Sorry Charlie, if a zip file was very reptitive, it'd be more compressible. A well compressed file looks like random data (so does encrypted data). If it doesn't, get a better compressor. Repeative data is redundant, compressing removes the redundancies. That's the general idea of compression.
Yes, the header will match the magic bytes, but that is also true of nearly any file format. All DOS executables start with MZ, GIF's start with a specific set of bytes. Linux executables normally start with ELF within the first handful of bytes, most perl scripts have perl on the first line. Every file format listed in the magic file has some easily recognizable format.
Also encrypting a file normally doesn't make it any large then to pad out the block size. I know that DES and RSA don't. I can't recall any from when I read the first edition of Applied Cryptography that did.
Hmmm, I agree with that, but the "news" isn't most media companies news either.
How many stories are covered by the AP wire, a freelance, or just a republished post by other people Yahoo does it, CNN does it, I don't read MSNBC, but I'll bet they do it. Yes CNN and MSNBC sends people to gather news, but a lot of them just get news from affiliates or other local news sources and aggregate it just like google does.
The thing most people I know who like Google's news, is that it's very up to date, and that it presents a lot of different views all of them at your finger tips. As such, it's the most balanced, accurate up to date "reporting". I quote reporting, because they don't have any reporters, but they aggregate news in a way that is far more useful then the individual pieces.
The only people who have better news sources, are the people who employ personal news reviewers to give them the most up to date, and concise news updates daily.
They can't give any kind of background or technical accomplishments of what happened? None at all?
The Academy Awards I always assumed had more information on their websites about the movies, about what was compelling about them, about who was involved and what was accomplished. During a 2 hour TV presentation, I understand why they do what they do, and to be honest, at least I understand the body of work they are judging. It's contents are the film I saw, with the possible exception of the lifetime achievement awards. Lifetime acheivement awards, they normally spend some time presenting what that person did, and what was interesting about it.
With your vote, you can't write a little blurb about the ones you voted for that you felt you had some area of expertise in? So they could give some quotes (it'd be optional, but I'm willing to bet each winner would find someone willing to say something nice about it in a couple of paragraphs).
When voting for a film, I know precisely what they voted for. If I saw the film, I know the entire body of work they considered. Google. I don't know all the stuff that google does. The news stuff is cool. The searchable images, cool. The weird advanced queries cool. The way cool stuff dealing with the froogle, cool. I know they do all kinds of cool interesting stuff I've never seen, because there's always more cool stuff I learn about google.
Apache puts out the Jakarta project, the Structs project, the Tomcat server, the Ant stuff, Apache server, they put out all kinds of stuff. Apache 2.0 is cool, but nothing impossible. Some of the other projects might be incredible compelling technological leaps, maybe they could ask someone from the Apache foundation for a blurb on their accomplishments for the year. Maybe like a little speech or something?
Uhhh, is it just me, or do the Webby site qualify (ironically), for the most useless site ever made. Wow, we give out awards with titles, with no explaination. None, at all. "Technical Achievement", okay, what did you think was so impressive about Apache? Why was it better then what Google's accomplished?
We give out this awards, and explain nothing, nothing at all. Geez, that's useful. They give you links to the people who won, and the people nominated. Whoopie! Why not tell me something useful, like the criteria that you used to evaluate them (the criteria is there, but hidden away). Why not tell me what the Apache people did to qualify as: "Sites introducing or integrating technology that pushes the envelope, and invite us to believe in what once seemed impossible" .
Great, you took 4 technical achievements, arbitrarily picked one. That's nice, where's some useful content? Personally, I think Google News is much cooler then anything Apache's done lately. Not that Apache isn't cool, but Google's done far more previously deemed impossible things lately then Apache has. At least tell me what you think Apache has done that you think is wonderful?
Maybe they'll release all that information later after some goofy ceremony, but seems like it'd be mighty useful content to give the site some actual value.
Actually, the HP 4500 runs around $2K, and does 4ppm in full color, it does 16ppm in black and white. The toner's not too incredibly high priced. There is an HP 8500 if I recall correctly that prints even faster. Bought one for Mom a couple of years ago, she does desktop publishing as a business. It holds up well, and other then the inability to print the grey when printing a color document, it's great. In a B/W, it does grey just fine, but in color, it mixes in blue, so all greys have a blue tinge.
Remember, high volume, is not only that it prints fast. High volume is that it can print a lot of papers without breaking down. We've got several HP's at work that print relatively quickly, but if you print more then say 40K pages a month to them, they breakdown and need a lot of tender loving care to get them to run again. We have an nearly identical printer that prints at the same pages per minute rate, but it's rated to print 150K pages a month.
If he needs something that can print 10,000 pages without a break, that's different then he needs 86,400 pages to be printed in a day.
Didn't SP1, or one of the hot fixes, or the WMP updates, include a EULA change that says basically, you agree to let us do a number of things that are intrusive, that you didn't agree to in the first license?
So to get the fixes, you had to agree to a EULA that you didn't want to.
Oh, I'm not saying that Diablo was in any way original. I'm merely pointing out that if he's grouping "Games that have objectives, where you have to kill all of the enemy" into a single large group. Then, RTS's, flight fighter based games, Mech style games, and FPS's aren't original, they are merely a conglomeration of games with no originality. WarCraft III, is very different from Descent, which is very different from MechWarrior, which is very different from Quake.
Sure, Diablo is a highly advanced version of "Zelda", or NetHack, or any number of other games. It's just not the same as WarCraft III. The original poster put them all in a single line, and said they all fall into the "Objectives and Kill the enemy" category. I'm merely saying, that there is a ton of originality to be found inside the "Objectives and Kill the enemy" category.
If your trying to imply that Diablo and Diablo II are in the same class as War/Star/Free Craft, the reason you don't think there are any new originals is that, you see everything that involves being in front of a keyboard as the same as nearly as I can tell.
Those two sets of games involve completely different things. Yes you run both of them from a birds eye view, and you kill the enemy, and most of them came from Blizzard. The Diablo games come from Blizzard North, which is a completely different set of guys then who did the Craft games for Blizzard.
Geez, I mean Wing Commander had objectives, and you had to destroy the enemy (most of the time at least), but nobody I've ever met would say, "Geez, WarCraft III, that's just a knock off of that old DOS game Wing Commander".
However, the spammer has no idea that a specific site only has kids related material. Nobody can classify web sites as to the type of content on them in an automated way. It's why Yahoo had human doing the classification for the longest time. It'd be entirely too much work for the spammer to check all the sites his e-mail addresses come from (so I think the we should require the spammer to do so).
Saying that it's only on kids sites is a red herring, spammers don't read the sites they crawl. They don't care about anything that they can't automate away. They'd send "Drink more Alcohol", to Alcohol Anonymous lists if they could make a buck at it. Spammers just crawl sites looking for e-mails. The content of sites can't be automatically detected, it's why porn blockers don't work. The other alternative is that, if it's a pronoucable name, it's entirely possible the spammer just did a dictionary attack to find the e-mail address.
You are angry, and want the spammer to do something that is technically infeasible. If we are going to require them to do something, pick something that would be very easy to do, let's just require them to stop sending unsolicited mail to a known list of e-mail addresses. Everybody who doesn't gets shot *grin*.
Duh, the dictionary definition of escrow is precisely that nobody gets access until certain terms are met, escrow isn't open source. That's why later in the post, I say that this is more likely then having it open sourced.
I switched gears, from the fourth paragraph on, assume I'm talking about the software being open sourced. For phrase "Having it Open Source", subsitute "Having it Open Source instead of Escrow would be much better because: ", and read the rest of the comment.
