I was involved with a computer repair shop that wanted to start up an internet service provider for nonprofit organisations. We had a storefront people could find us at, we had a good reputation in the community, we had a founder who was exceptional at applying for grants and 501c3 nonprofit status. However, at the moment the whole thing appears to have withered, and I myself left half a year ago.
Here's what happened, what I learned, what to do.
Use your talents, and try to avoid turning away from them towards more generic 'popular' ideas.
You need to distinguish, and if that means some customer doesn't like you, you'd better accept that rather than casting yourself into ever-new forms to please everybody you meet. I wrote a special version of site compiling software based on my Airwindows.com engine, trying to integrate people's amateur HTML into a 'more professional' three-column tablebased layout. This was discarded because customers (still about 4 customers, even now, and the one complaining left and isn't a customer anymore) insisted on uploading their pages completely unaltered, and _not_ built into a more sophisticated layout. I'll let them have some hits too, so they can use that as an argument for hopefully winning more clients- I was with Co-opnet.org. By this point all traces of my work have been removed, except that I did much copywriting on the main page, and a fair amount of this writing remains.
Outperform- but be damn aware of the context you're doing it in.
You need to be able to absolutely burn rubber, to totally cut any competition to shreds. For instance, I figure I can cut most web designers, as I do sorta Perl-active-site type things with custom programs written in REALbasic- I can maintain a large elaborate site and do redesigns and have the software handle crosslinks and details like filesizes and image dimensions. In sound recording, I'm even cockier:) Now, with the putative ISP for co-opnet (AFAIK still hosted off the very capable Vservers virtual servers company), there were also elaborate plans for an internet cafe to co-locate with the ISP servers. There were questions of location, of bandwidth and getting a pipe- while the other Co-opnet people kept the computer repair shop running (a demanding task), I ran about coming up with answers for these questions. I got to the point of actually entering negotiations for a storefront property in town at 2/3 of the going rate (because I knew the landlords personally and also knew the previous tenant and got figures on what he was paying) and basically came in with a bid that would have cost one third or less of the property originally being looked at, plus the previous store's customers were a similar demographic to internet cafe customers... at which point, again, the rules began quietly changing under me, and I got the impression we'd already put money down (without my even hearing about it, and I was on the damn board of directors- may _still_ be) on a basement room just big enough for servers that happens to have a fibre optic link capable of T1. (co-opnet's site currently boasts just over 1000 hits total). Clearly DSL would be more suitable, but what concerned me more was that I was putting myself out there, actually trying to make deals on behalf of co-opnet, and getting second-guessed and undercut- the internet cafe part of the idea quietly dried up and blew away while I was shopping for properties and figuring out what kind of store layout would bring people in and where to get the machines. This, plus I'd agreed to be the main sysadmin, put down $300 of my own money on O'Reilly books and was trying to armwrestle other co-opnet people to not commit to Vservers 'check here to get our special search engine, check here to give all your clients secure web Email' features that'd kill me to get all of them implemented singlehandedly on top of setting up a webserver on a dedicated machine for the first time- and though I'd made it clear that I wasn't going to be able to do all this myself, nobody else ever got added to the roster to cover this.
I bailed, obviously. Stress was freaking me out, I was beginning to get physically sick and nothing was being resolved. So, back to the moral of the story- outperform, but know the context. It wasn't going to help that I could wear many hats and do many things- I wasn't capable of doing what would need to be done. The context was that I was wasting my effort attempting to deliver on the things we'd originally written into the feature list.
Don't be afraid!
Every time you try something it's an opportunity to learn. The founder of co-opnet would boast that he'd had 18 businesses, 14 of them successful(I may be misremembering the numbers a bit). Now, one could well ask, "If they were so successful why aren't you still doing them?" but there's one key point about this- you learn by doing. Investors and smart businesspeople would rather deal with a startup run by people who have _had_ a total failure- at least this makes it possible for the people to learn from their mistakes! Maybe to learn is not a sure thing, but it's better than nothing, and better odds than dealing with people who've either never tried, or have never failed.
Business is a process because _life_ is a process. You're not laying plans for the only thing you'll ever do for the rest of your life- you're laying plans for what you hope to be doing next month or next year. If that works out well enough that you do it your whole life, well then- did you remember to ask yourself, "Is this the way I want to live my life?" Because if you _must_ arrange things so that you can't fail, you might end up hosing yourself, ruining it for yourself. In a way, that's what happened to co-opnet... it was never okay to momentarily fail. If a customer was fussing about some web page thing, it wasn't "Perhaps you'd be better off with something like Geocities", it was panic and overhaul the whole concept of the website. If it was looking too hard to get the internet cafe going and there wasn't enough people or money to do the work, it wasn't 'commit to it more, make it happen', it was quietly lose faith and scrap the concept, go with less exciting, safer ideas.
I'm currently in debt for a year trying to start up a recording studio, building all sorts of equipment toward that end, and I'm happier because though my horizons are more limited (I'm hardly going and shopping for storefront properties! That was kinda fun), it's up to me to pursue them. So figure out what you want to do, and pursue that! Don't be afraid of failure. It happens to everybody, especially if you haven't fallen on your face much.
The most important thing is to learn, and keep learning. Any geek-type slashdot-reader linux-fetishing person is a lot more likely to be committed to this (who runs Linux without having to learn? I'm not sure that's possible). Hence, rejoice- you are probably the sort of person who _should_ be starting a business and doing that sort of thing. Enjoy it:)
Jon, do you think the motion picture industry is genuinely doing this to you because they are afraid of content pirating? Or do you think it is likely that they are really afraid of losing their exclusive control over the production of media?
In other words, are they more worried about forbidding the illegal copies, or are they more worried about forbidding the technology itself from citizens?
Absolutely. Of course, you might find you have to inspire other sorts of people in order to accomplish this- but the hacker outrage against this control of media is NOT THAT UNUSUAL. Regular people can feel the same way. Artists can feel the same way.
One thing that's faking you out is this- the job is so much harder than you could possibly imagine. But that's OK too- sometimes it's good to have people around who are enthusiastic and don't realise a thing is impossible. And making movies is not strictly impossible- it's just very very involved and tedious.
I know I've been forming an 'open source recording studio': it's mostly because I want to 'push' acceptance of MP3s badly enough that I will record people for free if they are willing to release everything they do with me as MP3s unrestrictedly and look for other ways to earn actual money (like selling CDs or shirts or by gigging or whatever). However, you've got no idea how complicated, how involved it is to build a worldclass project studio- even if you're a hardwarehacker who can build his own gear half the time, and modify stock gear the other half. Everything from effects to the very cables themselves have to be made to demanding standards. You have to cast a wide net for certain key elements- for instance, I just arranged to get a Yamaha FM synth module, because certain types of tones (especially synthetic basses) need this type of synthesizer in order to get that sound. I'm about 1/3 of the way through replacing all the studio's patchcords with a special multistrand air-insulated variety I invented (the 8-channel snake is already built from this type of cable). Meanwhile, the studio's centerpiece, a 20-bit ADAT, is in Massachusetts being repaired, because when UPS drops such a thing in transit it goes 'smash'. This is all part of the day-to-day grind of building such a studio.
Now imagine your movie studio. There's no reason to limit yourself to webcams and basically produce a film that sucks- and the people are out there to give you access to equipment and skills- but again, the amount of work involved is not small. Who's your scriptwriter? Who knows how to direct- for that matter, who will you have that knows how to take a basic screenplay, work out all the locations, camera angles, different shots, and make a shooting script? When you have that, who gets the job of continuity and pays attention to the scene, shot over three days on a porch, only one of the days is 20% more overcast than the others- or keeps notes of who wears what costume when, and which props are in use or (like a glass of water) being altered over the course of shooting? Did he fire six bullets or only five?;)
But the crazy thing is- this stuff is _fun_. It's fascinating. Even something so much smaller, like my recording studio, can be great fun- it's like the musical or film equivalent to having a great compiler and all the source to everything >;) it's positively liberating.
This is, perhaps, why I sometimes freak out colorfully in the pages of Slashdot.org against the threat of media being taken away from independent artists. Art is _glorious_. It can be a stunning, joyous outburst of human expression- and that doesn't necessarily mean 'nice'- to me, the last scene in Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil' is a joyous outburst of directorial brilliance and panache, because it fscks with your head so brutally and giftedly;) by way of another tangent, in another Gilliam film, "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas", the sound engineering hits some fantastic peaks with the remastering of classic 60's songs into the film- this is yet another little detail work feature, but the resulting music is _so_ powerful and alive that it helps the film immensely.
You're right, Temporal- things _will_ be going this way soon enough. They already are- you have people trying to make films out of scripting the Quake engine, you have people working with 3dsMax, you have a whole passel of firewire-packin' iMac users with those new graphite machines that came with video editing software geared to consumers- it's happening, but it's happening in so many places at once that it's too big to spot at first. How many people have just a little piece of the picture, or a few pieces? I know I can write, I can put together shooting scripts, and I can come up with the sound engineering. There are so many people out there who have things they can do for such a project!
But the thing is, writing the software gets you only half the way there- but you do that half over and over and over again, it doesn't end. Once you have software you find people to use it, and their skills are not yours- they use it and the next thing you know, they need some changes and new behaviors or abilities and you go back and code some more and they run with that and then get back to you with some more ideas... that's how the film EFX industry works, though it's mostly broken into little camps, people working on proprietary technologies and accomplishing amazing things.
