First, let me say that some are confusing copyright with trademark. Mickey Mouse is a trademark (or should be), a movie starring Mickey Mouse has a copyright.
That means you won't see Mickey Mouse Rolling Papers or Mickey Mouse Chinese Food, just as you wouldn't see Coca-Cola rolling papers, even though Coca-Cola's been around a lot longer than Mr. Disney.
The problem with perpetual copyright is that it robs our generation and others of potentially useful content.
I'll use the video game industry since it's something that most of us can identify with. Many of us remember a favorite game we played in the arcades or on our Atari 2600, or Sega or Nintendo or what have you. Some of the current games today owe their roots to something spawned well in the past, and something that's likely unplayable today. If you want to revisit these games now, you're going to have a hard time finding them -- because they aren't made anymore. You're going to have to find a working game system and a working game for the consoles, you'll have to find an arcade game that wasn't gutted for the arcade games. Most of these things were not built to last (nor were they expected to last) twenty or thirty years. Most of them did not. Some of these games were expensive enough, odd enough, and unpopular enough that perhaps NONE survive (have you seen an original Street Fighter with the pressure-sensitive "punch" buttons lately?).
These games are disappearing because there is no marketing incentive for Sega or Capcom or whomever to sell just a very small handful to a few dedicated customers. These companies deal in bulk, and likely, would require a massive re-tooling to produce a very small run of games. It's not profitable for them -- so no new copies are produced. However, for a small company, it might well be possible. Pristine copies of Dragon's Lair go for over $1500 on ebay (a complete Transformers set goes for over $10,000). At least Dragon's Lair was popular enough and adaptable enough that they released a DVD of the original game. Most games don't get this fate.
Right now there are games I played and enjoyed as a kid that will not be played by future generations because they simply aren't available. Just think there is a 15 year old kid that loves video games that has no idea what Pitfall! was, why it was revolutionary at the time, and why the game play was fun even though you didn't kill anything or have a real, definable goal. These games (and movies and songs) slip out of production, and slowly they deteriorate into nothing. By the time the copyright expires and they can be printed again, there'll be no surviving copies to copy from.
Already there are famous movies (Nosferatu comes to mind) of which no pristine copy exists. This is a piece of our culture and our history that we can never remake, and never get back. Already there are CDs that I can't buy and can't find for a reasonable price. If the surviving copies are damaged, we can never get that back. Imagine if Beethoven's fifth had a perpetual copyright, and somewhere down the line the publisher wasn't making enough money and stopped printing copies. Then imagine if no one could print copies, and the copies that were left were lost to the ravages of time. It's quite possible we could be without this work of art today. Imagine if all his works were copyrighted this way, and none of it survived. We'd never know Beethoven or the contribution he made to our culture.
Imagine time traveling 200 years into the future to realize no one knew what Pac-Man was, or who the Beatles were, or what books Neil Stephenson wrote?
If life is such a zero sum game, why are living conditions so much better today?
Why is it our poor do so much better than poor people did a hundred years ago? Why are the rich much richer today?
I don't think we stole that money from other developing countries, and I think pretty much across the board (other than countries ravaged by war), living conditions are better or at least equal today than they were 200 years ago.
Don't forget that our truly poor people here in America would be considered rich in many third world countries. Many welfare-class poor families have an automobile, a roof over their head and food on the table. It may not be the best available here, but it's better than you can get in some parts of the world. Those are our poor! Even the homeless can find a bed and a hot meal if they want it. Provided how? Charity.
Socialism is not the answer. I don't think Bill Gates owes any money back to the rest of the country -- though indirectly he gives a lot back. Most of his wealth is sitting in a bank or in the stock market where it can be used by other people, and at the same time, he's giving massive amounts to charity because he quite literally doesn't need it. However, just because he doesn't need it doesn't mean we have the right to go and foricibly take it.
In every country that has tried socialism, it has lead not to wealth and innovation, but back down the path to the lowest common denomonator.
Socialism is a wonderful ideal, and that is what makes it so appealing. It appeals to our hearts -- wouldn't it be nice if we could all get along and cooperate and help each other out. But, it doesn't work in a real world with real human beings. Because everyone is rewarded the same, it leads to cooruption and an appeal to the lowest common denominator. Why should I stay late and bust my hump if I'm going to be rewarded the same as my coworker that leaves early and surfs the net all day? Why bother? Why bother having a job at all if the state will take care of me?
