If I buy something, I own it. Period. If you want to diddle around and chip away at what you will let me buy, then I will buy from someone else, or not at all.
Perhaps if these ticketing companies simply opened up for physical sales at the ticket booth (say) a day before they opened online sales they'd do far more damage to the professional scalpers.
Perhaps. But they often have exclusive contracts with ticketmaster and offer NO WAY of buying tickets at the venue. I think this should be illegal. I come into the theater - tickets are on sale and available - but they tell me to go to the third party website (and pay lots of "convenience" fees).
I do not have a problem with scalpers (those they buy small set of tickets from a consumer to sell to another consumer, or consumers selling to each other). What is a problem is the ones that took it up a notch, like TicketsNow did. They went out and bought huge blocks of tickets
Hahahahahahahahaha. Sorry, what? Consumers selling tickets to each other are NOT scalpers. They are people who want to get rid of extra tickets - they don't even have to sell it for profit... Buying small sets of tickets is pointless - this is not a hobby. In order to be making serious money and cover the risk of losing some of your investment you have to resell a large number of tickets. So scalpers are (almost by definition) people who have a way of buying large blocks of tickets and making serious money. Often enough they have a more direct method of getting that block of tickets (through venue employees)
Perhaps offering a way to transfer the ticket (by calling the venue perhaps?) would help the people while still thwarting the mass buying/resale done by scalpers?
Perhaps, but you seem to be assuming that the goal is to thwart the scalpers. It isn't. The goal is to take their place - the article mentions that ticketmaster will have their own re-seller website charging 20% for every transaction. I am sure they will expect you to re-sell the ticket in order to transfer it to someone else for a mere 20% fee. Still better than not being able to use it at all, I suppose.
The only ones who get screwed are the people who buy tickets from the scalpers - which, if you're willing to pay more for the ticket, would you complain if the original ticket price was raised to the scalper's price?
I am fairly certain that scalpers have other ways of getting tickets directly from the venue. If they had to pay ticketmaster fees for each ticket and deal with anti-bulk-purchase defense mechanisms (that ticketmaster has), they would sell fewer tickets for more money.
Red Sox (nominal) ticket prices are intentionally kept unreasonably low and re-sold by the employees.
You are so right. I say go even further. Kill scalpers on sight. Greedy motherfuckers charging MARKET VALUE for the stuff that they own? WTF?!?!?!
Most systems (including ticketmaster) have some control schemes supposedly preventing bulk commercial purchase. I suspect (and in some cases - know) that many of the scalpers get their tickets directly from the venue, sometimes they are the employees. They are not quick speculators operating in a fair market - they cheat.
You could always just not go to the show. When concert tickets already cost $100 or even much more, and then Ticket Master adds a $12 "convenience fee", which is mandatory, because there is no other way to get tickets, then I stop going to concerts.
Yes and no. Nowdays I go to concerns very, very rarely. But please understand that the demand for the band/concerts is not perfectly flexible. Just like everyone else I happen to *really* like some performers. And an arbitrary other band/show will *not* replace what I really like. And from what I understand most venues have exclusive contract with ticketmaster, forcing many performers to deal with them. So we are stuck and a better solution would be to break the evil monopoly instead of giving up on my favorite bands.
Bullshit. They often do! If you don't know what you talking about, don't post! The reason that a band like Pearl Jam has been required to deal with Ticketmaster is because Ticketmaster has exclusive contracts with most major venues for concerts and with almost all significant promoters of concerts in the United States. In essence, if you play any of these venues or if you deal with these promoters, Ticketmaster will claim that its contracts give it the exclusive right to distribute tickets for your concert. This affords Ticketmaster tremendous power in this business.
Would a solution be to allow teens to have "credit cards with zero credit limit"? (Not sure what that would be called.)
It would be called a pre-paid credit card or gift-visa card. They already have those. Some of them allow recharging - with a system for regular updates (i.e. weekly allowance added to the card).
>> With DRM, its nearly impossible to share music or sheet music legally amongst your own friends/family, original or not.
> Quite so. And your point would be, what? That this inconvenience justifies the theft of IP? That's just stupid. Not quite as stupid as punishing people who have legally paid for a DRM encumbered work, but stupid nonetheless.