Now imagine what it would be like if the open source community got a critical mass of these types of technologies- and got all these different people working together on projects, new media projects. That could truly change the world.
I hope we still have a way to show our creations when we finally get around to creating them.
Sure Loki could do it. Andrew Meggs successfully ported Half-Life to the Mac, at which point Valve pulled the plug. Loki could do a great job porting Half-Life and Valve would still pull the plug and refuse to ship the port, judging from what they actually did to the actual Mac port. Therefore the fact that Loki could do it isn't relevant- Valve are actively blocking anything that isn't Windows, even to the point of writing off porting efforts and keeping the resulting basically finished port under tight wraps. There's no reason to believe they'd allow a Linux port to ship even if they had Loki do one. It's the same old song, 'inadequate market share to support...', better spend your money with companies which make even a token effort at supporting platform diversity. Valve actively discourages it and have killed a perfectly good Mac port based only on not wanting to support more than one platform. Sorry.
Andrew Meggs (iconoclast Mac gamecoder) basically _finished_ a Mac Half-Life port, at which point Valve killed the project and refused to release the port or the code. Meggs flipped out, I don't blame him after completing all that work. Their argument was that it wasn't economically viable to support it (the whole marketshare thing). Now, Mac users _pay_ for software, yet the project was killed. Mind explaining how you're going to convince the treacherous Valve to port to Linux when most Linux software is downloadable at no cost? Again- they have already had a Mac port done. It's practically finished and they are sitting on it letting it ROT. Even _if_ they hired a Linux programmer to do a port- let's look at the record, shall we?
X-Plane is _way_ more of a geek flight simulator. Nothing else in the game sphere does blade element modeling of all the flight surfaces on the fly. In X-Plane you get to _design_ planes and set just the surfaces and control geometry and the CG and weight and then you fly the model and see if you designed it right >:) it's the closest thing to genuine aircraft CAD I've ever seen, NASA has a copy, a company is designing their new twin turboprop using it as the rough draft- it obliterates MSFS for geek credentials.
Unfortunately there is only one (1) developer, our beloved Nazi Soup Kitchen Chef Austin Meyer, and I don't think he has any experience with Linux at all. On the bright side, X-Plane is already Mac and Windows, so it's therefore that much closer to a Linux port than something that was just Windows. X-Plane uses OpenGL, too. GFX are not great by today's standards but framerate _is_ great by today's standards, and again, nothing comes close to the flight model and capacity for design.
Would somebody please establish a public domain inventions site? Not a 'these are bad patents that got overturned' site, or a 'our little patent pool' site, but a SourceForge-like model for hosting public domain inventions, whether for software algorithms or processes or mechanical contrivances- anything that can be covered by a patent.
I already checked on IdeaBazaar and both the org and the com have been taken by God knows who- they are cheesy 'under construction' pages, and I have no great hopes that either will become what I'm talking about.
We need an unrestricted PD site in which ideas are intensely searchable and attributed to the inventor responsible for them- this would serve as a glaringly public resource for prior art (I have no faith in little personal websites being useful for this purpose), and could further innovation a great deal by providing unrestricted access to publicised inventions.
It's important that this not be bogged down by restrictions that would only stop the site from being used at all. Making a purely public domain site would be cheap (costing only the price of the hosting, and it could arguably be text-only for very efficient use of resources- that or small graphics for illustrations, never for decoration), and doing it with a media splash would ensure that the site _be_ legally accepted as public domain- all you need to do is get two corporations taking note of it, and then if one tries to take anything for itself the other will be ready to send lawyers to argue that it's prior art, and none of the FSF's money needs to get spent at all!:)
Seriously. We need this- we need a resource for publication of _all_ types of patentable ideas in the public domain, and we need it to stick to establishing stuff in the public domain, with no loopholes or extra conditions to confuse the matter. Please, somebody grab some domain that would work for this, and let's set something up. Particularly at first it wouldn't be that costly. I'd have already grabbed www.ideaforge.org and be offering it for nothing to sourceforge (assuming they like the idea), except that I don't have a credit card and since I registered airwindows.com Network Solutions seem to have stopped using any payment option I have available. God knows what I'll do in May when airwindows' two years runs out o_O
This is for the purpose of establishing prior art while allowing the inventor to conceal their invention with the intent of future patenting and restricting. If you want to establish prior art, set up a place where people can publicise their inventions on the web, and tip off as many people as possible (and the Patent Office) to the existence of this place. Then anything published there becomes prior art by virtue of publication on a page people are actually reading. Hopefully it would become popular. I can picture corporations reading such a site avidly, because if one corporation tried to patent something covered by such a place, a competing corporation would be able to spend its own money and lawyers proving that the idea was in public domain by referring to the idea site. This is very different from publishing on some dumb little web page. Establishing a high-traffic, glaringly public site would be crucial.
"What happens if someone in the open source dimension actually invents something new? Put it on the net. Make it visible to search engines and such. Blammo, no one can patent your idea and you guarantee that no one will make the mistake of thinking your invention is worth money."
If someone invented a cure for cancer, AIDS, the common cold and measles and put it on the net, the idea would become ubitiquous and, indeed, no-one would think the IP was worth money.
There's a big difference between IP value and human value, and anything with enough human value will produce business around it even if the IP is valueless. Look at agribusiness- nobody is claiming that growing things is IP, but going out and doing it is worth money.
You can hold whatever viewpoints you like, but making things public domain is merely turning over the money-making to implementations- it's giving the corporations you like so much a chance to use their efficiencies of volume, while still allowing individuals to work on a much smaller scale.
That said, I entirely agree with part of your point here- to my way of thinking, what's needed is an IdeaBazaar (tm), like a weird hybrid of mp3.com, SourceForge and slashdot, where people can establish accounts and add to a huge monster database of easily searchable public domain ideas. This could further innovation immensely, and obviously it would not be restricted to software alone.
The primary motivation would be cooperation, but a very important side effect is that (as you rightly point out) this is the most effective defense against the threat of secret patents popping up in a field of endeavor to halt innovation and forbid further work. To those who (justifiably or not) fear that anything they come up with will be wrested from their hands by corporate lawyers... and this is the motivation for all this wild talk of FSF patent pools etc... such a scheme would be the ideal counter-agent, being a centralized database of 'ha, patent THIS!' ideas, glaringly public.
In addition, there's another level- since the place would be divided into personal areas (bazaar-like 'shops'), if any particular inventor was genuinely talented and doing this for personal reasons, their area would quickly become a hot-spot, with many corporations and individuals dropping by to take the nifty ideas. Such popularity could establish such an inventor as a noted figure, giving them useful publicity and also very likely bringing them offers to solve other problems, for money, outside the public domain (and sign over the solution to a corporation, naturally.) That, obviously, is worth money. Being publically accepted as someone who can think innovatively is definitely worth money. Your value is not your inventions. Your value is the kink in your brain that gives rise to your inventions. Never forget that...
First, once you have written something, it is already copyright to you. That's the exact arrangement of words verbatim and has nothing to do with the content. Paraphrasing is a fine way to get around this and it doesn't protect the idea at all, unless you can prove people read what you wrote before the contested time.
Second, the method you describe is an urban legend. It doesn't hold up in court. Ask any lawyer. Ask any professional in a field where this idea's put forth- for instance, I saw this idea debunked in the field of song publishing, where the idea was to write songs and mail them to yourself to prove you had copyright. It doesn't hold up, it's worthless legally. Give me an afternoon with a kettle and a scalpel and I'll steam the bugger open and tamper with the contents- come on, you're not even advocating a seal of some sort.
I'll confess- I have some ideas in envelopes. I had 'em notarized, too. They're still worthless as proofs, and it's about time I opened them and did something else with them. My suspicion is that the best thing to do (in a 'libre' sort of way) is not to establish ways of stashing away ideas in storage, but establishing a way of publicizing the ideas, of giving them glaring publicity in a context where many people can see them and where they can be indexed and searched on by patent examiners, who'd be able to add a "step 247: do quick search of IdeaBazaar for related terms" to their process.
This would not be making any claims to protectability for the ideas involved- indeed, you could express ideas that were (unbeknownst to you) already covered by patents, harmlessly. But it would be perhaps the only sensible way to establish ideas into the public domain in such a way that they couldn't be taken back by the patent process. I know that for me (foolish though this may be) I'm not so concerned for nailing down My Claim to good ideas I may have. I'm justifiably concerned that somebody might sneak in, grab my idea while it's relatively unknown, patent it and then forbid me or anyone else to use it- or for that matter, that for every couple ideas I sit on, one is probably already working its way through the patent office to be locked up and forbidden to me. I find that situation untenable.
So, can we instead have something like SourceForge, only instead it's a heavily searchable hosting service for ideas that are to be established as public domain? Doing this could better the world, lead to widescale deployment of any ideas that are truly great ideas (including competing commercial products that compete on price not IP), and make such ideas widely accessible to individuals. I can honestly say that I would throw my entire portfolio (largely audio hardware, but I'm an inveterate idea-scribbler in all fields) behind such a scheme. Who's with me, and is there anywhere we can start this up?
a) One major slashdot misconceptions is that the startup/entreprenuer can no longer afford to patent, or that it is geared strictly in favor of big companies. From personal experience, I can tell you that this is simply untrue.