I too waited tables (and bartended) my way through college. The ones that sat the most almost always tipped the least, and they never thought about the money that I or the restaurant could have been making off that table.
It was "we paid for a meal, and we're going to sit here until we feel like leaving". I actually had two people come in at 4:00 pm and leave after midnight. Tip? A wonderful $1.50.
By law if I rent your house, I own it for the time that I rent it, with all the rights that entails. Now, the title of the house never changes hands, because you didn't acutally buy the house, but under the legal system, any rented property is considered your property. The only thing is that I after a certain time (the rental period) I must turn the house back over to you. There may also be other exceptions in the rental agreement, but you do legally own the property and can legally do whatever would be legal in your own home.
That includes renting out the house to other people . It's called subletting. You could also "sell" the house (or basically the right to live there) for that time period that you rent. There's nothing that the landlord can do about that -- though they may not like it much and may try to evict you.
I have an old Acer 6202 CD-RW, which has been burning fine for about four years now. It's probably finished off at least a fewthousand CDs (at one time it was the only CD-R in my whole circle of hacker friends), and it still burns well, and never makes coasters. In fact, as far as I can tell, every coaster it ever made was directly attributable to some piece of hardware other than itself.
Can't ask for much more than that.
Also had a roommate that had an Acer computer while I was in college. Wasn't the best machine out there, and was extremely propriatary, but otherwise, a good solid computer. He's still using it -- not as a gaming machine or desktop, but it's just fine for a mp3 server.
I wouldn't buy one of their computers, the one I played with was too hard to upgrade. However, I can't say that it was a total turd, like a Packard Bell.
A lot of people don't realize that alcohol and tobacco aren't legal, they are decriminalized. There are laws that say when and where you can use them, where you can buy them, etc. Like here, I can't buy alcohol before noon on Sunday or after midnight most nights. I can't buy hard liquor at all on Sunday and only before 9pm any other day of the week. I'm not allowed to be drunk in public, I'm not allowed to give either to kids.
Why not say, ok, you can do any drug you want, but you're going to have be over a certain age, see a doctor to make sure you aren't addicted, you can only do it in your house or in designated clubs. You can't give it to little kids. You can't drive a car under the influence -- and prosecute these people. The ones sitting in their home not bothering anyone aren't the problem.
I always looked at it this way, it's a whole lot like prohibition, scary parallels in fact. Decriminalize it, tax the hell out of it, and the manufacturers will still be able to undercut the sales of the black market. No one is going to want to buy an unknown something off the street when they can go down the road and know exactly what they are getting, and in what amount. You also don't have to worry as much about overdosing or poisoning yourself because the stuff you bought was more/less pure than you're used to. It's why you don't see many moonshiners or alcohol bootleggers today. It's cheaper and better to buy down at the corner store. Not only that, the government makes money instead of wasting it fighting a futile war! The black market is gone, and street crime goes down. I don't know why this is so hard to wrap your brain around.
I've known users (not dealers) that have had their door broken down in the middle of the afternoon. No knock, just BOOM! and a bunch of guys dressed in black combat gear bust in and start ordering people around using some very derogatory terms I won't mention here.
Why? Because an upset friend called into crimestoppers and said my friends were expecting a ten-pound brick of marijuana delivered to that house on that day, and that they wanted to sell it to neighborhood kids. On top of that, they said my friends had a small arsenal, including semi-automatic assault rifles (not true) and grenades (absolutely not true). This nessessitated the "no-knock" entry and SWAT team and full assualt gear. Never mind there was no evidence -- none -- never mind they only had an anonymous informant, they still raided the house.
Say what you want, it was an anonymous tip, and there's no way to track down the person that made it, unless they were foolish enough to try to get their crimestopper reward.
End of story, some marijuana was found and my friends went to jail. While they were in jail (for about $15 of marijuana) someone in the neighborhood walked through the busted door and cleaned out their apartment. The police said it wasn't their problem -- even though they caused it.
