Look at the economics -- a printer is a one-time sale; you've collected the customer's money, and they've got their printer. Ink is a fungible; it gets used up, and you have to buy more. If a printer manufacturer can come up with a mechanism to ensure that the people who buy their printers have to buy their ink, they have a steady revenue stream.
Look at the relative costs. Printer prices have been going down almost as fast as memory prices. With some of the low-end ink-jet printers, once you buy more than one or two OEM ink cartridges, you've spent more on cartridges than you did on the printer. And over the printer's lifetime, looking at the OEM costs for some of these ink-jet cartridges, you're going to spend on ink several times what you spent on the printer. Think about what the automobile market would be like if you had to buy your oil, gasoline, tires, and every other consumable or replacement component for your car from the company that made your car. That's what the printer manufacturers want.
Several companies tried, back when the high-resolution ink-jet printers were first coming out, to achieve that kind of control over the other fungible supply for printers -- paper. They brought out special ink-jet paper 'specially designed for high-resolution printing' and ran ad campaigns suggesting that you would be producing sub-standard printouts if you used non-OEM paper. That lasted until the big paper manufacturers ramped up to produce the same products, and unlike ink cartridges, there was no way for the printer manufacturers to put in mechanisms to force consumers to use OEM paper.
Printer manufacturers have also claimed that using non-OEM inks would damage their printers, and that using non-OEM inks would void the warranty. However, the manufacturers were required to stop this tactic; under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and general principles of the Federal Trade Commission Act, a manufacturer may not require the use of any brand of ink (or any other article) unless the manufacturer provides the item free of charge under the terms of the warranty. This hasn't prevented salesdroids and tech-support people from claiming that, but they'll fold if you press them.
It may be an ongoing back-and-forth struggle, but market forces are going to continue to pry fungible supplies sales away from printer manufacturers.
As I understand the law, if it's a broadcast, it cannot legally be encrypted, because the airwaves are a public resource, and the use of a public resource has to be open to the entire public. IIRC, this issue was already hashed out in the courts with regard to analog TV broadcasts.
This doesn't prevent cable-only content providers from applying encryption to their programming; I don't believe that any legal precedent has been set regarding whether, say, TBS's programming constitute 'broadcasting' for purposes of falling under the existing prohibition. I do think that the issue would be resolved fairly quickly if encryption were to be implemented by cable programming networks, because of the inherent inequality of the law between wireless and cable programming. The lawsuits should be interesting to watch.
Monorails might have gotten more press if the LA County Supervisors had accepted Alweg's offer, back in 1963, to build a turnkey monorail transit system that would initially serve the San Fernando Valley, the Wilshire corridor, the San Bernardino corridor and downtown Los Angeles (see LA's Worst Transit Decision on the Monorail Society's website). But the decision was made not to implement anything, so today they've got a boondoggle of a 'subway' system.
In any case, each time the book is bought used, it devalues the overall worth of the book to the author. This is a good thing. It means that if they wrote a crap book, then the market compensates then at the rate for crap books.
This means that yes, we may see less books. Authors who write books may see less money. The qualifier is that these authors are the ones who are writing crap books, and the should be making less money.
And thus we wind up with bookstores filled with nothing but Tom Clancy novels, Harlequin Romances, and the latest cookie-cutter Star Trek novels.
There is an ongoing process among publishers that is compressing the midlist -- authors who don't sell hugely, but who sell steadily. Because of the economics involved in printing books, publishers will churn out books as fast as the presses will run, up to the print run for that book, and then stack them in a warehouse to be shipped out to bookstores.
Having the books stacked in a warehouse costs a publisher money (rent et al.), so the value of a book is based on both its sale quantity and its sale rate. If a book looks like it's going to sell out its initial printing and continue to sell well, the publisher will make another print run (and probably mark the author to get higher print runs in the future). If a book sells out its initial print run, but takes five years to do it, there probably won't be a second print run.
Publishers also have a limited advertising budget. Which books are they going to spend more of their budget on? The books by the authors who have had best-sellers in the past. The midlist authors, whose books may be just as good, don't get the full-press ad campaign, so it creates a self-perpetuating prophecy -- the publisher doesn't print as many copies, so they would be distributing fewer copies to reviewers (every review copy is one they can't sell), and there isn't as much advertising for the book, so the bookstore buyers don't buy as many, which means that there are fewer books available on store shelves to be bought. So the author's sales slide a bit, and their next book contract is for less money.