Please give more detail. My personal take on this matter is that the 'defensive patent pool' idea is a poor one- it's basically lawyer bait and isn't even meant to lay claim to intellectual property, it's meant to weaken intellectual property by a counterattack strategy. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about that because I'm not sure how rabidly I need to restrict my intellectual property.
That, in turn, is partly because I'm swayed by the GPL-type ideas I've read, and in fact I use the GPL for software because my primary concern isn't stopping people from using my IP, but stopping people from pulling a fast one on me and preventing me from using my own IP)... but it's also for just the reasons you're trying to debunk, the sense that the patent field is impossibly costly for an ill-funded geek and effectively useless anyhow unless you're a well-lawyered corporation. The sense I get is that this is deeply inequitable, though I have no wonderful ideas for completely fixing it o_O
You say that traditional IP through patents is in fact more accessible than I think, and that it does me more good than I think. Why?
It is NOT FEASIBLE to be a recording act that doesn't tour. Hasn't been for _years_. Many years. Don't even go there. It's not going to happen. It's part of the system now that you tour at your own expense to support the release. If you even get an advance that will cover that you'd better spend it on getting out there because if you don't you lose.
You are so totally wrong that anyone can expect to be a studio band in this day and age and be signed to a major label. Try it, just try it. Hell, even bands that _lip-synch_ tour now! You're making this up. How is a band supposed to self-promote except through touring? You don't seriously think the label does promotion? They only do that for about 3 albums a year for which they're prepared to do tonnage. They'll do it for the Spice Girls. They won't do it for you and they won't sign your band unless you agree to tour and promote the album for them. The tour may be written into the contract. You pay for it yourself out of the advance that is taken out of your supposed royalties.
There's no such thing as losing income that was never there in the first place. That's like saying that bands lose huge amounts of income because there aren't coin slots on every radio. That's like saying recording acts traditionally make money instead of losing it. That's totally flat wrong...
Do you have any fscking idea how much a band has to PAY to get a gig at certain well-placed clubs? How much a band would have to PAY to get radio airplay, to get a video in even light rotation on MTV? You're so off base it isn't even funny. Music has _never_ been a sensible job, and in recent years (the last twenty or so) it has become even worse, and it is the record labels who have done the most damage. Have you ever read a music industry contract? Did you know that jotted down notes on a memo pad (seemingly innocuous) routinely become a legal straightjacket for acts, forcing them to accept a deal whether they like it or not, or to quit the business entirely ('deal memos', in other words, that force the band into an unspecified deal, at which point all the leverage is on the label's side and the band takes a really BAD deal because they have no choice- in effect they have already signed without seeing the terms).
That's not even getting into the fact that large numbers of 'indie' labels are in fact wholly owned subsidaries of major labels, kept for their 'image', or semi-independent indies kept on a very short leash. You didn't know this? Let's see a list of the labels you're thinking of, so we can look up whether they are actually run by BMG or EMI or Sony.
I don't know who you are, AugstWest, but either you have a lot to learn about the way this industry works, or you're just a label flack busily fighting for your side. And that's cool, fight away if such things please you. But the picture you're painting is a damned lie. You're trying to induce guilt by suggesting that not supporting the industry is depriving musicians of money. It would be more accurate to induce guilt by suggesting that _supporting_ the industry is supporting a system in which musicians are routinely screwed with mind-bendingly nasty deals whose implications they don't even guess at until it's too late, in which musicians are routinely broken and left to have their bands break up, twisting in the wind with no label support, in debt to the record company from failure to recoup even modest advances, contractually bound to not play or record a note except with the record label that is now no longer interested.
If you want to support that, be my guest. I think that turning the acts loose with whatever mp3 popularity they can get is probably a lot more likely to result in some sort of income for the band. That becomes a question of business, and whether the band can charge much for a gig, can sell CDs out of their kitchen, can print up posters or have T-Shirts made.
At any rate, if you're worrying about artist income or artist rights or artists' welfare, you're worrying about the wrong things. Start figuring out how you can destroy the major labels if you want to do some real good. Things were out of hand even as early as the '80s, but now they are just ridiculous. Don't even support it.
I hope you get to eventually have the option to pay a few bucks to an artist directly because you want to. I'm a musician, and the conclusion I've come to is that mp3 is radio- so I'm working really hard to get together a catalog of music to put out there, and hope to make available inexpensive but high quality CDs for people like you. I don't want to just ask for money for the mp3s, I'd rather offer something else, something additional (that doesn't involve _withholding_ songs from you and putting you in a bind).
Everytime I see a music listener like you asking why they can't just cut out the middleman and pay the artist a couple bucks, I get a little bit of badly-needed hope. Keep it up- and keep new formats like mp3 and old formats like Red Book Audio CD alive for me, man. When you're just a musician doing everything yourself without help or money sometimes it can take a long time to get things done- I'm waiting on an ADAT repair and need to build some equipment to do the MP3 mastering I need to do. Delays, costs, there's never enough time and I'm scared my chance might dry up and blow away (or be stomped on by the RIAA) before I get to step up to the plate and take my swing. Keep the faith! There are people out there who need you as much as you need them.
As another poster mentioned, so the old players can't play these discs? Why get a new player when you can get a DVD player made to handle the new, non-Red-Book format?
You'd be surprised how quickly it'd become possible to deprecate Red Book so thoroughly that the newest DVD players WON'T PLAY RED BOOK any longer. Only the copy protected version! But that's okay, because you can buy the music all over again... I mean, because you had it all MP3ed anyway! So who does this hurt?
Musicians. The artists. We are seeing the end of an era where, for the first time in history, you can master the preferred audio format (I'm not counting cassettes here) ON YOUR DESKTOP. You don't have to be signed to anywhere to produce the media. You can burn Red Book Audio CDs! The media becomes accessible to anyone with a CD burner!
We are seeing the first attempts to take that power back- and fussing about how expected new non-Red-Book-playing DVD players 'harm the consumer' is accurate but a horrible trivialisation of the real damage here. (And who wants to bet that the industry will preserve the rippable, uncontrolled, unwatermarked, publically-accessible Red Book Audio format? Who really thinks the industry wouldn't turn their huge collections into useless coasters?)
This story freaks me out worse than any DVD-oriented story I've read- because I had subconsciously trusted that Red Book would always be there for me, that the plain old audio CD with all its obvious faults and clear limitations would at least be a public media format I could count on. I mock the audio CD- I think it is no sort of audiophile wonder- but I trusted it to stick around, to remain hugely popular and common.
I can't say that anymore, in fact I can identify several plausible means by which the industry can deprecate it and shift popular audio onto something strictly industry-controlled- and I'm scared shitless, as Red Book was the media I hoped to use to sell to people who wanted a little more than mp3, which I intend to make lots of and give out freely.
I see the industry saying, "So you like MP3s, do you? Let's see you sell them!" and taking away the audio CD (which I hadn't thought possible), returning me to the days in which you couldn't produce popular media without going through the industry channels. This time, mp3s are likely to remain widely popular through sheer user saturation- but who the hell is going to sell them? I don't even WANT to try and sell mp3s! I think of them as radio, you should be able to listen to all the mp3s you want and only pay if you want to buy your own nice copy of something! And the day may come when indy musicians (again) can no longer produce any of the DVD-hosted, corporate-encrypted public media, without getting signed and spending huge amounts of money and time for the privilege of releasing public media.
This will happen through the deprecation of anything people know how to produce, such as cassettes and Red Book CDs. MP3s may well remain a huge ghetto of underground music- but it's technologically possible to relegate such musicians to only the (freely exchanged) MP3s and deny them access to any new popular media that people are used to paying money before. And that's how it will be done... and ten years from now, today's 'nice' Red Book-savvy CD player is going to look awfully old, most will have broken by then, and it'll be taking up space needed for the new DVD player which also plays the revised CD format, just not the old Red Book format...
I wish I was sleeping, so that this could be a nightmare:( I can't believe this is already starting to happen. And for anyone who doesn't think the industry can make you throw away all your old media and buy the music all over again- remember the CD?
It is also a step in the direction of stopping honest musicians from making CDs!
I'm sorry, I don't give a rat's ass about whether or not some consumer hacker type can still copy it or not. I have a problem with the idea of a gradual shift over to formats I CANNOT PRODUCE! I've been going through absolute hell simply getting the ADAT I bought into working order (fortunately all the repairs are being covered by the seller, who didn't check the machine out enough before selling it), and I am not thrilled with the idea of a new generation of CD players made to no longer understand Red Book Audio. What the hell is happening to the world?
If I seem frantic, it's because I am already profoundly committed to pushing MP3s as hard as I can- and hoped to be able to earn small amounts of bread money by selling _master_ _CDs_ of the music that's being MP3ed. I know I can put out quality that's worth getting an 'audiophile' copy, and people who want to 'support the artist' can be encouraged to get that, I don't have to build timebombs into the mp3s or go for pay-by-play or anything psychotically disgusting like that.
Now the other shoe drops, and I find that the industry is quietly shifting the CD format out from under me to some other sort of format that won't play on normal CD players.
