Re:GNU Free Documentation License
on
GPL for Books?
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· Score: 2
Thank you! I've been wanting to lay the groundwork for a project of mine, revolving around the studio I'm building (the one in which I keep saying I'll record OSS-writing mp3-releasing hacker musicians for free, which I will)
My problem is this: I have a VERY LARGE amount of technical innovation concentrated in the equipment of this studio. Some of it is as simple as circuit tweaks for the equipment (such as a set of modifications for my vintage Small Stone phase shifter, or the rebuilt mixer and soon-to-be-rebuilt analog daughter card of the LX20 ADAT), and some of it is considerably more elaborate, most of all the monitor speakers which involve processes that are outright patentable. In addition there's a vinyl record turntable design which my scientist father (who holds several patents himself, in infrared sensor instrumentation) feels is also patentable.
I want to make all this available to OSS hardware hackers and audio geeks, but I don't want anyone to rip it all off my website and publish a book, basically. I don't mind people working with the ideas, even companies selling stuff based on them, but I don't want restrictions placed on 'em or to be eclipsed by a more well-funded operation that can move quicker and publish on a large scale to people who've never heard of me.
I'm very enthusiastic about RMS's proposed license! I'd like to know when he has a final version worked out, and if my needs can help shape this I'd like to become involved. Basically, where the soul of free software lies in the code, and the key concept is keeping it flowing freely, the soul of writing is in attribution- and the problem is not in making it flow, but in keeping reference to those who created it. It's not _hard_ to keep writing flowing freely, the hard part is doing anything other than hosing the original 'developer' of the writing. The problem is that you _want_ J. Random Whoever to be able to shop a version of the work to a publisher, and let them print up a copy- but you also want to be able to specify that the cover has to say "This is a version of Book X, which is freely available for download on the Web at (foo.bar.baz.com)" so people know they are not forced to spend money for that person's modification of your work. But they still get to make the published version, if they feel a strong market exists for such a paper printed volume! So can you- or you can just web-publish and if anyone wants a paper version in stores they can go to the trouble of doing so.
With all the hysteria over intellectual property these days, I have to wonder whether the future will be very different- with such wide access to ideas and data, it seems that information will be valueless- and only WHAT YOU DO WITH IT will have value. If somebody can print up a wonderfully well organised and illustrated version of a pile of great but unkempt ideas I put on the web- THEY SHOULD. I still get to have the ideas, but if there's a market for a cleaned up polished 'rendition' of those ideas, why shouldn't someone get a chance at selling this additional effort they put in?
Typically, there's one caveat- watch out for the corporations, any such proposal needs to at least understand the potential for aggregate entities like corporations to steamroller anything in their path. However, the inequity of this mustn't stop individuals from trying to interact socially in a world of ideas and exchange them freely- because frankly, you still lose if you become paranoid and do nothing and hide every bright notion you have. It is simply impossible to coexist or compete with corporations- so the idea is to somewhat ignore them in such a way that, although you're arguably giving them the ability to steamroller you, you're also cooperating with other individuals in a mutually beneficial way.
It looks like RMS's Free Documentation License could be an important part of this equation, and if he doesn't get it finished soon I may have to start using the draft;)
If your favorite artist is some sort of internet artist with no industry contract (note: most 'indie labels' you may have heard of are also owned outright by the industry labels, they are fake), then you can support your favorite artist directly.
If they signed, you probably can't help them at all, certainly not by buying their record- you probably don't have the power to help them break even, so they are going to be going up for contract renegotiation from a position of weakness and debt anyhow. Being in such a position of weakness is even worse than being in a position of naivete- many bands simply break up under the stress, typically to be not allowed to perform or record music independently (gee, like kevin mitnick not being allowed to hack), due to the contracts they signed off on, for a period of time that can be quite arbitrary, say five years perhaps.
Regarding your 'maybe I'm too naive but': who are you going to believe, your optimistic sense that is not backed up by observation and reality, or Steve Albini, who's been working in the industry as a producer and engineer for years, decades, and has been responsible for hit albums?
Better you should turn to the real indie scene (still vaguely happening) and the mp3 scene, and be optimistic about that, and optimistic about those people having a chance to work hard for their money and earn a little of it. Being optimistic about the industry is kind of like being optimistic about AOL or Microsoft- you get to feel nicely fairminded for a few minutes, and then you get proven wrong yet again. At what point will you set aside the 'can't be all bad' concept (which is VERY VAGUE- you think I'm claiming they eat babies or something?) and figure out, "This is exactly how bad they are. The individual people may have these various merits and be fine people, but as a collective entity (a corporation), they are THIS bad and you gain nothing by going along with it."
Your figure for the artist's dollar is gross. Subtract a fixed ten percent for record breakage (yes, I know they are CDs and don't break, but the charge is still taken out of the artist's cut). Then take the remaining amount and write it off against the advance, from which the artist PAYS FOR ALL THE STUDIO RECORDING, all the MANAGEMENT, all the TECHS and in fact any TOUR involved as well, meaning that the advance gets spent doing all the things you think the label pays for.
Guess what? The artist did not recoup the advance. The artist did not earn money- the artist _owes_ money for his trouble. This happens most of the time- do some homework, find out what the reality of the situation is.
This sort of comment reminds me of a common logical fallacy- imagine Johnny and Jimmy arguing about the shape of the world. Johnny says, "The earth is round!" Jimmy says "The earth is flat!" Their mom comes around and tries to calm the argument: "You should compromise. The truth is usually somewhere between the extreme points of an argument. So, the earth is a cube."
Sorry, Etam: though you may think it is unreasonable and hard to believe, the earth is round, and artists DO NOT get a dollar per CD. As I explained, pro music is about the most expensive hobby you could have- and after all the contractual requirements of signed bands are fulfilled (thou shalt make a video, thou shalt do a tour, thou shalt record at a good studio, paying for ALL OF THIS out of the advance which your royalties go toward repaying) the artist, far from getting 'a share of the pie', works very hard for absolutely nothing to subsidise the corporation that signed them.
Still don't believe me? Read this. Steve Albini is the producer/engineer who did The Pixie's 'Surfer Rosa', PJ Harvey's 'Rid Of Me' and many other great albums. Scroll to the bottom and read the figures on what happens to three million dollars worth of CD sales, and exactly why the artists come away with four thousand and thirty-one dollars each after a quarter of their contract is through, and are fourteen thousand dollars in debt to the record company, after selling A QUARTER MILLION COPIES.
