So Corporations necessarily exploit something, be it it's workers, the environment, or what ever. Corporations ALWAYS take more than they give. This might not make them evil, but it definitely puts them on my 'bad' list.
I find it most amusing that you should be using a computer to make this claim.
Who was AT&T exploiting when they spent millions of dollars researching the transistor? That single invention has led to billions, if not trillions, of dollars of real contribution to society. Can you possibly suggest that, in this case, Bell Labs "took more than it gave"?
The same is true for radio, television, automobiles, microwaves, magnetic resonance imaging, and even electrical power and the light bulb. All these things were invented or pioneered by corporations; they made a lot of money, and society was better off for it.
Do you not see? All of your arguments are about MONEY. Making an honest living would be SELLING software and not LICENSING it.
Strangely enough, this is exactly what the author of the piece is proposing: replace the blanket protection of copyright with a hodgepodge of legally enforceable licensing contracts. All easily reproducible media would be licensed under contracts, much like most software is today. Facilitating anything like this for the millions of currently copyrighted works sold daily would certainly require new contract laws, laws many might find distasteful. Imagine entering into a binding contract with a record company every time you buy a CD -- one that wouldn't have to include fair use.
How do you know that if the books were copied for free no one would want to be an author? ahem.. GNU/GPL/BSDed software. Point is made.
Pointing to a few examples of software made non-commercially hardly demonstrates that the elimination of copyright would not have disastrous effects. I'll repeat the tired point that it is only copyright (and the dubious right of license interpreted to accompany the installation of software) that prevents GPL code from being used in non-GPL products, or BSD code from being used without credit as such. In addition, there are some creative works that simply could not be financed without the kind of IP copyright ensures. Each of the 25 top grossing films of all time, for instance.
Copyright law may be broken in several ways: DMCA restrictions on free expression and fair use, seemingly infinite extensions, etc. However, rewarding creators with exclusive rights to their creations is, I think, a noble principle.
Uhm, you realize that by that logic, hardly any mass murderer ever qualifies as a villain?
Hitler, Stalin, even small-timers like Kaczynski; they were all doing what they did because of reasons that they thought were good.
I think this is exactly the question the film is raising. I don't think Shyamalan intended "Unbreakable" to be some sort of homage to the underappreciated comic book medium. When Dunn first meets with Price at his store, the dialog borders (deliberately, it seems) on the absurd. Half the audience was almost in chuckles as Price tried to tell Dunn he was some sort of comic book superhero.
Shyamalan expects his audience to react with the same mocking skepticism as Dunn. Slowly, however, he manipulates us into believing that Dunn is truly unbreakable. As a previous poster suggested, there is nothing remarkable about Dunn's actions that can't be explained by a good sense of intuition and some adrenaline. Yet by the time Dunn has saved the children, we do believe. After all, isn't that what we're looking for in this shades-of-gray modern world? Real heroes, like those we grew up reading about?
It's a nice fantasy, until the final scene pulls the carpet (and a good chunk of the floorboards) out from under it. If we're going to believe in superheroes--in their destiny to do great things--we cannot help but believe in supervillains and accept their "rightful" place in the world as well. Is the kind of black-and-white, good vs. evil moral absolutism of the comic book what we *really* want? Would you rather believe in "Mr. Glass" the supervillain capable of so much evil, or only the pathetically disturbed Elijah Price?
OK, I'll shut up now, but I really think this movie was more than an artsy "comic book film."
I have to say that I like the idea of non-partisan elections. Eliminate PACs, eliminate corporate money and limit donations to $100 a person.
... If you do all these things, maybe we will get a quailifed person to come forward.
Actually, this sort of proposal would have two effects:
- Dramatic restrictions on free speech. Sure, you can still say whatever you want, but don't try to say who you think should be elected in a pamphlet that costs more than $100 to publish or on more than $100 worth of TV ads. Spend "too much" money promoting something you believe (anti-DMCA, pro-Environment, whatever) and you're a PAC, and the government can put you in jail.
