right, it only escalates the arms race another notch, and will be circumvented just like anything else. I agree with the other replies to my post that its certainly "nicer" than DRM, but it is VERY open to abuse and is possibly WORSE than DRM. Before I just had to worry that I couldn't play my song the way I wanted to but now I have to worry that someone will steal MY copy without my knowledge and the **AA will come pounding on my door with "proof" that I violated their copyright.
We can only hope that EVENTUALLY, people will learn from allofmp3.com and others. If you set the price right (~$1/album/dvd/whatever) and don't use any DRM or whatever, you can STILL make money. In fact you'll probably make MORE because you don't have to license insane protection schemes like this, and nobody will bother pirating anything because if the price is reasonable, it is no longer worth people's time to pirate. If I (hypothetically) have to spend 30 minutes digging around some music warez torrent site to find the songs on an album and HOPE it downloads and HOPE its not fake and HOPE I never get sued, or I could (hypothetically) just pay $1 to allofmp3.com and get a good copy in a minute or two.
Only if the pirate has access to the reference file. Without that, he's SOL. Or just find 2 bought copies, do a diff, and you've found the bits. Flip some of them.
Better yet, steal a credit card number, "buy" a copy, and some other guy gets blamed for it.
The Iraq war has cost $355,000,000,000 so far. Has it? Really? Got a cite for that? Because that number looks a bit, um, wrong. Yes, really: costofwar.com. Congress will have appropriated a total of about $380B for it by March.
I think you're missing the point on this. You'll pay for every viewing under that model, if they get their way. Right, I agree it will only work if you can choose between pay to rent and pay once to own (where own may mean view an unlimited # of times). I also think the Barney & related folks will get smart enough to realize that allowing the kid to watch the show a million times and become obsessed with it is in their best interest.
Of course, the real money is made from new (like just came out to just came out on DVD) so if the pricing model degraded to free pretty quickly, that'd be fine by me. I think its Movie Gallery that offers a monthly unlimited DVD rental subscription for pretty cheap (like $10/month) for anything EXCEPT brand new releases (most movies in the "new release" section are free, just not the really new ones), which are extra.
However, I wouldn't pay a monthly fee unless it averaged out to less than I'd pay renting the movies I want to watch.
It was also interesting how many of the 'big questions' in 1994 are now forgotten. Like SLIP versus PPP -- now, most people couldn't even tell you what either of them are. It went from being a big question, to a decided fact, and then faded into irrelevance. Now there's just "the Internet," and most people don't think about how they connect to it with their modem, if they use a modem at all. I wonder if HD-DVD vs BluRay will look the same way, in 10 years of hindsight? Considering also how VHS vs. Betamax looks today (I can't remember the last time I bought a VHS tape)... mainly over convenience (no rewinding, etc.) and quality/durability.
In probably less than 10 years video on demand plus larger capacity flash media will make HD-DVD vs. BluRay irrelevant... also mainly over convenience and quality/durability.
Convenience - no need to buy/store/insert/etc. a "big" physical disk, if you want to bring it to a friend's house load it on your ~50GB USB stick on your keychain, or just email it to them. Plus all the new gaming consoles are internet-connected and have the power to decode & play video and already cost (or soon will) the same as what a HD-DVD or Bluray player costs... makes you wonder why Sony even bothered with what kind of disk their console uses...
Quality/durability - if the video is streamed over fiber and not stored locally, a ridiculous encoding bitrate can be used. Nothing to break, if you want to watch the movie, just enter your login and start streaming, or save it on your hard drive.
Actually, thats not a problem, the more views the better. The spammers have no easy way to verify what the user typed in is correct (if they could, then this whole discussion would be pointless), so they should show the captcha to tens or hundreds of people, and whatever text is most commonly entered should be attempted to get past the captcha... Or if they can afford incorrect guesses, just keep trying until some helpful user guesses correctly.
The point is it takes multiple users to access a single captcha-protected item.
The moral is that when you're getting your pr0n/warez/etc. fix, just enter random letters for the captcha response, because the pr0n server doesn't know any better.
No, this puts another nail in Microsoft's coffin
on
The Google Phone?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think Google is doing this for the purpose of enabling fancy feature X or getting its hands in TV/radio/whatever distribution.
The real killer is that right now the vast majority of Google's users are able to use Google's service thanks to the Microsoft monopoly providing said user with an OS and/or browser. If I were Google, (secret) priority #1 would be to sidestep Microsoft as soon as possible.
If Google can give people usable cell phone based interfaces to its services, then all Google has to worry about is providing quality services that people want to use, which they seem to be able to with little effort.
The only middleman then is the cell phone providers, which Google can sidestep by rolling out its own wireless network, probably similar to what Sanswire wants to do (or Google will buy Sanswire) with cheap blimps, then Google can have a way to sell ads to people 24/7 with a device that effectively costs Google $0 because people will be paying to make wireless VoIP calls using the same device.
This is all hypothetical of course, but its exactly what I would suggest if I worked at Google.
