When you have millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens engaging in illegal activity something has to give.
In the U.S.A., at least, it hasn't happened with marijuana yet.
The difference between file sharing and home taping is largely one of scale and centralization. Home taping is by nature a small scale, decentralized activity. I borrow an LP from my brother, tape it, that's the end of it. If someone tried to open a "home taping center" where any and all could come browse thousands of record collections and make cassette dupes, leaving behind a paper trail of their activities, you would quickly find out just how "decriminalized" home taping was.
Ironically, the underlying reason for the media's relative neglect of this story is rooted in the same thing that's wrong with the post you're responding to: the majority of people are not up for a complex, nuanced analysis of anything. That requires thought, and work, and research.
The subject of voting in general is a complicated one, at the numbers of voters even the U.S.A.'s patheric voter turnout generates, and most of the time the results are sufficiently skewed to one side or the other that these complexities can be ignored. The last presidential election, where the balance deciding state came down to, essentially, a statistical dead heat, provided the opportunity to review some of these issues - an opportunity that was almost totally drowned out in the partisan bickering.
It is reasonable to state that these days almost all television news is indistinguishable from the media industry in general and the media industry is indistinguishable from business in general, and it isn't completely crazy to suggest that the general choice of the media not to choose the tack that "big business is EVIL" as the requisite so-simple-it's-wrong sound bite. But I suspect it has a lot more to do with the fact that voting is boring, and complicated, and the technical issues are not so easy for the non-technical to understand. This story also lacks a smoking gun. People were willing to tolerate discussion of the finer technical points of hanging chads and other vagaries of punch-card voting when there was a disputed major election hanging on it. Try to imagine trying to get a major news organization to run an expose on punch-card problems before this election made it a right-here, right-now issue.
Meanwhile, another screwed-up high schooler opens up with a gun in my home state. Media is about attracting eyeballs and keeping them stuck on your content. Guess what leads?
My favorite Slashdot links are those that go down within about 12.5 seconds of showing up on the front page. I know I must be missing something really great!
Check a website which encourages you to share your stories of the tragic consequences of video games with the slimy, opportunistic scum lawyer in question. http://www.stopkill.com/
Am I the only one who is generally unimpressed with the various manifestations of these "project on mist" technologies that have come up in a few Slashdot articles? Ooh, aah, look you can project light onto a particulate cloud. Who woulda thunk it? This "projecting images into thin air" thing bugs me. It isn't thin air, it's thick air, that's the point. Projected light, no more space-age than a slide projecter, screen made of mist, no more space-age than a humidifier. It's a novelty. The density of the image by its nature is too low to be usefule as much else than as a novelty, it has a bit of a "looks cool" factor but for any kind of really serious imaging need the clarity, density and brightness of a screen will be worth far more than the "hanging in air" factor, and for 3D the only reasonable technology to pursue is binocular imaging, either with goggles or glasses and a split screen.
One of the issues not often addressed is the misuse (in my opinion, and some would argue by its original intention) of the Social Security number as a universal identifier in so many public and private functions. It happens for convenience - the SS # is government issued, unique and relatively difficult to spoof, so it's handy. But it shouldn't be allowed. The SS # should be used by the government for tax identification and issuance of SS and related benefits only. Unfortunately nobody wants to open this huge can of worms.
There is certainly a degree of catch-22 involved between convenience and security. When my wallet was stolen with license and SS card (dumb to carry both but I recently needed them starting a new job)a few years back, I was glad that I was able to get a new drivers license with no identification except a birth certificate copy I was able to get with just my SS number and no identification - but the ease of doing so certainly gave me pause for thought.
In addition to the sound advice of shredding, a good idea is to lock your credit reports from being issued without your consent and opting out of pre-approved CC offers. Instructions for both at this article - http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/TechTV/tech tv_fraudprevent030815.html
I'm just thankful my house has a mail slot that drops into an inaccessible bin inside the home.
Your sister-in-law may be bright at some things, but she is still a stupid person.