Bets that the industry won't phase out Red Book? Anyone?
Bets that the new format will be available to me and my little borrowed CD-Rom burner? Anyone?
What the hell do I have to do, try to make _cassette_ _tapes_ for God's sake, to get a medium with a future? Press vinyl? Actually I could do that very well- but NOT in tiny small runs. And there's the rub.
DAMN it! Anyone who can't see where this is headed is an idiot... and anyone who still claims MP3s are against the interests of artists in the face of this steady 'power shift' is crazy. I don't see MP3 copiers cutting off my access to the public- I see them enhancing it, in a strictly non-profit sort of way. I see the INDUSTRY steadily, subtly cutting off my access to the public, 'deprecating' the media I used to have increasingly easy access to- and I'm freaking out! What the HELL?
This morning when I got up I would not, in my wildest flights of suspicion and paranoia, have dreamed to suggest that the music industry was taking steps to DEPRECATE RED BOOK AUDIO.
Since when does a 7-11 clerk band get a quarter million dollar advance? It's not _that_ hard to tell when a band is good at what they do. It's not a lottery!
The band from 7-11 that can only sell 20,000 copies gets say a $2000 advance. Maybe $10,000 if you insist on assuming a benevolent record company which aches to throw money at needy artists;P
That lamer band STILL has to pay for all its recording and its tour out of that lamer advance, plus the label only _presses_ 20,000 copies and does absolutely squat to support the act. The act could sell out its pathetic little pressing and still not be noticed by the label it is in fact signed to. At which point they go back to 7-11, having mostly recouped the advance they've long since spent on the album (even $10,000 only goes so far, and frankly that seems high for a loser band with no business team), and having wasted years of their lives. Their role was no more than the industry's scratch ticket- in case they got lucky, the industry owns anything they record for the next ten years and rights to the publishing. All for a few grand that doesn't even buy them a professionally produced album- and then people like you come around thinking they got a quarter of a million dollars, just because they are a band signed to a major label! What?
Regarding the classical CDs- gee, maybe that's part of the reason why the consumers _and_ the bands get hosed so badly. It doesn't justify it. Are you suggesting that in spite of this, loser rock acts get big advances (albeit earmarked for recording the album and paying for the tour) even when they only expect to move 20,000 copies? And when the industry expects you'll move 20,000 copies, they only _press_ 20,000 copies, and getting more pressed isn't just a matter of selling the first ones- you have to convince the label that you're going to do that much better that it's worth going back to the pressing plant and churning out more, and that might not be the easiest thing to do...
This is an _extremely_ cliched view and very false. The industry cannot PICK who is going to succeed - only the listeners can. Yes, the industry can pick who the listeners will hear (to some extent) but it is still up to the listeners to decide. There have been albums which have been EXTREMELY heavily promoted, which have failed miserably. Remember Michael Jackson's HIStory?
Michael Jackson after Thriller was the most overexposed man in show business. That's very, very dangerous. Are you suggesting that you expected his later releases to do comparably well? You're not talking like an insider here, you should _know_ what I'm talking about if you're going to come across authoritative. The industry will gear up to 'do business' on certain albums, whatever you think. Look at Thriller itself- after surprisingly high volume with Off The Wall (not that surprising, it was a very very strong album), the industry knew to expect serious sales volume from the start with Thriller, okayed expensive videos that broke the color line on MTV, and prepared for extremely heavy distribution. It's the same with Bruce Springsteen's live set- after Born In The USA (which the record company _knew_ was strong, very strong), the industry geared up for a major promo blitz, backing it with the distribution.
You're being naive, I'm afraid. Just supposing some obscure album _did_ click with listeners so heavily that it was set to surprise the industry with monster sales- just where do you think people are going to BUY enough copies of such an album if they're not pressed and shipped to the stores? (Interestingly, with mp3 some random person might develop monster mindshare just by being copied around enough... something that cannot happen with the commercial products as they can't be legally copied so heavily)
Regarding G'n'R, hell- I like them pretty well myself, I'm not calling them the Monkees. But don't you remember the sales volume of, not Appetite, but Use Your Illusion I+II? Again, a breakout hit that basically sold out everywhere laid the way for the music industry to DO TONNAGE on the next album, and to put the earlier album into reprintings. GnR earned their shot- you might be interested to know that GnR are also near the top of the list as far as sound engineering is concerned, on top of everything else- but having done so, the industry decided to MAKE THEM into the megastars they became. And that was not up to GnR, it was up to the suits. They'd still be selling out to this day if they hadn't been given this treatment, but not as the superstars they became.
Regarding your take on Steve Albini's experience, are you out of your mind? I don't understand how you can claim that the quarter-million sellers are being hosed to pay for the loser acts WHEN THE ACTS FOOT THE DAMN BILL! Do some homework. If you want to be a recording act you PAY for the services you need. If you don't seem to be a quarter million seller, guess what? The advance will be basically squat! I'm sorry, there is no compensation as you suggest. In particular, it's lunacy to suggest that the bigger acts subsidise the minor ones when the minor ones are being hosed even worse, and when it's possible to do some homework comparing music industry accounting with other manufacturing industries. In the final analysis, what happened to the music industry is not a question of subsidizing small acts or defending narrow profit margins. What happened to the music industry is middle management, and corporate bloat. Nothing about this suggests that it benefits consumers- or artists.
Regarding your cited article, The Cost Of CDs, I quite agree. Two points:
Classical Musicians DO NOT foot the bill for recordings of their orchestras
Classical Musicians have a UNION which forces the record company to actually pay them scale.
This does not correspond with any situation in the rock and pop industries, and Steve Albini was not writing about classical music performers.
Or are you suggesting that all rock musicians should be robbed to pay for oboe players? o_O maybe you're suggesting that rock musicians should have a union like the classical guys? At least the latter get paid.
Actually, my understanding is that the board of shareholders is _legally_ _required_ to care only about return on investment, barring outright crime. The officers of a corporation are not free to follow their own sense of ethics, but are responsible to an abstract concept- it's not about the actual danger of their being ousted by shareholders, instead the rules are that they must not act in such a way that they _could_ be ousted by shareholders. Hence, life for the brain trust of a corporation becomes the compulsion to tread as close to the illegal as possible whereever profit lies.
Examples: the exploding Pintos, and the memo saying that fixing the problem would cost more than the resulting deaths- this is a beautiful example, because it forced the corporate officers to choose between intentionally spending money (thus breaking the rules) or potentially being liable for negligence (which would only happen if they were caught making such a decision). Naturally, they were compelled to take the path of least expenditure, as the rules of being a corporation were more immediate than the rules of not being negligent. Another good example is the Nestle flap over infant formula- to the corporate officers, giving third world nursing mothers infant formula (until they stop lactating at which point the infant formula stops being free) wasn't even a choice- the crime was ill-defined and not technically illegal, and the profitability was obvious. Thus, according to the rules of being corporate, they were forced to do this as not doing it would leave them open to charges that they were not maximizing profit for the corporation.
See how the rules pressure corporations to commit crimes, or hunt down ways to abuse the world that aren't technically crimes yet? It's a very powerful effect, and this bears thinking about.
Pink Floyd and Clapton are acts from an earlier era. I'm not saying that the industry was that much better in that era, but those acts were completely part of the sixties rock movement and both were seventies superstar acts- now, if you look at labels like Motown you find some of the acts (Jackson Five, anyone?) got shockingly low percentages, but Clapton was with Atlantic/ATCO early on, and Floyd was with EMI. During this era, the labels were making so much money that the 'gold rush' conditions people still believe in actually existed, sort of- big acts like this had managers good enough to get that one or two more points for the act that made the difference between lasting, investable riches and 'fake wealth' that ends up being lots of debt.
GnR are a different case- they were superstar level in an era when sales volume was huge by comparison, but the industry was already ripping off most acts. My guess, since I've heard things to suggest that GnR _are_ in fact pretty wealthy, is that they had a manager or some business team who knew what to do when negotiating a superstar act with the industry. They were only a superstar act _because_ the industry picked them to be, and the industry only picks a few acts each decade to do that with (Michael Jackson, Springsteen around 'Born in the USA + the live set, Madonna etc), but they had what it took to be marketed that heavily- and that almost certainly means a GnR business team who on the one hand got the band a cut of the money, and on the other hand were ready to _guarantee_ product.
What you're seeing, Jamie, is the special cases- not the 'winners' in the sense of some lottery or luck, but the acts that combined musicianship on a commercial level with a business team that seriously kicked butt and could (a) negotiate contracts well for the band and (b) even more importantly, deliver product for the record company on a superstar level- handling the artist, augmenting promotion, managing all this so intently that they were like a superstar _company_ or business team, wildly outperforming the business teams of the other bands.
I love how Steve Albini is suddenly getting massive link-exposure on Slashdot. You're linking to a different copy than I linked to- I used the copy on this page, which has a more detailed costs breakdown on the band's expenditures, which you might find morbidly interesting. It's here: "Some of your friends are probably already this fucked". READ THESE ARTICLES, PEOPLE! It gets... _tiresome_ listening to otherwise really sharp and clued Slashdotters saying 'Gee, we should help support the artists though, so the music industry can't be all bad' because they don't know the reality and are only guessing. Would people believe the practices of Microsoft without proof? "They can't be _all_ _that_ bad!". Would people believe how dumb Netscape was without proof? (*g* disclaimer, yes, I'm using Communicator, but I understand JWZ has some feelings on the matter;) )
Think about it. AOL already uses exclusively MS technologies and their largest userbase is emphatically MS users. Time Warner would get to add MSNBC to the roster and whatever MSN has to offer. It's really dead obvious and logical. Do you think that their fighting about instant messaging would concern them one tiny bit if there is profit and control in merging with each other?
