In this case, the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation is giving vaccines, scholarships, HIV research and the like. More people are likely to not die and the ones who live are likely to be better educated, so you could say Microsoft could profit from selling them more software. But other than that, it's completely the opposite of self-serving. Its true philanthropy on a global scale, and really one of the nicer things any single individual has been able to accomplish.
They may still hate their guts, but no one has done a bombing raid in about 50 years. The UN, US and SK all have diplomatic relations with NK. Things may be very chilly, especially after this nuke issue, but calling a disagreement that hasn't produced a battle in 50 years a war is very much stretching the term.
No treaty doesn't equal war. It equals no treaty. If you sock me in the jaw and then I don't see you for 50 years, we are most certainly not still in a fight just because we didn't shake hands afterwards.
I was in the army guarding the east/west German border from '85 to '87. We had a DMZ, we were armed to the teeth, and, yes, we were authorized to shoot to kill.
There was not only no war, but technically they never had a war in their entire existence.
Not exactly true. There's a defacto end to the war, much like people living together can get common law marriages and how Isreal is a real country regardless of the fact that most of the middle east doesn't recognize them. If you wait long enough in international politics, things are just accepted as fact. The war is over.
Several people have dinged me for the "Downloading songs without paying for them is bad" comment.
I could have been much more specific on this, but I chose brevity over precision. The truth is, lots of people download lots of copyrighted songs that well-know artists offer for sale with the intent of making money. If you download anything that has ever been on Billboard's top 40, for example, it's almost certainly copyrighted material that the artist intends to make money from.
Lets say you have some other ownership interest in the song. You gave an example of a video game you own. Let's go ahead and exempt any songs you feel you already own in some other form. Terrific. Now lets say you download material in the public domain or that you otherwise have permission for. No problem.
Downloading everything else is just flat-out wrong. Yes, even those derivative works*. And the vast majority of people who do it know quite good and well that it's wrong. What kind of percentage do you think this is? I have no proof, but I would be very surprised if this didn't account for more than 90% of the "market" for downloads when you exempt official music stores like iTunes.
Like I said, a lot of people dinged me for this, but you pretty much knew what I meant all along, didn't you? A lot of people like to make excuses for doing the things they know aren't right. I'm not saying you're one of these, but it's quite common on this topic. I love the idea of getting stuff for free just as much as the next guy, and I'm not going to make the claim that I've never infringed on a copyright, but at least I'm honest enough to call it what it is, and that's theft**.
TW
*Some songs contain material that has legitimate social commentary or humor. These are the exception, but they are, and should be, completely legal. Your average "remix" is clearly a derivative work.
**No, it's not "theft" in the same way as stealing a Bicycle, but it is denying others compensation that they rightfully are entitled to. That's close enough to theft in my book.
It all hinges on how you define the word "fair." People define the word "fair" very differently depending on their point of view.
If you define it as using Grokster to download whatever song you like without paying for it then, all caps or not, you're wrong. On the other hand, if he defines fair use as not allowing you to make a backup, then he is clearly wrong.
Maybe my wording should have been more precise. "He says we should define fair use to have certain specific rights, but not be unlimited." I agree.
Given their history, their hypocritical actions against artists, I have very little reason to believe they are arguing anything in good faith, hence I have very little reason to listen to them at all.
Yeah, their history sucks. But is what they're saying now unreasonable? If you push your opponent against the wall and he finally relents and gives you what you need (not saying he's giving everything, but he is giving something) do you just scoff at him?
Hell, we need to be taking notes on what he's saying now and we need to stick him to his word. He says things should be balanced. Yes, they should. He says we should have some, but not unlimited fair use. Yes and yes.
When your enemy gives you ground, you don't go hide in your bunker and call him names. You advance. I consider this an opportunity.
What part of it don't you agree with? He really doesn't say anything inflammatory at all. In fact, he goes on and on about a balance and different interests working together.
In truth, I think he only does that because we pushed his group's unreasonable stance so hard that they have no choice but to come closer to the center. We should not let up. But what he is actually saying makes sense.