That three paragraphs is a simple example of why having the source available under certain condictions is good. It being open source is vastly superior to escrow (from the perspective of the consumer), because you don't have to jump thru the legal hoops to break the escrow. You just grab your copy of the source, and find somebody to audit it.
Essentially, if it had been open source, the manager could have anonymously tipped anybody to check the source for a very specific flaw. Nobody has to break escrow, or is violation of the NDA, and a large corporation, or a gov't body could have fought the defamation case, instead of them crushing one of their former employees for defamation (even though they are correct, they'd probably lose in court).
Open source has a lot more transparency, which is very good in this case.
How about this, the software has to be held in escrow for the particular revision of the software I have. It has to build the binary I have, and this has to be verified by a third party.
When a lawsuit comes up, I file for the escrowed copy to be given to my lawyer under an NDA where upon they can have it examined by experts in the field of computer science and diving. The first person who figured out that the software might have had a bug, might have figured all this out.
That's a more viable solution to corporate nature. The only problem is that the process of escrowing it, means they are afraid a bug might exist, which creates an image problem. So it's not likely to happen, but more likely then open sourcing the software.
Having it as Open Source would have meant the bug could have been announced in public anonymously, and verified by people in the public. This is exactly the same as security via obscurity in encryption. You want security, not security by obscurity. It's mearly a matter of time until the obscurity becomes clear, and your data is now in the clear.
The problem here is that everyone who knew, was liable for a lawsuit for defamation and would have to defend themselves in a court of law. That's not very cheap. Putting out an e-mail, on a mailing lists, or thru the popular channels that divers use (magazines, flyers at the shops), would have been easy had the software been available to the public for examination.
I like open source and think it's great for the great software I get for essentially free. For specific applications however, the peer review and transparency are a wonderful thing. They can easily be accomplished without the GPL, or BSD licenses. Open source isn't a magic bullet, but I'll bet the manager resigning and announcing to the public that someone should peer review the software for a specific flaw, would have saved a lot of pain and suffering.
I'll bet word of a specific flaw that is provable by experts, that could explained to the divers so they can understand:
"The computer assumes when you come up for air, you are breathing the enriched oxygen, if you aren't the computer is wrong!"
I don't know dick about diving, but even I know about the bends and how bad it is, and what it does to you, and I'd understand the problem if somebody told me the above. I bet news like that would travel fast in diving circles. It might ruin the corporation, but it'd save lifes.
Open source isn't a magic bullet, but some transparency would have mitigated the number of people put at risk.
In 15 years, how many people will still have an OS that will reliable play it? I'm sure hoping you'll have to have an emulator, or a compatability layer around, and that the emulator/compatibility layer will present to the standard holographic projector to the DX8 layer as the output device...
This would be a cooler technology if they just presented the game with a DirectX 3D driver. I'm not much of a D3D API expert (never having seen it). I'm guessing this is doable given all the technology they have. D3D is supposed to abstract everything away from the hardware, but be a very thin layer to the hardware. I'm guessing a guy could take their technology and the sample Direct3D driver that the MSDN library should have, and turn out a workable D3D driver. However, then they'd sell the technology to gamers, and not to game companies (I supposed they could still sell it to game companies to bundle into the disks). However, if there is a market for it, I'm guessing MS will buy them, and ship it as a stock portion of D3D.
Hmmm, maybe the LKML is high volume enough, but in my experince, little anemic boxes run little lists that generate hundreds of mail messages a day. You only have to sign the message precisely once. If you can't afford to do that, your list can't have many more users added to it.
In my experience, most people can afford to encrypt every last bit and byte of data they can send upstream. I'm doubtful that encryption is that rough on a mailing list.
Especially, if they are only signing a digest of the message, as opposed to the whole message, so even lists that take large attachments won't be that hindered.
Even if the list doesn't require encrypted messages, encrypting one message and sending it out the door to 5K people, I'm guessing that encryption is a smaller part of that then the sending part. You only have to encrypt once, then send 5000 times.
I'd hate to have a mailing list move IP's and have me stop accepting mail from it. That's a nuciense. I suppose I could just accept all mail that has the appropriate X-Header attached to it, but that's an invitation for Spammers to start just adding the X-Headers off every single known mailing list on the planet to every e-mail they send, so I'll accept it.
Get a bit better box, and give sign the digest. Everyone will be happier. Christ, just encrypt with a small key if need be. A 512 byte key should be small enough to PGP sign documents on the crappiest box you can pick up at Wal-mart.
Well, that's simple to work around. Just create a white list of public keys you trust not to sign with your public key. The list signs the mailing list with the private key. The mail goes out, you have it on your public key white list, so you accept the mail. If your mailing list/mail server is at all scriptable, you should be albe to script having the message signed just before it leaves the server. So it should be doable, to using current technology. In fact, mailing lists would be a good place to start using it. Just digitially sign all outgoing e-mails with your mail servers public key, my mail server's CPU sits idle most of the day anyways, the disks are what's busy. Sometimes the virus scans are brutal if I get lots of big attachments.
Sure, the mailing list has to keep an unsigned key in memory all the time (or worse on the disk), but it's no worse then an SSL apache web server. Rebooting the mailing list machine will be a hassle, especially remotely, but it's still doable.
Next Objection?
Yes it will make running a large mail server more expensive. That's the idea! People who have a legitimate use to contact that many people who won't opt-in before hand, had better have some pretty serious CPU power. Which means they are probably a major corporation. While some major corporations send out spams, they do it so infrequently, the the concept of the major corporation spams pissing me off, is a delightful concept. That only happens once every couple of days to one a month. If that's all the more often I get spam, it's a win.
The problem is transitioning from the current system to the new system. I'd imagine it'll take someone making a killer client that makes signing a message relatively painless, and then having some geeky lists that will only take posts of digitially signed messages with the public key that is registered on the major key servers, and always signs e-mails with a private key so they can be used on the client end to check the signatures.
Uhhh, please don't use Shannon Elizabeth's name in the same sentence you use the word Bond. It creates a mental image that incapacitates me from any productive mental thoughts. Sorry, for the next half hour all I'm going to be able to ponder is Shannon Elizabeth and Bondage...:-)
They are nice thoughts, but I've really got work I need to get done.... (So why the heck am I reading slashdot...).
That's why copyright exists. Specifically as a construct to create scarcity. The economics are actually sound. You've mis-measured. Measure from the other side. I'm going to switch up on you for a bit here because it's quite a bit clearer. I'm going to talk about software to your taxes instead of music.
This is a new tactic for me, I've never argued it before, so make me earn it:
What's the value of the good to you? What's the opportunity cost of not copying the bits?
Lets say, it'll take you 2 hours to do your taxes without this software. You'd work 2 extra hours at work for $75. Thus, the opportunity cost saving these two hours of work is roughly $75. So you should be more then willing to pay $75 in trade for the value.
It didn't cost me anything to give you those two hours. Now, the marginal cost for me to produce a copy for you to use was roughly $0.00. However, it cost me a $100K to make the first copy. My problem is, I've got to sell the first one for $100K, then I can give the rest away, and I've broken even. Assuming my salary is part of the $100K, that's fair.
So I'm saying that the value of the software to you is $75, and you should willingly give up that $75 to cover my startup costs of $100K. If you are not, I'll be interested in seeing if the auction style that was used for Blender becomes more popular. We'll release the software once the creation costs, plus some extra profit for the risk of not getting paid is covered. So software will be released to the public once the $100K is covered. Then it will be available in the public domain (just the bits, not the original source).
