The riff Dre used came from a 1980 song by the Fatback Band. Did the Fatback Band sue him? No. The record company, Minder Music Ltd, sued him. Because he damaged them in any way? No. Because they can.
The punch line:
The jury agreed, calling the rapper's actions innocent infringement, but fined him anyway.
So the guy pays $1.5 million for an innocent mistake that caused no harm. Where did this jury come from, a sitcom?
Here's the next question: Musicians generally don't make money from record sales. Standard recording contracts are written such that all the expenses of production, advertising, manufacturing, distribution, etc. come out of the musician's share, usually leaving Zero. Record companies take all the profits from record sales. So how much of this fine is Dr. Dre's record company going to pay? My bet is Zero.
Users can opt to "turn off" the system when it becomes available, most likely in the next generation of Windows expected in 2004 or 2005. But doing so might well severely hamper consumers' access to digital information that's important to them -- and which may indeed be necessary in their work environment.
Bill's concept of giving Windows users a choice regarding security features is kind of like Senator Bob Dole's concept of giving U.S. citizens a choice of health-care.
For those too young to remember, Dole ran for president against Bill Clinton and lost. Dole repeatedly justified his vehement opposition to a national health-care system by claiming that consumers would lose the element of choice that they now enjoy with our wonderful corporate-controlled system. He actually said on TV, "Do you want a bunch of guys in suits deciding what your health care choices are?" I remember wondering at the time whether he was talking about some hypothetical big-government guys-in-suits, or the real-life guys-in-suits who run insurance companies and HMOs, who currently make those decisions for us. For most Americans with normal incomes, "health care choice" consists of whatever is offered by the company where they are currently hanging onto a job.
The idea that Windows users will have a meaningful choice about using Palladium security is just such a fantasy. Yeah, if you want to isolate yourself from all commercially produced content, go ahead and turn off Palladium. It's your choice. While you're at it, go ahead and disconnect from the power grid and the phone system. Like it's that easy.
I've been wondering for a while what in the hell Microsoft possibly thinks is going to inspire people to junk their PCs and buy new hardware so they can run Palladium Windows. Particularly the 40 million Win98 users who still haven't done that. Will MS invoke an obscure EULA clause that allows them to outlaw using the OS after a certain date? Will they simply stop supplying security patches and let virus authors do the rest?
I now believe Microsoft's deployment plan is to get content providers on board, with the promise of total copyright control and self-destructing documents that will force a subscription model on everybody. Of course, Microsoft won't be the bad guy any more than Grokster is the bad guy -- they're only providing a platform.
Bill and Steve know that most people want to be part of the world they live in. The teeming masses don't crave the adventure of living in a yurt with a solar panel and a shortwave radio. If major content providers announce a deadline after which all new documents will be inaccessible to older systems, people will buy new systems.
If Linux can be locked out by DMCA and other means, then the consumer computing world will be even more sharply divided than it was in the early Apple/IBM days. Bill is counting on most people wanting to stay in the mainstream, and I think he's right. It's called the mainstream for a reason.
At this point I don't see any way that anybody is going to prevent Microsoft from doing what it wants to do. The only question is whether it will actually work. Doubters can glibly forecast that the first time Palladium gets hacked will spell doom, but a constant stream of security problems hasn't stopped Windows so far. It's possible that Bill has already played his last card and sitting back smiling, waiting for everybody to realize that he has already won the game.
Shortly after making his statement, Ellison's ego was tracked by NORAD as it passed over the Cheyenne area. Residents are encouraged to stay in their homes and turn off all electrical appliances.
I love these advances. Farmers can now use this technology to grow crops more cheaply, which means distributors will offer them less for their crops, forcing all farmers to get more loans to buy this technology to stay in business. Meanwhile the distributors, retailers, bankers and consumers will be unaffected.