Point one: We must balance interests. Yep, I like it. Point two: Downloading songs without paying for them is bad. I agree with that as well. Point three: There are fair use provisions in the copyright act that must be respected. How could I disagree? Point four: The group championing consumer rights is self serving and wrong. This one I don't know about. I'm honestly not very familiar with this particular org. I won't defend this.
3 outa 4 aint bad. Do you care to elaborate further on the reasons for your stance?
No, that was Bill's friend, Warren Buffett. Bill gave a nice percentage, but he kept far more than he gave.
Bill is awesome for giving as much as he did. Don't mean to put him down. Just wanted to give credit where credit was due to Buffett, who's giving away basically everything.
Nice stats. How much recuring revenue did GTA make? The Sims have expansion packs, so they got some, but it's not like they're getting it monthly like Blizzard is. Truthfully, I don't have the numbers either, but online games are much more profitable, and thus important, than unit sales alone would indicate.
BTW, speaking of unit sales. With Half Life 2 I got both online and single player play. My guess is that the game sold to both markets, with some folks excited by online play and some excited by the story. This can work very well for next gen consoles as well. you need just one hit with a well-used online component to drive sales.
One more thing. I got into both the original Counter Strike and Battlefield 2 because of peer preasure. My friends wanted me to play with them online. You don't get that that kind of preasure for single-player games (well, at least not to the same extent). Good online play drives grass-roots efforts to get more player/sell more games. Game maker like this.
Online gaming isn't a subsititute for a nice single player game, but the reverse is true too. I think the truth is that both are very important.
The submission takes a bunch of half truthes, wishfull thinking and hope for revenge and throws it altogether to make a stew designed to rile up the/. reader. Don't bite.
The truth:
1. OEM Windows licenses are nowhere close to "hundreds of dollars". You'll still be able to buy $500 PCs 2. Force to open to WINE?!?!?! Are you smoking crack? The judge migh, literally, laugh. 3. Microsoft has not "won" over EU regulators yet. This is only one battle. 4. Just because we have a democratic congress is no reason to look for revenge "killings." Yes, MS is a Monopoly that totaly abuses it's position in a way that's damaging to its competition, but have you heard we're at war? The new congress should look at MS again before too long, but definately not right now. They have far more important work to do.
I'm glad people are still interested in this subject, but you definately need to start looking at this realistically. This isn't so much a start as an unrealistic rant.
What if I sold you a 12 issue magazine supscription, but keep delaying the each issue? I claim the reason is to keep my quality standards very high. You easily wait a year or more for each issue. How does that feel. Personaly, I'd cancel my subscription.
Claim quality is the reason all you want for Valve's actions. It might be true. But if they really need this long to meet their quality standards, they should remove the "episodes" lable from their marketing materials. It's disingenuous to bill this as serial entertainment and then not release on a predictable (and reasonably short) timetable.
On the other hand, World of Warcraft is one of the most popular games on the planet.
Game makers are fully aware that every console of this gen will have a network connection. With the PS3 it's wireless (read: easy to set up) and free (read: no need to convince mom to part with more $$$). The final reason most people didn't play online was that the game makers by and large didn't support online play. Mostly they didn't support it because the other two issues made it unlikely to draw a big audience. Chicken? Egg? Doesn't matter. It didn't work.
Think of how many game have already announced network support. This gen will be different.
... because today is not like yesterday. For example, online game play wasn't as important when the Dreamcast was released. Also, sales were sluggish from the beginning as people held their money for the PS2 launch which was not the case with the 360.
The PS3 might still dominate, but it's not likely to be for the exact same reasons as in the past.
Amen. It's starting to feel a bit more like a ripoff than a delay at this point. It's one thing to wait for a sequel and quite another to have to wait a year for something billed as an "episode."
Clearly Valve promised more than they're actually delivering. If the market for this kind of game disappears, I hope at least that they're honest enough to realize the cause.
