On the contrary, I feel that Apple has done a pretty good job over the years of balancing ethical behavior with making great products that will keep their customers happy, but even they have, on occasion screwed up, sometimes spectacularly. Apple bougth Logic Audio a couple of years ago (a music production software suite, which was available for PC and Apple). The first thing they did was cancel development for PCs. So I can't see any difference in the behaviour of these companies. Yes, you are right, it is the nature of the beast. Also Apple's.
From the GEZ website (www.gez.de): GERMAN: Im nicht ausschließlich privaten Bereich sind für neuartige Rundfunkgeräte keine zusätzlichen Rundfunkgebühren zu leisten, wenn bereits herkömmliche Radios und Fernsehgeräte auf ein und demselben Grundstück oder auf zusammenhängenden Grundstücken bereitgehalten werden und angemeldet sind. Sind keine herkömmlichen Rundfunkgeräte vorhanden, aber neuartige Rundfunkgeräte, so ist - unabhängig von der Anzahl dieser Geräte - lediglich eine Rundfunkgebühr zu zahlen.
ENGLISH: In "not exclusivlely private areas" (e.g. corporations) for "innovative broadcast devices" (this includes internet PCs) NO ADDITIONAL PAYMENT applies, if there are already radios or TVs on the same area. If there are no radios or TVs, then, NO MATTER, HOW MANY innovative broadcast devices, you only have to pay ONCE. (That means: a call center with 200 PCs has only to pay for ONE PC).
The text then says, that if the PC has a TV card or radio card, then it is handled like a normal radio or TV (as it always has been).
Hope this brings a bit of clarity. It is really not a big thing, neither for private persons nor for corporations.
So you say, that a victim of libel should not have the right to fight back, just because *you* think that the victim has lost it's reputation anyway? hmmm...not a really strong argument:-) The last paragraph is just the usual Europe bashing that you love so much. Not really insightful:-)
A couple of years and a dozen fps games later I still haven't found one that comes close to the dark athmosphere of Quake (the first one). The music did it. This shows how very important the music is for a game. And Trent Raznor is an evil genius:-)
This technology has been in use for 10 years. It has been used for creating samples of automotive and machinery parts directly from a 3D CAD model. Of course not for real use (material is very easy to break) but for checking designs, etc.
as a non-finnish German I have to deny it and I guess most Finnish Linux contributors also would. As much as I love the Finnish people for their extraordinarily black humour (finnish movies rule!) and their kindness, I think this argument only reflects the view of a non-European. "National pride" and the Open Source spirit don't fit together. Linux is a truly international endavour and I love this fact. If Linux were a reason for "national pride", it would lose most of it's attractivity for me.
I second this post.
Quote: "Artists who chose to release a song under the public license can build their reputation by offering unfettered access to their original works in exchange for recognition."
This shows that the whole thing is completely stupid. NO artist I know (and I know many) can pay his rent from "recognition".
Again this is the "I want freedom at someone else's cost" game. To pay with "recognition" is certainly a thing that many would love, while they spend their money for other things. This is a license for music done by mediocre musicians. Sorry guys, but it remains true: great music in genreal comes from musicians who spend all their life learning and improving their skills. They need to earn some real, cold *money* with their art. "Recognition" certainly is not enough.
so, if my wife asks me to read a goodnight story for her, I can tell her that it is not allowed! E-Books are great news for lazy husbands, then!
Cheers.
cooperative, democracy, communism, greed, whatever...this is not the point. Software is a tool. Not developers should be allowed to vote what to do next but users should be allowed to vote what developers should do. If users could vote, I assume there would be less bloat and more stability in software technology.
it is actually quite simple: if some country behaves in a way that might damage the american economy, there will be political actions to correct that.
This is easy with "friend countries" like the western world. E.g. the US managed to forbid that gene food can be labeled as such in Germany.
It is still relatively easy in countries of the 3rd world that depend on international help. Refuse to send them food and money and very quickly they will comply as far as they can.
