Not big and commercial, but maybe paired with MythTV or some other kind of box, it could take off... http://participatoryculture.org/
I still prefer the term "nichecasting" for this kind of idea (microcasting implies "small"), and it's particularly cool when you look at it from a Long Tail perspective. So if we can [n]cast for virtually no cost, all we need to do is create stuff for virutally no cost. RvB is still, I think, the best example of that kind project. Does anyone know of any other FOSE[ntertainment] out there?
Vital follow-up: towards the end of the "round trip" video, the world warps all around upside down and twists in mind-bending ways... she claims that's how it looked to her when she was there, too. So either she was traveling at the speed of light, or German beer is better than I thought.
I showed my wife the videos cause they were cool, but she got all misty-eyed about seeing Tubingen again, so I'm in for a long night of hearing about how much fun she had at university there. Sigh. Why can't more people appreciate the value of astrophysics for astrophysics' sake?
Ever watch Star Trek? They have those replicators that can make apples by rearranging tanks of various raw materials. If we had those starting today, apple farmers would indeed go out of business;
Ah, but you see that's a different issue altogether. If I could solve world hunger, I could put farmers out of business and guarantee they'd always have enough to eat, and never worry again. The only way this connects to freely copying art is if any artist is able to walk into a restaurant, perform or deliver some kind of art, and freely take food without paying actual money.
Copyright isn't intended to help artists. It's intended to get them to create new works (by giving them the incentive of a monopoly)
I would argue that incentive is meant to help artists. If you don't help artists turn their work into money (if only briefly) then you reduce the number of artists dramatically. The majority of "great" art created over the years was done by those who were either paid to produce or were using their art to make a living. If you completely gutted their ability to monetize their work, none of them would have kept at it.
If someone had been in the audience during the first performance of "Hamlet" and taped and re-distributed the play to everyone who wanted it, free of charge, Shakespeare would never have existed the way he does now. The risk to the public interest is that by dismissing the value of creative works and their creators, they may be discouraging the most brilliant artist of all time from taking a shot. An artist is not necessarily someone who opts to starve for their art.
I myself often find derivatives that are excellent, perhaps even superior to their sources.
What would be truly useful would be a mindset that let the creators of derivative works communicate with the original artist so that they could bounce ideas off each other to make something far superior to the first product. That was one of the worst victims of modern copyright... the inability of artists to collaborate unofficially, for fear of being sued.
Yes, except that [$1 for a movie] way too high
Yeah, I would prefer to see a complete decoupling of the service and payment myself. If you can get access to the work, enjoy it. If you enjoy it, pay something to the artist. In some cases the medium will require an up-front fee (like DVDs), but you as the consumer set the price. Most people have no trouble supporting the artist that made their favourite show or song or book. I just wonder if $1 as a suggested starting point is a good way to kick it off. I find that people today need to be told what to pay, even if they'd prefer another price. That's a whole lot of social engineering right there.
after all, how many times over do they want to get paid for the single act of creating a single work
This was the biggest problem that drama faced when it started getting written down and reproduced. It used to be you had no choice but to see the artist hard at work to appreciate their art, because you had to see them live. Once we started recording things (especially movies and TV), that personal connection got lost. Someone making a TV show shouldn't expect to be paid seven times for the same work by the same person, but if ten million people watch their show and enjoy it, they should expect that some of those people appreciate it enough to pay for it.
People in that sort of work [colour correcting] aren't the kind of artists we're talking about here. They merely provide a service, and that has nothing to do with copyright.
Ah, but it does. If I create a show and I have a crew of 100 people making each episode, and I can't keep Company B from selling it for $1 on the street corner, I can't make my next episode, and those 100 people are out of work. And those people ARE artists... that's just the point: you can say that a singer is just one person able to make their own way, starving on
Hell, the idea of copyright didn't even exist anywhere until 1710 -- but there's a lot of art that was created before then.
Yes, but a great deal of art created under such systems were propaganda made for the benefit of patrons, which is not in the public's interest either. The best thing that happened to art was when it was turned into a viable career for anyone to pursue.
Besides, copyright harms culture too, by preventing people from getting copies for the lowest possible price (or free),
That's not culture, though, that's the pocketbooks of consumers. We have to distinguish between the public's need for culture and the public's need for things to be free. I want apples to be free, but I can't go into someone's farm and pick a bunch and go sell them at half the going rate because it benefits society. I agree it would be GREAT if that's how the world worked, but it doesn't and all it accomplishes is putting an apple farmer into the poorhouse.
preventing people from creating derivatives without authorization
This is where copyright went all wrong. If I write a book about "Bob", I don't see why you couldn't write a story about him too. In fact, I would hope you WOULD. I would hope we could work together to make Bob a better-developed cultural fixture, without worrying about licensing and other silliness. On the other hand, I don't want you to take my book and sell it word-for-word without paying me anything. The two do not need to be tied together (though they currently are, in today's world).
Either way, the price is now effectively $1 since rational people will not pay more than they have to.