Now on to music. You enjoy listening to music right? What are you willing to trade for music? It appears that space on your harddrive, and some time searching, some power, some bandwidth, and a partially the cost of a computer. What else would you be willing to trade for it. If no music at all existed, would you spend time creating it yourself personally? Some people would. So music has an opportunity cost to them. They could buy just off the shelf music, or they could spend time creating it themselves individuallly. The time they would have spent creating it, is representative of the value of the time they are willing to spend.
So those bits have economic value to the public at large. The problem is that the marginal cost is $0, after the up front cost is paid. I'll be interested to see how the first copy gets paid for, if the public continues to insist on only paying for the marginal cost. I wonder who in the public will pay for the first one, because like most other things, the first step is a real doozie.
Copyright says, that supply is supposed to be completely controlled by copyright holder, so that the copyright holder can set the price. You are saying that the public should only ever be willing to pay the marginal cost of the cost of production. I'm saying, they should be willing to pay the opportunity cost of not having it.
I think the RIAA will crucify people in court in mass, in large judgements, and loads of people will be scared shitless to download music. I'd love to see them do it. The court system will be overrun with them. The court will setup special provisions, and there will be specialists in getting settlements done. It'll be great. The money the RIAA gets in infringement suits could dwarf what they get in sales. Geez, if they just started getting people for $10K a pop, they only need about 800,000 of those a year to completely replace their sales. My guess is they can get something like 10K from 10K people a year in mass lawsuits and settlements, that's a hundred million dollars. I think people will start to get the point then. The really funny part is, economically, it's the right thing to keep doing until it rasies the average marginal cost of downloading music above that of buying a CD. Marketing suicide, but economically sound.
Copyright is an important issue, and people should respect
Lots of neato math in there. Not going to debate the finer points of it. I'll just stipulate that it's accurate. I'm guessing that in aggregate P2P networks have a net effect on the value of copyrighted music.
I didn't see that part where you estimated the effect of 100K people on the internet doing it.
"No your honor, I didn't kill the man, I merely hit him but one time while in this mob of thousands doing the same." (Not to equate killing with copyright infringement, but eventually the rounding error adds up if enough people do it).
I find the RIAA's estimates laughable. I find their lawsuites and punative damages commical. I think we all agree on that. I think they themselves have done themselves a disservice in the way with which they have approached all of this. I have no idea how the right way to handle it is, but personally, I'd have started a found a group of 20 individuals in a convienent area and just sued them for copyright infringement. I wouldn't have settled. I would have persued a suitable punative damages. Say 3-5 times the average cost of rent (to index it to a value that makes it punishing in the area). I'd have continued doing this until people got the point, that it was going to continue happening for a long time. After that, settling is okay, but somebody needed to suffer thru the full blown court version.
I agree with you, that the music industry needs to adapt or suffer the economic fate of the best buggy whip makers.
Okay, now that we've covered what we agree on. The economics of scarcity work great. The problem with the economics of non-scarcity. The only people who can do that, are people who do it because they are independantly wealthy, or they have a patron, or it's funded thru some public money.
Creating artificial scarcity was the best proposed solution to the problem, it was the balance that was struck to create an as much advancement of the arts and sciences. It's worked reasonable well for several hundred years. It would continue to work well if people followed the law. Present another solution just as elegant, that will provide as much employment and as much advancement, and I'll be your most vocal advocate.
As to you having an exact duplicate of my Yogi Berra bat. Sure your welcome to your copy. If you can duplicate it to your satisfaction more power too you. I completely understand if when you start posting to the web "I've got identical Yogi Berra signed bats, even Yogi himself couldn't tell the difference". If you started to hand them out free at baseball conventions where Yogi was signing them, I could see the justification of his suit against you. You are damaging his ability to make money, and using his signature (or his likeness) without his permission.
I don't argue the case because I as a consumer disagree that P2P isn't good for me the consumer. I argue the case that, it's bad for the producer. Very, very bad. As a consumer of bits, and a producer of bits (I'm a programmer), I care very deeply out the thought-stuff I produce. It's how I make my living. I think it'd be a damn shame if I have to start only running programs on your behalf. Never giving you the source, never giving you the binaries. I'll only run them on my computers. You'll have to log into mine. If mine are slow, and you could afford better. Well you subscribe to a school of thought, that giving away the end results of my labor isn't bad for me. I disagree, and I'll do my utmost to deprive you of my pure thoughtstuff, while devising a way to get money from the public. My thought stuff is the result of years of toil.
People wonder why DRM is coming. They wonder why ASP's are coming. They wonder why Web Services are coming. They wonder why TCPA and Palladium are coming. They are coming, because the thoughtstuff people produce is incredibly valuable. They know they can get money from the consumer for it. Now'll they'll just have to make sure that nobody ever gets a copy of their bits. It'll be the end of
No, I wanted to show they that a reasonable person could see that harm might be done. I argued in absolutes which isn't precisely correct. Showing that increased the value of the work, is really irrelavent. The owner of the work, believes that you are doing damage to them. They've made it abundantly clear they want you to stop. Where is it shown, that you have a right to violate their wishes in the interest of increasing the value of the copyright?
Apply the princepal of it's for your own good, can I go break into a Fortune 500 company, send forged e-mails out as the CEO, and because my business advice while forging them made the company 100 Mil. I still broke the law. I impersonated a real person. However, if I'd lost the company 100Mil, I'd have a liability. So it's in everyone's best interest to not have me interfere. I could explain it to the CEO, and tell him I'm right. However, I couldn't just impersonate him.
If you think that the Big 5 should change their business model, tell them by not buying CD's, and not downloading it off the internet. I think they should, I'm not sure how they could do it. I think your method, is a crock for a variety of reasons, and is just as much a sign your soul over to the devil deal for musicians. I'd like to see independant artists be able to make a reasonable living, with reasonable consistancy rather then see a lot of huge rock stars, and thousands of starving artists.
Uhmmm, sure enjoyment can be measured by the money you payed to do such a something. If you paid $50 for concert tickets, you clearly thought you'd get $50 of enjoyment out of it. Anything you do with your disposable income is a precise measure of enjoyment you expect. Good movies are with about $8 of enjoyment. A really good steak, worth about $15-$30. I didn't need to eat a really good steak for nutritional value, I did it, because it's something I enjoy, and I desire to do. I could have had plenty of other stuff of the same nutritional content for less, but I wanted a steak.
Now sex is lots of fun, and that's generally free. However, it's got the cost of your time. Are you willing to spend years chasing the really hot chick you grew up next to, or do you want to go down to the bar and pick up the ugliest, drunkest chick there. Just because you didn't pay money for it, doesn't mean it doesn't have value, or economic value. You could have gone to work and made money by the hour, if you had spent that time working instead of chasing woman to have sex. Clearly the value of sex is higher then your value of the money if you chose to chase the women. If you truly valued the money more, that's what you would have done.
Economics isn't that complicated. Everything you do has an opportunity cost, and that can be used to measure the value of nearly anything. Me, I wouldn't skip Christmas with my family for $5/hr, but I might for $10,000/hour. I absolutely would for $100,000/hr. So clearly my value of the enjoyment of spending Christmas with my family is probably between 5-10,000/hr, but clearly no more then 100,000/hr. That's how you measure enjoyment as a dollar value.
All kinds of things play into this analysis, there's also marginal cost, and marginal benefit. If I had $100Mil, there's probably no amount of money you could pay me to stay away from my family. Because the marginal benefit of more money, is of no interest to me. I've got all the money I'll ever need, if I have $100Mil. So it's a series of tradeoffs and decisions you make, that define the value of joy, and enjoyment to an economist.
