I believe music is the place to start the overthrow of the entertainment empire. Remember that musicians don't make money from CDs, they make money from gigs. They need to see some evidence that free online distribution actually pays off. So change your life a little, go out of your house and hear some local bands live. Look for local bands you like on Kazaa etc. Go up to them and tell them you downloaded their song and that's why you came to their show. Call up the nearest place that features live music and ask them to book those bands. Go to the shows. The RIAA will go away when we all make it obsolete by making free online distribution work for musicians.
It seems to me that the MPAA is going to be a much tougher nut to crack, simply because nowadays everybody craves the kind of movies only big-money can produce. A truly awesome indie version of LOTR? Maybe, but not anytime soon. But that doesn't mean you can't go see indie films too. At least give the MPAA a little competition.
1: why couldn't terrorists etc use these same one-way ciphering techniques to hide their plans and schemes from the FBI?
2: regarding the smart cards etc. with fast transaction times for tollbooths, mass transit etc, here's the tangent idea: when you walk by a scanner and it charges your bank account for some purchase, how about if the card gives the scanner the bank's id in the clear, but gives your customer info in an encrypted form that only the bank can decrypt? Then once the bank validates the transaction, it could transfer the money to the vendor without saying whose account it came from.
Remember this story posted on/. about a year ago, about having using jets as flying antenna platforms for broadband? I remember reading that and thinking, "Jets? Jets??? What a dumb-ass idea. All you need is a blimp." Huzzah!!!
Plus, the look is straight out of Star Wars. Cool!
The type of protection a creative work receives should not hinge on the notion that transmitting an e-book involves making a copy or that reading a library book does not. These are legal nitpicks. The Supreme Court could decide that reading a book constitutes copying the contents of the book into your brain. Then the very act of reading would technically be regulated by copyright law. To me it doesn't matter whether this type of regulation is achieved by ridiculously redefining the notion of "copying" or by introducing book licensing. Either tactic is government by hair-splitting.
The question of copyright shouldn't revolve around the technical interpretation of existing law. The question should be how, in real terms in today's world, copyright law can best implement the intent that is stated in the Constitution, which is simply to provide incentive to produce new works.
If e-books are to be considered a threat to creativity and invention, it should be because e-books might make it difficult for an author to recoup the cost of creating the work, thus discouraging new works. It should not be because somebody decided that transmitting an e-book is technically making a copy. The latter argument assumes that the point of copyright is to protect authors indirectly by protecting the copy-making business directly. It isn't, and it never was.
As much as I respect Lessig, I wish he and other high-profile people who are thrashing out this issue would depart from dissecting the fine points of laws that weren't written with enough resolution to cover current conditions. What they are doing amounts to adding extra zeroes after the decimal point and arguing over the accuracy of the numbers. I wish they would consider that in a very few years, when almost anybody on earth will have the capability to publish their own work to the entire world at practically zero cost. Copyright law of the future should provide an incentive for the people and institutions who PRODUCE new works, not for those who merely make and sell copies.
It seems fairly obvious that Amazon is doing a very self-destructive thing here, similar to when the marketing consultant posed as an "I Switched" customer for Microsoft. It's not just a question of, "Take it with a grain of salt," it's fraud. IANAL but I believe that misrepresenting paid advertising as bona fide customer feedback is illegal, and the company should face criminal charges if they are doing it. If you agree, take 5 minutes and complain to the FTC here.
Informative??? This is supposed to be a JOKE. Froogle has nothing to do with reviewers. It's a products-for-sale search engine. "Find cheap reviewers at..." -- get it? JOKE!
Don't know if this is relevant, but to make his notes harder for others to read DaVinci often wrote backwards. Is is possible that some gearing and other things are reversed because he was also drawing backward and just made a few mistakes?
If you don't like the ads, don't visit the sites. Yesterday a/. story pointed to some site that kept asking me if I wanted to download their browser enhancer control or something. I didn't want to, and after saying No 3 times I just went somewhere else. The content was kind of interesting, but if their business model demands that they annoy me away from their site, oh well...
Jeez, didn't you see Armageddon? They wouldn't be strapped now if they hadn't spent so many rubles hauling cigarettes up to their orbital refueling stations.
About 30 years ago Popular Science had an article about a new type of motorcycle with a simple roll cage. The rider sat in a bucket seat, wearing an aircraft-style combination shoulder and lapbelt. The cage looked minimal but supposedly in tests you could lay the bike down on pavement at high speed and walk away without a scratch. I always wondered why those things never went into production.
Take the headline, "Wi-Fi Spreading Fast But Lacks Profit," replace [Wi-Fi] with [any Internet business idea], and you pretty much have the history of the net in a nutshell.
