The whole idea of selling people a magic machine whose uses are barely known is new to our generation, but this isn't the first instance. We've already seen the publishing house in a box and the multimedia studio in a box. Now we're looking at the factory in a box.
Of course the holders of certain government-granted rights (copyrights, patents) that are threatened by these new things will want to keep them inside the box. I think we are about to live through a Dark Age of legal repression and control that will make the DMCA look like a parking meter. But at some point it will become impossible to limit this technology to a small set of rights-restricted uses. At the other end of that tunnel is a world we can't even imagine.
One weird thing about this article is the mention here and elsewhere of "The Beast" being part of the movie, The Rapture. It's been a long time since I saw that movie but I don't remember anything about a supercomputer, just a sort of boring plot with some nice shots of Mimi Rogers. Odd reference.
Because when the shit hits the fan it's always the low people on the totem pole who are expected to wave the flag, send their kids off someplace to get shot, and cheer "USA! USA! USA!" like a bunch of fucking idiots. While the fat guys in expensive suits hide in their offices and continue business as usual.
People like Bill Gates wouldn't be where they are if they had been born in India. Those guys owe something to their own country and the people in it. But if they can get a better deal somewhere else, then off they go, pretending that they have no choice.
America now imports something like 90% of the physical goods it consumes. This isn't because business people had to, it's because they figured out that they could. Incredibly, the people at the top think America will somehow survive now by supplying the world with IP, despite the fact that it's about the easiest thing in the world to outsource. So what's the next plan, George?
It's rich, shortsighted, greedy bastards who have painted the US into this increasingly small corner, not the average worker trying to make a living.
If a lecture is worth all this peripheral activity, then whatever the prof is saying is probably sufficient to occupy a normal person's full attention span. Maybe I'm just slow, but I seriously doubt that many people can really absorb the material while dividing their bandwidth between the lecture and all the instant analysis and discussion. Maybe the real purpose of backchanneling is to provide legitimized filler for the more boring lectures.
Not being a lawyer, I found Cringely's idea very imaginative and stimulating. Other readers have mentioned possible legal flaws, but I think the scheme has an even bigger problem: it ignores the fact that we really don't need a music downloading business. Of any kind. The recording industry might need one, but musicians don't need one and the public certainly doesn't. The idea that anybody has to make money distributing individual copies of songs is an artifact we can afford to lose.
In an editorial mentioned on Slashdot a couple days ago, Doc Searls said something about television that I think is highly relevant: that it is a mistake to think of television shows as products and viewers as customers. Searls points out that the television industry makes its money selling eyeballs to advertisers. Shows aren't the product, they are merely bait that converts ordinary people into ad absorbers who might buy products later.
Likewise, from a musician's viewpoint, recordings are a way to convert people into future concert ticket buyers. It's been pointed out abundantly on Slashdot and elsewhere that musicians make money by performing, not by CD sales. What musicians get out of distribution (of any sort) is the fame that generates better gigs. For some reason everybody seems to have a hard time letting go of the idea that somebody has to make money selling copies of songs.
Try looking at it this way. The recording industry is in the position television set manufacturers could have been in if they had thought of building tv's like pay phones, collecting the coins, dictating which shows could be broadcast and demanding most of the rights. If that were the case, television set makers would now be right in the middle of the fray over video file swapping, claiming to be losing money with every download, probably also claiming to be protecting the creative artists who produce the shows (but who get none of the coins), and perhaps suing everybody like the RIAA is doing.
Obviously all that is unnecessary and sounds ridiculous, but it might not seem so if we were used to it. After a century of constantly feeding quarters into televisions, it might well seem like something was morally wrong unless someone was getting paid whenever a show was viewed.
There is in place right now plenty of infrastructure to freely distribute the songs of anybody who wants their songs distributed. What musicians and the public get from this technology is a way to eliminate the filtering imposed by the music business, do the distribution automatically, get the exposure for free and let the public pick the winners. Replacing the recording industry with a different middleman is completely unnecessary.
He logs 18-hour days to help his Westlake Village (Calif.)-based company hit its quarterly sales targets of around $8 million. How to cope? Jakubowski is no breathe-like-a-tree kind of guy. "I'm in business," he says, "and I need results."