If I was a judge and could rule however I want, I'd calculate is as the number downloads estimated to come from the file sharer in question, minus the percentage of downloads that actually count as a loss of sales to the studios.
In other words, lets say Bob offers 100 songs for download and the average number of downloads per song is 10. That would be 100X10X.70. I'd then want to see a study that estimates that, say, only 20% of downloads result in a lost sale. 100x10x.70x.20 = $140 in damages.
How would I see the study? I'd let each side commission a third-party study or reference one that already exists. I'd then listen to arguments about which should be used, possibly agreeing on a compromise of the two.
BUT I'm not a lawyer and not a judge. That's just how I'd look at it if it was completely up to me.
Specifically, I would not think it to be fair to determine how others may have used or redistributed the files. That's their own legal problem.
If I hit you over the head with a baseball bat sending you into a coma for 4 weeks, I can be charged with a number of things. Assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, ect ect. I can not, however, be charged with crimes against humanity because in that intervening 4 weeks you may or may not have discovered the cure for cancer, or discovered a pratical way to develop free energy from cold fusion.
However, I can sue you for damages well above my medical costs. Pain and suffering, for example, can not be calculated. Similarly, loss of wages is at best a guess, if for no other reason than we don't know when you would have retired or died.
Yes, we should have fairly standardized formulas for the more common cases, but we rarely do, and we definitely don't have any standardization for file sharing. Once again, the lack of a measure does not mean that damage wasn't done and shouldn't be awarded. It just means we have to try very hard to come up with the best guess we can.
BTW, I very much realize that many Slashdotters find it easier to put ourselves in the shoes of the defendant in this case. I don't blame you. However, if you really were hit over the head with a baseball bat and went into a coma, when you woke up, I'm sure you'd feel entitled to more than just hospital bills already paid. I'm sure you'd consider recurring, violent headaches and dizziness to be worthy of compensation. Just something to chew on.
All good and fine, but if you can't compute exact damages, that doesn't mean that damage wasn't done. Although in your example we could never calculate the true cost of a toe stepping incident, reasonable people could assume that the cost would be much higher if you stepped on a dancer's toe rather than an engineer's toe. Similarly, the cost of a file sharer's damages would be greater than someone who simply downloaded the same song for personal listening.
The hard part is that whatever the decision is, it will be a guess. We have no psychic power and will never know the exact damage. That's ok by me. We're have to do the best we can. Sure, the $750 per song cost should be challenged, but the true cost should almost certainly not be a simple $.70 per song. The truth almost certainly falls somewhere in between.
That's funny. My daughter was going to camp out in a pre-order line, much to the dismay of my girlfriend. She just didnt' understand it. Only when the comparison was made to camping out to hear your favorite band did she start to get it.
I know a lot of Slashdotters hate Sony and would like to see the PS3 suffer abismal failure, but it's worth noting that people don't line up unless they anticipate high demand. Lining up a week in advance signals fanaticism. Whith this kind of message being sent to them, I doubt that Sony execs are terribly worried about any boycott at this point.
I usually open up several things at a time in different tabs, which decreases the average loading time since I can read one thing while another loads. What browser were these people using?
1. The average user goes about doing things in an average way. That tells me they use IE, and even if it was IE7 (which isn't average quite yet) that they would do all their shopping on a single site from a single tab. Telling them there's a workaround is nice, but in the end is about as likely to affect the average user as Firefox is. (no flames please; firefox is not used by the "average" user and you know it)
2. Why should I have to work around things in order to get a good experience? Why should someone who wants me to use their site expect me to jumpt through hoops to do so?
3. One of the focuses of the article as commerce. You can't really click through the checkout process in multiple tabs.
4. Some of this is easy to fix. Why should I have to click through 3-4 different page loads to buy stuff? Why not just put everything on one page? Why load pages up with extra crap that has to download? There are ways to do fast loading sites, as long as it's a priority for those building them.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean it won't be able to play any other games, ever?!??!??! What a rip off!!!!