And what's annoying is that _MP3.COM_ are being annoying. I'm glad I'm still building the studio and haven't uploaded my back catalog anywhere yet- I don't approve of this mp3.com tactic at all.
It's lunacy to believe that they are licensed to 'perform' or distribute spare copies of someone's music to them just because the person owns the music. THEY do not. Can we say 'sickeningly obvious'? Can we say 'guilty, guilty, guilty'? Any judge can, and will.
The frustrating part is that I'd been subconsciously counting on mp3.com to be there for me when I started putting large amounts of material out there. I don't have anywhere near the resources to host even my back catalog on my own web server, it'd break me. mp3.com were ready to host as much as I could come up with, for equal rights to distribute it and the banner ad revenue. It was a truly win/win situation, and now they've totally obliterated their perfectly legitimate stance as a hosting service for all the LEGAL mp3 artists, by attempting to also host everything they have no rights to.
For God's sake, they wouldn't host cover tunes from their artists, and now this? Please tell me there's an mp3 site out there which will host _many_ megs of data for nothing, and which ISN'T STUPID? It'd be better still if it was a big name, but AFAIK mp3.com is _the_ big name in this area, and they're absolutely blowing it and endangering the wellbeing of all the artists who believed in them- and screwing up the plans of the artists who hadn't got round to establishing a serious mp3 presence yet.
Or, perhaps, is this a rock-and-roll style publicity stunt? Could mp3.com be planning to cave at the last minute, _after_ becoming front page news all over the world, but before actually taking any damage? And then turning around and going 'Why, it's OK, really- look at ALL THE GREAT BANDS we LEGALLY have! Why, we don't need those stinky old mainstream CDs at all!'
Oh, I hope it's something like that. That'd be worthy of Malcolm McLaren- truly a cynical and ruthless bid to manipulate the media and the industry. Please, mp3.com, be that cynical! You're not helping anybody one bit if you're serious about this Beam-It stuff. It's crazy, it's stupid, you're guilty, you have no right and no reason to believe you should have such a right and IT'S A SIDESHOW TO YOUR REAL PURPOSE! Support your own damn bands, not the industry!
No, it costs less than $2, plus shipping and distribution are many times more efficient than the days of LPs (drastically improving profitability in shipping of merchandise), and the actual CD packages are less fragile than the Philips cassette cases (of which large numbers would get broken in shipping or crushed and shattered).
Did you think these industries _haven't_ doubled and quadrupled their profit margins in recent years, or that they _aren't_ attempting to continue this doubling of profit margins past all boundaries of common sense and free market economics? Welcome to the Machine. Don't feel so bad- look on the bright side, the musicians and artists pay even _more_ for the privilege of being on the other end of the megaphone!:P you almost certainly make more than they do, even if you work at Wal-Mart!
My argument would be that musicians have never been able to extract pay-per-listen from people- why should that change now? Think about radio for a second. Sure, it's (literally) the same 8 songs in heavy rotation with an extended collection of older cuts to pad out the very small playlist (once it averaged nearer 'top 40', then 20, then 14, and so on...), but think again. When you turn on your radio, are you charged per song? No, you are not. Radio has pervaded the music business since well before payola, and has established the well-ingrained habit that you DON'T PAY for just listening to whatever music's there. You pay if you want to own a copy and listen to it whenever you want- or if you want a fancy copy, like the old Mobile Fidelity half-speed remasterings of rock albums- you pay for other stuff over and above just hearing the music, such as your ability to control the music or to get a better quality version.
This is even more apropos given mp3s, as they are as 'free as radio' for all practical purposes, but they are not a desirable audio quality compared to the source material. They can be quite listenable but nobody would argue they are a fidelity improvement over the original full-bandwidth data.
So, it's like a realworld of that AT+T feel-good ad, "One day you can watch the movie you want.... _when_ you want", only it's happening with audio first. It's like massively parallel radio- a lower fidelity version of the music is broadcast from somewhere- as a CD- and then countless people 'tune in' to the signal, and keep 'rebroadcasting' it, causing the effective bandwidth to become nearly infinite. A song released today need never die or drop off the charts- mp3 can keep it before the attention of the interested listeners for months, years. Any of those people can seek out the source CD and buy it if they like, just as if they were hearing the tune on the radio and wanted to own their own copy.
In an age when you have stuff like the Klipsch Permedia computer speaker system sneaking formidable audio performance into people's lives by disguising itself as a home theater system- it will become more significant, this distinction between the lower quality 'broadcast' of mp3s, and the performance of CDs or audio DVDs. What the industry _should_ be doing if it wasn't corrupt, insane, and bereft of common sense, is this: encourage mp3s as much as possible, especially 128K encoded ones that really compress a lot, and discourage _other_ types of downloadable digital media which might in future deliver performance closer to the store-bought physical media. I can tell you that you can get _very_ good sound out of mp3, but there are limits- the risk is that if the industry can step on mp3s and push some encrypted higher-quality format, said format would only get cracked eventually leaving the industry with the same problem and even less incentive for people to buy the physical media.
'Secure format' is an absurd term. Whose security is at stake? Not the consumer's, the record industry's. How secure is it? Completely unsecure- the better the format, the more of a risk it poses when it's eventually cracked and turned to 'warez', as you call it. They need to rent a clue and figure out that digital formats are like radio- and set things up so that everybody's happily swapping the equivalent of AM radio, rather than invent stereo FM radio and then attempt to build a coin-slot into all receivers which is only going to be massively defeated by the listening public.
If you're so ready to give 50 cents to a musician you like, bless you my friend;) and I'd rather give the music to you, and then offer you EXTRA FINE versions of the same music for if you want it to sound extra nice. That way, you can have it when you're hurting for money, but if you can afford it, then I can sell you something _real_ that you can have and do what you like with, even sample bits of it and make your own music.
Check _that_ out- a balance sheet for a typical major act _success_ on the order of 3 _million_ dollars of sales selling a quarter million copies. Gross profit, $710,000. Artist Royalties, $351,000. Actual artist _income_ after all items on balance sheet and recouping of advance- $4,031.25!
