It's worth pointing out that the Forbes article is not responding to MY "loaded rhetoric," but vice versa. And believe me, I've never been under any illusion that there is no substantive difference between posting on slashdot and sitting alone in my room cursing at the ceiling.
Interesting comparison. There is a considerable difference for being for wealth for wealth's sake (I'd accuse Forbes of leaning this direction) and being conservative and very pro-free market capitalism (how I'd characterize the Economist).
Many assume commie sympathies on my part that do not exist. I don't think open source is about communism or capitalism. I think it's a new way of getting certain things done - that could be used just as easily in a variety of contexts, both economic and political. But I think I'm right in my basic premise that what threatens Forbes about open source is that it rattles the status quo, which is why they smear it with these commie digs - because communism is a superficially similar paradigm that is thoroughly debunked in the real world (the odd throwback revolutionary notwithstanding). The trick of open source as opposed, say, to communism is that it takes the basic idea of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" - and makes it compeltely voluntary and self-service. That's pretty crazy stuff, actually.
The question of how wealth is distributed among populations is a factual one. The accuracy of the rule of thumb I cite is debatable but the basic trend is not. The majority of wealth is in the hands of the minority of individuals.
That the minority of individuals who control the majority of the wealth do not do the majority of wealth-creating labor, nor do they purchase the majority of products, is also a factual statement.
The fact that I cite facts that have been cited by proponents of various ideologies does not mean that I hold them. I am not a proponent of marxism nor communism, nor am I an opponent of capitalism. I am a pacifist Christian anarchist.
I may be guilty of rhetoric in how I characterize Forbes. On the other hand, at least I argue what my basis for that rhetoric is. Whereas you do not say a single thing about the factual basis of my statments nor the quality of the arguments I make. Your critique, therefore, I will take as merely an expression of your own knee-jerk proclivities unless you demonstrate otherwise by making some kind of substantive argument.
Forewarning: The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this.
I'd suggest it is very important to read this. I think it's a bit simplistic to say that Forbes is a "Microsoft shill." Rather, Forbes is heavily invested in the status quo of business circa the early 21st century, and is naturally threatened (and apparently not a little confused) by open source and what it represents.
Anyone who bothers to give it a little thought realizes that in the modern economic system, the wealth of the 5% that own 85% of everything is protected by a business environment where the barriers of entry are too high to permit the appearance of significant competition from below. Every once in a while, emerging technologies can be harnessed to create an Apple or a Microsoft to challenge the more traditional, say, IBM.
Now, it's plain enough that we among the 95% are largely responsible for all of this wealth getting shuffled around. We do the work, we buy the products. Our retirement plans sit around for 40 years, a nice capital base in the market while the fat cats try to speculate their way to another billion. In general, we aren't able to muster sufficient organization or marshall enough of our resources together to have a conscious, guided effect on these things.
It's little surprise, then, that Forbes falls back on the rhetoric of Communism and revolution to characterize the Open Source movement, because it represents a similar kind of threat to that system. Labor unions, for example, represent an attempt to collectivize the theoretical power of a group (workers are required for business to be done, workers can choose to see themselves in a collective bargaining position opposite those that own the business) to shift the balance of power between labor and management. Communism represents the attempt to acheive this reordering on the national scale through conventional political means (democratic processes and conquest). Open source has succeeded up to this point by a similar route - harnessing the distributed power of a group of individuals to achieve results normally available only to major players.
Unlike these things, though, while the Open Source "movement" may be informed by an ideology, the integrity of its product is maintained by an adherence to the strictly capitalist, legal definition of intellectual property. What is truly offensive to the Forbes set is that the grubby horde would have the audacity to coopt one of THEIR legal power tools to create a product that nakedly opposes the dynamics of the status quo.
The basic argument of this article, if you strip away the snide asides about the irony of those open source commies suing people for violating their I.P. just like regular businessmen, fercryin'outloud, is that by legally defending it's licenses, the Open Source community will discourage people who don't wish to abide by those licenses from adopting software released under them. Uh, yes, that is correct, sir. Businesses which wish to develop proprietary technologies with closed source software should not use GPL code.
Is Forbes genuinely incapable of understanding that the whole point of Open Source is that it represents a parallel software development strategy that is opposed to the conventional business paradigm of proprietary I.P., or are they engaged in conscious propaganda in defense of the status quo? In the end it doesn't matter, the result is the same. The principle of open source licensed software is a genuine economic threat to the conventional I.P. business paradigm, but it is completely impotent if the licenses are not enforced. So I'd say, don't skip this article - study it carefully and learn the strategy of your oponents.
In the increasingly bitter wars between those advocating stronger anti-piracy protections and those who favor less stringent copyright enforcement, the decision against legal action represents one of a precious few instances of companies looking past their bottom line.
It's hard to stuff so many misconceptions and questionable assumptions into a single paragraph. This is hardly about the conflict betweeen "strong anti-piracy protections" and "less stringent copyright enforcement." More accurate would be to cite it as an example of the ongoing conflict between weak anti-piracy protections and the legitimate research of academics and professionals who expose it as such.
