The other way to make money is to provide a service. I make my living writing software for a company. They get my services, I get a continuing income that, while it pays for a nice lifestyle, isn't going to make me rich. (My current company does much the same thing: instead of selling the software, it supports the company in supplying a service very efficiently.) I do something specifically for the company, and they pay me.
But your company would not pay you if they did not foresee a return on their investment in you. That there is a return now is why so much is invested into various forms of entertainment. Make that return impossible (make the product free) and you will drive off investors.
Eventually you will drive off enough that you will have to make something on pocket change, for better or worse, and you might (just might) recoup enough to make your money back.
For example, pre-sales - if enough fans pay for enough advance copies to make the production worthwhile, then the creators still make money, the fans still get new productions from creators they like and the bootleggers can still sell knock off copies to every one else.
But pre-pay is kind of a hard thing for a new artist to use successfully. A major band like Radiohead -might- be able to get away with it. For artists who you are confident of in their ability to produce good works will get plenty of business but what about new artists? It's a huge barrier if they must either somehow drum up the funds to produce an album ahead of time (sight unseen, something which many slashdotters are apparently averse to) or eat the costs and hope a few people are kind enough to throw a pittance their way.
Never mind the fact that this model probably can't support ventures and works with higher fixed costs. While technology is great for reducing costs, they can only come down so much before you start hitting practical barriers.
Bootleggers are probably the worst outcome of all cases, since they crank out mass quantities of duplicates with none of the initial investment. For essentially no work they'll make more off the back of a given work than the creator did, and that's a real good disincentive to bother.
Gee, because that's how they choose to be compensated? Or are you just bashing them out of sheer ignorance?
I would imagine that by negotiating for a percentage of the profits they ARE taking a risk on whether the show flops or not. This is likely the reason they were pissed at the studios, who wanted to cut them out of the loop entirely when a show went to TV or was somehow charged for on the Internet. Why bother pinning your reputation on the success of a show if you're going to get screwed either way (either by a bomb, or by the studio?)
Looks like the "big fat FAIL" is deserved more by you.
This would allow them to make money off their effort without restricting my freedom of speech.
They already got in trouble once for owning the theaters, which they would have to do or the same thing that lets you exercise your "freedom of speech" would allow theater owners to trade copies of the film for zero cost.
And copyright doesn't infringe upon YOUR freedom of speech. You're still free to say what you want. This just raises the bar temporarily and forces you to create something instead of just reiterating something someone else "said."
Then we run into the situation where the average person's greed and selfishness will have eclipsed that of the large companies. So selfish they'll take and enjoy all they want without supporting the creators. You may think that by initially undermining the large RIAA affiliated corps it's a good thing but the audience pandered to by TPB is generally a sign of a growing audience: warez fiends who feel entitled to everything for free.
A few thousand dollars (even 20k) is a non-trivial investment for most people. It gets even harder because at the value you quote you're only considering equipment and initial costs. If you start selling and transferring files, that $15/mo host will probably cut you off quickly and you'll have to move to something more expensive. I imagine that you'd be pushing to have your download income outpace your bandwidth bills, never mind costs for the rest of your equipment.
And as you said, you didn't include your time. Or your residence, food, or anything else you need to live. So you'll probably have to be working a job and doing this in your free time, which carries its own set of pitfalls.
I'd wager that the cost of running a business like this (since that's what you're doing) would not be high, but your income would probably not be much higher. I would be less surprised to see them operate at a consistent loss, since you aren't really selling anything. Giving your product away and hoping for handouts is a sure fire way to lose money on something.
And that only considers costs based around the production of an album of music. Never mind other, more expensive media (animation, video games) that don't have any real-life counterparts.
incidentally, i think that the financial support for all culture via traditional means SHOULD collapse.
Indeed, creative works should be a drain on society. Manual labor during the day and creative works during the night. Assuming you're not too tired to do anyhting.
new channels of financial support will emerge (concerts, advertising, etc.), but i think they will be permanently reduced funds. not that this is a big problem:
Don't know about you but I don't see films being done as concerts (as plays and films are entirely different mediums.) And of course, having reduced ability to do something is always good. Cutting back opportunity is always a benefit.
no more need for a middle man who presses lps and cds and tapes
Ok. So cost of duplication is gone.
the cost of production, sutdios, cameras, etc.: shrinking dramatically every day in the digital era. to make an album nowadays, all you need is a laptop
You love this example because it lets you convince yourself that all you need to do anything is a laptop, and you let yourself ignore ALL of the other costs that go into the production of an album. Never mind that human creativity reaches beyond music albums (and you need more than a laptop if you want to make something that sounds good. I hear microphones are pretty expensive still.)
people are motivated to do art for the sake of art.