And then you have the prominently-placed used-book links. Yes, having large numbers of used books available indicates that a lot of people may not have liked the book, but each sale of a book used is one less book sale that the publisher sees. We've already seen authors getting cutbacks on their hardback contracts because of the "I'll wait until it comes out in paper" attitude (which, in some cases, I can understand -- if I bought enough hardbacks, or even paperbacks, to keep me in new reading material, I'd go broke), and adding "I'll buy it used instead" cuts into both hardcover and paperback sales numbers to the publisher, which distorts the publisher's view of the salability of the authors.
The problem isn't that the authors aren't getting royalties from the sale of a used book, but that without any feedback to the publisher about the quantity of sales of a book as used, the publishers can only use new sales as their benchmark for the market value of an author, and working to massively increase used-book sales hurts the author's market value. If there were some way to get used-book sale numbers back to the publisher, and the publisher would use those numbers when evaluating overall sales by an author, I don't think that the authors would have anywhere near the problem with it as is being reported now.
The issue that the authors are worried about isn't that their profits will be decreased, but that their sales will be decreased.
Now, at first glance, those two seem to be the same thing, but they're not. The problem is that an author's future is driven by his present as measured by the publisher. If an author writes a novel that is published and sells 500,000 copies, when the author submits their next novel to the publisher, the publisher will look at the author's track record and base their offer on what they expect to be able to sell. If the publisher sells 300,000 copies, 200,000 of which are resold used, then the same 500,000 people have bought the author's book, but the publisher only sees sales of 300,000 copies -- so the next book by that author will get a lower offer from the publisher, if it's accepted at all.
With the ongoing compression of the midlist -- authors whose work sells steadily but not outstandingly are finding it harder to get book contracts, and the compensation they get when they do continues to fall -- drops in the publishers' sales figures because of heavily-pushed used book sales doesn't just impact their current income, it affects their income for everything they write in the future.
Midlist authors are already losing out on the store shelves, where you find half the shelves or racks loaded with copies of the three most recently-published books by blockbuster authors like Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton, and two-thirds of the rest filled with a dozen indistinguishable romance titles, '[Soon to be a | Novelization of the | Based on Characters from the] Major Motion Picture' titles, copies of the fourth or fifth volume in a few fantasy series, the latest two or three of the hundreds of Star Trek novels, and waaay down at the bottom, tucked away in a corner, a couple of midlist titles. And when the midlist titles don't sell well, the store doesn't order them, and the publisher downgrades the author when they try to sell their next novel.
Prominently-featured used book sales don't just help kill an author's royalties on the book you're buying; they help kill the author's future income and salability of their work.
The difference between this 'new wrinkle' and the previous trail of incompatible file formats is that, with previous versions of the software, if you were happy with the functionality you had and didn't need to read files from the 'latest&greatest' version, you could just go on using your old version of the program. Under a period-driven licensing program, if you don't want to cough up for another license period for the program, you can't use it any more.
Previously, there would inevitably be some fraction of the people/companies who bought Office, Word, or whatever who wouldn't upgrade; this means to Microsoft that they've 'used up' that income source. Once a customer bought Office 97, they didn't have to pay Microsoft any more money while they used the software, and the only way that Microsoft had to get more money out of them was to come out with a new version that had features that Microsoft felt would attract them enough to get them to upgrade.
With a period-based licensing model, Microsoft is able to get a customer to keep forking over money if they want to keep using the software. It doesn't matter whether the program's been enhanced, or bugs have been fixed; as long as the customer wants to keep using the software, they have to keep paying Microsoft. It changes a single, up-front cash influx to a steady revenue stream -- potentially a much more lucrative arrangement.
The issue is not whether a company can test employees to determine whether they are too high risk to insure, but whether a company can insure employees and then, after they file for benefits, test them and use the results of the test to attempt to deny coverage.
Do you see the difference? In the former case, the company performs the testing and either covers the employee or not up front. In the latter case, the company has contracted with the employee to provide coverage, but is now attempting to renege on the terms of that coverage, using the testing to establish some vague justification for denial of coverage. The problem is that predisposition is not causative; there is no way to prove that a predisposition to CTS is responsible for a patient acquiring CTS, where someone without the predisposition wouldn't.
Imagine that you've worked for the same company for twenty years, paying $100/month for health insurance. You've never been sick a day in your life, up until the day you have a heart attack at work. While you're lying in the hospital bed, the company's insurance representative comes in and tells you that, because a genetic test given as part of your care indicated that you have a genetic predisposition to heart attacks, none of the care you've been given and will need are going to be covered by your health insurance, even though your policy states that the treatment is covered.
Now contrast that with applying for work at the company, taking a preemployment physical, and being told that you have a genetic predisposition for heart attacks, and have your choice of having coverage for heart attacks excluded from your health insurance coverage, or paying an extra $10/month for coverage.