- Rates of incumbency (already well over 90%) would just go up, as incumbents have a huge advantage in free publicity.
I'm sorry, but it's simply wrong to say that banning political advertising is for "the good of the people" if you accept anything like the priniciples upon which our nation was founded.
If I want to spend a hundred thousand dollars of my money promoting an issue I believe in, or give that money to someone else who will promote the idea for me, the government should not step in to stop me. You can clearly see the conflict of interest here if the ideas I want to promote are opposed by that government!
Further, by blaming political advertising for a perceived lack of quality in our elected officials, you are subscribing to the notion that the American people are sheep who simply cannot think for themselves and will vote for whoever has the flashiest ads during ER. If you really believe that, I don't see why you support a system of democratically chosen representatives anyways.
If what you really want is a more democratic exchange of views, I think you should encourage more political spending, not less. I think it should be easy (read: unrestricted by the FEC) for a bunch of rich slashdotters to sell some stock options, set up a large pool of money, and buy political ads supporting candidates who are pro-fair use, anti-internet filtering...whatever. Go crazy!
I also think the best way to get the money out of politics is to get politics out of money! Why do you think the film industry, say, gives money to congressional and presidential campaigns? Because it is taken for granted that politicians will have power over the film industry (and its competitors). They can pass laws with favorable or unfavorable results to the film industry. If you believe in a far more limited role for the federal government, you no longer have to worry about most corporations "buying" influence: the influence won't be there to buy! Instead, it will be back where it belongs, with the public, who control the "influence" of corporations with their own purse-strings.
I have just been wondering what happens when this convergence becomes total - when all large recording companies are co-owned with music hardware companies. What happens when a new digital media format is specifically designed by its manufacturers' consortium to force users to adhere to excessively restrictive use limitations? As much as people might like to tout Open-Source software and standards and Free (speech) software, I'm guessing few of you have the resources to manufacture an alternate physical media type which could be used instead of CD's/audio-DVD/whatever if the need arose.
I would hate to live in a world where transnational corporations controlled not only information but the means for distributing it in such a fashion. Of course, one might say "Well, we'll just have to distribute digital copies on the internet through system foo-ster etc." but what if a) music becomes almost impossible to copy in the first place (heavy encryption), and b) there's no media which will accept the copies anyway?
The solution to this hypothetical problem is quite simple:
If you're an artist recording music, don't record on these formats and don't sign contracts with music companies that use them.
If you're a consumer of music, don't buy music on these formats.
If you think Company X is a predatory monopoly, preventing other companies and artists from getting into the business, call your state Attorney General or write your congressman. You can even sue, class-action or otherwise.
Note that note of these solutions involve distributing copyrighted music outside the bounds of fair use.
$20 says your a republican. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. That's a bullshit way to do things, and i won't give up my mp3's because of the recording gentry. It seems to me that this has been a long time coming. Music should be free.
I assume you don't want to stop with music? After all:
If people want it for free, i've got two choices. Continue to do it because i love doing it, or get a new line of work.
So once films are distributed digitally to theaters, and RipoffTheaters can download the terabyte or so from Moviester and display it in digital perfection at no cost to them, filmmakers should just scare up $50,000,000 they'll never see again just so they can do what they love? That's ridiculous. The only movies we'd see would be crappy Blair Witch knockoffs or 2-hour commercials for Pepsi.
Complain all you want about the latest pop crap on the radio or good-only-as-kindling bestseller books, but if there is no real incentive for artists to create, they won't. And yes, by that I mean money. Warm fuzzy feelings are nice, but they don't put food in your stomach or let you buy that new car you want. Of course, somehow, magically, you think "they'll pay for it one way or another" when the very reason this is a problem is that people who demand free music/movies/books are unwilling to pay what the artist asks.
Exactly how much do people need to get paid for their art? Do you really need hundreds of millions of dollars to continue being creative?
No you don't "need" hundreds of millions of dollars to continue being creative. So?
