The fact of the matter is people used Napster and are using these filesharing applications mainly because they get it for free.
Reducing a product to an insanely cheap price won't work, because you just can't beat free.
Well, I'm not so sure that that applies to everyone. I definitely have a threshold below which purchasing something becomes a much viable option. Take unabridged audio books, f'r instance: they usually run $70 or more in the stores, but at audible.com I can get them for $10-15 -- suddenly that's a purchase I can afford.
If there were a simple path from hearing an interesting single on the radio to purchasing it for a buck or two in MP3 format, I think a lot of people would do it.
But you're absolutely right about the "fair use" argument: we have to admit that this is not what the vast majority of filesharing is about, if we're going to think about it coherently.
Slashdot needs a filter preventing stories containing the phrase "late mythologist Joseph Campbell" from being posted. This would save a lot of suffering all around.
The "opening weekend" approach
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
If I could change the laws, I'd say that anyone is free to charge whatever they want for information, but not free to restrict what the purchaser does with that information afterwards. That is, it would be perfectly legal to transfer files, share them with your friends, and so forth. Clearly, this would put artists somewhat in the position of movie moguls who want to make a good chunk of their profits on opening weekend. When you release your product (whatever it is: a new book, song, movie), there will be people willing to pay to get it immediately. After that, it'll circulate around: tough. This might affect how much total profit is made from books, movies, and music -- but where is it written that a certain level of profit must always be made?
Now, if I also had the magical ability (suggested by the poster) to change society, I'd create a strong peer pressure in favour of micropayments for use of information. That is, systems where you (voluntarily) send the artist a penny every time you listen to a song, and a societal norm such that you are considered boorish if you don't do this. I think this would sidestep the End of Art As We Know It scenario that's cited as the reason for zealous protection of IP. I also think such pressures could be created in the society we've actually got, but I'm an optimist.
Gee, imagine how much more money AotC could have made if people hadn't been able to download a crappy digital copy before the movie even opened. They must have lost, what, thousands of dollars to all those people who thought that the download replaced seeing it on the big screen -- and who were in the odd category of "obsessive enough to find and download a bootleg copy, but not obsessive enough to walk out to a theatre."
Really, there ought to be a law. Nay, there ought to be vast, sweeping legislation controlling every aspect of the creation and distribution of digital content, to make sure that this sort of tragedy isn't repeated.
I work for a small plumbing, heating, irrigation, and BBQ supply house.
Damn, I wish we had one of these in my town! I can hardly count the number of times I've need to install plumbing, heating, irrigation AND barbecue systems, and have had to go running all over town to do it. "Wet Hot Pipes 'n' Ribs R Us" would have been a godsend.
I love the way anything can be given intellectual street-cred by invoking an appropriately impressive construct; here, it's the Power of Myth. I read comic books when I was a kid: they were entertaining, and featured quite a number of spandex-clad women with unusually large breasts. I think this latter factor may have more to do with the enduring popularity of comics than the Power of Myth crowd would like to admit.
I occasionally wander into a comic shop, and I note that the large breasts trend is stronger than ever. Indeed, there seem to be some female characters who consist entirely of breasts; Cleavage-Girl (*) and Bra-Lass (*), for example. OK, sure, there are enduring mythic themes, but don't discount the power of the breasts.
My "contract with the network"? Clearly he doesn't mean that in any technical legal sense, but I don't see how there's even the suggestion of such a contract in my interaction with the network. They place advertising in shows and HOPE that people will watch it; it's absurd to think that people are somehow REQUIRED to watch.
If advertisers decide that everyone is skipping their ads and therefore stop paying to run them, that would certainly constitute a large change in the nature of television. But it's crazy to suggest that it's illegal for such a change to take place. But of course, this is a running theme lately: industries wanting legislation protecting the way things currently work (RIAA, anyone?)
Things are going to change. Preventing that change will require increasingly draconian legislation, and for what? To protect the interests of bodies who have traditionally profited by the way things work now. Whatever changes come down the pike, I'm confident in predicting that somebody is going to profit from them; today's content distributors are just terrified that it won't be them. And they're probably right, given that they seem to be devoting all their efforts to preventing the changes rather than capitalizing on them.