Which one is acceptable practice? And which one equates to what BN is doing with its CTS claims?
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the economics -- a printer is a one-time sale; you've collected the customer's money, and they've got their printer. Ink is a fungible; it gets used up, and you have to buy more. If a printer manufacturer can come up with a mechanism to ensure that the people who buy their printers have to buy their ink, they have a steady revenue stream.
Look at the relative costs. Printer prices have been going down almost as fast as memory prices. With some of the low-end ink-jet printers, once you buy more than one or two OEM ink cartridges, you've spent more on cartridges than you did on the printer. And over the printer's lifetime, looking at the OEM costs for some of these ink-jet cartridges, you're going to spend on ink several times what you spent on the printer. Think about what the automobile market would be like if you had to buy your oil, gasoline, tires, and every other consumable or replacement component for your car from the company that made your car. That's what the printer manufacturers want.
Several companies tried, back when the high-resolution ink-jet printers were first coming out, to achieve that kind of control over the other fungible supply for printers -- paper. They brought out special ink-jet paper 'specially designed for high-resolution printing' and ran ad campaigns suggesting that you would be producing sub-standard printouts if you used non-OEM paper. That lasted until the big paper manufacturers ramped up to produce the same products, and unlike ink cartridges, there was no way for the printer manufacturers to put in mechanisms to force consumers to use OEM paper.
Printer manufacturers have also claimed that using non-OEM inks would damage their printers, and that using non-OEM inks would void the warranty. However, the manufacturers were required to stop this tactic; under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and general principles of the Federal Trade Commission Act, a manufacturer may not require the use of any brand of ink (or any other article) unless the manufacturer provides the item free of charge under the terms of the warranty. This hasn't prevented salesdroids and tech-support people from claiming that, but they'll fold if you press them.
It may be an ongoing back-and-forth struggle, but market forces are going to continue to pry fungible supplies sales away from printer manufacturers.
As I understand the law, if it's a broadcast, it cannot legally be encrypted, because the airwaves are a public resource, and the use of a public resource has to be open to the entire public. IIRC, this issue was already hashed out in the courts with regard to analog TV broadcasts.
This doesn't prevent cable-only content providers from applying encryption to their programming; I don't believe that any legal precedent has been set regarding whether, say, TBS's programming constitute 'broadcasting' for purposes of falling under the existing prohibition. I do think that the issue would be resolved fairly quickly if encryption were to be implemented by cable programming networks, because of the inherent inequality of the law between wireless and cable programming. The lawsuits should be interesting to watch.
Monorails might have gotten more press if the LA County Supervisors had accepted Alweg's offer, back in 1963, to build a turnkey monorail transit system that would initially serve the San Fernando Valley, the Wilshire corridor, the San Bernardino corridor and downtown Los Angeles (see LA's Worst Transit Decision on the Monorail Society's website). But the decision was made not to implement anything, so today they've got a boondoggle of a 'subway' system.
And thus we wind up with bookstores filled with nothing but Tom Clancy novels, Harlequin Romances, and the latest cookie-cutter Star Trek novels.
There is an ongoing process among publishers that is compressing the midlist -- authors who don't sell hugely, but who sell steadily. Because of the economics involved in printing books, publishers will churn out books as fast as the presses will run, up to the print run for that book, and then stack them in a warehouse to be shipped out to bookstores.
Having the books stacked in a warehouse costs a publisher money (rent et al.), so the value of a book is based on both its sale quantity and its sale rate. If a book looks like it's going to sell out its initial printing and continue to sell well, the publisher will make another print run (and probably mark the author to get higher print runs in the future). If a book sells out its initial print run, but takes five years to do it, there probably won't be a second print run.
Publishers also have a limited advertising budget. Which books are they going to spend more of their budget on? The books by the authors who have had best-sellers in the past. The midlist authors, whose books may be just as good, don't get the full-press ad campaign, so it creates a self-perpetuating prophecy -- the publisher doesn't print as many copies, so they would be distributing fewer copies to reviewers (every review copy is one they can't sell), and there isn't as much advertising for the book, so the bookstore buyers don't buy as many, which means that there are fewer books available on store shelves to be bought. So the author's sales slide a bit, and their next book contract is for less money.
And then you have the prominently-placed used-book links. Yes, having large numbers of used books available indicates that a lot of people may not have liked the book, but each sale of a book used is one less book sale that the publisher sees. We've already seen authors getting cutbacks on their hardback contracts because of the "I'll wait until it comes out in paper" attitude (which, in some cases, I can understand -- if I bought enough hardbacks, or even paperbacks, to keep me in new reading material, I'd go broke), and adding "I'll buy it used instead" cuts into both hardcover and paperback sales numbers to the publisher, which distorts the publisher's view of the salability of the authors.
