---- They were subscribers, the model changed, and they jumped ship. That includes me. Emusic could have continued getting my money forever with their model, even if they had raised their rates, but they changed to this asinine limit, and now they get $0 of my money instead of the $20, $30 or $50 a month I would glady have paid. ----
Most of the complaints posted here were people whining that they couldn't get unlimited downloads for next to nothing. Unlimited downloads for $10/15 (whatever it was) per month is not a viable business model. They have enough stuff there that I could cost them more in bandwidth costs than the subscription cost. Therefore, they had to change.
---- Neither is it the service for you -- anymore -- if you want more than a couple albums per month. Or if you mind downloading half an album then waiting a month for the other half. ----
So upgrade to the 90 songs/month plan for an extra $10. Add a booster pack for $5-15 that gives you between 10-50 extra songs. As an added bonus, your monthly songs always get used before the booster pack, so you can keep the unused booster songs around for as long as you have an account.
It certainly seems like a fair system to me, one where they're trying to be consumer friendly. The biggest problem with the current system is that the system is biased against albums with many short tracks. I'd rather see them switch to a system where it's based on how many seconds the songs are, but that might add a level of complication that the users would reject.
The problem is when should that maintenance window be? My servers are co-loed and have a "slow" time of 1AM through 6AM, times when I'd really rather be asleep or at least, not-doing-work(tm). And because some of them are Dell PowerEdge 350s (someone else bought, them, not my fault), they take about 5-6 minutes to reboot. Even during my off hours, that's still quite a few connections that fail to get through.
Before some of the straggling Windows boxes got converted to something else, we did weekly preventative reboots, and from time to time, they'd fail to come back up. And the powers that be saw it as being more affordable to have an IT staffer go out to the co-lo, rather than investing in a remotely controlled power unit.
Of course, I could just be like some admins in the branch I work in and shut down the database server at 5:30 every Monday afternoon, nevermind that people are still using it...
Yes folks, the dubiously legal (at best) russian site that doesn't actually pay the artists (anything appreciable) is somehow able to undercut the legal service that tries to make sure that everyone gets paid, yet offers reasonably high quality recordings with NO DRM and restrictions for personal use. Hands up those who are surprised.
As far as the 40 tracks/month thing, well yeah. It's called being in business. No pricing policy will ever suit everyone's needs, but these folks have chosen one that appears to work for them and their clients. If you only want one or two tracks a month, this is not the service for you. I've been a subscriber for some time, and it works for me, even though there've been some months I don't use up my quota. Big deal. The monthly fee is about the cost of a decent meal.
As a point of information, a nice thing about their DRM-less existance is that they keep track of what you have download and let you redownload the same tracks for free. So if your hard drive crashes or if you want a copy of a song while you're at work, just log in, go to the page of what you've downloaded in the past, and download it again.
--- Unless they stole the CDs to get those rips, it costs no one a penny except the guy who bought the hard drive and the bandwidth. ---
So, if I go to a store and take an item and leave behind the wholesale cost rather than the asking price, it's OK then? After all, the business owner isn't losing a penny.
And the sad thing is, just based on the stock performance, there's prolly a whole slew of companies that would hire him for very large sums of money to do the same thing.
American business is no longer about making a product that will bring long lasting success, it's about whatever will pump the stock price for a few months. Sad.
Intel being x86, in exclusion of Power, Sparc, Alpha, and the other architectures that Linux runs on. Use your mind a little before spouting naughty words.
I agree that some of the phishing scams are pretty slick (some with genuine Verisign certs, no less), but every online financial signup I've got through has stated explicitely that they will never ask for the types of personal information that phishing scams rely on. Many of my paper mailings from the same institutions have the same warning on them. The information is out there, but the public has tuned it out. Mostly it comes down to common sense, and most people don't bother to engage it before clicking.
Now the ebay.de takeover the other week.. that was excusable to be taken in by.
Re:Removing motivation to create innovative IP
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Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
Origins, Acclaim, Interplay (or rather, Black Isle), Sierra, Looking Glass Studios... Some of them might still sort of exist, but they're not what they were.
Re:Removing motivation to create innovative IP
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
At no point in my statement do I attribute the tremendous advancements of medicine (or computers or anything else) directly to IP. My point was merely responding to your statement that IP is a new concept by saying that the world has changed greatly in the past century. Is the system flawed? Of course it is. Is trying to remove the entire concept of IP a good idea? No.
Many of the advances in medicine that you reference are based on the fact that innovations have been protected by patents, allowing for that standing on shoulders. We've hit the stage that medical advances are ofter VERY costly. In a perfect world, governments would provide all the reasonable funding needed for that research, and everyone would live happily. In the real world, we both know that the populace will vote for the politician that promises lower taxes, never mind what services get cut. Is the system flawed in that rich people get better medical coverage, and poor people very often die from lack of it (AIDS drugs being a very good example)? Yes. Can you suggest a better solution that works in the real world?
Would you prefer a world where the solutions to medical problems never get created for lack of funding? At least with the current system, the benefits (generally) trickle down eventually.
