Remove marketing and the only way people are going to hear about games is word of mouth.
I've always suspected all those gaming mags were just huge paid-for-ads...
No, seriously, and apologies for being snide, but the games industry is one of the least dependent on word of mouth. Reviews and recommendations highly sought after by consumers. Combine it with web 2.0 and you have all the marketing channels you need, but more tailored towards people finding what people want instead of telling them what you (or a few players) have.
You mistake cause and effect. Marketing costs a lot of money because the large entities (try to) make it necessary.
drown in the flood of games that are released.
Drown in the flood of marketing by the large entities, you mean.
A bad game with marketing will almost always outsell a good one with no marketing.
I'm sure you're right, and that's one of the more severely damaging aspects of copyright. In a free market system with interchangeable goods there's a limit to the value of marketing; make too much and your product becomes too expensive and people buy the competition. In a monopoly system with low product fungibility the limit is simply where lost sales are not lost to competition but to unaffordability, that limit is much higher.
It's an effect that's noticable in every monopoly protected sector, from pharmaceuticals to music; more money gets spent on marketing than on the actual product.
Which is rather tragic, as it means we're getting less of what we, as a society, actually want, in exchange for more of what we don't want. Way to go, intellectual 'rights'.
And twice as tragic, as most such goods mostly sell themselves if left to do so.
I don't personally think it's the job of governments to support
Well, as copyright is inherently a government subsidy/taxation/benefit system, the end result of government paying outright for OSS development may actually result in a lower level of taxation/subsidies extracted from the economy as a whole.
Personally I'm doubtful that government subsidies are helpful, but between the choice of government paying outright or government granting monopoly rights I'd go for the lesser evil and would favor the less wasteful method of paying outright.
Frankly, I haven't been overly impressed with the speed of the market. What's it now, three, four years and VMWare still can't deliver a Linux VIClient?
In the mid to long term the ability to leverage OS developments as foundation for the virtualization will be far more important, trying to make hypervisors into operating systems in their own right is going exactly in the wrong direction. While it's understandable why the licensing issues make that road desirable for closed source players, the fact is that they're taking on replicating and maintaining massive functionality ranging from drivers through storage systems through clustering on their own.
There's a long way to go for them, statistically.
Perhaps. On the other hands, things like single support path, no more upgrade-cycle bugs and problems, no more waiting for both vendors to support before you can deploy, favourable support pricing, the ability to leverage knowledge, etc, offers some significant advantages.
Considering that it hasn't been supported that long the deployment rate I've seen and heard about is in line with what can be expected. Multi-thousand NOC's don't move that fast.
That lunch has been eaten
I'd say it's more like that lunch has been the only lunch in town. Unfortunately, being the single lunch vendor may lead one to overestimate ones popularity and the loyalty of customers, particularly if one uses ones position to maximize revenues.
doesn't reflect the general consensus of the wider population
I think that depends very much on what demographic you survey and exactly what questions you ask.
Which would pay artists for cases of internet piracy where there is no sale how?
Most of the time there is some revenue collected; even in the TPB case, with ads. If it was moved to a levy/sales-tax system I'd expect the available channels to morph into analogues of radio/cable TV. Commercial financed or subscription based systems.
There is also price point where the illegitimate systems simply aren't worth it and with a mandatory licensing/fee system the professional sites could easily offer services such as selection, availability, guaranteed quality and formats, freedom from infections, etc, that would simply make it a better deal to pay for it. Like someone noted, torrent sites are often crap when it comes to less widely popular material.
At that point DRM becomes unnecessary; it's easier to pay for and get what you want from a legitimate site than to mess around with dubious sites.
Why do you expect we would pay for more artists
Because 50% of end-sales revenue is still more than they're getting today from legitimate sales through channels, even if prices on end-sales were cut by 80%. And that's below what I think would be the inflection point where legitimate services would be of more value than free as in beer. Compare with program cost of cable or radio to get an estimate of the low-end of a possible revenue stream.
basic premise that people 'want' to pay
People will pay more than enough to support artists and creators, but not, perhaps, enough to support the current cost structures. They'll pay for convenience, but they won't pay because they're told to. Personally I pay for Emusic, which is a good price/value/convenience proposition for me, although I suspect it may be a bit expensive for the average radio listener, and not very useful if they listen to mainstream music. It also means I'm paying more than 6 times what I did when I was buying a few cd's per year, yet each track gets less money. It wont pay for huge marketing campaigns for every track, it wont pay for executives, release parties, payola, etc, but those things aren't necessarily something that should be paid for by what is a public incentive system.
I'd prefer to see such a resolution as it at least makes it possible to solve the initial investment problem, and it makes it possible to balance non-exclusive revenue incentives between interest groups, to maximize the value generated for society.
Either way tho, the current system is dead; the next-gen networks will be anonymous, encrypted and f2f cell based, making them impervious to monitoring.
Yes, I see you do get the point. 'Pirate' has been used and abused in so many ways that you cannot infer any specific meaning of the word anymore. It can mean anything from actual illegal acts to people doing things we don't like to people opposed to copyright on principle, it's been adopted by political movements, it's used with pride, and it's used as a derogative.
To claim, like the grand-grandparent did, that the name suggests intent requires an unambiguous name, or a unambiguous context. As neither name or context is in one of the possible unambiguous forms, no conclusion can be drawn as to the actual meaning or intent.
Considering the owners of traditional media often has certain parts of their business model dependent on copyright it's hard to find any sources that aren't biased. Which is, of course, the problem with holding a serious discussion on the future of various intellectual property rights.
you go back to the old patronage model of yestercentury
That's a strawman argument. There are many other possible models.