That's right- after paying for the studio, mastering, video budget, processing+transfers etc, after the tour (earning 50,000 gross on expenses of 50,875 not counting manager or agent's cut), the band that got a 'quarter million dollar' advance to pay for all the tech toys and tours and professionals, the band that made THREE MILLION dollars of business for the record company, have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.
You're crazy if you think almost anything wouldn't be an improvement. I don't know, maybe I can't satisfy you that mp3s can help artists. How exactly is mp3 exposure going to cost the artists _more_ than pay to play in LA and all that crap? At what point does mp3, free-as-spam-but-less-annoying distribution start to make artists capable of doing better than the industry- say, earning them _half_ as much as they'd make working at 7-11? You have no idea how fucked musicians actually are (to use Steve Albini's apt term for the condition...). Are you a musician? I am, and I'm building a studio- I've already talked with one slashdotter about recording him free for the purpose of making mp3s, and I've been talking to another artist I recorded who's currently living in Lithuania, about putting some of his back catalogue out there. Exposure is life- but there's something more important that that, and it's control and cashflow.
When artists don't have control over their own businesses, they're hosed- and that's what happens with the normal industry, it's 'Let us take care of it!' and the results are a damned wasteland. mp3 does not directly make artists money- but guess what? It is a key part of a strategy for the artist to take control of their own destiny and start running things themselves. Some might be tour-minded, and build on their talent and a popularity in mp3 to travel the world on a shoestring, paying their way by booking small gigs, saving up for their own PA and equipment and RUNNING THE BUSINESS effectively. They might make a bit more than working at a 7-11! But they'd be living their dream and not paying to play. Some (I like this option) will do extensive studio work, to become able to create amazing high-fidelity sonic experiences in music- and would give away the mp3s forever, but if you want to help them, BUY A CD. Not even an mp3.com cd (interestingly, mp3.com does not go for exclusive rights like a record label does), but a homegrown CD. First few, burned off a CD-Rom burner, and then it's time to save up and have a crate of CDs burned professionally- there are loads of people who can do this and throw in 1, 2, 3 or 4 color process inserts, even shrinkwrap, having the whole thing done to a 'mainstream' quality level. Of course if you're in it for the long term you set yourself up with the physical plant, printing your own art or pressing your own CDs in industrial duplicators... and so it goes.
Yeah, it's hard work, but you can earn money through hard work, and you can't really earn money with the industry, so why not? And mp3 is one very important thing- it is promotional material that YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR! You don't have to PAY people to distribute mp3s of your work. They will anyway, particularly if it's any good! What you do from that point will illustrate who you really are, and whether you deserve to earn anything...
Go read this: Major Labels: some of your friends are probably already this fucked. Think about it. One part of Tim Yohannon's intro article is particularly telling, I think: 1.It doesn't really matter what you say or what you sing, but how you conduct your business and what your motivation for doing it is. 2.It is only by being completely separated from governmental and corporate sponsorship, collusion, or connections that one can really claim to be "alternative" or "independent". 3.Unless there is an ongoing class consciousness to one's communication and expression, then it is inevitable that you will be assimilated into mainstream values, no matter how culturally "hip" you attempt to be."
This neatly sums up what I want to do with my abilities as a musician and sound engineer. It's not _about_ what style I use or what gear I can offer in my studio- it's about why I'm doing it and where I'm going with it.
For a long time, I didn't know what I wanted to do with that side of my life. I knew that the dream of being a musician for money was a fantasy, but I didn't have what you might call the radical consciousness to come up with any alternative. I sort of wanted to work with the tech side of things, but to what end? To be signed to a corrupt machine and help con other people and probably spend all my own money doing it? To languish obscurely playing with mixers? Who's listening? What would I be doing it for?
I think I have a better handle on these questions now. I'm siding with the punks, the indies, freaks like Zappa (the greatest independent music businessman ever, long live Zappa!). I am dedicating myself to giving people access to tools and information they need to do this kind of work and produce this kind of art themselves, rather than thinking they need to buy into the industry game to get it done. Sometimes I'll make money. Sometimes I'll spend it. Right now I'm in debt and am sorting out the hopped-up ADAT I'll be basing the studio around. (tweaker alert- Alesis LX-20 is a _beautiful_ machine to soup up, all the audio circuitry is on a daughtercard you can remove and tinker with! And there's loads of clearance for substitute parts, and you could shield the whole audio daughtercard. Sweeeeet).
So, highly-scored AC, you may say MP3 is just another word for warez to you- I say you don't sound like a musician yourself, and are not qualified to pass judgement on this. I am, and I've done more homework than you- and I would say conclusively that MP3 is the new radio, and furthermore it is a breakthrough in public access to production of media that's equal to open source and Internet collaboration on software. There are many similarities.
You don't directly make money on mp3. You don't directly make money on commercial music publishing either, you can play rock star for a few months if you're lucky and end up in debt for thousands of dollars. The difference is that with mp3 YOU GET TO CONTROL your business- if your music doesn't have a business, don't expect to make money, but if you do, even something as random as selling band mousepads or nerf guns imprinted with the band logo or pet rocks, you get to totally control your mp3 output, use your own mixes, sell your own merchandise and hire your own people and run all this yourself, taking whatever profit there is for yourself.
Do you really think major label acts get to choose their own mixes (hint: Nirvana was not allowed to use their own mix for "In Utero", you think you'd get more clout than Nirvana circa 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'?), manage their own expenditures (bands are legally required to produce things like videos under contract, but it is the band that pays for ALL aspects of this, not the label) and so on?
It's not so different from open source. It's really not. Power is being able to control YOUR OWN situation. Using mp3 as a promotional tool is an important part of being able to control the other aspects of your own music business- you give it away but you're not signing yourself over to any contractual requirements, are not waiving your rights to your own material or signing it over to the corporation outright. This is incredibly powerful.
Or would you rather go and personally try to buy space for your single on Top 40 radio?
"I don't think any of us really want that, because if everyone goes and gets pirated DVD's, the movie industry takes a serious blow."