And you're a knee-jerk, offensive asshole - but who's counting? The point is, she is NOT a stupid person. She was smart enough to grasp that there was an issue involved, to wonder about it, and to ask someone she figured would know. She was smart enough to understand the answer. She was merely an uninformed person, and that is not at all the same thing. You make my point - a lot of the people on a forum like this are so narrow-mindedly fixated on their own point of view, which is immersed in the internet and understands the fundamental distinctions between it and other mass media, that they are oblivious to the reality that to the majority of the public the internet is just another media source that has popped up. The question is, is a subpeona the proper response to this ignorance by an industry which makes its money entertaining people? The question is moot to me - I've never liked or trusted file sharing and so never engaged in it, and I haven't bought a CD from a non-independent since the DMCA was passed. I just think that there are most likely plenty of egregious and knowing offenders who are a lot more likely candidates for legal action than individuals like this family.
Her assumption is false but it isn't all that crazy. The kind of people who have a Slashdot account are innundated with this kind of information. We've talked copyright up one side and down the other. The majority of people do not understand these issues so well. I realize ignorance of the law is not a valid defense but honestly: people are used to this world where you turn on an appliance, sign up for some service, and get content. Cable or sattelite TV, the radio - you record a tape, capture TV with your Tivo, nobody hassles you. These people signed up for Kazaa and assumed it was the same thing. It really isn't that crazy. They didn't read the small print.
True story: my sister in law, who is not at all a stupid person, is telling me about how her teenage daughter showed her how to go out on the internet and download a Neil Young album and she burns it to a CD. And she says to me: I don't understand how they get paid for this though. I didn't pay anything to get on the site. And I said, they didn't get paid for it. The people that gave you that content didn't have the right to do that and that copy isn't legal. She honestly didn't know. People assume if it is available, it is legal. For all the furor the industry and its representatives have done a terrible job of instructing people about the realities of copyright law. And now they are simply going for the jugular in a completely haphazard, scattershot way.
Just as we've committed ourselves inextricably to a high-tech world (and thank God, for no other kind will feed five billion) (emphasis added).
Okay, maybe it's a petty gripe, but in an article about how we're no longer dream about the future, I gotta say: HEY SPIDER! The earth's population crossed the SIX BILLION mark in 1999!
Yeesh. Are we talking about the future or the past?
Although it's now been 10 years since I've done any serious research on the subject (every now & then I read the symposium notes), I can give you my opinions of the whole Cold Fusion uproar:
-There is something strange & new going on in these experiments
I've no doubt this is quite possibly true. Regardless of what "it" turns out to be (or whether we'll ever know) I think it makes an excellent case study of why the system of peer review and formal publication exists, and the costs of electing to circumvent channels, whether out of over-enthusiasm or naked self-promotion.
By making a big public furor over experiments that hadn't been reproduced and obviously were not properly understood (since we're still trying to figure them out over a decade later), Pons & Fleischmann attached an onus to the whole business that it has yet to shake.
If they had gone a more cautious and traditional route, publishing their findings without radical claims about its meanings in appropriate general science and electrochemistry journals, the tag of "cold fusion," which is now essentially just an albatross to any legitimate researcher, could have been avoided, interest and research would have developed more sustainably (instead of the bandwagon rush to prove or disprove, followed by an equally frenetic rush to gain distance from a discredited claim surrounded by shadows of impropriety) and the fascinating anomaly Pons & Fleischmann discovered in their lab might have created a whole lot more progress, albeit a lot more quietly.
I gotta say, 250 pages is not a "short book" and certainly not a novella in my book, whether or not the next "Harry Potter" novel is scheduled to weigh in at about seven thousand pages. Go read "The Heart of Darkness" and learn something about true economy in the fictional form. More often than not, books of exceptional length suggest nothing so much as authorial self-indulgence. 250 pages is an average, normal length for a novel.
Yeah... get your DVDs with their court-protected weak DRM that you can't legally crack even for legal viewing purposes. Fight the Power!
Seriously, though, his main point is he's giving up on CDs for other forms of entertainment and that's a shame.