While we're at it, let's replace "anti-piracy protections" with "anti-duplication technology," just to highlight what this stuff really accomplishes - making it harder (and basically illegal) for individuals to exercise their fair-use rights in a vain attempt to keep copyrighted materials off P2P networks and (probably representing a much bigger impact on actual bottom lines) people from burning dupes of CDs for friends. I find it difficult to imagine anyone who doesn't have a vested interest in propping up the illusion of the efficacy of DRM technology advocating that any of the measures out there represent any real defense against file sharing.
And we can go on to replace "those who favor less stringent copyright enforcement" with "a broad cross-section of individuals, academics, professionals and politicians who question whether draconian legal attacks against individuals, questionable lawsuits against academics, and legislation that extends copyright terms far beyond their traditional boundaries and violates the principles of fair use, freedom of speech and prior restraint in service of protecting claimed technological fixes for copyright violations that have so far failed to materialize as effective methods of preventing the illegal distribution of copyrighted information." Hey, it's not so snappy. But sometimes the truth hurts prose.
And then there's "the decision against legal action represents one of a precious few instances of companies looking past their bottom line." Well, I guess it's nice to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I guess I'll make the cynical observation that this example of a DMCA lawsuit threat getting dropped doesn't seem to be all that unique, now does it? One is tempted to offer the alternative explanation - that after making a knee jerk response to getting hammered in the market (and really, this is the result of how the press reported this article - in and of itself the article would never have had this kind of effect), someone in their legal department noted that the suit was likely going to lose, that it was likely to have the opposite effect of increasing investor confidence and good will, and that DMCA suits threatening academics were a strategy likely to lead to what the industry absolutely doesn't want - a high profile case, illustrating the critical problems with the DMCA, against an individual with representation and back-up (Princeton has made it pretty clear it will stand up against attacks of this nature) likely to take it to the point where the viability of the DMCA itself might be threatened. So they cooked up the best way to spin it and had themselves a press conference.
If I purchase a CD, it is my personal property. I have the absolute right to do with it as I see fit. Alex Halderman of Princeton University is only showing us how to take back our rights as property owners.
Well, this gets to the heart of the issue of what's wrong with the DMCA. Basically, it doesn't make fair use activities like producing copies for personal use illegal - it just makes them impossible to exercise in certain contexts.
The principle I think is most violated by the DMCA is that of prior restraint. The basic assumption of prior restraint is that you cannot legally act against someone who is engaged in a legal activity because you THINK it is leading towards an illegal activity. Certainly there are exceptions (it may not be illegal to walk around with a meat cleaver but it's easy to imagine scenarios where it could justifiably get you arrested). On the other hand, attempts to "stop the presses" - to prevent a newspaper from printing something based on the argument that when distributed it will be slander or libel - is almost always a failure because of the principle of prior restraint.
Unfortunately, the 2600 DeCSS case, the highest profile test of these principles thus far, was not an encouraging example. The justices in question seemed quite easily led by the arguments of industry that the only reason anyone would want to, say, cook their own decryption of a DVD signal would be for copyright violating activities - even though not a single example of this type of use could be cited and it was acknowledged that almost all DVD piracy was just a straight-across dupe, CSS and all.
I agree with you in principle but right now the law says you're wrong. The law needs to be changed.
It's time to sink below their level, so we can punch them in the nuts without throwing out our backs!
Well, while spamming is irritating and irresponsible but not necessarily illegal, selling "generic" equivalents of patented pharmaceuticals (whether bogus or not) and hacking people's computers are definitely illegal. Methinks it's time the law started getting serious about these people.
Okay, pretend I'm an idiot (this will not be that hard). Can someone point me at a resource that explains why the current setup makes it so impossible to verify where email comes from, which seems to be a main issue (I assume this is what MoxCamel is talking about, correct me if I'm wrong)? And what the solution is? And what the objections to the solution are? I'd like to be an informed participant in this debate but I'm not that technical and I just don't understand the issues. I understand that spammers spoof the headers and that this is easy to do. But why it is easy to do, and what to do about that? No clue.
Copyrights gained through heavy-handed means - from forcing minors into signing contracts backed by morally dubious laws, for example - and sometimes not entirely then - are not 'solid'.
This is true, a layer of complexity I ignored. There is some serious legal action ongoing around whether many of the copyrights owned by the majors are valid. Good call.
I'm not advocating theft, but it's awful hard to feel any sympathy for the RIAA's position.
Well, not to split hairs but you wouldn't be advocating theft anyway. Unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material is not theft, it's copyright violation and has to do with the perceived dilution of value of an activity the rights-holder has exclusive license to do.
And I have NO sympathy for the RIAA's position or more specifically that of the businesses they represent. What I do have is a belief that the basic architecture of copyright is going to stick around. It will be illegal to distribute unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. And this fundamental flaw will continue to interfere with anyone trying to make a go of alternative distribution of THEIR product. Dance our way or go to hell. Do it your own way, get sued.