What's going to kill the recording industry is musicians being able to succeed without it. This isn't going to happen overnight. First, musicians have to get comfortable with producing their own work and distributing free on the net. They have to get feedback (in the form of bigger and better gigs) and actually make money before they will believe it works. Right now it's still in the early adoption stage, and I think we are going to have to see somebody get rich this way before it really catches on. That will be the real death knell of the recording industry.
Even after that, the record industry will still have a huge backlog of copyrighted material that is still in demand, which they will jealously hold onto. As the market for recordings shrinks and RIAA companies become primarily oldies vendors, I think the lawsuits will become even more vindictive and the legislative efforts more and more ridiculous, and it will go on as long as there's a dime to be made selling Britney Spears songs or suing people for downloading them. As the companies fold, the former executives will personally sue. I really believe the death throes of the music industry will last until every last ego-inflated one of them runs out of lawyer money.
We will never know the outcome of this case. When Microsoft settles with InterTrust, InterTrust will be forbidden to disclose the terms of the settlement. Only InterTrust and their lawyers will know what the payoff was, and their lips will be sealed.
Sounds like the Portland Beavers' stadium is run by the same hall-monitor personalities that tend to populate HR departments. People whose mission in life is to imagine reasons why things shouldn't be allowed to happen, and to go running to the proper authorities to give them ample opportunity to object.
In this case the imagined authority entity that might be offended, Comcast, doesn't care. Even after assurances that they don't care and that everything is fine, hall monitor Metz isn't letting that dampen his spirits.
"I just don't want to step on anyone's toes," Metz said.
Yes Metz, we know you just want to do the right thing. Comcast knows, everybody knows. If WiFi at the stadium turns out to be a problem, we all know that it's Not Your Fault. So please do everybody a favor and shut the fuck up.
Check out the rest of his site and his brother Markus' site. My hat is off to both of them. I wish I had lived next door to these guys when I was a kid.
I did read the article and got the same idea. As someone mentioned above, you would have to use a number of different Amazon accounts to retrieve different portions of the book, but I don't see why it couldn't be done piecemeal.
1. Patent something fairly obvious but non-trivial. 2. Wait until other people do the actual work. 3. Sue one of the largest ones, settling for a license fee they can easily afford and which is far cheaper than litigation. 4. Sue the smaller ones on the strength of the first suit. 5. PROFIT!
Another illustration that the court system and the justice system are not always synonymous. In situations like this, whoever can afford more litigation costs wins. The only people who are going to challenge this sort of legal bullying are a few fanatics who will fight on principle, and the few who use smartcard programmers for some legitimate business purpose and can justify the expense. The rest will fold up and hand them over.
"As you know, if you can sell music in a format such as MP3 you eliminate the costs of packaging, shipping, handling."
Yeah, and as we also know, the ability to distribute music on the Internet eliminates the need for anyone to make money doing it. Free distribution on the net gives musicians the exposure they would otherwise get from selling CDs, but without need to shackle themselves to the terms of recording contracts. Perpetuating the record-company business model is completely unnecessary.
Certainly it's nice if he deals directly with some musicians. That way they are sure to make some money. Maybe the labels this guy is dealing with are all "good" indie labels that don't tie musicians down to exclusive contracts or lay claim to song rights, and will actually give musicians some of the money from the mp3 sales. But that remains to be seen.
If pay-for-copy mp3 distribution succeeds then the big labels will eventually end up owning it, and we will be up to our asses in copy-protection schemes, locked-down hardware, court cases with ridiculous damage awards, etc, etc.
The pay-for-copy music business carries too much heavy baggage. Let it slip away into the void where it belongs.
Making keywords pop-out instead of simply highlighting them doesn't seem all that useful, but I can see using the thumbnail feature to find a site that has, say, a graph of something or a picture of something. Or maybe to find a site you've been to but forgot to bookmark, and could recognize easily by the layout.
Are there any non-commercial projects afoot to build a distributed web search engine? I found Grub, a SETI@home-like web crawler, but it seems to me that any commercial venture under sufficient financial pressure will eventually resort to paid listings.
True Life Story
on
The Big Kerplop
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I vividly remember such a fake flying saucer incident that occurred in the SF Bay Area when I was a kid in the late 1960's.