There is another way. Go out there and start checking out the stealth galaxy of independent music. And when you find something that you really like, send 'em an email and let them know that you want them to stay independent and free from DRM and RIAA rotten tactics.
Yes... There's a real fine line in that statement she makes that "you want a game that is challenging but never frustrating."
Any challenge becomes a frustration if you can't overcome it. And whether you do so depends on your basic proficiency, how immersed you are in the game world, whether you have a stick-to-it personality, etc. etc. For the hard core gamer, a game wouldn't be a game without some beat-your-head-against-the-wall apparent cul-de-sacs and that elation you feel when you finally bust through that.
"I will admit to not understaning much of the term of QM I had to take in my physics major"
Leading us to another great misquote, "those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it," Niels Bohr, which gets turned into something like, anyone who thinks they understand quantum mechanics doesn't, which is really a totally different statement. It's not that you can't "understand" it - it's that the implications of the theory are simply shocking.
Both your statements about Einstein are perfectly true though. The Brownian motion work tends to be overshadowed by the relativity, but its actually elegant and significant science that was later backed up with some baroque and inventive experiments. And no, he could never accept the quantum mechanics entirely - not its reliance on probabilities and not the world where things could have no precise position and momentum. But as you note, he was never able to build a case against it that had any traction.
I don't know if anyone but the true math-heads really understands quantum mechanics. I took a fair amount with physical chemistry, and while I could grasp what was presented to me by the teacher, it was pretty damn clear that I wouldn't ever be coming up with stuff like that on my own. I remember very clearly being taught the proof for Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It was so elegant and undeniable - either this is the way it is or else our most fundamental definitions of matter and energy have to be scrapped. But I never would have figured it out on my own, and I can't really remember it now - it would be hours of unpleasant work with the calc book and scratch paper to take myself through the proof on my own. Ah well. Quantum nostalgia (o particle in a box, we hardly knew you!)
The theory yields a lot, but it hardly brings us any closer to the secret of the Old One. In any case I am convinced that He does not throw dice. --Einstein, writing to Max Born, 4 December 1926.
I think that quote (or rather, truncuated paraphrases thereof) is much abused. What Einstein is saying (which is much clearer in a fuller context) is that while the probabalistic equations that comprise much of quantum theory are valuable as descriptive and predictive tools, they do much less to further Einstein's cherished ideals of really understanding the fundamental basis of physical reality. The statement "I am convinced that He does not throw dice" is a statement that while the equations of quantum mechanics might behave like statistics, they did not mean that the underlying reasons for why these equations work were simply artifacts of random, statistical processes - mere throwing of dice. Our ongoing failure to connect all the dots of the various paradigms could indicate that he was on to something...
It is instructive how the articles that are popping up on the news services lean on the "it could hit us!" aspect... rather than the fact that it's the lowest rank on the liklihood scale short of no chance at all. Fish bones may lodge in your throat say scientists! Run for your lives!
I think the issue that is consistently ignored (and this weird little case, as tragic as its outcome is, is just one tip of the big giant iceberg) is that these people are screwed up in the first place - and their neglect of the ordinary things that humans care deeply about, ie their children's welfare, in exchange for artificial accomplishments in an artificial world, are just the outer symptoms of being deeply disconnected from reality and unhappy with themselves and their lives.
How many people who like games haven't spent a few hours too many on some obscure challenge and lost half a night's sleep as a result? Probably not such a great choice, and certainly the nature of games facilitates this choice. Likewise, most people who drink on some occasion drank too much and suffered as a result, and certainly the intoxicating effect of alcohol is what that's about. Indicting the manufacturers of a game for making it engrossing and time consuming is like condemning liquor manufacturers for putting alcohol in booze. It just doesn't really make much sense, and it illustrates the reality that a human being who is trying to escape reality will find some way to do it. If we want to do something social about it we can create more public awareness about compulsive behaviors and the serious problems they can lead to, and put more public money into treatment (which would save us money in the long run), but in the end these problems will always, always exist, because of the people who don't really WANT to change. Personally, I think it is the avoidance of this unpleasant reality that so often drives the urge to demonize what are merely symptoms.