It's funny you say that because I have learned that people seem to think that ANYTHING is worth $1, no matter what it is. I can't say why, but everything gravitates to that. Now, on DVD, that's hard to hit, because it's too close to production costs. But for purely torrent-based distribution, $1 is actually a doable price point for media. That's the beauty of online sales of media: it cuts out the person trying to profit on the backs of artists. The downside, though, is that it's a slippery slope into $0. Which is where the social contract comes in.
where they want the producers to get the minimum possible reward that ensures that they'll keep making more movies.
I would suggest that the public is not properly aware what the minimum possible reward should be. But that is very much the fault of $20M actors and special effects at the sake of art. It still doesn't change the fact that $0 is not going to pay the colour corrector's rent.
Sure. In fact, I bet that if you watched, you'd find that most people don't pay street performers.
And fewer would if the performers had large thugs holding pedestrians hostage till they paid for overhearing a song on a public sidewalk, which is what the current system is like. But I don't think we WANT it to come to the point where all the street performers disappear before we realize what we've lost. If we re-balance the system, we will have art and artists without anything unpleasant... but that means dropping a buck into the hat voluntarily, even if you COULD get it for free.
I'm interested in how copyright can best serve the public interest. Not in providing jobs for the crews of TV shows, or whatnot.
If the public's interest is in watching more Lost (rightly or wrongly), it is also in their interest to take care of the people who make that possible. I think the public has largely forgotten about all that because of years of "buy this record! buy this tape! buy this DVD!"... which masks the people behind the medium. Copyright is meant to serve the public's best interest with the artist in mind, not despite them. This is why there is a temporary monopoly, and not a simple declaration that all art must be shared immediately. But I think we agree on this point...
...90%+ of the advertisements I see in my telly are from very local companies, and would mean nothing to a large percentage of the torrent audience, it's problematic for the advertisers.
I've had some experience selling advertising like this for worldwide companies... the easy part about advertising on torrents would be that you can say with some certainty that the only people capable of managing the technology are the prime demographic for advertisers anyway (young, tech-savvy, with disposable income). If you sell a 30-second spot for even 1/5 the price of a cheap spot on a local station, you're probably covering your operating costs right there. It's quite astounding.
I once toyed with the idea of hitting local markets with targeted ads, but I couldn't think of a reasonable way to send a packaged video file down to the client with dynamically-inserted ads without massively increasing operating costs. So internet advertising kind of necessarily skips local markets for the time being... on the other hand, that may be a failing of the local advertisers not making themselves available to the world at large...
The one place TFA goes wrong is in assuming that any fool of a producer would scale advertising costs down as audience goes up. If I start off with 1000 viewers, I'll charge $100 for an ad. If by episode 3 I scale up to 1 million viewers, I am not going to drop my per-viewer price to stay in line with $100/ad. Well, _I_ might, but no one else would.
The benefit of torrents is that you end up with "nichecasting", or hitting a specific audience directly at the sake of others. Dr Who online with the right kind of ads would probably have the ability to rake in more cash than partnering with any Australian broadcaster, and at lower cost. It'll definitely take 10 years to get anywhere with this, but in the meantime hopefully some of these niche products will start to catch on, and the shows for the Slashdot crowd, at least, will start to be freed from the constraints of broadcast TV.
(Wow, I sound really "vive la resistance!" today, don't I?)
No, the only interests here are those of the public. The balance is merely in figuring out how to best serve the public.
Which is where the balance is: if the public's interest is in watching another season of "Lost", and the only way it can be produced is if all the people working on the show can earn enough to survive, and the only way that can happen is if copyright exists to defend the creators long enough to make money from the show... then it is in the public's interest to keep Company B from copying an episode off the web and selling it on the street corner for $3 ahead of the DVD box set hitting stores. The public's right isn't nearly as clear-cut as you're making it out to be. Without protection from COMMERCIAL piracy, artists can't afford to create, and there is very little art made, and culture suffers (except in very odd, isolated cases)
Having people reprint books is actually good for the public.
It all depends on who's copying the book and for what purpose.
Copyrighted works are basically commodities; there's not a significant difference between a DVD made in some factory with the authorization of a studio, and a DVD made in the same factory, without that authorization.
This assumes that the people that made the content on the DVD are being compensated in both cases. Let me give you a much clearer example: I make a short film, release it for free on the web. Universal snatches it, puts it on a DVD, and sells it at Best Buy. I don't get any money. I need the right to go after them because they're essentially stealing my hard work for financial gain.
But if everyone can make copies, there is competition, and this produces desirable efficiencies and low costs of copies.
I would say there's a big difference between making a parallel product to Star Wars and re-packaging and selling "Sith" bit-for-bit. You may drive the cost of the product down that way, but unless you're passing something on to the people that produced it, the only person benefiting is you (because you're likely taking all the profit yourself). Not in the public's interest, not in the artists'.
But just as artists say that they don't want to take a loss, neither should the public have to take a loss.
Neither the artist nor the public has a right to anything. It's a social contract that has become distorted with time. The artist goes out on a limb to entertain and enlighten the public with the unspoken understanding that appreciation will be shown with money dropped in a hat. Introducing physical media like DVDs put more of a focus on inventory and distribution costs, but the web has loosened that again. But all the same: a DVD is not purely manufacturing costs... the expensive part comes in what is ON it. Would you stand and listen to a street performer for 10 minutes and then walk away without leaving something?