What would really impress me is some technological innovation that eliminates the recording-industry-like agribusiness system. Something that lets farmers get their produce from the field to the stores, or better yet, directly to people's kitchens, and eliminates the army of leeching middlemen who run the show.
Another nail in the coffin of the record industry
on
Cheap Audio Production
·
· Score: 1
Most of the expenses of producing an album do come from distributing copies. All those expenses are normally taken out of the musicians share, which is why musicians don't tend to make money directly from CD sales. They make money indirectly because the exposure gets them gigs.
Musicians now have the technology to get the same exposure by distributing their music freely themselves, without cluttering up the world with little plastic discs, and without letting the companies that make the discs control their careers.
When enough musicians figure this out, record companies will become extinct.
Anything Microsoft does from now on should be seen through the longer lens of Windows DRM 2005, or whatever it's going to be called, which will require people to buy brand new Palladium-equipped hardware and will be incompatible with everything that now exists. Somehow they expect to convince everybody to do this, including the 40 million people who are still happy running Win98 on P100's.
In other words, Microsoft has finally gone insane. Does.Net really matter as Bill and Steve hold hands and drive their convertible off a cliff?
I think interesting stories like this illustrate an evolution in the nature of capitalism in the tech sector. The traditional model of businesses providing products and services to the public is turning into a new model of the public providing consumption for businesses.
Instead of price-fixing we are seeing feature-fixing and terms-fixing. Tech companies are becoming increasingly arrogant in dictating how, by whom, and for how long their products can be used. In a way, it's a privatization of the central planning aspects of socialism. As businesses get licensing laws on their side, they can care less and less about consumer preferences, and can redefine competition in terms of b2b things like cost control and litigation.
Be it resolved: The sum of 1 dinar shall be paid to the RIAA, for distribution to its members, every time any musical or vocal sound of any kind whatsoever is heard by any human being within the borders of Iraq. Sound consumption will be metered and transmitted to the RIAA by audio sensors implanted at birth. Removal of or tampering with RIAA sensors will be punishable by stoning or beheading.
No, my point is that a false analogy and a simple lack of knowledge are two different things. Diamond seems to be inventing phantom mechanisms to make his own structure work. The results are interesting but fluffy.
This article seems a bit anthropomormpic. Example: his example of a false analogy is that Viking settlers in Iceland assumed that they could clear-cut land in Iceland and not worry about soil erosion because Norwegian soil is heavier and not subject to wind erosion. I seriously doubt that the Vikings had a working knowledge of soil erosion at all, let alone that any conscious analogy figured into their land use plans in Iceland. More likely they didn't think about it at all, any more than leopards consciously think about maintaining an ideal prey population while they hunt.
Yay Amazon! Go Disney! Boooooo telecoms! I wonder who's gonna win? There's the snap... the telecoms try an end-around through state legislatures. Hollings (D-Disney) intercepts. Score!!! And the "voters" (ha-ha) go nuts!
Game results tonight on InterVision, 6:00, all channels.
Don't blame Lucas, he's just following in the grand tradition of many storytellers. For example, Shakespeare wrote a number of plays in which characters separated earlier in life are reunited by coincidence.
Well, I can see the Homeland Security boys freaking over this one. Anonymous blogs are sure to be a hotbed of terrorist steganography.
"Your Honor, we need a court order to seize their network logs for the last 6 months, and a gag order so they can't warn their potentially unlawful users." [insert rubber stamp sound]
This comment is not a racial slur, it's a sarcastic reference to the fact that outsourcing programming services to India is far cheaper than hiring local talent. This is understandably becoming a sore point among competing American programmers who have much higher living costs. There's no need to bring women's math scores or anything else into it.
As much as the Unix world has grown and blossomed through community development, it's hard to believe this is happening. But considering that the CEO is a guy who starts a sentence with, "At the end of the day," maybe it's not so hard.
Maybe SCO will grab a big pile of money from IBM, SUSE and Redhat. After lining the pockets of some execs and their lawyers, the net effect on the world will be to drive everybody to Linux, then SCO will dry up and blow away along with the recording industry.