Re:It's more about awareness than technology
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
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· Score: 1
I think some essentially have. Prince doesn't exactly make the cultural radar anymore, but I don't think we can assume he isn't making it.
Part of the issue is a lot of people are in really restrictive contracts. It's easier to just keep taking the guaranteed screw job than to try to navigate uncharted waters.
People are hung up not just on the money but the culture. It will take time but it will start to happen in a more visible way...
Re:It's more about awareness than technology
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
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· Score: 1
But that doesn't mean what I said was "absolutely untrue". Webcasting was really catching on, and it got kicked in the nuts. Especially with the backpay.
Absolutely correct. Sorry, yes, you're right - the way I phrased that was, uh, unfortunate. For an alternate radio that would give webcasters a fair shake, it would take a whole different system that does not exist right now... But I do believe this is possible and even, dare I say, necessary.
In theory I agree that your analysis is well-constructed but in day to day practice this just isn't the way it works. A few cases do not make a general trend. In pragmatic reality hundreds of thousands of individuals are creating, owning and selling their own material.
Of course if an alternative strategy of distribution started to gain ground it might be necessary to defend nuisance torts. Any such strategy would therefor have to make legal defense a significant aspect of their business model - but this would be true of any business model based on alternate distribution strategies for intellectual property. In the end people get sued because someone thinks there is some highly identifiable "hook" in their melody. It may not always be fair but I still beleive you are creating a problem where there is no demonstration one really exists.
Re:It's more about awareness than technology
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
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· Score: 1
Even if you don't play RIAA-backed music, you still have to pay $0.0X per song PER LISTENER. Scandalous.
This is absolutely untrue. Any individual has the right to deliver any content which they own the copyright on to anyone else, by agreement, on any terms they choose. This is the fundamental basis of both free speech and copyright law. You are misnterpreting the guidelines for royalties.
If anyone wants to share more information/participate in a discussion of leveraging an alternate internet radio strategy as a method to creating viable alternatives to the conventional music publishing industry, email me at visionary@DELETETHISgumption.com - wow what an avalanche of BS that sentence was I'm ready to talk to the venture capitalists baby...
It's more about awareness than technology
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Even more so than print publishing, for a long time music production has been available on a massively scalable level to the independent artist. (Someone can go off about how much it really costs to produce an album, because your cousin's girlfriend's dad is in the biz and... Okay, you can record an album that somebody will burn to CD from anywhere from tens of dollars to hundreds of thousands. Doesn't change the fact that 99% of what the conventional industry produces sounds like it was extruded from a tube.)
Diamonds are a rotten analogy because it suggests that, up to now and the magic golden age of P2P, the publishing industry posessed all of the real music. The only thing that really distinguishes their product is that it is so obvious. If you never want to buy a major label release again but want new music all the time it really is not hard at all to do. It just involves a little more work.
There are two ways in which the internet may create a revolution for independent musicians. One is by offering a viable replacement for radio. The second is by exposing music to the distributed filtering techniques of mass exposure and moderation that the internet essentially gave rise to the invention of. File sharing as such strikes me as something that will be much of an adjunct to the real 21st century revolution of music - assuming it really happens because it sure hasn't yet.
Slashdot Mirror
In the U.S.A., at least, it hasn't happened with marijuana yet.
The difference between file sharing and home taping is largely one of scale and centralization. Home taping is by nature a small scale, decentralized activity. I borrow an LP from my brother, tape it, that's the end of it. If someone tried to open a "home taping center" where any and all could come browse thousands of record collections and make cassette dupes, leaving behind a paper trail of their activities, you would quickly find out just how "decriminalized" home taping was.
The subject of voting in general is a complicated one, at the numbers of voters even the U.S.A.'s patheric voter turnout generates, and most of the time the results are sufficiently skewed to one side or the other that these complexities can be ignored. The last presidential election, where the balance deciding state came down to, essentially, a statistical dead heat, provided the opportunity to review some of these issues - an opportunity that was almost totally drowned out in the partisan bickering.