What about people like Britney Spears? She doesn't write, choreograph, or in any other way create her own music or performances. Basically, she is a glorified robot that performs instructions other people have written, and those programmers, so to speak, don't get paid nearly as much for their art as the robot. If you like Britney's songs, you should really be writing a check to the people that actually wrote the damn thing, because they sure as shit don't make a percentage.
Nobody forced the guy who writes Britney Spears' songs to do so. IIRC he's a pretty rich guy himself considering how in-demand the things he produces are.
In fact, nobody is being forced to do anything in the production, sale or purchase of Britney Spears, N'Sync, Star Wars: Episode 2 or any other product of the entertainment industry that we may or may not enjoy. It's irrelevant how much money everyone involved earns as long as they decide how much they're willing to work for and aren't made to work for less. The issue is copyright, and while DeCSS should be perfectly legal software, copyright is still something worth defending, whether it produces multi-millionaire flavors-of-the-month or not.
Wow - how great ! No more Independance Day movies, no more Jerry Springer show, no more Britney spears either... yeah, we would really miss the Hollywood studios "culture"
No more Matrix movies, no more X-Files, no more [insert favorite non-pop group here]. Not that I think losing the DeCSS case would kill the studios--DeCSS should be legal; copyright violation is the offense--but I, for one, would miss a lot of the product produced by Hollywood and Co.
Different people have different tastes. A lot of people like Britney Spears; less people like Elliott Smith. In our culture you can have either. In fact, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that 99.9% of people in this country can get access to the parts of our culture they like for a price they are willing to pay. In that the media giants have been remarkably successful, and I don't question either the profit they have made through this success or the product they produce (Ms. Spears, et al) to maximize this success by pleasing the greatest number of people.
You don't like Independence Day or Jerry Springer? Don't watch them. Don't pay for them. But if something produced by the media moguls does appeal to you, buy/see/rent it. Nobody will like everything they produce and nobody will force you to pay for any of it. I don't see any justification for hoping for the demise of a "Hollywood studios 'culture'" that satisfies the desires of just about everybody in the US and an increasing number of people overseas.
When will the technology industry realize that you can't have hi-tech industries run by people who don't understand them?
This may be the exception that proves the rule, but Lou Gerstner, not a high-tech guru by any means, apparently has done a pretty reasonable job running IBM.
Without cost, there's no need for payment. The payment for art comes from celebrity.
Newsflash: "celebrity" is not the "payment" that everyone wants. Celebrity doesn't get you a house, or food, or supports your family; money does.
You're essentially saying we should get rid of copyright, and with the assitance of digital media, the cost associated with obtaining any bit of information drops to 0. This means that producing information is unrewarded by the market: you can make a $75 million dollar movie, but since someone could (legally, now, since copyright is no more) get a digital copy and project it to audiences and not give you a cent, you'll likely never see a return on that investment.
But, you say, there are other ways to make money other than producing content, like advertising, product tie-ins, endorsement contracts! You're right... and that's where all the effort would be: the only thing that gets you more when it's distributed more is advertising. Digital content (and that's a broader term every day) would have to be advertising or it wouldn't be worth making.
Yes, you'd still have live performances of your favorite bands, they'd make money that way. And you could always go see a play somewhere; those would still be good since they need you to want to pay for a seat. But just about all of the benefits of distributable media, be it moving pictures, music, or even just words, would be lost because we find it easier to reward creators with "celebrity" rather than our dollars.
The recording industry has been bleeding us all dry for so long that its about time they got whats coming.. Personally I couldnt give a rats ass whether the legal technicalities are on their side or not, I just wanna see 'em take one in the face!
#undef _RANT_;
Huh? The recording industry has been "bleeding you dry"? How's that? Are they stealing money from you? Are they forcing you to buy things you don't want at gunpoint?
Look, if you don't like the practices of the recording industry, don't buy recordings!
Violating copyright by trading around millions of MP3s of other people's work is not the answer. Obviously MP3 has some great uses: making copies of CD's you own for personal enjoyment, easily distributing your garage band's latest hits, etc. We should defend these uses of MP3, as should we defend Napster's right to be a peer-to-peer file-sharing service.