For example, you could put a sales-tax on any material or revenue derived from sales or reproduction of works, with the proceeds going directly to the creators and artists. That would be somewhat similar to the radio model, but structured to include physical duplication as well as internet based replication. Further, such a model would direct much more of the customers money directly to the artists and creators, leading to a much better cost efficiency than the current system.
It would also have the huge advantage of allowing a multitude of new business models ranging from print-your-cd kiosks to libraries of all music ever made.
It would also have the advantage of saving artists and creators from the painfully subservient situation of trying to negotiate a contract while having basically no negotiating power at all; if their products generate revenue for someone, they'd get their share automatically.
lacking in perspective on the significance of this whole issue
If the question was merely one of payment, perhaps. But as it ties into everything from cultural legacy to freedom of communications to western economic competitive ability to the future evolution of society, I'd say the issue has a lot of significance. Well within the range where civil disobedience is acceptable, if not outright a moral obligation.
I mean, can you imagine what we're losing in the current system? How many artists we could pay if it was structured so more of the revenue went directly to them?
Can you even imagine having all art of humankind available at your fingertips? Cross-referenced as wikipedia, social-networked taste indexed to suggest material for you? Can you imagine the value lost to society due to the current model making this impossible?
Without a complete rewrite of copyright from an exclusive system to a monetary inventive system it's not going to happen; the owners of modern material don't want old or unmarketed material competing with the new to any greater extent than it already is.
On the other hand, it's not called 'the copyright infringement bay', nor are they accused of boarding ships on the high seas, so I'm not sure it's appropriate to draw any conclusions from that.
I'd say it's more a tongue-in-cheek naming poking fun at expected users and preempting expected name-calling.
shows fairly clearly what the intended purpose of TPB really is.
Providing and indexing links to the material the users want? It is, perhaps, a bit saddening that not more links were pointing to legitimate linux torrents (altho I suspect that is more because linux torrents have specific release sites that are well known to users, and the vast majority of linux programs are fed through packaging systems rather than random download sites).
I have no doubt that were the majority of the users of TPB mainly interested in Linux distributions, that's what you'd see. Which indicates that the material found is not so much a reflection of intent on the part of the site, but rather a reflection of the desire of the users.
Following Apple? More like following anything anyone else does. The shotgun model of business strategies? Throw enough spaghetti against the wall and maybe something sticks?
By now they've me-too'd so many things it's getting downright weird. Were I a stockholder I'd demand they stop wasting my money and if they're afraid their core business is getting undermined and they can't come up with a coherent plan for the future then hand out the revenue to the stockholders and let them decide where to invest instead.
how complete and obvious bullshit can be earnestly believed
Rather like how otherwise intelligent people actually appear to believe copyright was ever about paying creators and artists, eh?
Not exactly clear on what you mean by property rights here.
Property rights like all other property rights. I buy something it's mine to do with as I wish.
Intellectual monopoly law, from the perspective of property, is fundamentally a restriction of property rights. The owner of the property is prevented from exercising the rights he has with any other property until the expiration of whatever monopoly rights governs certain aspects of his property.
no movies can be made with any expectation of profit, which means that almost no movies will be made anymore
Funny then how pretty much no movies every show any profit, yet they still get made, eh? Oh, right, that's about corporations screwing artists and creators, so that's ok.
Perhaps we'd lose big-budget productions, but between the remake-of-the decade genre and formulaic productions, I can live without them. Movies would still get made (I mean, have you looked at the amount of film that gets produced on minimal budgets?), and with the rate technology improves, you hardly need a big studio to create rather amazing footage anymore.
The fact is copyright is a very inefficient way of directing money to where you want it to go. Most of it gets squandered on monopoly expenses, advertising, channel control, etc, far worse than even any government program. Restructuring intellectual incentives as actual monetary incentives, like direct revenue sharing from end-point sales or ads, would direct far more of the revenue directly to the productive parties, allowing far more art to be funded with incentives.
But like I said, it's never been about creators and artists, so I doubt we'll get a complete fundamental restructuring of incentives before the MAFIAA corps are wiped out.
There are many indications that copyright does more harm than good for the vast majority of artists and creators. The concentration of revenue streams derived from monopoly rights is largely what drives the marginalization of most material; it is what drives the profitability of everything from payola to channel control.
If you had content (a song for example) that was a method for you to put food on the table
Most songs do not put food on the table; most don't even get played on the radio as they're not on the corporations consultants dj list. Knowing that copyright isn't giving me any money, and in fact even prevents the exposure of my art, I doubt that I'd feel differently.
Of course, if I was an exec for whom having other peoples songs was a method for me to put coke in my nose I might very well feel differently.
If copyright was ever about artists or creators, it'd be written to ensure they got a cut out of every transaction. They don't, and very little of the money consumers spend on copyrighted material ever comes near the parties it was supposedly intended for.
Sounds like a job for power-over-ethernet. Or ethernet-over-powerlines. I wonder if anyone's tried to connect an electric fence transformer to ethernet shielding.
More seriously tho, with fiber cabling another possibility would be to simply install microducts or some other form of duct suitable for protecting fiber from natural enemies. Vermin control or not, fiber isn't exactly the most rugged form of cabling, and it's not really made to withstand a uncontrolled environment on its own.
A cure would be applied to those who are infected to cure.
