Simply reversing the arguments doesn't work here. The.xxx at most guaranteed that you'd get porn at a.xxx site (and it didn't even really do that). That's something you don't really need; you can verify that a porn site has porn just by looking at it. You could try to decree that all.com sites would now be porn-free, but that's impossible.
This is the converse: if all.safe sites are indeed safe, you've learned something valuable about the site just from its name. It doesn't matter that there are still safe.com sites; nobody has any interest in purging those.
So.safe could conceivably be a thing of value. You're basically taking a trusted group to make the judgment and trusting DNS to deliver that judgment to you accurately, both of which will lead to arguments. And you're still trusting users to recognize that.safe is really safe and the variants (safe.phishing.biz) aren't.
A browser mod would be helpful there; I believe both IE and Firefox now have built-in "probably phishing" detectors. In fact, those probably-phishing detectors could be more useful than a domain name, which is clearly trying to cram a hack on top of DNS. Let the verifiers register the info on some well-known site somewhere, let the phishing tools treat it as a whitelist, and anything too similar but not identical as a clue that it's phishing.
I was referring not to the use of these tools for advertising yourself, but for the fact that adwords can help support a site that Slashdotters maintain themselves. This is an interesting model: you make a site that people find interesting, and you can pay for it not by soliciting money from them but by taking advantage of a tiny portion of their attention when they come. That's not just your site for open software, but whatever it is you put on the web: your movie recommendation engine, your online game, your Battlebots fan page, etc.
So it's interesting not because Slashdotters will use this tool but because it's a useful development in the the way the web sites are supported. If the tool is useful, it's more advertising dollars shifted towards Google AdWords and presumably away from TV advertising (supporting useless network crud) or spinning/flashing/up-popping banners (supporting the kinds of web sites that tolerate that crud), but potentially supporting actual Slashdot users.
The fact that it's an interesting way to advertise web sites is also potentially of interest to Slashdotters, not for their own sites but for the sites they're paid to maintain, for those who do such things. Recommending marketing strategies may end up being part of their job. It's not really a technical thing, but we often wear many hats, especially in small companies, and as a web thing it often falls to us. There, too, advertising is useful; people only go searching for you if they already know you're out there somewhere.
The Louvre, in Paris. It's not one of the things they really draw attention to. I didn't really need to see the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo (for which there are signs pointing you at them). I'd have walked right past them if somebody hadn't told me that they were big deals. (A bit like the article in the Washington Post yesterday, about a massively famous violinist being ignored when he dressed down and played in the subway in DC.)
But the Codex Hammurabi.... I can't read it, so I wouldn't know its significance without being told, but dude... it was the freaking Codex Hammurabi. One of those rare times in my life when I really felt that just seeing something with my own eyes was really more important than just knowing what it was.
I agree that Slashdot has serious "when somebody farts at Google it's news" syndrome, but I don't think that "online marketing" is necessarily disjoint with Slashdot readers.
Especially Google's form of it. Slashdotters are coders and often want to put up interesting web sites to highlight their ideas, but that costs money, especially if significant bandwidth is involved. You can collect it from donations or support it with ads, and there aren't a whole lot of other options for sites which are interesting but don't have an obvious revenue model. Especially at the small scale, where the work of handling the revenue stream can distract you from doing the actual content of your site.
At least the AdWords are relatively unobtrusive, and targeted, which means that they may actually be of some interest to the people reading your web site.
Advertising is not evil. Flashing/spinning/dancing/up-popping/distracting advertising is evil. Polite, relevant advertising can be a way to support something without an immense amount of additional work.
I concur; I didn't mean to sound like I was campaigning for any effort to preserve the place. There are a very few objects and places which manage to rise above the logic that we can't preserve everything just because something happened there once. An industrial park in California is not the Magna Carta.
I often hang around with a historian, who loves to stand in the places where historical events occurred and soak up the atmosphere, in a sense peering into the past. It gives her a perspective of the place, and perhaps an insight into the minds of those who shaped history there.
I like to think I'm immune to such things, but on some of those trips I find myself similarly taken in. I didn't really need to see the Magna Carta or the Rosetta Stone or the Codex Hammurabi; I can read the texts more clearly and get better views via photographs. But on the other hand it's the FREAKING MAGNA CARTA and it's right there in front of me.