Besides, MS needs to own more media conglomerates to help control its image:)
*evilgrin* I'm serious. Think about it. Wouldn't that be a logical move?
Granted, the markets are _already_ stagnant, but given that we don't really have a lot of power to change them directly, what is wrong with allowing them to continue to get worse and worse? Personally, I WANT the music industry to go so completely stale that it's a scandal. It is already deeply corrupt and nasty- I want it to get worse and worse until even the regular person in the street thinks, 'What's up with that?' and goes in search of other avenues, other channels to get what they want.
Because those channels EXIST... people always talk about mp3s in a context of ripping off major label artists. Well, when there's only two major labels and only three major label artists and you hear them EVERYWHERE you go, tell me, would you even want to rip a mp3 of them? I think not. It becomes a non-issue, quite naturally.
This is _good_. Because it's _bad_. And it can have very harmful effects on music industry consumers and artists. AND THAT IS AS IT SHOULD BE... the natural counterbalance to the impossibly overwhelming dominance of the industry (I foresee a future in which you can be blackballed for ever having released an mp3. Bowie, of course, gets exempted;) ) is the increasing irrelevance of the industry to their original concerns- as they become entirely about media control and efficient profitable distribution, they become entirely not about music- the highest of ironies.
Once they're in that condition, it becomes much more easy for grassroots support and underground or indie artists to gain public attention through things like the web and mp3s.
Slashdot Mirror
I was involved with a computer repair shop that wanted to start up an internet service provider for nonprofit organisations. We had a storefront people could find us at, we had a good reputation in the community, we had a founder who was exceptional at applying for grants and 501c3 nonprofit status. However, at the moment the whole thing appears to have withered, and I myself left half a year ago.
Here's what happened, what I learned, what to do.
Use your talents, and try to avoid turning away from them towards more generic 'popular' ideas.
You need to distinguish, and if that means some customer doesn't like you, you'd better accept that rather than casting yourself into ever-new forms to please everybody you meet. I wrote a special version of site compiling software based on my Airwindows.com engine, trying to integrate people's amateur HTML into a 'more professional' three-column tablebased layout. This was discarded because customers (still about 4 customers, even now, and the one complaining left and isn't a customer anymore) insisted on uploading their pages completely unaltered, and _not_ built into a more sophisticated layout. I'll let them have some hits too, so they can use that as an argument for hopefully winning more clients- I was with Co-opnet.org. By this point all traces of my work have been removed, except that I did much copywriting on the main page, and a fair amount of this writing remains.
Outperform- but be damn aware of the context you're doing it in.
You need to be able to absolutely burn rubber, to totally cut any competition to shreds. For instance, I figure I can cut most web designers, as I do sorta Perl-active-site type things with custom programs written in REALbasic- I can maintain a large elaborate site and do redesigns and have the software handle crosslinks and details like filesizes and image dimensions. In sound recording, I'm even cockier :) Now, with the putative ISP for co-opnet (AFAIK still hosted off the very capable Vservers virtual servers company), there were also elaborate plans for an internet cafe to co-locate with the ISP servers. There were questions of location, of bandwidth and getting a pipe- while the other Co-opnet people kept the computer repair shop running (a demanding task), I ran about coming up with answers for these questions. I got to the point of actually entering negotiations for a storefront property in town at 2/3 of the going rate (because I knew the landlords personally and also knew the previous tenant and got figures on what he was paying) and basically came in with a bid that would have cost one third or less of the property originally being looked at, plus the previous store's customers were a similar demographic to internet cafe customers... at which point, again, the rules began quietly changing under me, and I got the impression we'd already put money down (without my even hearing about it, and I was on the damn board of directors- may _still_ be) on a basement room just big enough for servers that happens to have a fibre optic link capable of T1. (co-opnet's site currently boasts just over 1000 hits total). Clearly DSL would be more suitable, but what concerned me more was that I was putting myself out there, actually trying to make deals on behalf of co-opnet, and getting second-guessed and undercut- the internet cafe part of the idea quietly dried up and blew away while I was shopping for properties and figuring out what kind of store layout would bring people in and where to get the machines. This, plus I'd agreed to be the main sysadmin, put down $300 of my own money on O'Reilly books and was trying to armwrestle other co-opnet people to not commit to Vservers 'check here to get our special search engine, check here to give all your clients secure web Email' features that'd kill me to get all of them implemented singlehandedly on top of setting up a webserver on a dedicated machine for the first time- and though I'd made it clear that I wasn't going to be able to do all this myself, nobody else ever got added to the roster to cover this.
I bailed, obviously. Stress was freaking me out, I was beginning to get physically sick and nothing was being resolved. So, back to the moral of the story- outperform, but know the context. It wasn't going to help that I could wear many hats and do many things- I wasn't capable of doing what would need to be done. The context was that I was wasting my effort attempting to deliver on the things we'd originally written into the feature list.
Don't be afraid!
Every time you try something it's an opportunity to learn. The founder of co-opnet would boast that he'd had 18 businesses, 14 of them successful(I may be misremembering the numbers a bit). Now, one could well ask, "If they were so successful why aren't you still doing them?" but there's one key point about this- you learn by doing. Investors and smart businesspeople would rather deal with a startup run by people who have _had_ a total failure- at least this makes it possible for the people to learn from their mistakes! Maybe to learn is not a sure thing, but it's better than nothing, and better odds than dealing with people who've either never tried, or have never failed.
Business is a process because _life_ is a process. You're not laying plans for the only thing you'll ever do for the rest of your life- you're laying plans for what you hope to be doing next month or next year. If that works out well enough that you do it your whole life, well then- did you remember to ask yourself, "Is this the way I want to live my life?" Because if you _must_ arrange things so that you can't fail, you might end up hosing yourself, ruining it for yourself. In a way, that's what happened to co-opnet... it was never okay to momentarily fail. If a customer was fussing about some web page thing, it wasn't "Perhaps you'd be better off with something like Geocities", it was panic and overhaul the whole concept of the website. If it was looking too hard to get the internet cafe going and there wasn't enough people or money to do the work, it wasn't 'commit to it more, make it happen', it was quietly lose faith and scrap the concept, go with less exciting, safer ideas.
I'm currently in debt for a year trying to start up a recording studio, building all sorts of equipment toward that end, and I'm happier because though my horizons are more limited (I'm hardly going and shopping for storefront properties! That was kinda fun), it's up to me to pursue them. So figure out what you want to do, and pursue that! Don't be afraid of failure. It happens to everybody, especially if you haven't fallen on your face much.
The most important thing is to learn, and keep learning. Any geek-type slashdot-reader linux-fetishing person is a lot more likely to be committed to this (who runs Linux without having to learn? I'm not sure that's possible). Hence, rejoice- you are probably the sort of person who _should_ be starting a business and doing that sort of thing. Enjoy it :)
If the law permits corporations to send police to drag away 15-year-old geeks for trumped-up and bogus crimes, why should we honor those parts of it?
In other words, are they more worried about forbidding the illegal copies, or are they more worried about forbidding the technology itself from citizens?
What more can one say?
One thing that's faking you out is this- the job is so much harder than you could possibly imagine. But that's OK too- sometimes it's good to have people around who are enthusiastic and don't realise a thing is impossible. And making movies is not strictly impossible- it's just very very involved and tedious.
I know I've been forming an 'open source recording studio': it's mostly because I want to 'push' acceptance of MP3s badly enough that I will record people for free if they are willing to release everything they do with me as MP3s unrestrictedly and look for other ways to earn actual money (like selling CDs or shirts or by gigging or whatever). However, you've got no idea how complicated, how involved it is to build a worldclass project studio- even if you're a hardwarehacker who can build his own gear half the time, and modify stock gear the other half. Everything from effects to the very cables themselves have to be made to demanding standards. You have to cast a wide net for certain key elements- for instance, I just arranged to get a Yamaha FM synth module, because certain types of tones (especially synthetic basses) need this type of synthesizer in order to get that sound. I'm about 1/3 of the way through replacing all the studio's patchcords with a special multistrand air-insulated variety I invented (the 8-channel snake is already built from this type of cable). Meanwhile, the studio's centerpiece, a 20-bit ADAT, is in Massachusetts being repaired, because when UPS drops such a thing in transit it goes 'smash'. This is all part of the day-to-day grind of building such a studio.
Now imagine your movie studio. There's no reason to limit yourself to webcams and basically produce a film that sucks- and the people are out there to give you access to equipment and skills- but again, the amount of work involved is not small. Who's your scriptwriter? Who knows how to direct- for that matter, who will you have that knows how to take a basic screenplay, work out all the locations, camera angles, different shots, and make a shooting script? When you have that, who gets the job of continuity and pays attention to the scene, shot over three days on a porch, only one of the days is 20% more overcast than the others- or keeps notes of who wears what costume when, and which props are in use or (like a glass of water) being altered over the course of shooting? Did he fire six bullets or only five? ;)
But the crazy thing is- this stuff is _fun_. It's fascinating. Even something so much smaller, like my recording studio, can be great fun- it's like the musical or film equivalent to having a great compiler and all the source to everything >;) it's positively liberating.