A spectacular UFO story appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle one day. Hundreds of people had spotted a small, glowing cylindrical spaceship floating slowly out over the bay. It was described as being about 9 feet long by 3 feet in diameter, like a large water heater. A drawing by an eyewitness even showed a small humanoid figure reclining at the controls inside.
The very next day there was a followup article in the Chronicle, in which a bunch of students admitted they had launched dozens of small balloons, made from dry cleaner bags and drinking straws and powered by birthday candles. What struck me was the certainty of the eyewitness reports and the details they gave of the size and nature of the craft and its pilot.
The distinction between copyright infringement and theft or "piracy" is an important public perception issue. There are no copyright "owners," there are only copyright "holders" who enjoy temporary rights granted by the government. The crime of infringement is more like running a business without a business license than like stealing. While it may cause financial loss, so does arson, price fixing [ahem], and a host of other crimes which we don't mislabel as "theft."
You would know the answer if you bothered to read the article:
The system has cost $9 billion to develop, launch, and sustain over 30 years... Today, the GPS industry in North America is estimated at $4 billion a year.
Not a bad investment of your tax dollars and mine.
Musicians get paid to perform, not from record sales. Despite the record companies waving the flag of artist protection, all the downloads in the world don't take a cent away from musicians. Record companies have been ripping off musicians for a century by writing recording contracts such that the musician rarely sees a penny. What musicians get out of record deals is fame, which enables them to charge more from performances.
Musicians are starting to learn how to promote themselves by distributing their songs on the Internet for free, making the record companies redundant and perhaps obsoleting the very notion of selling recorded music. We could do nothing and let this process happen, or we could invent all kinds of technology and pass all kinds of restrictive laws to preserve the record industry's business model so musicians can use it themselves. I vote for option one.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole idea of selling people a magic machine whose uses are barely known is new to our generation, but this isn't the first instance. We've already seen the publishing house in a box and the multimedia studio in a box. Now we're looking at the factory in a box.
Of course the holders of certain government-granted rights (copyrights, patents) that are threatened by these new things will want to keep them inside the box. I think we are about to live through a Dark Age of legal repression and control that will make the DMCA look like a parking meter. But at some point it will become impossible to limit this technology to a small set of rights-restricted uses. At the other end of that tunnel is a world we can't even imagine.
...does this mean Microsoft may also launch SCO-style attacks against Free Software/Open Source?
Yes they will, if they deem it necessary, for instance if OSS really starts threatening MS on the desktop. Think RIAA.
One weird thing about this article is the mention here and elsewhere of "The Beast" being part of the movie, The Rapture. It's been a long time since I saw that movie but I don't remember anything about a supercomputer, just a sort of boring plot with some nice shots of Mimi Rogers. Odd reference.
Because when the shit hits the fan it's always the low people on the totem pole who are expected to wave the flag, send their kids off someplace to get shot, and cheer "USA! USA! USA!" like a bunch of fucking idiots. While the fat guys in expensive suits hide in their offices and continue business as usual.
People like Bill Gates wouldn't be where they are if they had been born in India. Those guys owe something to their own country and the people in it. But if they can get a better deal somewhere else, then off they go, pretending that they have no choice.
America now imports something like 90% of the physical goods it consumes. This isn't because business people had to, it's because they figured out that they could. Incredibly, the people at the top think America will somehow survive now by supplying the world with IP, despite the fact that it's about the easiest thing in the world to outsource. So what's the next plan, George?
It's rich, shortsighted, greedy bastards who have painted the US into this increasingly small corner, not the average worker trying to make a living.
If a lecture is worth all this peripheral activity, then whatever the prof is saying is probably sufficient to occupy a normal person's full attention span. Maybe I'm just slow, but I seriously doubt that many people can really absorb the material while dividing their bandwidth between the lecture and all the instant analysis and discussion. Maybe the real purpose of backchanneling is to provide legitimized filler for the more boring lectures.
Not being a lawyer, I found Cringely's idea very imaginative and stimulating. Other readers have mentioned possible legal flaws, but I think the scheme has an even bigger problem: it ignores the fact that we really don't need a music downloading business. Of any kind. The recording industry might need one, but musicians don't need one and the public certainly doesn't. The idea that anybody has to make money distributing individual copies of songs is an artifact we can afford to lose.