I'm afraid that fruit stand isn't going to mean much to me, but I can see it meaning a lot to somebody else.
It would take agreement among ISPs to ban/throttle each other when they're not following whatever rules they agree on about obvious spam sources coming from their routers.
As in, if Comcast or Verizon or AOL says, "Look, if you're not going to do something about the evil packets coming from your IP addresses, I'm going to have to do it myself by dropping all packets from you."
That has the effect of putting pressure even on ISPs from other countries. When their valid users start complaining that they can't get their mail through, they'll have to work on the problem.
It doesn't entirely solve the problem; the only thing that goes from one ISP to another is mail, and mail is not the most important protocol on the web. It would be nice if, say, Google and Amazon would also participate but they're just not going to turn away customers.
There are still some arguments to come out; some will swear that's all valid email traffic and not spam. Or they'll argue about how quickly they can be expected to react when one of their clients becomes a bot, and they'll come to Slashdot to complain how somebody hooked up a laptop to their network and they had to spend 20 hours talking to customer service to get it restored.
Nonetheless, it sounds like a start, and it works peer-to-peer between ISPs without having to get any governments involved.
As much as I'd love to right the wrongs of those who have been unfairly moderated down to -1, it just doesn't seem to be worth the effort. There's a vast quantity of truly offensive crap down there at 0 and below, and very little of the little guy being put down.
I prefer to spend my mod points on somebody whose karma means that they post at 1 rather than 2. It does a lot of good for them, and those who post at 2 don't need a lot of extra help.
Since you can't burn somebody below -1, it's hard to do serious damage via a single comment. Yeah, it sucks to lose a cogent contribution, but what one person said will usually be said by somebody else.
I suppose that very rarely you'll get somebody who actually knows something (say, an employee of an affected company posting anonymously), but I've almost never seen it happen. I'll leave modding that stuff up to somebody who has a higher tolerance.
It should be a lot more difficult to get the keys for a hardware player than for a software player. WinDVD made an easy target because it is running on a general-purpose computer, which means that the key is sitting there in memory at some point to be snooped out. It's not easy, I'm sure, to find that key among the many megabytes of code, but it's there.
A hardware player isn't a general purpose computer. I'm sure it's possible for somebody with the right hardware to snoop inside its memory (say, inserting a special thingamabob between the memory and the mother board that allows you to read all reads/writes as they go past), but it's not going to be readily available.
Presumably somebody will be the first one to do this, and that is sure going to be a bad day for both formats. People are prepared to upgrade their software; it happens all the time and it's a relatively painless process for most people. Upgrading your hardware is not going to be easy, and it may not even be possible. (I used to own a DVD player which was "upgraded" by downloading a patch, burning it onto a CD, and putting that in the machine, but I don't know if every DVD player supports that.)
If they start denying keys on hardware players, there will be a world of pain, but I don't expect this to shatter the world. They'll just advise everybody to download a patch with a new key.
I do, but not on a daily-basis sort of way. In a perfect world I start using a product/service before it becomes news, though that happens far less today than during the dotcom boom. I'm playing with a small enough amount of money that if I traded frequently the fees would eat up my profits.
I suppose if I were to use margin leverage I could have enough money to make it worthwhile, but I'm just not that brave these days. Back during the bubble, when they were giving out money in bags, it was different, but I had twice as much money at the time (and twice as much money as I had after the bust took much of it).
I'll admit that I bring up my portfolio several times a day if I'm bored AND the market is having an up day. I've discovered that checking my portfolio just makes me cranky if I'm losing money. This despite the fact that I'm not going to trade any of it, up or down: it's just a nice feeling to find, "Hey, they gave me $148 today just for sitting on my ass."
I use finance.yahoo.com to track the portfolio. I could use my broker (e*trade) but I like yahoo's layout better and its login process is less harsh (because there's no actual money attached to the account.)
Care to elaborate on that? The models are available for you to play with. The basic experiments (CO2 laden air traps more heat) are easy to replicate. The satellite data indicating that the atmosphere is warming is available. The fact that we're releasing carbon into the atmosphere by the millions of tons is fairly simple to calculate.