Why, oh why don't they make consoles that can also play more games later? Do you hear me god? WHY?
TW
In this case, the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation is giving vaccines, scholarships, HIV research and the like. More people are likely to not die and the ones who live are likely to be better educated, so you could say Microsoft could profit from selling them more software. But other than that, it's completely the opposite of self-serving. Its true philanthropy on a global scale, and really one of the nicer things any single individual has been able to accomplish.
TW
They may still hate their guts, but no one has done a bombing raid in about 50 years. The UN, US and SK all have diplomatic relations with NK. Things may be very chilly, especially after this nuke issue, but calling a disagreement that hasn't produced a battle in 50 years a war is very much stretching the term.
No treaty doesn't equal war. It equals no treaty. If you sock me in the jaw and then I don't see you for 50 years, we are most certainly not still in a fight just because we didn't shake hands afterwards.
TW
I was in the army guarding the east/west German border from '85 to '87. We had a DMZ, we were armed to the teeth, and, yes, we were authorized to shoot to kill.
There was not only no war, but technically they never had a war in their entire existence.
TW
Not exactly true. There's a defacto end to the war, much like people living together can get common law marriages and how Isreal is a real country regardless of the fact that most of the middle east doesn't recognize them. If you wait long enough in international politics, things are just accepted as fact. The war is over.
TW
Several people have dinged me for the "Downloading songs without paying for them is bad" comment.
I could have been much more specific on this, but I chose brevity over precision. The truth is, lots of people download lots of copyrighted songs that well-know artists offer for sale with the intent of making money. If you download anything that has ever been on Billboard's top 40, for example, it's almost certainly copyrighted material that the artist intends to make money from.
Lets say you have some other ownership interest in the song. You gave an example of a video game you own. Let's go ahead and exempt any songs you feel you already own in some other form. Terrific. Now lets say you download material in the public domain or that you otherwise have permission for. No problem.
Downloading everything else is just flat-out wrong. Yes, even those derivative works*. And the vast majority of people who do it know quite good and well that it's wrong. What kind of percentage do you think this is? I have no proof, but I would be very surprised if this didn't account for more than 90% of the "market" for downloads when you exempt official music stores like iTunes.
Like I said, a lot of people dinged me for this, but you pretty much knew what I meant all along, didn't you? A lot of people like to make excuses for doing the things they know aren't right. I'm not saying you're one of these, but it's quite common on this topic. I love the idea of getting stuff for free just as much as the next guy, and I'm not going to make the claim that I've never infringed on a copyright, but at least I'm honest enough to call it what it is, and that's theft**.
TW
*Some songs contain material that has legitimate social commentary or humor. These are the exception, but they are, and should be, completely legal. Your average "remix" is clearly a derivative work.
**No, it's not "theft" in the same way as stealing a Bicycle, but it is denying others compensation that they rightfully are entitled to. That's close enough to theft in my book.
It all hinges on how you define the word "fair." People define the word "fair" very differently depending on their point of view.
If you define it as using Grokster to download whatever song you like without paying for it then, all caps or not, you're wrong. On the other hand, if he defines fair use as not allowing you to make a backup, then he is clearly wrong.
Maybe my wording should have been more precise. "He says we should define fair use to have certain specific rights, but not be unlimited." I agree.
TW
Yeah, their history sucks. But is what they're saying now unreasonable? If you push your opponent against the wall and he finally relents and gives you what you need (not saying he's giving everything, but he is giving something) do you just scoff at him?
Hell, we need to be taking notes on what he's saying now and we need to stick him to his word. He says things should be balanced. Yes, they should. He says we should have some, but not unlimited fair use. Yes and yes.
When your enemy gives you ground, you don't go hide in your bunker and call him names. You advance. I consider this an opportunity.
TW
What part of it don't you agree with? He really doesn't say anything inflammatory at all. In fact, he goes on and on about a balance and different interests working together.
In truth, I think he only does that because we pushed his group's unreasonable stance so hard that they have no choice but to come closer to the center. We should not let up. But what he is actually saying makes sense.