It is reasonable to state that these days almost all television news is indistinguishable from the media industry in general and the media industry is indistinguishable from business in general, and it isn't completely crazy to suggest that the general choice of the media not to choose the tack that "big business is EVIL" as the requisite so-simple-it's-wrong sound bite. But I suspect it has a lot more to do with the fact that voting is boring, and complicated, and the technical issues are not so easy for the non-technical to understand. This story also lacks a smoking gun. People were willing to tolerate discussion of the finer technical points of hanging chads and other vagaries of punch-card voting when there was a disputed major election hanging on it. Try to imagine trying to get a major news organization to run an expose on punch-card problems before this election made it a right-here, right-now issue.
Meanwhile, another screwed-up high schooler opens up with a gun in my home state. Media is about attracting eyeballs and keeping them stuck on your content. Guess what leads?
My favorite Slashdot links are those that go down within about 12.5 seconds of showing up on the front page. I know I must be missing something really great!
Check a website which encourages you to share your stories of the tragic consequences of video games with the slimy, opportunistic scum lawyer in question. http://www.stopkill.com/
Am I the only one who is generally unimpressed with the various manifestations of these "project on mist" technologies that have come up in a few Slashdot articles? Ooh, aah, look you can project light onto a particulate cloud. Who woulda thunk it? This "projecting images into thin air" thing bugs me. It isn't thin air, it's thick air, that's the point. Projected light, no more space-age than a slide projecter, screen made of mist, no more space-age than a humidifier. It's a novelty. The density of the image by its nature is too low to be usefule as much else than as a novelty, it has a bit of a "looks cool" factor but for any kind of really serious imaging need the clarity, density and brightness of a screen will be worth far more than the "hanging in air" factor, and for 3D the only reasonable technology to pursue is binocular imaging, either with goggles or glasses and a split screen.
That's really interesting - I'd never heard a story like that. I'd be curious to know what the "official" word is on whether SSNs are unique.
There is certainly a degree of catch-22 involved between convenience and security. When my wallet was stolen with license and SS card (dumb to carry both but I recently needed them starting a new job)a few years back, I was glad that I was able to get a new drivers license with no identification except a birth certificate copy I was able to get with just my SS number and no identification - but the ease of doing so certainly gave me pause for thought.
In addition to the sound advice of shredding, a good idea is to lock your credit reports from being issued without your consent and opting out of pre-approved CC offers. Instructions for both at this article - http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/TechTV/tec
I'm just thankful my house has a mail slot that drops into an inaccessible bin inside the home.
And you're a knee-jerk, offensive asshole - but who's counting? The point is, she is NOT a stupid person. She was smart enough to grasp that there was an issue involved, to wonder about it, and to ask someone she figured would know. She was smart enough to understand the answer. She was merely an uninformed person, and that is not at all the same thing. You make my point - a lot of the people on a forum like this are so narrow-mindedly fixated on their own point of view, which is immersed in the internet and understands the fundamental distinctions between it and other mass media, that they are oblivious to the reality that to the majority of the public the internet is just another media source that has popped up. The question is, is a subpeona the proper response to this ignorance by an industry which makes its money entertaining people? The question is moot to me - I've never liked or trusted file sharing and so never engaged in it, and I haven't bought a CD from a non-independent since the DMCA was passed. I just think that there are most likely plenty of egregious and knowing offenders who are a lot more likely candidates for legal action than individuals like this family.
Maybe he means we should only feed the five billion "good ones."
True story: my sister in law, who is not at all a stupid person, is telling me about how her teenage daughter showed her how to go out on the internet and download a Neil Young album and she burns it to a CD. And she says to me: I don't understand how they get paid for this though. I didn't pay anything to get on the site. And I said, they didn't get paid for it. The people that gave you that content didn't have the right to do that and that copy isn't legal. She honestly didn't know. People assume if it is available, it is legal. For all the furor the industry and its representatives have done a terrible job of instructing people about the realities of copyright law. And now they are simply going for the jugular in a completely haphazard, scattershot way.
