Can't relax, it's where I live. I'm a good guy, I don't, knowingly, as an alternative to purchasing, download unlicensed material. But, yesterday, while reading a political commentary blog, I viewed a segment of Monty Python and the Holy Grail via an embed of YouTube. Was it fair use? Was it licensed? Was I infringing as the bits went through my cpu? I bought the DVD years ago, does that make it okay?
Those emails I get which go straight to the spam folder, was the sender fully licensed to send that content?
Thinking about neighbors, does an actor have the copyrights to the material they put on their reel?
What I suppose is really funny about this ordinance is that people with Hollywood jobs are always making copies of stuff for friends and business. Just imagine the chaos and self-petard hoisting that would ensue if it were enforced honestly. Did my supervisors vet the provenance of all the items in their homes and offices before voting "yea?"
But, was Microsoft a dot-com? Did pc sales slow as a result of the dot-com crash? Didn't Microsoft finally reverse its no-dividend policy? Hasn't Microsoft bought back some of its stock?
I think, at some point, someone is going to have to come to account for what looks like Microsoft's underperformance because, a) it launches money-losing products because it believes it must dominate every where, and b) it has to expensively reinvent wheels because of its anachronistic NIH ways. Yeah, I know, may opinion and a cup of coffee will get you a cup of coffee.
But SuSE, Mandriva, Xandros, and others already have boxed product that is available at retail. Canonical is a major desktop provider and their business model allows for giving the desktop away for free. What would RedHat have to spend in order to offer a technically superior and competitively priced product and get it into the sales channel? And what would be the upside for that expense? They have a thriving business in the server market, it's okay.
Just my opinion, but if the Linux Desktop happens it will start from business and head for home. My reasoning: businesses do review current expenditures and systems, have access to experts who can run the numbers, and have the size to realize significant savings from a $10 per desk proposition. They also will train.
In California, sales taxes are paid on leased and rented equipment. So, no, ownership is not a key concept. You pay sales tax on a can of beer, so, no, permanence is not a key concept. Tangible means it takes real form. I move your sofa for $10 and there's no sales tax, because you did not gain any tangible good for my sale (of a service). You give me $10 a month and I tell you the important news of the day on demand: a service, not tangible, no sales tax. You give me $10 a month and I deliver a newspaper to your door every day: tangible and taxable.
It used to be that when a photographer was hired, they charged for the photography as a non-taxable service and then charged a cost for limited licensing rights for each print or transparency and this was sales taxed. (If the transparencies were part of the fee, i.e., 1/2 day of photography with assistant plus three transparencies and a limited license to use them, the entire contract amount was sales taxed.) That was because the transparencies are clearly tangible. Nowadays, photographers transfer electronically the digital version of the photos and are not charging sales tax because sales tax law was not written in anticipation of the digital world. Music, movies, software, books are now sold and the buyer receives digital media whereas before they received a physical item. Obviously, any mass consumer item that may be distributed electronically will be because the costs of distribution are so advantageous.
I give somebody money and I get something that I load into a device and I hear music. Is it really apples and oranges to say the principle that applied to vinyl disk and turntable should apply to mp3 download and iPod? I say no and I think a sales tax on electronically distributed goods such as books, music, movies, etc., should happen. It would be real nice if in return for our taxes we could get equivalent usage rights for that digital file and that disk, but here we run into state commercial law vs. Federal copyright law and Hollywood owns both California and the U.S.
I also look at the two-year extension given to XP in the ULCPC market as an indicator of when Microsoft expects Windows 7 to land.
My barely-informed opinion is that we'll never see WFS. Search technologies, parallel processors, and virtual directories (smart folders) have obviated the idea that files need a relational database overlay in order to facilitate structured storage and convenient retrieval. Files and the reasons a person saves and the reasons a person retrieves are a many-to-many-squared hairball and it's difficult for me to imagine that a databased file system approach would be effective without user involvement and that dooms it right there. We all see how Google seems to handle keeping track of the web. Apple tells a story that they were going one way with Spotlight and they realized they had already solved the search problem with iTunes. No, my read is WFS was yanked because others showed how the user could go fishing, get bites, and join in the fish fry without an explicit graph structure overlay of the file system tree.