Point one: We must balance interests. Yep, I like it.
Point two: Downloading songs without paying for them is bad. I agree with that as well.
Point three: There are fair use provisions in the copyright act that must be respected. How could I disagree?
Point four: The group championing consumer rights is self serving and wrong. This one I don't know about. I'm honestly not very familiar with this particular org. I won't defend this.
3 outa 4 aint bad. Do you care to elaborate further on the reasons for your stance?
TW
No, that was Bill's friend, Warren Buffett. Bill gave a nice percentage, but he kept far more than he gave.
Bill is awesome for giving as much as he did. Don't mean to put him down. Just wanted to give credit where credit was due to Buffett, who's giving away basically everything.
TW
Nice stats. How much recuring revenue did GTA make? The Sims have expansion packs, so they got some, but it's not like they're getting it monthly like Blizzard is. Truthfully, I don't have the numbers either, but online games are much more profitable, and thus important, than unit sales alone would indicate.
BTW, speaking of unit sales. With Half Life 2 I got both online and single player play. My guess is that the game sold to both markets, with some folks excited by online play and some excited by the story. This can work very well for next gen consoles as well. you need just one hit with a well-used online component to drive sales.
One more thing. I got into both the original Counter Strike and Battlefield 2 because of peer preasure. My friends wanted me to play with them online. You don't get that that kind of preasure for single-player games (well, at least not to the same extent). Good online play drives grass-roots efforts to get more player/sell more games. Game maker like this.
Online gaming isn't a subsititute for a nice single player game, but the reverse is true too. I think the truth is that both are very important.
Cheers,
TW
Thank you. That's a nice compliment.
TW
Which is pretty much why I'd prefer congress address that situation first.
The submission takes a bunch of half truthes, wishfull thinking and hope for revenge and throws it altogether to make a stew designed to rile up the /. reader. Don't bite.
The truth:
1. OEM Windows licenses are nowhere close to "hundreds of dollars". You'll still be able to buy $500 PCs
2. Force to open to WINE?!?!?! Are you smoking crack? The judge migh, literally, laugh.
3. Microsoft has not "won" over EU regulators yet. This is only one battle.
4. Just because we have a democratic congress is no reason to look for revenge "killings." Yes, MS is a Monopoly that totaly abuses it's position in a way that's damaging to its competition, but have you heard we're at war? The new congress should look at MS again before too long, but definately not right now. They have far more important work to do.
I'm glad people are still interested in this subject, but you definately need to start looking at this realistically. This isn't so much a start as an unrealistic rant.
TW
What if I sold you a 12 issue magazine supscription, but keep delaying the each issue? I claim the reason is to keep my quality standards very high. You easily wait a year or more for each issue. How does that feel. Personaly, I'd cancel my subscription.
Claim quality is the reason all you want for Valve's actions. It might be true. But if they really need this long to meet their quality standards, they should remove the "episodes" lable from their marketing materials. It's disingenuous to bill this as serial entertainment and then not release on a predictable (and reasonably short) timetable.
TW
On the other hand, World of Warcraft is one of the most popular games on the planet.
Game makers are fully aware that every console of this gen will have a network connection. With the PS3 it's wireless (read: easy to set up) and free (read: no need to convince mom to part with more $$$). The final reason most people didn't play online was that the game makers by and large didn't support online play. Mostly they didn't support it because the other two issues made it unlikely to draw a big audience. Chicken? Egg? Doesn't matter. It didn't work.
Think of how many game have already announced network support. This gen will be different.
TW
That's kind of a problem at both ends.
Low end: You gave the example yourself.
High end: If Steven Kings books get copied and sold to all of China, the damage could easily be worth far more than 30k.
Sounds like the law is due for an overhaul.
... because today is not like yesterday. For example, online game play wasn't as important when the Dreamcast was released. Also, sales were sluggish from the beginning as people held their money for the PS2 launch which was not the case with the 360.