But portraying those who support copyright as "behind the times" or outright villainous is wrong--unless you want to take the position that copyright should be abolished, in which case get ready for the quality of media to be exactly what people will have to pay for it.
'The primary reason the internet is working is due to its LACK of regulation and government involvment.'
Which is exactly what AOL/timewarner want you to believe. Lawrence Lessig has a bunch to say about exactly this misconception. It's really worrying that people will stick to such dogma while the corporations take advantage of their blindness to further entrench themselves.
I don't buy Lessig's argument. It seems to me he's saying that the internet was successful because open standards prevailed and users were free to do what they wanted with their bandwidth therefore we should not be afraid of government regulation of the internet designed to protect this freedom.
Put aside the fact that most of the government regulation we've seen so far (or at least heard the most noise about) is of the "Won't someone PLEASE think of the CHILDREN??" variety...I don't see any way to "protect" everyone's freedom of choice on the internet through government regulation.
Regulation is about keeping things the same: we know how to properly process meat so it doesn't make people sick, so there are regulations that attempt to ensure this is always done; we know how to build highways so they don't erode away in a summer rain, so regulations exist codifying this knowledge.
We don't know what the internet will look like in 5 years... Lessig's example of gopher vs. http is a good one. But there's no way for regulators to forsee these changes either--the only way progress is made is when someone has an itch and someone else finds a better way to scratch it.
AOL/Time-Warner paid for cable lines to people's houses and networking hardware to connect those cables to the internet; certainly the government didn't attempt to fulfill people's desire for a wider variety of TV programming and high-speed internet access--a corporation did, and that corporation deserves the fruits of their labor. If people don't like it, they don't have to pay for it.
Now I'm sure Lessig would argue that various municipalities gave Time Warner the land to run their cable along and they have a right to expect they'll use that cable for "the public good"--but Time Warner should be bound only by their contract with those municipalities, which may or may not give the municipalities legal recourse--if not, it's their own fault. It's certainly not the business of the federal government what a private corporation runs over wires they paid for.
The fact that some people remember the "good old days" when there were more.edu's than.com's and you could get a domain just by asking nicely is a good reason to go play with Internet2, not a good reason for the governement to come in and fix whatever "the public" doesn't like at the moment about a private network they never spent a dime on.
Yikes that was a rant... sorry I just haven't been thrilled with Lessig's arguments since one of his (many?) papers on why governement was the salvation of the 'net was passed out in my systems engineering class.
So how does this make government regulation any better, you ask? Well, at least I am paying for the service directly, and I have some say in what is developed. In a laissez faire scenario, my only freedom is as a consumer, where choice is limited by what is on the market and my influence is proportional to how much money I have.
Yes... your freedom is exactly that: what you can pay for. You don't get to tell other people what they can and can't do with their fiber lines and IP packets. If you want to control a network, you can buy one yourself and put whatever you want on it.
Now, if you think we would have a better world-wide IP network today if the government had stepped in a few years back and monopolized the whole thing, I think you're wrong. The big telecom companies (and the ones that were small and got big because of the explosion in worldwide data traffic) have spent billions of dollars building a pretty darn impressive network. Despite all the grand proclamations of Al Gore and Co. about a government-funded "Information Super Highway" we haven't *needed* one--where there is demand, private money has been invested, the network has grown and grown, and smart people have gotten rich for investing their company's money in the right projects.
It may not be exactly what you want it to be, but I'll put the success of private-sector communications networks against any government-funded program or system you can name.
Just think what the world would be like if major companies owned all the main highways and freeways?
I imagine they'd be cheaper, better-maintained, and probably safer: try suing the government for negligence in maintenance or for letting drunk drivers on the road and see how far you get...
I agree. In addition, most indie/small-label music isn't even available on Napster. It's only good for fetching the prechewed pap you hear on the radio already. Search for 'Jaco Pastorias' and one, maybe two hits will come up on an opennap server with 700k songs on it. But query a server with 500 songs for 'Dave Matthews', and your result list will fill up like nothin'.