If it is at all possible to effect an actual cure. Many virus types hide from even the immune system, so once you've got it, it's there for life. Which may be significantly shortened if the virus wrecks havoc on your DNA and causes a cancer of some sort, or suppresses the nearby immune system, preventing proper response to other random cancer cells.
Take a serious look at uncured diseases today. There are usually reasons they're not cured yet, and it tends to be that they are really, really nasty. They mutate. They hide. They develop immunities against anything thrown at them simply by being highly varied so the only thing the average cure accomplishes is wiping out... most... maybe 99.999% of the infection. But only all of it would be enough.
but the dollar value is MUCH higher in vaccinations.
Yes, well, for the money spent on medicines today we could get five times the research if we simply scrapped patents and funded the research outright. Of the money spent today, barely 20% goes to research, the rest goes to marketing, administration, and to comparatively inefficient and expensive production. That's the effect you get from monopoly rights.
But that's really a separate issue beyond the argument about the importance of vaccines.
If they can research how to cure your cancer... which do you think they will pick?
Eh, you do realize that HPV vaccinations essentially _are_ 'cures for cancer', right...? With current research indicating that many cancers may be linked to various virus types, many more such 'cures' may be coming, and many cancers may become horrors of the past.
I have little faith in the pharmaceutical industry, but vaccinations that can essentially wipe out horrific diseases is not something to be taken lightly.
As has been noted many times, proper sources aren't necessarily always all that good either. A healthy dose of skepticism is always useful, and when it's something important, verify claims against multiple independent sources or even yourself.
Of course, in this case the guys name is so long that even adding a whole extra name is hardly more significant than a spelling error, which frankly isn't that uncommon in newspapers anyway.
At least dm-crypt simply has multiple passphrases unlocking the same encryption key, and I'd expect most others to do it the same way. So, fortunately, there's no extra overhead.
"for fear of a grave "threat" made by America last year if the evidence were published"
"Mr Miliband's lawyers confirmed that under the Obama administration the position had not changed."
See, apparently there have been words from the US on this, the fact that such communications do not go through the tabloids are hardly surprising. The lack of statements or explicit directives is irrelevant; now it's Obamas administration, the buck stops with him. He could easily make a statement or directive to the contrary and let the UK courts have their evidence and remove any such concern.
but to say that Obama has threatened to withhold intelligence is simply false.
Ok, Obama has failed to prevent his subordinates from asserting that no change has been made to the standing threat to withhold intelligence.
The ethical culpability is the same.
Of course, should Obama actually issue a directive to allow the release of information I'm not convinced the UK government would comply anyway; personally I suspect the UK partially at least wants to hide their own culpability and is using the US as an excuse.
Unfortunately, I suspect it's not so much about what he hasn't had time to do, but about what he's also done. Threatening the UK with withdrawing intelligence cooperation if the UK government hands evidence in a torture case to the courts. Appointing RIAA lawyers to significant positions. Nominating no less than three tax evaders. Cozying up with Blair.
I had some hopes for Obama, and I still hope he wont be as much of a disaster as that last guy, but he's shown either some seriously bad judgment or signs of getting reeled in. It's not a good start.
The difficulty to penetrate cell networks is well known; despite the massive resources of counterinsurgency, counterespionage and organized crime policing, penetrating a single cell takes massive effort and is often of limited use.
As long as there is some form of closed circle of people
It's not a closed circle of people. It's an interlinked cell structure; you talk only to your closest most trusted friends, they talk only to their closest friends, yet everyone is linked to everyone _through other people_.
You don't know Madonnas sound technician, but through an odd coincidence, your mothers close co-workers daughter is best friends with the girl who goes out with him. Your query for Madonnas latest goes to your mom, from her to the co-worker, to the daughter, to the best friend to the technician. Everyone sees only the neighbours, yet the query is routed through the whole with nobody knowing where it came from apart from the closest hop and the response goes back, without anyone again seeing anything but the closest hop.
Think the tech is going to betray his girlfriend? Your mom is going to betray you? Is you asking your mother for something organized crime? Is the tech letting his girlfriend have the file? Would the physical replication of the same function, like friends copying eachothers tapes be organized crime?
With growth comes visibility and undeserved trust.
There is no growth in visibility as growth is organic, personal and disconnected. If someone undeserved gets trusted the penetration stops with the person trusting the untrustworthy person. The untrustworthy person can never see anyone but the person who trusted him. As far as he can see, all queries come from his 'friend', and anything he sends he sends to his 'friend'.
This is nothing like the 'filesharing hubs' or closed servers that that you appear to be thinking about. This replicates the models of clandestine cell systems used by military, intelligence and insurgencies but in a potentially vastly magnified scale.
Why does a firm wishing to enter the x86 market need to buy licenses
They're probably alluding to possible patents held. Of course, NVidia has them in the graphics part and could leverage that anyway. Just another reason why patents need to be scrapped and replaced with a non-exclusive system of financial incentive, if we need one at all.
however did AMD come to own any
Ancient history. AMD got into the x86 market in the 80's when the USG required multiple sources for many components, so Intel was more or less forced to let them in if they wanted USG business. Once they were established they've worked on improvements themselves which they license to Intel, etc.
I'd argue that the people who don't buy today don't increase the balance price
Indeed, but removing the only available 'competition' leads to a price shift higher (if there are actually any lost sales to piracy, which may be debatable). That's fundamental economic rules, and a large part of why IP material has increased in price for so long (pricing follows disposable income, not free market competition)....and risk criminal charges?
See, with the next-gen nets there is no risk. On one hand f2f darknets are fundamentally impenetrable as you never connect to any untrusted nodes, and on the other hand you're never engaging in anything but copying to your closest friends.