This is, perhaps, why I sometimes freak out colorfully in the pages of Slashdot.org against the threat of media being taken away from independent artists. Art is _glorious_. It can be a stunning, joyous outburst of human expression- and that doesn't necessarily mean 'nice'- to me, the last scene in Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil' is a joyous outburst of directorial brilliance and panache, because it fscks with your head so brutally and giftedly ;) by way of another tangent, in another Gilliam film, "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas", the sound engineering hits some fantastic peaks with the remastering of classic 60's songs into the film- this is yet another little detail work feature, but the resulting music is _so_ powerful and alive that it helps the film immensely.
You're right, Temporal- things _will_ be going this way soon enough. They already are- you have people trying to make films out of scripting the Quake engine, you have people working with 3dsMax, you have a whole passel of firewire-packin' iMac users with those new graphite machines that came with video editing software geared to consumers- it's happening, but it's happening in so many places at once that it's too big to spot at first. How many people have just a little piece of the picture, or a few pieces? I know I can write, I can put together shooting scripts, and I can come up with the sound engineering. There are so many people out there who have things they can do for such a project!
But the thing is, writing the software gets you only half the way there- but you do that half over and over and over again, it doesn't end. Once you have software you find people to use it, and their skills are not yours- they use it and the next thing you know, they need some changes and new behaviors or abilities and you go back and code some more and they run with that and then get back to you with some more ideas... that's how the film EFX industry works, though it's mostly broken into little camps, people working on proprietary technologies and accomplishing amazing things.
Now imagine what it would be like if the open source community got a critical mass of these types of technologies- and got all these different people working together on projects, new media projects. That could truly change the world.
I hope we still have a way to show our creations when we finally get around to creating them.
Sure Loki could do it. Andrew Meggs successfully ported Half-Life to the Mac, at which point Valve pulled the plug. Loki could do a great job porting Half-Life and Valve would still pull the plug and refuse to ship the port, judging from what they actually did to the actual Mac port. Therefore the fact that Loki could do it isn't relevant- Valve are actively blocking anything that isn't Windows, even to the point of writing off porting efforts and keeping the resulting basically finished port under tight wraps. There's no reason to believe they'd allow a Linux port to ship even if they had Loki do one. It's the same old song, 'inadequate market share to support...', better spend your money with companies which make even a token effort at supporting platform diversity. Valve actively discourages it and have killed a perfectly good Mac port based only on not wanting to support more than one platform. Sorry.
Andrew Meggs (iconoclast Mac gamecoder) basically _finished_ a Mac Half-Life port, at which point Valve killed the project and refused to release the port or the code. Meggs flipped out, I don't blame him after completing all that work. Their argument was that it wasn't economically viable to support it (the whole marketshare thing). Now, Mac users _pay_ for software, yet the project was killed. Mind explaining how you're going to convince the treacherous Valve to port to Linux when most Linux software is downloadable at no cost? Again- they have already had a Mac port done. It's practically finished and they are sitting on it letting it ROT. Even _if_ they hired a Linux programmer to do a port- let's look at the record, shall we?
Unfortunately there is only one (1) developer, our beloved Nazi Soup Kitchen Chef Austin Meyer, and I don't think he has any experience with Linux at all. On the bright side, X-Plane is already Mac and Windows, so it's therefore that much closer to a Linux port than something that was just Windows. X-Plane uses OpenGL, too. GFX are not great by today's standards but framerate _is_ great by today's standards, and again, nothing comes close to the flight model and capacity for design.
X-Plane forever! Aero geeks unite!
Would somebody please establish a public domain inventions site? Not a 'these are bad patents that got overturned' site, or a 'our little patent pool' site, but a SourceForge-like model for hosting public domain inventions, whether for software algorithms or processes or mechanical contrivances- anything that can be covered by a patent.
I already checked on IdeaBazaar and both the org and the com have been taken by God knows who- they are cheesy 'under construction' pages, and I have no great hopes that either will become what I'm talking about.
We need an unrestricted PD site in which ideas are intensely searchable and attributed to the inventor responsible for them- this would serve as a glaringly public resource for prior art (I have no faith in little personal websites being useful for this purpose), and could further innovation a great deal by providing unrestricted access to publicised inventions.
It's important that this not be bogged down by restrictions that would only stop the site from being used at all. Making a purely public domain site would be cheap (costing only the price of the hosting, and it could arguably be text-only for very efficient use of resources- that or small graphics for illustrations, never for decoration), and doing it with a media splash would ensure that the site _be_ legally accepted as public domain- all you need to do is get two corporations taking note of it, and then if one tries to take anything for itself the other will be ready to send lawyers to argue that it's prior art, and none of the FSF's money needs to get spent at all! :)
Seriously. We need this- we need a resource for publication of _all_ types of patentable ideas in the public domain, and we need it to stick to establishing stuff in the public domain, with no loopholes or extra conditions to confuse the matter. Please, somebody grab some domain that would work for this, and let's set something up. Particularly at first it wouldn't be that costly. I'd have already grabbed www.ideaforge.org and be offering it for nothing to sourceforge (assuming they like the idea), except that I don't have a credit card and since I registered airwindows.com Network Solutions seem to have stopped using any payment option I have available. God knows what I'll do in May when airwindows' two years runs out o_O
This is for the purpose of establishing prior art while allowing the inventor to conceal their invention with the intent of future patenting and restricting. If you want to establish prior art, set up a place where people can publicise their inventions on the web, and tip off as many people as possible (and the Patent Office) to the existence of this place. Then anything published there becomes prior art by virtue of publication on a page people are actually reading. Hopefully it would become popular. I can picture corporations reading such a site avidly, because if one corporation tried to patent something covered by such a place, a competing corporation would be able to spend its own money and lawyers proving that the idea was in public domain by referring to the idea site. This is very different from publishing on some dumb little web page. Establishing a high-traffic, glaringly public site would be crucial.
If someone invented a cure for cancer, AIDS, the common cold and measles and put it on the net, the idea would become ubitiquous and, indeed, no-one would think the IP was worth money.
There's a big difference between IP value and human value, and anything with enough human value will produce business around it even if the IP is valueless. Look at agribusiness- nobody is claiming that growing things is IP, but going out and doing it is worth money.
You can hold whatever viewpoints you like, but making things public domain is merely turning over the money-making to implementations- it's giving the corporations you like so much a chance to use their efficiencies of volume, while still allowing individuals to work on a much smaller scale.
That said, I entirely agree with part of your point here- to my way of thinking, what's needed is an IdeaBazaar (tm), like a weird hybrid of mp3.com, SourceForge and slashdot, where people can establish accounts and add to a huge monster database of easily searchable public domain ideas. This could further innovation immensely, and obviously it would not be restricted to software alone.
The primary motivation would be cooperation, but a very important side effect is that (as you rightly point out) this is the most effective defense against the threat of secret patents popping up in a field of endeavor to halt innovation and forbid further work. To those who (justifiably or not) fear that anything they come up with will be wrested from their hands by corporate lawyers... and this is the motivation for all this wild talk of FSF patent pools etc... such a scheme would be the ideal counter-agent, being a centralized database of 'ha, patent THIS!' ideas, glaringly public.
In addition, there's another level- since the place would be divided into personal areas (bazaar-like 'shops'), if any particular inventor was genuinely talented and doing this for personal reasons, their area would quickly become a hot-spot, with many corporations and individuals dropping by to take the nifty ideas. Such popularity could establish such an inventor as a noted figure, giving them useful publicity and also very likely bringing them offers to solve other problems, for money, outside the public domain (and sign over the solution to a corporation, naturally.) That, obviously, is worth money. Being publically accepted as someone who can think innovatively is definitely worth money. Your value is not your inventions. Your value is the kink in your brain that gives rise to your inventions. Never forget that...
Second, the method you describe is an urban legend. It doesn't hold up in court. Ask any lawyer. Ask any professional in a field where this idea's put forth- for instance, I saw this idea debunked in the field of song publishing, where the idea was to write songs and mail them to yourself to prove you had copyright. It doesn't hold up, it's worthless legally. Give me an afternoon with a kettle and a scalpel and I'll steam the bugger open and tamper with the contents- come on, you're not even advocating a seal of some sort.
I'll confess- I have some ideas in envelopes. I had 'em notarized, too. They're still worthless as proofs, and it's about time I opened them and did something else with them. My suspicion is that the best thing to do (in a 'libre' sort of way) is not to establish ways of stashing away ideas in storage, but establishing a way of publicizing the ideas, of giving them glaring publicity in a context where many people can see them and where they can be indexed and searched on by patent examiners, who'd be able to add a "step 247: do quick search of IdeaBazaar for related terms" to their process.