Of course, this might have something to do with the fact that the Dave Matthews Band explicitly allows (and encourages) taping at their shows, and also allows non-commercial distribution of those tapes--including as MP3s. Fans (like me) are happy to be able to get all sorts of cool live recordings (some of which are crap, but a lot of which sound pretty good), and we still shell out good money for CDs/t-shirts/concerts. Not that people don't put ripped DMB albums on Napster, but I think their policy (which has been the case, AFAIK, from their days of obscurity) is a good one, and should be encouraged, rather than held up as an example of what's wrong with Napster.
Actually, around here (suburban Massachusetts) the Hoyts theater chain has become extremely strict about their R policy. I couldn't take my 16 1/2 year old sister to see "Go" (I'm 20). They simply refused to sell me the ticket. God help me if I tried to let her see "The Matrix." The unfortunate thing is, these Hoyts megaplexes are about all that's around, so there's little alternative.
I think most of these theater chains are counting on making up the lost teen audience by forcing kids to drag their parents along (even parents can't buy tickets for their kids, they have to physically accompany them into the theater). At $8.25 a ticket, they just might be able to.
This whole situation has me very upset. I would have missed seeing a lot of excellent films (and maybe a few just fun ones:) ) if this policy had been enforced when I was a teen. Somehow I didn't turn into a crazed monster... it must be the fact that I have responsible parents who trust me not to be warped by movies.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it most amusing that you should be using a computer to make this claim.
Who was AT&T exploiting when they spent millions of dollars researching the transistor? That single invention has led to billions, if not trillions, of dollars of real contribution to society. Can you possibly suggest that, in this case, Bell Labs "took more than it gave"?
The same is true for radio, television, automobiles, microwaves, magnetic resonance imaging, and even electrical power and the light bulb. All these things were invented or pioneered by corporations; they made a lot of money, and society was better off for it.
Do you not see? All of your arguments are about MONEY. Making an honest living would be SELLING software and not LICENSING it.
Strangely enough, this is exactly what the author of the piece is proposing: replace the blanket protection of copyright with a hodgepodge of legally enforceable licensing contracts. All easily reproducible media would be licensed under contracts, much like most software is today. Facilitating anything like this for the millions of currently copyrighted works sold daily would certainly require new contract laws, laws many might find distasteful. Imagine entering into a binding contract with a record company every time you buy a CD -- one that wouldn't have to include fair use.
How do you know that if the books were copied for free no one would want to be an author? ahem.. GNU/GPL/BSDed software. Point is made.
Pointing to a few examples of software made non-commercially hardly demonstrates that the elimination of copyright would not have disastrous effects. I'll repeat the tired point that it is only copyright (and the dubious right of license interpreted to accompany the installation of software) that prevents GPL code from being used in non-GPL products, or BSD code from being used without credit as such. In addition, there are some creative works that simply could not be financed without the kind of IP copyright ensures. Each of the 25 top grossing films of all time, for instance.
Copyright law may be broken in several ways: DMCA restrictions on free expression and fair use, seemingly infinite extensions, etc. However, rewarding creators with exclusive rights to their creations is, I think, a noble principle.
Wasn't Soundwave the Decepticon tape-deck?
Shockwave, IIRC, was the Cyclops-like purple Decepticon who supervised Cybertron while Megatron was inactive on Earth for a few million years.
Hitler, Stalin, even small-timers like Kaczynski; they were all doing what they did because of reasons that they thought were good.
I think this is exactly the question the film is raising. I don't think Shyamalan intended "Unbreakable" to be some sort of homage to the underappreciated comic book medium. When Dunn first meets with Price at his store, the dialog borders (deliberately, it seems) on the absurd. Half the audience was almost in chuckles as Price tried to tell Dunn he was some sort of comic book superhero.