It is pretty difficult with "enemy countries" or countries that just don't give a shit like Libya or China. But then, these are usually countries, where there are other (usually human rights) problems that you wouldn't want to support.
Basically the US will engage anything that their world power arsenal contains to protect/save/support their industry.
The bottomline: if you want to do something against copyright, then do it in your own country. In the US. The rest of the world (including us Europeans) is pretty helpless when the US play with their muscles to support their economy.
as for the DNA entropy stuff I guess we are leading a not so important discussion:-)
Regarding the music I want to make a point that is generally overseen in the discussion: all are talking about the big 4 when talking about labels. I am working in the "evil music industry". I am dealing with independent labels who generally have a very high standard when it comes to quality of music. These guys (who are often musicians and label owners in one person) don't earn heaps of money. They won't earn any money at all if music is regarded free.
And I repeat it: you can't compare software and music. Software is a result of engineering, (good) music the result of a purely creative process.
Well, go to mp3.com and download a couple of tracks. Most of the stuff there is so bad you can't stand it. That's the quality of music you get if nobody pays the musicians and the technical infrastructure they need to produce their music.
The first to die from "making music free" are the small, good labels.
Declaring music "free" is declaring one's freedom on someone else's cost.
the Hannover exhibition center actually does no exhibitions for the music industry. These happen in Cologne and in Frankfurt (and in Cannes of course).
So I wonder what their motivation would be to bow to the pressure of the music industry.
On the exhibition area they currently have the EXPO 2000, which is a financial desaster. May be BMG (Bertelsmann operates one of the most visited boothes on EXPO) offered to support Expo a bit? But then, this is too far-fetched I hope.
SDMI is about copy protection mechanisms, not about encoding/compression formats. So the statement, that "SDMI provides better quality and smaller files" is complete nonsense.
what a nonsense. DNA as the first known medium to organise information is the basis for most of what we call life. it organises molecules by investing energy into maintaining an ordered state. free molecules (or better: free particles, since molecules maintain some state, too) are the opposite of "information". a somehow ordered state is required to create information.
coming back to DNA: living creatures have always been fighting for access to "good" DNA. the fight for the best male, the fight for the best female. nothing like free information here. information has always been traded: "my good DNA for your good DNA".
but anyway, the post is highly irrelevant. the important statement in the article is: if you want free information, create it. and there comes the dilemma: I'm afraid to say that writing reasonably good software is much easier than writing and performing reasonably good music. go to mp3.com and listen to some free music. hard to find good stuff there. so I assume that we cannot simply apply the rules of free software to music.
I just have checked the pricing on their website. It's DM 89 (ca. 45 US$) for the personal and DM 129 (ca. 65 US$) for the professional version. Compare this to DM 229 (ca. 115 US$) for Red Hat Deluxe. So they are still pretty reasonable priced. But I have switched to Redhat anyway. SuSE gave me the willies with their pretty proprietary directory structure. Always made problems when installing downloaded RPMs.
and this piece is especially amusing: Maybe debit and other forms of transactional software can be used to charge small amounts of money for downloaded music, using some system that measures time or data. Haha! The "small amount" is what makes me laughing. That is typical. Again he is declaring some kind of freedom at someone else's cost. Musicians pay the same rents, the same price for a car and the same price for a lunch. So why should they get "small amounts" of money? Jon Katz, you are again and again declaring music worthless. And yes, it is pretty tough to deal with the major labels, but there have always been a lot of indie labels. And you know what? They charge more or less the same money for a CD! Because otherwise they loose money. I have been talking to so many of them, since we are setting up an mod service for indie music. And you know what? 99% of them demand some kind of copy protection for their music on the net. Because they need to get money for the music. Why should they get paid worse than Jon Katz? May be musicians have to be protected from the major labels. But indie labels have to be protected from people like Jon Katz.