I find it strange that he argues against copywrite, and yet the first footnote in his writings is his own copywrite. Given that the person immediately following him in the Stanford Law faculty directory is closely associated with a well known intellectual freedom license, I would think that he'd consider practicing what he preaches.
One of the trends I've noticed is that many of the people who advocate against the concept of intellectual property are the ones who have little or nothing to lose from its abolishment. (Yes, there are obvious exceptions, Stallman et all.) In this case, Lemley has little to lose - he has a nice position as a professor, writes $100+ textbooks that are a small enough market that there's little interest in trying to take the niche from his publishers. And yet, he still grabs for the very same rights he argues against.
Re:the whole IP issue is invalid
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
--- If the public decides it can share copies, then the publisher is not entitled to expect to be paid for each copy, and so cannot claim there is a "loss" when it is not. ---
If the public decides that burning people as witches and taking their money/possesions, is that a good thing? The public has a demonstrated history of making poor choices. Even if the majority decides something, it doesn't mean that it won't have detrimental effects on people and society in general.
--- The same consequence can result if your friend decides to play bridge instead of reading a book. In a free market system, no business is entitled to cry "foul" just because a potential customer chooses not to deal with them. ---
The difference is that the friends playing bridge aren't still using the work (yes, writing well really is hard) of someone else. It's not crying foul because a potential customer chose not to deal with them, it's crying foul because the customer has chosen not to deal with them, but still takes advantage of their work.
Re:Removing motivation to create innovative IP
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
I work with musicians. Many have seen their record sales drop because of MP3 piracy. Being a _really_ good musician almost always takes a lot of practice and touring, both of which preclude most "normal" jobs. (There are exceptions. I have a friend who worked for Ericson, and was given the leeway he needed to practice and tour. But that's not common.) Therefore, to be a _really_ good musician means that a reasonable income must be derived from music. I also work with quite a few musicians who do hold "normal" day jobs. Many of them are stuck in perpetual amateur status, because they can't practice or write enough. Many others are simply derivative or cover bands. Nothing unique or interesting. Do you think that offering _high_ quality music and arts is a reasonable goal for society? I do.
How many of the really quite good video game companies have gone out of business in the past few years? How many would still be in business if 1/10 of the people that pirate their software had bought it instead?
The basic fact is doing just about ANYTHING really well takes time, which is something that many people just don't have. Providing money in exchange for services gives people the ability to persue intellectual development, rather than doing whatever it takes to pay the bills. You offer two exceptional cases as counter-evidence, not any conclusive trend.
The ratio of excellent open source software to excellent closed source software is pretty small. (That's coming from an open source advocate, who's job description includes transitioning systems from closed to open software.) And the Riemann hypothesis is different in that it's the sort of thing that many people find interesting to mentally wrestle with as a hobby.
Re:Removing motivation to create innovative IP
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, actually, there has been a tremendous increase in inventions during this century compaired to previous ones. Look at how far medicine has advanced in the previous 100 years.
IP has had to be invented relatively recently due to two factors. First, the ability to easily create identical copies of information changes the game. When there's a certain inherent physical/time cost of duplicating something or if the quality/convenience decreases, the creators of the product are financially protected because it's just about as easy to buy the official product as it is to copy it. Cassettes did some damage to CD sales, but not enough to worry much about, because the sound quality was decreased, and it wasn't as convenient to go to whatever song you wanted. And there was a basic physical cost to the media. Whereas an MP3 can spread with no perceived cost to thousands of people with no addition degenaration of quality.
Second, the nature of the world has changed in the past 100 years, in that information has become an imporant commodity that people's income is derived from. This wasn't practical until easy, fast, accurate data transmittion became possible. Huge portions of citizen of first world countries do jobs that function entirely on data rather than on a physical product.
There's not been a whole lot of recent music that I've been blown away by, but here's a few from the past couple years at least:
Four Tet - Rounds - I call it "thinking man's electronica." It's very organic sounding to me, and frequently throws in unexpected twists that I enjoy. Kind of a modern version of Brian Eno's early solo work/electronic experementation.
PJ Harvey - Uh Huh Her - She's not new by any means, but I think this is her most solid album in the past while.
Beth Orton - Daybreaker - I'm a huge fan of her earlier work, and this took a little while to grow on me, but it's got some great moments. If you've never been exposed to her, I recommend everything she's done. Also, the Two Lone Swordsmen remix of Anywhere was _excellent_.
The Walkmen - Dunno the album name - The overall album's OK, but I've really been digging the single "The Rat" that was big on college radio
The Rapture - Echoes - Yeah, they're too trendy to be cool to aging hipsters, and yeah, they're basically rehashing GOF, but this album found its way into my coding sessions when I was _almost_ there and needed a little extra push.
Delerium - Karma and Poem - perhaps cliched, but music that I've really loved. The remix collection was also common in coding sessions.
Tim Buckley - various - OK, so he's way past 20 years old, but there's been recent issues of some great material that had only existed in bootleg form before that's great, particularly the early versions of "Song to the Siren" and "Sing a Song For You." There's a medely of Hallucianations and Troubadour on one of the recent live releases that's breathtaking to me.
Richard Bona - various - a very nice blend of African, Jazz, World, and French music.