Of course they are, but they need to eat too.
if you were guaranteed to make $0 from making a song or a movie, people would still make songs and movies.
They would, but you'd see a lot fewer people making it. Go ahead and tell yourself that ALL the bad things would go away and all that would remain would be good things.
it's called love of art, not love of money. money is an artificial injection into the creation of art
In a world driven by money and commerce, the injection of money into artistic works is NOT artifical. It's the natural product of the way the world works.
I'd rather have enforced copyright of reasonable length than be reduced to crap packed to the gills with advertising, or more American Idol type trash. Which is largely what you'd get if what you want were to happen.
as long as flash keeps getting bigger and cheaper we won't see it's 'Successor' for a while.
As I understand it, flash (nand) capacity grows with the shrinking of the trace size. It's also cheap because it's produced in mass quantities.
Everything that has made flash high capacity and cheap can be applied to PCM, only PCM has a number of advantages: - more durable, since it doesn't force high voltages over blocks to erase them - smaller cells, allowing more to be packed in the same space - rewriteability. You don't have to erase a block to change a single byte. It's more like RAM or hard disks in that respect.
So what will likely happen is a slow change from FLASH to PCM as the major flash manufacturers transition their products to this technology. It'll still have the same form factor, and most people won't notice aside from an increase in capacity.
IANAPCMEBIWNS (I am not a pcm expert but I work near some...)
The question would be that of intent and purpose, I imagine.
First purpose:
Google is a very general search engine, it hosts nothing. The question of its cache is still up for debate, but things can and have been removed from it. Google can not arguably be considered responsible for what is linked to on its site, since it controls nothing outside of the google domain (unless explicitly noted.)
TPB is very specific, they host torrents and make no bones about it. They host trackers, which coordinate the transfers. They are in every way responsible for the torrents being uploaded, though it's the users that are actively violating the copyrights.
And intent:
Google is essentially a query driven directory where (the majority of) results point externally to the site. Google directs anyone to anything that matches the search term with no mind paid to the content, the author of the content or the poster of the content. Were you to remove the Google cache (the only part that arguably violates copyright,) Google would continue to function.
TPB is dedicated around the hosting and location of torrents. Were you to remove the tracker and delist torrents of material whose distribution via bittorrent was not permitted, TPB's usefulness would plummet massively. The same goes for pretty much any site like TPB.
The purpose and intent of search engines and sites like TPB are very, very different.
Whereby "partisan" means "in line with 'conservative republican' philosophy." Am I right?
The ACLU has stated that they are not opposed to reasonable measures of gun control, but they won't say more than that on the issue. They don't cover gun issues at all because the NRA is dedicated to it entirely.
their actual stance is "liberal", not "libertarian"
Liberties, as in freedom. Not this damn epithet "liberal" that people spew out towards anyone they disagree with. And not "libertarian" as in the political party.
What other issues have they worked against civil liberties on?
While the EC may do the actual voting, I sincerely doubt they would actively vote against the populace of the state. So long as the votes of the citizens is accurate, any countermanding by the EC would be blatant and visible, and (hopefully) swiftly corrected.
If someone cannot take the time to devote a minimum amount of effort to fill out a ballot properly, perhaps they should not vote at all.
No, they should be notified of their error immediately and be allowed to correct it. You are wholly wrong here.
