It's reasonable for MPAA members to expect a healty 5 or 10 percent profit on they're effort.
I work in the financial industry. There is no legal investment of which I am aware for which it is reasonable to expect a healthy 5 or 10 percent profit within a small number (less than 2) of years.
The pivotal word is "reasonable". Why should the MPAA/RIAA be able to reasonably expect to make a 5-10% return on their investment (and expect the government to help them enforce that profit), when I can't expect the government to force the person who manages the assets in my 401(k) to generate a "healthy" 5-10% return on my investments.
What gets me is that the MPAA/RIAA seem to act like it is their entitlement to earn a "healthy" profit. A profit should be a reward for a job well done.
Although they are clearly marking the movie as having been edited, it is still the same movie title with the same artistic credits. Since the edited movie no longer represents the artists' original artistic vision, it should not bear the title or artistic credits of the original movie.
In the very least, CleanFlix should be required to obtain permission of each individual with a credit in the movie to use their name in the revised credits, as well as obtaining permission from the production studio to use the original title.
This is precisely the same as if I bought the lastest Steven King book, retyped it, edited the retyped version, destroyed the original and bound the edited version for resale with the words "sanitized for your comfort" on the back cover.
The bottom line is that if the courts affirm CleanFlix's claims, this will be an afront to the artistic community.
I actually heard about this a few days ago on NPR. The thing is, CleanFlix is a commercial entity. The DGA is claiming you can't take copyrighted work, alter it, and then turn around and sell it. The question at the heart of this situation is the following: At what point does a CleanFlix version of a movie cease to be the creative product of the director?
Suppose I bought a DaVinci painting, and painted over most of it, but left the signature, then sold it to someone as a DaVinci. That would be fraud, theft by deception, and in the very least unethical.
That is precisely what CleanFlix is doing to movies. They are desecrating someone's creative work. I would agree that they have a right to edit a movie and resell it, but they should be forced to strip the title and the credits (particularly the production/direction/writing credits) before they were allowed to resell it.
No one is saying that if you buy a dvd and take it home that you can't skip scenes or hit the mute button. Or that you can't edit your own copies. Just don't sell them using the reputation of the artists who created the original version.
I was an undergrad at MIT in the early 90's when the DoJ decided to sue 22 universities for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust act. It was called the "Overlap Case". The really funny thing about it all was that apparently, when proposing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, Sherman himself stated that it should not be applied to schools. Anyway, I digress. Basically, the Ivies got on their knees and begged for mercy and only MIT was left fighting the DoJ. Eventually, MIT and the DoJ set up rules under which schools were allowed to pool admissions info (I think only financial aid info, but I'm not sure), and the DoJ dropped the charges.
A "truly competitive" market is a market in equilibrium. In such a situation, everybody has to sell their competing "equivalent" products for the same price. There is no profit. The mere existence of a profit means a market has not equilibriated.
When a market does reach equilibrium, the market shares for each participating company stabilizes. Thus, you won't care if Dell sells HPs or only Dells because your market share will remain the same.
Furthermore, the stocks of the companies transition from growth stocks (little or no dividend but growth in stock price) to value stocks (only dividends because due to competition there is no more room to grow) as the market matures (i.e., becomes truly competitive).
Now back to reality. This is not a mature market. By refusing to supply Dell with HP printers in the short term, Dell's initial market share of the printer market may be considerably smaller than if HP allowed them to make a smooth transition. As the market becomes competitive, HP will have a larger market share and thus will be able to leverage economies of scale to obtain a larger profit than its competitors. Furthermore, it will preserve a greater market share when equilibrium is reached, thus locking in greater dividends to its stock holders as the market matures.
Bottom line, this is a very good business decision.
The stockholders should be pleased.