Step 6 only happens if you use autorun or do something stupid. So does getting a virus. We don't need recovery tools at all since only stupid people will need them!
I don't think anything that can be run straight from a USB stick can't be also run from a CD... unless you have an example?
Also, there is actually a *LOT* of danger in software that rewrites, or having your recovery CD/stick/etc be rewriteable. I'd predict something like:
1) Machine A gets a virus 2) use Machine B to make recovery USB stick 3) put stick in Machine A. 4) Tool doesn't work and Machine A infects USB stick 5) put USB stick back in Machine B to add more tools 6) USB Stick infects Machine B.
So, I would say stick to plain old CD-R's, and lock the disk so no more sessions can be written. Or, make a CD that just brings up the network and then grabs the latest copy of all your scripts, tools, etc. via a read-only FTP login.
Or are you claiming that technology stands still So a 1GB or so USB stick or SD/CF/etc card is about $20. A 700MB CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, etc. is around $0.10 to $1 and has been for a few years. So, yes, cheap ~1GB portable storage is not new. Granted a USB stick or card is more convenient than a CD/DVD, but the stuff you'd put on it is pretty much the same since the capacity is not much bigger and most tools aren't very large anyway.
no the numbers are compared with last year
on
PSP, PS2 Sales Skyrocket
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I agree the scarcity of the PS3 argument is a bit of a stretch, but the sales figures are compared with last year (according to the summary), so any holiday-related factor is already being considered.
Yeah, it used to be cheap. Now its $0.20/msg (sender & receiver both get charged, or $5-10/mo extra for a text plan) while voice is free (included).
So, from 9pm to 7am or whatever, I could call any number I want for the entire night, every single day (plus all day on weekends) for free and hog a TON of their resources. But its $0.10 to send a single text msg which is a few hundred bytes? Thats insane.
Actually a fair amount of info is known about some of the deals. For example, from http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/18/10 46247 Warner Music's agreement allows "full" access to their Artists' music videos, including allowing users to incorporate parts of them into their own videos. I think Google is in a good position to negotiate further w/ the content producers, being worth more than a good number of them.
Obviously there are some things they need to work out, but based on their history I don't Google would throw around $1.65B without having a pretty good idea of what they're getting into.
I completely agree with your suggestion that history does not support this, and I think that's why nobody bought YouTube until now. However, in case you didn't read the Forbes link in the article, YouTube has signed deals with:
Sony BMG Music Entertainment
Warner Music Group
CBS Corp.
Vivendi's Universal Music Group
I don't know how they got this far, but that was DEFINITELY the hard part. The Washington Post recently stated that Drudge Report is their main source of traffic and that they have a symbiotic relationship. The rest will follow once the first couple start saying they are making money.
You cannot monetize other people's content without their approval.
YouTube has just signed how many agreements with major content providers. Do you think that MAYBE, just MAYBE, Google was waiting for that to happen before buying them?
So, the question isn't even relevant. Nobody cares whether they can do it without their approval. YouTube HAS their approval, and now that Google owns YouTube, so does Google.
Any remaining content providers will quickly realize their choices are 1) spend money on long, expensive lawsuits against Google with little/no prospect of a ROI, or 2) jump on the bandwagon for practically free and make some money out of it. It shouldn't take long even for a corporate board member to figure that one out.
Slashdot Mirror
right, it only escalates the arms race another notch, and will be circumvented just like anything else. I agree with the other replies to my post that its certainly "nicer" than DRM, but it is VERY open to abuse and is possibly WORSE than DRM. Before I just had to worry that I couldn't play my song the way I wanted to but now I have to worry that someone will steal MY copy without my knowledge and the **AA will come pounding on my door with "proof" that I violated their copyright.
We can only hope that EVENTUALLY, people will learn from allofmp3.com and others. If you set the price right (~$1/album/dvd/whatever) and don't use any DRM or whatever, you can STILL make money. In fact you'll probably make MORE because you don't have to license insane protection schemes like this, and nobody will bother pirating anything because if the price is reasonable, it is no longer worth people's time to pirate. If I (hypothetically) have to spend 30 minutes digging around some music warez torrent site to find the songs on an album and HOPE it downloads and HOPE its not fake and HOPE I never get sued, or I could (hypothetically) just pay $1 to allofmp3.com and get a good copy in a minute or two.
Better yet, steal a credit card number, "buy" a copy, and some other guy gets blamed for it.
and that makes the guy in the suit Trojan Man...
Where are you from?
1,000,000 is 1 million
1,000,000,000 is 1 billion
355,000,000,000 (the number in question) is 355 billion
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion
Of course, the real money is made from new (like just came out to just came out on DVD) so if the pricing model degraded to free pretty quickly, that'd be fine by me. I think its Movie Gallery that offers a monthly unlimited DVD rental subscription for pretty cheap (like $10/month) for anything EXCEPT brand new releases (most movies in the "new release" section are free, just not the really new ones), which are extra.
However, I wouldn't pay a monthly fee unless it averaged out to less than I'd pay renting the movies I want to watch.