In the case of Buggy whips, both the supply and the demand have moved. If supply had stayed constant (ie there where still 500 buggy whip makers producing a 100K buggy whips in aggregate a year), and the demand went down, the real price drops (the dollar value cost might have gone up, but that's inflation). Would you like me to construct a completely unrelated economic situation for you to analzye? Supply dropped, so demand dropped. Can't say much about that, without more information, the price could do anything at that point.
So on your second point, are you saying you'd deem it wrong if you got a completely notes, lyrics, and what not free? Everyone I know would buy music if all they got was an unlabelled blank CD, no case, no liner, no pictures. Are you saying that those other things are what enduce you to pay $15 a disc for the CD, and the music has zero value? Surprisingly, I've never seen an after market for CD liners, notes, pictures, I have for used CD's though. I wonder where the economic value is? Follow the money, you'll find the value. It's surely not in the stuff besides the music. That's merely a keep up with the Jone's issue. Other music companies did it so I have to. Beside's who'd buy a Brittany Spear's CD without a picture of her:-)
Libraries have specific limits, and I might have to concede, they don't significantly reduce the value of the copyright, as opposed to don't reduce the value. Also a library has a specific number of physical copies, normally 1 of any given work. So if there is incredible demand for that work, only one person can have it at a time. Thus high demand works will probably get purchased, as opposed to having them consumed via the library. It's my understanding they are there primarily for the poor to have access to content they might need to better themselves, and advance in society. Also to preseve the content until it goes into the public domain.
I think the Founding Father's were quite clear on what they believed would increase the value of copyrightable material. I have yet to see anyone make a compelling argument, that they aren't correct. Right now, I think someone could argue that copyright too imbalanced in favor copyright holder based solely on the time copyright's are held. I'd second that argument, and I was mad that the Supreme Court decide they way they did on the Bono Act. Copyright is for the good of the public, specifically the advancement of the arts and sciences, via giving a monopoly to the individual to give them compelling reasons.
No people who generate IP don't know the optimal way to generate economic value. However, it's their right to try any way they want to, and the public has no right to interfere with it under the Constitution of the United States. I think in the end, I think I agree with you on the basics of this issue.
Okay, lets say, I can make a car for free, costs me 500K to make the duplicator machine, but from then on all cars are free. It's not a Ford, but it's an exact duplicate of a Ford. You can get it from Ford, or you can get it from me. I give mine away free of charge. What I'm doing is legal (assuming no patents or trademarks are violated), because I've created my own copy. Ford has nothing on me, and can't stop me.
You're saying this doesn't have any effect on the supply, and has no affect on the price of a Ford? None at all? Don't mind me while I go over here to a corner and snicker. The mere threat of saying well I'll just go get his for free will drive the price of a Ford down significantly.
A copy of music that is identical to the original, is an increase in the supply. The P2P network is a source of precisely the same music. It's a supply. To say it isn't is blantly ignoring the facts of the matter. There are more copies of it. The copyright holder could completely control the number of copies CD's prior to the price of a blank CD dropping below the price of a music CD. (Okay they couldn't completely control it, but you were an idiot to make a CD to blank CD for any reason if the blank costs more then the original would to buy at the store).
Now let's say I have all these Ford duplicates that are mine. I can make another one for free. Not nearly free, not cheap. Free, absolutely 100% Free. I think I want one more, I have one more. Would it be illegal for you to steal one off my lot, even if I would have given it to you for free, but I didn't conscent to you having one, because I didn't talk with you first? Even if you wouldn't have paid for it to get one? Could I call the police and have you arrested for doing it?
I believe I could call the police, and they would arrest you, and you would be a thief. Clearly the terminology is different for copyright infringement, but the analogy holds water. Even if you we're never to actually pay for my duplicate Ford, you'd be a thief for taking my car without my conscent, and enjoying the benefits of having a car. Technically I didn't lose anything, I can just make another Ford, but you took my property without my conscent.
Music in electronic form is different from cars, because it's nearly free to copy. You are a copyright infringer rather then a thief, and you are enjoying the fruits of my labor without my approval.
Copyright was made to create economic value specifically for the cause creating incentive to create new copyrightable material. Copyright's sole purpose is to artifically create scarcity of a non-scarce good. Because it's good for the benefit of society.
Land is different in that it doesn't revert back to the public like music does. However, the Lockean idea that by taking the natural resources out of the commons, and by your own sweat and hard work, you have aquire ownership of the land. Is very similar to the concept of the toil involved in creating music gives you ownership/control, and thus copyright over the original work. It's just as unique as any piece of land. It however isn't naturally scarce like land is. Copyright tries to make it scarce.
Cynical comment of the day: do you really think anything that is copyrighted will ever go back into the public domain again?:-)
The Founding Father's gave back the copyright to the public, because having a large pool of public domain is good for the public. They needed an incentive to cause people to create content. That incentive is copyright, specifically to cause scarcity in content to create economic value, because they thought it was good for the public. The Founding Father's setup the government for the public's good. It had a balance between the public and the copyright holder. They did that so that people couldn't perpetually own ideas indefinitely. The King back in England did that, it was part of what people didn't like about the King. The King randomly gave out Monopolies for a variet
Oh, no the RIAA has absolutely no right to fool with your computer. They have a right to send you a legal notice, and drag you into court. The RIAA isn't really inflating their value, they are suing for the maximum value under law, not for the actual loss (otherwise it would be an economic win to copyright infringe, infringe if caught, then pay up). They need a punative damage to punish you with, so that paying up front is a really good idea.
I think you should most definitely get punitive damages in your lawsuit for a variety of computer crime violations. That's a criminal charge too. Stick it to'em. You'd be my hero for a day! If they fool with your computer, I really, really hope go ahead and sue, and win the suit. As a corporation, I think the RIAA is well, evil. As a copyright holder, I agree that they can, and should crucify you ever last time you make an illegal copy, not covered under fair use.
Right, but what anyone could find diamonds littered on the ground? If they merely bothered to pick them up they could have their very own shiney piece of carbon, do you think the value of diamonds would go down?
I do.
Clearly nothing on that isn't on the market, doesn't really change the economics of it. However, P2P networks are too large scale to say they don't change the nature of the market place. That's why the RIAA never got up in arms about tapes made. They weren't that happy. But an illegal tape was only avaible to people who actually knew you, and who were geographic close enough, that shipping them a copy was an economic win. I think P2P is closer to diamonds everyone on the ground, then it is to a giant ass diamond in my backyard.
Ironic that you pick diamonds, because they are an interesting study in price control. The people in charge of that market could teach the RIAA a thing or two about how to make money via tight control of supply, and incredible marketing. Try selling a diamond once as a consumer. Last I heard, as a consumer, you lose something 50-80% of the value because you are a consumer selling it, instead of a regular seller of diamonds. It's a bigger racket then baseball cards.
Sure, Microsoft got big doing that. However, notice now that Microsoft doesn't want you to do that. Microsoft wanted you to do that, way back in the day.
It makes you famous, and gets you notice in the public. It's not your place to determine if it increases the network effect or not. That's the copyright holders privledge. I don't think at any point Microsoft as a corporation said, piracy is good, however, as a small company they understood that exposure is good.
Microsoft did it, because they knew they had a consumer to consume it, who'd pay for it. Both the OEM's and larger corporations couldn't risk the legal liability of not being on the up and up. There is no similar group in the music consumer. The end consumer is the only person who pays for music. Teenagers downloading it for free, is the primary consumer of a lot of music. If fortune 500 corporations are running illegal copies of MS, you can bet your bottom dollar MS will have them in court if they find out. Microsoft didn't care, because the OEM who made 90% of all computers sold, paid them for the copy, weather or not you got a license. For a while, it was nearly impossible to have a copy of a MS Windows that didn't get paid for. That's how it was part of their business model. They got paid for it. If you had a PC, Microsoft got paid for yor copy. I wouldn't care either at that point. It's irrelavent. I think that's part of the reason why new MS OS's really need new hardware, it means you have to buy a new computer to effectively use it, which means the MS tax gets paid. If you could just use it on all your old computers, they'd miss out on a big reveune stream.