For many years I have wondered what good ads on TV really did. Consider the following. During the Superbowl, people actually watch for the ads. Companies make a major production out of the Superbowl ads. One such company is Pepsi. Now, almost everybody in the US drinks either Coke or Pepsi or both. Those who don't do so for a reason. It isn't because they haven't been "enlightened" yet by the clever folks on Madison Ave. Nobody saw the Pepsi commercials and decided to stop drinking Coke and only drink Pepsi. (Of course, this is the same for Coke.) So why blow millions of dollars on the ads? There are many such ads that I cannot imagine have any impact on the actual demand for the product. The impact of the ad campaign is "measured" (for lack of a better word) by people who might have learned enough math to satisfy the breadth requirement for their BA in marketing. (Letting marketing people play with math is like letting a toddler play with a knife.) It is pretty easy to make the data look like there is a cause and effect situation, thus leading credence to the ad company's pitch. However, upon closer inspection by a trained, unbiased statistician, I'll bet you'd fail to reject the null hypothesis that ads have no effect on demand (after subtracting out all correlation effects from your model).
I think that sooner or later the CEOs of these companies are going to begin to realize that TV ads are wastes of money (mostly). Then they will really cut their ad budgets. As demand falls, TV stations will also have to cut back. TV shows won't be able to pay their actors a million dollars per episode. The quality of TV shows will fall off and people will watch less TV (which is probably a good thing). Yes, that means that maybe in my lifetime NBC won't be able to pay the talentless, rangeless ensemble cast of Friends the rediculous amounts of money they currently get.
As for me, I am almost to the point where the only shows I watch are on HBO, so the networks can do whatever they want with their commercials -- I'll just stop watching network TV altogether.
Though, I will miss Buffy and Scrubs.
Seriously, doesn't this sound just like Colony by Ben Bova?
Everyone starts running out of resources. The poorer countries get hit harder, but eventually all countries are effected, and there is rioting and marshall law everywhere. And, people from a space colony orbiting the earth have to try to save the day without being corrupted by the same power structure that threatens to destroy the earth. Anyway, it was a good read. I recommend it, though it wasn't as good as Mars.
Yes. They are rude people who think they have a right to interrupt me and violate my privacy because they are too lazy to get an honest job. I am so sick of people saying "they're only trying to earn a living," refering to telemarketers. Elephant poachers are only trying to make a living. That doesn't excuse them! I have taken all the precautions to avoid telemarkets, and, for the most part, I only receive a call once every few months (and that is usually a wrong number). However, I still take it upon myself to give the caller the hardest time I can. My reasoning is this -- if everyone was incredibly mean and rude to telemarketers, few people would be willing to do the work and the cost of labor would be prohibitively high. Don't even get me started about the jackasses that actually buy something from telemarketers. If they would all just stop the problem would disappear.
OK, then assign the patents to the FSF.
No? Why not?
I think there may be another reason. I am not an IP lawyer, but I think that if Red Hat assigns the patents to the FSF, they cannot use said patents for counter-offensive legal moves.
Another common reason is that instead of getting mixed up in costly legal battles, companies trade IP from their portfolios (kind of like baseball cards). If the FSF holds Red Hat's patents, they cannot do this. Although some OSS fans may find this objectionable, it would be like granting some commercial software company rights to use Red Hat IP in exchange for Red Hat including proprietary software in their distribution. Again, some may find the inclusion of proprietary software in Red Hat to be a very bad idea, but remember that even Linus has gone on the record as saying that he uses proprietary software (I believe his example was M$ Excel).
Anyway, I trust Red Hat to uphold their promises more than I trust the PTO/Government Officials or other corporations. Maybe that's foolish, maybe not. It's just my $0.02
The DMA (Direct Marketing Association) has their own opt-out for mail, phone and email. In my experience, it works quite well. You can get more information from the following URL: http://www.dmaconsumers.org/privacy.html . It generally takes 3 months to work, but I found that it works best if you can get on the list before your new info has a chance to circulate.
I also found that
asking credit card companies to put you on their "do not call unless someone stole my card" list at the same time as you give them your new info allows you to avoid that whole "4--6 weeks" before it takes effect line they give you.
Using these two strategies, I have not received any phonecalls or mail from commercial telemarketers in almost three years. Charities are another story.
The article seemed to imply that the technology would only use mouth movements, thus allowing the phone to ignore all sound, a lot of which is noise.
Of course, as CmdrTaco points out, this could lead to a loss in some of the subtleties of communication.