But what you point out is that as the conventional industry is REDUCING the value of their product (don't use it this way, don't use it that way, oh look now it breaks your computer, sure you can have a compressed file but only this bundled Windows Media version! What you're an online store and you want to stream our product so potential buyers can browse the catalog? Heavens no, what if they capture it off the sound card, it'll be like they've got a cassette tape made off the radio, horror! You're welcome to start an internet radio station to stream our product - here's all your paperwork and here's your fat bill for royalties, and no you may not serve on demand and no you may not say what will be playing next! Thank you for sharing our music with thousands of potential customers. You're sued.) In this atmosphere, independents can RAISE the value of their product simply by doing NOTHING - just producing regular old CDs and not suing anyone - or even doing NEXT TO NOTHING - releasing under a license that specifically sanctions certain types of redistribution, like open source licenses do. That's a pretty cool opportunity the indies have and I'd like to see it used more and more, is all I'm saying.
So what the hell are the recording labels good for?
PRECISELY! I'm not saying the labels represented by the RIAA are good, or right. But they OWN the rights. They bought them under the existing law. I'm not saying how they operate is right - it certainly isn't. I'm saying - here is a rotten business behaving in a rotten manner. Let's seek out and support their replacements, not just illegally access their product using new technology. Because the latter will expose you to legal repercussions, while the former will create the thing that will kill or change the dinosaurs the fastest - real competition.
You state the valid distinction between the copyright issue and the patent issue much better than I did. I do believe that it will continue to be illegal to distribute copyrighted information without the permission of the copyright holder. With advocacy and proper support, the copyright term may go down, the DMCA may be overturned or significantly altered, but the basic reality of how copyright operates is not going to change, I suspect. So to really "fight the power" it will come down to a truly alternative product base.
The point I was trying to make is that I think the issue of the opportunity for independent producers of music that the conventional industry is creating by treating its customers (and I agree that probably all of the people getting sued are also customers of the businesses represented by the RIAA) in a quite foul and egregious manner is being underrepresented in the reporting and discussion.
I could have phrased this more clearly - I'm saying it is illegal to "dupe and share" - to distribute the duplicates you make. That is in fact illegal whether you do it for free or not.
The alternative commodity is the packaging and delivery of the music, not the music itself.
Precisely my objection. I want to see not just the delivery system overhauled, I want to see independents take advantage of the opportunity to raise the profile on non-corporate fed, non-mushed out to the lowest common denominator, non-star machine processed pap. I want high quality indie pap.
The comparisons are interesting. Now if only there was someone out there truly analogous to Henry Ford - coming out with a true alternative commodity. Kazaa and its ilk are merely repackaging someone else's property, intellectual though it may be - the point of the Ford case is he won based on the reality that the patent was BS. The copyrights the music industry owns are not BS. They're solid. The DMCA may fall but it will still be illegal to dupe and share stuff with someone else's copyright on it.
Still, the ill-will the industry is generating (and the resources it is expending on being the bigger bully) do expand the opportunity of independent publishers to band together and take the high road. Let's hope we get some Ford-scale contenders in the mix soon.
I hope someone else can assist because I can't. I don't know. Basically, I'm a late adopter. I didn't get my first CD player until 1992. I still don't own a digital portable. I wait until the stuff is ready at the price I want. For Ogg portables it isn't there yet. But I really believe that when it gets there Walmart will carry it because it will be cheaper.
For now, iRiver http://iriver.com/ is supposedly going to be supporting Ogg soon, Rio http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/rioaudio/default. asp?cat=35 has at least one player - the Karma - that supports Ogg. But this is still high-end, hard-drive stuff. You have to take into account that the first commercial release of system IP to decode Ogg only came (from FineArch Inc. http://www.finearch.com/english/news/pr_20030715/p r_20030715.htm) in July this year. The integer-only Ogg Vorbis playback lib ['Tremor'] was released under BSD license only a year ago. These things take time. Write your favorite portable producer a letter, too! The more they hear about supporting Ogg the sooner it will come.
The state of hardware issues can be reviewed at xiph.org -http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/hardware.html
If you've got a PDA you may also be able to find a decent decoder for it - very cost effective, I'm only aware of support for Sharp right now (http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/oggportab le.html) but I'm not looking very hard.
I'd say MP3 is a reasonable interim technology - as you note, you can get into it very cheaply. I'm just stubborn (and, in matters of technology, patient). Hope this helps some.
A dollar would cover only the songwriting royalties for an album...
I'm talking only about the production of the physical artifact of the CD. Yes, there are other issues. Rights clearing and verification are a major bugaboo and missing link for independents cutting the conventional industry out of the picture. This does not change the fact that the skim and waste of the conventional industry is outrageous, and the economics of lawless kiddies burning their friends copies of their faves is such a serious issue for those as would like to keep selling CDs for 10-20 bucks a pop.
Why doesn't the price of a fresh loaf of bread go down over time?
Because the price of a loaf of bread is a reasonable commodity price. Competition and economies of scale are exercised properly in the bread market. This is why the music industry gets sued for price-fixing while the bread industry does not. My message is just this: the only thing unique and irreplacable about what the conventional music industry offers is their ownership of copyrights. And they expect far too much from their consumers for the transfer of that particular license.
