have begun to mean a great deal to large numbers of ordinary people." -- Castronova, "Virtual Worlds" p.2, 2001.
Everyone seems to be deriding these things for uselessness, poor resolution, etc. I admit that when these things first came on the market here in Japan, I was skeptical as well. Having seen them in use for a couple of years now, though, I see where they fit in. Case in point: my girlfriend's sister recently had a baby. A few minutes after it was born, my girlfriend and I got its first photo in our email, courtesy of J-Phone's Sha-mail (photo mail). Now sure, the non-computer-savvy expecting couple could have dragged a laptop with a wireless net connection and a digital camera to the hospital. Right. Instead they brought their 1-yen phone.
The problem is that the economically rational choice your store made (when it was on the 2nd story) makes sense for *all* stores. Going back to websites; it doesn't make economic sense for *any* site to accomodate blind people because they constitute only a small percentage of the customer base. So the market quite efficiently has found a solution in which blind people are screwed.
I'm not arguing that it makes economic sense for websites to accomodate the blind, any more than it made economic sense for your store to move locations. And that is precisely why laws to guarantee the disabled rights of access are needed: because the market won't provide for them otherwise.
One very regular customer who requires an electric scooter for mobility would beat me senseless if I held the door for him, or did anything I wouldn't do for any of our perfectly healthy customers.
I assume that this fellow doesn't have one of those scooters that can climb stairs. So he is using a federally-mandated ramp to access your store, a ramp that would not otherwise exist because it doesn't make economic sense to cater to 0.5% or less of your customer base.
Gosh, that's good to know. Here I've been living and working in Japan for the past four years, writing emails and presentations in Japanese on my Linux box, thinking all along that my OS was capable of "doing" Japanese. Apparently I was wrong, as was my Japanese girlfriend who has Linux installed on her iMac. Thanks for setting us straight, philovivero!
Thank god the folks at Microsoft invented a way for computers to "do" Japanese...as everyone knows, before Microsoft released their IME, there was no way to input Japanese data into a computer, which is why Japanese didn't use computers at all until the early 1990s.
I'm heading to Akihabara today...I'll be sure to let all the Japanese folks there picking up copies of Kondara and Vine Linux not to waste their money, because I got the lowdown from an American who married a Taiwanese woman, and immediately became the world's foremost expert on Asian input methods.
Case in point: several months ago emails to my father started bouncing. After some investigation I got in touch with the sysadmins at his company. Apparently they were spammed or hacked once by someone with an account at my ISP, so they decided to block the entire ISP, forever.
BUT: my ISP is one of the largest in Japan, and I know for a fact they run a tight-ship. They even have an ad campaign to inform people how they can help to fight spam. But someone slipped through the cracks, and as a result, some lazy US sysadmins blocked several hundred thousand email addresses, just because they reasoned, "Who would ever get email from Japan?" Typical American thinking: "Those other countries just exist on TV, right?"
Clearly there are a LOT of evil spammers in China. But I wonder how many Chinese ISPs who are trying to do things the right way, by closing open relays, etc. are being cut off anyway due to lazy US sysadmins who have decided to deal with their spam problem by just blocking all packets from China.
The "annihilation of self" or the sacrifice of self for the good of the group is a prevalent ideology in Japan and other eastern cultures and I'm assuming that they would not be too put out by having their information transmitted to a potential supplier of wares, goods, or serivces.
I'm sure that sounded great when you read it in your Japanese cultural theory class, but I can tell you for a fact that it is not true.
Japan actually has much stronger laws than the US regarding what kinds of information companies can collect, and what they can do with that information. "Privacy" is quite important to most modern Japanese, and the fact that it is difficult to obtain just makes it more precious.
There is already a huge problem with keitai (cell phone) spam on i-mode and other services in Japan. My girlfriend recently had to change her number due to 50+ spam calls a day. These kinds of problems have made Japanese consumers very aware of the dangers of leaving personal information unguarded.
Tsutaya is not doing anything that hundreds of US companies aren't slavering to do. And you can bet that once wireless penetration in the US reaches the levels of Japan, Americans will be tracked in far more insidious ways than this. In fact, I would say that Americans, rather than Japanese, are the ones who would happily "annihilate themselves" for convenience, as their use of credit cards (which most Japanese mistrust) for even the smallest transactions shows.
I think it is interesting that the Free Software community is embracing.NET, after years of scorning Java, which offers many of the same features.
Sure there are a few free implementations of the JVM, but none support Java beyond 1.1. Whenever Java is discussed among Linux developers, their voices drip with scorn and they go on and on about performance problems eliminated three years ago, and the dangers of a language "owned by Sun". But those same developers are jumping right in to develop free implementations of.NET, a language "owned" by a company with a far worse track record for cooperation than Sun, and which boasts that you will be able to "write a class in C#, subclass it in C++, and instantiate it in Eiffel" (I'm sure there won't be any performance issues there).