On the other hand, one doesn't get the benefit of running into the belly-itchers. My feeling is that, on average, the superstars, the ones with above 340 career averages, generally feasted on the mediocre to minor pitchers.
What this study doesn't take into account is how long it takes to live through a streak. DiMaggio needed two months. Besides the strain of day to day playing (and if it's a pennant race, you know the hot hitter is going to be in the lineup) there's also the way the weather and the light changes during the season. There used to be more day games and double-headers back in the 30s-40s-50s when batting averages were highest. Travel was by train and by bus and took longer. There seems to be a week every season when a cold or flu is making the rounds of the club. Then there's situational issues. 7th inning and behind, man on second base, the hitter is 0-3 and 30 games into the streak. I say the pitcher semi-intentionally walks the batter and amid a chorus of boos the streak goes poof. Here's another consideration, the opposing players and pitchers know the hitter has a streak when it gets past 20 games and the pitching gets a bit more careful and the batter has to extend the streak via pitchers' mistakes, and that makes it less likely.
if what I say is true, it should follow that the incidence of any consecutive games with a hit streak beyond 15 in a MLB season should be lower than the probability suggested by the league batting averages (which are depressed in the NL by pitchers and the other bottom 4 from the lineup.)
I'm with you until the last paragraph and there we diverge slightly. I think that, in keeping with the logic of your first two paragraphs and by observation, Apple is not interested in a give away the razor to sell the blades (software) business model. Someone buys an iPhone, it's profit. Someone uses that iPhone on AT&T, it's more profit. But I haven't seen an Apple product in ages where after-market purchases were needed to create a net profit. So, a person owning an unlocked iPhone is no more a "problem" than a person who bought a G4 PowerMac from TerraSoft with Yellow Dog Linux installed.
I don't think the jailbreakers/unlockers, anticipated or not (I would guess expected), accelerated Apple's time lines in terms of releasing the SDK. I think the green light for SDK's final polishing and release was triggered by a sales goal being met so app developers would see a clearly defined market of significant potential volume and thus be interesting to the pros.
Never underestimate the power of cranky cheapskatery to convince an electorate. Indeed, "it will raise taxes" can kill initiatives which have long-term payoffs. I'm glad this time the argument is on the side of the angels and Declaration of Independence.
If that chair is owned by a business in Los Angeles County, buddy, that company pays property taxes on it (the value is depreciated so the taxes paid decrease over a period of time, I would guess seven years, until 0.) The lessor also pays property taxes for leased items if the lessee is in L.A. County.
Once before I also asked the question in these pages, couldn't the government seize ip via eminent domain, if it's really property. Course when it comes to taxes and public use, the answer will be it's not that kind of property, even as the publishers argue for more draconian penalties based on trespass or theft metaphors.
So I went and looked. Microsoft closed at $28.42 per share on 2/15, down from its 52 week high of 37.50 on 12/25. Yahoo closed at 29.66. A share of Yahoo had more value than a share of Microsoft, yesterday, at the end of the day. Microsoft, though it was up on Wednesday, gave back most of the increase to end the week essentially flat. Yahoo was down for the week.
So, back to the original question, looking at how much market cap Microsoft has lost, despite the announcement of great quarterly results at the end of January, isn't this pursuit of Yahoo, so far, hurting Microsoft shareholders?
You're right. The artists provide a face to sell the concept to the fans. How many millions of records must one have sold and have potential to sell before the record company include ownership of masters in the contract? I'm guessing that 5% overestimates the percentage of European masters created over the last 50 years that are now owned by the artists.