The types of free offerings you note illustrate the new ground of music distribution that is being shaped right now.
I never signed onto e-music, despite good things about it, for a very simple reason: I don't do MP3s. Call me a purist but I'll wait for Ogg. It's pretty much already there but I'm waiting for the portable that has all I want and supports it. The argument that that's the way it oughta be is sufficient for me.
I haven't bought into other pay download services, because I think the pricing is ridiculous. If I purchase a song online, I would expect it to be equivalent to what I get buying a CD - that is, the full digital information, unencumbered by digital rights management. The information to do with as I choose within the boundaries of law (I won't buy a CD that doesn't meet these requirements). I think it is reasonable to expect that the price will be significantly reduced from the per track price of a CD, since I am already paying for bandwidth to receive the content as well as the physical media to store it, and I'm not receiving a physical disc as an archive and portability tool (i.e. if I want to play it in my car CD player I have to buy a blank CD and burn it on my own drive). 3 bucks is not, in my opinion, a reasonable price for the digital transfer of an album of compressed tracks. iTunes is worse: a dollar for a compressed track with DRM is simply a joke.
It all illustrates the bottom line of what's wrong with the conventional music industry: they are a hidebound, greedy, innefficient, inflexible and monolithic monster, and those services that emulate them are headed in the same direction as the conventional industry (isn't this round two in the whole eMusic thing? I seem to recall some unpleasantness previously about hassling customers for "abusing" the system with excessive downloading, generating a bunch of ill will that motivated them to make it truly unlimited in the first place). Even beyond the compression and DRM issues, comparing services like this to CD prices ignores the fact that CDs are far too expensive in the first place. Here you have a mature technology, economies of scale up the wazoo, yet the price does not go down. Meanwhile the technology of home burning is to the extent that if you cannot produce a CD-R copy for less than a dollar you're doing something seriously wrong. Yet I'm expected to hand Apple a dollar for a single track of compressed and encumbered audio, delivered through the internet access I pay for, onto the very expensive Apple computer I paid for, and if I want it on external media w(which I can't play on my CD players in the car, the boombox, my portable), I have to buy the media and assume the cost of the time (both my own and clocking against the inevitable eventual failure of my burner)?
I give my friend a couple hundred dollars every couple of years and I receive something in the area of 30, 40 CDs, many of them one-of-a-kind, with hand-crafted covers, sent to me in the mail and handed to me during visits. They are full audio format and totally unencumbered. He is an independent musician, self-supporting (no day job), and I doubt very much that the vast majority of people here have ever heard of him. The CDs end up costing me less than 5 bucks and I can do whatever I want with them, and he's a thousand times superior to anything I can find on the radio dial. This is the reality of the technological revolution in music and it is so far under the radar of conventional industry that it is not even visible to most. Yet the economics are there. He does not even bother with the digital access component because CD-Rs are so cheap to burn.
When you can go a bunch of places and pick up MP3s for free, and eMusic expects you to pay 25 cents a piece, there is simply something wrong with the picture, and what is wrong with the picture is the people who own the copyrights, who insist on that product being a crazy magic money creation machine.
Disclaimer - I didn't have a cellphone at all up until about a month ago, and don't really now - the wife got one from her work, so we sort of have a family one, but I almost never use it. To my mind not being accessible to the telephone has always been one of the fringe benefits of going outside, and while I appreciate the benefit of having the OPTION of access to a telephone now, I guess I'm not really a cellphone guy.
But an issue that seems to not be addressed much is, what's the point of having your cellphone be your handheld? It seems like other combos - namely PDAs, music portables (I realize the N-Gage has a MP3 player but it doesn't sound like a great one), Pocket GPS, mini emailing device...
Your telephone becomes useless for anything else when you're using it. And it's use is sometimes mission critical. Therefore it would seem to me that what I want from a wireless phone is that #1 it's as small as is functionally useful and #2 that I can rely on its battery. Making it a handheld seems to go against both those principles.
If I went looking for a combo, I think I'd leave the telephone right out of the picture.
Well, the economy of solar power really has been getting progressively better all this time. But it certainly hasn't met with optimisitic projections.
Is there a conspiracy? I doubt it, in the technical sense. But there is no question that all alternative power systems get the short end when it comes to energy generation research dollars. The huge existing fossil fuel infrastructure continues to snap up most of the available research dollar. Alternative energy tends to be something politicians give lip service to and quickly forget. Where the hell is my solar panel Bill Clinton promised me?
When some technologies sort of shoot ahead (i.e. computers) it is easy to forget that others may have a more leisurely gestation. The 27 years since '76 seems like a really long time but it really isn't so long in the world of research, and phenomenal discoveries and gains have been made. Expect the overall pace to be slow, though, unless we somehow managed to elect a government with the guts to do some longer term investment in fundamental research and helping to build the economies of scale for alternative electrical generation.
How many new "van Goghs" do we have since the advent of Photoshop?