This would not be making any claims to protectability for the ideas involved- indeed, you could express ideas that were (unbeknownst to you) already covered by patents, harmlessly. But it would be perhaps the only sensible way to establish ideas into the public domain in such a way that they couldn't be taken back by the patent process. I know that for me (foolish though this may be) I'm not so concerned for nailing down My Claim to good ideas I may have. I'm justifiably concerned that somebody might sneak in, grab my idea while it's relatively unknown, patent it and then forbid me or anyone else to use it- or for that matter, that for every couple ideas I sit on, one is probably already working its way through the patent office to be locked up and forbidden to me. I find that situation untenable.
So, can we instead have something like SourceForge, only instead it's a heavily searchable hosting service for ideas that are to be established as public domain? Doing this could better the world, lead to widescale deployment of any ideas that are truly great ideas (including competing commercial products that compete on price not IP), and make such ideas widely accessible to individuals. I can honestly say that I would throw my entire portfolio (largely audio hardware, but I'm an inveterate idea-scribbler in all fields) behind such a scheme. Who's with me, and is there anywhere we can start this up?
Please give more detail. My personal take on this matter is that the 'defensive patent pool' idea is a poor one- it's basically lawyer bait and isn't even meant to lay claim to intellectual property, it's meant to weaken intellectual property by a counterattack strategy. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about that because I'm not sure how rabidly I need to restrict my intellectual property.
That, in turn, is partly because I'm swayed by the GPL-type ideas I've read, and in fact I use the GPL for software because my primary concern isn't stopping people from using my IP, but stopping people from pulling a fast one on me and preventing me from using my own IP)... but it's also for just the reasons you're trying to debunk, the sense that the patent field is impossibly costly for an ill-funded geek and effectively useless anyhow unless you're a well-lawyered corporation. The sense I get is that this is deeply inequitable, though I have no wonderful ideas for completely fixing it o_O
You say that traditional IP through patents is in fact more accessible than I think, and that it does me more good than I think. Why?
You are so totally wrong that anyone can expect to be a studio band in this day and age and be signed to a major label. Try it, just try it. Hell, even bands that _lip-synch_ tour now! You're making this up. How is a band supposed to self-promote except through touring? You don't seriously think the label does promotion? They only do that for about 3 albums a year for which they're prepared to do tonnage. They'll do it for the Spice Girls. They won't do it for you and they won't sign your band unless you agree to tour and promote the album for them. The tour may be written into the contract. You pay for it yourself out of the advance that is taken out of your supposed royalties.
There's no such thing as losing income that was never there in the first place. That's like saying that bands lose huge amounts of income because there aren't coin slots on every radio. That's like saying recording acts traditionally make money instead of losing it. That's totally flat wrong...
Do you have any fscking idea how much a band has to PAY to get a gig at certain well-placed clubs? How much a band would have to PAY to get radio airplay, to get a video in even light rotation on MTV? You're so off base it isn't even funny. Music has _never_ been a sensible job, and in recent years (the last twenty or so) it has become even worse, and it is the record labels who have done the most damage. Have you ever read a music industry contract? Did you know that jotted down notes on a memo pad (seemingly innocuous) routinely become a legal straightjacket for acts, forcing them to accept a deal whether they like it or not, or to quit the business entirely ('deal memos', in other words, that force the band into an unspecified deal, at which point all the leverage is on the label's side and the band takes a really BAD deal because they have no choice- in effect they have already signed without seeing the terms).
That's not even getting into the fact that large numbers of 'indie' labels are in fact wholly owned subsidaries of major labels, kept for their 'image', or semi-independent indies kept on a very short leash. You didn't know this? Let's see a list of the labels you're thinking of, so we can look up whether they are actually run by BMG or EMI or Sony.
I don't know who you are, AugstWest, but either you have a lot to learn about the way this industry works, or you're just a label flack busily fighting for your side. And that's cool, fight away if such things please you. But the picture you're painting is a damned lie. You're trying to induce guilt by suggesting that not supporting the industry is depriving musicians of money. It would be more accurate to induce guilt by suggesting that _supporting_ the industry is supporting a system in which musicians are routinely screwed with mind-bendingly nasty deals whose implications they don't even guess at until it's too late, in which musicians are routinely broken and left to have their bands break up, twisting in the wind with no label support, in debt to the record company from failure to recoup even modest advances, contractually bound to not play or record a note except with the record label that is now no longer interested.
If you want to support that, be my guest. I think that turning the acts loose with whatever mp3 popularity they can get is probably a lot more likely to result in some sort of income for the band. That becomes a question of business, and whether the band can charge much for a gig, can sell CDs out of their kitchen, can print up posters or have T-Shirts made.
At any rate, if you're worrying about artist income or artist rights or artists' welfare, you're worrying about the wrong things. Start figuring out how you can destroy the major labels if you want to do some real good. Things were out of hand even as early as the '80s, but now they are just ridiculous. Don't even support it.
Everytime I see a music listener like you asking why they can't just cut out the middleman and pay the artist a couple bucks, I get a little bit of badly-needed hope. Keep it up- and keep new formats like mp3 and old formats like Red Book Audio CD alive for me, man. When you're just a musician doing everything yourself without help or money sometimes it can take a long time to get things done- I'm waiting on an ADAT repair and need to build some equipment to do the MP3 mastering I need to do. Delays, costs, there's never enough time and I'm scared my chance might dry up and blow away (or be stomped on by the RIAA) before I get to step up to the plate and take my swing. Keep the faith! There are people out there who need you as much as you need them.
As another poster mentioned, so the old players can't play these discs? Why get a new player when you can get a DVD player made to handle the new, non-Red-Book format?
You'd be surprised how quickly it'd become possible to deprecate Red Book so thoroughly that the newest DVD players WON'T PLAY RED BOOK any longer. Only the copy protected version! But that's okay, because you can buy the music all over again... I mean, because you had it all MP3ed anyway! So who does this hurt?
Musicians. The artists. We are seeing the end of an era where, for the first time in history, you can master the preferred audio format (I'm not counting cassettes here) ON YOUR DESKTOP. You don't have to be signed to anywhere to produce the media. You can burn Red Book Audio CDs! The media becomes accessible to anyone with a CD burner!
We are seeing the first attempts to take that power back- and fussing about how expected new non-Red-Book-playing DVD players 'harm the consumer' is accurate but a horrible trivialisation of the real damage here. (And who wants to bet that the industry will preserve the rippable, uncontrolled, unwatermarked, publically-accessible Red Book Audio format? Who really thinks the industry wouldn't turn their huge collections into useless coasters?)
This story freaks me out worse than any DVD-oriented story I've read- because I had subconsciously trusted that Red Book would always be there for me, that the plain old audio CD with all its obvious faults and clear limitations would at least be a public media format I could count on. I mock the audio CD- I think it is no sort of audiophile wonder- but I trusted it to stick around, to remain hugely popular and common.
I can't say that anymore, in fact I can identify several plausible means by which the industry can deprecate it and shift popular audio onto something strictly industry-controlled- and I'm scared shitless, as Red Book was the media I hoped to use to sell to people who wanted a little more than mp3, which I intend to make lots of and give out freely.
I see the industry saying, "So you like MP3s, do you? Let's see you sell them!" and taking away the audio CD (which I hadn't thought possible), returning me to the days in which you couldn't produce popular media without going through the industry channels. This time, mp3s are likely to remain widely popular through sheer user saturation- but who the hell is going to sell them? I don't even WANT to try and sell mp3s! I think of them as radio, you should be able to listen to all the mp3s you want and only pay if you want to buy your own nice copy of something! And the day may come when indy musicians (again) can no longer produce any of the DVD-hosted, corporate-encrypted public media, without getting signed and spending huge amounts of money and time for the privilege of releasing public media.
This will happen through the deprecation of anything people know how to produce, such as cassettes and Red Book CDs. MP3s may well remain a huge ghetto of underground music- but it's technologically possible to relegate such musicians to only the (freely exchanged) MP3s and deny them access to any new popular media that people are used to paying money before. And that's how it will be done... and ten years from now, today's 'nice' Red Book-savvy CD player is going to look awfully old, most will have broken by then, and it'll be taking up space needed for the new DVD player which also plays the revised CD format, just not the old Red Book format...
I wish I was sleeping, so that this could be a nightmare :( I can't believe this is already starting to happen. And for anyone who doesn't think the industry can make you throw away all your old media and buy the music all over again- remember the CD?
I'm sorry, I don't give a rat's ass about whether or not some consumer hacker type can still copy it or not. I have a problem with the idea of a gradual shift over to formats I CANNOT PRODUCE! I've been going through absolute hell simply getting the ADAT I bought into working order (fortunately all the repairs are being covered by the seller, who didn't check the machine out enough before selling it), and I am not thrilled with the idea of a new generation of CD players made to no longer understand Red Book Audio. What the hell is happening to the world?
If I seem frantic, it's because I am already profoundly committed to pushing MP3s as hard as I can- and hoped to be able to earn small amounts of bread money by selling _master_ _CDs_ of the music that's being MP3ed. I know I can put out quality that's worth getting an 'audiophile' copy, and people who want to 'support the artist' can be encouraged to get that, I don't have to build timebombs into the mp3s or go for pay-by-play or anything psychotically disgusting like that.
Now the other shoe drops, and I find that the industry is quietly shifting the CD format out from under me to some other sort of format that won't play on normal CD players.
Bets that the industry won't phase out Red Book? Anyone?
