Economic eviction not gentrification is the issue.
Mostly, it's a problem for renters, who get evicted or have their rents priced out of their reach when someone buys the house/unit they are renting,
It generally has nothing whatsoever to do with Google, other than highly paid people are capable of paying higher rents, and Google tends to pay its employees well. But if the now-priced-out-of-range rental unit were not rented by someone from Google or Twitter or Facebook, or Genentech, or Apple, or some other company, of which many are increasingly based in San Francisco, they would either be rented by someone else with more money than the previous occupants, or they would stand empty, and provide a tax write-off as a loss at the higher rental rate.
There are in fact huge amounts of both housing and office space in SF that are currently standing empty as a tax write-off for some absurd per square foot rental cost that no one in their right mind will be willing to pay.
Note that the vast majority of the investment driving the economic eviction in San Francisco is *not* coming from the tech industry, it is instead coming from foreign investors. Out of 6 offers I made on houses in San Francisco - houses I fully intended to live in, not merely hold as investments or use as rental properties or "flip" in the new real estate bubble - all six were bid out by over 25% at the last second by all cash offers from foreign investors.
Very few countries allow foreign ownership of property; the U.S. is one of the few which does; Japan, China, Mexico, the Philippines, Australia, and Thailand, among others. Minnesota does not permit foreign ownership of agricultural land, period, and does not allow corporate ownership of such land, either, unless associated with an existing long-held family farm. Here's an interesting resource:
Perhaps it's time to take a page from one of these books, and apply the same restrictions on a state-wide level, rather than bitching about San Francisco in particular, since San Francisco has no legal ability to regulate foreign ownership.
I imagine the Real Estate agents would not be terrifically happy, since most of their "big fish" clients are foreign buyers.
Should this mythical land of the free allow you to run a bus service with vehicles that are a menace to its passengers or other road users? Without proper education of it's bus drivers? Without any insurance? Would you mind if this bus service cherry-picks the profitable routes, so that companies that try to offer more balanced public transport go bankrupt?
You're right! Let's shut down Muni! It does all those things!
Why is who signed it always so important? Tell me the party membership of the namesakes for that bill. What, guilt for supporting the party that wrote, sponsored and passed it?
The first time the legislation that the GP is complaining about Bush signing failed to pass was due to a pocket veto by Bill Clinton. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of legislation that's passed by congress as a matter of posturing for constituents - "Well, as the record shows, I tried very hard" - that ends with "Jesus Christ! We never expected him to *sign* the damn thing!".
So yeah, legislation passing is the fault of the person who signs it into law, regardless of where it originated.
It's an executive decision by the executive branch to sign something into law - or not - unless it's a result of a veto override by a 2/3rds majority of congress. That rarely happens, since it's impossible to point fingers at the other guy, if you were all in it together.
But in 2005, Congress and the Bush Administration clamped down on bankruptcy filings, placing hurdles in the path of Americans trying to file and making it more difficult to discharge debts. In particular, the 2005 law made private student loan debt, like federal student loans, impossible to discharge in bankruptcy except under a difficult to meet hardship exemption.
The lead-in for this, which made it possible in the first place, was the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, signed by Bill Clinton, which is what allowed the merger that led to the legislation. This effectively turned credit card debt for students who shouldn't have been offered credit cards in the first place to be non-dischargable by bankruptcy (effectively turning uncollateralized loans into collateralized ones).
Multiple reports of massive layoffs in Australia, US, Brazil, Taiwan and India. I don't care about Alliance@IBM (I'm not in the US) but the layoffs are a reality.
Links to stories from reputable sources, with numbers if possible.
For the 25% who subscribe, they can, in fact, elect a specific song. However, does the ability to do this equal a compelling enough reason to bear economic costs above and beyond the subscription costs? For most people, it does not; indeed, we know for a fact that even the subscription costs are not a compelling enough argument for 75% of the user base.
Then the business plan is not viable. If a shopkeeper can't charge enough to buy the stock, the shop closes.
Thank you! We are in total agreement! GEMA's business plan of charging about what the market will bear for the licensing fees is, indeed, not viable.
I guess it's time for the yearly Communication Workers of America local 1701 to try to unionize IBM again under the name "Alliance@IBM". Don't they usually wait until March for this same old song and dance? Why's it early this year?
Demanding the same amount per play to a single user as to an entire radio audience for a regional station, of which there are a limited number, is both extortionate and unrealistic.
It seems extortionate and unrealistic, right up until you consider that the big difference between radio and Spotify isn't the "one-to-one" vs "one-to-many" part, but the on-demand part. The individual value of a radio play is low because the listener has next-to-no say in the matter.