Yes, content is king. Content in the sense of *usable information*. But also keep in mind that people love to get things presented in an attractive way. And that also includes graphics. This said, the study doesn't really make a point against embedding text in a graphical environment. No matter where people look first, the overall impression of a page has a huge influence on wether people come back or not. And the "commercial web" is all about making people come back. That for sure doesn't excuse these glossy macromedia flash company presentation websites that take longer to load than anyone would be ready to wait - but I support a sensible use of graphic elements on websites. Btw...anyone working on a text-only version of "userfriendly"? With ASCII graphics?:-)
The true face of Robertson
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
at least this story might finally convince some of the more naive ones that mp3.com is not about freeing the world from the evil major labels. It is about making big money and if the majors help making that then Robertson quickly loses his idealistic mask.
As a condition to your account with Napster, you agree that you will not use the Napster service to infringe the intellectual property rights of others in any way. Napster will terminate the accounts of users who are repeat infringers of the copyrights, or other intellectual property rights, of others.
Honestly, Mr. Katz...who is really going after the people who swapped Metallica songs? Someone has collected their IPs or email addresses or whatever. This information has been sent to Napster to remind them of their copyright statements. Quote from their web site:
Users are responsible for complying with all applicable federal and state laws applicable to such content, including copyright laws.
And, Mr. Katz, remember: there is big money behind Napster. There is big money behind mp3.com. These are not Robin Hoods. They want to make big money. Napster wants to do it at someone elses cost. You proclaim your freedom at someone elses cost. At the cost of musicians.
Reading your article makes me so incredibly sick. Because it is polemic, it is cheap propaganda. It tries to agitate the crowd against a small group of persons, who tried to defend their rights. Shame on you.
I used to like your articles. But now it is about time you lose your forum on slashdot. You abuse it.
Metallica have to do this if they want to be successful in sueing Napster. Napster claims that they are urging their users to obey to copyright laws. If they now don't ban users who obviously have broken these rules, then they are vulnerable. And, btw, we shouldn't proclaim our freedom at someone elses cost and on the other hand complain loudly if someone breaks the GPL. Cheers Wolfgang
you are right, the dance-oriented stuff is much easier to get than ambient or trance music. We actually have a couple of DJs in our team and the reason they love the internet is: you can get out many remixes and variants of a song easily, the listeners decide which of the remixes they like. The sound quality is perfect for this kind of music. The problem is: now, with all the Napster trouble and the RIAA and SDMI warning everyone, many of them are pretty reluctant to put anything at all on the internet without any copy protection.
How many indie labels have you been talking to within the last two months? I've been talking to about 50 withing the last two months. The result of Napster is quite simple: now the smaller labels are calling for copy protection, too. What do you "give back" to others? Something, you have stolen. You are giving back at someone elses cost. How generous.
1) "You are into trance": Yes, it is difficult to find that kind of music in stores. We are starting an online music shop esp. for this kind of music soon. Our problem: Almost NONE of the small labels is willing to sell music over the net as plain mp3 any more. They all require us to put some kind of copy protection on it. And Napster is to blame for that. Small labels need to sell their music to survive. They now think it will get copied over and over and they don't get money for their work any more. Btw, you'll find us at www.soundg.com
2) "Junk": Well, you need to listen to what you are going to buy. You can do that in every good record store and you can do that online in legal music-on-demand stores.
3) "You are poor": There are lots of good, free music. Most of the musicians that play the kind of music that you like, "are poor", too. They need every cent.
4) "Record sales are booming": This is the typical "the others pay anyway, so why should I?" argument. Not a very good argument.
I hope you don't feel flamed by this. I have just been talking to so many musicians within the last few months. And their statements were much more thought through than anything I hear here from the music industry as well as from the self-proclaimed promotors of freedom (on other's cost, of course).
the reason the industry is scared of napster is because it gives small unknown artists the power of distribution without having their work extorted by music industry gatekeepers
That's completely wrong. We are working with Indie Labels for a music on demand service and fact ist that many small labels are scared of putting anything on the internet because of Napster and Co. They do really need the money for each record sale. And many of them won't release anything on the internet, because they know that their work is going to be stolen. Many of these labels are operated by the artists themselves. These artists know that by playing gigs alone you'll never survive. (So much about the "earn-your-money-by-playing-gigs-bullshit). I am getting pissed by these people who propagate their freedom on someone else's cost. I wonder how these people would react if someone else would propagate her/his freedom on THEIR cost.