Couldn't someone use the movements in addition to the sound to filter out the actual speaker's voice from the background noise? This seems almost like a nonlinear Kalman filter application (though I am by no means an expert on such things), if you had a (presumably nonlinear) model for speech as a function of the movements of the mouth.
The article didn't give too much detail. Oh well, it sounds interesting in the very least.
Generally speaking, one really means "Gauss-Newton" when referring to "Newton methods." The GN algorithm (which I mentioned in my original post) works by "dampening" the Newton step via a 1-dimensional optimization subproblem called a line search (e.g. Armijo), thus avoiding "overshooting" the root.
Most professional implementations use damped Newton methods (like GN), which are globally superlinearly convergent. In practice, GN is only merely superlinearly convergent for the first few iterations before moving close enough to the root to converge quadratically.
The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is a quasi-Newton algorithm (which I also mentioned in my original post) because it estimates the Jacobian matrix of the nonlinear function instead of always using the exact Jacobian. In this way, there are less function evaluations required per iteration at the cost of superlinear convergence instead of quadratic.
As far as nonlinear programming is concerned, no algorithm beats the class of Newton-like algorithms for their generality, efficiency and elegance. There are even a few different flavors of Newton algorithms that can be used to solve nonsmooth equations and their ilk! (The Bouligand differentiable Newton algorithm can solve systems of variational inequalities and complementarity problems.)
One Vote for Newton!
on
Deep Algorithms?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What about Newton's Method (and its variants like Quasi-Newton and Gauss-Newton)? This algorithm solves a system of nonlinear equations iteratively by solving a sequence of linear systems of equations. With Newton's method, one can use the extremely effective matrix decompositions (QR, LU, etc.) to solve nonlinear equations. Under typical conditions, it exhibits quadratic convergence (basically, the number of decimal places of precision double after each iteration). Plus, it is very easy to understand. (It is taught in many freshman calculus classes.)
Actually, what I took away from the article was that the more "end-user friendly" a (free) piece of software is, the less you will need to pay for support. Thus, we have the author's claim that the pay-for-support business model that works for operating systems under the GPL is not nearly as effective (or doesn't work at all) for end-user friendly software.
That is why the original essay gives the analogy of selling software in a retail store versus giving it away for free and selling support.
I agree that in general, there is very little quality control. However, in some cases, there can be a great deal. I'm a mathematician, and from time to time, I teach some applied math classes at a local university. Suppose I wanted to write my own web-based book on differential equations, but I was not concerned about making any money with it.
I could try to write it in a GPL-type way allowing readers to contribute "patches" with me acting as the benevolent dictator. Presumably, since I would be teaching the class, I'd be adequately qualified as a benevolent dictator. If not, then someone else can take the parts of my book they like, and "fork" it into a different book. As an instructor, I'd be delighted if every time I taught a class, I could go online, and "build" my own text book by choosing chapters like they were kernel modules.
This situation is different from a web novel because the subject (differential equations) is fairly objective. There may be stylistic disagreements between contributors, but all should agree upon (correct) mathematics. In this way, such a book would be very similar to code. Programmers may not agree on coding style, but either the code works or it doesn't, and that is objective.
I suspect that this is one possible direction that the OpenCourseWare project at MIT might be heading. Does anyone know of any similar "open source" text book projects?
That may be true for companies that hold IP (and, from reading other comments, that is a debatable point). However, consider that a large amount of IP is produced by individuals.
For example, a friend of mine is an aspiring film-maker. His primary goal is exposure, and he understands that releasing his IP (in this case, a film) into the public domain will give him an opportunity to increase his exposure cheaply. However, he would like to retain some of the conditions of his copyright. (If he did release his film into the public domain, then he may not have any legal options if a studio decided to rip off his idea without even giving him credit.)
I can easily imagine that many artists would have a similar use for a spectrum of license options between 100% restricted and 100% public domain. Furthermore, Lessig's idea about embedding the license into the digital media makes this more attractive to someone like my friend.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in the financial industry. There is no legal investment of which I am aware for which it is reasonable to expect a healthy 5 or 10 percent profit within a small number (less than 2) of years.