But this doesn't apply to starting a software business in your home. If it's just you sitting there coding, nobody knows or cares and the zoning is completely irrelevant. Unless he's totally anal about thinking up reasons not to do it, in which case don't bother starting.
If it's a matter of just you or you and somebody else sitting your house writing code or running servers, zoning shouldn't affect you any more than it would affect someone such as a playwright. Don't worry about it.
I think we are seeing the beginning of the record industry's transition from aristocracy to service provider.
To review: Musicians generally don't make money from recording contracts, they make money from gigs. With a standard recording contract all expenses come out of the musician's share, usually leaving zero. What musicians do get out of record distribution is exposure, which translates to paying gigs, from which they Can make money.
As more and more musicians learn to achieve the same thing with free online distribution, recording contracts will cease to be the carrot-on-a-stick that has always allowed record companies to call the shots. Fewer and fewer artists will sign away their lives to record companies, and eventually the record companies' only assets will be their existing store of controlled songs. Thanks to the Bono Act, this material will probably belong to them and their heirs forever, but the market for these oldies will shrink. The recording business will either die or become providers of streaming and download services, promotional websites for musicians, that sort of thing. And they will have to do it for a reasonable fee, without extorting perpetual rights and control over the musicians' careers.
McCullagh makes an excellent point that US government agencies have a history of illegal surveillance. If protecting the public justifies building in eavesdropping capability, then it equally justifies building in accountability. Terrorists and civilian criminals aren't the only menaces to the public. Surveillance activity should be logged and sent to secure storage which can be accessed through well-defined legal channels.
So Grub is commercial. Big deal. Any large-scale project like this furthers our knowledge of distributed computing and helps pave the way to other things, like on-demand mirroring of popular content.
Slashdot Mirror
Become the next AOL Time Warner so that you can be represented in Congress, then spread some money around. Isn't American democracy wonderful?
The riff Dre used came from a 1980 song by the Fatback Band. Did the Fatback Band sue him? No. The record company, Minder Music Ltd, sued him. Because he damaged them in any way? No. Because they can.
The punch line:
The jury agreed, calling the rapper's actions innocent infringement, but fined him anyway.
So the guy pays $1.5 million for an innocent mistake that caused no harm. Where did this jury come from, a sitcom?
Here's the next question: Musicians generally don't make money from record sales. Standard recording contracts are written such that all the expenses of production, advertising, manufacturing, distribution, etc. come out of the musician's share, usually leaving Zero. Record companies take all the profits from record sales. So how much of this fine is Dr. Dre's record company going to pay? My bet is Zero.
Users can opt to "turn off" the system when it becomes available, most likely in the next generation of Windows expected in 2004 or 2005. But doing so might well severely hamper consumers' access to digital information that's important to them -- and which may indeed be necessary in their work environment.
Bill's concept of giving Windows users a choice regarding security features is kind of like Senator Bob Dole's concept of giving U.S. citizens a choice of health-care.
For those too young to remember, Dole ran for president against Bill Clinton and lost. Dole repeatedly justified his vehement opposition to a national health-care system by claiming that consumers would lose the element of choice that they now enjoy with our wonderful corporate-controlled system. He actually said on TV, "Do you want a bunch of guys in suits deciding what your health care choices are?" I remember wondering at the time whether he was talking about some hypothetical big-government guys-in-suits, or the real-life guys-in-suits who run insurance companies and HMOs, who currently make those decisions for us. For most Americans with normal incomes, "health care choice" consists of whatever is offered by the company where they are currently hanging onto a job.
The idea that Windows users will have a meaningful choice about using Palladium security is just such a fantasy. Yeah, if you want to isolate yourself from all commercially produced content, go ahead and turn off Palladium. It's your choice. While you're at it, go ahead and disconnect from the power grid and the phone system. Like it's that easy.