You mean something more like machine readable media.
True, sorry. I talk to luddites all day, so my language is upside down on this subject.
But special breaks for artists, at the detriment of the public? I don't think so.
I personally believe in most of what you're saying, but I think you're too far in the direction of "damn the artist, they're screwing us over!". I work in entertainment, and most of the people I know make way less than those in programming, and spend half the year out of work while the actors go on vacation before the next season. They just barely scrape by. If the next ep of Lost doesn't get made, real people are going to hurt in a very big way. That's the public there. They're all part of the system, and they shouldn't be demonized because they work under a nasty umbrella.
That said, the people that need to be attacked are not the downloaders, not the people who skip commercials or anything like that. The people who should be chased for copyright infringement are those that actively and directly try and profit from the resale of creative works without passing anything on to the creators.
Everyone has become too polarised on this subject, and it's going to hurt the public in the long run unless we resolve it peacefully.
I've actually been in on meetings with TV people who say the industry is getting more comfortable with the idea of treating the internet as their "distributed market"... they're trying to convince the stations that the people that download are not watching their local stations anyway, so it's not lost revenue. The trick is to get good advertising that's relevant worldwide, but that shouldn't be too hard for most (hell, even I could do it). Of course the system is so well designed now that I'm sure it'll take years before things budge enough to make torrents a legal distribution method.
It's a balance thing, though, and I think you're focusing too much on the public's rights here (which given what you're replying to is very understandable). The missing piece of this puzzle is how you compensate creatives who put themselves on the line for the enjoyment of others.
The purpose of copyright, from my understanding, is to keep Company B from taking my idea and turning it into a series of books and selling them all over the world, and not paying me a cent. The advent of digital media meant that the distinction between btefnet and Company B was blurred, but there's still a giant difference: Company B is SELLING my idea, whereas btefnet is just giving it away. 14 year copyright is still a great idea to help creatives use the sword against commercial piracy, but is a foolish tactic against one's own audience.
The thing is that the public needs to realize that creatives need money to survive, too. If you had a reasonable avenue to compensate the cast and crew of "Lost" for every.avi you downloaded, would you? Ads? Subscription? Do you have a fundamental issue with that, or is it just that no one made it viable?
Copyright needs to exist to allow authors to stomp on true piracy, but at the same time the public and the creators have to dial down the rhetoric and talk about how the system can work for everyone.
(P.S. I don't mean "you" as in cpt kangarooski, I mean "the one reading this post")
Should have put it in context: I was more interested in software in general. The problem with Safari and vulnerabilities is that they tack on too much "other" stuff that falls outside the realm of a good solid web browser. Muddies the waters too much. Maybe a better example would be Mail.app, where it does everything it needs to do, but is probably cutting corners everywhere behind the scenes, vs Thunderbird, which may be a more solid app, but doesn't have the same polish. Or really pick any pairing and contemplate...
Anyway, weren't most of the Safari security holes OS-specific calls? So those wouldn't cross over into KHTML anyway (though the fact that holes exist I guess predicts cross-platform bugs).
The point of software then is to do what the user wants as safely as possible, despite the wishes of the programmer. Still off?
Ah, but is it actual perfection or the appearance of perfection that draws you? Which is more important: software that does what it's supposed to do safely and well, or software that is technically perfect, but may have usability hiccups? I know I prefer software that is brilliantly executed and as perfect as can be made, but none of that matters if the user doesn't see the job being done perfectly too. One doesn't make software for programmers, one makes software for users.
Ew, I haven't been on a Bell network for a while so I didn't know about the port blocking. That's exactly why the CRTC needs to stomp around in that area. But they'll also be going after price, I figure, because once Bell loses ground on port blocking, they'll just drown out the competition with overly-low prices in the short term, and then slowly increase prices as the smaller opponents fizzle.
Nah, it was Dustrunners. dustrunners.com. The show is ever-moving, but the game is dead, dead, dead. I reckon the longer I leave those fake sites out there and functioning, the less obvious they'll be if/when I ever bring back the game. I actually take one day a week to write fake press releases for fake companies with fully-articulated websites that no one ever looks at. I think I need therapy, cause my hobby is very odd.
You over-estimate the critical mind of Canadian bureaucracy. They don't do things to help out rich corporate friends, they do things taking into account a small part of a complex problem, and it typically pisses half the country off. Regulating VoIP in this case is almost certainly an attempt to randomly pound on Bell and make them cry (punishment for ExpressVu?). I would be surprised if the eventual regulations imposed didn't closely match what some smaller shop was providing already. The real fun will come in a year or two when Bell makes the point that half the leading VoIP providers in Canada are U.S.-based, and then regulations will change back in favour of Bell and Telus.
I could be wrong, but a line in the actual article makes it sound like they're reducing Bell and Telus' ability to treat VoIP as a loss-leader, basically making it impossible for other players like Vonage or Shaw to compete. It's not that they're regulating broadly, they're just warning Bell and Telus that they're being watched, and they can't shut out competition but charging $0.50/month for VoIP. Still not ideal, but a lot less terrible than it seems at first.