Notice how MS is also turning up the screws on that deal? How they are putting in Activation, and having you connect to them. Radio is the exposure creates a network effect for music, and if it wasn't for the payola, it'd be free too. Radio is the method of public exposure that the copyright holder agrees to.
Neither your place, nor your right to decide that P2P distribution is good for the copyright holders. Make an argument that shows downloading MP3's is legal via copyright, and you'll convince me. Arguing merely that is good for them isn't of any interest to me. Blantent copyright violations should be stomped out with an iron boot. It's illegal, clearly could have harm, and it's the copyright holder's right to make the decisions about who should get free copies, and the mechanism of delivery. You might be better off if we garnished your wages, and force you to invest it, but nobody does that to you, it's your right to control your property.
Sure, everybody gets fair use. I understand how fair works. Everyone acts like illegal copies are fine, because there is no harm in copying the bits. Everyone acts like they couldn't possible have a net effect on economics of price (they don't because there is probably price fixing involved). Assuming a free market, you'll still drive prices of CD's down. Freely available high quality music has to drive the price down in a free market.
Fair use copies are precisely designed to not diminsh the value of the copyright. Really it's to balance the rights of the consumer versus that of the content creator, but now I'm nitpicking. Look at how they are limited. It's fair for you to create copies of your creation to small groups. It's fair for you to create a backup copy. It's fair for you to create copies of stuff off the radio. It's fair for you to create copies to do a lot of things with. However, distribution on a wide scale isn't one of them. Playing them in a bar isn't one of them. Putting them on the internet isn't one of them.
If the copyright holder thought that creating releasing MP3's would create demand, they would release it to the public on an P2P network. They don't believe it will create demand, or help them. If they did, they would happily release it on an MP3 network themselves. It would be simple and easy for them to do so. Clearly they don't believe it'll create demand. I think for smaller known songs it will, and for incredibly famous, it'll decrease demand. I believe you'll find that almost all anecdotal evidence is by less popular CD's. That's because I think there is a smaller group of people searching for new music, who actively buy it, and there is a large group who just downloads the music to avoid paying for it. So the good, but unknown artist sees a bump in demand, while the incredibly famous artist sees a decrease due to the relative sizes of each group.
Break into somebodies computer and fix security flaws, still illegal, even if your attempting to be helpful. Don't try and be helpful, the copyright owner is in charge of creating demand. In radio, the radio buys the CD's and pays for the right to broadcast it, to sell advertising. (Minus the payola payments buy the Big 5). It's not the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the header will match the magic bytes, but that is also true of nearly any file format. All DOS executables start with MZ, GIF's start with a specific set of bytes. Linux executables normally start with ELF within the first handful of bytes, most perl scripts have perl on the first line. Every file format listed in the magic file has some easily recognizable format.
Also encrypting a file normally doesn't make it any large then to pad out the block size. I know that DES and RSA don't. I can't recall any from when I read the first edition of Applied Cryptography that did.
Kirby
How many stories are covered by the AP wire, a freelance, or just a republished post by other people Yahoo does it, CNN does it, I don't read MSNBC, but I'll bet they do it. Yes CNN and MSNBC sends people to gather news, but a lot of them just get news from affiliates or other local news sources and aggregate it just like google does.
The thing most people I know who like Google's news, is that it's very up to date, and that it presents a lot of different views all of them at your finger tips. As such, it's the most balanced, accurate up to date "reporting". I quote reporting, because they don't have any reporters, but they aggregate news in a way that is far more useful then the individual pieces.
The only people who have better news sources, are the people who employ personal news reviewers to give them the most up to date, and concise news updates daily.
Kirby
The Academy Awards I always assumed had more information on their websites about the movies, about what was compelling about them, about who was involved and what was accomplished. During a 2 hour TV presentation, I understand why they do what they do, and to be honest, at least I understand the body of work they are judging. It's contents are the film I saw, with the possible exception of the lifetime achievement awards. Lifetime acheivement awards, they normally spend some time presenting what that person did, and what was interesting about it.
With your vote, you can't write a little blurb about the ones you voted for that you felt you had some area of expertise in? So they could give some quotes (it'd be optional, but I'm willing to bet each winner would find someone willing to say something nice about it in a couple of paragraphs).
When voting for a film, I know precisely what they voted for. If I saw the film, I know the entire body of work they considered. Google. I don't know all the stuff that google does. The news stuff is cool. The searchable images, cool. The weird advanced queries cool. The way cool stuff dealing with the froogle, cool. I know they do all kinds of cool interesting stuff I've never seen, because there's always more cool stuff I learn about google.
Apache puts out the Jakarta project, the Structs project, the Tomcat server, the Ant stuff, Apache server, they put out all kinds of stuff. Apache 2.0 is cool, but nothing impossible. Some of the other projects might be incredible compelling technological leaps, maybe they could ask someone from the Apache foundation for a blurb on their accomplishments for the year. Maybe like a little speech or something?
Kirby
We give out this awards, and explain nothing, nothing at all. Geez, that's useful. They give you links to the people who won, and the people nominated. Whoopie! Why not tell me something useful, like the criteria that you used to evaluate them (the criteria is there, but hidden away). Why not tell me what the Apache people did to qualify as: "Sites introducing or integrating technology that pushes the envelope, and invite us to believe in what once seemed impossible" .
Great, you took 4 technical achievements, arbitrarily picked one. That's nice, where's some useful content? Personally, I think Google News is much cooler then anything Apache's done lately. Not that Apache isn't cool, but Google's done far more previously deemed impossible things lately then Apache has. At least tell me what you think Apache has done that you think is wonderful?
Maybe they'll release all that information later after some goofy ceremony, but seems like it'd be mighty useful content to give the site some actual value.
Kirby
Remember, high volume, is not only that it prints fast. High volume is that it can print a lot of papers without breaking down. We've got several HP's at work that print relatively quickly, but if you print more then say 40K pages a month to them, they breakdown and need a lot of tender loving care to get them to run again. We have an nearly identical printer that prints at the same pages per minute rate, but it's rated to print 150K pages a month.
If he needs something that can print 10,000 pages without a break, that's different then he needs 86,400 pages to be printed in a day.
Kirby
So to get the fixes, you had to agree to a EULA that you didn't want to.
Kirby
Sure, Diablo is a highly advanced version of "Zelda", or NetHack, or any number of other games. It's just not the same as WarCraft III. The original poster put them all in a single line, and said they all fall into the "Objectives and Kill the enemy" category. I'm merely saying, that there is a ton of originality to be found inside the "Objectives and Kill the enemy" category.
Kirby
Those two sets of games involve completely different things. Yes you run both of them from a birds eye view, and you kill the enemy, and most of them came from Blizzard. The Diablo games come from Blizzard North, which is a completely different set of guys then who did the Craft games for Blizzard.
Geez, I mean Wing Commander had objectives, and you had to destroy the enemy (most of the time at least), but nobody I've ever met would say, "Geez, WarCraft III, that's just a knock off of that old DOS game Wing Commander".
Kirby
However, the spammer has no idea that a specific site only has kids related material. Nobody can classify web sites as to the type of content on them in an automated way. It's why Yahoo had human doing the classification for the longest time. It'd be entirely too much work for the spammer to check all the sites his e-mail addresses come from (so I think the we should require the spammer to do so).