A bad system vs. a bad system. Except the paper ballot system is likely easily corrected by pulling the scanner machines out of the centralized location and placing them in the polling venues. In stark contrast the systemic flaws seemingly designed into most electronic voting systems.
people will trade movies online. for free. without any limitations. they just will, get used to it. no matter what laws anyone passes. end of story, there really is no alternative to that future
Guess we'll have to get used to a future with less then. Kind of a shame that people are so self centered and greedy they can't be bothered to respect people who produce works.
movies will still be made for $100 million. the studios will just make their money only in the theatres. there just will be no more online/ dvd/ vhs aftermarket
Somehow I doubt they'd risk spending $100 million on something that must make all its money back in the theater. But trading won't threaten movies like that, it'll threaten smaller budget works whose production budget is based on the idea of recouping the costs on DVD sales. Of course you (and the mass of warez fiends) simply will not have any part of this "paying others for their work."
people announced the death of the moviehouse in the 1950s. why? television.
Completely irrelevant and unrelated. They figured they'd lose due to competition. Filesharing is competition of an entirely different matter. They predicted that TV would kill the Movie, but instead they co-exist perfectly, because they both bring unique things to the table.
Filesharing brings nothing unique to the table. It just takes the works that would be in movie theaters and on TV and shoves them over the internet, with no respect shown to those who created them. Or if you're the pirate bay, with arrogance, a childish attitutde, and while generating revenue off it.
Chimney sweeps still exist. It's recommended you call one for a cleaning and inspection before the winter if you have a wood burning fireplace to prevent chimney fires. And the steamship captains just went on to captain the diesel ships. Both of which are service jobs, and have little to nothing to do with the production of scientific or artistic works. Care to make any more bad examples?
Sure you can point and click and give everyone access to your music collection. That fact is entirely besides the point, considering the efforts that went into making that music (and let me guess, they all used only a laptop, right?) You seem to have concluded that when the cost of duplication drops to zero, then the cost of production is zero as well. However, until we're a money-less utopia there will be costs associated with the production of anything.
It's the people's fault. If these corporations are pushing laws and getting them through, the people who are opposed to them need to counter their efforts.
Failure on your behalf to act in opposition of their bills does not constitute a failure on their part.
I am not surprised that the majority of people might side with TPB
The majority of whom, internet connected people who revel in getting movies, music and games for free? It can't seriously be those who want a change in the law, because that's an extremely poor way to go about it unless your goal is to shoot yourself in the foot.
Oh and remember, they can't take away what was not theirs to begin with. If you don't like how they act, support those who don't act like them. Don't go and say "we hate your actions" then go and give their products your time (even if you don't give them your money.)
Like I said, a dime and two toothpicks. Serious consideration of production costs never come into play with some people, never mind that a laptop can't do anything on its own.
Oh and I suppose you're gonna film that movie with the camera built into your laptop's lid?
They infringe liberally on animes owned by large publishing firms, yet those firms turn a blind eye.
It's not that they turn a blind eye, so much as they realize it's a starting point for future artists. CLAMP, a rather famous manga group, started as a doujin group. And in turn they toss out things in their works and designs intentionally that are picked up and run with by doujin artists. And then you have studios that are filled with people who have done and still do doujin works.
In return they draw more people to the original animes owned by the publishing firm.
Debatable, a lot of the works are by fans and for fans. And a huge percentage of it is porn, not exactly what most people would expect from fairly benign shows like pokemon or dragonball.
In a sense it's a huge, self-perpetuating feedback loop. Better than what we have though, certainly.
However, if there was no copyright the current commercial SW model would not exist either, so you can not say that lack of copyright would life harder in the SW arena for non-commercial entities.
There would be commercial software, it'd all be wrapped up in NDAs and Trade Secret clauses, encrypted and only available as binaries. It'd make use of all the best efforts of GPL and BSD software and contribute very little back. And if you did trade the binaries for free, good luck getting the source code without putting up a sacrificial goat.
A lot of major companies that contribute to the kernel now do so with the knowlege that their work won't be bottled up or modified by someone else without the changes getting back to them. It's a bit of give and take that a LOT of people find valuable, and considered so because they feel the GPL has teeth. Take those teeth away and they'll probably pull their support.
However, the politics of the GPL are specifically anti-copyright.
I can't see the anti-copyright nature behind the GPL, except that it uses copyright to enforce equal rights. It's a clever use, but does nothing at all to undermine the concept. Indeed, it enforces the very purpose of the copyright system.
Now wouldn't that be an interesting twist on copyright law: You can't redistribute something (even for free) unless what you redistribute is a derivative work. Then people would have to get truly creative before sticking stuff on torrents. I suspect that they'd still run afoul of the law.
unless you have an existing fan base that pools money for it.