His point is (I am guessing) is that oddly enough you don't see any of the starving artists insist that DRM maintain the rights that we ARE supposed to have legally! How many of the DRM schemes will turn off when the copyright in question expires? None of them?
That puts at least somewhat of the dent into the argument. If they think that the law is optional when it benefits the customer, they should not be arguing that the customer should follow the law.
It doesn't mean violating copyright is ok, but it does say that most of the people arguing "Follow the law, don't steal IP" should at least shut up until they follow the law themselves
Yes, you are right. And that is why copyrights expire, just like children grow up.
Ghm. I respectfully disagree. Aren't copyrights life of author + 70 years now? Even if they are never extended again (big if!), I would not say that they really "expire". If I were to have a child in the next few years, that child is very likely to die of old age before anything that's been created today actually expires (unless it was created by a very, very sickly author, in which case they might be lucky enough to see it go out of copyright in their 70s)
As nice as it is with cheap stuff, I cannot come up with a good argument why internet sales should be except from tax while in-store sales still pay. Internet stores can compete just fine on actual efficiency improvements over physical stores.
You must be reading the internet tax discussion for the first time. It's not that internet sales *should* be exempt. It's that there is no *practical* way to implement them. If you decreed that the seller has to collect the tax from the buyer based on their locale, then every small and medium store would go out of business overnight. You see, US has thousands of tax locales (not one per state, but sometimes more than one per city with lots and lots of particular arcane rules). Many companies would have to double their staff to keep track...
Of course there is already the "use" tax that people are supposed to keep track of and report with their annual state tax report, but even that is not so practical in my opinion.
The ruling was for devices provided by the government, did you expect anything less? If it was for your own personal phone, that would be different.
Exactly! Just don't use a government device for any private stuff and you'll be fine. It's not like all your communication has to go through it -- presumably just the work related things, which are not particlarly private. I don't care who reads my work emails/sms-es/etc as long as my personal phone is off limits.
There are examples of successful DRM out there. The PS3 is probably the most biggest.
Absolutely. All you need for successful DRM is locked hardware. If personal computers are ever replaced by several additional lines of XBoxes, then DRM might start working as intended. Fortunately that cat is out of the bag...
(Also, please note, that the law being used against him is one that is generally only used for people who show bestiality, extremely violent porn, etc., not the simple hetero porn that Greene allegedly showed someone
With all due respect - what the f@@k are you talking about? I don't know where to begin... "law that is generally only used for people"? Because no one has ever abused a good-intentioned law far beyond the scope it was intended? I am a little to lazy to look things up, but check "war on drugs", "patriot act" etc to see that laws are generally used in the most convenient rather than intended way.
And then I don't care if he showed someone (college student, mind you - not a 5 year girl) the most violent bestiality video ever. If there is a law on the books that says showing violent porn to an adult can send you to prison for 5 years (!) - then the law is clearly wrong. There is just no other interpretation. If this has to be against the law (when adults are involved?) then something like community service or fines would be a lot more appropriate.
There are just three regional codes for Blu-Ray. Japan, East Asia and the Americas are region A/1.
Regional codes a piss-poor excuse for piracy.
You, Sir, are a piss-poor shill. How many regional codes do you need to consider it a problem? Two is one too many. I know plenty of European students and switching between regions will only last you about two visits home before you are locked out. Those of them who happen to own DVDs from home can't rent DVDs in US (or vice-versa)
Ticketmaster definitely has an evil interface. Independently of being evil, that is
You can't see the total price (all fees are added later)
You can't tell if there are no tickets for the show - it will let you search, do the image challenge, and THEN tell you that you might want to try other dates
And you have to do all of the above for each price category, because it won't even tell you that some price categories sold out.
I bet actually buying tickets you run into some more issues, but this is how far I got
So I was buying a ticket through Ticketmaster, which is a harrowing process. I don't normally do this, so I did not know how harrowing. I will not even discuss the deceptive practice of displaying a total price for tickets, then add in a $6 charge at the very end.
Haha, you got lucky - $6 is nothing. Normally you get a "convenience" charge of $5, some $3 fee that I don't remember and - my favorite - "$2.50 convenience fee" to comfortably print your ticket at home. All of those are per ticket, of course.