Just as we've committed ourselves inextricably to a high-tech world (and thank God, for no other kind will feed five billion) (emphasis added).
Okay, maybe it's a petty gripe, but in an article about how we're no longer dream about the future, I gotta say: HEY SPIDER! The earth's population crossed the SIX BILLION mark in 1999!
Yeesh. Are we talking about the future or the past?
-There is something strange & new going on in these experiments
I've no doubt this is quite possibly true. Regardless of what "it" turns out to be (or whether we'll ever know) I think it makes an excellent case study of why the system of peer review and formal publication exists, and the costs of electing to circumvent channels, whether out of over-enthusiasm or naked self-promotion.
By making a big public furor over experiments that hadn't been reproduced and obviously were not properly understood (since we're still trying to figure them out over a decade later), Pons & Fleischmann attached an onus to the whole business that it has yet to shake.
If they had gone a more cautious and traditional route, publishing their findings without radical claims about its meanings in appropriate general science and electrochemistry journals, the tag of "cold fusion," which is now essentially just an albatross to any legitimate researcher, could have been avoided, interest and research would have developed more sustainably (instead of the bandwagon rush to prove or disprove, followed by an equally frenetic rush to gain distance from a discredited claim surrounded by shadows of impropriety) and the fascinating anomaly Pons & Fleischmann discovered in their lab might have created a whole lot more progress, albeit a lot more quietly.
I gotta say, 250 pages is not a "short book" and certainly not a novella in my book, whether or not the next "Harry Potter" novel is scheduled to weigh in at about seven thousand pages. Go read "The Heart of Darkness" and learn something about true economy in the fictional form. More often than not, books of exceptional length suggest nothing so much as authorial self-indulgence. 250 pages is an average, normal length for a novel.
Seriously, though, his main point is he's giving up on CDs for other forms of entertainment and that's a shame.
There is another way. Go out there and start checking out the stealth galaxy of independent music. And when you find something that you really like, send 'em an email and let them know that you want them to stay independent and free from DRM and RIAA rotten tactics.
Start with CD Baby
http://www.cdbaby.com/
Or just start browsing. A random selection of links from searching independent musicians and independent music.
http://www.indiemusic.com/
http://www.musicbizacademy.com/directory/indiemusi c.htm
http://www.secondfret.com/
http://www.hotbands.com/
http://www.sonicawareness.com/ http://www.narcopop.com/musicians/
http://www.rainmusic.com/
http://www.musicianmp3.com/
http://www.indie-music.com/
http://www.galaris.com/
http://www.internetdj.com/
I remember reading a book on chaos theory that had a statement on the last page that said: If God played dice with the universe - he'd win.
Any challenge becomes a frustration if you can't overcome it. And whether you do so depends on your basic proficiency, how immersed you are in the game world, whether you have a stick-to-it personality, etc. etc. For the hard core gamer, a game wouldn't be a game without some beat-your-head-against-the-wall apparent cul-de-sacs and that elation you feel when you finally bust through that.
Leading us to another great misquote, "those who are not shocked when they first come across
quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it," Niels Bohr, which gets turned into something like, anyone who thinks they understand quantum mechanics doesn't, which is really a totally different statement. It's not that you can't "understand" it - it's that the implications of the theory are simply shocking.
Both your statements about Einstein are perfectly true though. The Brownian motion work tends to be overshadowed by the relativity, but its actually elegant and significant science that was later backed up with some baroque and inventive experiments. And no, he could never accept the quantum mechanics entirely - not its reliance on probabilities and not the world where things could have no precise position and momentum. But as you note, he was never able to build a case against it that had any traction.
I don't know if anyone but the true math-heads really understands quantum mechanics. I took a fair amount with physical chemistry, and while I could grasp what was presented to me by the teacher, it was pretty damn clear that I wouldn't ever be coming up with stuff like that on my own. I remember very clearly being taught the proof for Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It was so elegant and undeniable - either this is the way it is or else our most fundamental definitions of matter and energy have to be scrapped. But I never would have figured it out on my own, and I can't really remember it now - it would be hours of unpleasant work with the calc book and scratch paper to take myself through the proof on my own. Ah well. Quantum nostalgia (o particle in a box, we hardly knew you!)