Granted. On the other hand, it's also reasonable to ask how many people are doing a fairly decent job on routine manipulations of photos since the advent of Photoshop, as compared to when you needed a darkroom and the equipment (and knowledge) to dodge and burn, touch up and mask? Of course merely having a tool doesn't mean knowing how to use it - but there is no question that this technology is changing the level of access to studio-quality mixing for artists at all levels.
On another hand, having the professional ability doesn't mean what you're doing is worth a rat's asshole. From the article:
"His production work on the song "Pop" from Nsync's last record is one of the projects he did while flying... 'There's something like 2,000 or 3,000 edits in that three-minute song, and I did that sitting on a plane.'"
Is there much question why all this pop garbage sounds like cheese that's already made at least one pass through the digestive system of a pig?
The only real comparison I'm suggesting is that just because "millions" of people do a thing does not mean that society at large will look askance at its criminalization. What the RIAA is fighting for more than anything right now is to make the notion of criminalizing minor (non-commercial i.e. bootlegging) violation of copyright - a crime that has up to now been almost completely ignored by law enforcement. I'm advising the poster not make the error of assuming this is about what makes sense - and mary-jane is a fine example of that issue.
In most people's moral universe, drinking alcohol isn't even close to shooting heroin - but the reality is that drinking alcohol is much closer to smoking weed than smoking weed is to shooting heroin (I would argue that drinking alcohol is worse on every single scale except the legal threat). Yet in the U.S.A. the majority of anti-drug resources are arrayed against marijuana. It is about nothing but social manipulation and control for the benefit of specific parties.
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I'll be damned if I'll listed to the opinion of an American who would join the Taliban.
It's worth pointing out that the Forbes article is not responding to MY "loaded rhetoric," but vice versa. And believe me, I've never been under any illusion that there is no substantive difference between posting on slashdot and sitting alone in my room cursing at the ceiling.
anonymous coward parrots simplistic affirmation of status quo. News at eleven.
Many assume commie sympathies on my part that do not exist. I don't think open source is about communism or capitalism. I think it's a new way of getting certain things done - that could be used just as easily in a variety of contexts, both economic and political. But I think I'm right in my basic premise that what threatens Forbes about open source is that it rattles the status quo, which is why they smear it with these commie digs - because communism is a superficially similar paradigm that is thoroughly debunked in the real world (the odd throwback revolutionary notwithstanding). The trick of open source as opposed, say, to communism is that it takes the basic idea of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" - and makes it compeltely voluntary and self-service. That's pretty crazy stuff, actually.
That the minority of individuals who control the majority of the wealth do not do the majority of wealth-creating labor, nor do they purchase the majority of products, is also a factual statement.
The fact that I cite facts that have been cited by proponents of various ideologies does not mean that I hold them. I am not a proponent of marxism nor communism, nor am I an opponent of capitalism. I am a pacifist Christian anarchist.
I may be guilty of rhetoric in how I characterize Forbes. On the other hand, at least I argue what my basis for that rhetoric is. Whereas you do not say a single thing about the factual basis of my statments nor the quality of the arguments I make. Your critique, therefore, I will take as merely an expression of your own knee-jerk proclivities unless you demonstrate otherwise by making some kind of substantive argument.
I'd suggest it is very important to read this. I think it's a bit simplistic to say that Forbes is a "Microsoft shill." Rather, Forbes is heavily invested in the status quo of business circa the early 21st century, and is naturally threatened (and apparently not a little confused) by open source and what it represents.
Anyone who bothers to give it a little thought realizes that in the modern economic system, the wealth of the 5% that own 85% of everything is protected by a business environment where the barriers of entry are too high to permit the appearance of significant competition from below. Every once in a while, emerging technologies can be harnessed to create an Apple or a Microsoft to challenge the more traditional, say, IBM.
Now, it's plain enough that we among the 95% are largely responsible for all of this wealth getting shuffled around. We do the work, we buy the products. Our retirement plans sit around for 40 years, a nice capital base in the market while the fat cats try to speculate their way to another billion. In general, we aren't able to muster sufficient organization or marshall enough of our resources together to have a conscious, guided effect on these things.
It's little surprise, then, that Forbes falls back on the rhetoric of Communism and revolution to characterize the Open Source movement, because it represents a similar kind of threat to that system. Labor unions, for example, represent an attempt to collectivize the theoretical power of a group (workers are required for business to be done, workers can choose to see themselves in a collective bargaining position opposite those that own the business) to shift the balance of power between labor and management. Communism represents the attempt to acheive this reordering on the national scale through conventional political means (democratic processes and conquest). Open source has succeeded up to this point by a similar route - harnessing the distributed power of a group of individuals to achieve results normally available only to major players.
Unlike these things, though, while the Open Source "movement" may be informed by an ideology, the integrity of its product is maintained by an adherence to the strictly capitalist, legal definition of intellectual property. What is truly offensive to the Forbes set is that the grubby horde would have the audacity to coopt one of THEIR legal power tools to create a product that nakedly opposes the dynamics of the status quo.
