we are witnessing a change in info flow but its not all good, folks.
Blame it on the greed and entitlement attitude of the average person. They want it all but don't want to pay for it. As a result, control falls to the organizations with a big enough hand to survive via other means.
As for the GP, you're an idiot. A journalist that can't focus on the subject at hand is worthless.
The natural effect of Capitalism is that people expect to get what they want, when and how they want it.
Yes, but the other effect is that everything has a price, and when people bypass that it's not capitalism anymore (more akin to communism.) The capitalistic effect when all of your "customers" decide they no longer want to pay is that you go out of business. And now they're met with the dissonance that what they produce -IS- popular and in demand but no one's buying (fewer, rather.)
They've been very successful at selling them for $6 a book without DRM.
I'd like to see what the return on a given book released in that manner would be if they hadn't likely fully recouped the costs already. IIRC, none of the books in the Baen Free Library are recent publications.
A natural effect of capitalism would be someone coming up with content on their own and distributing it on the terms the Internet Users(tm) would like, and making a killing at it. Not taking someone else's work without compensation.
Unsurprisingly, no one has truly tried this model (giving it away for free, praying people actually buy it) because it doesn't look terribly profitable (to the point that it would almost always be a money loser.)
Did Michelangelo lock the doors to the Sistine Chapel and stand outside charging $20 a head (sorry, no cameras or sketchpads allowed) to come in and see his masterpiece? No.
Paid for by the church. I don't imagine that he did the work for free, seeing as how even then people needed money to live.
Did Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart charge each symphony that wanted to play his pieces a separate fee for each concert they performed? No.
Mozart was commissioned by the king. His pieces were ONLY played for royalty, and he wrote what the royalty wanted to hear.
Did Leonardo Da Vinci hide digital watermarks in Mona Lisa so he could make sure no one was stealing his work? No.
Leonardo was a genius on an entirely different level from most people. Do we know what his opinion on things would be today? Unlikely.
I don't see why people think that forcing the studios to switch business models (to one that not even slashdot can do more than poorly suggest) will solve the problem. The growing attitude these days seems to be one of entitlement and a "looting" behavior. I don't see how switching business models (aside from going out of business) will help.
without compelling reason it should default to the public domain.
How about the compelling reason that some ideas require monetary investment to bring to fruition, and forcing people to release into the public domain basically ensures that no one will commit resources to it.
Sure, -some- will commit resources but not to the extent you see today.
Its 2009, the world is different, get over it and adjust your business models.
What a brilliant comment! Truly insightful!
Pray tell, how should they adjust their business model to this asinine entitlement attitude that seems to spread across the internet like wildfire where everyone expects everyone that creates these works to foot the bill to create them and distribute them?
It's like everyone concluded with the following logic:
Internet = Easily copy data Video = digital data digital data = easily copied internet = video over the internet video = free
and completely forgot about all of the real economic costs involved in production of works.
But then I remembered that they failed at math before and assumed that the price of something was equal to the raw materials in the physical object, and the costs of producing the work (music, movie, game) were zero or something.
Considering that it is how they earn their livelihood, I am not surprised they are offended.
Unless you insist they -must- give their works away for free, and rely on the pittance given by the few people who will actually pay (which as Stephen King and Radiohead found out, is an unsustainably small group of people when the option of -free- is available.)
This is false. It is entirely possible to copyright something and never publish it. In fact, that is the default state of all works created these days.
In fact, it's entirely possible to register a copyright on something and not fully publish it. You can't request the entirety of Microsoft's source code from the Library of Congress or the Copyright Office, for instance.
Sure there is, when your entire economic policy is centered on the concept of ownership. Copyright basically provides a means of codifying a work into an "ownable" construct.
The difference is that unlike a physical object this construct can (and should) evaporate after a limited amount of time. So it is not artificial in modern society by any stretch of the imagination, if your imagination is dominated by the concept of ownership as a means of judging value.
H.264's greatest weakness is the heavy CPU load on playback, it's just not friendly to low-cost and/or mobile devices. If Theora can get within the ballpark in terms of quality, but beat H.264 in speed, that could be the edge it needs to hit the mainstream.
The catch is that industry involvement alone gives H.264 an edge. IC companies are putting effort into making low-power chips that can decode H.264 in hardware, in realtime. So the CPU-efficiency of Vorbis goes out the window, and everyone sticks with the existing standard.