Slashdot Mirror
From the GEZ website (www.gez.de):
GERMAN: Im nicht ausschließlich privaten Bereich sind für neuartige Rundfunkgeräte keine zusätzlichen Rundfunkgebühren zu leisten, wenn bereits herkömmliche Radios und Fernsehgeräte auf ein und demselben Grundstück oder auf zusammenhängenden Grundstücken bereitgehalten werden und angemeldet sind. Sind keine herkömmlichen Rundfunkgeräte vorhanden, aber neuartige Rundfunkgeräte, so ist - unabhängig von der Anzahl dieser Geräte - lediglich eine Rundfunkgebühr zu zahlen.
ENGLISH: In "not exclusivlely private areas" (e.g. corporations) for "innovative broadcast devices" (this includes internet PCs) NO ADDITIONAL PAYMENT applies, if there are already radios or TVs on the same area. If there are no radios or TVs, then, NO MATTER, HOW MANY innovative broadcast devices, you only have to pay ONCE. (That means: a call center with 200 PCs has only to pay for ONE PC).
The text then says, that if the PC has a TV card or radio card, then it is handled like a normal radio or TV (as it always has been).
Hope this brings a bit of clarity. It is really not a big thing, neither for private persons nor for corporations.
So you say, that a victim of libel should not have the right to fight back, just because *you* think that the victim has lost it's reputation anyway? hmmm...not a really strong argument :-) :-)
The last paragraph is just the usual Europe bashing that you love so much. Not really insightful
A couple of years and a dozen fps games later I still haven't found one that comes close to the dark athmosphere of Quake (the first one). The music did it. This shows how very important the music is for a game. And Trent Raznor is an evil genius :-)
This technology has been in use for 10 years. It has been used for creating samples of automotive and machinery parts directly from a 3D CAD model. Of course not for real use (material is very easy to break) but for checking designs, etc.
as a non-finnish German I have to deny it and I guess most Finnish Linux contributors also would. As much as I love the Finnish people for their extraordinarily black humour (finnish movies rule!) and their kindness, I think this argument only reflects the view of a non-European. "National pride" and the Open Source spirit don't fit together. Linux is a truly international endavour and I love this fact. If Linux were a reason for "national pride", it would lose most of it's attractivity for me.
I second this post.
Quote: "Artists who chose to release a song under the public license can build their reputation by offering unfettered access to their original works in exchange for recognition."
This shows that the whole thing is completely stupid. NO artist I know (and I know many) can pay his rent from "recognition".
Again this is the "I want freedom at someone else's cost" game. To pay with "recognition" is certainly a thing that many would love, while they spend their money for other things. This is a license for music done by mediocre musicians. Sorry guys, but it remains true: great music in genreal comes from musicians who spend all their life learning and improving their skills. They need to earn some real, cold *money* with their art. "Recognition" certainly is not enough.
so, if my wife asks me to read a goodnight story for her, I can tell her that it is not allowed! E-Books are great news for lazy husbands, then!
Cheers.
cooperative, democracy, communism, greed, whatever...this is not the point. Software is a tool. Not developers should be allowed to vote what to do next but users should be allowed to vote what developers should do. If users could vote, I assume there would be less bloat and more stability in software technology.
This is easy with "friend countries" like the western world. E.g. the US managed to forbid that gene food can be labeled as such in Germany.
It is still relatively easy in countries of the 3rd world that depend on international help. Refuse to send them food and money and very quickly they will comply as far as they can.
It is pretty difficult with "enemy countries" or countries that just don't give a shit like Libya or China. But then, these are usually countries, where there are other (usually human rights) problems that you wouldn't want to support.
Basically the US will engage anything that their world power arsenal contains to protect/save/support their industry.