When else in history have so many geeks been given so much money to have so much fun? Gotta love it!
Someone here commented that money doesn't ALWAYS win elections. That's like saying drunk drivers don't ALWAYS cause car accidents. It's true, but it's also trite and useless. Take the time to check out some actual numbers for state elections, for example Maryland, or Iowa or Florida, which I chose completely at random. Look at wherever you live. The fact is that nearly all elections in America are won by the candidates with the most money backing them.
You will see this pattern repeated over and over in every state if you bother to look. Election results no longer reflect the will of the people. They reflect the effectiveness of the campaign fundraising. The only actual voters in America are the ones who write checks. The election itself is little more than a quaint, old-world ceremony which we indulge in before the best fundraisers give their acceptance speeches.
Every time you have a chance to write in the name of a candidate on a ballot, write the words "No Confidence".
Although this idea is technologically interesting, it seems to me that a more effective system would be simply to walk around wearing signs like, "Motorcycle for sale," or, "I want to get laid." Then you wouldn't limit yourself to only the people in the crowd who are carrying wireless LAN equipment.
So why aren't people already doing that?
A) Nobody thought of it yet. B) It's equivalent to shouting, "I'm a dork!"
All this is basically is a self-contained web. So what? Would anybody be getting excited if somebody created a.food domain or a.anime domain containing only internal links? And if the.food guard dogs decided that, say, candy recipes don't qualify as food, so what? There's plenty of candy elsewhere on the WWW.
You don't have to "file" for a copyright or get forms from anywhere, at least in the USA. Every thought put into writing (or typing) since April 1, 1989 is automatically copyrighted whether it bears a copyright notice or not. If you choose to include a copyright notice it affects the type and amount of infringement damages you can sue for.
Nice job on this article. The one point that really troubles me is near the bottom:
"To ensure that the record companies still obtain revenues, it is important that the developers in the post-Napster era create commercial alternatives to the user-driven free beer networks."
The reason this troubles me is that it's based on a misconception that there is any inherent relationship between record companies and copyrights. There is absolutely no reason for record companies and copyrights to be connected. People in the record business could have chosen to conduct their business as most people do, by performing services and moving on. They didn't have to extort copyright ownership from musicians in exchange for these services. Doctors who save your life with surgery don't demand a share of your income for the rest of your life. Truckers and railroads don't demand a share of the cargo they haul, or attempt to regulate what you do with it after they deliver it.
Record companies are pretty much the only ones who make money from record sales. Standard recording contracts take all production and promotional expenses out of the musician's share of the profit, usually leaving nothing. What record sales do for musicians is provide exposure, which translates to performance gigs, which is how musicians actually do make money. Musicians have tolerated this arrangement for a century because they had no reasonable alternative. Now they can get that exposure by distributing their music freely. I believe musicians will gradually move away from physical CDs, and electronic distribution will become the norm.
There will still be a need for promotional services, but they need not be connected to copyrights. The multi-billion dollar advertising industry has managed to thrive without demanding ownership of the rights to the products they sell. There is certainly no reason to artificially maintain any business advantage record companies got from technology that is becoming obsolete.
As much as I like the idea of space travel, I bet using the $40 billion to finance technical education over the same time period would have paid off already in better engineers and better technology. We'd be on the way to Mars instead of putzing around in Earth orbit.
But that would mean giving somebody something for nothing (bad). Big contracts for aerospace firms, good.
There are about 12 million businesses in the US alone. If one tenth of one percent of them sent you one email per year, it would amount to 1000 messages per month. Just a single, polite inquiry once a year by a tiny fraction of the legitimate businesses in the US, none of whom would suspect that they are causing a problem. As common as spam may seem, most businesses haven't discovered unsolicited email as a marketing tool.
That's the main reason we need anti-spam legislation. Not especially because of the aggressive efforts of a few assholes, but because of the clogging potential of even light usage by a vast number of businesses who mean no harm.
It's kind of a brainy idea, but the mere idea of using legal nitpicks as a tool to get people to treat each other like human beings highlights the pitiful state our world is in. I would hate, for example, to think that the DMCA was all that stood between me and getting lynched.
Yeah, it's a typo. As in "SponeBob". But before I read the article I did spend a couple fruitless minutes trying to look it up elsewhere on the internet, in a weird spinoff of RTFM. [Slaps forehead]
Slashdot Mirror
I believe music is the place to start the overthrow of the entertainment empire. Remember that musicians don't make money from CDs, they make money from gigs. They need to see some evidence that free online distribution actually pays off. So change your life a little, go out of your house and hear some local bands live. Look for local bands you like on Kazaa etc. Go up to them and tell them you downloaded their song and that's why you came to their show. Call up the nearest place that features live music and ask them to book those bands. Go to the shows. The RIAA will go away when we all make it obsolete by making free online distribution work for musicians.