Studies also indicate that most computer-related difficulties are caused by people actually using the machines. If the boxes sat alone in an isolated room, disconnected from the network, and just ran quietly the way God intended, virtually all crashes, data theft, and viral infections could be averted.
But no, companies insist on not only having employees, but letting them come in and paw at the computers every day. No wonder there are problems!
Some of the contributors to the "fortune" program (a random quote generator) had some affectionately nasty things to say about X windows. Under Linux, try fortune -m "X windows". A random sample:
X windows: Accept any substitute; Making the world safe for competing window systems; It could be worse, but it'll take time; Simplicity made complex; One thousand monkeys. One thousand MicroVAXes. One thousand years. X windows; It's not how slow you make it. It's how you make it slow; Warn your friends about it; A mistake carried out to perfection; Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems; The defacto substandard.
I can't quite figure out why there aren't more MP3s floating around on OpenNap with advertising blurbs in them. Well, all right, actually I can: nobody with money wants to pay for that kind of promotion.
But think about it: for purposes of advertising, the fact that these things spread like wildfire suddenly becomes an advantage rather than a drawback. Sure, some people would edit the files and cut out the ads, but I bet not everybody would. And "Don't remove ads" is an easier sell than "Don't use this incredibly tempting, limitless sea of files," especially if you keep them brief.
The only example of this approach I've personally run into is at a site called AudioBookForFree, but all of their ads are for themselves -- no real clients yet, obviously. Still, it's an interesting idea.
I have a horrible feeling that the words "self-organized criticality" are heading inexorably towards this discussion. Please, just say no.
No, seriously: it doesn't look like the article is making that particular connection, thank goodness. Per Bak's theory of self-organized criticality predicts power law distributions of many things under many conditions, so people (or, specifically, Bak fans) often get all excited whenever they see a power law and start saying, "Hey, it's SOC!" But there are many ways to get power laws, and of course the logic doesn't work: "SOC gives power laws; thus if it has a power law, it was caused by SOC."
If you want to know more about SOC, you can check out Bak's modestly-titled book, How Nature Works.
If you don't have the time or inclination to read the David Brin article, the following quote captures the sense of it:
This saga is not just another expression of the Homeric archetype, extolling old hierarchies of princes, wizards and demigods. By making its centerpiece the romanticization of a mass murderer, "Star Wars" has sunk far lower. It is unworthy of our attention, our enthusiasm -- or our civilization.
well, that might happen, except for the fact that you have to:
a. press a button to shoot. b. the enemy control tower (if it even existed) would have been nailed by a HARM before any air support went in. c. the control tower can't see ice on the wing. aircraft show up as dots. d. aircraft communications are secure, which means it's really hard to eavesdrop. e. you would never make it through boot camp if you think listening to the enemy is a good idea.
so, from these points, i can come to the conclusion that you are: a moron.
Ouch! Yeah, you got me . . . Here I thought I was presenting an incisive (and deadly serious) critique of this military technology, but you've clearly demonstrated the absurdity of my analysis. Well done.
Artists never get paid, the RIAA is squashing fair use, the world will be better when people stop trying to stop me from using Napster . ..
I happen to agree with all of that. What bothers me is that no actual communication seems to be going on. The RIAA has its position, the Other Side (whoever we are) has its position, and they shout past each other every time a new issue gets raised. Is there absolutely no hope for any kind of meaningful discussion?
Assuming that the world will not actually end when the RIAA fails to kill every single Napster/Morpheus/Whatever system in the world, there is a great deal to discuss, in terms of how the production of creative works is going to be handled in the future. Where will (or should) such discussion take place?
Which of the following processes do you want to run in the background?
(a) A search for extraterrestrial intelligence. (b) A search for Mersenne Primes. (c) A rendering engine allowing the geek next door to play Tekken with really, really good graphics.
It's always heartwarming to see someone find an excuse to watch many hours of television in the name of academics. You see this more often in sociology, but it's about damn time that mathematics and the physical sciences got in on the action.