In probably less than 10 years video on demand plus larger capacity flash media will make HD-DVD vs. BluRay irrelevant... also mainly over convenience and quality/durability.
Convenience - no need to buy/store/insert/etc. a "big" physical disk, if you want to bring it to a friend's house load it on your ~50GB USB stick on your keychain, or just email it to them. Plus all the new gaming consoles are internet-connected and have the power to decode & play video and already cost (or soon will) the same as what a HD-DVD or Bluray player costs... makes you wonder why Sony even bothered with what kind of disk their console uses...
Quality/durability - if the video is streamed over fiber and not stored locally, a ridiculous encoding bitrate can be used. Nothing to break, if you want to watch the movie, just enter your login and start streaming, or save it on your hard drive.
Actually, thats not a problem, the more views the better. The spammers have no easy way to verify what the user typed in is correct (if they could, then this whole discussion would be pointless), so they should show the captcha to tens or hundreds of people, and whatever text is most commonly entered should be attempted to get past the captcha... Or if they can afford incorrect guesses, just keep trying until some helpful user guesses correctly.
The point is it takes multiple users to access a single captcha-protected item.
The moral is that when you're getting your pr0n/warez/etc. fix, just enter random letters for the captcha response, because the pr0n server doesn't know any better.
I don't think Google is doing this for the purpose of enabling fancy feature X or getting its hands in TV/radio/whatever distribution.
The real killer is that right now the vast majority of Google's users are able to use Google's service thanks to the Microsoft monopoly providing said user with an OS and/or browser. If I were Google, (secret) priority #1 would be to sidestep Microsoft as soon as possible.
If Google can give people usable cell phone based interfaces to its services, then all Google has to worry about is providing quality services that people want to use, which they seem to be able to with little effort.
The only middleman then is the cell phone providers, which Google can sidestep by rolling out its own wireless network, probably similar to what Sanswire wants to do (or Google will buy Sanswire) with cheap blimps, then Google can have a way to sell ads to people 24/7 with a device that effectively costs Google $0 because people will be paying to make wireless VoIP calls using the same device.
This is all hypothetical of course, but its exactly what I would suggest if I worked at Google.
2 big companies offering the same services (finally) != monopoly
Whether they will engage in price fixing is of course another story.
I don't think anything that can be run straight from a USB stick can't be also run from a CD... unless you have an example?
Also, there is actually a *LOT* of danger in software that rewrites, or having your recovery CD/stick/etc be rewriteable. I'd predict something like:
1) Machine A gets a virus
2) use Machine B to make recovery USB stick
3) put stick in Machine A.
4) Tool doesn't work and Machine A infects USB stick
5) put USB stick back in Machine B to add more tools
6) USB Stick infects Machine B.
So, I would say stick to plain old CD-R's, and lock the disk so no more sessions can be written. Or, make a CD that just brings up the network and then grabs the latest copy of all your scripts, tools, etc. via a read-only FTP login.
Not every Mr. Slowsky lives far from the DSL central office.
thank you, I'm glad I'm not the only one.
Nothing personal against the submitter BTW, its more a criticism of the editors.
...when you copied to CD/DVD/FTP/SMB/whatever.
why is this on the front page?
I agree the scarcity of the PS3 argument is a bit of a stretch, but the sales figures are compared with last year (according to the summary), so any holiday-related factor is already being considered.
...is whether using Windows counts as a handicap?
Windows luzers need not apply.
Yeah, it used to be cheap. Now its $0.20/msg (sender & receiver both get charged, or $5-10/mo extra for a text plan) while voice is free (included).
So, from 9pm to 7am or whatever, I could call any number I want for the entire night, every single day (plus all day on weekends) for free and hog a TON of their resources. But its $0.10 to send a single text msg which is a few hundred bytes? Thats insane.
For example, on your website, write your name someplace, then say that your email address is your last name @example.com
Actually a fair amount of info is known about some of the deals. For example, from http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/18/10 46247 Warner Music's agreement allows "full" access to their Artists' music videos, including allowing users to incorporate parts of them into their own videos. I think Google is in a good position to negotiate further w/ the content producers, being worth more than a good number of them.
Obviously there are some things they need to work out, but based on their history I don't Google would throw around $1.65B without having a pretty good idea of what they're getting into.
I don't know how they got this far, but that was DEFINITELY the hard part. The Washington Post recently stated that Drudge Report is their main source of traffic and that they have a symbiotic relationship. The rest will follow once the first couple start saying they are making money.
YouTube has just signed how many agreements with major content providers. Do you think that MAYBE, just MAYBE, Google was waiting for that to happen before buying them?
So, the question isn't even relevant. Nobody cares whether they can do it without their approval. YouTube HAS their approval, and now that Google owns YouTube, so does Google.
Any remaining content providers will quickly realize their choices are 1) spend money on long, expensive lawsuits against Google with little/no prospect of a ROI, or 2) jump on the bandwagon for practically free and make some money out of it. It shouldn't take long even for a corporate board member to figure that one out.
Indeed.