I think that quote (or rather, truncuated paraphrases thereof) is much abused. What Einstein is saying (which is much clearer in a fuller context) is that while the probabalistic equations that comprise much of quantum theory are valuable as descriptive and predictive tools, they do much less to further Einstein's cherished ideals of really understanding the fundamental basis of physical reality. The statement "I am convinced that He does not throw dice" is a statement that while the equations of quantum mechanics might behave like statistics, they did not mean that the underlying reasons for why these equations work were simply artifacts of random, statistical processes - mere throwing of dice. Our ongoing failure to connect all the dots of the various paradigms could indicate that he was on to something...
It is instructive how the articles that are popping up on the news services lean on the "it could hit us!" aspect... rather than the fact that it's the lowest rank on the liklihood scale short of no chance at all. Fish bones may lodge in your throat say scientists! Run for your lives!
How many people who like games haven't spent a few hours too many on some obscure challenge and lost half a night's sleep as a result? Probably not such a great choice, and certainly the nature of games facilitates this choice. Likewise, most people who drink on some occasion drank too much and suffered as a result, and certainly the intoxicating effect of alcohol is what that's about. Indicting the manufacturers of a game for making it engrossing and time consuming is like condemning liquor manufacturers for putting alcohol in booze. It just doesn't really make much sense, and it illustrates the reality that a human being who is trying to escape reality will find some way to do it. If we want to do something social about it we can create more public awareness about compulsive behaviors and the serious problems they can lead to, and put more public money into treatment (which would save us money in the long run), but in the end these problems will always, always exist, because of the people who don't really WANT to change. Personally, I think it is the avoidance of this unpleasant reality that so often drives the urge to demonize what are merely symptoms.
Part of the issue is a lot of people are in really restrictive contracts. It's easier to just keep taking the guaranteed screw job than to try to navigate uncharted waters.
People are hung up not just on the money but the culture. It will take time but it will start to happen in a more visible way...
Absolutely correct. Sorry, yes, you're right - the way I phrased that was, uh, unfortunate. For an alternate radio that would give webcasters a fair shake, it would take a whole different system that does not exist right now... But I do believe this is possible and even, dare I say, necessary.
In theory I agree that your analysis is well-constructed but in day to day practice this just isn't the way it works. A few cases do not make a general trend. In pragmatic reality hundreds of thousands of individuals are creating, owning and selling their own material.
Of course if an alternative strategy of distribution started to gain ground it might be necessary to defend nuisance torts. Any such strategy would therefor have to make legal defense a significant aspect of their business model - but this would be true of any business model based on alternate distribution strategies for intellectual property. In the end people get sued because someone thinks there is some highly identifiable "hook" in their melody. It may not always be fair but I still beleive you are creating a problem where there is no demonstration one really exists.
This is absolutely untrue. Any individual has the right to deliver any content which they own the copyright on to anyone else, by agreement, on any terms they choose. This is the fundamental basis of both free speech and copyright law. You are misnterpreting the guidelines for royalties.
If anyone wants to share more information/participate in a discussion of leveraging an alternate internet radio strategy as a method to creating viable alternatives to the conventional music publishing industry, email me at visionary@DELETETHISgumption.com - wow what an avalanche of BS that sentence was I'm ready to talk to the venture capitalists baby...
Diamonds are a rotten analogy because it suggests that, up to now and the magic golden age of P2P, the publishing industry posessed all of the real music. The only thing that really distinguishes their product is that it is so obvious. If you never want to buy a major label release again but want new music all the time it really is not hard at all to do. It just involves a little more work.
There are two ways in which the internet may create a revolution for independent musicians. One is by offering a viable replacement for radio. The second is by exposing music to the distributed filtering techniques of mass exposure and moderation that the internet essentially gave rise to the invention of. File sharing as such strikes me as something that will be much of an adjunct to the real 21st century revolution of music - assuming it really happens because it sure hasn't yet.