This is about the record companies underscore and period. Time to show them some tough love. A healthy forest has young trees and that sometimes mean the old big trees have to fall down. If a record company wants to solve its long-term problems, question number 1 is how to get people to listen to new music. Solve that and you can afford to let Aker Bilt's 45 slide into the public domain. (Plus, record companies, you physically possess the masters, so who but you, can make clean copies?)
And if your tools are ripped off, you can also add the frisson of identity theft worry to the nuisance and cost of replacing expensive tools.
What percentage of the professional photographers' work is work-for-hire? Does the watermarking survive the printing process? Will the watermarking survive the web-sizing?
However, as noted above, I would be concerned about freedom of the speech and the press if the photos could be traced back to the photographer.
For me, it's much simpler. The bad guys of my youth, Nazis and Commies, were always going around demanding to see "your papers" with the clear implication that they wanted to note who you were, who was with you, and why were you not in your assigned place being a good citizen (which meant, of course, acquiescing to the party and its leader). With my child-like logic, it seemed the good guys, the free guys, didn't demand to see papers. On this point, I never grew up.
Seems to me there's a lot of focus on the GPL aspect of the story, which is a red herring. The copyright holder permitted use, modification, and redistribution of their code with an untermed and/or non-revocable license. That right there would be the defense should any one be silly enough to go to court on this.
Think of Bach as an open source code writer; his job was to perform and he wrote music to make his performances better - there was no real market for compositions. Beethoven was trying to make a living as a composer. Liszt, not that you asked, wrote showy pieces because his bread and butter was being the badass piano player of his day.
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Can't relax, it's where I live. I'm a good guy, I don't, knowingly, as an alternative to purchasing, download unlicensed material. But, yesterday, while reading a political commentary blog, I viewed a segment of Monty Python and the Holy Grail via an embed of YouTube. Was it fair use? Was it licensed? Was I infringing as the bits went through my cpu? I bought the DVD years ago, does that make it okay?
Those emails I get which go straight to the spam folder, was the sender fully licensed to send that content?
Thinking about neighbors, does an actor have the copyrights to the material they put on their reel?
What I suppose is really funny about this ordinance is that people with Hollywood jobs are always making copies of stuff for friends and business. Just imagine the chaos and self-petard hoisting that would ensue if it were enforced honestly. Did my supervisors vet the provenance of all the items in their homes and offices before voting "yea?"
But, was Microsoft a dot-com? Did pc sales slow as a result of the dot-com crash? Didn't Microsoft finally reverse its no-dividend policy? Hasn't Microsoft bought back some of its stock?
I think, at some point, someone is going to have to come to account for what looks like Microsoft's underperformance because, a) it launches money-losing products because it believes it must dominate every where, and b) it has to expensively reinvent wheels because of its anachronistic NIH ways. Yeah, I know, may opinion and a cup of coffee will get you a cup of coffee.
That's a good choice. Ryan Reynolds?
But SuSE, Mandriva, Xandros, and others already have boxed product that is available at retail. Canonical is a major desktop provider and their business model allows for giving the desktop away for free. What would RedHat have to spend in order to offer a technically superior and competitively priced product and get it into the sales channel? And what would be the upside for that expense? They have a thriving business in the server market, it's okay.
Just my opinion, but if the Linux Desktop happens it will start from business and head for home. My reasoning: businesses do review current expenditures and systems, have access to experts who can run the numbers, and have the size to realize significant savings from a $10 per desk proposition. They also will train.
Back in my day we went to school with geeky hippies. Now where did I put that Whole Earth Catalog?
In California, sales taxes are paid on leased and rented equipment. So, no, ownership is not a key concept. You pay sales tax on a can of beer, so, no, permanence is not a key concept. Tangible means it takes real form. I move your sofa for $10 and there's no sales tax, because you did not gain any tangible good for my sale (of a service). You give me $10 a month and I tell you the important news of the day on demand: a service, not tangible, no sales tax. You give me $10 a month and I deliver a newspaper to your door every day: tangible and taxable.