I had a friend lose a new Honda Civic because he was unfortunate enough to get caught driving with a small amount of coke in the console. My aunt almost lost a rental house because a tenant was selling drugs out of it -- even though she had no knowledge of it. I've had friends call in anonymous tips to get back at enemies, ex-girlfriends, you name it.
After a while you wonder about the cost of it. Drug use (legal and illegal) has it's cost to society, but the cost of the drug war is far higher. It's created an insane black market, one rich enough to buy governments, a navy (see drug submarine that was found half-finished, think they don't have another?), and a military force. There are some nations that don't have these kinds of resources. It's also created a police force high on power and without normal checks and balences. One that runs rampant over civil rights and imprisions more people per capita than even Stalinist Russia. What's the cost on that? Broken homes, children without parents, people with promising futures cut short. Rapists and murders going free so we can keep non-violent drug users imprisoned with mandatory minimums.
The parallels with prohibition are scary. Notice the decline in crime after prohibition. Notice the increase since we've gotten serious about the war on drugs. Something's not working, let's stop throwing money at it and try a different course.
You forget that it also offered less than comparable DVD. It's video quality wasn't as good, it didn't have all the extra features of DVD, and most of the time it didn't even have letterboxing available. It also wasn't flexible. The RIAA could take a clue here. People don't want to buy things that limit they way they can use them.
Truth be told, DVD offered more and better for approximately the same price.
I'm just wondering, with all the mp3 hoopla, what's going to happen when this fantastic new 3d printer comes out?
Just think, the day something gets invented, you could recreate it right there in your home. And, oh my, what if you could download files that contain the blueprints for making guns or drugs or nuclear weapons?
Just a thought. If this things ever gets online, it will revolutionize the way things are done. The implications of a printer than can create anything given the raw elements to do so are amazing.
This could be either really good, or really bad.
on
D&D Movie on The Way
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure what they mean by "sticking to the rules". If they mean that the characters will have the same skill sets and limitations they had in the game, and the creatures stats will be taken from the game as well, then this might be good. If they go with a sample storyline, or try to make it too much like the way the games were *supposed* to go, it could be very very bad. Maybe it was just me, but did anyone really play by the "rules"? I was under the impression that the rules were there as kind of a guideline system. In every rpg we ever played, we always twisted and bent and revised the rules we felt were unfair or took away from the fun aspect of the game. Granted, there were players that came and went over the years that wanted to play strictly by the book, but they were usually a bit anal-retentive and didn't really understand that the enjoyment of the game came from the interaction among the players. We found that our best adventuring was when we just played it fast and loose and kept the story moving. Combat wasn't even the biggest thrill, it was figuring out puzzles, and if the guy in the back of the party was actually a doppelganger now, or even just the petty infighting that went on between player characters. The role playing made the game, not arguing if the target number was really a 6 when the GM said it was 10.
This is pretty old. Houston, Texas got them about three months ago. I remember seeing them while I was still living there, and the newspaper even had a whole write up about them. I think when I left there were six of these in the city.
This is a bit off topic, but I just thought some people might like to know how radio promotion works. Radio stations today are for the most part controlled by one of about ten companies nationwide. This means that in your town, probably two or three or even perhaps ALL of your radio stations are owned by the same company. There is no real "request line" and the playlist is composed by computer (which gets it's data from , big surprise, the record companies). I worked in radio for about two years, and I was amazed at the lack of concern for the everyday listener. The program director didn't care about what the DJ's thought was good music (believe me, most of their taste is actually quite good), but only what the distributors told her was good music(which was what they wanted people to hear). We could take polls, show requests, it didn't matter. We even had a "top 5 at 9" thing where the listeners were supposed to vote for the top 5 songs, it was all computer generated. I could go in at noon on Monday and tell you what the top 5 would be for the whole week! I can't tell you how many times I said we shouldn't play something or we should play this and nobody listened. The average listener will believe anything (s)he is told and will like whatever crap is spoonfed down their throats.
Me, I was eventually fired for violation of station rules (making my own playlists because I didn't agree with my computer generated one).