The PS3 might still dominate, but it's not likely to be for the exact same reasons as in the past.
TW
Amen. It's starting to feel a bit more like a ripoff than a delay at this point. It's one thing to wait for a sequel and quite another to have to wait a year for something billed as an "episode."
Clearly Valve promised more than they're actually delivering. If the market for this kind of game disappears, I hope at least that they're honest enough to realize the cause.
TW
Thank god I didn't see that when I was taking a drink. I hate cleaning my monitor.
If I was a judge and could rule however I want, I'd calculate is as the number downloads estimated to come from the file sharer in question, minus the percentage of downloads that actually count as a loss of sales to the studios.
In other words, lets say Bob offers 100 songs for download and the average number of downloads per song is 10. That would be 100X10X.70. I'd then want to see a study that estimates that, say, only 20% of downloads result in a lost sale. 100x10x.70x.20 = $140 in damages.
How would I see the study? I'd let each side commission a third-party study or reference one that already exists. I'd then listen to arguments about which should be used, possibly agreeing on a compromise of the two.
BUT I'm not a lawyer and not a judge. That's just how I'd look at it if it was completely up to me.
Specifically, I would not think it to be fair to determine how others may have used or redistributed the files. That's their own legal problem.
TW
However, I can sue you for damages well above my medical costs. Pain and suffering, for example, can not be calculated. Similarly, loss of wages is at best a guess, if for no other reason than we don't know when you would have retired or died.
Yes, we should have fairly standardized formulas for the more common cases, but we rarely do, and we definitely don't have any standardization for file sharing. Once again, the lack of a measure does not mean that damage wasn't done and shouldn't be awarded. It just means we have to try very hard to come up with the best guess we can.
BTW, I very much realize that many Slashdotters find it easier to put ourselves in the shoes of the defendant in this case. I don't blame you. However, if you really were hit over the head with a baseball bat and went into a coma, when you woke up, I'm sure you'd feel entitled to more than just hospital bills already paid. I'm sure you'd consider recurring, violent headaches and dizziness to be worthy of compensation. Just something to chew on.
TW
All good and fine, but if you can't compute exact damages, that doesn't mean that damage wasn't done. Although in your example we could never calculate the true cost of a toe stepping incident, reasonable people could assume that the cost would be much higher if you stepped on a dancer's toe rather than an engineer's toe. Similarly, the cost of a file sharer's damages would be greater than someone who simply downloaded the same song for personal listening.
The hard part is that whatever the decision is, it will be a guess. We have no psychic power and will never know the exact damage. That's ok by me. We're have to do the best we can. Sure, the $750 per song cost should be challenged, but the true cost should almost certainly not be a simple $.70 per song. The truth almost certainly falls somewhere in between.
TW
That's funny. My daughter was going to camp out in a pre-order line, much to the dismay of my girlfriend. She just didnt' understand it. Only when the comparison was made to camping out to hear your favorite band did she start to get it.
I know a lot of Slashdotters hate Sony and would like to see the PS3 suffer abismal failure, but it's worth noting that people don't line up unless they anticipate high demand. Lining up a week in advance signals fanaticism. Whith this kind of message being sent to them, I doubt that Sony execs are terribly worried about any boycott at this point.
TW
1. The average user goes about doing things in an average way. That tells me they use IE, and even if it was IE7 (which isn't average quite yet) that they would do all their shopping on a single site from a single tab. Telling them there's a workaround is nice, but in the end is about as likely to affect the average user as Firefox is. (no flames please; firefox is not used by the "average" user and you know it)
2. Why should I have to work around things in order to get a good experience? Why should someone who wants me to use their site expect me to jumpt through hoops to do so?
3. One of the focuses of the article as commerce. You can't really click through the checkout process in multiple tabs.
4. Some of this is easy to fix. Why should I have to click through 3-4 different page loads to buy stuff? Why not just put everything on one page? Why load pages up with extra crap that has to download? There are ways to do fast loading sites, as long as it's a priority for those building them.
TW