But then how do new people get started? And how many times have I read on slashdot where people say "I'd never have bought X or Y if I hadn't downloaded it?"
You have a right to *try* to make money.
I do have a right to try. But it's hard to try when you have to compete with your own work being traded freely or (worse yet) being sold for a pittance by knock-offs (which we have now but not nearly as badly as we would without copyright.)
You seem to think you have a right to make money. You don't. You have a right to *try* to make money. There's an important difference there. Its too bad you will end up producing less, but giving the entire world access to 100 years of worldwide culture that they don't have now outweighs anything the world will produce in the next few decades.
So what you're saying is that we've already produced our best, and won't produce anything better or equal in the next few decades, and thus hindering the production of new works is a good thing?
Fixing the law would do the same job, and more. And believe me, if you're in a position to eliminate it you can fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
But your company would not pay you if they did not foresee a return on their investment in you. That there is a return now is why so much is invested into various forms of entertainment. Make that return impossible (make the product free) and you will drive off investors.
Eventually you will drive off enough that you will have to make something on pocket change, for better or worse, and you might (just might) recoup enough to make your money back.
But pre-pay is kind of a hard thing for a new artist to use successfully. A major band like Radiohead -might- be able to get away with it. For artists who you are confident of in their ability to produce good works will get plenty of business but what about new artists? It's a huge barrier if they must either somehow drum up the funds to produce an album ahead of time (sight unseen, something which many slashdotters are apparently averse to) or eat the costs and hope a few people are kind enough to throw a pittance their way.
Never mind the fact that this model probably can't support ventures and works with higher fixed costs. While technology is great for reducing costs, they can only come down so much before you start hitting practical barriers.
Bootleggers are probably the worst outcome of all cases, since they crank out mass quantities of duplicates with none of the initial investment. For essentially no work they'll make more off the back of a given work than the creator did, and that's a real good disincentive to bother.
Gee, because that's how they choose to be compensated? Or are you just bashing them out of sheer ignorance?
I would imagine that by negotiating for a percentage of the profits they ARE taking a risk on whether the show flops or not. This is likely the reason they were pissed at the studios, who wanted to cut them out of the loop entirely when a show went to TV or was somehow charged for on the Internet. Why bother pinning your reputation on the success of a show if you're going to get screwed either way (either by a bomb, or by the studio?)
Looks like the "big fat FAIL" is deserved more by you.
They already got in trouble once for owning the theaters, which they would have to do or the same thing that lets you exercise your "freedom of speech" would allow theater owners to trade copies of the film for zero cost.
And copyright doesn't infringe upon YOUR freedom of speech. You're still free to say what you want. This just raises the bar temporarily and forces you to create something instead of just reiterating something someone else "said."
Then we run into the situation where the average person's greed and selfishness will have eclipsed that of the large companies. So selfish they'll take and enjoy all they want without supporting the creators. You may think that by initially undermining the large RIAA affiliated corps it's a good thing but the audience pandered to by TPB is generally a sign of a growing audience: warez fiends who feel entitled to everything for free.
A few thousand dollars (even 20k) is a non-trivial investment for most people. It gets even harder because at the value you quote you're only considering equipment and initial costs. If you start selling and transferring files, that $15/mo host will probably cut you off quickly and you'll have to move to something more expensive. I imagine that you'd be pushing to have your download income outpace your bandwidth bills, never mind costs for the rest of your equipment.
And as you said, you didn't include your time. Or your residence, food, or anything else you need to live. So you'll probably have to be working a job and doing this in your free time, which carries its own set of pitfalls.
I'd wager that the cost of running a business like this (since that's what you're doing) would not be high, but your income would probably not be much higher. I would be less surprised to see them operate at a consistent loss, since you aren't really selling anything. Giving your product away and hoping for handouts is a sure fire way to lose money on something.
And that only considers costs based around the production of an album of music. Never mind other, more expensive media (animation, video games) that don't have any real-life counterparts.
Indeed, creative works should be a drain on society. Manual labor during the day and creative works during the night. Assuming you're not too tired to do anyhting.
Don't know about you but I don't see films being done as concerts (as plays and films are entirely different mediums.) And of course, having reduced ability to do something is always good. Cutting back opportunity is always a benefit.