None of that is absolutely conclusive, and could well be misleading or wrong, but when it comes to making policy it would be nice to have a more constructive argument than "I just don't buy it."
I don't have any details of how their money works, but I suspect that they sell only a tiny fraction of the domains they seize. That's part of the reason negotiations with them begin in the $500 range; they have to make up for the years the domain took to sell and the number of domains that they'll never sell.
So each domain they sell has to sell not for $.40 additional, but more like 7% of the $500 starting negotiation, or $35, which makes it that much more likely somebody will just get a different name.
They're never going to go out of business entirely, but if even one of them goes home tonight feeling like a miserable abject failure, I consider it a pretty good day.
Which means they'll be raising prices by 7% every year, raising prices higher and higher on the squatters. Fine by me. I can afford $.42 for the half-dozen domains I run. Let them multiply it by 10,000.
Word up. This must really be pissing off the domain squatters. They must be one of Verisign's largest sources of income. But they're entirely at the mercy of Verisign's policies. Some accountants at Verisign undoubtedly calculated 7% as the marginal number; any more and some squatters will drop out or drop their most unlikely domains.
Domain squatting is an utterly vile practice, and anything that drives even a few of them out of business is OK by me.
(It also pisses off the spammers, and it's neck-and-neck who I hate more.)
Interesting. Is there a classic way to externalize such hidden costs?
Programmer productivity has always been a difficult thing to measure, which means that it's difficult to justify any tool a programmer uses, right down to the computer on his desk.
It seems to me that there should be some way to tell the auditors, "We used to develop 27 lines of code per hour here, and now we crank out 33." That justifies the cost in numerical terms, but since it introduces a new metric it doesn't really justify anything. Still, like I said, if they're going to insist on metrics, they're going to have to deal with the fact that for most shops the only metric for developers is "number of hours sitting at desk".
I personally have yet to find myself bothered by a cell phone conversation in a restaurant, though I've heard plenty of anecdotes. It's probably the case that 98% of all people talk at a reasonable level into their phones and that the entire problem is attributed to a small subset of people who are rude in general and have just been given an opportunity to make that fact known.
Like the way every baby I've ever noticed is screaming. There may be perfectly polite infants on airplanes, but I'd never notice them.
You can talk to a person sitting next to you in a whisper. They get a lot of other clues (facial expressions, unconscious lip reading) that fill in a lot of the details.
On a cell phone you tend to talk louder to be sure that you're heard. You're dealing with a tiny microphone. You're also dealing with a tiny speaker; when you're having trouble hearing you tend to talk louder in the belief that they must also be having trouble hearing you.
So a perfect cell phone would indeed be no more of a nuisance than a conversation with a seat mate, but at least some people talk a lot louder than that. It may actually be no louder than ordinary conversation, but a cramped space (restaurant, airplane) requires hushed tones.
Thing is, the artists have always been willing to sell out. I can't speak to recording artists, but I know actors; I am a professional actor myself. (Stage, not screen, and regional rather than national; you've never heard of me.) Half the questions I get asked are "How do I get famous?" Few people have any interest in how to get better, and they'd sign any contract you put in front of them if it put their faces on the screen.
So it doesn't bother me that the artists get squat out of the deal. They got famous and that's what they wanted from the labels. If all they wanted to do was make music, they're welcome to crank it out in their home studio and sell it out of the back of a van, just like my musician friends do.
Those guys don't have any music industry to blame their lack of sales on. They sell to what customers they can reach, but without a music industry to promote them, their reach is limited. And I haven't seen the customers going too far out of their way to buy the music from CDBaby or eMusic for bands they've never heard of.
I think that there's plenty of blame to go around.
Right. But the law was written with an understanding of the term that turns out to be insufficient. People who wrote the law figured that people probably wouldn't go to the trouble of distributing music for free if there wasn't a profit in it for them.
That turns out to be wrong, and the reasons are interesting. Either you can expand your definition of "profit", and leave the law intact, or you can rewrite the law entirely. But I don't think it's fair to say, "Hey, the law says this and should always say this" just because changing technology allows you to get stuff for free that you couldn't previously.