The basic argument of this article, if you strip away the snide asides about the irony of those open source commies suing people for violating their I.P. just like regular businessmen, fercryin'outloud, is that by legally defending it's licenses, the Open Source community will discourage people who don't wish to abide by those licenses from adopting software released under them. Uh, yes, that is correct, sir. Businesses which wish to develop proprietary technologies with closed source software should not use GPL code.
Is Forbes genuinely incapable of understanding that the whole point of Open Source is that it represents a parallel software development strategy that is opposed to the conventional business paradigm of proprietary I.P., or are they engaged in conscious propaganda in defense of the status quo? In the end it doesn't matter, the result is the same. The principle of open source licensed software is a genuine economic threat to the conventional I.P. business paradigm, but it is completely impotent if the licenses are not enforced. So I'd say, don't skip this article - study it carefully and learn the strategy of your oponents.
It's hard to stuff so many misconceptions and questionable assumptions into a single paragraph. This is hardly about the conflict betweeen "strong anti-piracy protections" and "less stringent copyright enforcement." More accurate would be to cite it as an example of the ongoing conflict between weak anti-piracy protections and the legitimate research of academics and professionals who expose it as such.
While we're at it, let's replace "anti-piracy protections" with "anti-duplication technology," just to highlight what this stuff really accomplishes - making it harder (and basically illegal) for individuals to exercise their fair-use rights in a vain attempt to keep copyrighted materials off P2P networks and (probably representing a much bigger impact on actual bottom lines) people from burning dupes of CDs for friends. I find it difficult to imagine anyone who doesn't have a vested interest in propping up the illusion of the efficacy of DRM technology advocating that any of the measures out there represent any real defense against file sharing.
And we can go on to replace "those who favor less stringent copyright enforcement" with "a broad cross-section of individuals, academics, professionals and politicians who question whether draconian legal attacks against individuals, questionable lawsuits against academics, and legislation that extends copyright terms far beyond their traditional boundaries and violates the principles of fair use, freedom of speech and prior restraint in service of protecting claimed technological fixes for copyright violations that have so far failed to materialize as effective methods of preventing the illegal distribution of copyrighted information." Hey, it's not so snappy. But sometimes the truth hurts prose.
And then there's "the decision against legal action represents one of a precious few instances of companies looking past their bottom line." Well, I guess it's nice to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I guess I'll make the cynical observation that this example of a DMCA lawsuit threat getting dropped doesn't seem to be all that unique, now does it? One is tempted to offer the alternative explanation - that after making a knee jerk response to getting hammered in the market (and really, this is the result of how the press reported this article - in and of itself the article would never have had this kind of effect), someone in their legal department noted that the suit was likely going to lose, that it was likely to have the opposite effect of increasing investor confidence and good will, and that DMCA suits threatening academics were a strategy likely to lead to what the industry absolutely doesn't want - a high profile case, illustrating the critical problems with the DMCA, against an individual with representation and back-up (Princeton has made it pretty clear it will stand up against attacks of this nature) likely to take it to the point where the viability of the DMCA itself might be threatened. So they cooked up the best way to spin it and had themselves a press conference.
Well, this gets to the heart of the issue of what's wrong with the DMCA. Basically, it doesn't make fair use activities like producing copies for personal use illegal - it just makes them impossible to exercise in certain contexts.
The principle I think is most violated by the DMCA is that of prior restraint. The basic assumption of prior restraint is that you cannot legally act against someone who is engaged in a legal activity because you THINK it is leading towards an illegal activity. Certainly there are exceptions (it may not be illegal to walk around with a meat cleaver but it's easy to imagine scenarios where it could justifiably get you arrested). On the other hand, attempts to "stop the presses" - to prevent a newspaper from printing something based on the argument that when distributed it will be slander or libel - is almost always a failure because of the principle of prior restraint.
Unfortunately, the 2600 DeCSS case, the highest profile test of these principles thus far, was not an encouraging example. The justices in question seemed quite easily led by the arguments of industry that the only reason anyone would want to, say, cook their own decryption of a DVD signal would be for copyright violating activities - even though not a single example of this type of use could be cited and it was acknowledged that almost all DVD piracy was just a straight-across dupe, CSS and all.
I agree with you in principle but right now the law says you're wrong. The law needs to be changed.
Well, while spamming is irritating and irresponsible but not necessarily illegal, selling "generic" equivalents of patented pharmaceuticals (whether bogus or not) and hacking people's computers are definitely illegal. Methinks it's time the law started getting serious about these people.
Okay, pretend I'm an idiot (this will not be that hard). Can someone point me at a resource that explains why the current setup makes it so impossible to verify where email comes from, which seems to be a main issue (I assume this is what MoxCamel is talking about, correct me if I'm wrong)? And what the solution is? And what the objections to the solution are? I'd like to be an informed participant in this debate but I'm not that technical and I just don't understand the issues. I understand that spammers spoof the headers and that this is easy to do. But why it is easy to do, and what to do about that? No clue.
This is true, a layer of complexity I ignored. There is some serious legal action ongoing around whether many of the copyrights owned by the majors are valid. Good call.
Well, not to split hairs but you wouldn't be advocating theft anyway. Unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material is not theft, it's copyright violation and has to do with the perceived dilution of value of an activity the rights-holder has exclusive license to do.