Shyamalan expects his audience to react with the same mocking skepticism as Dunn. Slowly, however, he manipulates us into believing that Dunn is truly unbreakable. As a previous poster suggested, there is nothing remarkable about Dunn's actions that can't be explained by a good sense of intuition and some adrenaline. Yet by the time Dunn has saved the children, we do believe. After all, isn't that what we're looking for in this shades-of-gray modern world? Real heroes, like those we grew up reading about?
It's a nice fantasy, until the final scene pulls the carpet (and a good chunk of the floorboards) out from under it. If we're going to believe in superheroes--in their destiny to do great things--we cannot help but believe in supervillains and accept their "rightful" place in the world as well. Is the kind of black-and-white, good vs. evil moral absolutism of the comic book what we *really* want? Would you rather believe in "Mr. Glass" the supervillain capable of so much evil, or only the pathetically disturbed Elijah Price?
OK, I'll shut up now, but I really think this movie was more than an artsy "comic book film."
~Tom Woodfin
twoodfin@mit.edu
Actually, this sort of proposal would have two effects:
- Dramatic restrictions on free speech. Sure, you can still say whatever you want, but don't try to say who you think should be elected in a pamphlet that costs more than $100 to publish or on more than $100 worth of TV ads. Spend "too much" money promoting something you believe (anti-DMCA, pro-Environment, whatever) and you're a PAC, and the government can put you in jail.
- Rates of incumbency (already well over 90%) would just go up, as incumbents have a huge advantage in free publicity.
I'm sorry, but it's simply wrong to say that banning political advertising is for "the good of the people" if you accept anything like the priniciples upon which our nation was founded.
If I want to spend a hundred thousand dollars of my money promoting an issue I believe in, or give that money to someone else who will promote the idea for me, the government should not step in to stop me. You can clearly see the conflict of interest here if the ideas I want to promote are opposed by that government!
Further, by blaming political advertising for a perceived lack of quality in our elected officials, you are subscribing to the notion that the American people are sheep who simply cannot think for themselves and will vote for whoever has the flashiest ads during ER. If you really believe that, I don't see why you support a system of democratically chosen representatives anyways.
If what you really want is a more democratic exchange of views, I think you should encourage more political spending, not less. I think it should be easy (read: unrestricted by the FEC) for a bunch of rich slashdotters to sell some stock options, set up a large pool of money, and buy political ads supporting candidates who are pro-fair use, anti-internet filtering...whatever. Go crazy!
I also think the best way to get the money out of politics is to get politics out of money! Why do you think the film industry, say, gives money to congressional and presidential campaigns? Because it is taken for granted that politicians will have power over the film industry (and its competitors). They can pass laws with favorable or unfavorable results to the film industry. If you believe in a far more limited role for the federal government, you no longer have to worry about most corporations "buying" influence: the influence won't be there to buy! Instead, it will be back where it belongs, with the public, who control the "influence" of corporations with their own purse-strings.
The solution to this hypothetical problem is quite simple:
If you're an artist recording music, don't record on these formats and don't sign contracts with music companies that use them.
If you're a consumer of music, don't buy music on these formats.
If you think Company X is a predatory monopoly, preventing other companies and artists from getting into the business, call your state Attorney General or write your congressman. You can even sue, class-action or otherwise.
Note that note of these solutions involve distributing copyrighted music outside the bounds of fair use.
~TomW
I assume you don't want to stop with music? After all:
So once films are distributed digitally to theaters, and RipoffTheaters can download the terabyte or so from Moviester and display it in digital perfection at no cost to them, filmmakers should just scare up $50,000,000 they'll never see again just so they can do what they love? That's ridiculous. The only movies we'd see would be crappy Blair Witch knockoffs or 2-hour commercials for Pepsi.
Complain all you want about the latest pop crap on the radio or good-only-as-kindling bestseller books, but if there is no real incentive for artists to create, they won't. And yes, by that I mean money. Warm fuzzy feelings are nice, but they don't put food in your stomach or let you buy that new car you want. Of course, somehow, magically, you think "they'll pay for it one way or another" when the very reason this is a problem is that people who demand free music/movies/books are unwilling to pay what the artist asks.