That's what I've been saying for quite some time. The mp3 format is a freight train that has already started to move. You can either jump on, or you're going to get run over. How much has the RIAA spent trying to put mp3 sites out of business? It seems that there are more mp3 sites now than there were a year ago. They'll even conceed that for every mp3 site they shut down, four or five more spring up to take it's place. It's too easy for some backyard hacker to set up a server on a cable modem or hide it at work on the T1.
However, you are talking about billions of dollars in profits, don't expect that the record industry is just going to roll over and die quietly.
Don't you ever wonder why you get stuck with "popular" artists like Puff Daddy and the Spice Girls? They aren't popular because their music is all that great, that's for certain. It's because the general public prefers to be told what it likes rather than find out for itself what is good. The popular artists are popular not because they produce better music, but because they have a multimillion dollar marketing scheme behind them. That's why record companies are running scared now. If mp3 takes off, not only will they have to deal with piracy, but they will lose their control over who becomes the next big thing. The way that they do business is going to change completely in the next five or so years. That's a long time to people thinking in net time, but to a major corporation, that's a product cycle. That's no time. Suddenly, artists don't HAVE to sign with them to be promoted and to be big. Your bigger artists will not renew contracts as soon as they realize the profit they can put in their pocket is greater by releasing on the net than it is by going through a traditional distributor. Right now, you're seeing "has-beens" because those are the people who aren't locked down in contracts, because either a)they've completed them or b)the studios aren't that interested in extending a inticing contract. What do you think the Beastie Boys are going to do when their contract comes up? They'll either negotiate something where they can distribute some tracks in mp3, or they might just go at it alone. Changes are a' coming.
We will benefit by virtue of better music, but the record companies will lose major dollars. Don't expect them to go down without a fight.
Yeah, that's going to happen. Imagine everyone picking up those $4.99 discs. All of a sudden the studios can't sell you a $25.00 DVD because everyone who doesn't care about quality (ie, average consumer) is snapping up the cheap disks. Hell, they'll probably be sitting in cut out bins for a buck and a quarter. I can't imagine the studios allowing that to happen. I can't even imagine them snapping up the ones left in the stores and then telling those people that already had the DIVX movies that they can watch them whenever they want. If DIVX goes belly up, you can bet the distributors are going to want to sell you a DVD movie to replace your worthless DIVX, count on it. I seriously think those people that invest in the DIVX technology are going to be seriously out of luck when things fail. ...the sad thing is, CC is trying to get people to buy the silver package so they can watch the movie as many times as they want, except, it costs the same as a DVD, looks crappier, and if DIVX goes belly up.... well, we discussed that, didn't we?
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That means you won't see Mickey Mouse Rolling Papers or Mickey Mouse Chinese Food, just as you wouldn't see Coca-Cola rolling papers, even though Coca-Cola's been around a lot longer than Mr. Disney.
The problem with perpetual copyright is that it robs our generation and others of potentially useful content.
I'll use the video game industry since it's something that most of us can identify with. Many of us remember a favorite game we played in the arcades or on our Atari 2600, or Sega or Nintendo or what have you. Some of the current games today owe their roots to something spawned well in the past, and something that's likely unplayable today. If you want to revisit these games now, you're going to have a hard time finding them -- because they aren't made anymore. You're going to have to find a working game system and a working game for the consoles, you'll have to find an arcade game that wasn't gutted for the arcade games. Most of these things were not built to last (nor were they expected to last) twenty or thirty years. Most of them did not. Some of these games were expensive enough, odd enough, and unpopular enough that perhaps NONE survive (have you seen an original Street Fighter with the pressure-sensitive "punch" buttons lately?).
These games are disappearing because there is no marketing incentive for Sega or Capcom or whomever to sell just a very small handful to a few dedicated customers. These companies deal in bulk, and likely, would require a massive re-tooling to produce a very small run of games. It's not profitable for them -- so no new copies are produced. However, for a small company, it might well be possible. Pristine copies of Dragon's Lair go for over $1500 on ebay (a complete Transformers set goes for over $10,000). At least Dragon's Lair was popular enough and adaptable enough that they released a DVD of the original game. Most games don't get this fate.