I've been wondering for a while what in the hell Microsoft possibly thinks is going to inspire people to junk their PCs and buy new hardware so they can run Palladium Windows. Particularly the 40 million Win98 users who still haven't done that. Will MS invoke an obscure EULA clause that allows them to outlaw using the OS after a certain date? Will they simply stop supplying security patches and let virus authors do the rest?
I now believe Microsoft's deployment plan is to get content providers on board, with the promise of total copyright control and self-destructing documents that will force a subscription model on everybody. Of course, Microsoft won't be the bad guy any more than Grokster is the bad guy -- they're only providing a platform.
Bill and Steve know that most people want to be part of the world they live in. The teeming masses don't crave the adventure of living in a yurt with a solar panel and a shortwave radio. If major content providers announce a deadline after which all new documents will be inaccessible to older systems, people will buy new systems.
If Linux can be locked out by DMCA and other means, then the consumer computing world will be even more sharply divided than it was in the early Apple/IBM days. Bill is counting on most people wanting to stay in the mainstream, and I think he's right. It's called the mainstream for a reason.
At this point I don't see any way that anybody is going to prevent Microsoft from doing what it wants to do. The only question is whether it will actually work. Doubters can glibly forecast that the first time Palladium gets hacked will spell doom, but a constant stream of security problems hasn't stopped Windows so far. It's possible that Bill has already played his last card and sitting back smiling, waiting for everybody to realize that he has already won the game.
One acronym: DMCA.
One corporation to rule them all.
Shortly after making his statement, Ellison's ego was tracked by NORAD as it passed over the Cheyenne area. Residents are encouraged to stay in their homes and turn off all electrical appliances.
BRING IT
I love these advances. Farmers can now use this technology to grow crops more cheaply, which means distributors will offer them less for their crops, forcing all farmers to get more loans to buy this technology to stay in business. Meanwhile the distributors, retailers, bankers and consumers will be unaffected.
What would really impress me is some technological innovation that eliminates the recording-industry-like agribusiness system. Something that lets farmers get their produce from the field to the stores, or better yet, directly to people's kitchens, and eliminates the army of leeching middlemen who run the show.
Most of the expenses of producing an album do come from distributing copies. All those expenses are normally taken out of the musicians share, which is why musicians don't tend to make money directly from CD sales. They make money indirectly because the exposure gets them gigs.
Musicians now have the technology to get the same exposure by distributing their music freely themselves, without cluttering up the world with little plastic discs, and without letting the companies that make the discs control their careers.
When enough musicians figure this out, record companies will become extinct.
Anything Microsoft does from now on should be seen through the longer lens of Windows DRM 2005, or whatever it's going to be called, which will require people to buy brand new Palladium-equipped hardware and will be incompatible with everything that now exists. Somehow they expect to convince everybody to do this, including the 40 million people who are still happy running Win98 on P100's.
.Net really matter as Bill and Steve hold hands and drive their convertible off a cliff?
In other words, Microsoft has finally gone insane. Does
I think interesting stories like this illustrate an evolution in the nature of capitalism in the tech sector. The traditional model of businesses providing products and services to the public is turning into a new model of the public providing consumption for businesses.
Instead of price-fixing we are seeing feature-fixing and terms-fixing. Tech companies are becoming increasingly arrogant in dictating how, by whom, and for how long their products can be used. In a way, it's a privatization of the central planning aspects of socialism. As businesses get licensing laws on their side, they can care less and less about consumer preferences, and can redefine competition in terms of b2b things like cost control and litigation.
Be it resolved: The sum of 1 dinar shall be paid to the RIAA, for distribution to its members, every time any musical or vocal sound of any kind whatsoever is heard by any human being within the borders of Iraq. Sound consumption will be metered and transmitted to the RIAA by audio sensors implanted at birth. Removal of or tampering with RIAA sensors will be punishable by stoning or beheading.
Go Hilary!