With Spotify, I choose what I listen to, which makes it immediately more valuable to me. Spotify pays 0.6 cents per play, so let's assume a 100% markup, and that they're receiving 1.2 cents per play on average. Compare with a 99c track from iTunes -- you get 82.5 plays for the price of that, and I have to say there are a lot of CDs in my collection that I haven't played that many times.
Comparing the cost of Spotify to the cost of radio plays is like comparing Blockbuster Video to TV plays. A better comparison would be comparing hiring a VHS tape from Blockbuster against buying the same film. The difference there was not 82.5 times...
The 75% of Spotify users (15 million out of 20 million) are unpaid (ad supported) users.
For advertising supported users, you can select a genre/"like this artist" playlist, but you can't select the specific song that gets played; so for the 75% of users, the "on demand" that you state is a feature, isn't actually a feature.
For the 25% who subscribe, they can, in fact, elect a specific song. However, does the ability to do this equal a compelling enough reason to bear economic costs above and beyond the subscription costs? For most people, it does not; indeed, we know for a fact that even the subscription costs are not a compelling enough argument for 75% of the user base. And that's a conservative number, based on the premise that the sole benefit they are getting from their subscription fee is totally attributable to the GEMA content, and said content being "on demand", and that it has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the social media, playlist exchange, playlist "permanence", or other features which are services of Spotify, rather than GEMA.
So you should be prepared to reduce your royalty numbers by a factor of 4 relative to the play counts, and then you should further reduce them by explicit song request, to quantify the "on demand" value (as opposed to a straight-through playout of "workout music or some other playlist that happens to contain a particular song).
Again: the economics of the situation are such that the GEMA demands are unreasonable, and for 75% of the users your iTunes analogy falls flat, even assuming that someone got the "full" 82 (or 115) plays out of a particular song to extract their entire side of the proposed value proposition.
PS: I'm pretty sure I have not listened to the Beatles White Album 115 times through yet, and it's arguably one of the better albums ever recorded in the history of music.
Or on the flipside, without some form of concession to economic reality, such as paying a reasonable royalty rate, digital services give zero incentive for artists to participate in the service.
I suggest that if Spotify can't afford to pay a decent rate, then the problem is in their model, not their suppliers'. Spotify's problem is either that their subscription fee is too low, or that they're taking too much as the middle man, or both. Spotify's shareholders include Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI, who are also their biggest content providers. For them, low royalties aren't that much of a problem, because it translates to extra profit that they get as capital gains from their shares rather than income from sales/licensing (I understand corporate capital gains are taxed less than profits, the same as with the domestic equivalents). Furthermore, the investment returns are the companies' to keep, whereas the royalties have to be split with the artist.
The GEMA model splits the royalties on an apportionment basis related to ratings, which in no way has anything to do with views of a particular artist.
I think I might have little problem with the business model, if the royalties for a particular artists work being streamed were paid specifically to the artist whose work was being streamed, instead of being predominantly paid to artists who had nothing to do with the work in question, and are being apportioned an amount based on the amount of air play they get on the radio, which is in turn tied to GEMA controlling what the radio stations played.
In other words, if me playing some obscure indie band's song got the indie band paid, and no one else, I might be able to live with it, but having half the money going to David Hasslehoff or One Direction or whatever idiotic pap GEMA is trying to sell that week, instead of going to the obscure indie band's pockets kind of pisses me off. A lot.
But assume that that's the case, and they aren't just using all of the other bands to make GEMA and the top 10 playlist that they've dictated to the radio stations richer.
Even were that the case, the economic value of a play on Spotify, which is point-to-point, and only reaches the person playing it, rather than every idiot stuck in their car on the Autobahn, and too lazy to change the station instead of just waiting for the next song to come up instead in no way reaches the economic value of a play to a much larger (semi-captive) audience.
Demanding the same amount per play to a single user as to an entire radio audience for a regional station, of which there are a limited number, is both extortionate and unrealistic.
GEMA wants to protect their historical one-to-many broadcast, controlled playlist, predictable LP/tape/CD sales business model; I can *understand* them wanting this (I want a pony); I can not *support* the idea that we should pervert natural economies in order to *enforce* their old business model remain profitable for them.
That you have to try to explain all that reveals the problem...
With the mental capacity of the people who are fearing being recorded, yeah. Given that it's a bar, and bars tend to be full of people on the spectrum from "mildly buzzed" to "passed out in the restroom with their head in the toilet and in real danger of drowning", you don't have to be Buzz Lightyear to detect a potential problem...