Tindersticks - Waiting for the Moon - not necessarily as cutting as some of their earlier works, but has some great moments in it.
Low - Things We Lost in the Fire - I've loved Low since the beginning, and at first the newer sound on this album didn't match my tastes, but it really grew on me in the end.
Nields - Play - Gorgeous folk rock.
But yeah, music's really been bad these past years. I listen to a lot of ethnic music and traditional music that I have hundreds CDs of, and get a lot of enjoyment out of those.
How about the fact that virtually every school on that list is a religious one, and thus is heavily subsidized by religious groups as well as additional "donations" from parents, figures that are not included in the listed tuition?
In fact, the average cost of the non-religious schools in the study you cite is $4600 for elementary and $7050 for secondary.
How about the fact that the [religious] private school I went to was tremendously poorer academically than the public schools I went to? It was a place where a call to the vice principle from a parent (particularly one who had made a proper "donation" to the school) could fix a pesky bad grade. The public school thought me to think and analyze, the Catholic school taught me to get around rules. A place where ALL you needed to teach was ANY college degree, regardless of whether it related to the classes you were supposed to teach. A place where a first year instructor made $14,000/year in the DC area, ensuring that only the most desparate and unemployable (other than a few highly religious teachers) people would work. A place where the school priest was defrocked a few years after I left in a huge scandal (no, it didn't involve anyone under 18, but quite unpleasant none-the-less), where drugs were freely available and used with no enforcement against it, where an "outsider" student was beaten so severely he suffered brain damage and died a few years later, where the religion instructors would tell girls that their place was in the kitchen and the bedroom. Yeah, that's a great place to send your kids.
Entertainment! was re-released by EMI circa 95 or so with bonus tracks from an early LP slapped on the end and should be available through better CD stores. Glad to hear someone else out there still remembers GoF - they managed to make it into one of my recent password generation schemes.
I highly recommend checking out GoF member Dave Allen's Elastic Purejoy self titled album (from 1994). It ranges from very GoF inspired dance-rock to grunge rock to psychedelia and everywhere inbetween. Between songs with titles such as "If Samuel Becket Had Met Lenny Bruce" and "Caxton Vs the Fouth Estate" and fantastic Eno and Sebadoh covers, it's all over the place, but ranks up there in my list of music that's been most important to me.
--- "...once you start making exceptions, where do you stop?" Where it makes sense. You don't execute a shop-lifter. ---
That was in reply to someone who said that (s)he is against the death penalty, but was wavering because of this incident. It is very hard to be against the death penalty and make exceptions. You clearly believe in the death penalty, so that statement doesn't apply to you.
--- Wrongo, chum. The terrorists want exactly what happened in Spain, the redirection of a nation's decisions because of their threats. They certainly do not want to be snuffed out and the nation's resolve hardened against them. ---
In the Spanish case, perhaps. But what they want in Chechnia is to fuel the fires of hatred on both sides such that there is so much animosity on both sides that maintaining unity becomes untenable. See Bosnia/Serb, Hutu/Tustsi, etc.
'"If I see a Chechen or an Ingush, I will kill him, or his mother, or his son," Reuters quoted one young man as saying.' Cite
Because of this, innocent Chechens may be killed in revenge, which will lead their friends and family to want to kill Russians, who's friends and family... The terrorists may have miscalculated and gone to far, but their goal was to sow the seeds of hate. They went in expecting to kill and expecting to die. Their list of demands were never going to be met. Their best case senario is for a bunch of Russians to go shoot up a Chechnian school.
Do you really think that the world is safer today because of how we went into Iraq? We've just bred another, larger wave of terrorists. George W. is Al Qaida's best friend - those extremists will happily go to the grave knowing that the seeds of hate have been well planted in the minds of the youth of the middle east. They may fall, but a dozen more will spring forward to replace them.
--- Shit happens in a war, but "suppose they find those that really put it there..." Anyone can construct a bad-resulting hypothetical, big deal. ---
This isn't a war. This is a sleepy little town on the first day of school that happened to be targeted by a very small group of extremists.
If you eliminate the death penalty, the best case senario is that the surviving guilty spend the rest of their lives behind bars. The worst case senario is that an inncocent person spends time behind bars, but has a chance to be proven innocent. With the death penalty, the worst case senario is that an innocent person dies, and there's no way to undo that. Look at how many people have wrongfully been sent to death row in this country and later been proven innocent. Yes, it's a relatively small number. But would you want it to be you, a member of your family, a friend? Innocent people get caught up in the justice system all the time.
As someone else pointed out, once you start making exceptions, where do you stop?
The fact that you're experiencing such anger means that your intellect (killing, regardless of reason, is bad) has been pushed aside by the primal instinct of "take revenge." That's exactly what the terrorists want, and it's exactly the kind of motivation that should not be allowed to decide if someone lives or dies.
Lastly, you can't undo an execution, no matter how "good" your intent. How do you guarantee that someone innocent doesn't get swept up in the net? The latest rumor that CNN is circulating is that supplies for the attack were hidden in the gym duing construction/renovation this summer. Suppose a completely uninvolved muslim construction worker gets railroaded and executed because the public is crying out for blood?