The problem isn't that the authors aren't getting royalties from the sale of a used book, but that without any feedback to the publisher about the quantity of sales of a book as used, the publishers can only use new sales as their benchmark for the market value of an author, and working to massively increase used-book sales hurts the author's market value. If there were some way to get used-book sale numbers back to the publisher, and the publisher would use those numbers when evaluating overall sales by an author, I don't think that the authors would have anywhere near the problem with it as is being reported now.
The issue that the authors are worried about isn't that their profits will be decreased, but that their sales will be decreased.
Now, at first glance, those two seem to be the same thing, but they're not. The problem is that an author's future is driven by his present as measured by the publisher. If an author writes a novel that is published and sells 500,000 copies, when the author submits their next novel to the publisher, the publisher will look at the author's track record and base their offer on what they expect to be able to sell. If the publisher sells 300,000 copies, 200,000 of which are resold used, then the same 500,000 people have bought the author's book, but the publisher only sees sales of 300,000 copies -- so the next book by that author will get a lower offer from the publisher, if it's accepted at all.
With the ongoing compression of the midlist -- authors whose work sells steadily but not outstandingly are finding it harder to get book contracts, and the compensation they get when they do continues to fall -- drops in the publishers' sales figures because of heavily-pushed used book sales doesn't just impact their current income, it affects their income for everything they write in the future.
Midlist authors are already losing out on the store shelves, where you find half the shelves or racks loaded with copies of the three most recently-published books by blockbuster authors like Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton, and two-thirds of the rest filled with a dozen indistinguishable romance titles, '[Soon to be a | Novelization of the | Based on Characters from the] Major Motion Picture' titles, copies of the fourth or fifth volume in a few fantasy series, the latest two or three of the hundreds of Star Trek novels, and waaay down at the bottom, tucked away in a corner, a couple of midlist titles. And when the midlist titles don't sell well, the store doesn't order them, and the publisher downgrades the author when they try to sell their next novel.
Prominently-featured used book sales don't just help kill an author's royalties on the book you're buying; they help kill the author's future income and salability of their work.
The difference between this 'new wrinkle' and the previous trail of incompatible file formats is that, with previous versions of the software, if you were happy with the functionality you had and didn't need to read files from the 'latest&greatest' version, you could just go on using your old version of the program. Under a period-driven licensing program, if you don't want to cough up for another license period for the program, you can't use it any more.
Previously, there would inevitably be some fraction of the people/companies who bought Office, Word, or whatever who wouldn't upgrade; this means to Microsoft that they've 'used up' that income source. Once a customer bought Office 97, they didn't have to pay Microsoft any more money while they used the software, and the only way that Microsoft had to get more money out of them was to come out with a new version that had features that Microsoft felt would attract them enough to get them to upgrade.
With a period-based licensing model, Microsoft is able to get a customer to keep forking over money if they want to keep using the software. It doesn't matter whether the program's been enhanced, or bugs have been fixed; as long as the customer wants to keep using the software, they have to keep paying Microsoft. It changes a single, up-front cash influx to a steady revenue stream -- potentially a much more lucrative arrangement.
The issue is not whether a company can test employees to determine whether they are too high risk to insure, but whether a company can insure employees and then, after they file for benefits, test them and use the results of the test to attempt to deny coverage.
Do you see the difference? In the former case, the company performs the testing and either covers the employee or not up front. In the latter case, the company has contracted with the employee to provide coverage, but is now attempting to renege on the terms of that coverage, using the testing to establish some vague justification for denial of coverage. The problem is that predisposition is not causative; there is no way to prove that a predisposition to CTS is responsible for a patient acquiring CTS, where someone without the predisposition wouldn't.
Imagine that you've worked for the same company for twenty years, paying $100/month for health insurance. You've never been sick a day in your life, up until the day you have a heart attack at work. While you're lying in the hospital bed, the company's insurance representative comes in and tells you that, because a genetic test given as part of your care indicated that you have a genetic predisposition to heart attacks, none of the care you've been given and will need are going to be covered by your health insurance, even though your policy states that the treatment is covered.
Now contrast that with applying for work at the company, taking a preemployment physical, and being told that you have a genetic predisposition for heart attacks, and have your choice of having coverage for heart attacks excluded from your health insurance coverage, or paying an extra $10/month for coverage.
Which one is acceptable practice? And which one equates to what BN is doing with its CTS claims?