It used to be that when a photographer was hired, they charged for the photography as a non-taxable service and then charged a cost for limited licensing rights for each print or transparency and this was sales taxed. (If the transparencies were part of the fee, i.e., 1/2 day of photography with assistant plus three transparencies and a limited license to use them, the entire contract amount was sales taxed.) That was because the transparencies are clearly tangible. Nowadays, photographers transfer electronically the digital version of the photos and are not charging sales tax because sales tax law was not written in anticipation of the digital world. Music, movies, software, books are now sold and the buyer receives digital media whereas before they received a physical item. Obviously, any mass consumer item that may be distributed electronically will be because the costs of distribution are so advantageous.
I give somebody money and I get something that I load into a device and I hear music. Is it really apples and oranges to say the principle that applied to vinyl disk and turntable should apply to mp3 download and iPod? I say no and I think a sales tax on electronically distributed goods such as books, music, movies, etc., should happen. It would be real nice if in return for our taxes we could get equivalent usage rights for that digital file and that disk, but here we run into state commercial law vs. Federal copyright law and Hollywood owns both California and the U.S.
I also look at the two-year extension given to XP in the ULCPC market as an indicator of when Microsoft expects Windows 7 to land.
My barely-informed opinion is that we'll never see WFS. Search technologies, parallel processors, and virtual directories (smart folders) have obviated the idea that files need a relational database overlay in order to facilitate structured storage and convenient retrieval. Files and the reasons a person saves and the reasons a person retrieves are a many-to-many-squared hairball and it's difficult for me to imagine that a databased file system approach would be effective without user involvement and that dooms it right there. We all see how Google seems to handle keeping track of the web. Apple tells a story that they were going one way with Spotlight and they realized they had already solved the search problem with iTunes. No, my read is WFS was yanked because others showed how the user could go fishing, get bites, and join in the fish fry without an explicit graph structure overlay of the file system tree.
And Vista(TM) which I use every day makes me more productive(TM). It must be all the forest creatures who fly in to help with the housework.
Am I wrong in noticing that the possible customers were saying to Microsoft, primarily a software company, to not write the applications? Ouch.
On the other hand, one doesn't get the benefit of running into the belly-itchers. My feeling is that, on average, the superstars, the ones with above 340 career averages, generally feasted on the mediocre to minor pitchers.
What this study doesn't take into account is how long it takes to live through a streak. DiMaggio needed two months. Besides the strain of day to day playing (and if it's a pennant race, you know the hot hitter is going to be in the lineup) there's also the way the weather and the light changes during the season. There used to be more day games and double-headers back in the 30s-40s-50s when batting averages were highest. Travel was by train and by bus and took longer. There seems to be a week every season when a cold or flu is making the rounds of the club. Then there's situational issues. 7th inning and behind, man on second base, the hitter is 0-3 and 30 games into the streak. I say the pitcher semi-intentionally walks the batter and amid a chorus of boos the streak goes poof. Here's another consideration, the opposing players and pitchers know the hitter has a streak when it gets past 20 games and the pitching gets a bit more careful and the batter has to extend the streak via pitchers' mistakes, and that makes it less likely.
if what I say is true, it should follow that the incidence of any consecutive games with a hit streak beyond 15 in a MLB season should be lower than the probability suggested by the league batting averages (which are depressed in the NL by pitchers and the other bottom 4 from the lineup.)
I'm with you until the last paragraph and there we diverge slightly. I think that, in keeping with the logic of your first two paragraphs and by observation, Apple is not interested in a give away the razor to sell the blades (software) business model. Someone buys an iPhone, it's profit. Someone uses that iPhone on AT&T, it's more profit. But I haven't seen an Apple product in ages where after-market purchases were needed to create a net profit. So, a person owning an unlocked iPhone is no more a "problem" than a person who bought a G4 PowerMac from TerraSoft with Yellow Dog Linux installed.