Bets that the new format will be available to me and my little borrowed CD-Rom burner? Anyone?
What the hell do I have to do, try to make _cassette_ _tapes_ for God's sake, to get a medium with a future? Press vinyl? Actually I could do that very well- but NOT in tiny small runs. And there's the rub.
DAMN it! Anyone who can't see where this is headed is an idiot... and anyone who still claims MP3s are against the interests of artists in the face of this steady 'power shift' is crazy. I don't see MP3 copiers cutting off my access to the public- I see them enhancing it, in a strictly non-profit sort of way. I see the INDUSTRY steadily, subtly cutting off my access to the public, 'deprecating' the media I used to have increasingly easy access to- and I'm freaking out! What the HELL?
This morning when I got up I would not, in my wildest flights of suspicion and paranoia, have dreamed to suggest that the music industry was taking steps to DEPRECATE RED BOOK AUDIO.
What the _hell_? :(
ROFL
s/you didn't like them/they didn't like you/
HTH, HAND
The band from 7-11 that can only sell 20,000 copies gets say a $2000 advance. Maybe $10,000 if you insist on assuming a benevolent record company which aches to throw money at needy artists ;P
That lamer band STILL has to pay for all its recording and its tour out of that lamer advance, plus the label only _presses_ 20,000 copies and does absolutely squat to support the act. The act could sell out its pathetic little pressing and still not be noticed by the label it is in fact signed to. At which point they go back to 7-11, having mostly recouped the advance they've long since spent on the album (even $10,000 only goes so far, and frankly that seems high for a loser band with no business team), and having wasted years of their lives. Their role was no more than the industry's scratch ticket- in case they got lucky, the industry owns anything they record for the next ten years and rights to the publishing. All for a few grand that doesn't even buy them a professionally produced album- and then people like you come around thinking they got a quarter of a million dollars, just because they are a band signed to a major label! What?
Regarding the classical CDs- gee, maybe that's part of the reason why the consumers _and_ the bands get hosed so badly. It doesn't justify it. Are you suggesting that in spite of this, loser rock acts get big advances (albeit earmarked for recording the album and paying for the tour) even when they only expect to move 20,000 copies? And when the industry expects you'll move 20,000 copies, they only _press_ 20,000 copies, and getting more pressed isn't just a matter of selling the first ones- you have to convince the label that you're going to do that much better that it's worth going back to the pressing plant and churning out more, and that might not be the easiest thing to do...
Michael Jackson after Thriller was the most overexposed man in show business. That's very, very dangerous. Are you suggesting that you expected his later releases to do comparably well? You're not talking like an insider here, you should _know_ what I'm talking about if you're going to come across authoritative. The industry will gear up to 'do business' on certain albums, whatever you think. Look at Thriller itself- after surprisingly high volume with Off The Wall (not that surprising, it was a very very strong album), the industry knew to expect serious sales volume from the start with Thriller, okayed expensive videos that broke the color line on MTV, and prepared for extremely heavy distribution. It's the same with Bruce Springsteen's live set- after Born In The USA (which the record company _knew_ was strong, very strong), the industry geared up for a major promo blitz, backing it with the distribution.
You're being naive, I'm afraid. Just supposing some obscure album _did_ click with listeners so heavily that it was set to surprise the industry with monster sales- just where do you think people are going to BUY enough copies of such an album if they're not pressed and shipped to the stores? (Interestingly, with mp3 some random person might develop monster mindshare just by being copied around enough... something that cannot happen with the commercial products as they can't be legally copied so heavily)
Regarding G'n'R, hell- I like them pretty well myself, I'm not calling them the Monkees. But don't you remember the sales volume of, not Appetite, but Use Your Illusion I+II? Again, a breakout hit that basically sold out everywhere laid the way for the music industry to DO TONNAGE on the next album, and to put the earlier album into reprintings. GnR earned their shot- you might be interested to know that GnR are also near the top of the list as far as sound engineering is concerned, on top of everything else- but having done so, the industry decided to MAKE THEM into the megastars they became. And that was not up to GnR, it was up to the suits. They'd still be selling out to this day if they hadn't been given this treatment, but not as the superstars they became.
Regarding your take on Steve Albini's experience, are you out of your mind? I don't understand how you can claim that the quarter-million sellers are being hosed to pay for the loser acts WHEN THE ACTS FOOT THE DAMN BILL! Do some homework. If you want to be a recording act you PAY for the services you need. If you don't seem to be a quarter million seller, guess what? The advance will be basically squat! I'm sorry, there is no compensation as you suggest. In particular, it's lunacy to suggest that the bigger acts subsidise the minor ones when the minor ones are being hosed even worse, and when it's possible to do some homework comparing music industry accounting with other manufacturing industries. In the final analysis, what happened to the music industry is not a question of subsidizing small acts or defending narrow profit margins. What happened to the music industry is middle management, and corporate bloat. Nothing about this suggests that it benefits consumers- or artists.
Regarding your cited article, The Cost Of CDs, I quite agree. Two points:
- Classical Musicians DO NOT foot the bill for recordings of their orchestras
- Classical Musicians have a UNION which forces the record company to actually pay them scale.
This does not correspond with any situation in the rock and pop industries, and Steve Albini was not writing about classical music performers.Or are you suggesting that all rock musicians should be robbed to pay for oboe players? o_O maybe you're suggesting that rock musicians should have a union like the classical guys? At least the latter get paid.
Examples: the exploding Pintos, and the memo saying that fixing the problem would cost more than the resulting deaths- this is a beautiful example, because it forced the corporate officers to choose between intentionally spending money (thus breaking the rules) or potentially being liable for negligence (which would only happen if they were caught making such a decision). Naturally, they were compelled to take the path of least expenditure, as the rules of being a corporation were more immediate than the rules of not being negligent. Another good example is the Nestle flap over infant formula- to the corporate officers, giving third world nursing mothers infant formula (until they stop lactating at which point the infant formula stops being free) wasn't even a choice- the crime was ill-defined and not technically illegal, and the profitability was obvious. Thus, according to the rules of being corporate, they were forced to do this as not doing it would leave them open to charges that they were not maximizing profit for the corporation.
See how the rules pressure corporations to commit crimes, or hunt down ways to abuse the world that aren't technically crimes yet? It's a very powerful effect, and this bears thinking about.
GnR are a different case- they were superstar level in an era when sales volume was huge by comparison, but the industry was already ripping off most acts. My guess, since I've heard things to suggest that GnR _are_ in fact pretty wealthy, is that they had a manager or some business team who knew what to do when negotiating a superstar act with the industry. They were only a superstar act _because_ the industry picked them to be, and the industry only picks a few acts each decade to do that with (Michael Jackson, Springsteen around 'Born in the USA + the live set, Madonna etc), but they had what it took to be marketed that heavily- and that almost certainly means a GnR business team who on the one hand got the band a cut of the money, and on the other hand were ready to _guarantee_ product.
What you're seeing, Jamie, is the special cases- not the 'winners' in the sense of some lottery or luck, but the acts that combined musicianship on a commercial level with a business team that seriously kicked butt and could (a) negotiate contracts well for the band and (b) even more importantly, deliver product for the record company on a superstar level- handling the artist, augmenting promotion, managing all this so intently that they were like a superstar _company_ or business team, wildly outperforming the business teams of the other bands.
I love how Steve Albini is suddenly getting massive link-exposure on Slashdot. You're linking to a different copy than I linked to- I used the copy on this page, which has a more detailed costs breakdown on the band's expenditures, which you might find morbidly interesting. It's here: "Some of your friends are probably already this fucked". READ THESE ARTICLES, PEOPLE! It gets... _tiresome_ listening to otherwise really sharp and clued Slashdotters saying 'Gee, we should help support the artists though, so the music industry can't be all bad' because they don't know the reality and are only guessing. Would people believe the practices of Microsoft without proof? "They can't be _all_ _that_ bad!". Would people believe how dumb Netscape was without proof? (*g* disclaimer, yes, I'm using Communicator, but I understand JWZ has some feelings on the matter ;) )
Think about it. AOL already uses exclusively MS technologies and their largest userbase is emphatically MS users. Time Warner would get to add MSNBC to the roster and whatever MSN has to offer. It's really dead obvious and logical. Do you think that their fighting about instant messaging would concern them one tiny bit if there is profit and control in merging with each other?
Besides, MS needs to own more media conglomerates to help control its image :)
*evilgrin* I'm serious. Think about it. Wouldn't that be a logical move?
Because those channels EXIST... people always talk about mp3s in a context of ripping off major label artists. Well, when there's only two major labels and only three major label artists and you hear them EVERYWHERE you go, tell me, would you even want to rip a mp3 of them? I think not. It becomes a non-issue, quite naturally.
This is _good_. Because it's _bad_. And it can have very harmful effects on music industry consumers and artists. AND THAT IS AS IT SHOULD BE... the natural counterbalance to the impossibly overwhelming dominance of the industry (I foresee a future in which you can be blackballed for ever having released an mp3. Bowie, of course, gets exempted ;) ) is the increasing irrelevance of the industry to their original concerns- as they become entirely about media control and efficient profitable distribution, they become entirely not about music- the highest of ironies.
Once they're in that condition, it becomes much more easy for grassroots support and underground or indie artists to gain public attention through things like the web and mp3s.