Something tells me it's basically a runaround game and they haven't realized it yet.
100% of the benefits of outsourcing come from firing your labor force in high wage areas and moving them to low wage areas, while still selling your product for a good margin in the high wage areas.
Eventually, though, they'll shaft the high wage areas enough that they won't be able to afford their expensive products anymore and profits will fall. At the same time the low wage areas will increase in cost, so they'll have to fire them and move again as people like to, you know, have something to show for their efforts.
I mean really. Their product that they can't sell for $10 USD in India sells for $200 in the US. And they expect to be able to reduce pay or fire all their workers in the US and still retain (or grow) their profits? Somehow this doesn't surprise me considering the calamity that rampant corporate greed has brought upon us after 8 years of a CEO-and-Shareholder-fellating administration that enacted policies against our own best interests.
They switched to NExT (xnu,) adopted a bit from FreeBSD, and added the BSD userland and their own proprietary front end. Then got it certified UNIX.
No, the biggest jump in improvement for Apple was bringing Jobs back. The only thing it's bad for these days are the techies who think their minority opinion is what everyone really wants.
And he's right, it doesn't need to be abolished but fixed.
the potential benefits of doing so are way more interesting than the deprecated business models
What benefits are there to ensure that creators know ahead of time that there will be no means of ensuring at least the opportunity to recoup ones investment?
At least now they have the option to try and pursue it, success and failure are entirely on them. Without copyright then whoever makes something is guaranteed to be left holding the bag, likely by large companies like Wal-Mart who would immediately pay a chinese CD/DVD duplicator to make millions of copies of every work out there.
I'm a coward who only breaks laws I can get away with (eg. downloading stuff I shouldn't on torrent sites). I do it because the risk is low, at least for now. If the police actually went full-bore with dealing with downloaders, I'd stop immediately. I'm just talking about the ideal way to fight an unjust law.
Why not just post next time with "My opinion is worthless, please ignore me>" since it's obvious that your "stance" is about as strong as a peice of wet paper.
Slashdot Mirror
Enjoy the lack of exposure and footing the bandwith costs.
On second thought, those are mutually exclusive, now aren't they?
Blame it on the greed and entitlement attitude of the average person. They want it all but don't want to pay for it. As a result, control falls to the organizations with a big enough hand to survive via other means.
As for the GP, you're an idiot. A journalist that can't focus on the subject at hand is worthless.
Yup, they're gonna make money selling bootleg copies of OS X.
Nothing BETTER than screwing the developers, eh?
Or they simply won't sell retail copies of OS X, which is how Psystar was doing this.
Which will leave only the people who are violating their copyrights, something far more easily pursued (if they sell in Europe, the US, or Japan.)
Doesn't Google make all of its money from advertising?
IIRC, they aren't giving away their products so much as subsidizing them via ad sales. Not even Google's services are free, in the end.
Yes, but the other effect is that everything has a price, and when people bypass that it's not capitalism anymore (more akin to communism.) The capitalistic effect when all of your "customers" decide they no longer want to pay is that you go out of business. And now they're met with the dissonance that what they produce -IS- popular and in demand but no one's buying (fewer, rather.)
I'd like to see what the return on a given book released in that manner would be if they hadn't likely fully recouped the costs already. IIRC, none of the books in the Baen Free Library are recent publications.
A natural effect of capitalism would be someone coming up with content on their own and distributing it on the terms the Internet Users(tm) would like, and making a killing at it. Not taking someone else's work without compensation.
Unsurprisingly, no one has truly tried this model (giving it away for free, praying people actually buy it) because it doesn't look terribly profitable (to the point that it would almost always be a money loser.)
Paid for by the church. I don't imagine that he did the work for free, seeing as how even then people needed money to live.
Mozart was commissioned by the king. His pieces were ONLY played for royalty, and he wrote what the royalty wanted to hear.
Leonardo was a genius on an entirely different level from most people. Do we know what his opinion on things would be today? Unlikely.
I don't see why people think that forcing the studios to switch business models (to one that not even slashdot can do more than poorly suggest) will solve the problem. The growing attitude these days seems to be one of entitlement and a "looting" behavior. I don't see how switching business models (aside from going out of business) will help.