In all seriousness, as the movie industry enters an era where production costs are made cheaper through use of computers (if not now then in two years) and duplication and distribution costs are an order of magnitude cheaper (quiz: how much merchandise as VHS tapes can you fit in a truck? Now, how much as DVDs?), wouldn't a real free market _have_ them take a serious blow in the form of competition doing the same thing at the _real_ profit margins of the industry? Apparently the actual breakeven costs of DVDs are nearer three dollars, as the modified 'disposable' DVDs are being suggested at such a price, and all the copying and transportation costs are a tiny bit higher than regular DVDs due to an additional process.
The movie industry _should_ take a serious blow to their pricing structure. It is foolish to argue that they should be protected from capitalism- look at what the opposite condition did to the computer hardware industry! Sure things have been a bit tough for computer hardware makers, but huge progress was made. Why shouldn't there be huge progress in the movie industry? What gives them the right to rot happily on piles of money? Let them fight it out in the marketplace like normal people.
Instead of being sent glossy catalogs, _mail_ DVDs with video advertising and multimedia. The consumer doesn't have to risk hosing their PC, and you get audio, video, and even some program logic to play with. It's a fantastic advertising concept, and safe as houses- DVD players would either play the thing, or not, it wouldn't hurt them if it was 'evil' or a trojan.
Of course, why the hell would you want your advertising circular to _expire?_ You'd want it to be permanent. You wouldn't pay an extra 2 cents for the tech to make your DVD quit working. That's crazy. Now for the evil part- brace yourself;)
If you can sell disposable DVDs at a profit of a penny for $3.00, and the degradation tech costs a penny and all of shipping and distribution costs a penny and the entire content costs a penny, then making your advertisement DVD as a disposable will cost you $2.96 for the media. On the other hand, it costs less to make the permanent sort of DVDs that are sold for $20 and up...
Isn't it interesting that this proposal reveals the true profit margins for the industry? The media clearly costs well under $3. So why are unit costs higher than VHS tapes, for which the media and duplication costs are drastically, drastically higher? Something stinks here.
I just hope we (as in, the public) end up eventually being able to do things like make little films or advertisements using this type of media, and being able to distribute them. It concerns me that these people on the one hand are successfully maintaining a trust holding the cost of DVD media at many times its free-market value (it should be _less_ than VHS, with some allowances made for additional media, but duplication and media costs are orders of magnitude lower than VHS), and on the other hand are also wanting to keep access to this technology out of our hands so only they can produce the media. That's just wrong, wrong, wrong...
Jon, please just shut up about this. You are wrong.
There are flame-free zones on the net- I've seen one. It was and is a Usenet newsgroup, co-hosted on a private news network dedicated to that group and others like it, and it was created as refuge from a flame-saturated situation which showed no signs of ever easing up, i.e. the group alt.fan.furry. (If you want to see what real flames look like, go look at that- even so, there is some normal dialogue there).
A subgroup was tired of being flamed and left to create this new group, and in the charter specified that it was orthoganal to AFF interests and also specified that flaming and argument was offtopic, that nobody's opinions were to be denigrated but also that you weren't to denigrate anybody or anything. THIS WORKED. It continues to work and has worked even in the face of the occasional attack from flamers or 'meowers' or whoever. But it asks a lot- more, I think, than you, Jon, can give.
How often, Jon, do you refrain from denigrating people or things? It appears to me that you wish to have flames against you outlawed by rule or peer pressure, but you still want to flame hotheaded adolescents, corporations, movie theaters, you name it. This is unfair- and you don't deserve peace unless you are willing to start extending it.
As for myself, I've spent a lot of effort mediating and protecting this mysterious non-flame newsgroup I speak of (in which everyone has every freedom except the freedom to denigrate which must be exercised elsewhere). I compare it to Slashdot and I think it would be vastly inappropriate to subject Slashdot to such conditions. Never mind that it can't happen because it'd have to be written into the charter and have all slashdotters agree on it- even so, Slashdot is simply too feisty and controversial to function under such a system. Its primary value is that of a crucible in which the newest tech and the most bitterly contested issues are brought to light and argued about by the readership until a reader can see all the points of view and find a personal viewpoint on the matter. Even in your own articles the most important work is done by the readership, not you. Far from 'self-appointed border guards', a deeply derogatory description, these people are Slashdot.org, something you seem to not understand in your desire to be superior to them and control or silence them.
And on a personal note, I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with your characterisations of your enemies. Am I the 'Invisible Katz-Critic'? To read your take on the matter, I am an illiterate, adolescent, cowardly hothead primarily motivated by jealousy and spite, with nothing to say. I just want to take a minute to rebut this, knowing that you are not even deigning to read this, but that others are, and can form their own opinions on my character.
I am not illiterate. I've been a writer for years, and have written for the international audio journal "The Absolute Sound" (v18, issues 87 and 88). I have fiction writing up on the web, including my first novel, "The Kings of Rainmoor".
I am not adolescent. I was born in '68 and am 31 years old. Maybe this is not the ravages of old age, but it is certainly not adolescence, and I prefer it that way. I hated my adolescence and prefer being an adult.
I am not a coward. It particularly rankles after I've constantly put myself out there, willingly risking 'dekarmaization' from what fans of yours remain, to criticise your failings publically, under my own name. My email is available- you certainly have not used it. I'll make a special one, just for you: IKatz@airwindows.com to make replying as easy as a single click on a word in the middle of the text you're (not) reading. I don't believe for a second this will work, but what more can I do? I honestly considered posting my full address and telephone number, might still do so someday in a fit of bravado, but this would fall more accurately under 'I am not stupid';)
I am not motivated by jealousy. Jon, I've had a feature all to myself on Slashdot too. I can have another one any time I want, under two conditions- one, that I come up with a topic that is genuinely interesting and worthy of Slashdot and the attention of its readers, and two, that I put enough effort into writing it to justify its massive virtual publication. You seem to be free of either of these restrictions- am I jealous of that? No, because they are self-imposed restrictions reinforced by the necessity of going through Slashdot editorial circles. If I had story posting access like you, I can only say that I would be a great deal more sensitive to the responsibility of it.
I am not motivated by spite. Jon, you abuse your position. You come out with the damndest notions and use your access to media to dump them on the world without a thought to your responsibility.