Right now there are games I played and enjoyed as a kid that will not be played by future generations because they simply aren't available. Just think there is a 15 year old kid that loves video games that has no idea what Pitfall! was, why it was revolutionary at the time, and why the game play was fun even though you didn't kill anything or have a real, definable goal. These games (and movies and songs) slip out of production, and slowly they deteriorate into nothing. By the time the copyright expires and they can be printed again, there'll be no surviving copies to copy from.
Already there are famous movies (Nosferatu comes to mind) of which no pristine copy exists. This is a piece of our culture and our history that we can never remake, and never get back. Already there are CDs that I can't buy and can't find for a reasonable price. If the surviving copies are damaged, we can never get that back. Imagine if Beethoven's fifth had a perpetual copyright, and somewhere down the line the publisher wasn't making enough money and stopped printing copies. Then imagine if no one could print copies, and the copies that were left were lost to the ravages of time. It's quite possible we could be without this work of art today. Imagine if all his works were copyrighted this way, and none of it survived. We'd never know Beethoven or the contribution he made to our culture.
Imagine time traveling 200 years into the future to realize no one knew what Pac-Man was, or who the Beatles were, or what books Neil Stephenson wrote?
Why is it our poor do so much better than poor people did a hundred years ago? Why are the rich much richer today?
I don't think we stole that money from other developing countries, and I think pretty much across the board (other than countries ravaged by war), living conditions are better or at least equal today than they were 200 years ago.
Don't forget that our truly poor people here in America would be considered rich in many third world countries. Many welfare-class poor families have an automobile, a roof over their head and food on the table. It may not be the best available here, but it's better than you can get in some parts of the world. Those are our poor! Even the homeless can find a bed and a hot meal if they want it. Provided how? Charity.
Socialism is not the answer. I don't think Bill Gates owes any money back to the rest of the country -- though indirectly he gives a lot back. Most of his wealth is sitting in a bank or in the stock market where it can be used by other people, and at the same time, he's giving massive amounts to charity because he quite literally doesn't need it. However, just because he doesn't need it doesn't mean we have the right to go and foricibly take it.
In every country that has tried socialism, it has lead not to wealth and innovation, but back down the path to the lowest common denomonator.
Socialism is a wonderful ideal, and that is what makes it so appealing. It appeals to our hearts -- wouldn't it be nice if we could all get along and cooperate and help each other out. But, it doesn't work in a real world with real human beings. Because everyone is rewarded the same, it leads to cooruption and an appeal to the lowest common denominator. Why should I stay late and bust my hump if I'm going to be rewarded the same as my coworker that leaves early and surfs the net all day? Why bother? Why bother having a job at all if the state will take care of me?
I too waited tables (and bartended) my way through college. The ones that sat the most almost always tipped the least, and they never thought about the money that I or the restaurant could have been making off that table.
It was "we paid for a meal, and we're going to sit here until we feel like leaving". I actually had two people come in at 4:00 pm and leave after midnight. Tip? A wonderful $1.50.
By law if I rent your house, I own it for the time that I rent it, with all the rights that entails. Now, the title of the house never changes hands, because you didn't acutally buy the house, but under the legal system, any rented property is considered your property. The only thing is that I after a certain time (the rental period) I must turn the house back over to you. There may also be other exceptions in the rental agreement, but you do legally own the property and can legally do whatever would be legal in your own home.
That includes renting out the house to other people . It's called subletting. You could also "sell" the house (or basically the right to live there) for that time period that you rent. There's nothing that the landlord can do about that -- though they may not like it much and may try to evict you.
Can't ask for much more than that.
Also had a roommate that had an Acer computer while I was in college. Wasn't the best machine out there, and was extremely propriatary, but otherwise, a good solid computer. He's still using it -- not as a gaming machine or desktop, but it's just fine for a mp3 server.
I wouldn't buy one of their computers, the one I played with was too hard to upgrade. However, I can't say that it was a total turd, like a Packard Bell.
A lot of people don't realize that alcohol and tobacco aren't legal, they are decriminalized. There are laws that say when and where you can use them, where you can buy them, etc. Like here, I can't buy alcohol before noon on Sunday or after midnight most nights. I can't buy hard liquor at all on Sunday and only before 9pm any other day of the week. I'm not allowed to be drunk in public, I'm not allowed to give either to kids.