My favourite kind of game
on
The Rise of ARGs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Back in early 2001, my company ran what could loosely be called an ARG for about 9 months. The gist being that you would interact with characters and move through a bit of a vague social structure from being a pure outsider to a hardcore fugitive. The greatest mistake you could make in the game was to let anyone figure out who you really were, which greatly helped the immersion in the world we were creating.
The best part of the experience for me, from the inside, was constantly pushing the boundaries of the game so that those who were just plowing through would always have something exciting to do. When things got too comfy for players in a certain group, we flipped things upside down and watched them react. Sometimes we had players defect from one team to another for no reason we could see, and it made everyone nervous that someone was about to rat them out. Compared to "I can see your avatar" kind of games, I found ARGs to be a lot more interesting because you didn't have any strong point of reference to tell what was really going on.
The game itself was a bit of a companion to the show we were also making at the time. Since we had a strong storyline and events to push along, at certain points in the game, world politics would create a sudden "in-game event" that shook things up. But likewise, the events the players were creating started oozing into the scripts, so now a lot of the "history" we have comes from the ARG (including one now-important character who was previously a footnote, but got elevated due to some characters' interest in the mystery surrounding her). We laid so much groundwork out there in print and on the web that I think easily half of the content is still undiscovered (but most is still live and findable). Back in those days we stayed up all day and night writing new puzzles to keep things humming. The best 9 months of my life (work-wise).
Near the end we started looking at ways to create two easier-to-manage games: more of an RPG and a flight simulator... but I think the real urgency we had with the ARG was lost trying to envision that kind of world, because it didn't leave nearly as many "in"s to muddle the player's worlds as we were used to.
Some day I should pick of the bits of that game and give it another go. I just have to find enough coffee to help me stay awake that long (gettin' old).
Ultimately, it's like this: the user brings the train to the spot where the children play, but doesn't proceed. However, the new Google computer onboard the train turns the engine back on and plows on forward. Why? 'cause that's a track, and this is a train.
The kids shouldn't be playing there, but that doesn't mean the automatic train idea is smart.
I think the only real shock in all this is that no one at Google was aware GET/POST was as abused as it is.
That's both cool and sad at the same time. It's somehow sad when an entire culture adapts so strongly to English influence like that. Japan tries for the same thing in a lot of ways, and it just feels wrong. I prefer the good ol' fashioned Ottawa/Gatineau approach, where the Francophones look at you funny when you speak English to them: you adapt to THEM, not the other way around. Thank god for early french immersion...
What will get you are the long dark winters...
As if I get to see the sun now anyway... I work on the floor of a windowless room 20 hours a day. (incidentally, does anyone in Victoria know if it's raining out today?)
You would think that, but having just moved from Ottawa out west, I can tell you the tech in the bigger cities is even less evolved than it is in Ottawa. They're more aggressive, have a lot more ego, but they're doing things in BC that have been passe in Ottawa for years now (and for less).
Somewhat irrelevant, but I thought it was strange.
As for vacations: exactly right. When I worked for companies as an employee, asking for a week of my vacation time at a time was almost scandalous. Working as a free agent is almost harder, though, because none of your clients wants to LET you take your vacation, and they get those puppy dog eyes, and shucks, I just can't say no.
Hell, if it weren't for the... uh... Swedish thing, I'd move to Sweden too!
Even though it's never been a "problem" per se, it's definitely never been something fully accepted... which is to say, if they DON'T kick this ruling, you might see nicely packaged boxes in the average supermarket touting software specifically designed to override CSS on all your favourite Hollywood movies, or be able to find copy-protection-free DVD players in any electronics shop. I wonder what this would do to the release of American films in France?
Granted, this'll get overturned in a heartbeat, but here's something interesting: according to my lawyer-friend, it should be perfectly legal to help people rip their DVDs with De-CSS now, because it's basically become proper fair use. Though he did mention that for anyone hoping to sell a ripping service to les Français, if money trades hands, you'll likely get sued when this is all over. Still, wouldn't this be the first case of it being legal to break encryption?
Better than that, the best way to get something like this killed is to make Industry Canada think it will cripple innovation for small business. So anyone in Vancouver Kingsway with any sort of high-tech business should go down and leave David Emerson a letter of concern. But really, IC is probably already freaking out about this, so I doubt there's much work to do.
Semi-relatedly, if anyone in said Victoria-Beacon Hill district happens to have a spare petition lying around, it would save me buying a printer:)
If and when you get one working, let me know... it's a massively useful idea for people trying to self-sustain in arts... you really tripped my brain back into the "on" position. thanks!
Set up an escrow account that people can deposit money in via paypal, credit cards and electronic checks.
Pure mechanics question: any good suggestions on where to set up such an account? Obviously something with wide accessibility and someplace your fans would trust, non?
That's a very well-phrased plan you've got there. It's like ArtistShare, but without such a high threshhold to entry.