I'm going to compile a list of occurrences of physics in the Simpsons -- "Episode 1: Homer drops a doughnut. Fails to obey Newton's Second Law." [drew guffaws from physics students]
I just honestly think game makers need to look back and reignite the Text Based RPG craze.
Well, I don't know about re-igniting the craze, but there are certainly examples out there of people trying to do just that. See The Eternal City, for example.
I think we need more than a grain of salt, here, we need a whole bag. I've seen many such pieces of research, and the pattern is this: 1) Code up some sort of multi-agent simulation; 2) Note a behaviour vaguely similar to something seen in humans; 3) Set your Extrapolater on Max; 4) Hand it over to the university's PR department to write press releases and jump up and down about it.
Note that Balch himself is much more cautious (than the journalist) about the applicability of his findings to human interaction. Who knows, he may even be correct that using artificial agents could be useful in testing social hypotheses -- at least they're controllable and repeatable, though of course that's both good and bad when it comes to trying to model humans. But you'd be crazy to conclude anything about the properties of capitalism or socialism based on individual vs. global feedback schemes.
I heard that one time, this guy and this girl
got a package through UPS, and they heard this
scratching noise from inside. Finally, they
opened it up, and found a dozen baby alligators
and a mass murderer with a hook for a hand!
But seriously, don't most of these comments have
that "urban legend" flavour? "A friend of a
friend of mine sez that UPS does X, Y, and Z."
I'd say it's unworthy of Slashdot, but I'm not
so sure.
I want to be able to pay the artists money for their songs. Up until now, there simply is no way to give money if you want to download an electronic version.
You might want to check out
Fairtunes,
which is a free voluntary payment service: they
contact artists (and others) and send them a
cheque ("check" in American) when enough money
has accumulated. There's no fee except the
unavoidable percentage/transaction fee charged
by the credit card companies.
I say "and others" because many non-musicians
have received donations. Linus Torvalds is near
the top of the list in terms of total payments.
Check out Kim Stanley Robinson's series about this very subject: Red Mars, Green Mars, and
Blue Mars.
There's a breakaway faction (the "Reds") among the colonists who think that it's inherently wrong to turn Mars into a copy of Earth (rather than leaving it in its pristine state to permit further scientific study). A sort of civil war breaks out over the issue. (The sequence of titles gives you a hint as to who wins, though.)
The post by apsmith illustrates a point we should keep in mind: Not everyone who wants to charge money for access to information is evil.
The American Physical Society (APS) is a great institution, and their line of journals (Physical Review Letters and Phys Rev A through E) are very highly regarded in the community. That high regard comes at a price (namely that of overseeing the peer review process; a staff qualified to do that doesn't come cheap), and though APS is non-profit, they do need to recover their costs. Bear this in mind next time you see someone assuming that anyone who suggests any sort of fee for information is a corporate stooge.
At the same time, we have the old "Information wants to be free" argument. It's true, information isn't subject to physical-world restrictions, so you can give it away and still have it, and essentially infinitely many copies of it can be made at essentially no cost to anybody.
So: "Information wants to be free", but "Information can be damned expensive." Wish I
knew how to resolve this conflict.
I wonder if it's possible for organizations like the APS (or even for-profit entities) to make enough money from initial sales that they wouldn't need to care about attempting to implement ridiculous and enunforceable copyright restrictions? That is, sell people your information (there will always be those you can't wait for it to propagate enough for them to get it free, or those who voluntarily pay to support the organization's mandate), but don't try to control what they can do with it. Once they've bought it, they can spread it around as they like; you just have to hope that enough people buy it that you can sustain your operation. In the film world, this would be like needing to make most of your money off a film on opening weekend -- if you can manage to make enough, who cares if free copies are floating around on Monday?
At the very least, we need to work out a different approach to the legislation-and-encryption tack that seems to be the standard governmental response these days. As a friend of a friend of mine once said, "You can have copyright protection, or you can have civil rights, but you can't have both." Check out this article by John Lanier for a nice thought-experiment on the kinds of totalitarian measures it would take to really prevent the dissemination of digital music.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact of the matter is people used Napster and are using these filesharing applications mainly because they get it for free.