Napster made for an interesting little fillip in the interpretation of copyright law. People were taking CDs that they bought, ripping them, and then making them available for free, without any payment to themselves at all.
The question is why. There may be a simple karmic sense; even though you don't make a direct profit, your willingness to share keeps the whole system moving, and you get to download stuff of your own (a profit to you).
There may also be a kind of stick-it-to-the-man feeling; you just paid $20 for a stupid CD and now you want to get it back. Again, you're getting kind of a "profit", albeit not a financial one.
Those who download songs rather than buy them are almost certainly getting a profit out of the situation; they have a song that they did not pay for, and which they were expected to pay for. It's not a large profit, but in aggregate it's a lot of value spread out over a lot of people.
So the "profitability" notion of fair use got smeared out. Nobody was making a profit but the labels were losing considerable potential sales. Yeah, there's the whole "free advertising" notion, but I hardly consider that worth talking about; it's like the Change Bank claiming to make a profit off of volume, and the argument is so self-serving as to be hypocritical. The exact amount of lost sales is up for debate, and it's certainly less than 100% of the number of copies downloaded for free, but it's certainly greater than zero.
And the technologies that permit what's obviously fair use (backups, taking extracts) also permit free exchange. I don't think that the proponents of fair use did themselves any favors by demanding that their fair use rights remain untouched while offering absolutely no quarter to the lost sales from the labels. It made the entire movement look like they wanted to buy one CD and then "back it up" among the entire population of the planet.
Different running styles encourage different tools, apparently. I have exactly the opposite problem: I start slow, then taper off. It makes me a fine marathoner (as long as I don't want to win), but I look like a lumbering ox in any distance shorter than that. I look like a lumbering ox at any distance, but there's at least some respect for somebody who can lumber 26.2 miles.
In fact I'm training for an ultra now, which may suit my running style even better.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply reversing the arguments doesn't work here. The .xxx at most guaranteed that you'd get porn at a .xxx site (and it didn't even really do that). That's something you don't really need; you can verify that a porn site has porn just by looking at it. You could try to decree that all .com sites would now be porn-free, but that's impossible.
.safe sites are indeed safe, you've learned something valuable about the site just from its name. It doesn't matter that there are still safe .com sites; nobody has any interest in purging those.
.safe could conceivably be a thing of value. You're basically taking a trusted group to make the judgment and trusting DNS to deliver that judgment to you accurately, both of which will lead to arguments. And you're still trusting users to recognize that .safe is really safe and the variants (safe.phishing.biz) aren't.
This is the converse: if all
So
A browser mod would be helpful there; I believe both IE and Firefox now have built-in "probably phishing" detectors. In fact, those probably-phishing detectors could be more useful than a domain name, which is clearly trying to cram a hack on top of DNS. Let the verifiers register the info on some well-known site somewhere, let the phishing tools treat it as a whitelist, and anything too similar but not identical as a clue that it's phishing.
I was referring not to the use of these tools for advertising yourself, but for the fact that adwords can help support a site that Slashdotters maintain themselves. This is an interesting model: you make a site that people find interesting, and you can pay for it not by soliciting money from them but by taking advantage of a tiny portion of their attention when they come. That's not just your site for open software, but whatever it is you put on the web: your movie recommendation engine, your online game, your Battlebots fan page, etc.
So it's interesting not because Slashdotters will use this tool but because it's a useful development in the the way the web sites are supported. If the tool is useful, it's more advertising dollars shifted towards Google AdWords and presumably away from TV advertising (supporting useless network crud) or spinning/flashing/up-popping banners (supporting the kinds of web sites that tolerate that crud), but potentially supporting actual Slashdot users.
The fact that it's an interesting way to advertise web sites is also potentially of interest to Slashdotters, not for their own sites but for the sites they're paid to maintain, for those who do such things. Recommending marketing strategies may end up being part of their job. It's not really a technical thing, but we often wear many hats, especially in small companies, and as a web thing it often falls to us. There, too, advertising is useful; people only go searching for you if they already know you're out there somewhere.