--- I actually asked if I could get double vacation (4 weeks) ---
Look into state government jobs. In Virginia, a first year salaried employee earns one vacation day per month worked, plus ~15 paid holidays (depending one which day certain holidays fall on), plus 4 personal days, plus 10 sick days. That works out to about 2 months off per year. I make less than I would in a private company, but I get alot more time off (many people I know in similar positions to mine in local companies get 15 days a year off total). That's worth a lot to me.
If you make a career out of it, the leave just goes up and up - for every 5 years of service, add 3 days of leave. So if you've lasted 20 years in any series of jobs working for VA, you'd be getting 53 days off per year.
Not that this will change where you shop, but the argument against Walmart isn't just that they put destroy other businesses that sell things, but that its overall effect on the businesses that it buys from and the government.
Walmart is notorius for squeezing every last panny out of the companies they buy goods from. While in the strictest economic sense, this is a great idea for Walmart, it is decimating other companies that pay a living wage to their employees, fueling outsourcing and bankrupsy in this country. I live within a two hour drive of towns with 20+% unemployment because the textile industry has been destroyed by foreign imports. No matter how libertarian/randian you may be, that kind of situation is very dangerous, because large numbers of unemployed (and unemployable) people leads to high crime and even civil rebellion.
If I lived out in the middle of nowhere, I'd prolly shop at Walmart, just because it would be the only option. I'm lucky to have a decent amount of money and to be surrounded by choices, and deal with small retailers and restuarants as much as possible rather than feeding the large corporate machines. It's not just feeling smarmy and alternative, it's good economic sense to make sure that money is circulated into your local economy. Absolutely pure capitalism is great only for big businesses - it's horrible for the inviduals.
I have a dream T-Shirt I want to make to wear to work. On the front, it will say, "Does not play well with idiots." On the back it will say, "I'm not deaf, I'm ignoring you."
>I do spend money on music, just not on pre-recorded music.
What makes you feel that you have a god-given right to prerecorded music then? Just because you want it? That justifies you? Do you shoplift too? If a quadraplegic wrote beautiful music that made your heart soar, they wouldn't be worthy of getting a dime from you, as they couldn't tour?
>Quality musicians produce quality music.
Take a listen of a major recording artist's demos compared to the final product. Tool is a great example, if you can actually find the demo versions. A good studio recording sounds vastly better.
>I'm not a musician at all.
So, you wouldn't know how much time that being a really good musician takes then, would you? Did you know most professional musicians practice 4-8 hours a day? Kind of hard to hold down a day job and have a life with that kind of schedule isn't it?
You also wouldn't know the economic realities of the music industry. Consider this: a band that I've worked with has sold 50K+ copies of their last two albums as a completely independent group. At roughly $10/profit per disk, that's one million dollars directly into their pocket. Nonetheless, they are considering signing on with a large independent label, which would drop their per unit profit to around $4. Now, if there wasn't some real benefit to all parties involved, would they be considering that?
>I am a programmer, and I do give away (GPL) any code I don't write under contract.
So, you favour intellectual property rights when it serves your given sphere. Why should _you_ be able to choose what license to give your code away under, but musicians should be forced (in your view) to give theirs away? Why should you be able to offer your code through contracts? If everything music should be free, everything software should be free as well, right?
Switch your business model to giving away _every_ bit of code you write for free and charge for support. Do you think that touring is fun and easy? It's not a nice, easy situation like software types deal with.
Would you have fun spending all day in a cramped, crowded van, getting sick constantly from eating low end food/getting exposed to new and interesting sets of bacteria in every new city, staying in cheap hotels who's checkout policy only allowed you to get 4 or 5 hours of sleep? Getting home to find your significant other's left you because you're never home, and your kids don't recognise you as more than a stranger who visits every now and then?
Quality. Rewarding the people who's hard work you enjoy?
--- Musicians will make music regardless of how much money they make. ---
Some will. Many won't be able to afford to spend as much time on music and what they can make won't be as high quality. I happen to work for many musicians and I've seen them negatively affected by music piracy. I'm not talking about major label artists, I'm talking about small indies like Sugar Hill that exist in small niches.
--- I predict the rise of the small-time recording studio. Anyone with a computer and some talent can get software that allows them to produce near-studio quality music in their bedroom. ---
Let me guess, they can just download from some pirate site too? And no, the software is nowhere close. I've used it all, and there's nothing that can make a bedroom recording of drums sound like a good accoustic room, miced with Neumann and Sennheiser mics, run through API, Neve, etc. mic pres, through LA2s or 1176s or whatever flavour of analog compressor you like.
--- >Remember MP3.com?
I remember that it was basically sued out of existence. ---
Regardless of that, the music selection was awful. Like I said, there was some fantastic music on it (quite a few of my friends), but 90% of it was unlistenable.
--- And it's still an improvement over what we have now. ---
Um... from what perspective? If you think you should get free music from artists, what do YOU offer to the world? I've noticed that those that advocate loudest for "free" music tend to be the ones that don't contribute anything, but merely think that they should get was they want.
Out of curiosity, who are the last 10 musicians/groups that have passed through your CD/mp3/whatever player?