The bottomline: if you want to do something against copyright, then do it in your own country. In the US. The rest of the world (including us Europeans) is pretty helpless when the US play with their muscles to support their economy.
as for the DNA entropy stuff I guess we are leading a not so important discussion :-)
Regarding the music I want to make a point that is generally overseen in the discussion: all are talking about the big 4 when talking about labels. I am working in the "evil music industry". I am dealing with independent labels who generally have a very high standard when it comes to quality of music. These guys (who are often musicians and label owners in one person) don't earn heaps of money. They won't earn any money at all if music is regarded free.
And I repeat it: you can't compare software and music. Software is a result of engineering, (good) music the result of a purely creative process.
Well, go to mp3.com and download a couple of tracks. Most of the stuff there is so bad you can't stand it. That's the quality of music you get if nobody pays the musicians and the technical infrastructure they need to produce their music.
The first to die from "making music free" are the small, good labels.
Declaring music "free" is declaring one's freedom on someone else's cost.
the Hannover exhibition center actually does no exhibitions for the music industry. These happen in Cologne and in Frankfurt (and in Cannes of course).
So I wonder what their motivation would be to bow to the pressure of the music industry.
On the exhibition area they currently have the EXPO 2000, which is a financial desaster. May be BMG (Bertelsmann operates one of the most visited boothes on EXPO) offered to support Expo a bit? But then, this is too far-fetched I hope.
SDMI is about copy protection mechanisms, not about encoding/compression formats. So the statement, that "SDMI provides better quality and smaller files" is complete nonsense.
what a nonsense. DNA as the first known medium to organise information is the basis for most of what we call life. it organises molecules by investing energy into maintaining an ordered state. free molecules (or better: free particles, since molecules maintain some state, too) are the opposite of "information". a somehow ordered state is required to create information.
coming back to DNA: living creatures have always been fighting for access to "good" DNA. the fight for the best male, the fight for the best female. nothing like free information here. information has always been traded: "my good DNA for your good DNA".
but anyway, the post is highly irrelevant. the important statement in the article is: if you want free information, create it. and there comes the dilemma: I'm afraid to say that writing reasonably good software is much easier than writing and performing reasonably good music. go to mp3.com and listen to some free music. hard to find good stuff there. so I assume that we cannot simply apply the rules of free software to music.
cheers
I just have checked the pricing on their website. It's DM 89 (ca. 45 US$) for the personal and DM 129 (ca. 65 US$) for the professional version. Compare this to DM 229 (ca. 115 US$) for Red Hat Deluxe. So they are still pretty reasonable priced. But I have switched to Redhat anyway. SuSE gave me the willies with their pretty proprietary directory structure. Always made problems when installing downloaded RPMs.
and this piece is especially amusing:
Maybe debit and other forms of transactional software can be used to charge small amounts of money for downloaded music, using some system that measures time or data.
Haha! The "small amount" is what makes me laughing. That is typical. Again he is declaring some kind of freedom at someone else's cost. Musicians pay the same rents, the same price for a car and the same price for a lunch. So why should they get "small amounts" of money? Jon Katz, you are again and again declaring music worthless.
And yes, it is pretty tough to deal with the major labels, but there have always been a lot of indie labels. And you know what? They charge more or less the same money for a CD! Because otherwise they loose money.
I have been talking to so many of them, since we are setting up an mod service for indie music. And you know what? 99% of them demand some kind of copy protection for their music on the net. Because they need to get money for the music. Why should they get paid worse than Jon Katz? May be musicians have to be protected from the major labels. But indie labels have to be protected from people like Jon Katz.
Yes, content is king. Content in the sense of *usable information*. But also keep in mind that people love to get things presented in an attractive way. And that also includes graphics. :-)
This said, the study doesn't really make a point against embedding text in a graphical environment. No matter where people look first, the overall impression of a page has a huge influence on wether people come back or not. And the "commercial web" is all about making people come back. That for sure doesn't excuse these glossy macromedia flash company presentation websites that take longer to load than anyone would be ready to wait - but I support a sensible use of graphic elements on websites. Btw...anyone working on a text-only version of "userfriendly"? With ASCII graphics?
at least this story might finally convince some of the more naive ones that mp3.com is not about freeing the world from the evil major labels. It is about making big money and if the majors help making that then Robertson quickly loses his idealistic mask.