Saying that it's only on kids sites is a red herring, spammers don't read the sites they crawl. They don't care about anything that they can't automate away. They'd send "Drink more Alcohol", to Alcohol Anonymous lists if they could make a buck at it. Spammers just crawl sites looking for e-mails. The content of sites can't be automatically detected, it's why porn blockers don't work. The other alternative is that, if it's a pronoucable name, it's entirely possible the spammer just did a dictionary attack to find the e-mail address.
You are angry, and want the spammer to do something that is technically infeasible. If we are going to require them to do something, pick something that would be very easy to do, let's just require them to stop sending unsolicited mail to a known list of e-mail addresses. Everybody who doesn't gets shot *grin*.
Kirby
I switched gears, from the fourth paragraph on, assume I'm talking about the software being open sourced. For phrase "Having it Open Source", subsitute "Having it Open Source instead of Escrow would be much better because: ", and read the rest of the comment.
That three paragraphs is a simple example of why having the source available under certain condictions is good. It being open source is vastly superior to escrow (from the perspective of the consumer), because you don't have to jump thru the legal hoops to break the escrow. You just grab your copy of the source, and find somebody to audit it.
Essentially, if it had been open source, the manager could have anonymously tipped anybody to check the source for a very specific flaw. Nobody has to break escrow, or is violation of the NDA, and a large corporation, or a gov't body could have fought the defamation case, instead of them crushing one of their former employees for defamation (even though they are correct, they'd probably lose in court).
Open source has a lot more transparency, which is very good in this case.
Kirby
When a lawsuit comes up, I file for the escrowed copy to be given to my lawyer under an NDA where upon they can have it examined by experts in the field of computer science and diving. The first person who figured out that the software might have had a bug, might have figured all this out.
That's a more viable solution to corporate nature. The only problem is that the process of escrowing it, means they are afraid a bug might exist, which creates an image problem. So it's not likely to happen, but more likely then open sourcing the software.
Having it as Open Source would have meant the bug could have been announced in public anonymously, and verified by people in the public. This is exactly the same as security via obscurity in encryption. You want security, not security by obscurity. It's mearly a matter of time until the obscurity becomes clear, and your data is now in the clear.
The problem here is that everyone who knew, was liable for a lawsuit for defamation and would have to defend themselves in a court of law. That's not very cheap. Putting out an e-mail, on a mailing lists, or thru the popular channels that divers use (magazines, flyers at the shops), would have been easy had the software been available to the public for examination.
I like open source and think it's great for the great software I get for essentially free. For specific applications however, the peer review and transparency are a wonderful thing. They can easily be accomplished without the GPL, or BSD licenses. Open source isn't a magic bullet, but I'll bet the manager resigning and announcing to the public that someone should peer review the software for a specific flaw, would have saved a lot of pain and suffering.
I'll bet word of a specific flaw that is provable by experts, that could explained to the divers so they can understand:
"The computer assumes when you come up for air, you are breathing the enriched oxygen, if you aren't the computer is wrong!"
I don't know dick about diving, but even I know about the bends and how bad it is, and what it does to you, and I'd understand the problem if somebody told me the above. I bet news like that would travel fast in diving circles. It might ruin the corporation, but it'd save lifes.
Open source isn't a magic bullet, but some transparency would have mitigated the number of people put at risk.
Kirby
This would be a cooler technology if they just presented the game with a DirectX 3D driver. I'm not much of a D3D API expert (never having seen it). I'm guessing this is doable given all the technology they have. D3D is supposed to abstract everything away from the hardware, but be a very thin layer to the hardware. I'm guessing a guy could take their technology and the sample Direct3D driver that the MSDN library should have, and turn out a workable D3D driver. However, then they'd sell the technology to gamers, and not to game companies (I supposed they could still sell it to game companies to bundle into the disks). However, if there is a market for it, I'm guessing MS will buy them, and ship it as a stock portion of D3D.
Kirby
In my experience, most people can afford to encrypt every last bit and byte of data they can send upstream. I'm doubtful that encryption is that rough on a mailing list.
Especially, if they are only signing a digest of the message, as opposed to the whole message, so even lists that take large attachments won't be that hindered.
Even if the list doesn't require encrypted messages, encrypting one message and sending it out the door to 5K people, I'm guessing that encryption is a smaller part of that then the sending part. You only have to encrypt once, then send 5000 times.
I'd hate to have a mailing list move IP's and have me stop accepting mail from it. That's a nuciense. I suppose I could just accept all mail that has the appropriate X-Header attached to it, but that's an invitation for Spammers to start just adding the X-Headers off every single known mailing list on the planet to every e-mail they send, so I'll accept it.
Get a bit better box, and give sign the digest. Everyone will be happier. Christ, just encrypt with a small key if need be. A 512 byte key should be small enough to PGP sign documents on the crappiest box you can pick up at Wal-mart.
Kirby
Kirby
Sure, the mailing list has to keep an unsigned key in memory all the time (or worse on the disk), but it's no worse then an SSL apache web server. Rebooting the mailing list machine will be a hassle, especially remotely, but it's still doable.
Next Objection?
Yes it will make running a large mail server more expensive. That's the idea! People who have a legitimate use to contact that many people who won't opt-in before hand, had better have some pretty serious CPU power. Which means they are probably a major corporation. While some major corporations send out spams, they do it so infrequently, the the concept of the major corporation spams pissing me off, is a delightful concept. That only happens once every couple of days to one a month. If that's all the more often I get spam, it's a win.
The problem is transitioning from the current system to the new system. I'd imagine it'll take someone making a killer client that makes signing a message relatively painless, and then having some geeky lists that will only take posts of digitially signed messages with the public key that is registered on the major key servers, and always signs e-mails with a private key so they can be used on the client end to check the signatures.
Kirby
They are nice thoughts, but I've really got work I need to get done.... (So why the heck am I reading slashdot...).
Kirby
This is a new tactic for me, I've never argued it before, so make me earn it:
What's the value of the good to you? What's the opportunity cost of not copying the bits?
Lets say, it'll take you 2 hours to do your taxes without this software. You'd work 2 extra hours at work for $75. Thus, the opportunity cost saving these two hours of work is roughly $75. So you should be more then willing to pay $75 in trade for the value.
It didn't cost me anything to give you those two hours. Now, the marginal cost for me to produce a copy for you to use was roughly $0.00. However, it cost me a $100K to make the first copy. My problem is, I've got to sell the first one for $100K, then I can give the rest away, and I've broken even. Assuming my salary is part of the $100K, that's fair.
So I'm saying that the value of the software to you is $75, and you should willingly give up that $75 to cover my startup costs of $100K. If you are not, I'll be interested in seeing if the auction style that was used for Blender becomes more popular. We'll release the software once the creation costs, plus some extra profit for the risk of not getting paid is covered. So software will be released to the public once the $100K is covered. Then it will be available in the public domain (just the bits, not the original source).
Now on to music. You enjoy listening to music right? What are you willing to trade for music? It appears that space on your harddrive, and some time searching, some power, some bandwidth, and a partially the cost of a computer. What else would you be willing to trade for it. If no music at all existed, would you spend time creating it yourself personally? Some people would. So music has an opportunity cost to them. They could buy just off the shelf music, or they could spend time creating it themselves individuallly. The time they would have spent creating it, is representative of the value of the time they are willing to spend.
So those bits have economic value to the public at large. The problem is that the marginal cost is $0, after the up front cost is paid. I'll be interested to see how the first copy gets paid for, if the public continues to insist on only paying for the marginal cost. I wonder who in the public will pay for the first one, because like most other things, the first step is a real doozie.