Anyone reading your original comment would take "light" to mean little red LED - not the light in the viewfinder of a reverse image that also would be tiny and not especially visible.
And that's totally cool. Let them take it that way, not see a red LED, and then not lose their mind over the idea that they are being recorded, because, hey, no red light.
If someone is too stupid to know that it requires a human to do something to record, then I have no problem with them being prevented from flying off the handle and sitting there mollified in their drunken stupor by the fact that there's no little red light.
Unless you are suggesting that we start requiring a little red light? That'd be a great idea, as long as you also ban white nail polish and/or liquid paper, which could be used to ver up the little red light.
You think any government in the first world would cut Germany off the Internet because the German courts held someone in contempt for violating the spirit of a court ruling and comparing the courts with the Nazi party? I'd be surprised if you could find a single politician who wanted their name anywhere near that case.
I think it more likely that various Internet services will voluntarily cease operations in Germany due to legal pressures from German courts.
Effectively, by not reigning in their judiciary, this is the same thing as German voluntarily leaving the Internet, if you can't get to any of the major services or various classes of services which are available in other countries.
One prominent example of this trend is Groveshark, which ceased operations in Germany.
There have been similar recent rumblings about Spotify, which will be resolved in the next year (the deadline is 2015). Without some form of concession to economic reality, such that the amount GEMA is attempting to grab for each instance of playback is less than the net profit to the company providing the service through which the playback occurs, there's zero incentive for companies to continue operations in Germany.
What's the difference, in the limit, between being cut off the Internet by government fiat vs. being cut off the Internet by providers refusing to participate in the German market? With the first, Germany has recourse by treaty with the foreign governments; with the second, Germany is SOL; it's not like a German court can order a service which has no presence in Germany to serve the German market, rather than just ignoring them as economically not worth the trouble.
Picking on Grooveshark until they pack it in, and attempting to extort money from Spotify until they do the same (the likely outcome of the current situation, if GEMA fails to provide a reasonable accommodation by 2015) is one thing; YouTube pulling out because it doesn't make that much money from the German market, or doing it on principle because Google has more money than God, and doesn't actually *need* German revenue, is another.
I expect that if this situation persists, media streaming providers will end up having something like a "GEMA Awareness Week", and Germany will effectively "go black" as far as media, including YouTube, is concerned, for an entire week, and then we can see what the German public thinks about it.
(1) Apparently cars with pine tree air fresheners really *are* cool...
(2) The actual cause of winter is all the christmas tree smell caused by growing them in the first place, and winter goes away after we cut them down, hold them hostage for a couple of weeks, and then release them, after which it starts warming up again...
The thing is, with the exponential distribution potential and the speed of the modern Internet, taking something down 24 hours after it goes up has little value if 90% of the people who wanted to rip it already did anyway. When the current copyright frameworks were established, that kind of near-instantaneous, near-effortless, widescale distribution of a work simply wasn't practical, and no-one designed the system to allow for it.
You're right; so we either need to revamp copyright frameworks, or give up on using the Internet. Guess which one I pick?
In all seriousness, both RIAA and MPAA have been asking for some magic-ass technology that we technologists keep telling them is not possible due to the halting problem, and they keep insisting that we magically solve the halting problem for them. Then they ask that we implement DRM that actually works so that they don't have to change their business model, even when we tell them, again, it's impossible to create a 100% effective DRM.
I've suggested before that if the RIAA and MPAA want to stop digital redistribution of their copyrighted works, the best way to do this would be to go back to analog distribution, where it costs additional $$ to create a physical artifact as a container for their copyrighted material, and thys they can take margins from the economies of scale from physical production vs. the cost of a one-off copy.
Unfortunately, both RIAA and MPAA want to have all the benefits of digital distribution, while at the same time having none of the drawbacks.
If RIAA and MPAA are capable of solving the halting problem themselves, I'm sure that Google would be first in line to license the patent, and would probably be willing to pay a really outrageous amount for the privilege, but until then, the rest of us get to live in the real world, and in the real world, I can always analog hole and DRM scheme you come up with, and for video, I can even digital hole it by pretending I'm an LVDS display built out of discrete ICs, so unless you start licensing use of discrete ICs, you are still SOL on the DRM pipe dream.
So the idea that these idiots, just like everyone else on the Internet, can scan all the content uploaded to Youtube, and then submit takedown notices is, I think a fair and balanced approach, given that they submit them for both licensed and unlicensed content, indiscriminately, and we have to live with the consequence of them taking down things they have absolutely no rights taking down, like performance pieces licensed under creative commons and uploaded by the performers themselves, who then have to go through an unfair cost to get the takedown reversed.