Why not say, ok, you can do any drug you want, but you're going to have be over a certain age, see a doctor to make sure you aren't addicted, you can only do it in your house or in designated clubs. You can't give it to little kids. You can't drive a car under the influence -- and prosecute these people. The ones sitting in their home not bothering anyone aren't the problem.
I always looked at it this way, it's a whole lot like prohibition, scary parallels in fact. Decriminalize it, tax the hell out of it, and the manufacturers will still be able to undercut the sales of the black market. No one is going to want to buy an unknown something off the street when they can go down the road and know exactly what they are getting, and in what amount. You also don't have to worry as much about overdosing or poisoning yourself because the stuff you bought was more/less pure than you're used to. It's why you don't see many moonshiners or alcohol bootleggers today. It's cheaper and better to buy down at the corner store. Not only that, the government makes money instead of wasting it fighting a futile war! The black market is gone, and street crime goes down. I don't know why this is so hard to wrap your brain around.
I've known users (not dealers) that have had their door broken down in the middle of the afternoon. No knock, just BOOM! and a bunch of guys dressed in black combat gear bust in and start ordering people around using some very derogatory terms I won't mention here.
Why? Because an upset friend called into crimestoppers and said my friends were expecting a ten-pound brick of marijuana delivered to that house on that day, and that they wanted to sell it to neighborhood kids. On top of that, they said my friends had a small arsenal, including semi-automatic assault rifles (not true) and grenades (absolutely not true). This nessessitated the "no-knock" entry and SWAT team and full assualt gear. Never mind there was no evidence -- none -- never mind they only had an anonymous informant, they still raided the house.
Say what you want, it was an anonymous tip, and there's no way to track down the person that made it, unless they were foolish enough to try to get their crimestopper reward.
End of story, some marijuana was found and my friends went to jail. While they were in jail (for about $15 of marijuana) someone in the neighborhood walked through the busted door and cleaned out their apartment. The police said it wasn't their problem -- even though they caused it.
I had a friend lose a new Honda Civic because he was unfortunate enough to get caught driving with a small amount of coke in the console. My aunt almost lost a rental house because a tenant was selling drugs out of it -- even though she had no knowledge of it. I've had friends call in anonymous tips to get back at enemies, ex-girlfriends, you name it.
After a while you wonder about the cost of it. Drug use (legal and illegal) has it's cost to society, but the cost of the drug war is far higher. It's created an insane black market, one rich enough to buy governments, a navy (see drug submarine that was found half-finished, think they don't have another?), and a military force. There are some nations that don't have these kinds of resources. It's also created a police force high on power and without normal checks and balences. One that runs rampant over civil rights and imprisions more people per capita than even Stalinist Russia. What's the cost on that? Broken homes, children without parents, people with promising futures cut short. Rapists and murders going free so we can keep non-violent drug users imprisoned with mandatory minimums.
The parallels with prohibition are scary. Notice the decline in crime after prohibition. Notice the increase since we've gotten serious about the war on drugs. Something's not working, let's stop throwing money at it and try a different course.
november.org
Truth be told, DVD offered more and better for approximately the same price.
I'm just wondering, with all the mp3 hoopla, what's going to happen when this fantastic new 3d printer comes out?
Just think, the day something gets invented, you could recreate it right there in your home. And, oh my, what if you could download files that contain the blueprints for making guns or drugs or nuclear weapons?
Just a thought. If this things ever gets online, it will revolutionize the way things are done. The implications of a printer than can create anything given the raw elements to do so are amazing.
I'm not sure what they mean by "sticking to the rules". If they mean that the characters will have the same skill sets and limitations they had in the game, and the creatures stats will be taken from the game as well, then this might be good. If they go with a sample storyline, or try to make it too much like the way the games were *supposed* to go, it could be very very bad. Maybe it was just me, but did anyone really play by the "rules"? I was under the impression that the rules were there as kind of a guideline system. In every rpg we ever played, we always twisted and bent and revised the rules we felt were unfair or took away from the fun aspect of the game. Granted, there were players that came and went over the years that wanted to play strictly by the book, but they were usually a bit anal-retentive and didn't really understand that the enjoyment of the game came from the interaction among the players. We found that our best adventuring was when we just played it fast and loose and kept the story moving. Combat wasn't even the biggest thrill, it was figuring out puzzles, and if the guy in the back of the party was actually a doppelganger now, or even just the petty infighting that went on between player characters. The role playing made the game, not arguing if the target number was really a 6 when the GM said it was 10.