And I have NO sympathy for the RIAA's position or more specifically that of the businesses they represent. What I do have is a belief that the basic architecture of copyright is going to stick around. It will be illegal to distribute unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. And this fundamental flaw will continue to interfere with anyone trying to make a go of alternative distribution of THEIR product. Dance our way or go to hell. Do it your own way, get sued.
But what you point out is that as the conventional industry is REDUCING the value of their product (don't use it this way, don't use it that way, oh look now it breaks your computer, sure you can have a compressed file but only this bundled Windows Media version! What you're an online store and you want to stream our product so potential buyers can browse the catalog? Heavens no, what if they capture it off the sound card, it'll be like they've got a cassette tape made off the radio, horror! You're welcome to start an internet radio station to stream our product - here's all your paperwork and here's your fat bill for royalties, and no you may not serve on demand and no you may not say what will be playing next! Thank you for sharing our music with thousands of potential customers. You're sued.) In this atmosphere, independents can RAISE the value of their product simply by doing NOTHING - just producing regular old CDs and not suing anyone - or even doing NEXT TO NOTHING - releasing under a license that specifically sanctions certain types of redistribution, like open source licenses do. That's a pretty cool opportunity the indies have and I'd like to see it used more and more, is all I'm saying.
PRECISELY! I'm not saying the labels represented by the RIAA are good, or right. But they OWN the rights. They bought them under the existing law. I'm not saying how they operate is right - it certainly isn't. I'm saying - here is a rotten business behaving in a rotten manner. Let's seek out and support their replacements, not just illegally access their product using new technology. Because the latter will expose you to legal repercussions, while the former will create the thing that will kill or change the dinosaurs the fastest - real competition.
The point I was trying to make is that I think the issue of the opportunity for independent producers of music that the conventional industry is creating by treating its customers (and I agree that probably all of the people getting sued are also customers of the businesses represented by the RIAA) in a quite foul and egregious manner is being underrepresented in the reporting and discussion.
I could have phrased this more clearly - I'm saying it is illegal to "dupe and share" - to distribute the duplicates you make. That is in fact illegal whether you do it for free or not.
Precisely my objection. I want to see not just the delivery system overhauled, I want to see independents take advantage of the opportunity to raise the profile on non-corporate fed, non-mushed out to the lowest common denominator, non-star machine processed pap. I want high quality indie pap.
Still, the ill-will the industry is generating (and the resources it is expending on being the bigger bully) do expand the opportunity of independent publishers to band together and take the high road. Let's hope we get some Ford-scale contenders in the mix soon.
I hope someone else can assist because I can't. I don't know. Basically, I'm a late adopter. I didn't get my first CD player until 1992. I still don't own a digital portable. I wait until the stuff is ready at the price I want. For Ogg portables it isn't there yet. But I really believe that when it gets there Walmart will carry it because it will be cheaper.
For now, iRiver http://iriver.com/ is supposedly going to be supporting Ogg soon, Rio http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/rioaudio/default
The state of hardware issues can be reviewed at xiph.org -http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/hardware.html
If you've got a PDA you may also be able to find a decent decoder for it - very cost effective, I'm only aware of support for Sharp right now (http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/oggporta
I'd say MP3 is a reasonable interim technology - as you note, you can get into it very cheaply. I'm just stubborn (and, in matters of technology, patient). Hope this helps some.
I'm talking only about the production of the physical artifact of the CD. Yes, there are other issues. Rights clearing and verification are a major bugaboo and missing link for independents cutting the conventional industry out of the picture. This does not change the fact that the skim and waste of the conventional industry is outrageous, and the economics of lawless kiddies burning their friends copies of their faves is such a serious issue for those as would like to keep selling CDs for 10-20 bucks a pop.
Why doesn't the price of a fresh loaf of bread go down over time?
Because the price of a loaf of bread is a reasonable commodity price. Competition and economies of scale are exercised properly in the bread market. This is why the music industry gets sued for price-fixing while the bread industry does not. My message is just this: the only thing unique and irreplacable about what the conventional music industry offers is their ownership of copyrights. And they expect far too much from their consumers for the transfer of that particular license.
I never signed onto e-music, despite good things about it, for a very simple reason: I don't do MP3s. Call me a purist but I'll wait for Ogg. It's pretty much already there but I'm waiting for the portable that has all I want and supports it. The argument that that's the way it oughta be is sufficient for me.
I haven't bought into other pay download services, because I think the pricing is ridiculous. If I purchase a song online, I would expect it to be equivalent to what I get buying a CD - that is, the full digital information, unencumbered by digital rights management. The information to do with as I choose within the boundaries of law (I won't buy a CD that doesn't meet these requirements). I think it is reasonable to expect that the price will be significantly reduced from the per track price of a CD, since I am already paying for bandwidth to receive the content as well as the physical media to store it, and I'm not receiving a physical disc as an archive and portability tool (i.e. if I want to play it in my car CD player I have to buy a blank CD and burn it on my own drive). 3 bucks is not, in my opinion, a reasonable price for the digital transfer of an album of compressed tracks. iTunes is worse: a dollar for a compressed track with DRM is simply a joke.