This is totally aside, mind you, from the fact that, unlike real theft, or your other analogy of sleeping in someone's house, that the rights holder in this case is never derived of the use of their property, as would be the case were we talking about the physical theft of an LP or someone squatting in your living room.
Oh, and by the way, your entire legal team and every executive who ever sets foot in a country with an extradition treaty gets 6 months in jail for contempt. Have a nice day.
"Germany? What's... Oh, you mean that third world country that decided they didn't want to be on the Internet?..."
It's not a self-evident truth that sites hosting user-submitted content like YouTube should get a free pass for what would otherwise clearly be infringing redistribution under some sort of safe harbour rule, even if that's the way many western states have decided to handle the issue for now.
Actually, it's handled by them having to be responsive to takedown notices, at no insignificant cost in fielding those notices. And, in fact, they are responsive to takedown notices.
I think a reasonable alternative would be to put up "this video removed due to takedown notice by XXX. Here's their email address: xxx@example.com".
So in it's entirety it does raise the initial impression that YouTube is good and understanding whereas GEMA is the evil empire. The reality probably lies somewhere in between.
The middle being "YouTube is neither good nor understanding *and* GEMA is the evil empire"?
If the break is below the half-way point it will go up if the break is above the half-way point it would come down.
Actually, everything below the break falls down, and everything above the break falls up, no matter where the break occurs. The centripetal acceleration is capable of holding the entire mass of the cable plus the weight of all the cars, plus some force to tension the cable. The falling down is also generally not that catastrophic, for the most part, since the max speed of the falling cable will be less than or equal to 50% of terminal velocity for a naked cable due to transverse forces based on the pull from the rest of the falling cable. If you don't assume a naked cable, but a cable with periodic airfoils, the remainder of the cable could be guided to a safe fall shadow.
You can hold whatever beliefs you want in private. And you have the right to publicly speak about those beliefs. And you have the right to freely congregate with others who also hold those beliefs.
2. The freedom not to be forced to do X.
No one is telling you that you have to congregate with blacks / gays / whatever in private.
BUT, once you open a PUBLIC business then you must treat all classes of people the same regardless of what your PRIVATE beliefs are.
Unless you are, you know, wearing no shirt or no shoes. Then it's OK for a public business to discriminate.
Europe, Korea, Japan, and China are ramping up research efforts.
Great. So we should have fusion reactors on the grid any day now, right?
Not if you call them that!
Only if we're careful to call them "Fusion power plants", and not use words like "nuclear" and "reactor".
You know, the same way people are happy to get an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) instead of an NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), and they're happy to get a CAT scan, but would never go in for Computed Axial X-Ray Tomography... because X-Rays are radiation, but kitties are cute.
You really don't want the "bad adjective choice" protestors coming after your technology trying to shut it down.
Sounds like a certain someone doesn't know how SSL/TLS works.
Sounds like someone has never heard of "router level redirect to proxy" and "deep packet inspection" so that you can either use their proxy and let them see your traffic, or you don't get to negotiate a connection.
The author who says that this is 'most alarming' is missing one key thing; sometimes people use computers that belong to someone else.
Any company that needs it's employees to be able to use the internet, but also want to be able to detect any employee that is sending documents via the internet to outside of the company would love to use this, as well as have every permission to install this on their own computers.
Alternately, they put in a transparent https proxy, and sign a trust certificate for the proxy, and install the cert on all the corporate computers. Attempts to access port 443 from interior computers which do not already have the cert installed are redirected to a download page for the cert, and have a one-time "opt in". Making the proposal totally unnecessary for this use case.
It's already quite easy to add a * certificate to a browser to allow a proxy to intercept SSL. This is a standard practice in many LANs to allow the web filter to work on SSL pages - otherwise it'd be impossible to perform more than the most basic DNS/IP filtering on HTTPS sites, which would let a *lot* of undesired content through - google images alone would be quite the pornucopia.
So, if I understand you correctly, this proposal does nothing which it is not already possible to do, and should therefore be discarded...
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Economic eviction not gentrification is the issue.
Mostly, it's a problem for renters, who get evicted or have their rents priced out of their reach when someone buys the house/unit they are renting,
It generally has nothing whatsoever to do with Google, other than highly paid people are capable of paying higher rents, and Google tends to pay its employees well. But if the now-priced-out-of-range rental unit were not rented by someone from Google or Twitter or Facebook, or Genentech, or Apple, or some other company, of which many are increasingly based in San Francisco, they would either be rented by someone else with more money than the previous occupants, or they would stand empty, and provide a tax write-off as a loss at the higher rental rate.