Slashdot Mirror
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They were subscribers, the model changed, and they jumped ship. That includes me. Emusic could have continued getting my money forever with their model, even if they had raised their rates, but they changed to this asinine limit, and now they get $0 of my money instead of the $20, $30 or $50 a month I would glady have paid.
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Most of the complaints posted here were people whining that they couldn't get unlimited downloads for next to nothing. Unlimited downloads for $10/15 (whatever it was) per month is not a viable business model. They have enough stuff there that I could cost them more in bandwidth costs than the subscription cost. Therefore, they had to change.
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Neither is it the service for you -- anymore -- if you want more than a couple albums per month. Or if you mind downloading half an album then waiting a month for the other half.
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So upgrade to the 90 songs/month plan for an extra $10. Add a booster pack for $5-15 that gives you between 10-50 extra songs. As an added bonus, your monthly songs always get used before the booster pack, so you can keep the unused booster songs around for as long as you have an account.
It certainly seems like a fair system to me, one where they're trying to be consumer friendly. The biggest problem with the current system is that the system is biased against albums with many short tracks. I'd rather see them switch to a system where it's based on how many seconds the songs are, but that might add a level of complication that the users would reject.
The problem is when should that maintenance window be? My servers are co-loed and have a "slow" time of 1AM through 6AM, times when I'd really rather be asleep or at least, not-doing-work(tm). And because some of them are Dell PowerEdge 350s (someone else bought, them, not my fault), they take about 5-6 minutes to reboot. Even during my off hours, that's still quite a few connections that fail to get through.
Before some of the straggling Windows boxes got converted to something else, we did weekly preventative reboots, and from time to time, they'd fail to come back up. And the powers that be saw it as being more affordable to have an IT staffer go out to the co-lo, rather than investing in a remotely controlled power unit.
Of course, I could just be like some admins in the branch I work in and shut down the database server at 5:30 every Monday afternoon, nevermind that people are still using it...
allofmp3.com, refered to in the parent post as being "better" than emusic.com.
Yes folks, the dubiously legal (at best) russian site that doesn't actually pay the artists (anything appreciable) is somehow able to undercut the legal service that tries to make sure that everyone gets paid, yet offers reasonably high quality recordings with NO DRM and restrictions for personal use. Hands up those who are surprised.
As far as the 40 tracks/month thing, well yeah. It's called being in business. No pricing policy will ever suit everyone's needs, but these folks have chosen one that appears to work for them and their clients. If you only want one or two tracks a month, this is not the service for you. I've been a subscriber for some time, and it works for me, even though there've been some months I don't use up my quota. Big deal. The monthly fee is about the cost of a decent meal.
As a point of information, a nice thing about their DRM-less existance is that they keep track of what you have download and let you redownload the same tracks for free. So if your hard drive crashes or if you want a copy of a song while you're at work, just log in, go to the page of what you've downloaded in the past, and download it again.
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Unless they stole the CDs to get those rips, it costs no one a penny except the guy who bought the hard drive and the bandwidth.
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So, if I go to a store and take an item and leave behind the wholesale cost rather than the asking price, it's OK then? After all, the business owner isn't losing a penny.
And the sad thing is, just based on the stock performance, there's prolly a whole slew of companies that would hire him for very large sums of money to do the same thing.
American business is no longer about making a product that will bring long lasting success, it's about whatever will pump the stock price for a few months. Sad.
Intel being x86, in exclusion of Power, Sparc, Alpha, and the other architectures that Linux runs on. Use your mind a little before spouting naughty words.
I agree that some of the phishing scams are pretty slick (some with genuine Verisign certs, no less), but every online financial signup I've got through has stated explicitely that they will never ask for the types of personal information that phishing scams rely on. Many of my paper mailings from the same institutions have the same warning on them. The information is out there, but the public has tuned it out. Mostly it comes down to common sense, and most people don't bother to engage it before clicking.
Now the ebay.de takeover the other week.. that was excusable to be taken in by.
Origins, Acclaim, Interplay (or rather, Black Isle), Sierra, Looking Glass Studios... Some of them might still sort of exist, but they're not what they were.
At no point in my statement do I attribute the tremendous advancements of medicine (or computers or anything else) directly to IP. My point was merely responding to your statement that IP is a new concept by saying that the world has changed greatly in the past century. Is the system flawed? Of course it is. Is trying to remove the entire concept of IP a good idea? No.
Many of the advances in medicine that you reference are based on the fact that innovations have been protected by patents, allowing for that standing on shoulders. We've hit the stage that medical advances are ofter VERY costly. In a perfect world, governments would provide all the reasonable funding needed for that research, and everyone would live happily. In the real world, we both know that the populace will vote for the politician that promises lower taxes, never mind what services get cut. Is the system flawed in that rich people get better medical coverage, and poor people very often die from lack of it (AIDS drugs being a very good example)? Yes. Can you suggest a better solution that works in the real world?
Would you prefer a world where the solutions to medical problems never get created for lack of funding? At least with the current system, the benefits (generally) trickle down eventually.