It all illustrates the bottom line of what's wrong with the conventional music industry: they are a hidebound, greedy, innefficient, inflexible and monolithic monster, and those services that emulate them are headed in the same direction as the conventional industry (isn't this round two in the whole eMusic thing? I seem to recall some unpleasantness previously about hassling customers for "abusing" the system with excessive downloading, generating a bunch of ill will that motivated them to make it truly unlimited in the first place). Even beyond the compression and DRM issues, comparing services like this to CD prices ignores the fact that CDs are far too expensive in the first place. Here you have a mature technology, economies of scale up the wazoo, yet the price does not go down. Meanwhile the technology of home burning is to the extent that if you cannot produce a CD-R copy for less than a dollar you're doing something seriously wrong. Yet I'm expected to hand Apple a dollar for a single track of compressed and encumbered audio, delivered through the internet access I pay for, onto the very expensive Apple computer I paid for, and if I want it on external media w(which I can't play on my CD players in the car, the boombox, my portable), I have to buy the media and assume the cost of the time (both my own and clocking against the inevitable eventual failure of my burner)?
I give my friend a couple hundred dollars every couple of years and I receive something in the area of 30, 40 CDs, many of them one-of-a-kind, with hand-crafted covers, sent to me in the mail and handed to me during visits. They are full audio format and totally unencumbered. He is an independent musician, self-supporting (no day job), and I doubt very much that the vast majority of people here have ever heard of him. The CDs end up costing me less than 5 bucks and I can do whatever I want with them, and he's a thousand times superior to anything I can find on the radio dial. This is the reality of the technological revolution in music and it is so far under the radar of conventional industry that it is not even visible to most. Yet the economics are there. He does not even bother with the digital access component because CD-Rs are so cheap to burn.
When you can go a bunch of places and pick up MP3s for free, and eMusic expects you to pay 25 cents a piece, there is simply something wrong with the picture, and what is wrong with the picture is the people who own the copyrights, who insist on that product being a crazy magic money creation machine.
Right here, right no
But an issue that seems to not be addressed much is, what's the point of having your cellphone be your handheld? It seems like other combos - namely PDAs, music portables (I realize the N-Gage has a MP3 player but it doesn't sound like a great one), Pocket GPS, mini emailing device...
Your telephone becomes useless for anything else when you're using it. And it's use is sometimes mission critical. Therefore it would seem to me that what I want from a wireless phone is that #1 it's as small as is functionally useful and #2 that I can rely on its battery. Making it a handheld seems to go against both those principles.
If I went looking for a combo, I think I'd leave the telephone right out of the picture.
Is there a conspiracy? I doubt it, in the technical sense. But there is no question that all alternative power systems get the short end when it comes to energy generation research dollars. The huge existing fossil fuel infrastructure continues to snap up most of the available research dollar. Alternative energy tends to be something politicians give lip service to and quickly forget. Where the hell is my solar panel Bill Clinton promised me?
When some technologies sort of shoot ahead (i.e. computers) it is easy to forget that others may have a more leisurely gestation. The 27 years since '76 seems like a really long time but it really isn't so long in the world of research, and phenomenal discoveries and gains have been made. Expect the overall pace to be slow, though, unless we somehow managed to elect a government with the guts to do some longer term investment in fundamental research and helping to build the economies of scale for alternative electrical generation.
Granted. On the other hand, it's also reasonable to ask how many people are doing a fairly decent job on routine manipulations of photos since the advent of Photoshop, as compared to when you needed a darkroom and the equipment (and knowledge) to dodge and burn, touch up and mask? Of course merely having a tool doesn't mean knowing how to use it - but there is no question that this technology is changing the level of access to studio-quality mixing for artists at all levels.
On another hand, having the professional ability doesn't mean what you're doing is worth a rat's asshole. From the article:
"His production work on the song "Pop" from Nsync's last record is one of the projects he did while flying... 'There's something like 2,000 or 3,000 edits in that three-minute song, and I did that sitting on a plane.'"
Is there much question why all this pop garbage sounds like cheese that's already made at least one pass through the digestive system of a pig?
Yeah man, that Matrix game r0x0r3d so hard. This is a tragic, tragic loss.
The only real comparison I'm suggesting is that just because "millions" of people do a thing does not mean that society at large will look askance at its criminalization. What the RIAA is fighting for more than anything right now is to make the notion of criminalizing minor (non-commercial i.e. bootlegging) violation of copyright - a crime that has up to now been almost completely ignored by law enforcement. I'm advising the poster not make the error of assuming this is about what makes sense - and mary-jane is a fine example of that issue.
In most people's moral universe, drinking alcohol isn't even close to shooting heroin - but the reality is that drinking alcohol is much closer to smoking weed than smoking weed is to shooting heroin (I would argue that drinking alcohol is worse on every single scale except the legal threat). Yet in the U.S.A. the majority of anti-drug resources are arrayed against marijuana. It is about nothing but social manipulation and control for the benefit of specific parties.