Why not ramp up the effort to create free VMs and libraries for Java, a language actually in use around the world *right now*? It boggles the mind.
"When a country (at this point in the game, anyway) has such a large percentage of Linux users, it probably means that the market is so small that techies and hackers dominate the market for PCs while everyone else is satisfied to just own a PlayStation."
That is exactly why the next year and a half or so will see serious threats to Microsoft coming out of Japan. You're right, the Japanese "ignorant end user" market is content to just own a PlayStation--and a cellular phone (85% of the population) and a palmtop, and a GPS navigator...
The bloated Microsoft PC is great for American consumers, who can put it in the rec room next to the bumper pool. But it doesn't fit too well in the average Japanese consumer's backpack. Nor does it drive powerful graphic engines for video games (far more popular than movies here).
The Playstations, cell phones, palmtops, and countless other gadgets are getting more powerfully very quickly, and their combined power and flexibility will soon outstrip that of PCs. Japan will be the first place to realize the dream of "ubiquitous computing" embedded in billions of consumer devices, communicating through the internet. The GUI for the OSes running on these devices won't have windows and icons--more likely kittens and dinosaurs and busty schoolgirls. Unlike American consumers, the Japanese don't need the bland (inter)face of Microsoft to reassure them that they bought the right thing.
So given that the Japanese techies and hackers at the companies who make these devices are so devoted to Linux, who's to say the OSes they run won't be Linux-based?
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The amount of money being sought is the maximum amount allowed by law. This is for punitive and compensatory damages. It seems to me that $150,000 per song is rediculous, but this number came out of Washington, not out of the RIAA.
It is especially ridiculous when you consider that Bush wants to set the maximum compensatory damages for victims of medical negligence to $250,000.
One life, $250,000. One song, $150,000. Incredible.
Sorry, I should have said "poor U.S. legislators." Basically I agree with Larry Lessig's contention that the U.S. government's policy of "do nothing", relying solely on the market to build and keep broadband neutral, has failed.
The U.S. government's inaction in the face of a clear market failure has left the U.S. far behind Japan, South Korea, and a growing number of other nations. As a result there are new business opportunities in these countries that won't exist for a long time in the U.S., "Internet TV" being one of them.
8mbps ADSL connections over in Japan are extremely common with 12mbps starting to be introduced.
Actually, most ADSL customers here have already gotten their free upgrade to 12mbps. And now a lot of people are moving to fiber: 100mbps for about US$30 a month. Note that fiber to the home is available even in rural areas like Fukui prefecture, so claims that this is due solely to higher population density are simply false--the incredible disparity is mostly the result of poor US legislation.
It's unfortunate that what he stands up for is often unconstitutional. Think restrictions on political speech in the campaign finance reform legislation. What part of "Congress shall make no law..." are they having trouble with?
Ah yes, our beloved First Amendment:
That's how it goes, right?
If you bothered to read any of this guy's papers, you would understand exactly how. "Value" is not an intrinsic quality of some object or idea. Things have value only because they are important for one reason or another to some group of people. But Castronova puts it better than I can:
Everyone seems to be deriding these things for uselessness, poor resolution, etc. I admit that when these things first came on the market here in Japan, I was skeptical as well. Having seen them in use for a couple of years now, though, I see where they fit in. Case in point: my girlfriend's sister recently had a baby. A few minutes after it was born, my girlfriend and I got its first photo in our email, courtesy of J-Phone's Sha-mail (photo mail). Now sure, the non-computer-savvy expecting couple could have dragged a laptop with a wireless net connection and a digital camera to the hospital. Right. Instead they brought their 1-yen phone.
The problem is that the economically rational choice your store made (when it was on the 2nd story) makes sense for *all* stores. Going back to websites; it doesn't make economic sense for *any* site to accomodate blind people because they constitute only a small percentage of the customer base. So the market quite efficiently has found a solution in which blind people are screwed.
I'm not arguing that it makes economic sense for websites to accomodate the blind, any more than it made economic sense for your store to move locations. And that is precisely why laws to guarantee the disabled rights of access are needed: because the market won't provide for them otherwise.
One very regular customer who requires an electric scooter for mobility would beat me senseless if I held the door for him, or did anything I wouldn't do for any of our perfectly healthy customers.
I assume that this fellow doesn't have one of those scooters that can climb stairs. So he is using a federally-mandated ramp to access your store, a ramp that would not otherwise exist because it doesn't make economic sense to cater to 0.5% or less of your customer base.