No, my point is that a false analogy and a simple lack of knowledge are two different things. Diamond seems to be inventing phantom mechanisms to make his own structure work. The results are interesting but fluffy.
This article seems a bit anthropomormpic. Example: his example of a false analogy is that Viking settlers in Iceland assumed that they could clear-cut land in Iceland and not worry about soil erosion because Norwegian soil is heavier and not subject to wind erosion. I seriously doubt that the Vikings had a working knowledge of soil erosion at all, let alone that any conscious analogy figured into their land use plans in Iceland. More likely they didn't think about it at all, any more than leopards consciously think about maintaining an ideal prey population while they hunt.
Yay Amazon! Go Disney! Boooooo telecoms! I wonder who's gonna win? There's the snap... the telecoms try an end-around through state legislatures. Hollings (D-Disney) intercepts. Score!!! And the "voters" (ha-ha) go nuts!
Game results tonight on InterVision, 6:00, all channels.
The MS link is broken now, but the pdf is also available here.
Don't blame Lucas, he's just following in the grand tradition of many storytellers. For example, Shakespeare wrote a number of plays in which characters separated earlier in life are reunited by coincidence.
Well, I can see the Homeland Security boys freaking over this one. Anonymous blogs are sure to be a hotbed of terrorist steganography.
"Your Honor, we need a court order to seize their network logs for the last 6 months, and a gag order so they can't warn their potentially unlawful users." [insert rubber stamp sound]
This comment is not a racial slur, it's a sarcastic reference to the fact that outsourcing programming services to India is far cheaper than hiring local talent. This is understandably becoming a sore point among competing American programmers who have much higher living costs. There's no need to bring women's math scores or anything else into it.
See what happens when powerful tools get into the hands of terrorists?
As much as the Unix world has grown and blossomed through community development, it's hard to believe this is happening. But considering that the CEO is a guy who starts a sentence with, "At the end of the day," maybe it's not so hard.
Maybe SCO will grab a big pile of money from IBM, SUSE and Redhat. After lining the pockets of some execs and their lawyers, the net effect on the world will be to drive everybody to Linux, then SCO will dry up and blow away along with the recording industry.
But this doesn't apply to starting a software business in your home. If it's just you sitting there coding, nobody knows or cares and the zoning is completely irrelevant. Unless he's totally anal about thinking up reasons not to do it, in which case don't bother starting.
If it's a matter of just you or you and somebody else sitting your house writing code or running servers, zoning shouldn't affect you any more than it would affect someone such as a playwright. Don't worry about it.
I think we are seeing the beginning of the record industry's transition from aristocracy to service provider.
To review: Musicians generally don't make money from recording contracts, they make money from gigs. With a standard recording contract all expenses come out of the musician's share, usually leaving zero. What musicians do get out of record distribution is exposure, which translates to paying gigs, from which they Can make money.
As more and more musicians learn to achieve the same thing with free online distribution, recording contracts will cease to be the carrot-on-a-stick that has always allowed record companies to call the shots. Fewer and fewer artists will sign away their lives to record companies, and eventually the record companies' only assets will be their existing store of controlled songs. Thanks to the Bono Act, this material will probably belong to them and their heirs forever, but the market for these oldies will shrink. The recording business will either die or become providers of streaming and download services, promotional websites for musicians, that sort of thing. And they will have to do it for a reasonable fee, without extorting perpetual rights and control over the musicians' careers.
Good stuff happening.
McCullagh makes an excellent point that US government agencies have a history of illegal surveillance. If protecting the public justifies building in eavesdropping capability, then it equally justifies building in accountability. Terrorists and civilian criminals aren't the only menaces to the public. Surveillance activity should be logged and sent to secure storage which can be accessed through well-defined legal channels.
So Grub is commercial. Big deal. Any large-scale project like this furthers our knowledge of distributed computing and helps pave the way to other things, like on-demand mirroring of popular content.