There are in fact huge amounts of both housing and office space in SF that are currently standing empty as a tax write-off for some absurd per square foot rental cost that no one in their right mind will be willing to pay.
Note that the vast majority of the investment driving the economic eviction in San Francisco is *not* coming from the tech industry, it is instead coming from foreign investors. Out of 6 offers I made on houses in San Francisco - houses I fully intended to live in, not merely hold as investments or use as rental properties or "flip" in the new real estate bubble - all six were bid out by over 25% at the last second by all cash offers from foreign investors.
Very few countries allow foreign ownership of property; the U.S. is one of the few which does; Japan, China, Mexico, the Philippines, Australia, and Thailand, among others. Minnesota does not permit foreign ownership of agricultural land, period, and does not allow corporate ownership of such land, either, unless associated with an existing long-held family farm. Here's an interesting resource:
http://www.academia.edu/106796...
Perhaps it's time to take a page from one of these books, and apply the same restrictions on a state-wide level, rather than bitching about San Francisco in particular, since San Francisco has no legal ability to regulate foreign ownership.
I imagine the Real Estate agents would not be terrifically happy, since most of their "big fish" clients are foreign buyers.
Should this mythical land of the free allow you to run a bus service with vehicles that are a menace to its passengers or other road users? Without proper education of it's bus drivers? Without any insurance? Would you mind if this bus service cherry-picks the profitable routes, so that companies that try to offer more balanced public transport go bankrupt?
You're right! Let's shut down Muni! It does all those things!
Why is who signed it always so important? Tell me the party membership of the namesakes for that bill. What, guilt for supporting the party that wrote, sponsored and passed it?
The first time the legislation that the GP is complaining about Bush signing failed to pass was due to a pocket veto by Bill Clinton. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of legislation that's passed by congress as a matter of posturing for constituents - "Well, as the record shows, I tried very hard" - that ends with "Jesus Christ! We never expected him to *sign* the damn thing!".
So yeah, legislation passing is the fault of the person who signs it into law, regardless of where it originated.
It's an executive decision by the executive branch to sign something into law - or not - unless it's a result of a veto override by a 2/3rds majority of congress. That rarely happens, since it's impossible to point fingers at the other guy, if you were all in it together.
But in 2005, Congress and the Bush Administration clamped down on bankruptcy filings, placing hurdles in the path of Americans trying to file and making it more difficult to discharge debts. In particular, the 2005 law made private student loan debt, like federal student loans, impossible to discharge in bankruptcy except under a difficult to meet hardship exemption.
The lead-in for this, which made it possible in the first place, was the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, signed by Bill Clinton, which is what allowed the merger that led to the legislation. This effectively turned credit card debt for students who shouldn't have been offered credit cards in the first place to be non-dischargable by bankruptcy (effectively turning uncollateralized loans into collateralized ones).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...–Leach–Bliley_Act
Frankly, there's no difference between the parties; they both work for the banks.
"Keep it contained" is a little optimistic. There is radioactive tea draining from the site to the sea.
(1) Bury it in concrete
(2) Quit adding water; no new water = no new tea.
Multiple reports of massive layoffs in Australia, US, Brazil, Taiwan and India. I don't care about Alliance@IBM (I'm not in the US) but the layoffs are a reality.
Links to stories from reputable sources, with numbers if possible.
For the 25% who subscribe, they can, in fact, elect a specific song. However, does the ability to do this equal a compelling enough reason to bear economic costs above and beyond the subscription costs? For most people, it does not; indeed, we know for a fact that even the subscription costs are not a compelling enough argument for 75% of the user base.
Then the business plan is not viable. If a shopkeeper can't charge enough to buy the stock, the shop closes.
Thank you! We are in total agreement! GEMA's business plan of charging about what the market will bear for the licensing fees is, indeed, not viable.
This isn't what IBM says it's doing...
"IBM layoffs expected. Instead, IBM adds 500 positions."
http://www.csmonitor.com/Busin...
I guess it's time for the yearly Communication Workers of America local 1701 to try to unionize IBM again under the name "Alliance@IBM". Don't they usually wait until March for this same old song and dance? Why's it early this year?
Demanding the same amount per play to a single user as to an entire radio audience for a regional station, of which there are a limited number, is both extortionate and unrealistic.