Reducing a product to an insanely cheap price won't work, because you just can't beat free.
Well, I'm not so sure that that applies to everyone. I definitely have a threshold below which purchasing something becomes a much viable option. Take unabridged audio books, f'r instance: they usually run $70 or more in the stores, but at audible.com I can get them for $10-15 -- suddenly that's a purchase I can afford.
If there were a simple path from hearing an interesting single on the radio to purchasing it for a buck or two in MP3 format, I think a lot of people would do it.
But you're absolutely right about the "fair use" argument: we have to admit that this is not what the vast majority of filesharing is about, if we're going to think about it coherently.
Slashdot needs a filter preventing stories containing the phrase "late mythologist Joseph Campbell" from being posted. This would save a lot of suffering all around.
If I could change the laws, I'd say that anyone is free to charge whatever they want for information, but not free to restrict what the purchaser does with that information afterwards. That is, it would be perfectly legal to transfer files, share them with your friends, and so forth. Clearly, this would put artists somewhat in the position of movie moguls who want to make a good chunk of their profits on opening weekend. When you release your product (whatever it is: a new book, song, movie), there will be people willing to pay to get it immediately. After that, it'll circulate around: tough. This might affect how much total profit is made from books, movies, and music -- but where is it written that a certain level of profit must always be made?
Now, if I also had the magical ability (suggested by the poster) to change society, I'd create a strong peer pressure in favour of micropayments for use of information. That is, systems where you (voluntarily) send the artist a penny every time you listen to a song, and a societal norm such that you are considered boorish if you don't do this. I think this would sidestep the End of Art As We Know It scenario that's cited as the reason for zealous protection of IP. I also think such pressures could be created in the society we've actually got, but I'm an optimist.
Gee, imagine how much more money AotC could have made if people hadn't been able to download a crappy digital copy before the movie even opened. They must have lost, what, thousands of dollars to all those people who thought that the download replaced seeing it on the big screen -- and who were in the odd category of "obsessive enough to find and download a bootleg copy, but not obsessive enough to walk out to a theatre."
Really, there ought to be a law. Nay, there ought to be vast, sweeping legislation controlling every aspect of the creation and distribution of digital content, to make sure that this sort of tragedy isn't repeated.
I work for a small plumbing, heating, irrigation, and BBQ supply house.
Damn, I wish we had one of these in my town! I can hardly count the number of times I've need to install plumbing, heating, irrigation AND barbecue systems, and have had to go running all over town to do it. "Wet Hot Pipes 'n' Ribs R Us" would have been a godsend.
I love the way anything can be given intellectual street-cred by invoking an appropriately impressive construct; here, it's the Power of Myth. I read comic books when I was a kid: they were entertaining, and featured quite a number of spandex-clad women with unusually large breasts. I think this latter factor may have more to do with the enduring popularity of comics than the Power of Myth crowd would like to admit.
I occasionally wander into a comic shop, and I note that the large breasts trend is stronger than ever. Indeed, there seem to be some female characters who consist entirely of breasts; Cleavage-Girl (*) and Bra-Lass (*), for example. OK, sure, there are enduring mythic themes, but don't discount the power of the breasts.
(*) Yes, I made these up.
My "contract with the network"? Clearly he doesn't mean that in any technical legal sense, but I don't see how there's even the suggestion of such a contract in my interaction with the network. They place advertising in shows and HOPE that people will watch it; it's absurd to think that people are somehow REQUIRED to watch.
If advertisers decide that everyone is skipping their ads and therefore stop paying to run them, that would certainly constitute a large change in the nature of television. But it's crazy to suggest that it's illegal for such a change to take place. But of course, this is a running theme lately: industries wanting legislation protecting the way things currently work (RIAA, anyone?)
Things are going to change. Preventing that change will require increasingly draconian legislation, and for what? To protect the interests of bodies who have traditionally profited by the way things work now. Whatever changes come down the pike, I'm confident in predicting that somebody is going to profit from them; today's content distributors are just terrified that it won't be them. And they're probably right, given that they seem to be devoting all their efforts to preventing the changes rather than capitalizing on them.