Copyright says, that supply is supposed to be completely controlled by copyright holder, so that the copyright holder can set the price. You are saying that the public should only ever be willing to pay the marginal cost of the cost of production. I'm saying, they should be willing to pay the opportunity cost of not having it.
I think the RIAA will crucify people in court in mass, in large judgements, and loads of people will be scared shitless to download music. I'd love to see them do it. The court system will be overrun with them. The court will setup special provisions, and there will be specialists in getting settlements done. It'll be great. The money the RIAA gets in infringement suits could dwarf what they get in sales. Geez, if they just started getting people for $10K a pop, they only need about 800,000 of those a year to completely replace their sales. My guess is they can get something like 10K from 10K people a year in mass lawsuits and settlements, that's a hundred million dollars. I think people will start to get the point then. The really funny part is, economically, it's the right thing to keep doing until it rasies the average marginal cost of downloading music above that of buying a CD. Marketing suicide, but economically sound.
Copyright is an important issue, and people should respect
I didn't see that part where you estimated the effect of 100K people on the internet doing it.
"No your honor, I didn't kill the man, I merely hit him but one time while in this mob of thousands doing the same." (Not to equate killing with copyright infringement, but eventually the rounding error adds up if enough people do it).
I find the RIAA's estimates laughable. I find their lawsuites and punative damages commical. I think we all agree on that. I think they themselves have done themselves a disservice in the way with which they have approached all of this. I have no idea how the right way to handle it is, but personally, I'd have started a found a group of 20 individuals in a convienent area and just sued them for copyright infringement. I wouldn't have settled. I would have persued a suitable punative damages. Say 3-5 times the average cost of rent (to index it to a value that makes it punishing in the area). I'd have continued doing this until people got the point, that it was going to continue happening for a long time. After that, settling is okay, but somebody needed to suffer thru the full blown court version.
I agree with you, that the music industry needs to adapt or suffer the economic fate of the best buggy whip makers.
Okay, now that we've covered what we agree on. The economics of scarcity work great. The problem with the economics of non-scarcity. The only people who can do that, are people who do it because they are independantly wealthy, or they have a patron, or it's funded thru some public money.
Creating artificial scarcity was the best proposed solution to the problem, it was the balance that was struck to create an as much advancement of the arts and sciences. It's worked reasonable well for several hundred years. It would continue to work well if people followed the law. Present another solution just as elegant, that will provide as much employment and as much advancement, and I'll be your most vocal advocate.
As to you having an exact duplicate of my Yogi Berra bat. Sure your welcome to your copy. If you can duplicate it to your satisfaction more power too you. I completely understand if when you start posting to the web "I've got identical Yogi Berra signed bats, even Yogi himself couldn't tell the difference". If you started to hand them out free at baseball conventions where Yogi was signing them, I could see the justification of his suit against you. You are damaging his ability to make money, and using his signature (or his likeness) without his permission.
I don't argue the case because I as a consumer disagree that P2P isn't good for me the consumer. I argue the case that, it's bad for the producer. Very, very bad. As a consumer of bits, and a producer of bits (I'm a programmer), I care very deeply out the thought-stuff I produce. It's how I make my living. I think it'd be a damn shame if I have to start only running programs on your behalf. Never giving you the source, never giving you the binaries. I'll only run them on my computers. You'll have to log into mine. If mine are slow, and you could afford better. Well you subscribe to a school of thought, that giving away the end results of my labor isn't bad for me. I disagree, and I'll do my utmost to deprive you of my pure thoughtstuff, while devising a way to get money from the public. My thought stuff is the result of years of toil.
People wonder why DRM is coming. They wonder why ASP's are coming. They wonder why Web Services are coming. They wonder why TCPA and Palladium are coming. They are coming, because the thoughtstuff people produce is incredibly valuable. They know they can get money from the consumer for it. Now'll they'll just have to make sure that nobody ever gets a copy of their bits. It'll be the end of
Apply the princepal of it's for your own good, can I go break into a Fortune 500 company, send forged e-mails out as the CEO, and because my business advice while forging them made the company 100 Mil. I still broke the law. I impersonated a real person. However, if I'd lost the company 100Mil, I'd have a liability. So it's in everyone's best interest to not have me interfere. I could explain it to the CEO, and tell him I'm right. However, I couldn't just impersonate him.
If you think that the Big 5 should change their business model, tell them by not buying CD's, and not downloading it off the internet. I think they should, I'm not sure how they could do it. I think your method, is a crock for a variety of reasons, and is just as much a sign your soul over to the devil deal for musicians. I'd like to see independant artists be able to make a reasonable living, with reasonable consistancy rather then see a lot of huge rock stars, and thousands of starving artists.
Uhmmm, sure enjoyment can be measured by the money you payed to do such a something. If you paid $50 for concert tickets, you clearly thought you'd get $50 of enjoyment out of it. Anything you do with your disposable income is a precise measure of enjoyment you expect. Good movies are with about $8 of enjoyment. A really good steak, worth about $15-$30. I didn't need to eat a really good steak for nutritional value, I did it, because it's something I enjoy, and I desire to do. I could have had plenty of other stuff of the same nutritional content for less, but I wanted a steak.
Now sex is lots of fun, and that's generally free. However, it's got the cost of your time. Are you willing to spend years chasing the really hot chick you grew up next to, or do you want to go down to the bar and pick up the ugliest, drunkest chick there. Just because you didn't pay money for it, doesn't mean it doesn't have value, or economic value. You could have gone to work and made money by the hour, if you had spent that time working instead of chasing woman to have sex. Clearly the value of sex is higher then your value of the money if you chose to chase the women. If you truly valued the money more, that's what you would have done.
Economics isn't that complicated. Everything you do has an opportunity cost, and that can be used to measure the value of nearly anything. Me, I wouldn't skip Christmas with my family for $5/hr, but I might for $10,000/hour. I absolutely would for $100,000/hr. So clearly my value of the enjoyment of spending Christmas with my family is probably between 5-10,000/hr, but clearly no more then 100,000/hr. That's how you measure enjoyment as a dollar value.
All kinds of things play into this analysis, there's also marginal cost, and marginal benefit. If I had $100Mil, there's probably no amount of money you could pay me to stay away from my family. Because the marginal benefit of more money, is of no interest to me. I've got all the money I'll ever need, if I have $100Mil. So it's a series of tradeoffs and decisions you make, that define the value of joy, and enjoyment to an economist.
Kirby
So on your second point, are you saying you'd deem it wrong if you got a completely notes, lyrics, and what not free? Everyone I know would buy music if all they got was an unlabelled blank CD, no case, no liner, no pictures. Are you saying that those other things are what enduce you to pay $15 a disc for the CD, and the music has zero value? Surprisingly, I've never seen an after market for CD liners, notes, pictures, I have for used CD's though. I wonder where the economic value is? Follow the money, you'll find the value. It's surely not in the stuff besides the music. That's merely a keep up with the Jone's issue. Other music companies did it so I have to. Beside's who'd buy a Brittany Spear's CD without a picture of her :-)
Libraries have specific limits, and I might have to concede, they don't significantly reduce the value of the copyright, as opposed to don't reduce the value. Also a library has a specific number of physical copies, normally 1 of any given work. So if there is incredible demand for that work, only one person can have it at a time. Thus high demand works will probably get purchased, as opposed to having them consumed via the library. It's my understanding they are there primarily for the poor to have access to content they might need to better themselves, and advance in society. Also to preseve the content until it goes into the public domain.