It seems extortionate and unrealistic, right up until you consider that the big difference between radio and Spotify isn't the "one-to-one" vs "one-to-many" part, but the on-demand part. The individual value of a radio play is low because the listener has next-to-no say in the matter.
With Spotify, I choose what I listen to, which makes it immediately more valuable to me. Spotify pays 0.6 cents per play, so let's assume a 100% markup, and that they're receiving 1.2 cents per play on average. Compare with a 99c track from iTunes -- you get 82.5 plays for the price of that, and I have to say there are a lot of CDs in my collection that I haven't played that many times.
Comparing the cost of Spotify to the cost of radio plays is like comparing Blockbuster Video to TV plays. A better comparison would be comparing hiring a VHS tape from Blockbuster against buying the same film. The difference there was not 82.5 times...
The 75% of Spotify users (15 million out of 20 million) are unpaid (ad supported) users.
For advertising supported users, you can select a genre/"like this artist" playlist, but you can't select the specific song that gets played; so for the 75% of users, the "on demand" that you state is a feature, isn't actually a feature.
For the 25% who subscribe, they can, in fact, elect a specific song. However, does the ability to do this equal a compelling enough reason to bear economic costs above and beyond the subscription costs? For most people, it does not; indeed, we know for a fact that even the subscription costs are not a compelling enough argument for 75% of the user base. And that's a conservative number, based on the premise that the sole benefit they are getting from their subscription fee is totally attributable to the GEMA content, and said content being "on demand", and that it has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the social media, playlist exchange, playlist "permanence", or other features which are services of Spotify, rather than GEMA.
So you should be prepared to reduce your royalty numbers by a factor of 4 relative to the play counts, and then you should further reduce them by explicit song request, to quantify the "on demand" value (as opposed to a straight-through playout of "workout music or some other playlist that happens to contain a particular song).
Again: the economics of the situation are such that the GEMA demands are unreasonable, and for 75% of the users your iTunes analogy falls flat, even assuming that someone got the "full" 82 (or 115) plays out of a particular song to extract their entire side of the proposed value proposition.
PS: I'm pretty sure I have not listened to the Beatles White Album 115 times through yet, and it's arguably one of the better albums ever recorded in the history of music.
Or on the flipside, without some form of concession to economic reality, such as paying a reasonable royalty rate, digital services give zero incentive for artists to participate in the service.
I suggest that if Spotify can't afford to pay a decent rate, then the problem is in their model, not their suppliers'. Spotify's problem is either that their subscription fee is too low, or that they're taking too much as the middle man, or both. Spotify's shareholders include Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI, who are also their biggest content providers. For them, low royalties aren't that much of a problem, because it translates to extra profit that they get as capital gains from their shares rather than income from sales/licensing (I understand corporate capital gains are taxed less than profits, the same as with the domestic equivalents). Furthermore, the investment returns are the companies' to keep, whereas the royalties have to be split with the artist.
The GEMA model splits the royalties on an apportionment basis related to ratings, which in no way has anything to do with views of a particular artist.
I think I might have little problem with the business model, if the royalties for a particular artists work being streamed were paid specifically to the artist whose work was being streamed, instead of being predominantly paid to artists who had nothing to do with the work in question, and are being apportioned an amount based on the amount of air play they get on the radio, which is in turn tied to GEMA controlling what the radio stations played.
In other words, if me playing some obscure indie band's song got the indie band paid, and no one else, I might be able to live with it, but having half the money going to David Hasslehoff or One Direction or whatever idiotic pap GEMA is trying to sell that week, instead of going to the obscure indie band's pockets kind of pisses me off. A lot.
But assume that that's the case, and they aren't just using all of the other bands to make GEMA and the top 10 playlist that they've dictated to the radio stations richer.
Even were that the case, the economic value of a play on Spotify, which is point-to-point, and only reaches the person playing it, rather than every idiot stuck in their car on the Autobahn, and too lazy to change the station instead of just waiting for the next song to come up instead in no way reaches the economic value of a play to a much larger (semi-captive) audience.
Demanding the same amount per play to a single user as to an entire radio audience for a regional station, of which there are a limited number, is both extortionate and unrealistic.
GEMA wants to protect their historical one-to-many broadcast, controlled playlist, predictable LP/tape/CD sales business model; I can *understand* them wanting this (I want a pony); I can not *support* the idea that we should pervert natural economies in order to *enforce* their old business model remain profitable for them.
That you have to try to explain all that reveals the problem...