Slashdot Mirror
Not big and commercial, but maybe paired with MythTV or some other kind of box, it could take off... http://participatoryculture.org/
I still prefer the term "nichecasting" for this kind of idea (microcasting implies "small"), and it's particularly cool when you look at it from a Long Tail perspective. So if we can [n]cast for virtually no cost, all we need to do is create stuff for virutally no cost. RvB is still, I think, the best example of that kind project. Does anyone know of any other FOSE[ntertainment] out there?
Vital follow-up: towards the end of the "round trip" video, the world warps all around upside down and twists in mind-bending ways... she claims that's how it looked to her when she was there, too. So either she was traveling at the speed of light, or German beer is better than I thought.
I showed my wife the videos cause they were cool, but she got all misty-eyed about seeing Tubingen again, so I'm in for a long night of hearing about how much fun she had at university there. Sigh. Why can't more people appreciate the value of astrophysics for astrophysics' sake?
Ever watch Star Trek? They have those replicators that can make apples by rearranging tanks of various raw materials. If we had those starting today, apple farmers would indeed go out of business;
Ah, but you see that's a different issue altogether. If I could solve world hunger, I could put farmers out of business and guarantee they'd always have enough to eat, and never worry again. The only way this connects to freely copying art is if any artist is able to walk into a restaurant, perform or deliver some kind of art, and freely take food without paying actual money.
Copyright isn't intended to help artists. It's intended to get them to create new works (by giving them the incentive of a monopoly)
I would argue that incentive is meant to help artists. If you don't help artists turn their work into money (if only briefly) then you reduce the number of artists dramatically. The majority of "great" art created over the years was done by those who were either paid to produce or were using their art to make a living. If you completely gutted their ability to monetize their work, none of them would have kept at it.
If someone had been in the audience during the first performance of "Hamlet" and taped and re-distributed the play to everyone who wanted it, free of charge, Shakespeare would never have existed the way he does now. The risk to the public interest is that by dismissing the value of creative works and their creators, they may be discouraging the most brilliant artist of all time from taking a shot. An artist is not necessarily someone who opts to starve for their art.
I myself often find derivatives that are excellent, perhaps even superior to their sources.
What would be truly useful would be a mindset that let the creators of derivative works communicate with the original artist so that they could bounce ideas off each other to make something far superior to the first product. That was one of the worst victims of modern copyright... the inability of artists to collaborate unofficially, for fear of being sued.
Yes, except that [$1 for a movie] way too high
Yeah, I would prefer to see a complete decoupling of the service and payment myself. If you can get access to the work, enjoy it. If you enjoy it, pay something to the artist. In some cases the medium will require an up-front fee (like DVDs), but you as the consumer set the price. Most people have no trouble supporting the artist that made their favourite show or song or book. I just wonder if $1 as a suggested starting point is a good way to kick it off. I find that people today need to be told what to pay, even if they'd prefer another price. That's a whole lot of social engineering right there.
after all, how many times over do they want to get paid for the single act of creating a single work
This was the biggest problem that drama faced when it started getting written down and reproduced. It used to be you had no choice but to see the artist hard at work to appreciate their art, because you had to see them live. Once we started recording things (especially movies and TV), that personal connection got lost. Someone making a TV show shouldn't expect to be paid seven times for the same work by the same person, but if ten million people watch their show and enjoy it, they should expect that some of those people appreciate it enough to pay for it.
People in that sort of work [colour correcting] aren't the kind of artists we're talking about here. They merely provide a service, and that has nothing to do with copyright.
Ah, but it does. If I create a show and I have a crew of 100 people making each episode, and I can't keep Company B from selling it for $1 on the street corner, I can't make my next episode, and those 100 people are out of work. And those people ARE artists... that's just the point: you can say that a singer is just one person able to make their own way, starving on
Hell, the idea of copyright didn't even exist anywhere until 1710 -- but there's a lot of art that was created before then.
Yes, but a great deal of art created under such systems were propaganda made for the benefit of patrons, which is not in the public's interest either. The best thing that happened to art was when it was turned into a viable career for anyone to pursue.
Besides, copyright harms culture too, by preventing people from getting copies for the lowest possible price (or free),
That's not culture, though, that's the pocketbooks of consumers. We have to distinguish between the public's need for culture and the public's need for things to be free. I want apples to be free, but I can't go into someone's farm and pick a bunch and go sell them at half the going rate because it benefits society. I agree it would be GREAT if that's how the world worked, but it doesn't and all it accomplishes is putting an apple farmer into the poorhouse.
preventing people from creating derivatives without authorization
This is where copyright went all wrong. If I write a book about "Bob", I don't see why you couldn't write a story about him too. In fact, I would hope you WOULD. I would hope we could work together to make Bob a better-developed cultural fixture, without worrying about licensing and other silliness. On the other hand, I don't want you to take my book and sell it word-for-word without paying me anything. The two do not need to be tied together (though they currently are, in today's world).
Either way, the price is now effectively $1 since rational people will not pay more than they have to.