Oh, and then there is the CAPTCHA test for every search query change. This is meant to deter scalpers (it clearly doesn't), but what it does do is to make it a pain to check differently priced tickets or 2-3 different dates for me. That is an evil interface...
I, and pretty much anyone i know, carry my drivers license around all the time. Since in Arizona that's proof of citizenship, this law will effect only people without drivers licenses or other valid forms of ID.
You, Sir, are part of the problem. I also carry my drivers license all the time. But it is still f@@king illegal to demand it from me without a probable cause. Even if I speak with an accent or look non-white. Therefore it will affect some people with the valid licenses - those of us who look foreign but are citizens and do not wish to prove it to every cop who illegally demands it.
When I visit Canada, China, etc. If I don't have my passport with me, and an official requires it of me I could be detained and eventually handed off to my government to get new papers or explain to them where my papers are located.
I honestly have no idea how Canada/China handle this. But in US, as a citizen, I am not required to have (or even own) a passport or a drivers license. Therefore you can't demand them from me. Now if citizens had a permanent tattoo identifying them as such and you could demand papers from non-citizens only in Arizona, everything would be ok.
Non-citizens do not have all of the rights that a citizen does. And frankly, I don't see what the big deal here is. In most places in the world...
How hard is this to follow? Yes, but as soon as they demand documents from a Hispanic-looking US citizen and arrest them for not having papers, they will break the f**cking law. If you could visually determine someone's legal status, then this law would not be so problematic. But since you can't, at the very least you will end up illegally harassing some US citizens. And that is why it will be thrown out by courts very soon.
You are not as insightful as you think. IANAL, but here's the catch
Yes, aliens (even green card holders?) are required to carry documents with them. And maybe protections don't even apply to them. But as a citizen I am NOT required to carry any papers with me. And as a police officer you have no way of determining if I am a citizen without checking my document. So you lose - you can't check everyone's papers, because if I am a citizen, then you are acting against the law.
so, because you have no sympathy, you are ok with a private corporation sending 'representatives' to search his house ?
WTF? Have you read anything about this story? I would be the first to complain if the private corporation sent representatives to anyones house. They DIDN'T. Police went to his house. After he frigging bragged about buying stolen property. It was the right thing to do. The guy might have my sympathy (which wouldn't be of much help to him) if we wasn't being an asshole in addition to buying stolen property. But he was, as he released the name of the engineer who lost the iPhone...
Just like corporations expect privacy, and individuals are told that we should have no expectation of privacy. Too bad we can sue TRW for providing every creditor in the world our "trade secrets".
Although I agree with your sentiment - have you read the story in question? Apple is not directly involved in this. The Gizmodo guy is (going to be) busted for BUYING STOLEN PROPERTY. Not for industrial espionage or such. Apple might sue him later, but that's the kind of thing that generates bad PR and I hope would not actually succeed. However, I do hope he gets his due for buying clearly stolen property and bragging about it, not to mention revealing the name of the poor sap who lost the phone while protecting the seller.
He did: he published the fact that he found an iPhone 4G prototype on Gizmodo in great detail, and as soon as Apple called, they got their prototype back.
Hahahahahahahaha. First of all, the guy who found the phone (and who's name was protected, unlike the poor sap who lost the phone), SOLD it to Gizmodo instead of returning it. If the editor himself found the phone I could kinda see your point, although he also dissected the phone a little beyond what he needed to identify it. But at least the author of the article wouldn't be guilty of buying stolen property which I think is his most obvious problem
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So... can you re-sell your airline ticket?
Perhaps. But they often have exclusive contracts with ticketmaster and offer NO WAY of buying tickets at the venue. I think this should be illegal. I come into the theater - tickets are on sale and available - but they tell me to go to the third party website (and pay lots of "convenience" fees).
Hahahahahahahahaha. Sorry, what? Consumers selling tickets to each other are NOT scalpers. They are people who want to get rid of extra tickets - they don't even have to sell it for profit... Buying small sets of tickets is pointless - this is not a hobby. In order to be making serious money and cover the risk of losing some of your investment you have to resell a large number of tickets. So scalpers are (almost by definition) people who have a way of buying large blocks of tickets and making serious money. Often enough they have a more direct method of getting that block of tickets (through venue employees)
Perhaps offering a way to transfer the ticket (by calling the venue perhaps?) would help the people while still thwarting the mass buying/resale done by scalpers?