With the mental capacity of the people who are fearing being recorded, yeah. Given that it's a bar, and bars tend to be full of people on the spectrum from "mildly buzzed" to "passed out in the restroom with their head in the toilet and in real danger of drowning", you don't have to be Buzz Lightyear to detect a potential problem...
Anyone reading your original comment would take "light" to mean little red LED - not the light in the viewfinder of a reverse image that also would be tiny and not especially visible.
And that's totally cool. Let them take it that way, not see a red LED, and then not lose their mind over the idea that they are being recorded, because, hey, no red light.
If someone is too stupid to know that it requires a human to do something to record, then I have no problem with them being prevented from flying off the handle and sitting there mollified in their drunken stupor by the fact that there's no little red light.
Unless you are suggesting that we start requiring a little red light? That'd be a great idea, as long as you also ban white nail polish and/or liquid paper, which could be used to ver up the little red light.
You think any government in the first world would cut Germany off the Internet because the German courts held someone in contempt for violating the spirit of a court ruling and comparing the courts with the Nazi party? I'd be surprised if you could find a single politician who wanted their name anywhere near that case.
I think it more likely that various Internet services will voluntarily cease operations in Germany due to legal pressures from German courts.
Effectively, by not reigning in their judiciary, this is the same thing as German voluntarily leaving the Internet, if you can't get to any of the major services or various classes of services which are available in other countries.
One prominent example of this trend is Groveshark, which ceased operations in Germany.
There have been similar recent rumblings about Spotify, which will be resolved in the next year (the deadline is 2015). Without some form of concession to economic reality, such that the amount GEMA is attempting to grab for each instance of playback is less than the net profit to the company providing the service through which the playback occurs, there's zero incentive for companies to continue operations in Germany.
What's the difference, in the limit, between being cut off the Internet by government fiat vs. being cut off the Internet by providers refusing to participate in the German market? With the first, Germany has recourse by treaty with the foreign governments; with the second, Germany is SOL; it's not like a German court can order a service which has no presence in Germany to serve the German market, rather than just ignoring them as economically not worth the trouble.
Picking on Grooveshark until they pack it in, and attempting to extort money from Spotify until they do the same (the likely outcome of the current situation, if GEMA fails to provide a reasonable accommodation by 2015) is one thing; YouTube pulling out because it doesn't make that much money from the German market, or doing it on principle because Google has more money than God, and doesn't actually *need* German revenue, is another.
I expect that if this situation persists, media streaming providers will end up having something like a "GEMA Awareness Week", and Germany will effectively "go black" as far as media, including YouTube, is concerned, for an entire week, and then we can see what the German public thinks about it.
I learned 2 things from this article...
(1) Apparently cars with pine tree air fresheners really *are* cool...
(2) The actual cause of winter is all the christmas tree smell caused by growing them in the first place, and winter goes away after we cut them down, hold them hostage for a couple of weeks, and then release them, after which it starts warming up again...
Science: It's not just for breakfast any more!
The thing is, with the exponential distribution potential and the speed of the modern Internet, taking something down 24 hours after it goes up has little value if 90% of the people who wanted to rip it already did anyway. When the current copyright frameworks were established, that kind of near-instantaneous, near-effortless, widescale distribution of a work simply wasn't practical, and no-one designed the system to allow for it.
You're right; so we either need to revamp copyright frameworks, or give up on using the Internet. Guess which one I pick?
In all seriousness, both RIAA and MPAA have been asking for some magic-ass technology that we technologists keep telling them is not possible due to the halting problem, and they keep insisting that we magically solve the halting problem for them. Then they ask that we implement DRM that actually works so that they don't have to change their business model, even when we tell them, again, it's impossible to create a 100% effective DRM.
I've suggested before that if the RIAA and MPAA want to stop digital redistribution of their copyrighted works, the best way to do this would be to go back to analog distribution, where it costs additional $$ to create a physical artifact as a container for their copyrighted material, and thys they can take margins from the economies of scale from physical production vs. the cost of a one-off copy.
Unfortunately, both RIAA and MPAA want to have all the benefits of digital distribution, while at the same time having none of the drawbacks.
If RIAA and MPAA are capable of solving the halting problem themselves, I'm sure that Google would be first in line to license the patent, and would probably be willing to pay a really outrageous amount for the privilege, but until then, the rest of us get to live in the real world, and in the real world, I can always analog hole and DRM scheme you come up with, and for video, I can even digital hole it by pretending I'm an LVDS display built out of discrete ICs, so unless you start licensing use of discrete ICs, you are still SOL on the DRM pipe dream.