I think the Founding Father's were quite clear on what they believed would increase the value of copyrightable material. I have yet to see anyone make a compelling argument, that they aren't correct. Right now, I think someone could argue that copyright too imbalanced in favor copyright holder based solely on the time copyright's are held. I'd second that argument, and I was mad that the Supreme Court decide they way they did on the Bono Act. Copyright is for the good of the public, specifically the advancement of the arts and sciences, via giving a monopoly to the individual to give them compelling reasons.
No people who generate IP don't know the optimal way to generate economic value. However, it's their right to try any way they want to, and the public has no right to interfere with it under the Constitution of the United States. I think in the end, I think I agree with you on the basics of this issue.
Kirby
You're saying this doesn't have any effect on the supply, and has no affect on the price of a Ford? None at all? Don't mind me while I go over here to a corner and snicker. The mere threat of saying well I'll just go get his for free will drive the price of a Ford down significantly.
A copy of music that is identical to the original, is an increase in the supply. The P2P network is a source of precisely the same music. It's a supply. To say it isn't is blantly ignoring the facts of the matter. There are more copies of it. The copyright holder could completely control the number of copies CD's prior to the price of a blank CD dropping below the price of a music CD. (Okay they couldn't completely control it, but you were an idiot to make a CD to blank CD for any reason if the blank costs more then the original would to buy at the store).
Now let's say I have all these Ford duplicates that are mine. I can make another one for free. Not nearly free, not cheap. Free, absolutely 100% Free. I think I want one more, I have one more. Would it be illegal for you to steal one off my lot, even if I would have given it to you for free, but I didn't conscent to you having one, because I didn't talk with you first? Even if you wouldn't have paid for it to get one? Could I call the police and have you arrested for doing it?
I believe I could call the police, and they would arrest you, and you would be a thief. Clearly the terminology is different for copyright infringement, but the analogy holds water. Even if you we're never to actually pay for my duplicate Ford, you'd be a thief for taking my car without my conscent, and enjoying the benefits of having a car. Technically I didn't lose anything, I can just make another Ford, but you took my property without my conscent.
Music in electronic form is different from cars, because it's nearly free to copy. You are a copyright infringer rather then a thief, and you are enjoying the fruits of my labor without my approval.
Copyright was made to create economic value specifically for the cause creating incentive to create new copyrightable material. Copyright's sole purpose is to artifically create scarcity of a non-scarce good. Because it's good for the benefit of society.
Land is different in that it doesn't revert back to the public like music does. However, the Lockean idea that by taking the natural resources out of the commons, and by your own sweat and hard work, you have aquire ownership of the land. Is very similar to the concept of the toil involved in creating music gives you ownership/control, and thus copyright over the original work. It's just as unique as any piece of land. It however isn't naturally scarce like land is. Copyright tries to make it scarce.
Cynical comment of the day: do you really think anything that is copyrighted will ever go back into the public domain again? :-)
The Founding Father's gave back the copyright to the public, because having a large pool of public domain is good for the public. They needed an incentive to cause people to create content. That incentive is copyright, specifically to cause scarcity in content to create economic value, because they thought it was good for the public. The Founding Father's setup the government for the public's good. It had a balance between the public and the copyright holder. They did that so that people couldn't perpetually own ideas indefinitely. The King back in England did that, it was part of what people didn't like about the King. The King randomly gave out Monopolies for a variet
I think you should most definitely get punitive damages in your lawsuit for a variety of computer crime violations. That's a criminal charge too. Stick it to'em. You'd be my hero for a day! If they fool with your computer, I really, really hope go ahead and sue, and win the suit. As a corporation, I think the RIAA is well, evil. As a copyright holder, I agree that they can, and should crucify you ever last time you make an illegal copy, not covered under fair use.
Kirby
I do.
Clearly nothing on that isn't on the market, doesn't really change the economics of it. However, P2P networks are too large scale to say they don't change the nature of the market place. That's why the RIAA never got up in arms about tapes made. They weren't that happy. But an illegal tape was only avaible to people who actually knew you, and who were geographic close enough, that shipping them a copy was an economic win. I think P2P is closer to diamonds everyone on the ground, then it is to a giant ass diamond in my backyard.
Ironic that you pick diamonds, because they are an interesting study in price control. The people in charge of that market could teach the RIAA a thing or two about how to make money via tight control of supply, and incredible marketing. Try selling a diamond once as a consumer. Last I heard, as a consumer, you lose something 50-80% of the value because you are a consumer selling it, instead of a regular seller of diamonds. It's a bigger racket then baseball cards.
Kirby
It makes you famous, and gets you notice in the public. It's not your place to determine if it increases the network effect or not. That's the copyright holders privledge. I don't think at any point Microsoft as a corporation said, piracy is good, however, as a small company they understood that exposure is good.
Microsoft did it, because they knew they had a consumer to consume it, who'd pay for it. Both the OEM's and larger corporations couldn't risk the legal liability of not being on the up and up. There is no similar group in the music consumer. The end consumer is the only person who pays for music. Teenagers downloading it for free, is the primary consumer of a lot of music. If fortune 500 corporations are running illegal copies of MS, you can bet your bottom dollar MS will have them in court if they find out. Microsoft didn't care, because the OEM who made 90% of all computers sold, paid them for the copy, weather or not you got a license. For a while, it was nearly impossible to have a copy of a MS Windows that didn't get paid for. That's how it was part of their business model. They got paid for it. If you had a PC, Microsoft got paid for yor copy. I wouldn't care either at that point. It's irrelavent. I think that's part of the reason why new MS OS's really need new hardware, it means you have to buy a new computer to effectively use it, which means the MS tax gets paid. If you could just use it on all your old computers, they'd miss out on a big reveune stream.
Notice how MS is also turning up the screws on that deal? How they are putting in Activation, and having you connect to them. Radio is the exposure creates a network effect for music, and if it wasn't for the payola, it'd be free too. Radio is the method of public exposure that the copyright holder agrees to.
Neither your place, nor your right to decide that P2P distribution is good for the copyright holders. Make an argument that shows downloading MP3's is legal via copyright, and you'll convince me. Arguing merely that is good for them isn't of any interest to me. Blantent copyright violations should be stomped out with an iron boot. It's illegal, clearly could have harm, and it's the copyright holder's right to make the decisions about who should get free copies, and the mechanism of delivery. You might be better off if we garnished your wages, and force you to invest it, but nobody does that to you, it's your right to control your property.
Kirby
Fair use copies are precisely designed to not diminsh the value of the copyright. Really it's to balance the rights of the consumer versus that of the content creator, but now I'm nitpicking. Look at how they are limited. It's fair for you to create copies of your creation to small groups. It's fair for you to create a backup copy. It's fair for you to create copies of stuff off the radio. It's fair for you to create copies to do a lot of things with. However, distribution on a wide scale isn't one of them. Playing them in a bar isn't one of them. Putting them on the internet isn't one of them.
If the copyright holder thought that creating releasing MP3's would create demand, they would release it to the public on an P2P network. They don't believe it will create demand, or help them. If they did, they would happily release it on an MP3 network themselves. It would be simple and easy for them to do so. Clearly they don't believe it'll create demand. I think for smaller known songs it will, and for incredibly famous, it'll decrease demand. I believe you'll find that almost all anecdotal evidence is by less popular CD's. That's because I think there is a smaller group of people searching for new music, who actively buy it, and there is a large group who just downloads the music to avoid paying for it. So the good, but unknown artist sees a bump in demand, while the incredibly famous artist sees a decrease due to the relative sizes of each group.
Break into somebodies computer and fix security flaws, still illegal, even if your attempting to be helpful. Don't try and be helpful, the copyright owner is in charge of creating demand. In radio, the radio buys the CD's and pays for the right to broadcast it, to sell advertising. (Minus the payola payments buy the Big 5). It's not the same.
Kirby