This is a fundamental aspect of psychology: the chance of getting caught, not the severity of punishment is what controls behaviour. You see it every day in traffic and in many other places. It is perhaps unfortunate, and not what the lawmakers would like, but it's the way humans work.
they'll know that they're on the wrong side of the law.
In this case I think there's a very large group who considers the law to be on the wrong side of right. That's the risk of following special-interest lobbyists and avoiding implementing reasonable solutions (there are many, following the radio model and taxing p2p sites with revenues going to artists and writers would be one way). Unfortunately, this also decreases the average respect for law and lawmakers even further.
they'll need software which they'll only get from questionable sources
There are already several unquestionable softwares. Freenet, GNUnet, Turtle, WASTE.
I understand the "bring it on" attitude.
Personally I don't have a "bring it on" attitude. I pay for most of my music. Call it an attitude of inevitability; the move to f2f networks is simply what will happen. For better or worse. While I'm libertarian to some extent I'm not a fundamentalist and I can recognize some good being done in certain network surveillance; the trouble if this comes to pass is that the clandestine cell structure used by some very undesirable organizations will become a common, if not default mode of communication for many.
We get a complete pre-built ubiqutous impenetrable communications network available for every crackpot in the world.
Yay.
organizing a friend-to-friend copyright infringement cell
See, there wont be any 'organizing'. It wont be any more 'organized' than friends handing their encryption keys to eachother. Like 'friending' in social networks. One huge social network without any central point.
The only reason it's not pervasively used already is that the groups using it, dissidents, hard-core libertarians, crypto-anarchists, the curious and various less palatable elements simply aren't such huge groups. With this, the influx will reach far beyond critical mass.
So it simply isn't going to work the way you think, instead it will ensure that most communications go permanently out of reach of any monitoring. Inevitably getting the opposite result; whatever deterrence is felt today through the openness of the networks will be gone as well.
It should be obvious to anyone who's read a paper the last decade; humans as a rule don't react that well to threats. Many are psychologically geared to get rid of the threat rather than comply; in this case it will be a no-brainer.
so raising the price of the illegal method of acquisition is exactly what they want and will have the desired effect.
The price on IP products is set according to the principles on monopoly pricing, IE, revenue is maximized when the loss of customers who cannot buy outweighs the increased revenue of the ones who do buy. Which means that the tighter the control the more prices will rise, and profitability in any black market will rise as well.
You see that exact function in countries with high taxes on alcohol and tobacco.
How many people are going to work or pay their way into clandestine file sharing clubs
Some, probably as many as are engaged in illicit alcohol and tobacco smuggling. More than enough to subsidize new criminal networks.
However, the vast majority wont be paying for clandestine filesharing clubs, they'll simply move from open networks to friend-to-friend encrypted multiprotocol stealthed darknets. Clandestine cell networks. No 'filesharing club' needed, you just connect to your friends with encryption keys, who connect to their friends, who connects to their friends. Small world theory and all that. Then you simply send out queries, where each friend asks his friends on your behalf, who then ask their friends, etc and the transfers go back. You never see anyone but your friends, hence the networks become inpenetrable yet vast. You'll lose some efficiency, but the question of filesharing and untraceable unmonitorable communications will be settled once and for all.
I've had an emusic subscription since I heard of them, so pretty much all of it. Which exchanged maybe three or four CD purchases per year for $12 per month, ie, at least tripling the amount I spend on music. Of course, I also get at least six times as much music so it's a fair deal.
Where was all the concern about "artist compensation"
The concern over artist and creator compensation has always been there, since the beginning of copyright. The fact that you apparently don't know that indicates you may need to study up on the topic.
Copyright, and in fact, most IP, is simply a horrendously inefficient way to get money to the supposed purpose. With more than 90% of the funds lost on the way it means it's costing the economy huge sums for nothing; an efficient allocation system could support ten times as many artists and creators as the current one. For the exact same money consumers are spending today.
before enforcement started getting serious?
Enforcement is irrelevant; next-gen systems will be encrypted stealthed multi-protocol friend-to-friend darknets which will make any monitoring impossible, basically the computerized and automated version of the sneakernet friend-to-friend copying. If the pressure to move to such systems becomes significant, any chance to ever exert any form of control will be permanently gone. And with it goes any chance to monitor any other transfers and communications, as well as much of the efficiency (what there is) of transfers. The whole of social communications will have moved to a clandestine cell system. For better or worse.
The window of opportunity to implement a productive solution to the issue is closing. But whatever else happens, the current model is dead.
Unions supporting intellectual monopoly laws is also self-defeating; costs such as IP added to the economy are one of the reasons western workers have difficulty competing with lower wage countries.
IP laws are not free. Strengthening them is the macroeconomic equivalent of increasing taxation levels such as VAT (which has a similar distribution) across the economy as a whole, and as a non-progressive tax it tends to increase the cost pressure on the lower to mid income groups the most. Pretty much the same group the union members belong to.
Artist and creator compensation are important things, but the current construct of IP laws are far less efficient in getting the money to the right people than even the worst run government programs. Not even a 10th of the money paid by the population reaches the intended group, a level that for any actually accountable and controlled taxation form would cause an uproar.
Slashdot Mirror
Remove marketing and the only way people are going to hear about games is word of mouth.
I've always suspected all those gaming mags were just huge paid-for-ads...
No, seriously, and apologies for being snide, but the games industry is one of the least dependent on word of mouth. Reviews and recommendations highly sought after by consumers. Combine it with web 2.0 and you have all the marketing channels you need, but more tailored towards people finding what people want instead of telling them what you (or a few players) have.
marketing costs a lot of money.