How about the compelling reason that some ideas require monetary investment to bring to fruition, and forcing people to release into the public domain basically ensures that no one will commit resources to it.
Sure, -some- will commit resources but not to the extent you see today.
Ellison?
I hear violence sells. Or at least in his case, it'd probably be pretty fucking funny.
What a brilliant comment! Truly insightful!
Pray tell, how should they adjust their business model to this asinine entitlement attitude that seems to spread across the internet like wildfire where everyone expects everyone that creates these works to foot the bill to create them and distribute them?
It's like everyone concluded with the following logic:
Internet = Easily copy data
Video = digital data
digital data = easily copied
internet = video over the internet
video = free
and completely forgot about all of the real economic costs involved in production of works.
But then I remembered that they failed at math before and assumed that the price of something was equal to the raw materials in the physical object, and the costs of producing the work (music, movie, game) were zero or something.
Considering that it is how they earn their livelihood, I am not surprised they are offended.
Unless you insist they -must- give their works away for free, and rely on the pittance given by the few people who will actually pay (which as Stephen King and Radiohead found out, is an unsustainably small group of people when the option of -free- is available.)
This is false. It is entirely possible to copyright something and never publish it. In fact, that is the default state of all works created these days.
In fact, it's entirely possible to register a copyright on something and not fully publish it. You can't request the entirety of Microsoft's source code from the Library of Congress or the Copyright Office, for instance.
Sure there is, when your entire economic policy is centered on the concept of ownership. Copyright basically provides a means of codifying a work into an "ownable" construct.
The difference is that unlike a physical object this construct can (and should) evaporate after a limited amount of time. So it is not artificial in modern society by any stretch of the imagination, if your imagination is dominated by the concept of ownership as a means of judging value.
You're forgetting to qualify your statements:
There. Now it is appropriate Slashbot-think.
The catch is that industry involvement alone gives H.264 an edge. IC companies are putting effort into making low-power chips that can decode H.264 in hardware, in realtime. So the CPU-efficiency of Vorbis goes out the window, and everyone sticks with the existing standard.
Yes, but at least they don't lie and say "oh no, we're Fair and Balanced(tm)" and try to masquerade as some impartial reporter.
Microsoft can't solve PEBCAK without taking control over the computer completely out of the user's hands.
Are you willing to give them that level control?
Something tells me it's basically a runaround game and they haven't realized it yet.
100% of the benefits of outsourcing come from firing your labor force in high wage areas and moving them to low wage areas, while still selling your product for a good margin in the high wage areas.
Eventually, though, they'll shaft the high wage areas enough that they won't be able to afford their expensive products anymore and profits will fall. At the same time the low wage areas will increase in cost, so they'll have to fire them and move again as people like to, you know, have something to show for their efforts.
I mean really. Their product that they can't sell for $10 USD in India sells for $200 in the US. And they expect to be able to reduce pay or fire all their workers in the US and still retain (or grow) their profits? Somehow this doesn't surprise me considering the calamity that rampant corporate greed has brought upon us after 8 years of a CEO-and-Shareholder-fellating administration that enacted policies against our own best interests.
They'd whine, until they could get into it with their cronies in China, where the government serves the corrupt and not the people.
Nitpick: They didn't switch to UNIX.
They switched to NExT (xnu,) adopted a bit from FreeBSD, and added the BSD userland and their own proprietary front end. Then got it certified UNIX.
No, the biggest jump in improvement for Apple was bringing Jobs back. The only thing it's bad for these days are the techies who think their minority opinion is what everyone really wants.
Then maybe they shouldn't call themselves the Pirate Party? After all, it's the political philosophy and not the name that is important, right?
And my grammar in that post is screwed up something fierce. Oh man...
And he's right, it doesn't need to be abolished but fixed.
What benefits are there to ensure that creators know ahead of time that there will be no means of ensuring at least the opportunity to recoup ones investment?
At least now they have the option to try and pursue it, success and failure are entirely on them. Without copyright then whoever makes something is guaranteed to be left holding the bag, likely by large companies like Wal-Mart who would immediately pay a chinese CD/DVD duplicator to make millions of copies of every work out there.
Why not just post next time with "My opinion is worthless, please ignore me>" since it's obvious that your "stance" is about as strong as a peice of wet paper.