The pivotal word is "reasonable". Why should the MPAA/RIAA be able to reasonably expect to make a 5-10% return on their investment (and expect the government to help them enforce that profit), when I can't expect the government to force the person who manages the assets in my 401(k) to generate a "healthy" 5-10% return on my investments.
What gets me is that the MPAA/RIAA seem to act like it is their entitlement to earn a "healthy" profit. A profit should be a reward for a job well done.
In the very least, CleanFlix should be required to obtain permission of each individual with a credit in the movie to use their name in the revised credits, as well as obtaining permission from the production studio to use the original title.
This is precisely the same as if I bought the lastest Steven King book, retyped it, edited the retyped version, destroyed the original and bound the edited version for resale with the words "sanitized for your comfort" on the back cover.
The bottom line is that if the courts affirm CleanFlix's claims, this will be an afront to the artistic community.
Suppose I bought a DaVinci painting, and painted over most of it, but left the signature, then sold it to someone as a DaVinci. That would be fraud, theft by deception, and in the very least unethical.
That is precisely what CleanFlix is doing to movies. They are desecrating someone's creative work. I would agree that they have a right to edit a movie and resell it, but they should be forced to strip the title and the credits (particularly the production/direction/writing credits) before they were allowed to resell it.
No one is saying that if you buy a dvd and take it home that you can't skip scenes or hit the mute button. Or that you can't edit your own copies. Just don't sell them using the reputation of the artists who created the original version.
Is it legal to circumvent DRM spyware under the DMCA?
I would hope it is, since you can do so without violating the copyright holder's rights. But, you never know when lawyers are involved.
I wonder if this recent act violates those rules?
When a market does reach equilibrium, the market shares for each participating company stabilizes. Thus, you won't care if Dell sells HPs or only Dells because your market share will remain the same.
Furthermore, the stocks of the companies transition from growth stocks (little or no dividend but growth in stock price) to value stocks (only dividends because due to competition there is no more room to grow) as the market matures (i.e., becomes truly competitive).
Now back to reality. This is not a mature market. By refusing to supply Dell with HP printers in the short term, Dell's initial market share of the printer market may be considerably smaller than if HP allowed them to make a smooth transition. As the market becomes competitive, HP will have a larger market share and thus will be able to leverage economies of scale to obtain a larger profit than its competitors. Furthermore, it will preserve a greater market share when equilibrium is reached, thus locking in greater dividends to its stock holders as the market matures.
Bottom line, this is a very good business decision. The stockholders should be pleased.
I think that sooner or later the CEOs of these companies are going to begin to realize that TV ads are wastes of money (mostly). Then they will really cut their ad budgets. As demand falls, TV stations will also have to cut back. TV shows won't be able to pay their actors a million dollars per episode. The quality of TV shows will fall off and people will watch less TV (which is probably a good thing). Yes, that means that maybe in my lifetime NBC won't be able to pay the talentless, rangeless ensemble cast of Friends the rediculous amounts of money they currently get.
As for me, I am almost to the point where the only shows I watch are on HBO, so the networks can do whatever they want with their commercials -- I'll just stop watching network TV altogether. Though, I will miss Buffy and Scrubs.
Everyone starts running out of resources. The poorer countries get hit harder, but eventually all countries are effected, and there is rioting and marshall law everywhere. And, people from a space colony orbiting the earth have to try to save the day without being corrupted by the same power structure that threatens to destroy the earth. Anyway, it was a good read. I recommend it, though it wasn't as good as Mars.
Yes. They are rude people who think they have a right to interrupt me and violate my privacy because they are too lazy to get an honest job. I am so sick of people saying "they're only trying to earn a living," refering to telemarketers. Elephant poachers are only trying to make a living. That doesn't excuse them! I have taken all the precautions to avoid telemarkets, and, for the most part, I only receive a call once every few months (and that is usually a wrong number). However, I still take it upon myself to give the caller the hardest time I can. My reasoning is this -- if everyone was incredibly mean and rude to telemarketers, few people would be willing to do the work and the cost of labor would be prohibitively high. Don't even get me started about the jackasses that actually buy something from telemarketers. If they would all just stop the problem would disappear.
No? Why not?
I think there may be another reason. I am not an IP lawyer, but I think that if Red Hat assigns the patents to the FSF, they cannot use said patents for counter-offensive legal moves.