You mistake cause and effect. Marketing costs a lot of money because the large entities (try to) make it necessary.
drown in the flood of games that are released.
Drown in the flood of marketing by the large entities, you mean.
A bad game with marketing will almost always outsell a good one with no marketing.
I'm sure you're right, and that's one of the more severely damaging aspects of copyright. In a free market system with interchangeable goods there's a limit to the value of marketing; make too much and your product becomes too expensive and people buy the competition. In a monopoly system with low product fungibility the limit is simply where lost sales are not lost to competition but to unaffordability, that limit is much higher.
It's an effect that's noticable in every monopoly protected sector, from pharmaceuticals to music; more money gets spent on marketing than on the actual product.
Which is rather tragic, as it means we're getting less of what we, as a society, actually want, in exchange for more of what we don't want. Way to go, intellectual 'rights'.
And twice as tragic, as most such goods mostly sell themselves if left to do so.
I don't personally think it's the job of governments to support
Well, as copyright is inherently a government subsidy/taxation/benefit system, the end result of government paying outright for OSS development may actually result in a lower level of taxation/subsidies extracted from the economy as a whole.
Personally I'm doubtful that government subsidies are helpful, but between the choice of government paying outright or government granting monopoly rights I'd go for the lesser evil and would favor the less wasteful method of paying outright.
They're four years behind the market.
Frankly, I haven't been overly impressed with the speed of the market. What's it now, three, four years and VMWare still can't deliver a Linux VIClient?
In the mid to long term the ability to leverage OS developments as foundation for the virtualization will be far more important, trying to make hypervisors into operating systems in their own right is going exactly in the wrong direction. While it's understandable why the licensing issues make that road desirable for closed source players, the fact is that they're taking on replicating and maintaining massive functionality ranging from drivers through storage systems through clustering on their own.
There's a long way to go for them, statistically.
Perhaps. On the other hands, things like single support path, no more upgrade-cycle bugs and problems, no more waiting for both vendors to support before you can deploy, favourable support pricing, the ability to leverage knowledge, etc, offers some significant advantages.
Considering that it hasn't been supported that long the deployment rate I've seen and heard about is in line with what can be expected. Multi-thousand NOC's don't move that fast.
That lunch has been eaten
I'd say it's more like that lunch has been the only lunch in town. Unfortunately, being the single lunch vendor may lead one to overestimate ones popularity and the loyalty of customers, particularly if one uses ones position to maximize revenues.
doesn't reflect the general consensus of the wider population
I think that depends very much on what demographic you survey and exactly what questions you ask.
Which would pay artists for cases of internet piracy where there is no sale how?
Most of the time there is some revenue collected; even in the TPB case, with ads. If it was moved to a levy/sales-tax system I'd expect the available channels to morph into analogues of radio/cable TV. Commercial financed or subscription based systems.
There is also price point where the illegitimate systems simply aren't worth it and with a mandatory licensing/fee system the professional sites could easily offer services such as selection, availability, guaranteed quality and formats, freedom from infections, etc, that would simply make it a better deal to pay for it. Like someone noted, torrent sites are often crap when it comes to less widely popular material.
At that point DRM becomes unnecessary; it's easier to pay for and get what you want from a legitimate site than to mess around with dubious sites.
Why do you expect we would pay for more artists
Because 50% of end-sales revenue is still more than they're getting today from legitimate sales through channels, even if prices on end-sales were cut by 80%. And that's below what I think would be the inflection point where legitimate services would be of more value than free as in beer. Compare with program cost of cable or radio to get an estimate of the low-end of a possible revenue stream.
basic premise that people 'want' to pay
People will pay more than enough to support artists and creators, but not, perhaps, enough to support the current cost structures. They'll pay for convenience, but they won't pay because they're told to. Personally I pay for Emusic, which is a good price/value/convenience proposition for me, although I suspect it may be a bit expensive for the average radio listener, and not very useful if they listen to mainstream music. It also means I'm paying more than 6 times what I did when I was buying a few cd's per year, yet each track gets less money. It wont pay for huge marketing campaigns for every track, it wont pay for executives, release parties, payola, etc, but those things aren't necessarily something that should be paid for by what is a public incentive system.
I'd prefer to see such a resolution as it at least makes it possible to solve the initial investment problem, and it makes it possible to balance non-exclusive revenue incentives between interest groups, to maximize the value generated for society.
Either way tho, the current system is dead; the next-gen networks will be anonymous, encrypted and f2f cell based, making them impervious to monitoring.
Some words have more than one meaning.
Yes, I see you do get the point. 'Pirate' has been used and abused in so many ways that you cannot infer any specific meaning of the word anymore. It can mean anything from actual illegal acts to people doing things we don't like to people opposed to copyright on principle, it's been adopted by political movements, it's used with pride, and it's used as a derogative.
To claim, like the grand-grandparent did, that the name suggests intent requires an unambiguous name, or a unambiguous context. As neither name or context is in one of the possible unambiguous forms, no conclusion can be drawn as to the actual meaning or intent.
from heavily biased sources
Considering the owners of traditional media often has certain parts of their business model dependent on copyright it's hard to find any sources that aren't biased. Which is, of course, the problem with holding a serious discussion on the future of various intellectual property rights.
you go back to the old patronage model of yestercentury
That's a strawman argument. There are many other possible models.