It seems to me that the MPAA is going to be a much tougher nut to crack, simply because nowadays everybody craves the kind of movies only big-money can produce. A truly awesome indie version of LOTR? Maybe, but not anytime soon. But that doesn't mean you can't go see indie films too. At least give the MPAA a little competition.
Reading this story I had two thoughts.
1: why couldn't terrorists etc use these same one-way ciphering techniques to hide their plans and schemes from the FBI?
2: regarding the smart cards etc. with fast transaction times for tollbooths, mass transit etc, here's the tangent idea: when you walk by a scanner and it charges your bank account for some purchase, how about if the card gives the scanner the bank's id in the clear, but gives your customer info in an encrypted form that only the bank can decrypt? Then once the bank validates the transaction, it could transfer the money to the vendor without saying whose account it came from.
No wait. I thought I did. Then I realized, where the hell am I going to find a disgruntled Postal worker who lives near Acacia's home office?
Remember this story posted on /. about a year ago, about having using jets as flying antenna platforms for broadband? I remember reading that and thinking, "Jets? Jets??? What a dumb-ass idea. All you need is a blimp." Huzzah!!!
Plus, the look is straight out of Star Wars. Cool!
At last, somebody has any reason to download a Britney Spears album.
The type of protection a creative work receives should not hinge on the notion that transmitting an e-book involves making a copy or that reading a library book does not. These are legal nitpicks. The Supreme Court could decide that reading a book constitutes copying the contents of the book into your brain. Then the very act of reading would technically be regulated by copyright law. To me it doesn't matter whether this type of regulation is achieved by ridiculously redefining the notion of "copying" or by introducing book licensing. Either tactic is government by hair-splitting.
The question of copyright shouldn't revolve around the technical interpretation of existing law. The question should be how, in real terms in today's world, copyright law can best implement the intent that is stated in the Constitution, which is simply to provide incentive to produce new works.
If e-books are to be considered a threat to creativity and invention, it should be because e-books might make it difficult for an author to recoup the cost of creating the work, thus discouraging new works. It should not be because somebody decided that transmitting an e-book is technically making a copy. The latter argument assumes that the point of copyright is to protect authors indirectly by protecting the copy-making business directly. It isn't, and it never was.
As much as I respect Lessig, I wish he and other high-profile people who are thrashing out this issue would depart from dissecting the fine points of laws that weren't written with enough resolution to cover current conditions. What they are doing amounts to adding extra zeroes after the decimal point and arguing over the accuracy of the numbers. I wish they would consider that in a very few years, when almost anybody on earth will have the capability to publish their own work to the entire world at practically zero cost. Copyright law of the future should provide an incentive for the people and institutions who PRODUCE new works, not for those who merely make and sell copies.
Paid advertisments masquerading as customer reviews (see /. story below)
It seems fairly obvious that Amazon is doing a very self-destructive thing here, similar to when the marketing consultant posed as an "I Switched" customer for Microsoft. It's not just a question of, "Take it with a grain of salt," it's fraud. IANAL but I believe that misrepresenting paid advertising as bona fide customer feedback is illegal, and the company should face criminal charges if they are doing it. If you agree, take 5 minutes and complain to the FTC here.
Informative??? This is supposed to be a JOKE. Froogle has nothing to do with reviewers. It's a products-for-sale search engine. "Find cheap reviewers at..." -- get it? JOKE!
Don't know if this is relevant, but to make his notes harder for others to read DaVinci often wrote backwards. Is is possible that some gearing and other things are reversed because he was also drawing backward and just made a few mistakes?
If you don't like the ads, don't visit the sites. Yesterday a /. story pointed to some site that kept asking me if I wanted to download their browser enhancer control or something. I didn't want to, and after saying No 3 times I just went somewhere else. The content was kind of interesting, but if their business model demands that they annoy me away from their site, oh well...
Jeez, didn't you see Armageddon? They wouldn't be strapped now if they hadn't spent so many rubles hauling cigarettes up to their orbital refueling stations.
About 30 years ago Popular Science had an article about a new type of motorcycle with a simple roll cage. The rider sat in a bucket seat, wearing an aircraft-style combination shoulder and lapbelt. The cage looked minimal but supposedly in tests you could lay the bike down on pavement at high speed and walk away without a scratch. I always wondered why those things never went into production.