Another common reason is that instead of getting mixed up in costly legal battles, companies trade IP from their portfolios (kind of like baseball cards). If the FSF holds Red Hat's patents, they cannot do this. Although some OSS fans may find this objectionable, it would be like granting some commercial software company rights to use Red Hat IP in exchange for Red Hat including proprietary software in their distribution. Again, some may find the inclusion of proprietary software in Red Hat to be a very bad idea, but remember that even Linus has gone on the record as saying that he uses proprietary software (I believe his example was M$ Excel).
Anyway, I trust Red Hat to uphold their promises more than I trust the PTO/Government Officials or other corporations. Maybe that's foolish, maybe not. It's just my $0.02
I also found that asking credit card companies to put you on their "do not call unless someone stole my card" list at the same time as you give them your new info allows you to avoid that whole "4--6 weeks" before it takes effect line they give you.
Using these two strategies, I have not received any phonecalls or mail from commercial telemarketers in almost three years. Charities are another story.
Couldn't someone use the movements in addition to the sound to filter out the actual speaker's voice from the background noise? This seems almost like a nonlinear Kalman filter application (though I am by no means an expert on such things), if you had a (presumably nonlinear) model for speech as a function of the movements of the mouth. The article didn't give too much detail. Oh well, it sounds interesting in the very least.
Most professional implementations use damped Newton methods (like GN), which are globally superlinearly convergent. In practice, GN is only merely superlinearly convergent for the first few iterations before moving close enough to the root to converge quadratically.
The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is a quasi-Newton algorithm (which I also mentioned in my original post) because it estimates the Jacobian matrix of the nonlinear function instead of always using the exact Jacobian. In this way, there are less function evaluations required per iteration at the cost of superlinear convergence instead of quadratic.
As far as nonlinear programming is concerned, no algorithm beats the class of Newton-like algorithms for their generality, efficiency and elegance. There are even a few different flavors of Newton algorithms that can be used to solve nonsmooth equations and their ilk! (The Bouligand differentiable Newton algorithm can solve systems of variational inequalities and complementarity problems.)
For an excellent reference, see Numerical Methods for Unconstrained Optimization and Nonlinear Equations by Dennis and Schnabel.
What about Newton's Method (and its variants like Quasi-Newton and Gauss-Newton)? This algorithm solves a system of nonlinear equations iteratively by solving a sequence of linear systems of equations. With Newton's method, one can use the extremely effective matrix decompositions (QR, LU, etc.) to solve nonlinear equations. Under typical conditions, it exhibits quadratic convergence (basically, the number of decimal places of precision double after each iteration). Plus, it is very easy to understand. (It is taught in many freshman calculus classes.)
That is why the original essay gives the analogy of selling software in a retail store versus giving it away for free and selling support.
I could try to write it in a GPL-type way allowing readers to contribute "patches" with me acting as the benevolent dictator. Presumably, since I would be teaching the class, I'd be adequately qualified as a benevolent dictator. If not, then someone else can take the parts of my book they like, and "fork" it into a different book. As an instructor, I'd be delighted if every time I taught a class, I could go online, and "build" my own text book by choosing chapters like they were kernel modules.
This situation is different from a web novel because the subject (differential equations) is fairly objective. There may be stylistic disagreements between contributors, but all should agree upon (correct) mathematics. In this way, such a book would be very similar to code. Programmers may not agree on coding style, but either the code works or it doesn't, and that is objective.
I suspect that this is one possible direction that the OpenCourseWare project at MIT might be heading. Does anyone know of any similar "open source" text book projects?
For example, a friend of mine is an aspiring film-maker. His primary goal is exposure, and he understands that releasing his IP (in this case, a film) into the public domain will give him an opportunity to increase his exposure cheaply. However, he would like to retain some of the conditions of his copyright. (If he did release his film into the public domain, then he may not have any legal options if a studio decided to rip off his idea without even giving him credit.)
I can easily imagine that many artists would have a similar use for a spectrum of license options between 100% restricted and 100% public domain. Furthermore, Lessig's idea about embedding the license into the digital media makes this more attractive to someone like my friend.