From the Napster web site:
;-)
As a condition to your account with Napster, you agree that you will not use the Napster service to infringe the intellectual property rights of others in any way. Napster will terminate the accounts of users who are repeat infringers of the copyrights, or other intellectual property rights, of others.
Metallica is just helping them to do their job
Honestly, Mr. Katz...who is really going after the people who swapped Metallica songs? Someone has collected their IPs or email addresses or whatever. This information has been sent to Napster to remind them of their copyright statements. Quote from their web site:
Users are responsible for complying with all applicable federal and state laws applicable to such content, including copyright laws.
And, Mr. Katz, remember: there is big money behind Napster. There is big money behind mp3.com. These are not Robin Hoods. They want to make big money. Napster wants to do it at someone elses cost. You proclaim your freedom at someone elses cost. At the cost of musicians.
Reading your article makes me so incredibly sick. Because it is polemic, it is cheap propaganda. It tries to agitate the crowd against a small group of persons, who tried to defend their rights. Shame on you.
I used to like your articles. But now it is about time you lose your forum on slashdot. You abuse it.
Cheers Wolfgang
Metallica have to do this if they want to be successful in sueing Napster. Napster claims that they are urging their users to obey to copyright laws. If they now don't ban users who obviously have broken these rules, then they are vulnerable.
And, btw, we shouldn't proclaim our freedom at someone elses cost and on the other hand complain loudly if someone breaks the GPL.
Cheers
Wolfgang
you are right, the dance-oriented stuff is much easier to get than ambient or trance music.
We actually have a couple of DJs in our team and the reason they love the internet is: you can get out many remixes and variants of a song easily, the listeners decide which of the remixes they like.
The sound quality is perfect for this kind of music.
The problem is: now, with all the Napster trouble and the RIAA and SDMI warning everyone, many of them are pretty reluctant to put anything at all on the internet without any copy protection.
How many indie labels have you been talking to within the last two months?
I've been talking to about 50 withing the last two months.
The result of Napster is quite simple: now the smaller labels are calling for copy protection, too.
What do you "give back" to others? Something, you have stolen. You are giving back at someone elses cost. How generous.
1) "You are into trance": Yes, it is difficult to find that kind of music in stores. We are starting an online music shop esp. for this kind of music soon. Our problem: Almost NONE of the small labels is willing to sell music over the net as plain mp3 any more. They all require us to put some kind of copy protection on it. And Napster is to blame for that. Small labels need to sell their music to survive. They now think it will get copied over and over and they don't get money for their work any more. Btw, you'll find us at www.soundg.com
2) "Junk": Well, you need to listen to what you are going to buy. You can do that in every good record store and you can do that online in legal music-on-demand stores.
3) "You are poor": There are lots of good, free music. Most of the musicians that play the kind of music that you like, "are poor", too. They need every cent.
4) "Record sales are booming": This is the typical "the others pay anyway, so why should I?" argument. Not a very good argument.
I hope you don't feel flamed by this. I have just been talking to so many musicians within the last few months. And their statements were much more thought through than anything I hear here from the music industry as well as from the self-proclaimed promotors of freedom (on other's cost, of course).
the reason the industry is scared of napster is because it gives small unknown artists the power of distribution without having their work extorted by music industry gatekeepers
That's completely wrong. We are working with Indie Labels for a music on demand service and fact ist that many small labels are scared of putting anything on the internet because of Napster and Co.
They do really need the money for each record sale. And many of them won't release anything on the internet, because they know that their work is going to be stolen.
Many of these labels are operated by the artists themselves. These artists know that by playing gigs alone you'll never survive. (So much about the "earn-your-money-by-playing-gigs-bullshit).
I am getting pissed by these people who propagate their freedom on someone else's cost. I wonder how these people would react if someone else would propagate her/his freedom on THEIR cost.
Cheers
Wolfgang