Perhaps, but you seem to be assuming that the goal is to thwart the scalpers. It isn't. The goal is to take their place - the article mentions that ticketmaster will have their own re-seller website charging 20% for every transaction. I am sure they will expect you to re-sell the ticket in order to transfer it to someone else for a mere 20% fee. Still better than not being able to use it at all, I suppose.
I am fairly certain that scalpers have other ways of getting tickets directly from the venue. If they had to pay ticketmaster fees for each ticket and deal with anti-bulk-purchase defense mechanisms (that ticketmaster has), they would sell fewer tickets for more money.
Red Sox (nominal) ticket prices are intentionally kept unreasonably low and re-sold by the employees.
Most systems (including ticketmaster) have some control schemes supposedly preventing bulk commercial purchase. I suspect (and in some cases - know) that many of the scalpers get their tickets directly from the venue, sometimes they are the employees. They are not quick speculators operating in a fair market - they cheat.
Yes and no. Nowdays I go to concerns very, very rarely. But please understand that the demand for the band/concerts is not perfectly flexible. Just like everyone else I happen to *really* like some performers. And an arbitrary other band/show will *not* replace what I really like. And from what I understand most venues have exclusive contract with ticketmaster, forcing many performers to deal with them. So we are stuck and a better solution would be to break the evil monopoly instead of giving up on my favorite bands.
Bullshit. They often do! If you don't know what you talking about, don't post!
The reason that a band like Pearl Jam has been required to deal with Ticketmaster is because Ticketmaster has exclusive contracts with most major venues for concerts and with almost all significant promoters of concerts in the United States. In essence, if you play any of these venues or if you deal with these promoters, Ticketmaster will claim that its contracts give it the exclusive right to distribute tickets for your concert. This affords Ticketmaster tremendous power in this business.
It would be called a pre-paid credit card or gift-visa card. They already have those. Some of them allow recharging - with a system for regular updates (i.e. weekly allowance added to the card).
> Quite so. And your point would be, what? That this inconvenience justifies the theft of IP? That's just stupid. Not quite as stupid as punishing people who have legally paid for a DRM encumbered work, but stupid nonetheless.
His point is (I am guessing) is that oddly enough you don't see any of the starving artists insist that DRM maintain the rights that we ARE supposed to have legally! How many of the DRM schemes will turn off when the copyright in question expires? None of them?
That puts at least somewhat of the dent into the argument. If they think that the law is optional when it benefits the customer, they should not be arguing that the customer should follow the law.
It doesn't mean violating copyright is ok, but it does say that most of the people arguing "Follow the law, don't steal IP" should at least shut up until they follow the law themselves
Ghm. I respectfully disagree. Aren't copyrights life of author + 70 years now? Even if they are never extended again (big if!), I would not say that they really "expire". If I were to have a child in the next few years, that child is very likely to die of old age before anything that's been created today actually expires (unless it was created by a very, very sickly author, in which case they might be lucky enough to see it go out of copyright in their 70s)
You must be reading the internet tax discussion for the first time. It's not that internet sales *should* be exempt. It's that there is no *practical* way to implement them. If you decreed that the seller has to collect the tax from the buyer based on their locale, then every small and medium store would go out of business overnight. You see, US has thousands of tax locales (not one per state, but sometimes more than one per city with lots and lots of particular arcane rules). Many companies would have to double their staff to keep track...
Of course there is already the "use" tax that people are supposed to keep track of and report with their annual state tax report, but even that is not so practical in my opinion.
Exactly! Just don't use a government device for any private stuff and you'll be fine. It's not like all your communication has to go through it -- presumably just the work related things, which are not particlarly private. I don't care who reads my work emails/sms-es/etc as long as my personal phone is off limits.
Absolutely. All you need for successful DRM is locked hardware. If personal computers are ever replaced by several additional lines of XBoxes, then DRM might start working as intended. Fortunately that cat is out of the bag...