I just replied to a poster on your last story- who thought I was making a straw man argument about your advocating (in the Ticket Booth Tyranny articles) that Slashdotters should go sneak children into dirty movies without consulting the childrens' parents. My reply was to _quote_ you directly, and you advocated just this. Can't you see this is wrong? Can't you see that you have responsibilities that come with access to media that reaches large numbers of people? You have been misbehaving, and continue to do so- now you are mounting a little crusade all your own, and can anyone guess the purpose? It's not landing that big movie deal, or sneaking kids into cinemas- no, what you are doing now is making a concerted effort to damage the reputation, the validity of Slashdot discussion forums, just because they criticise you!
Rob Malda, do you really want this guy publically denigrating _your_ _creation_?? That's crazy! It's also harmful- if self-moderating discussion boards develop the public image of mere usenet groups (and who is to say even these are valueless? Russ Albery's Rant) then a major and novel mechanism for social equality is cut off at the knees. It is _important_ that people learn to respect the value, and tolerate the jarring nature, of an 'unfiltered feed' of opinion and information. It will be a tremendous victory if people can learn to coexist and thrive in an environment which contains both approval and bitter disapproval, and allow the full range of opinion to get out there, allow the public to get the whole story (including rants and even nonsense and spite) and make up their minds about it.
Except, Jon Katz does not _trust_ the new media. That which he likes, such as R-rated movies, he considers a freedom, and overrides anyone else's opinion thereof. That which he doesn't like, such as detailed, bitter criticism of himself and his whole ethic? Well, we'll assume that he does not try to have it silenced outright. (Only CmdrTaco and other Slashdot staffers can answer this, as they are the only ones who'd hear if Jon had been steadily canvassing for the banning of ACs, his pet peeve.) Assuming that he has not been surreptitiously trying to get ACs shut off, his reaction is instead to attack their reputation! It's been posted in this very thread that the overall karma value for the AC is 1975- that's a very positive moderation total! Yet to listen to Jon, they are all hothead adolescents- and the unstated implication here is that such people should not be listened to, do not have a right to an opinion. One wonders if Jon felt the same way about adolescents in the 60s when he was one...
Summary? Jon Katz abuses his position, and has increasingly been trying to discredit the very publically-moderated system that makes Slashdot what it is. He needs to be dropped. Period.
"Adults: Fight Ticket Booth Tyranny. Observe Take A Geek Kid To A Restricted Movie Day this Labor Day. Find a smart 13-year-old who wants to see something off-limits and take him to a movie, or, once during that long weekend, go to a nearby movie theater and help kids trying to get in. Even better, volunteer to take kids you know, too."
Please explain how this says what you thought it said. I realise it sounds like I was making a strawman, but read this quote from "Ticket Booth Tyranny, Part 2". I'm sorry, but Katz is not as responsible as you thought he was. You're confusing him with some of the legitimate gripes of parents who responded to the thread. Katz is the one who said, "Find a smart 13-year-old who wants to see something off-limits and take him to a movie" and "go to a nearby movie theater and help kids trying to get in". Then he suggests helping kids that you know "too".
I might be caught getting irate and making strawmen sometimes. Not this time. This time I derided Katz, uniformly, for his actual actions.
"As a non-geek who usually (for a variety of work reasons) writes in Microsoft Word, some members of this community have been trying to drive me off the site ever since I arrived. Often, their attacks have little to do with what I think or write, mostly to do with the fact that I'm different, an outsider, a non-programmer who made different technology choices."
No, Jon, I'm afraid that these attacks often have much to do with what you think and write. The trouble is, you won't even entertain the idea, so instead you have to demonize people who (every so often) are trying to help you.
People were going nuts trying to get you help to use Linux, and you played with a storebought computer, let your dog play with the motherboard, and have then ignored it completely.
People were going nuts trying to get you to stop using _corrupted_ ASCII encodings (you see, Microsoft has changed the encodings for ISO/Latin in such a way that when you use Word and smartquotes it produces false characters when decoded with normal ASCII). You basically ignored this, and now that you seem to be doing it properly you've formed the opinion that people are mad at you over what brand of word processor you use (and not, instead, mad because of your going along with an embrace-and-extend tactic and bringing it even here to Slashdot and then behaving like it's insignificant).
People tried to make sense of your crusade to sneak minors into dirty movies. I saw responsible parents expressing their shock and outrage that you'd seek to overrule the parenting they wanted their own kids to have. Where are your words acknowledging the harm your misguided notions could do them? Where is the humility to let you admit that you are not the ranking parent of everyone else's children?
Lastly, I myself made all too much sense of your courting Hollywood- in an era where multinational corporations are (as you yourself argue!) gaining all too much power, in an era where Big Media (as you yourself argue!) has too much control and is rapidly gaining more under a smaller and smaller set of controlling players, you, Jon, chose to seek their approval all of a sudden, and I have some suspicion that by leveraging your 'street cred' at Slashdot and Rolling Stone, you may even get your movie, and then it will literally be true that you will be in the pay of Big Media. Choke that down if you can swallow nothing else I'm saying- it is the truth, and it is the essence of what you are really seeking for yourself.
And then you have to point out that you are a paid columnist! "Most people who aren't paid columnists will go elsewhere." Do tell, really? Is this the reason you stick around? As a matter of fact, I had a Slashdot column all to myself, and I can tell you that _I_ didn't get paid, nor did I ask to. I wrote an essay on levels of interface. Some people actually said things like 'brilliant' about this essay. Some people flamed it like crazy. Some people pointedly found fault with some of my ideas. And I LEARNED from the criticism.
I don't actually know if your 'paid columnist' remark means you're paid by Slashdot. It could be read that way, or it could be typically disjointed bluster to make you look like a professional (which is rather a stretch!) If this is true, then I can only say that I would very nearly pay you _not_ to post articles to Slashdot. It does honestly bug me that you are allowed free rein to bluster on, that you resent showing even the minor courtesy of using proper ASCII, language and spelling, that in effect you seem to have formed the opinion that you have a _right_ to be 'published' at Slashdot. There is no such right, and I still don't know what Rob Malda sees in you that he continues to put up with your unpleasant and touchy attitude towards Slashdot's readership.
The traditional journalism is dead here, Jon. If you cannot summon up the humility to exist in a context _with_ your own readers and suffer them to reply to you even when they aren't saying things you want to hear, then you're going to be left by the wayside in favor of people who can handle that more turbulent dynamic, thrive on it, and grow from it. There is no soapbox for you to stand on. You are no better than us.