The Louvre, in Paris. It's not one of the things they really draw attention to. I didn't really need to see the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo (for which there are signs pointing you at them). I'd have walked right past them if somebody hadn't told me that they were big deals. (A bit like the article in the Washington Post yesterday, about a massively famous violinist being ignored when he dressed down and played in the subway in DC.)
But the Codex Hammurabi.... I can't read it, so I wouldn't know its significance without being told, but dude... it was the freaking Codex Hammurabi. One of those rare times in my life when I really felt that just seeing something with my own eyes was really more important than just knowing what it was.
I agree that Slashdot has serious "when somebody farts at Google it's news" syndrome, but I don't think that "online marketing" is necessarily disjoint with Slashdot readers.
Especially Google's form of it. Slashdotters are coders and often want to put up interesting web sites to highlight their ideas, but that costs money, especially if significant bandwidth is involved. You can collect it from donations or support it with ads, and there aren't a whole lot of other options for sites which are interesting but don't have an obvious revenue model. Especially at the small scale, where the work of handling the revenue stream can distract you from doing the actual content of your site.
At least the AdWords are relatively unobtrusive, and targeted, which means that they may actually be of some interest to the people reading your web site.
Advertising is not evil. Flashing/spinning/dancing/up-popping/distracting advertising is evil. Polite, relevant advertising can be a way to support something without an immense amount of additional work.
I concur; I didn't mean to sound like I was campaigning for any effort to preserve the place. There are a very few objects and places which manage to rise above the logic that we can't preserve everything just because something happened there once. An industrial park in California is not the Magna Carta.
I often hang around with a historian, who loves to stand in the places where historical events occurred and soak up the atmosphere, in a sense peering into the past. It gives her a perspective of the place, and perhaps an insight into the minds of those who shaped history there.
I like to think I'm immune to such things, but on some of those trips I find myself similarly taken in. I didn't really need to see the Magna Carta or the Rosetta Stone or the Codex Hammurabi; I can read the texts more clearly and get better views via photographs. But on the other hand it's the FREAKING MAGNA CARTA and it's right there in front of me.
I'm afraid that fruit stand isn't going to mean much to me, but I can see it meaning a lot to somebody else.
It would take agreement among ISPs to ban/throttle each other when they're not following whatever rules they agree on about obvious spam sources coming from their routers.
As in, if Comcast or Verizon or AOL says, "Look, if you're not going to do something about the evil packets coming from your IP addresses, I'm going to have to do it myself by dropping all packets from you."
That has the effect of putting pressure even on ISPs from other countries. When their valid users start complaining that they can't get their mail through, they'll have to work on the problem.
It doesn't entirely solve the problem; the only thing that goes from one ISP to another is mail, and mail is not the most important protocol on the web. It would be nice if, say, Google and Amazon would also participate but they're just not going to turn away customers.
There are still some arguments to come out; some will swear that's all valid email traffic and not spam. Or they'll argue about how quickly they can be expected to react when one of their clients becomes a bot, and they'll come to Slashdot to complain how somebody hooked up a laptop to their network and they had to spend 20 hours talking to customer service to get it restored.
Nonetheless, it sounds like a start, and it works peer-to-peer between ISPs without having to get any governments involved.
Fuck the anonymous coward. Stay safe.
As much as I'd love to right the wrongs of those who have been unfairly moderated down to -1, it just doesn't seem to be worth the effort. There's a vast quantity of truly offensive crap down there at 0 and below, and very little of the little guy being put down.
I prefer to spend my mod points on somebody whose karma means that they post at 1 rather than 2. It does a lot of good for them, and those who post at 2 don't need a lot of extra help.
Since you can't burn somebody below -1, it's hard to do serious damage via a single comment. Yeah, it sucks to lose a cogent contribution, but what one person said will usually be said by somebody else.
I suppose that very rarely you'll get somebody who actually knows something (say, an employee of an affected company posting anonymously), but I've almost never seen it happen. I'll leave modding that stuff up to somebody who has a higher tolerance.
It should be a lot more difficult to get the keys for a hardware player than for a software player. WinDVD made an easy target because it is running on a general-purpose computer, which means that the key is sitting there in memory at some point to be snooped out. It's not easy, I'm sure, to find that key among the many megabytes of code, but it's there.