In an editorial mentioned on Slashdot a couple days ago, Doc Searls said something about television that I think is highly relevant: that it is a mistake to think of television shows as products and viewers as customers. Searls points out that the television industry makes its money selling eyeballs to advertisers. Shows aren't the product, they are merely bait that converts ordinary people into ad absorbers who might buy products later.
Likewise, from a musician's viewpoint, recordings are a way to convert people into future concert ticket buyers. It's been pointed out abundantly on Slashdot and elsewhere that musicians make money by performing, not by CD sales. What musicians get out of distribution (of any sort) is the fame that generates better gigs. For some reason everybody seems to have a hard time letting go of the idea that somebody has to make money selling copies of songs.
Try looking at it this way. The recording industry is in the position television set manufacturers could have been in if they had thought of building tv's like pay phones, collecting the coins, dictating which shows could be broadcast and demanding most of the rights. If that were the case, television set makers would now be right in the middle of the fray over video file swapping, claiming to be losing money with every download, probably also claiming to be protecting the creative artists who produce the shows (but who get none of the coins), and perhaps suing everybody like the RIAA is doing.
Obviously all that is unnecessary and sounds ridiculous, but it might not seem so if we were used to it. After a century of constantly feeding quarters into televisions, it might well seem like something was morally wrong unless someone was getting paid whenever a show was viewed.
There is in place right now plenty of infrastructure to freely distribute the songs of anybody who wants their songs distributed. What musicians and the public get from this technology is a way to eliminate the filtering imposed by the music business, do the distribution automatically, get the exposure for free and let the public pick the winners. Replacing the recording industry with a different middleman is completely unnecessary.
Hilarity ensues.
He logs 18-hour days to help his Westlake Village (Calif.)-based company hit its quarterly sales targets of around $8 million. How to cope? Jakubowski is no breathe-like-a-tree kind of guy. "I'm in business," he says, "and I need results."
How about: "I'm a human, and I need a life."
What's going to kill the recording industry is musicians being able to succeed without it. This isn't going to happen overnight. First, musicians have to get comfortable with producing their own work and distributing free on the net. They have to get feedback (in the form of bigger and better gigs) and actually make money before they will believe it works. Right now it's still in the early adoption stage, and I think we are going to have to see somebody get rich this way before it really catches on. That will be the real death knell of the recording industry.
Even after that, the record industry will still have a huge backlog of copyrighted material that is still in demand, which they will jealously hold onto. As the market for recordings shrinks and RIAA companies become primarily oldies vendors, I think the lawsuits will become even more vindictive and the legislative efforts more and more ridiculous, and it will go on as long as there's a dime to be made selling Britney Spears songs or suing people for downloading them. As the companies fold, the former executives will personally sue. I really believe the death throes of the music industry will last until every last ego-inflated one of them runs out of lawyer money.
We will never know the outcome of this case. When Microsoft settles with InterTrust, InterTrust will be forbidden to disclose the terms of the settlement. Only InterTrust and their lawyers will know what the payoff was, and their lips will be sealed.
Sounds like the Portland Beavers' stadium is run by the same hall-monitor personalities that tend to populate HR departments. People whose mission in life is to imagine reasons why things shouldn't be allowed to happen, and to go running to the proper authorities to give them ample opportunity to object.
In this case the imagined authority entity that might be offended, Comcast, doesn't care. Even after assurances that they don't care and that everything is fine, hall monitor Metz isn't letting that dampen his spirits.
"I just don't want to step on anyone's toes," Metz said.
Yes Metz, we know you just want to do the right thing. Comcast knows, everybody knows. If WiFi at the stadium turns out to be a problem, we all know that it's Not Your Fault. So please do everybody a favor and shut the fuck up.
Check out the rest of his site and his brother Markus' site. My hat is off to both of them. I wish I had lived next door to these guys when I was a kid.
ALL government money paid to ALL private companies should be publicly listed. After all, it is our money.