The point you're missing is here, and yes, it's an interesting point to discuss: "Once we invested time, effort and money to write this software, how can we avoid having someone larger than us profit from our labors at our expense?"
If you assume for someone else to profit, you have to lose, you will avoid this situation at all costs.
If you consider it possible for yourself and another to both profit in some manner, then you will be more inclined to allow this situation to happen.
There are good arguments on both sides- for instance, when you include corporations in the equation you have to understand that, while you may wish a mutually-profitable situation, the corporation is legally bound to not only try to profit, but to try to hurt you and cause you to lose, if you are in the same line of business. It cannot cooperate with you. But at the same time, if the corporation is copying your GPLed source, there is a limit to how uncooperative it can be. It can take your code, use it, outmarket you and then withhold its changes until release- but then it has to let you have them, and even without using your code it still outmarketed you, get used to it;)
The basic issue is simply this: how important is it that you be able to prevent someone else from profiting by your labors? Are your labors so miraculously advanced beyond the rest of the industry that (a) nobody can help you with them, and (b) they'd make a significant difference in the performance of your competitor? This is software, people- there's never been much of a link between quality and profitability. If there seems to be a gain from cooperating, consider the possibility that 'having someone else profit from your labors' is just a chance you'd have to take.
This whole 'winner takes all' concept seems to have grown out of the years of Microsoft monopoly. I suggest that this is not the only way the world works, and that the software industry is drifting back into regions where developers can profitably cooperate with each other. It's _normal_ to not need to take a 100% hostile ruthless attitude at all times. Such things are quirks of history, and we have lived through such a quirk. Amazingly enough, some things survived, such as Macintoshes and Linux. Now it's time to settle down a bit, quit scorching the earth, and get back to more normal interactions.
OK, I went over this and actually wrote RMS about it _months_ ago. Here's the story:
If you are a corporate employee, this can override certain 'human rights' you might think you have. You may not be entitled to your own thoughts, or ideas. You probably are safe from being legally tortured to death with pitchforks, look on the bright side:)
This fellow's hysteria seems to be based on the notion that people who are part of corporations have some sort of 'individual' rights. It's a pleasing argument, but largely hypothetical. Expect corporate powers over 'their own bodies' to become stronger and stronger as they are challenged.
To a corporation, firing and suing an employee to ruin the employee's life because the employee posted internal GPL code is the same as you cutting your toenails or burning off a _wart_. There is reason to believe that this perspective would hold up in court, because the employee theoretically had complete freedom to join, or not join, the corporation in the first place. Having joined, the employee's 'rights' or lack of same are spelled out in contract law... the person might find that they themselves did not own the ideas they used to modify the GPLed software, or any of the other ideas they talked about at work or came up with at home- so after being fired they could be left with _only_ publically GPLed work, and the company project which they forcibly publicized ahead of schedule- and everything else they did, not having been GPLed by anyone, is property of the company and if they tried doing anything with that, they'd be hosed, slammed into the pavement by a very slam-dunk sort of case in which they are STEALING TRADE SECRETS not theirs to GPL.
That is an ugly scenario, but it is quite real. So the trouble is not the corporate employee being harmed for exercising their right to GPL- they have no such right, they are a corporation's toenail in the legal sense and are not entitled to any such grandstanding. The trouble is on a more pragmatic level, and it's a medium sort of trouble, not a big trouble.
Basically, the corporation can fork a GPLed project and put massive resources behind trying to produce a significantly different version, all under tight wraps. It's allowed to discipline its parts as it sees fit, and is allowed to keep its work entirely to itself until it releases it with a well-funded publicity splash. At this point it must release source, and anyone can extend off this reference point- but the corporation can turn around and begin another round of complete revamping under complete secrecy, refusing to cooperate with outsiders.
I spoke to RMS about this, seeing it as a sort of loophole. He remained unperturbed, and I think I understand why- to RMS, 'free' development will always outpace, always outproduce such closed environments. For RMS this isn't even an issue, much less a loophole, to him it's the corporations being fools by turning away from a world full of willing helpers.
I don't know if he's right or not. Certainly he has a point- though there are also examples of types of work where a controlled team can outperform the bazaar- particularly game or art projects where the project's goals and values are very much a judgement call. On the other hand, OSS moves really fast- in the event of a radically altered GPLed codebase being sprung on the world, everything about it would be known and understood within days- there's not a lot of strategic advantage to keeping secrecy when you're inevitably going to make full disclosure anyhow.
Final analysis- this really isn't about the GPL so much as it's about corporatism. Like it or not, corporations get to own people and their ideas, legally. They also get to play in the fields of OSS alongside ill-funded hackers, and what they lack in nimbleness and cooperativeness they gain in sheer ability to market and distribute on a global scale.
It may be that eventually corporations will set the course for OSS by using their capacity to control collective programming skills and choke off communications. However, in a way this hardly matters- the source will get out there, no amount of GPL-allowable obfuscation (i.e. minimal) would stand up to the eyes of the world for longer than six hours or so, and frankly, if anyone thinks the amount of kluge and mess created by a world of corporate OSS 'coders' trying to trip each other up... would be worse than the current world of _closed_ corporate coders collectively trying to do exactly the same thing, with no expectation of eventual source disclosure.
Expect the corporations to abuse their privileges as hard as it can. It only adds a scattering of immensely rich, and twisted and obnoxious 'individuals' to the talent pool. Think of it like having some prima donnas who keep re-inventing everything, and just roll with it...
I quote a bit of text from John Walker's 'Hacker's Diet' pages, which should be taken as a hint towards the answer you seek:
"Why So Many Versions?
The Hacker's Diet spreadsheets were originally developed in 1990 with Excel 2.1 on Microsoft Windows 3.1. Some of the components in the package use Excel macros which are, for the most part, relatively simple and straightforward compared to those found in a typical corporate Excel application.
Nonetheless, thanks to Microsoft's practice of "strategic incompatibility" and utter contempt for the investment made by their customers, these rudimentary macros have required specific modifications for every single new version of Excel in the decade since they were originally released, and things have gotten worse, not better, since Microsoft introduced the new Visual Basic programming language for Excel (itself a cesspool of release-to-release incompatibility), due to what appears to be a deliberate Microsoft strategy to destabilise the original macro language in order to force customers onto the new one (at a cost to Microsoft corporate clients I estimate on the order of a hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars).