For example, you could put a sales-tax on any material or revenue derived from sales or reproduction of works, with the proceeds going directly to the creators and artists. That would be somewhat similar to the radio model, but structured to include physical duplication as well as internet based replication. Further, such a model would direct much more of the customers money directly to the artists and creators, leading to a much better cost efficiency than the current system.
It would also have the huge advantage of allowing a multitude of new business models ranging from print-your-cd kiosks to libraries of all music ever made.
It would also have the advantage of saving artists and creators from the painfully subservient situation of trying to negotiate a contract while having basically no negotiating power at all; if their products generate revenue for someone, they'd get their share automatically.
lacking in perspective on the significance of this whole issue
If the question was merely one of payment, perhaps. But as it ties into everything from cultural legacy to freedom of communications to western economic competitive ability to the future evolution of society, I'd say the issue has a lot of significance. Well within the range where civil disobedience is acceptable, if not outright a moral obligation.
I mean, can you imagine what we're losing in the current system? How many artists we could pay if it was structured so more of the revenue went directly to them?
Can you even imagine having all art of humankind available at your fingertips? Cross-referenced as wikipedia, social-networked taste indexed to suggest material for you? Can you imagine the value lost to society due to the current model making this impossible?
Without a complete rewrite of copyright from an exclusive system to a monetary inventive system it's not going to happen; the owners of modern material don't want old or unmarketed material competing with the new to any greater extent than it already is.
it's called The Pirate Bay!
On the other hand, it's not called 'the copyright infringement bay', nor are they accused of boarding ships on the high seas, so I'm not sure it's appropriate to draw any conclusions from that.
I'd say it's more a tongue-in-cheek naming poking fun at expected users and preempting expected name-calling.
shows fairly clearly what the intended purpose of TPB really is.
Providing and indexing links to the material the users want? It is, perhaps, a bit saddening that not more links were pointing to legitimate linux torrents (altho I suspect that is more because linux torrents have specific release sites that are well known to users, and the vast majority of linux programs are fed through packaging systems rather than random download sites).
I have no doubt that were the majority of the users of TPB mainly interested in Linux distributions, that's what you'd see. Which indicates that the material found is not so much a reflection of intent on the part of the site, but rather a reflection of the desire of the users.
Following Apple? More like following anything anyone else does. The shotgun model of business strategies? Throw enough spaghetti against the wall and maybe something sticks?
By now they've me-too'd so many things it's getting downright weird. Were I a stockholder I'd demand they stop wasting my money and if they're afraid their core business is getting undermined and they can't come up with a coherent plan for the future then hand out the revenue to the stockholders and let them decide where to invest instead.
how complete and obvious bullshit can be earnestly believed
Rather like how otherwise intelligent people actually appear to believe copyright was ever about paying creators and artists, eh?
Not exactly clear on what you mean by property rights here.
Property rights like all other property rights. I buy something it's mine to do with as I wish.
Intellectual monopoly law, from the perspective of property, is fundamentally a restriction of property rights. The owner of the property is prevented from exercising the rights he has with any other property until the expiration of whatever monopoly rights governs certain aspects of his property.
no movies can be made with any expectation of profit, which means that almost no movies will be made anymore
Funny then how pretty much no movies every show any profit, yet they still get made, eh? Oh, right, that's about corporations screwing artists and creators, so that's ok.
Perhaps we'd lose big-budget productions, but between the remake-of-the decade genre and formulaic productions, I can live without them. Movies would still get made (I mean, have you looked at the amount of film that gets produced on minimal budgets?), and with the rate technology improves, you hardly need a big studio to create rather amazing footage anymore.
The fact is copyright is a very inefficient way of directing money to where you want it to go. Most of it gets squandered on monopoly expenses, advertising, channel control, etc, far worse than even any government program. Restructuring intellectual incentives as actual monetary incentives, like direct revenue sharing from end-point sales or ads, would direct far more of the revenue directly to the productive parties, allowing far more art to be funded with incentives.
But like I said, it's never been about creators and artists, so I doubt we'll get a complete fundamental restructuring of incentives before the MAFIAA corps are wiped out.
Neither of these do more harm than good.
There are many indications that copyright does more harm than good for the vast majority of artists and creators. The concentration of revenue streams derived from monopoly rights is largely what drives the marginalization of most material; it is what drives the profitability of everything from payola to channel control.
If you had content (a song for example) that was a method for you to put food on the table
Most songs do not put food on the table; most don't even get played on the radio as they're not on the corporations consultants dj list. Knowing that copyright isn't giving me any money, and in fact even prevents the exposure of my art, I doubt that I'd feel differently.
Of course, if I was an exec for whom having other peoples songs was a method for me to put coke in my nose I might very well feel differently.
If copyright was ever about artists or creators, it'd be written to ensure they got a cut out of every transaction. They don't, and very little of the money consumers spend on copyrighted material ever comes near the parties it was supposedly intended for.
Sounds like a job for power-over-ethernet. Or ethernet-over-powerlines. I wonder if anyone's tried to connect an electric fence transformer to ethernet shielding.
More seriously tho, with fiber cabling another possibility would be to simply install microducts or some other form of duct suitable for protecting fiber from natural enemies. Vermin control or not, fiber isn't exactly the most rugged form of cabling, and it's not really made to withstand a uncontrolled environment on its own.
A cure would be applied to those who are infected to cure.
If it is at all possible to effect an actual cure. Many virus types hide from even the immune system, so once you've got it, it's there for life. Which may be significantly shortened if the virus wrecks havoc on your DNA and causes a cancer of some sort, or suppresses the nearby immune system, preventing proper response to other random cancer cells.