I did read the article and got the same idea. As someone mentioned above, you would have to use a number of different Amazon accounts to retrieve different portions of the book, but I don't see why it couldn't be done piecemeal.
1. Patent something fairly obvious but non-trivial.
2. Wait until other people do the actual work.
3. Sue one of the largest ones, settling for a license fee they can easily afford and which is far cheaper than litigation.
4. Sue the smaller ones on the strength of the first suit.
5. PROFIT!
How about a bell that rings any time one of our corporations, or their subsidiary government agencies, gives somebody one more reason to hate the US?
Another illustration that the court system and the justice system are not always synonymous. In situations like this, whoever can afford more litigation costs wins. The only people who are going to challenge this sort of legal bullying are a few fanatics who will fight on principle, and the few who use smartcard programmers for some legitimate business purpose and can justify the expense. The rest will fold up and hand them over.
"As you know, if you can sell music in a format such as MP3 you eliminate the costs of packaging, shipping, handling."
Yeah, and as we also know, the ability to distribute music on the Internet eliminates the need for anyone to make money doing it. Free distribution on the net gives musicians the exposure they would otherwise get from selling CDs, but without need to shackle themselves to the terms of recording contracts. Perpetuating the record-company business model is completely unnecessary.
Certainly it's nice if he deals directly with some musicians. That way they are sure to make some money. Maybe the labels this guy is dealing with are all "good" indie labels that don't tie musicians down to exclusive contracts or lay claim to song rights, and will actually give musicians some of the money from the mp3 sales. But that remains to be seen.
If pay-for-copy mp3 distribution succeeds then the big labels will eventually end up owning it, and we will be up to our asses in copy-protection schemes, locked-down hardware, court cases with ridiculous damage awards, etc, etc.
The pay-for-copy music business carries too much heavy baggage. Let it slip away into the void where it belongs.
It's all about getting richer and richer. Morality is just one of the smoke screens they hide behind, and a behavior control tool.
Making keywords pop-out instead of simply highlighting them doesn't seem all that useful, but I can see using the thumbnail feature to find a site that has, say, a graph of something or a picture of something. Or maybe to find a site you've been to but forgot to bookmark, and could recognize easily by the layout.
Are there any non-commercial projects afoot to build a distributed web search engine? I found Grub , a SETI@home-like web crawler, but it seems to me that any commercial venture under sufficient financial pressure will eventually resort to paid listings.
I vividly remember such a fake flying saucer incident that occurred in the SF Bay Area when I was a kid in the late 1960's.
A spectacular UFO story appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle one day. Hundreds of people had spotted a small, glowing cylindrical spaceship floating slowly out over the bay. It was described as being about 9 feet long by 3 feet in diameter, like a large water heater. A drawing by an eyewitness even showed a small humanoid figure reclining at the controls inside.
The very next day there was a followup article in the Chronicle, in which a bunch of students admitted they had launched dozens of small balloons, made from dry cleaner bags and drinking straws and powered by birthday candles. What struck me was the certainty of the eyewitness reports and the details they gave of the size and nature of the craft and its pilot.
The distinction between copyright infringement and theft or "piracy" is an important public perception issue. There are no copyright "owners," there are only copyright "holders" who enjoy temporary rights granted by the government. The crime of infringement is more like running a business without a business license than like stealing. While it may cause financial loss, so does arson, price fixing [ahem], and a host of other crimes which we don't mislabel as "theft."
You would know the answer if you bothered to read the article:
The system has cost $9 billion to develop, launch, and sustain over 30 years... Today, the GPS industry in North America is estimated at $4 billion a year.
Not a bad investment of your tax dollars and mine.
Musicians get paid to perform, not from record sales. Despite the record companies waving the flag of artist protection, all the downloads in the world don't take a cent away from musicians. Record companies have been ripping off musicians for a century by writing recording contracts such that the musician rarely sees a penny. What musicians get out of record deals is fame, which enables them to charge more from performances.
Musicians are starting to learn how to promote themselves by distributing their songs on the Internet for free, making the record companies redundant and perhaps obsoleting the very notion of selling recorded music. We could do nothing and let this process happen, or we could invent all kinds of technology and pass all kinds of restrictive laws to preserve the record industry's business model so musicians can use it themselves. I vote for option one.