Studies also indicate that most computer-related difficulties are caused by people actually using the machines. If the boxes sat alone in an isolated room, disconnected from the network, and just ran quietly the way God intended, virtually all crashes, data theft, and viral infections could be averted.
But no, companies insist on not only having employees, but letting them come in and paw at the computers every day. No wonder there are problems!
[sarcasm off]
Some of the contributors to the "fortune" program (a random quote generator) had some affectionately nasty things to say about X windows. Under Linux, try fortune -m "X windows". A random sample:
X windows: Accept any substitute; Making the world safe for competing window systems; It could be worse, but it'll take time; Simplicity made complex; One thousand monkeys. One thousand MicroVAXes. One thousand years. X windows; It's not how slow you make it. It's how you make it slow; Warn your friends about it; A mistake carried out to perfection; Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems; The defacto substandard.
I can't quite figure out why there aren't more MP3s floating around on OpenNap with advertising blurbs in them. Well, all right, actually I can: nobody with money wants to pay for that kind of promotion.
But think about it: for purposes of advertising, the fact that these things spread like wildfire suddenly becomes an advantage rather than a drawback. Sure, some people would edit the files and cut out the ads, but I bet not everybody would. And "Don't remove ads" is an easier sell than "Don't use this incredibly tempting, limitless sea of files," especially if you keep them brief.
The only example of this approach I've personally run into is at a site called AudioBookForFree, but all of their ads are for themselves -- no real clients yet, obviously. Still, it's an interesting idea.
I have a horrible feeling that the words "self-organized criticality" are heading inexorably towards this discussion. Please, just say no.
No, seriously: it doesn't look like the article is making that particular connection, thank goodness. Per Bak's theory of self-organized criticality predicts power law distributions of many things under many conditions, so people (or, specifically, Bak fans) often get all excited whenever they see a power law and start saying, "Hey, it's SOC!" But there are many ways to get power laws, and of course the logic doesn't work: "SOC gives power laws; thus if it has a power law, it was caused by SOC."
If you want to know more about SOC, you can check out Bak's modestly-titled book, How Nature Works.
If you don't have the time or inclination to read the David Brin article, the following quote captures the sense of it:
This saga is not just another expression of the Homeric archetype, extolling old hierarchies of princes, wizards and demigods. By making its centerpiece the romanticization of a mass murderer, "Star Wars" has sunk far lower. It is unworthy of our attention, our enthusiasm -- or our civilization.
Jeez, Dave, calm down.
well, that might happen, except for the fact that you have to:
a. press a button to shoot.
b. the enemy control tower (if it even existed) would have been nailed by a HARM before any air support went in.
c. the control tower can't see ice on the wing. aircraft show up as dots.
d. aircraft communications are secure, which means it's really hard to eavesdrop.
e. you would never make it through boot camp if you think listening to the enemy is a good idea.
so, from these points, i can come to the conclusion that you are: a moron.
Ouch! Yeah, you got me . . . Here I thought I was presenting an incisive (and deadly serious) critique of this military technology, but you've clearly demonstrated the absurdity of my analysis. Well done.
ENEMY CONTROL TOWER: Attention, American fighter pilot, you have some ice on your wing.
AMERICAN FIGHTER PILOT (looking): No, I don't . . . [BOOM!] Mayday, mayday, my wing's exploded.
ENEMY CONTROL TOWER: Heh. Works every time.
Artists never get paid, the RIAA is squashing fair use, the world will be better when people stop trying to stop me from using Napster . . .
I happen to agree with all of that. What bothers me is that no actual communication seems to be going on. The RIAA has its position, the Other Side (whoever we are) has its position, and they shout past each other every time a new issue gets raised. Is there absolutely no hope for any kind of meaningful discussion?
Assuming that the world will not actually end when the RIAA fails to kill every single Napster/Morpheus/Whatever system in the world, there is a great deal to discuss, in terms of how the production of creative works is going to be handled in the future. Where will (or should) such discussion take place?
Which of the following processes do you want to run in the background?