Ok. So cost of duplication is gone.
You love this example because it lets you convince yourself that all you need to do anything is a laptop, and you let yourself ignore ALL of the other costs that go into the production of an album. Never mind that human creativity reaches beyond music albums (and you need more than a laptop if you want to make something that sounds good. I hear microphones are pretty expensive still.)
Of course they are, but they need to eat too.
They would, but you'd see a lot fewer people making it. Go ahead and tell yourself that ALL the bad things would go away and all that would remain would be good things.
In a world driven by money and commerce, the injection of money into artistic works is NOT artifical. It's the natural product of the way the world works.
I'd rather have enforced copyright of reasonable length than be reduced to crap packed to the gills with advertising, or more American Idol type trash. Which is largely what you'd get if what you want were to happen.
Too bad they're not dupes.
As I understand it, flash (nand) capacity grows with the shrinking of the trace size. It's also cheap because it's produced in mass quantities.
Everything that has made flash high capacity and cheap can be applied to PCM, only PCM has a number of advantages:
- more durable, since it doesn't force high voltages over blocks to erase them
- smaller cells, allowing more to be packed in the same space
- rewriteability. You don't have to erase a block to change a single byte. It's more like RAM or hard disks in that respect.
So what will likely happen is a slow change from FLASH to PCM as the major flash manufacturers transition their products to this technology. It'll still have the same form factor, and most people won't notice aside from an increase in capacity.
IANAPCMEBIWNS (I am not a pcm expert but I work near some...)
The question would be that of intent and purpose, I imagine.
First purpose:
Google is a very general search engine, it hosts nothing. The question of its cache is still up for debate, but things can and have been removed from it. Google can not arguably be considered responsible for what is linked to on its site, since it controls nothing outside of the google domain (unless explicitly noted.)
TPB is very specific, they host torrents and make no bones about it. They host trackers, which coordinate the transfers. They are in every way responsible for the torrents being uploaded, though it's the users that are actively violating the copyrights.
And intent:
Google is essentially a query driven directory where (the majority of) results point externally to the site. Google directs anyone to anything that matches the search term with no mind paid to the content, the author of the content or the poster of the content. Were you to remove the Google cache (the only part that arguably violates copyright,) Google would continue to function.
TPB is dedicated around the hosting and location of torrents. Were you to remove the tracker and delist torrents of material whose distribution via bittorrent was not permitted, TPB's usefulness would plummet massively. The same goes for pretty much any site like TPB.
The purpose and intent of search engines and sites like TPB are very, very different.
The ACLU has stated that they are not opposed to reasonable measures of gun control, but they won't say more than that on the issue. They don't cover gun issues at all because the NRA is dedicated to it entirely.
Liberties, as in freedom. Not this damn epithet "liberal" that people spew out towards anyone they disagree with. And not "libertarian" as in the political party.
What other issues have they worked against civil liberties on?
Good to see you can take a nice, reasoned post and taint it with partisan bullshit. Good job.
While the EC may do the actual voting, I sincerely doubt they would actively vote against the populace of the state. So long as the votes of the citizens is accurate, any countermanding by the EC would be blatant and visible, and (hopefully) swiftly corrected.
No, they should be notified of their error immediately and be allowed to correct it. You are wholly wrong here.
A bad system vs. a bad system. Except the paper ballot system is likely easily corrected by pulling the scanner machines out of the centralized location and placing them in the polling venues. In stark contrast the systemic flaws seemingly designed into most electronic voting systems.
Guess we'll have to get used to a future with less then. Kind of a shame that people are so self centered and greedy they can't be bothered to respect people who produce works.
Somehow I doubt they'd risk spending $100 million on something that must make all its money back in the theater. But trading won't threaten movies like that, it'll threaten smaller budget works whose production budget is based on the idea of recouping the costs on DVD sales. Of course you (and the mass of warez fiends) simply will not have any part of this "paying others for their work."
Completely irrelevant and unrelated. They figured they'd lose due to competition. Filesharing is competition of an entirely different matter. They predicted that TV would kill the Movie, but instead they co-exist perfectly, because they both bring unique things to the table.