The upshot of this is that while in a reasonable world spreadsheets and macros would be capital, created once and then used thereafter with no additional attention, in the world of Microsoft, software developed for their platforms is a "wasting asset" more like a stock option with an strike date about 18 months from the time it was developed. By then Billy Boy or one of his Kode Kiddies will have changed their mind about something (or simply introduced a gratuitous incompatibility, whether for strategic reasons, due to sloppiness or incompetence, or just for the Hell of it) which pulls the carpet out from under the application and its users when they "upgrade" to a more recent Microsoft release (which is increasingly involuntary as more and more new computers are sold pre-loaded with the latest releases of Microsoft operating systems and applications, offering the customer no option but to pay the "Microsoft Tax" bundled in the cost of the system)."
...and I'll fight mine (to paraphrase Dylan. No, _Bob_ Dylan...)
I don't buy that at all. Invalidate their position by becoming their worst nightmare and the fullest possible justification for their most psychotic excesses? Somehow I miss the logic in this action sequence;)
Do what I do, what I am doing. GET THE TECHNOLOGY and then work for free with other geeks and artists who are in line to be cut off from access to media. Make CDs and work for free with artists who will release mp3s. Make video and movies and start an indie movie subculture, get the 3DSMax guys and the owners of linux rendering farms into it. CREATE. Spend your own money and your own goddamn sweat and blood and CREATE and get the work out there into the underground! Do it for free, give it away because the alternative is equally to make no money but to not have access to the media the world runs on!
I'm still waiting on my next-gen ADAT but I've been putting the rest of my studio through its paces, the hopped-up mixing board, the vast monitors, the custom low-capacitance shielded-strand snake, and I remain convinced that I can (cartman) club the industry's quality levels in the head and make it cry like Nancy Kerrigan(/cartman) >;)
Furthermore, I will not only record open-source oriented geek musicians (i.e. mp3-liking unsigned rebel sorts), I will not only do it for free, but I will provide the tape on top of that. I'm debating whether my next buy should be electronic parts for building submixers and hopping up the adat, or a Color Quickcam for showing pictures of the studio to you slashdotter rugrats;) The more the media industry follows this scorch-the-earth path, the more determined I am to say 'hell with it!' and simply dump everything I have into an all-out assault on the status quo, using the popularity of formats like mp3 and the irresistable appeal of the free as weapons.
I consider cries of 'pirate everything the studios do!' to be pathetic wussy childish attempts to 'fight'. Exactly how does your redistribution of THEIR MEDIA! help matters? Exactly how brave do you have to be to take something at no cost to you, and give it to someone else? Unless the MPAA literally beat down your door you're risking absolutely squat. You're not DOING anything, except being a 'bad consumer' instead of a 'good consumer'. Either way you are a luser. You are sacrificing nothing and creating nothing.
If you want your fight to matter, CREATE media and get it out there as free data, to underscore the idea that in the 21st century data is too cheap to meter! Create AMAZING media. Do the most amazing music, the most incredible movie, outdo the industry at its own game and then have the guts to stand up for your convictions and keep that data free, make it possible for people to buy T-shirts or some damn thing so you can get by, so it can subsidize what you're doing. Apply for grants, I don't know- the point is, if the traditional media (being progressively concentrated in ever-fewer hands) is a magic circle, we need content creators outside the circle. We need _genius_ outside the circle. And we need it now, and we need it fast. And we can get it- if people are ready to face the situation and start pulling together.
"The revolution will not be televised" - Gil Scott-Heron Isn't it ironic- now that digital globalisation has made any person techically capable of expressing their message to the world, surprise- the revolution will still not be televised- because MS owns this television station, AOL/Time Warner owns that, and so on, a merry game of media restriction with no loopholes! There will be no shortcut to the real digital age- so we will just have to actually do the work. Cry me a river- then roll up your sleeves. If you can't actually sing or play or create media of some kind, then go forth and scour mp3.com or some such place (it is one huge 'slush pile', but no worse than what the industry has access to), and hunt down some band, some artist who is committed to a future of mp3 and free data. Buy one of their t-shirts. If they don't have any, buy them _a_ t-shirt;) tell the people you meet offline about the great band you found, and how you found them, and then tell them 'It's free, this is the digital underground. It lives.'
I will confess: I have wanted to be the great breakout hit from mp3-land. This, without even having stuff up yet, while still building and assembling the gear (in some cases, literally building it out of parts). And not breakout as in 'crossover', not as in getting signed with a major label- breakout as in making it completely separate from the labels, the industry, making it big enough and hitting hard enough that you wind up on the cover of Rolling Stone or Time because the story _cannot_ be ignored any longer- and still remaining a completely free-data, internet phenomenon, with no ties to the standard distribution chains. The money or lack of same isn't even important- I think done right you could be quite upper-middle class with all the tech toys you wanted, but I'm talking about being a massive breakout hit as a paradigm shift, about changing people's expectations of where you get music/movies/etc. Only that can truly fight the studios. Only that will win the war.
I still want this- who wouldn't? But I'm becoming increasingly convinced of one thing- it's not about who does it, the important thing is that someone must do that, must break the paradigm, for the benefit of all us artistic types who want to be able to control our own destinies. If it's not me, and hey, it wouldn't have to be, then it will just have to be somebody else- and I mean to throw everything I have behind that person, whoever they might be, if I get the chance. I'll record 'em for free. I'll give them the benefit of 20 years of audio hacker experience and producer savvy. I'll coax their ultimate performances out of them... anything, everything, to get someone who can break the paradigm.
When your 'wares people' are finally spending most of their time copying off free data with the blessings of the artists to distribute among the consumers... because nothing the recording or movie industries produce is anything near as good... THEN we will have won.
Expect several MAKING OF articles. Like at least three, touching on how empowering it is for these poor obscure computer geeks to be lifted out of the drab and unrewarding surroundings of... well, reality... and immortalized, thanks to Jon Katz, in images from Hollywood!
*gag*
Seriously, what the hell is going on here? I'm not so concerned with Taco and Hemos et al, they're just running a site and having a great time seeing what trouble they can stir up. I'm shocked (and some would say I shouldn't be) by what Katz will go along with.