It's funny you say that because I have learned that people seem to think that ANYTHING is worth $1, no matter what it is. I can't say why, but everything gravitates to that. Now, on DVD, that's hard to hit, because it's too close to production costs. But for purely torrent-based distribution, $1 is actually a doable price point for media. That's the beauty of online sales of media: it cuts out the person trying to profit on the backs of artists. The downside, though, is that it's a slippery slope into $0. Which is where the social contract comes in.
where they want the producers to get the minimum possible reward that ensures that they'll keep making more movies.
I would suggest that the public is not properly aware what the minimum possible reward should be. But that is very much the fault of $20M actors and special effects at the sake of art. It still doesn't change the fact that $0 is not going to pay the colour corrector's rent.
Sure. In fact, I bet that if you watched, you'd find that most people don't pay street performers.
And fewer would if the performers had large thugs holding pedestrians hostage till they paid for overhearing a song on a public sidewalk, which is what the current system is like. But I don't think we WANT it to come to the point where all the street performers disappear before we realize what we've lost. If we re-balance the system, we will have art and artists without anything unpleasant... but that means dropping a buck into the hat voluntarily, even if you COULD get it for free.
I'm interested in how copyright can best serve the public interest. Not in providing jobs for the crews of TV shows, or whatnot.
If the public's interest is in watching more Lost (rightly or wrongly), it is also in their interest to take care of the people who make that possible. I think the public has largely forgotten about all that because of years of "buy this record! buy this tape! buy this DVD!"... which masks the people behind the medium. Copyright is meant to serve the public's best interest with the artist in mind, not despite them. This is why there is a temporary monopoly, and not a simple declaration that all art must be shared immediately. But I think we agree on this point...
If optimum copyright la
...90%+ of the advertisements I see in my telly are from very local companies, and would mean nothing to a large percentage of the torrent audience, it's problematic for the advertisers.
I've had some experience selling advertising like this for worldwide companies... the easy part about advertising on torrents would be that you can say with some certainty that the only people capable of managing the technology are the prime demographic for advertisers anyway (young, tech-savvy, with disposable income). If you sell a 30-second spot for even 1/5 the price of a cheap spot on a local station, you're probably covering your operating costs right there. It's quite astounding.
I once toyed with the idea of hitting local markets with targeted ads, but I couldn't think of a reasonable way to send a packaged video file down to the client with dynamically-inserted ads without massively increasing operating costs. So internet advertising kind of necessarily skips local markets for the time being... on the other hand, that may be a failing of the local advertisers not making themselves available to the world at large...
The one place TFA goes wrong is in assuming that any fool of a producer would scale advertising costs down as audience goes up. If I start off with 1000 viewers, I'll charge $100 for an ad. If by episode 3 I scale up to 1 million viewers, I am not going to drop my per-viewer price to stay in line with $100/ad. Well, _I_ might, but no one else would.
The benefit of torrents is that you end up with "nichecasting", or hitting a specific audience directly at the sake of others. Dr Who online with the right kind of ads would probably have the ability to rake in more cash than partnering with any Australian broadcaster, and at lower cost. It'll definitely take 10 years to get anywhere with this, but in the meantime hopefully some of these niche products will start to catch on, and the shows for the Slashdot crowd, at least, will start to be freed from the constraints of broadcast TV.
(Wow, I sound really "vive la resistance!" today, don't I?)
No, the only interests here are those of the public. The balance is merely in figuring out how to best serve the public.
Which is where the balance is: if the public's interest is in watching another season of "Lost", and the only way it can be produced is if all the people working on the show can earn enough to survive, and the only way that can happen is if copyright exists to defend the creators long enough to make money from the show... then it is in the public's interest to keep Company B from copying an episode off the web and selling it on the street corner for $3 ahead of the DVD box set hitting stores. The public's right isn't nearly as clear-cut as you're making it out to be. Without protection from COMMERCIAL piracy, artists can't afford to create, and there is very little art made, and culture suffers (except in very odd, isolated cases)
Having people reprint books is actually good for the public.
It all depends on who's copying the book and for what purpose.
Copyrighted works are basically commodities; there's not a significant difference between a DVD made in some factory with the authorization of a studio, and a DVD made in the same factory, without that authorization.
This assumes that the people that made the content on the DVD are being compensated in both cases. Let me give you a much clearer example: I make a short film, release it for free on the web. Universal snatches it, puts it on a DVD, and sells it at Best Buy. I don't get any money. I need the right to go after them because they're essentially stealing my hard work for financial gain.
But if everyone can make copies, there is competition, and this produces desirable efficiencies and low costs of copies.
I would say there's a big difference between making a parallel product to Star Wars and re-packaging and selling "Sith" bit-for-bit. You may drive the cost of the product down that way, but unless you're passing something on to the people that produced it, the only person benefiting is you (because you're likely taking all the profit yourself). Not in the public's interest, not in the artists'.
But just as artists say that they don't want to take a loss, neither should the public have to take a loss.
Neither the artist nor the public has a right to anything. It's a social contract that has become distorted with time. The artist goes out on a limb to entertain and enlighten the public with the unspoken understanding that appreciation will be shown with money dropped in a hat. Introducing physical media like DVDs put more of a focus on inventory and distribution costs, but the web has loosened that again. But all the same: a DVD is not purely manufacturing costs... the expensive part comes in what is ON it. Would you stand and listen to a street performer for 10 minutes and then walk away without leaving something?