Take a serious look at uncured diseases today. There are usually reasons they're not cured yet, and it tends to be that they are really, really nasty. They mutate. They hide. They develop immunities against anything thrown at them simply by being highly varied so the only thing the average cure accomplishes is wiping out... most... maybe 99.999% of the infection. But only all of it would be enough.
but the dollar value is MUCH higher in vaccinations.
Yes, well, for the money spent on medicines today we could get five times the research if we simply scrapped patents and funded the research outright. Of the money spent today, barely 20% goes to research, the rest goes to marketing, administration, and to comparatively inefficient and expensive production. That's the effect you get from monopoly rights.
But that's really a separate issue beyond the argument about the importance of vaccines.
fought against the HPV vaccination
If they can research how to cure your cancer ... which do you think they will pick?
Eh, you do realize that HPV vaccinations essentially _are_ 'cures for cancer', right...? With current research indicating that many cancers may be linked to various virus types, many more such 'cures' may be coming, and many cancers may become horrors of the past.
I have little faith in the pharmaceutical industry, but vaccinations that can essentially wipe out horrific diseases is not something to be taken lightly.
we give Egypt so much money to keep their Human Rights up to standard with the UN
Somehow I think the message may get slightly diluted from the rendering operations where the services of Egyptian torturers get used.
Maybe we could impose sanctions on the torture service industry as a start...
As has been noted many times, proper sources aren't necessarily always all that good either. A healthy dose of skepticism is always useful, and when it's something important, verify claims against multiple independent sources or even yourself.
Of course, in this case the guys name is so long that even adding a whole extra name is hardly more significant than a spelling error, which frankly isn't that uncommon in newspapers anyway.
Obviously this will increase the overhead
At least dm-crypt simply has multiple passphrases unlocking the same encryption key, and I'd expect most others to do it the same way. So, fortunately, there's no extra overhead.
From the very same article you linked:
"for fear of a grave "threat" made by America last year if the evidence were published"
"Mr Miliband's lawyers confirmed that under the Obama administration the position had not changed."
See, apparently there have been words from the US on this, the fact that such communications do not go through the tabloids are hardly surprising. The lack of statements or explicit directives is irrelevant; now it's Obamas administration, the buck stops with him. He could easily make a statement or directive to the contrary and let the UK courts have their evidence and remove any such concern.
but to say that Obama has threatened to withhold intelligence is simply false.
Ok, Obama has failed to prevent his subordinates from asserting that no change has been made to the standing threat to withhold intelligence.
The ethical culpability is the same.
Of course, should Obama actually issue a directive to allow the release of information I'm not convinced the UK government would comply anyway; personally I suspect the UK partially at least wants to hide their own culpability and is using the US as an excuse.
A couple of weeks in office and Obama has already
Unfortunately, I suspect it's not so much about what he hasn't had time to do, but about what he's also done. Threatening the UK with withdrawing intelligence cooperation if the UK government hands evidence in a torture case to the courts. Appointing RIAA lawyers to significant positions. Nominating no less than three tax evaders. Cozying up with Blair.
I had some hopes for Obama, and I still hope he wont be as much of a disaster as that last guy, but he's shown either some seriously bad judgment or signs of getting reeled in. It's not a good start.
People rat on each other. People get caught.
You need to choose your friends better. :)
The difficulty to penetrate cell networks is well known; despite the massive resources of counterinsurgency, counterespionage and organized crime policing, penetrating a single cell takes massive effort and is often of limited use.
As long as there is some form of closed circle of people
It's not a closed circle of people. It's an interlinked cell structure; you talk only to your closest most trusted friends, they talk only to their closest friends, yet everyone is linked to everyone _through other people_.
You don't know Madonnas sound technician, but through an odd coincidence, your mothers close co-workers daughter is best friends with the girl who goes out with him. Your query for Madonnas latest goes to your mom, from her to the co-worker, to the daughter, to the best friend to the technician. Everyone sees only the neighbours, yet the query is routed through the whole with nobody knowing where it came from apart from the closest hop and the response goes back, without anyone again seeing anything but the closest hop.
Think the tech is going to betray his girlfriend? Your mom is going to betray you? Is you asking your mother for something organized crime? Is the tech letting his girlfriend have the file? Would the physical replication of the same function, like friends copying eachothers tapes be organized crime?
With growth comes visibility and undeserved trust.
There is no growth in visibility as growth is organic, personal and disconnected. If someone undeserved gets trusted the penetration stops with the person trusting the untrustworthy person. The untrustworthy person can never see anyone but the person who trusted him. As far as he can see, all queries come from his 'friend', and anything he sends he sends to his 'friend'.
This is nothing like the 'filesharing hubs' or closed servers that that you appear to be thinking about. This replicates the models of clandestine cell systems used by military, intelligence and insurgencies but in a potentially vastly magnified scale.
Why does a firm wishing to enter the x86 market need to buy licenses
They're probably alluding to possible patents held. Of course, NVidia has them in the graphics part and could leverage that anyway. Just another reason why patents need to be scrapped and replaced with a non-exclusive system of financial incentive, if we need one at all.
however did AMD come to own any
Ancient history. AMD got into the x86 market in the 80's when the USG required multiple sources for many components, so Intel was more or less forced to let them in if they wanted USG business. Once they were established they've worked on improvements themselves which they license to Intel, etc.
I'd argue that the people who don't buy today don't increase the balance price
Indeed, but removing the only available 'competition' leads to a price shift higher (if there are actually any lost sales to piracy, which may be debatable). That's fundamental economic rules, and a large part of why IP material has increased in price for so long (pricing follows disposable income, not free market competition). ...and risk criminal charges?