With all due respect - what the f@@k are you talking about? I don't know where to begin... "law that is generally only used for people"? Because no one has ever abused a good-intentioned law far beyond the scope it was intended? I am a little to lazy to look things up, but check "war on drugs", "patriot act" etc to see that laws are generally used in the most convenient rather than intended way.
And then I don't care if he showed someone (college student, mind you - not a 5 year girl) the most violent bestiality video ever. If there is a law on the books that says showing violent porn to an adult can send you to prison for 5 years (!) - then the law is clearly wrong. There is just no other interpretation. If this has to be against the law (when adults are involved?) then something like community service or fines would be a lot more appropriate.
With that said - he sounds like a bad candidate :)
You, Sir, are a piss-poor shill. How many regional codes do you need to consider it a problem? Two is one too many. I know plenty of European students and switching between regions will only last you about two visits home before you are locked out. Those of them who happen to own DVDs from home can't rent DVDs in US (or vice-versa)
You can't see the total price (all fees are added later)
You can't tell if there are no tickets for the show - it will let you search, do the image challenge, and THEN tell you that you might want to try other dates
And you have to do all of the above for each price category, because it won't even tell you that some price categories sold out.
I bet actually buying tickets you run into some more issues, but this is how far I got
Haha, you got lucky - $6 is nothing. Normally you get a "convenience" charge of $5, some $3 fee that I don't remember and - my favorite - "$2.50 convenience fee" to comfortably print your ticket at home. All of those are per ticket, of course.
Oh, and then there is the CAPTCHA test for every search query change. This is meant to deter scalpers (it clearly doesn't), but what it does do is to make it a pain to check differently priced tickets or 2-3 different dates for me. That is an evil interface...
You, Sir, are part of the problem. I also carry my drivers license all the time. But it is still f@@king illegal to demand it from me without a probable cause. Even if I speak with an accent or look non-white. Therefore it will affect some people with the valid licenses - those of us who look foreign but are citizens and do not wish to prove it to every cop who illegally demands it.
I honestly have no idea how Canada/China handle this. But in US, as a citizen, I am not required to have (or even own) a passport or a drivers license. Therefore you can't demand them from me. Now if citizens had a permanent tattoo identifying them as such and you could demand papers from non-citizens only in Arizona, everything would be ok.
How hard is this to follow? Yes, but as soon as they demand documents from a Hispanic-looking US citizen and arrest them for not having papers, they will break the f**cking law. If you could visually determine someone's legal status, then this law would not be so problematic. But since you can't, at the very least you will end up illegally harassing some US citizens. And that is why it will be thrown out by courts very soon.
You are not as insightful as you think. IANAL, but here's the catch
Yes, aliens (even green card holders?) are required to carry documents with them. And maybe protections don't even apply to them. But as a citizen I am NOT required to carry any papers with me. And as a police officer you have no way of determining if I am a citizen without checking my document. So you lose - you can't check everyone's papers, because if I am a citizen, then you are acting against the law.
WTF? Have you read anything about this story? I would be the first to complain if the private corporation sent representatives to anyones house. They DIDN'T. Police went to his house. After he frigging bragged about buying stolen property. It was the right thing to do. The guy might have my sympathy (which wouldn't be of much help to him) if we wasn't being an asshole in addition to buying stolen property. But he was, as he released the name of the engineer who lost the iPhone...
Although I agree with your sentiment - have you read the story in question? Apple is not directly involved in this. The Gizmodo guy is (going to be) busted for BUYING STOLEN PROPERTY. Not for industrial espionage or such. Apple might sue him later, but that's the kind of thing that generates bad PR and I hope would not actually succeed. However, I do hope he gets his due for buying clearly stolen property and bragging about it, not to mention revealing the name of the poor sap who lost the phone while protecting the seller.
Hahahahahahahaha. First of all, the guy who found the phone (and who's name was protected, unlike the poor sap who lost the phone), SOLD it to Gizmodo instead of returning it. If the editor himself found the phone I could kinda see your point, although he also dissected the phone a little beyond what he needed to identify it. But at least the author of the article wouldn't be guilty of buying stolen property which I think is his most obvious problem