You mean something more like machine readable media.
True, sorry. I talk to luddites all day, so my language is upside down on this subject.
But special breaks for artists, at the detriment of the public? I don't think so.
I personally believe in most of what you're saying, but I think you're too far in the direction of "damn the artist, they're screwing us over!". I work in entertainment, and most of the people I know make way less than those in programming, and spend half the year out of work while the actors go on vacation before the next season. They just barely scrape by. If the next ep of Lost doesn't get made, real people are going to hurt in a very big way. That's the public there. They're all part of the system, and they shouldn't be demonized because they work under a nasty umbrella.
That said, the people that need to be attacked are not the downloaders, not the people who skip commercials or anything like that. The people who should be chased for copyright infringement are those that actively and directly try and profit from the resale of creative works without passing anything on to the creators.
Everyone has become too polarised on this subject, and it's going to hurt the public in the long run unless we resolve it peacefully.
I've actually been in on meetings with TV people who say the industry is getting more comfortable with the idea of treating the internet as their "distributed market"... they're trying to convince the stations that the people that download are not watching their local stations anyway, so it's not lost revenue. The trick is to get good advertising that's relevant worldwide, but that shouldn't be too hard for most (hell, even I could do it). Of course the system is so well designed now that I'm sure it'll take years before things budge enough to make torrents a legal distribution method.
It's a balance thing, though, and I think you're focusing too much on the public's rights here (which given what you're replying to is very understandable). The missing piece of this puzzle is how you compensate creatives who put themselves on the line for the enjoyment of others.
.avi you downloaded, would you? Ads? Subscription? Do you have a fundamental issue with that, or is it just that no one made it viable?
The purpose of copyright, from my understanding, is to keep Company B from taking my idea and turning it into a series of books and selling them all over the world, and not paying me a cent. The advent of digital media meant that the distinction between btefnet and Company B was blurred, but there's still a giant difference: Company B is SELLING my idea, whereas btefnet is just giving it away. 14 year copyright is still a great idea to help creatives use the sword against commercial piracy, but is a foolish tactic against one's own audience.
The thing is that the public needs to realize that creatives need money to survive, too. If you had a reasonable avenue to compensate the cast and crew of "Lost" for every
Copyright needs to exist to allow authors to stomp on true piracy, but at the same time the public and the creators have to dial down the rhetoric and talk about how the system can work for everyone.
(P.S. I don't mean "you" as in cpt kangarooski, I mean "the one reading this post")
Should have put it in context: I was more interested in software in general. The problem with Safari and vulnerabilities is that they tack on too much "other" stuff that falls outside the realm of a good solid web browser. Muddies the waters too much. Maybe a better example would be Mail.app, where it does everything it needs to do, but is probably cutting corners everywhere behind the scenes, vs Thunderbird, which may be a more solid app, but doesn't have the same polish. Or really pick any pairing and contemplate...
Anyway, weren't most of the Safari security holes OS-specific calls? So those wouldn't cross over into KHTML anyway (though the fact that holes exist I guess predicts cross-platform bugs).
The point of software then is to do what the user wants as safely as possible, despite the wishes of the programmer. Still off?
Ah, but is it actual perfection or the appearance of perfection that draws you? Which is more important: software that does what it's supposed to do safely and well, or software that is technically perfect, but may have usability hiccups? I know I prefer software that is brilliantly executed and as perfect as can be made, but none of that matters if the user doesn't see the job being done perfectly too. One doesn't make software for programmers, one makes software for users.
Ew, I haven't been on a Bell network for a while so I didn't know about the port blocking. That's exactly why the CRTC needs to stomp around in that area. But they'll also be going after price, I figure, because once Bell loses ground on port blocking, they'll just drown out the competition with overly-low prices in the short term, and then slowly increase prices as the smaller opponents fizzle.
Nah, it was Dustrunners. dustrunners.com. The show is ever-moving, but the game is dead, dead, dead. I reckon the longer I leave those fake sites out there and functioning, the less obvious they'll be if/when I ever bring back the game. I actually take one day a week to write fake press releases for fake companies with fully-articulated websites that no one ever looks at. I think I need therapy, cause my hobby is very odd.
You over-estimate the critical mind of Canadian bureaucracy. They don't do things to help out rich corporate friends, they do things taking into account a small part of a complex problem, and it typically pisses half the country off. Regulating VoIP in this case is almost certainly an attempt to randomly pound on Bell and make them cry (punishment for ExpressVu?). I would be surprised if the eventual regulations imposed didn't closely match what some smaller shop was providing already. The real fun will come in a year or two when Bell makes the point that half the leading VoIP providers in Canada are U.S.-based, and then regulations will change back in favour of Bell and Telus.
I could be wrong, but a line in the actual article makes it sound like they're reducing Bell and Telus' ability to treat VoIP as a loss-leader, basically making it impossible for other players like Vonage or Shaw to compete. It's not that they're regulating broadly, they're just warning Bell and Telus that they're being watched, and they can't shut out competition but charging $0.50/month for VoIP. Still not ideal, but a lot less terrible than it seems at first.