See, with the next-gen nets there is no risk. On one hand f2f darknets are fundamentally impenetrable as you never connect to any untrusted nodes, and on the other hand you're never engaging in anything but copying to your closest friends.
This is a fundamental aspect of psychology: the chance of getting caught, not the severity of punishment is what controls behaviour. You see it every day in traffic and in many other places. It is perhaps unfortunate, and not what the lawmakers would like, but it's the way humans work.
they'll know that they're on the wrong side of the law.
In this case I think there's a very large group who considers the law to be on the wrong side of right. That's the risk of following special-interest lobbyists and avoiding implementing reasonable solutions (there are many, following the radio model and taxing p2p sites with revenues going to artists and writers would be one way). Unfortunately, this also decreases the average respect for law and lawmakers even further.
they'll need software which they'll only get from questionable sources
There are already several unquestionable softwares. Freenet, GNUnet, Turtle, WASTE.
I understand the "bring it on" attitude.
Personally I don't have a "bring it on" attitude. I pay for most of my music. Call it an attitude of inevitability; the move to f2f networks is simply what will happen. For better or worse. While I'm libertarian to some extent I'm not a fundamentalist and I can recognize some good being done in certain network surveillance; the trouble if this comes to pass is that the clandestine cell structure used by some very undesirable organizations will become a common, if not default mode of communication for many.
We get a complete pre-built ubiqutous impenetrable communications network available for every crackpot in the world.
Yay.
organizing a friend-to-friend copyright infringement cell
See, there wont be any 'organizing'. It wont be any more 'organized' than friends handing their encryption keys to eachother. Like 'friending' in social networks. One huge social network without any central point.
The only reason it's not pervasively used already is that the groups using it, dissidents, hard-core libertarians, crypto-anarchists, the curious and various less palatable elements simply aren't such huge groups. With this, the influx will reach far beyond critical mass.
So it simply isn't going to work the way you think, instead it will ensure that most communications go permanently out of reach of any monitoring. Inevitably getting the opposite result; whatever deterrence is felt today through the openness of the networks will be gone as well.
It should be obvious to anyone who's read a paper the last decade; humans as a rule don't react that well to threats. Many are psychologically geared to get rid of the threat rather than comply; in this case it will be a no-brainer.
so raising the price of the illegal method of acquisition is exactly what they want and will have the desired effect.
The price on IP products is set according to the principles on monopoly pricing, IE, revenue is maximized when the loss of customers who cannot buy outweighs the increased revenue of the ones who do buy. Which means that the tighter the control the more prices will rise, and profitability in any black market will rise as well.
You see that exact function in countries with high taxes on alcohol and tobacco.
How many people are going to work or pay their way into clandestine file sharing clubs
Some, probably as many as are engaged in illicit alcohol and tobacco smuggling. More than enough to subsidize new criminal networks.
However, the vast majority wont be paying for clandestine filesharing clubs, they'll simply move from open networks to friend-to-friend encrypted multiprotocol stealthed darknets. Clandestine cell networks. No 'filesharing club' needed, you just connect to your friends with encryption keys, who connect to their friends, who connects to their friends. Small world theory and all that. Then you simply send out queries, where each friend asks his friends on your behalf, who then ask their friends, etc and the transfers go back. You never see anyone but your friends, hence the networks become inpenetrable yet vast. You'll lose some efficiency, but the question of filesharing and untraceable unmonitorable communications will be settled once and for all.
And what percentage of your music is paid for?
I've had an emusic subscription since I heard of them, so pretty much all of it. Which exchanged maybe three or four CD purchases per year for $12 per month, ie, at least tripling the amount I spend on music. Of course, I also get at least six times as much music so it's a fair deal.
Where was all the concern about "artist compensation"
The concern over artist and creator compensation has always been there, since the beginning of copyright. The fact that you apparently don't know that indicates you may need to study up on the topic.
Copyright, and in fact, most IP, is simply a horrendously inefficient way to get money to the supposed purpose. With more than 90% of the funds lost on the way it means it's costing the economy huge sums for nothing; an efficient allocation system could support ten times as many artists and creators as the current one. For the exact same money consumers are spending today.
before enforcement started getting serious?
Enforcement is irrelevant; next-gen systems will be encrypted stealthed multi-protocol friend-to-friend darknets which will make any monitoring impossible, basically the computerized and automated version of the sneakernet friend-to-friend copying. If the pressure to move to such systems becomes significant, any chance to ever exert any form of control will be permanently gone. And with it goes any chance to monitor any other transfers and communications, as well as much of the efficiency (what there is) of transfers. The whole of social communications will have moved to a clandestine cell system. For better or worse.
The window of opportunity to implement a productive solution to the issue is closing. But whatever else happens, the current model is dead.
Unions supporting intellectual monopoly laws is also self-defeating; costs such as IP added to the economy are one of the reasons western workers have difficulty competing with lower wage countries.
IP laws are not free. Strengthening them is the macroeconomic equivalent of increasing taxation levels such as VAT (which has a similar distribution) across the economy as a whole, and as a non-progressive tax it tends to increase the cost pressure on the lower to mid income groups the most. Pretty much the same group the union members belong to.
Artist and creator compensation are important things, but the current construct of IP laws are far less efficient in getting the money to the right people than even the worst run government programs. Not even a 10th of the money paid by the population reaches the intended group, a level that for any actually accountable and controlled taxation form would cause an uproar.