~TomW
In fact, nobody is being forced to do anything in the production, sale or purchase of Britney Spears, N'Sync, Star Wars: Episode 2 or any other product of the entertainment industry that we may or may not enjoy. It's irrelevant how much money everyone involved earns as long as they decide how much they're willing to work for and aren't made to work for less. The issue is copyright, and while DeCSS should be perfectly legal software, copyright is still something worth defending, whether it produces multi-millionaire flavors-of-the-month or not.
~TomW
No more Matrix movies, no more X-Files, no more [insert favorite non-pop group here]. Not that I think losing the DeCSS case would kill the studios--DeCSS should be legal; copyright violation is the offense--but I, for one, would miss a lot of the product produced by Hollywood and Co.
Different people have different tastes. A lot of people like Britney Spears; less people like Elliott Smith. In our culture you can have either. In fact, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that 99.9% of people in this country can get access to the parts of our culture they like for a price they are willing to pay. In that the media giants have been remarkably successful, and I don't question either the profit they have made through this success or the product they produce (Ms. Spears, et al) to maximize this success by pleasing the greatest number of people.
You don't like Independence Day or Jerry Springer? Don't watch them. Don't pay for them. But if something produced by the media moguls does appeal to you, buy/see/rent it. Nobody will like everything they produce and nobody will force you to pay for any of it. I don't see any justification for hoping for the demise of a "Hollywood studios 'culture'" that satisfies the desires of just about everybody in the US and an increasing number of people overseas.
~TomW
This may be the exception that proves the rule, but Lou Gerstner, not a high-tech guru by any means, apparently has done a pretty reasonable job running IBM.
Newsflash: "celebrity" is not the "payment" that everyone wants. Celebrity doesn't get you a house, or food, or supports your family; money does.
You're essentially saying we should get rid of copyright, and with the assitance of digital media, the cost associated with obtaining any bit of information drops to 0. This means that producing information is unrewarded by the market: you can make a $75 million dollar movie, but since someone could (legally, now, since copyright is no more) get a digital copy and project it to audiences and not give you a cent, you'll likely never see a return on that investment.
But, you say, there are other ways to make money other than producing content, like advertising, product tie-ins, endorsement contracts! You're right... and that's where all the effort would be: the only thing that gets you more when it's distributed more is advertising. Digital content (and that's a broader term every day) would have to be advertising or it wouldn't be worth making.
Yes, you'd still have live performances of your favorite bands, they'd make money that way. And you could always go see a play somewhere; those would still be good since they need you to want to pay for a seat. But just about all of the benefits of distributable media, be it moving pictures, music, or even just words, would be lost because we find it easier to reward creators with "celebrity" rather than our dollars.
The recording industry has been bleeding us all dry for so long that its about time they got whats coming.. Personally I couldnt give a rats ass whether the legal technicalities are on their side or not, I just wanna see 'em take one in the face!
#undef _RANT_;
Huh? The recording industry has been "bleeding you dry"? How's that? Are they stealing money from you? Are they forcing you to buy things you don't want at gunpoint?
Look, if you don't like the practices of the recording industry, don't buy recordings!
Violating copyright by trading around millions of MP3s of other people's work is not the answer. Obviously MP3 has some great uses: making copies of CD's you own for personal enjoyment, easily distributing your garage band's latest hits, etc. We should defend these uses of MP3, as should we defend Napster's right to be a peer-to-peer file-sharing service.
But portraying those who support copyright as "behind the times" or outright villainous is wrong--unless you want to take the position that copyright should be abolished, in which case get ready for the quality of media to be exactly what people will have to pay for it.
Which is exactly what AOL/timewarner want you to believe. Lawrence Lessig has a bunch to say about exactly this misconception. It's really worrying that people will stick to such dogma while the corporations take advantage of their blindness to further entrench themselves.
I don't buy Lessig's argument. It seems to me he's saying that the internet was successful because open standards prevailed and users were free to do what they wanted with their bandwidth therefore we should not be afraid of government regulation of the internet designed to protect this freedom.