So the idea that these idiots, just like everyone else on the Internet, can scan all the content uploaded to Youtube, and then submit takedown notices is, I think a fair and balanced approach, given that they submit them for both licensed and unlicensed content, indiscriminately, and we have to live with the consequence of them taking down things they have absolutely no rights taking down, like performance pieces licensed under creative commons and uploaded by the performers themselves, who then have to go through an unfair cost to get the takedown reversed.
This is totally aside, mind you, from the fact that, unlike real theft, or your other analogy of sleeping in someone's house, that the rights holder in this case is never derived of the use of their property, as would be the case were we talking about the physical theft of an LP or someone squatting in your living room.
Oh, and by the way, your entire legal team and every executive who ever sets foot in a country with an extradition treaty gets 6 months in jail for contempt. Have a nice day.
"Germany? What's... Oh, you mean that third world country that decided they didn't want to be on the Internet? ..."
It's not a self-evident truth that sites hosting user-submitted content like YouTube should get a free pass for what would otherwise clearly be infringing redistribution under some sort of safe harbour rule, even if that's the way many western states have decided to handle the issue for now.
Actually, it's handled by them having to be responsive to takedown notices, at no insignificant cost in fielding those notices. And, in fact, they are responsive to takedown notices.
I think a reasonable alternative would be to put up "this video removed due to takedown notice by XXX. Here's their email address: xxx@example.com".
So in it's entirety it does raise the initial impression that YouTube is good and understanding whereas GEMA is the evil empire. The reality probably lies somewhere in between.
The middle being "YouTube is neither good nor understanding *and* GEMA is the evil empire"?
If the break is below the half-way point it will go up if the break is above the half-way point it would come down.
Actually, everything below the break falls down, and everything above the break falls up, no matter where the break occurs. The centripetal acceleration is capable of holding the entire mass of the cable plus the weight of all the cars, plus some force to tension the cable. The falling down is also generally not that catastrophic, for the most part, since the max speed of the falling cable will be less than or equal to 50% of terminal velocity for a naked cable due to transverse forces based on the pull from the rest of the falling cable. If you don't assume a naked cable, but a cable with periodic airfoils, the remainder of the cable could be guided to a safe fall shadow.
1. The freedom to do X.
You can hold whatever beliefs you want in private. And you have the right to publicly speak about those beliefs. And you have the right to freely congregate with others who also hold those beliefs.
2. The freedom not to be forced to do X.
No one is telling you that you have to congregate with blacks / gays / whatever in private.
BUT, once you open a PUBLIC business then you must treat all classes of people the same regardless of what your PRIVATE beliefs are.
Unless you are, you know, wearing no shirt or no shoes. Then it's OK for a public business to discriminate.
Europe, Korea, Japan, and China are ramping up research efforts.
Great. So we should have fusion reactors on the grid any day now, right?
Not if you call them that!
Only if we're careful to call them "Fusion power plants", and not use words like "nuclear" and "reactor".
You know, the same way people are happy to get an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) instead of an NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), and they're happy to get a CAT scan, but would never go in for Computed Axial X-Ray Tomography... because X-Rays are radiation, but kitties are cute.
You really don't want the "bad adjective choice" protestors coming after your technology trying to shut it down.
Fix the headline!
"DARPA funds psychic friends network"
!!!
Que the advertisement for flying cars. Wait, there aren't any
There are, you just can't have them.
Sounds like a certain someone doesn't know how SSL/TLS works.
Sounds like someone has never heard of "router level redirect to proxy" and "deep packet inspection" so that you can either use their proxy and let them see your traffic, or you don't get to negotiate a connection.
The author who says that this is 'most alarming' is missing one key thing; sometimes people use computers that belong to someone else.
Any company that needs it's employees to be able to use the internet, but also want to be able to detect any employee that is sending documents via the internet to outside of the company would love to use this, as well as have every permission to install this on their own computers.
Alternately, they put in a transparent https proxy, and sign a trust certificate for the proxy, and install the cert on all the corporate computers. Attempts to access port 443 from interior computers which do not already have the cert installed are redirected to a download page for the cert, and have a one-time "opt in". Making the proposal totally unnecessary for this use case.
It's already quite easy to add a * certificate to a browser to allow a proxy to intercept SSL. This is a standard practice in many LANs to allow the web filter to work on SSL pages - otherwise it'd be impossible to perform more than the most basic DNS/IP filtering on HTTPS sites, which would let a *lot* of undesired content through - google images alone would be quite the pornucopia.
So, if I understand you correctly, this proposal does nothing which it is not already possible to do, and should therefore be discarded...