A hardware player isn't a general purpose computer. I'm sure it's possible for somebody with the right hardware to snoop inside its memory (say, inserting a special thingamabob between the memory and the mother board that allows you to read all reads/writes as they go past), but it's not going to be readily available.
Presumably somebody will be the first one to do this, and that is sure going to be a bad day for both formats. People are prepared to upgrade their software; it happens all the time and it's a relatively painless process for most people. Upgrading your hardware is not going to be easy, and it may not even be possible. (I used to own a DVD player which was "upgraded" by downloading a patch, burning it onto a CD, and putting that in the machine, but I don't know if every DVD player supports that.)
If they start denying keys on hardware players, there will be a world of pain, but I don't expect this to shatter the world. They'll just advise everybody to download a patch with a new key.
Does anyone else invest?
I do, but not on a daily-basis sort of way. In a perfect world I start using a product/service before it becomes news, though that happens far less today than during the dotcom boom. I'm playing with a small enough amount of money that if I traded frequently the fees would eat up my profits.
I suppose if I were to use margin leverage I could have enough money to make it worthwhile, but I'm just not that brave these days. Back during the bubble, when they were giving out money in bags, it was different, but I had twice as much money at the time (and twice as much money as I had after the bust took much of it).
I'll admit that I bring up my portfolio several times a day if I'm bored AND the market is having an up day. I've discovered that checking my portfolio just makes me cranky if I'm losing money. This despite the fact that I'm not going to trade any of it, up or down: it's just a nice feeling to find, "Hey, they gave me $148 today just for sitting on my ass."
I use finance.yahoo.com to track the portfolio. I could use my broker (e*trade) but I like yahoo's layout better and its login process is less harsh (because there's no actual money attached to the account.)
Care to elaborate on that? The models are available for you to play with. The basic experiments (CO2 laden air traps more heat) are easy to replicate. The satellite data indicating that the atmosphere is warming is available. The fact that we're releasing carbon into the atmosphere by the millions of tons is fairly simple to calculate.
None of that is absolutely conclusive, and could well be misleading or wrong, but when it comes to making policy it would be nice to have a more constructive argument than "I just don't buy it."
I don't have any details of how their money works, but I suspect that they sell only a tiny fraction of the domains they seize. That's part of the reason negotiations with them begin in the $500 range; they have to make up for the years the domain took to sell and the number of domains that they'll never sell.
So each domain they sell has to sell not for $.40 additional, but more like 7% of the $500 starting negotiation, or $35, which makes it that much more likely somebody will just get a different name.
They're never going to go out of business entirely, but if even one of them goes home tonight feeling like a miserable abject failure, I consider it a pretty good day.
Which means they'll be raising prices by 7% every year, raising prices higher and higher on the squatters. Fine by me. I can afford $.42 for the half-dozen domains I run. Let them multiply it by 10,000.
Word up. This must really be pissing off the domain squatters. They must be one of Verisign's largest sources of income. But they're entirely at the mercy of Verisign's policies. Some accountants at Verisign undoubtedly calculated 7% as the marginal number; any more and some squatters will drop out or drop their most unlikely domains.
Domain squatting is an utterly vile practice, and anything that drives even a few of them out of business is OK by me.
(It also pisses off the spammers, and it's neck-and-neck who I hate more.)
Interesting. Is there a classic way to externalize such hidden costs?
Programmer productivity has always been a difficult thing to measure, which means that it's difficult to justify any tool a programmer uses, right down to the computer on his desk.
It seems to me that there should be some way to tell the auditors, "We used to develop 27 lines of code per hour here, and now we crank out 33." That justifies the cost in numerical terms, but since it introduces a new metric it doesn't really justify anything. Still, like I said, if they're going to insist on metrics, they're going to have to deal with the fact that for most shops the only metric for developers is "number of hours sitting at desk".
I personally have yet to find myself bothered by a cell phone conversation in a restaurant, though I've heard plenty of anecdotes. It's probably the case that 98% of all people talk at a reasonable level into their phones and that the entire problem is attributed to a small subset of people who are rude in general and have just been given an opportunity to make that fact known.