Back in early 2001, my company ran what could loosely be called an ARG for about 9 months. The gist being that you would interact with characters and move through a bit of a vague social structure from being a pure outsider to a hardcore fugitive. The greatest mistake you could make in the game was to let anyone figure out who you really were, which greatly helped the immersion in the world we were creating.
The best part of the experience for me, from the inside, was constantly pushing the boundaries of the game so that those who were just plowing through would always have something exciting to do. When things got too comfy for players in a certain group, we flipped things upside down and watched them react. Sometimes we had players defect from one team to another for no reason we could see, and it made everyone nervous that someone was about to rat them out. Compared to "I can see your avatar" kind of games, I found ARGs to be a lot more interesting because you didn't have any strong point of reference to tell what was really going on.
The game itself was a bit of a companion to the show we were also making at the time. Since we had a strong storyline and events to push along, at certain points in the game, world politics would create a sudden "in-game event" that shook things up. But likewise, the events the players were creating started oozing into the scripts, so now a lot of the "history" we have comes from the ARG (including one now-important character who was previously a footnote, but got elevated due to some characters' interest in the mystery surrounding her). We laid so much groundwork out there in print and on the web that I think easily half of the content is still undiscovered (but most is still live and findable). Back in those days we stayed up all day and night writing new puzzles to keep things humming. The best 9 months of my life (work-wise).
Near the end we started looking at ways to create two easier-to-manage games: more of an RPG and a flight simulator... but I think the real urgency we had with the ARG was lost trying to envision that kind of world, because it didn't leave nearly as many "in"s to muddle the player's worlds as we were used to.
Some day I should pick of the bits of that game and give it another go. I just have to find enough coffee to help me stay awake that long (gettin' old).
Ultimately, it's like this: the user brings the train to the spot where the children play, but doesn't proceed. However, the new Google computer onboard the train turns the engine back on and plows on forward. Why? 'cause that's a track, and this is a train.
The kids shouldn't be playing there, but that doesn't mean the automatic train idea is smart.
I think the only real shock in all this is that no one at Google was aware GET/POST was as abused as it is.
That's both cool and sad at the same time. It's somehow sad when an entire culture adapts so strongly to English influence like that. Japan tries for the same thing in a lot of ways, and it just feels wrong. I prefer the good ol' fashioned Ottawa/Gatineau approach, where the Francophones look at you funny when you speak English to them: you adapt to THEM, not the other way around. Thank god for early french immersion...
What will get you are the long dark winters...
As if I get to see the sun now anyway... I work on the floor of a windowless room 20 hours a day. (incidentally, does anyone in Victoria know if it's raining out today?)
You would think that, but having just moved from Ottawa out west, I can tell you the tech in the bigger cities is even less evolved than it is in Ottawa. They're more aggressive, have a lot more ego, but they're doing things in BC that have been passe in Ottawa for years now (and for less).
Somewhat irrelevant, but I thought it was strange.
As for vacations: exactly right. When I worked for companies as an employee, asking for a week of my vacation time at a time was almost scandalous. Working as a free agent is almost harder, though, because none of your clients wants to LET you take your vacation, and they get those puppy dog eyes, and shucks, I just can't say no.
Hell, if it weren't for the... uh... Swedish thing, I'd move to Sweden too!
Even though it's never been a "problem" per se, it's definitely never been something fully accepted... which is to say, if they DON'T kick this ruling, you might see nicely packaged boxes in the average supermarket touting software specifically designed to override CSS on all your favourite Hollywood movies, or be able to find copy-protection-free DVD players in any electronics shop. I wonder what this would do to the release of American films in France?
Granted, this'll get overturned in a heartbeat, but here's something interesting: according to my lawyer-friend, it should be perfectly legal to help people rip their DVDs with De-CSS now, because it's basically become proper fair use. Though he did mention that for anyone hoping to sell a ripping service to les Français, if money trades hands, you'll likely get sued when this is all over. Still, wouldn't this be the first case of it being legal to break encryption?
Better than that, the best way to get something like this killed is to make Industry Canada think it will cripple innovation for small business. So anyone in Vancouver Kingsway with any sort of high-tech business should go down and leave David Emerson a letter of concern. But really, IC is probably already freaking out about this, so I doubt there's much work to do.
:)
Semi-relatedly, if anyone in said Victoria-Beacon Hill district happens to have a spare petition lying around, it would save me buying a printer
If and when you get one working, let me know... it's a massively useful idea for people trying to self-sustain in arts... you really tripped my brain back into the "on" position. thanks!
Set up an escrow account that people can deposit money in via paypal, credit cards and electronic checks.
Pure mechanics question: any good suggestions on where to set up such an account? Obviously something with wide accessibility and someplace your fans would trust, non?
That's a very well-phrased plan you've got there. It's like ArtistShare, but without such a high threshhold to entry.
I used to do that trick too until my wife realized she could just slam the lid on the PB shut and achieve the same basic effect.
However, I then found that the sudden dread that she might've smashed the crap out of my $5000 laptop made me get up right quick.