(a) A search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
(b) A search for Mersenne Primes.
(c) A rendering engine allowing the geek next door to play Tekken with really, really good graphics.
Take your time.
I'm going to compile a list of occurrences of physics in the Simpsons -- "Episode 1: Homer drops a doughnut. Fails to obey Newton's Second Law." [drew guffaws from physics students]
I just honestly think game makers need to look back and reignite the Text Based RPG craze.
Well, I don't know about re-igniting the craze, but there are certainly examples out there of people trying to do just that. See The Eternal City, for example.
I think we need more than a grain of salt, here, we need a whole bag. I've seen many such pieces of research, and the pattern is this: 1) Code up some sort of multi-agent simulation; 2) Note a behaviour vaguely similar to something seen in humans; 3) Set your Extrapolater on Max; 4) Hand it over to the university's PR department to write press releases and jump up and down about it.
Note that Balch himself is much more cautious (than the journalist) about the applicability of his findings to human interaction. Who knows, he may even be correct that using artificial agents could be useful in testing social hypotheses -- at least they're controllable and repeatable, though of course that's both good and bad when it comes to trying to model humans. But you'd be crazy to conclude anything about the properties of capitalism or socialism based on individual vs. global feedback schemes.
got a package through UPS, and they heard this
scratching noise from inside. Finally, they
opened it up, and found a dozen baby alligators
and a mass murderer with a hook for a hand!
But seriously, don't most of these comments have
that "urban legend" flavour? "A friend of a
friend of mine sez that UPS does X, Y, and Z."
I'd say it's unworthy of Slashdot, but I'm not
so sure.
You might want to check out Fairtunes, which is a free voluntary payment service: they contact artists (and others) and send them a cheque ("check" in American) when enough money has accumulated. There's no fee except the unavoidable percentage/transaction fee charged by the credit card companies.
I say "and others" because many non-musicians have received donations. Linus Torvalds is near the top of the list in terms of total payments.
Check out Kim Stanley Robinson's series about this very subject: Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars.
There's a breakaway faction (the "Reds") among the colonists who think that it's inherently wrong to turn Mars into a copy of Earth (rather than leaving it in its pristine state to permit further scientific study). A sort of civil war breaks out over the issue. (The sequence of titles gives you a hint as to who wins, though.)
I'd like to apologize to Jaron Lanier for getting his name wrong. Also to the word "unenforceable".
The post by apsmith illustrates a point we should keep in mind: Not everyone who wants to charge money for access to information is evil.
The American Physical Society (APS) is a great institution, and their line of journals (Physical Review Letters and Phys Rev A through E) are very highly regarded in the community. That high regard comes at a price (namely that of overseeing the peer review process; a staff qualified to do that doesn't come cheap), and though APS is non-profit, they do need to recover their costs. Bear this in mind next time you see someone assuming that anyone who suggests any sort of fee for information is a corporate stooge.
At the same time, we have the old "Information wants to be free" argument. It's true, information isn't subject to physical-world restrictions, so you can give it away and still have it, and essentially infinitely many copies of it can be made at essentially no cost to anybody.
So: "Information wants to be free", but "Information can be damned expensive." Wish I knew how to resolve this conflict.
I wonder if it's possible for organizations like the APS (or even for-profit entities) to make enough money from initial sales that they wouldn't need to care about attempting to implement ridiculous and enunforceable copyright restrictions? That is, sell people your information (there will always be those you can't wait for it to propagate enough for them to get it free, or those who voluntarily pay to support the organization's mandate), but don't try to control what they can do with it. Once they've bought it, they can spread it around as they like; you just have to hope that enough people buy it that you can sustain your operation. In the film world, this would be like needing to make most of your money off a film on opening weekend -- if you can manage to make enough, who cares if free copies are floating around on Monday?
At the very least, we need to work out a different approach to the legislation-and-encryption tack that seems to be the standard governmental response these days. As a friend of a friend of mine once said, "You can have copyright protection, or you can have civil rights, but you can't have both." Check out this article by John Lanier for a nice thought-experiment on the kinds of totalitarian measures it would take to really prevent the dissemination of digital music.