I find it strange that he argues against copywrite, and yet the first footnote in his writings is his own copywrite. Given that the person immediately following him in the Stanford Law faculty directory is closely associated with a well known intellectual freedom license, I would think that he'd consider practicing what he preaches.
One of the trends I've noticed is that many of the people who advocate against the concept of intellectual property are the ones who have little or nothing to lose from its abolishment. (Yes, there are obvious exceptions, Stallman et all.) In this case, Lemley has little to lose - he has a nice position as a professor, writes $100+ textbooks that are a small enough market that there's little interest in trying to take the niche from his publishers. And yet, he still grabs for the very same rights he argues against.
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If the public decides it can share copies, then the publisher is not entitled to expect to be paid for each copy, and so cannot claim there is a "loss" when it is not.
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If the public decides that burning people as witches and taking their money/possesions, is that a good thing? The public has a demonstrated history of making poor choices. Even if the majority decides something, it doesn't mean that it won't have detrimental effects on people and society in general.
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The same consequence can result if your friend decides to play bridge instead of reading a book. In a free market system, no business is entitled to cry "foul" just because a potential customer chooses not to deal with them.
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The difference is that the friends playing bridge aren't still using the work (yes, writing well really is hard) of someone else. It's not crying foul because a potential customer chose not to deal with them, it's crying foul because the customer has chosen not to deal with them, but still takes advantage of their work.
I work with musicians. Many have seen their record sales drop because of MP3 piracy. Being a _really_ good musician almost always takes a lot of practice and touring, both of which preclude most "normal" jobs. (There are exceptions. I have a friend who worked for Ericson, and was given the leeway he needed to practice and tour. But that's not common.) Therefore, to be a _really_ good musician means that a reasonable income must be derived from music. I also work with quite a few musicians who do hold "normal" day jobs. Many of them are stuck in perpetual amateur status, because they can't practice or write enough. Many others are simply derivative or cover bands. Nothing unique or interesting. Do you think that offering _high_ quality music and arts is a reasonable goal for society? I do.
How many of the really quite good video game companies have gone out of business in the past few years? How many would still be in business if 1/10 of the people that pirate their software had bought it instead?
The basic fact is doing just about ANYTHING really well takes time, which is something that many people just don't have. Providing money in exchange for services gives people the ability to persue intellectual development, rather than doing whatever it takes to pay the bills. You offer two exceptional cases as counter-evidence, not any conclusive trend.
The ratio of excellent open source software to excellent closed source software is pretty small. (That's coming from an open source advocate, who's job description includes transitioning systems from closed to open software.) And the Riemann hypothesis is different in that it's the sort of thing that many people find interesting to mentally wrestle with as a hobby.
Yes, actually, there has been a tremendous increase in inventions during this century compaired to previous ones. Look at how far medicine has advanced in the previous 100 years.
IP has had to be invented relatively recently due to two factors. First, the ability to easily create identical copies of information changes the game. When there's a certain inherent physical/time cost of duplicating something or if the quality/convenience decreases, the creators of the product are financially protected because it's just about as easy to buy the official product as it is to copy it. Cassettes did some damage to CD sales, but not enough to worry much about, because the sound quality was decreased, and it wasn't as convenient to go to whatever song you wanted. And there was a basic physical cost to the media. Whereas an MP3 can spread with no perceived cost to thousands of people with no addition degenaration of quality.
Second, the nature of the world has changed in the past 100 years, in that information has become an imporant commodity that people's income is derived from. This wasn't practical until easy, fast, accurate data transmittion became possible. Huge portions of citizen of first world countries do jobs that function entirely on data rather than on a physical product.
There's not been a whole lot of recent music that I've been blown away by, but here's a few from the past couple years at least:
Four Tet - Rounds - I call it "thinking man's electronica." It's very organic sounding to me, and frequently throws in unexpected twists that I enjoy. Kind of a modern version of Brian Eno's early solo work/electronic experementation.
PJ Harvey - Uh Huh Her - She's not new by any means, but I think this is her most solid album in the past while.
Beth Orton - Daybreaker - I'm a huge fan of her earlier work, and this took a little while to grow on me, but it's got some great moments. If you've never been exposed to her, I recommend everything she's done. Also, the Two Lone Swordsmen remix of Anywhere was _excellent_.
The Walkmen - Dunno the album name - The overall album's OK, but I've really been digging the single "The Rat" that was big on college radio
The Rapture - Echoes - Yeah, they're too trendy to be cool to aging hipsters, and yeah, they're basically rehashing GOF, but this album found its way into my coding sessions when I was _almost_ there and needed a little extra push.
Delerium - Karma and Poem - perhaps cliched, but music that I've really loved. The remix collection was also common in coding sessions.
Tim Buckley - various - OK, so he's way past 20 years old, but there's been recent issues of some great material that had only existed in bootleg form before that's great, particularly the early versions of "Song to the Siren" and "Sing a Song For You." There's a medely of Hallucianations and Troubadour on one of the recent live releases that's breathtaking to me.
Richard Bona - various - a very nice blend of African, Jazz, World, and French music.
Tindersticks - Waiting for the Moon - not necessarily as cutting as some of their earlier works, but has some great moments in it.