Put aside the fact that most of the government regulation we've seen so far (or at least heard the most noise about) is of the "Won't someone PLEASE think of the CHILDREN??" variety...I don't see any way to "protect" everyone's freedom of choice on the internet through government regulation.
Regulation is about keeping things the same: we know how to properly process meat so it doesn't make people sick, so there are regulations that attempt to ensure this is always done; we know how to build highways so they don't erode away in a summer rain, so regulations exist codifying this knowledge.
We don't know what the internet will look like in 5 years... Lessig's example of gopher vs. http is a good one. But there's no way for regulators to forsee these changes either--the only way progress is made is when someone has an itch and someone else finds a better way to scratch it.
AOL/Time-Warner paid for cable lines to people's houses and networking hardware to connect those cables to the internet; certainly the government didn't attempt to fulfill people's desire for a wider variety of TV programming and high-speed internet access--a corporation did, and that corporation deserves the fruits of their labor. If people don't like it, they don't have to pay for it.
Now I'm sure Lessig would argue that various municipalities gave Time Warner the land to run their cable along and they have a right to expect they'll use that cable for "the public good"--but Time Warner should be bound only by their contract with those municipalities, which may or may not give the municipalities legal recourse--if not, it's their own fault. It's certainly not the business of the federal government what a private corporation runs over wires they paid for.
The fact that some people remember the "good old days" when there were more .edu's than .com's and you could get a domain just by asking nicely is a good reason to go play with Internet2, not a good reason for the governement to come in and fix whatever "the public" doesn't like at the moment about a private network they never spent a dime on.
Yikes that was a rant... sorry I just haven't been thrilled with Lessig's arguments since one of his (many?) papers on why governement was the salvation of the 'net was passed out in my systems engineering class.
Yes... your freedom is exactly that: what you can pay for. You don't get to tell other people what they can and can't do with their fiber lines and IP packets. If you want to control a network, you can buy one yourself and put whatever you want on it.
Now, if you think we would have a better world-wide IP network today if the government had stepped in a few years back and monopolized the whole thing, I think you're wrong. The big telecom companies (and the ones that were small and got big because of the explosion in worldwide data traffic) have spent billions of dollars building a pretty darn impressive network. Despite all the grand proclamations of Al Gore and Co. about a government-funded "Information Super Highway" we haven't *needed* one--where there is demand, private money has been invested, the network has grown and grown, and smart people have gotten rich for investing their company's money in the right projects.
It may not be exactly what you want it to be, but I'll put the success of private-sector communications networks against any government-funded program or system you can name.
I imagine they'd be cheaper, better-maintained, and probably safer: try suing the government for negligence in maintenance or for letting drunk drivers on the road and see how far you get...
Of course, this might have something to do with the fact that the Dave Matthews Band explicitly allows (and encourages) taping at their shows, and also allows non-commercial distribution of those tapes--including as MP3s. Fans (like me) are happy to be able to get all sorts of cool live recordings (some of which are crap, but a lot of which sound pretty good), and we still shell out good money for CDs/t-shirts/concerts. Not that people don't put ripped DMB albums on Napster, but I think their policy (which has been the case, AFAIK, from their days of obscurity) is a good one, and should be encouraged, rather than held up as an example of what's wrong with Napster.
That is the single scariest thing I have ever read on Slashdot.
Upon what system of ethics do you base the right to rob someone blind in the name of "self-sacrifice"?
I'm really hoping you were just being sarcastic, but somehow I doubt it.
I think most of these theater chains are counting on making up the lost teen audience by forcing kids to drag their parents along (even parents can't buy tickets for their kids, they have to physically accompany them into the theater). At $8.25 a ticket, they just might be able to.
This whole situation has me very upset. I would have missed seeing a lot of excellent films (and maybe a few just fun ones :) ) if this policy had been enforced when I was a teen. Somehow I didn't turn into a crazed monster... it must be the fact that I have responsible parents who trust me not to be warped by movies.
Yeah!! And none of this is real!! It's all the MATRIX!!!