This is pretty old. Houston, Texas got them about three months ago. I remember seeing them while I was still living there, and the newspaper even had a whole write up about them. I think when I left there were six of these in the city.
what copy protection is that? I haven't seen it. All the discs I've wanted to copy have been no problem with CDRWin
This is a bit off topic, but I just thought some people might like to know how radio promotion works. Radio stations today are for the most part controlled by one of about ten companies nationwide. This means that in your town, probably two or three or even perhaps ALL of your radio stations are owned by the same company. There is no real "request line" and the playlist is composed by computer (which gets it's data from , big surprise, the record companies). I worked in radio for about two years, and I was amazed at the lack of concern for the everyday listener. The program director didn't care about what the DJ's thought was good music (believe me, most of their taste is actually quite good), but only what the distributors told her was good music(which was what they wanted people to hear). We could take polls, show requests, it didn't matter. We even had a "top 5 at 9" thing where the listeners were supposed to vote for the top 5 songs, it was all computer generated. I could go in at noon on Monday and tell you what the top 5 would be for the whole week! I can't tell you how many times I said we shouldn't play something or we should play this and nobody listened. The average listener will believe anything (s)he is told and will like whatever crap is spoonfed down their throats.
Me, I was eventually fired for violation of station rules (making my own playlists because I didn't agree with my computer generated one).
That's what I've been saying for quite some time. The mp3 format is a freight train that has already started to move. You can either jump on, or you're going to get run over. How much has the RIAA spent trying to put mp3 sites out of business? It seems that there are more mp3 sites now than there were a year ago. They'll even conceed that for every mp3 site they shut down, four or five more spring up to take it's place. It's too easy for some backyard hacker to set up a server on a cable modem or hide it at work on the T1.
However, you are talking about billions of dollars in profits, don't expect that the record industry is just going to roll over and die quietly.
Don't you ever wonder why you get stuck with "popular" artists like Puff Daddy and the Spice Girls? They aren't popular because their music is all that great, that's for certain. It's because the general public prefers to be told what it likes rather than find out for itself what is good. The popular artists are popular not because they produce better music, but because they have a multimillion dollar marketing scheme behind them. That's why record companies are running scared now. If mp3 takes off, not only will they have to deal with piracy, but they will lose their control over who becomes the next big thing. The way that they do business is going to change completely in the next five or so years. That's a long time to people thinking in net time, but to a major corporation, that's a product cycle. That's no time. Suddenly, artists don't HAVE to sign with them to be promoted and to be big. Your bigger artists will not renew contracts as soon as they realize the profit they can put in their pocket is greater by releasing on the net than it is by going through a traditional distributor. Right now, you're seeing "has-beens" because those are the people who aren't locked down in contracts, because either a)they've completed them or b)the studios aren't that interested in extending a inticing contract. What do you think the Beastie Boys are going to do when their contract comes up? They'll either negotiate something where they can distribute some tracks in mp3, or they might just go at it alone. Changes are a' coming.
We will benefit by virtue of better music, but the record companies will lose major dollars. Don't expect them to go down without a fight.
Yeah, that's going to happen. Imagine everyone picking up those $4.99 discs. All of a sudden the studios can't sell you a $25.00 DVD because everyone who doesn't care about quality (ie, average consumer) is snapping up the cheap disks. Hell, they'll probably be sitting in cut out bins for a buck and a quarter.
I can't imagine the studios allowing that to happen. I can't even imagine them snapping up the ones left in the stores and then telling those people that already had the DIVX movies that they can watch them whenever they want. If DIVX goes belly up, you can bet the distributors are going to want to sell you a DVD movie to replace your worthless DIVX, count on it.
I seriously think those people that invest in the DIVX technology are going to be seriously out of luck when things fail.
...the sad thing is, CC is trying to get people to buy the silver package so they can watch the movie as many times as they want, except, it costs the same as a DVD, looks crappier, and if DIVX goes belly up.... well, we discussed that, didn't we?