Like the way every baby I've ever noticed is screaming. There may be perfectly polite infants on airplanes, but I'd never notice them.
You can talk to a person sitting next to you in a whisper. They get a lot of other clues (facial expressions, unconscious lip reading) that fill in a lot of the details.
On a cell phone you tend to talk louder to be sure that you're heard. You're dealing with a tiny microphone. You're also dealing with a tiny speaker; when you're having trouble hearing you tend to talk louder in the belief that they must also be having trouble hearing you.
So a perfect cell phone would indeed be no more of a nuisance than a conversation with a seat mate, but at least some people talk a lot louder than that. It may actually be no louder than ordinary conversation, but a cramped space (restaurant, airplane) requires hushed tones.
So we'll all be Coopers?
/gunshot, clutches chest, croaks
And then we'll all really be over a barrel!
Didn't you hear? VoIP packets interfere with the navigation of the plane. Do you want to kill us all, you fool?
Sadly, they just broke up. Partly it's the stress of not having made it yet; partly it was events that overtook some of the members.
The music is still there, though:
http://www.myspace.com/wakingstate
Thing is, the artists have always been willing to sell out. I can't speak to recording artists, but I know actors; I am a professional actor myself. (Stage, not screen, and regional rather than national; you've never heard of me.) Half the questions I get asked are "How do I get famous?" Few people have any interest in how to get better, and they'd sign any contract you put in front of them if it put their faces on the screen.
So it doesn't bother me that the artists get squat out of the deal. They got famous and that's what they wanted from the labels. If all they wanted to do was make music, they're welcome to crank it out in their home studio and sell it out of the back of a van, just like my musician friends do.
Those guys don't have any music industry to blame their lack of sales on. They sell to what customers they can reach, but without a music industry to promote them, their reach is limited. And I haven't seen the customers going too far out of their way to buy the music from CDBaby or eMusic for bands they've never heard of.
I think that there's plenty of blame to go around.
Right. But the law was written with an understanding of the term that turns out to be insufficient. People who wrote the law figured that people probably wouldn't go to the trouble of distributing music for free if there wasn't a profit in it for them.
That turns out to be wrong, and the reasons are interesting. Either you can expand your definition of "profit", and leave the law intact, or you can rewrite the law entirely. But I don't think it's fair to say, "Hey, the law says this and should always say this" just because changing technology allows you to get stuff for free that you couldn't previously.
Napster made for an interesting little fillip in the interpretation of copyright law. People were taking CDs that they bought, ripping them, and then making them available for free, without any payment to themselves at all.
The question is why. There may be a simple karmic sense; even though you don't make a direct profit, your willingness to share keeps the whole system moving, and you get to download stuff of your own (a profit to you).
There may also be a kind of stick-it-to-the-man feeling; you just paid $20 for a stupid CD and now you want to get it back. Again, you're getting kind of a "profit", albeit not a financial one.
Those who download songs rather than buy them are almost certainly getting a profit out of the situation; they have a song that they did not pay for, and which they were expected to pay for. It's not a large profit, but in aggregate it's a lot of value spread out over a lot of people.
So the "profitability" notion of fair use got smeared out. Nobody was making a profit but the labels were losing considerable potential sales. Yeah, there's the whole "free advertising" notion, but I hardly consider that worth talking about; it's like the Change Bank claiming to make a profit off of volume, and the argument is so self-serving as to be hypocritical. The exact amount of lost sales is up for debate, and it's certainly less than 100% of the number of copies downloaded for free, but it's certainly greater than zero.
And the technologies that permit what's obviously fair use (backups, taking extracts) also permit free exchange. I don't think that the proponents of fair use did themselves any favors by demanding that their fair use rights remain untouched while offering absolutely no quarter to the lost sales from the labels. It made the entire movement look like they wanted to buy one CD and then "back it up" among the entire population of the planet.
Different running styles encourage different tools, apparently. I have exactly the opposite problem: I start slow, then taper off. It makes me a fine marathoner (as long as I don't want to win), but I look like a lumbering ox in any distance shorter than that. I look like a lumbering ox at any distance, but there's at least some respect for somebody who can lumber 26.2 miles.
In fact I'm training for an ultra now, which may suit my running style even better.