Low - Things We Lost in the Fire - I've loved Low since the beginning, and at first the newer sound on this album didn't match my tastes, but it really grew on me in the end.
Nields - Play - Gorgeous folk rock.
But yeah, music's really been bad these past years. I listen to a lot of ethnic music and traditional music that I have hundreds CDs of, and get a lot of enjoyment out of those.
How about the fact that virtually every school on that list is a religious one, and thus is heavily subsidized by religious groups as well as additional "donations" from parents, figures that are not included in the listed tuition?
In fact, the average cost of the non-religious schools in the study you cite is $4600 for elementary and $7050 for secondary.
How about the fact that the [religious] private school I went to was tremendously poorer academically than the public schools I went to? It was a place where a call to the vice principle from a parent (particularly one who had made a proper "donation" to the school) could fix a pesky bad grade. The public school thought me to think and analyze, the Catholic school taught me to get around rules. A place where ALL you needed to teach was ANY college degree, regardless of whether it related to the classes you were supposed to teach. A place where a first year instructor made $14,000/year in the DC area, ensuring that only the most desparate and unemployable (other than a few highly religious teachers) people would work. A place where the school priest was defrocked a few years after I left in a huge scandal (no, it didn't involve anyone under 18, but quite unpleasant none-the-less), where drugs were freely available and used with no enforcement against it, where an "outsider" student was beaten so severely he suffered brain damage and died a few years later, where the religion instructors would tell girls that their place was in the kitchen and the bedroom. Yeah, that's a great place to send your kids.
Entertainment! was re-released by EMI circa 95 or so with bonus tracks from an early LP slapped on the end and should be available through better CD stores. Glad to hear someone else out there still remembers GoF - they managed to make it into one of my recent password generation schemes.
I highly recommend checking out GoF member Dave Allen's Elastic Purejoy self titled album (from 1994). It ranges from very GoF inspired dance-rock to grunge rock to psychedelia and everywhere inbetween. Between songs with titles such as "If Samuel Becket Had Met Lenny Bruce" and "Caxton Vs the Fouth Estate" and fantastic Eno and Sebadoh covers, it's all over the place, but ranks up there in my list of music that's been most important to me.
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"...once you start making exceptions, where do you stop?"
Where it makes sense. You don't execute a shop-lifter.
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That was in reply to someone who said that (s)he is against the death penalty, but was wavering because of this incident. It is very hard to be against the death penalty and make exceptions. You clearly believe in the death penalty, so that statement doesn't apply to you.
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Wrongo, chum. The terrorists want exactly what happened in Spain, the redirection of a nation's decisions because of their threats. They certainly do not want to be snuffed out and the nation's resolve hardened against them.
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In the Spanish case, perhaps. But what they want in Chechnia is to fuel the fires of hatred on both sides such that there is so much animosity on both sides that maintaining unity becomes untenable. See Bosnia/Serb, Hutu/Tustsi, etc.
'"If I see a Chechen or an Ingush, I will kill him, or his mother, or his son," Reuters quoted one young man as saying.' Cite
Because of this, innocent Chechens may be killed in revenge, which will lead their friends and family to want to kill Russians, who's friends and family... The terrorists may have miscalculated and gone to far, but their goal was to sow the seeds of hate. They went in expecting to kill and expecting to die. Their list of demands were never going to be met. Their best case senario is for a bunch of Russians to go shoot up a Chechnian school.
Do you really think that the world is safer today because of how we went into Iraq? We've just bred another, larger wave of terrorists. George W. is Al Qaida's best friend - those extremists will happily go to the grave knowing that the seeds of hate have been well planted in the minds of the youth of the middle east. They may fall, but a dozen more will spring forward to replace them.
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Shit happens in a war, but "suppose they find those that really put it there..." Anyone can construct a bad-resulting hypothetical, big deal.
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This isn't a war. This is a sleepy little town on the first day of school that happened to be targeted by a very small group of extremists.
If you eliminate the death penalty, the best case senario is that the surviving guilty spend the rest of their lives behind bars. The worst case senario is that an inncocent person spends time behind bars, but has a chance to be proven innocent. With the death penalty, the worst case senario is that an innocent person dies, and there's no way to undo that. Look at how many people have wrongfully been sent to death row in this country and later been proven innocent. Yes, it's a relatively small number. But would you want it to be you, a member of your family, a friend? Innocent people get caught up in the justice system all the time.
As someone else pointed out, once you start making exceptions, where do you stop?
The fact that you're experiencing such anger means that your intellect (killing, regardless of reason, is bad) has been pushed aside by the primal instinct of "take revenge." That's exactly what the terrorists want, and it's exactly the kind of motivation that should not be allowed to decide if someone lives or dies.
Lastly, you can't undo an execution, no matter how "good" your intent. How do you guarantee that someone innocent doesn't get swept up in the net? The latest rumor that CNN is circulating is that supplies for the attack were hidden in the gym duing construction/renovation this summer. Suppose a completely uninvolved muslim construction worker gets railroaded and executed because the public is crying out for blood?
Nice statement. Pity that I have never been deemed worthy of getting mod points.