I don't think the jailbreakers/unlockers, anticipated or not (I would guess expected), accelerated Apple's time lines in terms of releasing the SDK. I think the green light for SDK's final polishing and release was triggered by a sales goal being met so app developers would see a clearly defined market of significant potential volume and thus be interesting to the pros.
Let me add, I don't believe that supremacy, mentioned in the summary, is neither necessary nor sufficient for a product's profitability.
Never underestimate the power of cranky cheapskatery to convince an electorate. Indeed, "it will raise taxes" can kill initiatives which have long-term payoffs. I'm glad this time the argument is on the side of the angels and Declaration of Independence.
Volume! 20 cents on the dollar is real money when there's billions served.
Isn't this the server side of the Linux Desktop conundrum. How do you get people to switch when what they have is okay?
If that chair is owned by a business in Los Angeles County, buddy, that company pays property taxes on it (the value is depreciated so the taxes paid decrease over a period of time, I would guess seven years, until 0.) The lessor also pays property taxes for leased items if the lessee is in L.A. County.
Once before I also asked the question in these pages, couldn't the government seize ip via eminent domain, if it's really property. Course when it comes to taxes and public use, the answer will be it's not that kind of property, even as the publishers argue for more draconian penalties based on trespass or theft metaphors.
I may have to nag at you for quitting too soon.
So I went and looked. Microsoft closed at $28.42 per share on 2/15, down from its 52 week high of 37.50 on 12/25. Yahoo closed at 29.66. A share of Yahoo had more value than a share of Microsoft, yesterday, at the end of the day. Microsoft, though it was up on Wednesday, gave back most of the increase to end the week essentially flat. Yahoo was down for the week.
So, back to the original question, looking at how much market cap Microsoft has lost, despite the announcement of great quarterly results at the end of January, isn't this pursuit of Yahoo, so far, hurting Microsoft shareholders?
You're right. The artists provide a face to sell the concept to the fans. How many millions of records must one have sold and have potential to sell before the record company include ownership of masters in the contract? I'm guessing that 5% overestimates the percentage of European masters created over the last 50 years that are now owned by the artists.
This is about the record companies underscore and period. Time to show them some tough love. A healthy forest has young trees and that sometimes mean the old big trees have to fall down. If a record company wants to solve its long-term problems, question number 1 is how to get people to listen to new music. Solve that and you can afford to let Aker Bilt's 45 slide into the public domain. (Plus, record companies, you physically possess the masters, so who but you, can make clean copies?)
And if your tools are ripped off, you can also add the frisson of identity theft worry to the nuisance and cost of replacing expensive tools.
What percentage of the professional photographers' work is work-for-hire? Does the watermarking survive the printing process? Will the watermarking survive the web-sizing?
However, as noted above, I would be concerned about freedom of the speech and the press if the photos could be traced back to the photographer.
For me, it's much simpler. The bad guys of my youth, Nazis and Commies, were always going around demanding to see "your papers" with the clear implication that they wanted to note who you were, who was with you, and why were you not in your assigned place being a good citizen (which meant, of course, acquiescing to the party and its leader). With my child-like logic, it seemed the good guys, the free guys, didn't demand to see papers. On this point, I never grew up.
Seems to me there's a lot of focus on the GPL aspect of the story, which is a red herring. The copyright holder permitted use, modification, and redistribution of their code with an untermed and/or non-revocable license. That right there would be the defense should any one be silly enough to go to court on this.
Think of Bach as an open source code writer; his job was to perform and he wrote music to make his performances better - there was no real market for compositions. Beethoven was trying to make a living as a composer. Liszt, not that you asked, wrote showy pieces because his bread and butter was being the badass piano player of his day.
Call it dannyo's commentary, companies that rely on customer satisfaction to stay competitive don't have to say it.