Right?
Take the headline, "Wi-Fi Spreading Fast But Lacks Profit," replace [Wi-Fi] with [any Internet business idea], and you pretty much have the history of the net in a nutshell.
When else in history have so many geeks been given so much money to have so much fun? Gotta love it!
Someone here commented that money doesn't ALWAYS win elections. That's like saying drunk drivers don't ALWAYS cause car accidents. It's true, but it's also trite and useless. Take the time to check out some actual numbers for state elections, for example Maryland , or Iowa or Florida , which I chose completely at random. Look at wherever you live. The fact is that nearly all elections in America are won by the candidates with the most money backing them.
You will see this pattern repeated over and over in every state if you bother to look. Election results no longer reflect the will of the people. They reflect the effectiveness of the campaign fundraising. The only actual voters in America are the ones who write checks. The election itself is little more than a quaint, old-world ceremony which we indulge in before the best fundraisers give their acceptance speeches.
Every time you have a chance to write in the name of a candidate on a ballot, write the words "No Confidence".
Although this idea is technologically interesting, it seems to me that a more effective system would be simply to walk around wearing signs like, "Motorcycle for sale," or, "I want to get laid." Then you wouldn't limit yourself to only the people in the crowd who are carrying wireless LAN equipment.
So why aren't people already doing that?
A) Nobody thought of it yet.
B) It's equivalent to shouting, "I'm a dork!"
I'm gonna go with B.
All this is basically is a self-contained web. So what? Would anybody be getting excited if somebody created a .food domain or a .anime domain containing only internal links? And if the .food guard dogs decided that, say, candy recipes don't qualify as food, so what? There's plenty of candy elsewhere on the WWW.
At last, a fridge that goes to ELEVEN.
You don't have to "file" for a copyright or get forms from anywhere, at least in the USA. Every thought put into writing (or typing) since April 1, 1989 is automatically copyrighted whether it bears a copyright notice or not. If you choose to include a copyright notice it affects the type and amount of infringement damages you can sue for.
Nice job on this article. The one point that really troubles me is near the bottom:
"To ensure that the record companies still obtain revenues, it is important that the developers in the post-Napster era create commercial alternatives to the user-driven free beer networks."
The reason this troubles me is that it's based on a misconception that there is any inherent relationship between record companies and copyrights. There is absolutely no reason for record companies and copyrights to be connected. People in the record business could have chosen to conduct their business as most people do, by performing services and moving on. They didn't have to extort copyright ownership from musicians in exchange for these services. Doctors who save your life with surgery don't demand a share of your income for the rest of your life. Truckers and railroads don't demand a share of the cargo they haul, or attempt to regulate what you do with it after they deliver it.
Record companies are pretty much the only ones who make money from record sales. Standard recording contracts take all production and promotional expenses out of the musician's share of the profit, usually leaving nothing. What record sales do for musicians is provide exposure, which translates to performance gigs, which is how musicians actually do make money. Musicians have tolerated this arrangement for a century because they had no reasonable alternative. Now they can get that exposure by distributing their music freely. I believe musicians will gradually move away from physical CDs, and electronic distribution will become the norm.
There will still be a need for promotional services, but they need not be connected to copyrights. The multi-billion dollar advertising industry has managed to thrive without demanding ownership of the rights to the products they sell. There is certainly no reason to artificially maintain any business advantage record companies got from technology that is becoming obsolete.
As much as I like the idea of space travel, I bet using the $40 billion to finance technical education over the same time period would have paid off already in better engineers and better technology. We'd be on the way to Mars instead of putzing around in Earth orbit.
But that would mean giving somebody something for nothing (bad). Big contracts for aerospace firms, good.
A little calculation...
There are about 12 million businesses in the US alone. If one tenth of one percent of them sent you one email per year, it would amount to 1000 messages per month. Just a single, polite inquiry once a year by a tiny fraction of the legitimate businesses in the US, none of whom would suspect that they are causing a problem. As common as spam may seem, most businesses haven't discovered unsolicited email as a marketing tool.
That's the main reason we need anti-spam legislation. Not especially because of the aggressive efforts of a few assholes, but because of the clogging potential of even light usage by a vast number of businesses who mean no harm.
It's kind of a brainy idea, but the mere idea of using legal nitpicks as a tool to get people to treat each other like human beings highlights the pitiful state our world is in. I would hate, for example, to think that the DMCA was all that stood between me and getting lynched.
Yeah, it's a typo. As in "SponeBob". But before I read the article I did spend a couple fruitless minutes trying to look it up elsewhere on the internet, in a weird spinoff of RTFM. [Slaps forehead]