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I actually asked if I could get double vacation (4 weeks)
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Look into state government jobs. In Virginia, a first year salaried employee earns one vacation day per month worked, plus ~15 paid holidays (depending one which day certain holidays fall on), plus 4 personal days, plus 10 sick days. That works out to about 2 months off per year. I make less than I would in a private company, but I get alot more time off (many people I know in similar positions to mine in local companies get 15 days a year off total). That's worth a lot to me.
If you make a career out of it, the leave just goes up and up - for every 5 years of service, add 3 days of leave. So if you've lasted 20 years in any series of jobs working for VA, you'd be getting 53 days off per year.
Not that this will change where you shop, but the argument against Walmart isn't just that they put destroy other businesses that sell things, but that its overall effect on the businesses that it buys from and the government.
Walmart is notorius for squeezing every last panny out of the companies they buy goods from. While in the strictest economic sense, this is a great idea for Walmart, it is decimating other companies that pay a living wage to their employees, fueling outsourcing and bankrupsy in this country. I live within a two hour drive of towns with 20+% unemployment because the textile industry has been destroyed by foreign imports. No matter how libertarian/randian you may be, that kind of situation is very dangerous, because large numbers of unemployed (and unemployable) people leads to high crime and even civil rebellion.
Walmart also shifts expenses to the taxpayers. See a biased source and a collection of less biases sources.
If I lived out in the middle of nowhere, I'd prolly shop at Walmart, just because it would be the only option. I'm lucky to have a decent amount of money and to be surrounded by choices, and deal with small retailers and restuarants as much as possible rather than feeding the large corporate machines. It's not just feeling smarmy and alternative, it's good economic sense to make sure that money is circulated into your local economy. Absolutely pure capitalism is great only for big businesses - it's horrible for the inviduals.
I have a dream T-Shirt I want to make to wear to work. On the front, it will say, "Does not play well with idiots." On the back it will say, "I'm not deaf, I'm ignoring you."
>I do spend money on music, just not on pre-recorded music.
What makes you feel that you have a god-given right to prerecorded music then? Just because you want it? That justifies you? Do you shoplift too? If a quadraplegic wrote beautiful music that made your heart soar, they wouldn't be worthy of getting a dime from you, as they couldn't tour?
>Quality musicians produce quality music.
Take a listen of a major recording artist's demos compared to the final product. Tool is a great example, if you can actually find the demo versions. A good studio recording sounds vastly better.
>I'm not a musician at all.
So, you wouldn't know how much time that being a really good musician takes then, would you? Did you know most professional musicians practice 4-8 hours a day? Kind of hard to hold down a day job and have a life with that kind of schedule isn't it?
You also wouldn't know the economic realities of the music industry. Consider this: a band that I've worked with has sold 50K+ copies of their last two albums as a completely independent group. At roughly $10/profit per disk, that's one million dollars directly into their pocket. Nonetheless, they are considering signing on with a large independent label, which would drop their per unit profit to around $4. Now, if there wasn't some real benefit to all parties involved, would they be considering that?
>I am a programmer, and I do give away (GPL) any code I don't write under contract.
So, you favour intellectual property rights when it serves your given sphere. Why should _you_ be able to choose what license to give your code away under, but musicians should be forced (in your view) to give theirs away? Why should you be able to offer your code through contracts? If everything music should be free, everything software should be free as well, right?
Switch your business model to giving away _every_ bit of code you write for free and charge for support. Do you think that touring is fun and easy? It's not a nice, easy situation like software types deal with.
Would you have fun spending all day in a cramped, crowded van, getting sick constantly from eating low end food/getting exposed to new and interesting sets of bacteria in every new city, staying in cheap hotels who's checkout policy only allowed you to get 4 or 5 hours of sleep? Getting home to find your significant other's left you because you're never home, and your kids don't recognise you as more than a stranger who visits every now and then?
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What could be better than free?
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Quality. Rewarding the people who's hard work you enjoy?
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Musicians will make music regardless of how much money they make.
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Some will. Many won't be able to afford to spend as much time on music and what they can make won't be as high quality. I happen to work for many musicians and I've seen them negatively affected by music piracy. I'm not talking about major label artists, I'm talking about small indies like Sugar Hill that exist in small niches.
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I predict the rise of the small-time recording studio. Anyone with a computer and some talent can get software that allows them to produce near-studio quality music in their bedroom.
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Let me guess, they can just download from some pirate site too? And no, the software is nowhere close. I've used it all, and there's nothing that can make a bedroom recording of drums sound like a good accoustic room, miced with Neumann and Sennheiser mics, run through API, Neve, etc. mic pres, through LA2s or 1176s or whatever flavour of analog compressor you like.
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>Remember MP3.com?
I remember that it was basically sued out of existence.
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Regardless of that, the music selection was awful. Like I said, there was some fantastic music on it (quite a few of my friends), but 90% of it was unlistenable.
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And it's still an improvement over what we have now.
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Um... from what perspective? If you think you should get free music from artists, what do YOU offer to the world? I've noticed that those that advocate loudest for "free" music tend to be the ones that don't contribute anything, but merely think that they should get was they want.
Out of curiosity, who are the last 10 musicians/groups that have passed through your CD/mp3/whatever player?