This would be like me walking into Target (or any other store) and suing them because they don't sell XL-Tall shirts that will fit me.
No, it would be like you not being able to walk into Target because you can't fit through the door.
"Linux just can't do Chinese (or Japanese) now."
Gosh, that's good to know. Here I've been living and working in Japan for the past four years, writing emails and presentations in Japanese on my Linux box, thinking all along that my OS was capable of "doing" Japanese. Apparently I was wrong, as was my Japanese girlfriend who has Linux installed on her iMac. Thanks for setting us straight, philovivero!
Thank god the folks at Microsoft invented a way for computers to "do" Japanese...as everyone knows, before Microsoft released their IME, there was no way to input Japanese data into a computer, which is why Japanese didn't use computers at all until the early 1990s.
I'm heading to Akihabara today...I'll be sure to let all the Japanese folks there picking up copies of Kondara and Vine Linux not to waste their money, because I got the lowdown from an American who married a Taiwanese woman, and immediately became the world's foremost expert on Asian input methods.
Case in point: several months ago emails to my father started bouncing. After some investigation I got in touch with the sysadmins at his company. Apparently they were spammed or hacked once by someone with an account at my ISP, so they decided to block the entire ISP, forever.
BUT: my ISP is one of the largest in Japan, and I know for a fact they run a tight-ship. They even have an ad campaign to inform people how they can help to fight spam. But someone slipped through the cracks, and as a result, some lazy US sysadmins blocked several hundred thousand email addresses, just because they reasoned, "Who would ever get email from Japan?" Typical American thinking: "Those other countries just exist on TV, right?"
Clearly there are a LOT of evil spammers in China. But I wonder how many Chinese ISPs who are trying to do things the right way, by closing open relays, etc. are being cut off anyway due to lazy US sysadmins who have decided to deal with their spam problem by just blocking all packets from China.
Japan actually has much stronger laws than the US regarding what kinds of information companies can collect, and what they can do with that information. "Privacy" is quite important to most modern Japanese, and the fact that it is difficult to obtain just makes it more precious.
There is already a huge problem with keitai (cell phone) spam on i-mode and other services in Japan. My girlfriend recently had to change her number due to 50+ spam calls a day. These kinds of problems have made Japanese consumers very aware of the dangers of leaving personal information unguarded.
Tsutaya is not doing anything that hundreds of US companies aren't slavering to do. And you can bet that once wireless penetration in the US reaches the levels of Japan, Americans will be tracked in far more insidious ways than this. In fact, I would say that Americans, rather than Japanese, are the ones who would happily "annihilate themselves" for convenience, as their use of credit cards (which most Japanese mistrust) for even the smallest transactions shows.
They already have. It's called Miracle Linux.
I think it is interesting that the Free Software community is embracing .NET, after years of scorning Java, which offers many of the same features.
.NET, a language "owned" by a company with a far worse track record for cooperation than Sun, and which boasts that you will be able to "write a class in C#, subclass it in C++, and instantiate it in Eiffel" (I'm sure there won't be any performance issues there).
Sure there are a few free implementations of the JVM, but none support Java beyond 1.1. Whenever Java is discussed among Linux developers, their voices drip with scorn and they go on and on about performance problems eliminated three years ago, and the dangers of a language "owned by Sun". But those same developers are jumping right in to develop free implementations of
Why not ramp up the effort to create free VMs and libraries for Java, a language actually in use around the world *right now*? It boggles the mind.
"When a country (at this point in the game, anyway) has such a large percentage of Linux users, it probably means that the market is so small that techies and hackers dominate the market for PCs while everyone else is satisfied to just own a PlayStation."
That is exactly why the next year and a half or so will see serious threats to Microsoft coming out of Japan. You're right, the Japanese "ignorant end user" market is content to just own a PlayStation--and a cellular phone (85% of the population) and a palmtop, and a GPS navigator...
The bloated Microsoft PC is great for American consumers, who can put it in the rec room next to the bumper pool. But it doesn't fit too well in the average Japanese consumer's backpack. Nor does it drive powerful graphic engines for video games (far more popular than movies here).
The Playstations, cell phones, palmtops, and countless other gadgets are getting more powerfully very quickly, and their combined power and flexibility will soon outstrip that of PCs. Japan will be the first place to realize the dream of "ubiquitous computing" embedded in billions of consumer devices, communicating through the internet. The GUI for the OSes running on these devices won't have windows and icons--more likely kittens and dinosaurs and busty schoolgirls. Unlike American consumers, the Japanese don't need the bland (inter)face of Microsoft to reassure them that they bought the right thing.
So given that the Japanese techies and hackers at the companies who make these devices are so devoted to Linux, who's to say the OSes they run won't be Linux-based?
Left in the dust? I doubt it.