Filesharing brings nothing unique to the table. It just takes the works that would be in movie theaters and on TV and shoves them over the internet, with no respect shown to those who created them. Or if you're the pirate bay, with arrogance, a childish attitutde, and while generating revenue off it.
Did the russians have fun brushing the shavings and graphite dust out of the relays?
Chimney sweeps still exist. It's recommended you call one for a cleaning and inspection before the winter if you have a wood burning fireplace to prevent chimney fires. And the steamship captains just went on to captain the diesel ships. Both of which are service jobs, and have little to nothing to do with the production of scientific or artistic works. Care to make any more bad examples?
Sure you can point and click and give everyone access to your music collection. That fact is entirely besides the point, considering the efforts that went into making that music (and let me guess, they all used only a laptop, right?) You seem to have concluded that when the cost of duplication drops to zero, then the cost of production is zero as well. However, until we're a money-less utopia there will be costs associated with the production of anything.
Failure on your behalf to act in opposition of their bills does not constitute a failure on their part.
The majority of whom, internet connected people who revel in getting movies, music and games for free? It can't seriously be those who want a change in the law, because that's an extremely poor way to go about it unless your goal is to shoot yourself in the foot.
Oh and remember, they can't take away what was not theirs to begin with. If you don't like how they act, support those who don't act like them. Don't go and say "we hate your actions" then go and give their products your time (even if you don't give them your money.)
Except that they're not a "Robin Hood" because the people they're giving to aren't exactly the oppressed and poor.
All they're doing is undermining those who legitimately seek fairer copyright laws by giving industry groups more ammunition for their own cause.
To nitpick, while I disagree with TPB technically they aren't breaking the law. The people who put up and join on the torrent are.
Not that I care for TPB. They're as immature as a bunch of warez fiends can be, and Slashdot roots them on.
Like I said, a dime and two toothpicks. Serious consideration of production costs never come into play with some people, never mind that a laptop can't do anything on its own.
Oh and I suppose you're gonna film that movie with the camera built into your laptop's lid?
Because money is bad, baaaaaad!
And anyone who touches money is evil, evil!
And bad things ALWAYS happen when ART and MONEY come together!
Except for that whole cost of production thing, which people like to ignore. Oh wait, anything can be produced with a dime and two toothpicks.
It's not that they turn a blind eye, so much as they realize it's a starting point for future artists. CLAMP, a rather famous manga group, started as a doujin group. And in turn they toss out things in their works and designs intentionally that are picked up and run with by doujin artists. And then you have studios that are filled with people who have done and still do doujin works.
Debatable, a lot of the works are by fans and for fans. And a huge percentage of it is porn, not exactly what most people would expect from fairly benign shows like pokemon or dragonball.
In a sense it's a huge, self-perpetuating feedback loop. Better than what we have though, certainly.
There would be commercial software, it'd all be wrapped up in NDAs and Trade Secret clauses, encrypted and only available as binaries. It'd make use of all the best efforts of GPL and BSD software and contribute very little back. And if you did trade the binaries for free, good luck getting the source code without putting up a sacrificial goat.
A lot of major companies that contribute to the kernel now do so with the knowlege that their work won't be bottled up or modified by someone else without the changes getting back to them. It's a bit of give and take that a LOT of people find valuable, and considered so because they feel the GPL has teeth. Take those teeth away and they'll probably pull their support.
I can't see the anti-copyright nature behind the GPL, except that it uses copyright to enforce equal rights. It's a clever use, but does nothing at all to undermine the concept. Indeed, it enforces the very purpose of the copyright system.
Now wouldn't that be an interesting twist on copyright law: You can't redistribute something (even for free) unless what you redistribute is a derivative work. Then people would have to get truly creative before sticking stuff on torrents. I suspect that they'd still run afoul of the law.
But then how do new people get started? And how many times have I read on slashdot where people say "I'd never have bought X or Y if I hadn't downloaded it?"
I do have a right to try. But it's hard to try when you have to compete with your own work being traded freely or (worse yet) being sold for a pittance by knock-offs (which we have now but not nearly as badly as we would without copyright.)
So what you're saying is that we've already produced our best, and won't produce anything better or equal in the next few decades, and thus hindering the production of new works is a good thing?
Fixing the law would do the same job, and more. And believe me, if you're in a position to eliminate it you can fix it.