Is it in fact true that Jon Katz is exactly the type of corrosive media trendy powerworshipper he purports to be against?
Does he have rationalizations already in place about how he's not really leveraging his new-media connections to gain special privileges with the very same corporate media dinosaur he claims to hate and fear?
Which would he choose, to have his film carefully sterilized to be suitable for general audiences, or to have 'his people' sneak children into theaters to see his film?
*sigh* really, this whole business is disgusting. I would have no gripe with Katz doing this if he was sincere in his desire to align himself with the existing power structures of media that so many of us have to fight against. But he is not- something is wrong with his mind, that he can't see the phenomenal hypocrisy of his actions and desires.
I'm looking at Jon's reaction to the AOL/Time Warner merger, and it's bitterly funny how the whole first paragraph is bitching not about social issues, or the media implications, but the gripes of a _disgruntled_ _consumer_. And then, the relevance... "Is individualism, free expression, diverse opinion advanced when the information economy breaks down into two or three "old and new" media conglomerates that control virtually all of the archived news and entertainment information online, and increasingly, the means to deliver it?"
Well, Jon, never mind that, eh? Which one of the media conglomerates do you like the best for your movie? It's true that taking an option doesn't mean squat in the biz, and the movie may never be made- but as we watch you dance with big media, first Amazon now the film industry in your ever-broadening search for an audience that will accept you as their guru, it's impossible to overlook some things now.
If your dream continues, you may continue to mouth the same words you've been reciting for years, and you may continue to make a pretense of outrage against corporatism and big media: but the truth will be this: You are not only supporting corporatism and big media... let me spell it out.
...this is really not unlike the hippie phenomenon.
Back when Katz was young and hadn't smoked too much dope, there was a subculture called 'hippies'. There were a certain amount of hippies that were perfectly sincere, and quite a lot of plastic imitations cruising over to the Haight on the weekends. (No, I wasn't one of the latter, I was about 3 months old at the time).
Eventually hippieness became a media explosion, infighting set in, and now hippie is largely an epithet, a term of abuse or embarrassment and something to be repudiated.
Thanks to Jon Katz, I can foresee a time when geek becomes equally an embarrassment. Where hippie became synonymous with an airheaded spacecase, geek will become synonymous with a sociopathic, daylight-fearing danger to society.
And maybe that's good, because then we can get back to being people for a change.:P
It's not that suddenly people are able to copy and they weren't before, and it's not even really about audio or video quality issues, either.
Put simply, technology never supported an encryption option before, nor would it have been a salable feature for consumers.
If someone put out a version of the Philips cassette which was impossible to duplicate from, this 'feature' would meet with a singular lack of enthusiasm from consumers. Let's get creative and add that the new Philips cassette not only can't be copied from, but will only play on the tape player that you have, plus there's the option of spending a dollar less for a tape that will play only ten times and then destroy itself neatly without injuring the drive.
Well, woo frickin' hoo- what a triumph of technology for purposes either orthoganal or hostile to what the consumer wants! This would not fly. At the time of the 33rpm LP, the Philips cassette, even the CD, this sort of thing was not attempted. DAT was 'secure' from unauthorised consumer use- and DAT died in the consumer market.
The goal of the recording industry, and indeed the movie industry as well, is to establish a new playing field in which none of the power falls into the consumers' hands. You buy your DVD- if you move to another area you have to buy another copy of the DVD for that area's players. Limited-play media are another recurring industry wet dream, especially when confronted with the specter of 'perfect media that lasts forever'. The fact of vastly cheaper media production than the old days combined with raised prices on the grounds of higher quality is nice for the industry, sure, but perfect media copying scares them... hence the paradigm change.
The change is from rude methods of interoperability (many people make audio cassettes, but they all pretty much play on all the decks you can buy, due to rigorous specs as to the dimensions of the cassette shell and standards for tape speed and dimensions), forced by the reliance on cruder analog media, to the new world of entirely virtual media- media that is no more and no less than a bunch of data. The data is easier to standardize- but it is too accessible! Any clown could write that format, or alternately could suck the data off the disk and start making identical copies. So the paradigm is to treat media, data, like it is hostile software- the word encryption, and especially the word security, give people a sense of potential danger safely contained.
But whose safety is being protected? Hint: it is not the consumer's. Indeed, in many ways the world of the media consumer, with data that can only be played on regionally localized players, data that is only rented and though you own the container you only are licensed to view the data in certain ways and don't own even the copy you purchased, data that is increasingly way beyond the consumer's ability to comprehend or control- this world is less safe for the consumer than the days of 45s and LPs. The consumer is increasingly restricted, controlled, and where once the idea of a consumer's copying off loads of tapes was seen as an intolerable abuse of the consumer's reasonable freedoms, now we approach an era where the consumer may be literally not allowed to own their own media. Instead, he or she can only be trusted to buy and care for the carrier media for streams of data- which are marked off as explicitly not the consumer's property, and which may be so well defended that the consumer can only plunk a dvd into a player and watch the fiberoptics deliver a tightly encrypted datastream into a black box in a _speaker_... inaccessible, unopenable. One wonders if the music and film industries are devising scuttling charges, so that if evil hacker people try to open the black boxes, they destroy themselves, thus preserving their secrets and forever withholding... the consumer's purchase from the consumer.
That's the paradigm change, bigtime. Are you buying the data of a song when you buy the CD, or are you only buying permission to listen to the sounds? If you analyzed the grooves of a record to determine the harmonic content of Pink Floyd, would you be thrown in jail for it? Obviously not- the concept is absurd, you own the physical record. Now, what if you crack the encryption to run a fast fourier analysis on the harmonic content of a Pink Floyd DVD? Curious how the activity is the same, but all of a sudden you're in jail for what you are doing with your possession... or is it your possession?
*sigh*
I don't know about anybody else but I know where I stand on the matter. I have purchased a modern 20-bit ADAT (an 8 track digital audio recorder) and will be producing music again, after rather a long hiatus. I'll be releasing this music in MP3 and seeing if maybe I sell 'original master' CDs on the side. I also intend to offer free recording to the likes of slashdot nerds who also intend to release mp3s for free. If I end up too busy I might also require that the musician code something and release it under the gpl;) but anyway, each of us eventually find our own best battlefield. For me it is using my sound engineering and musical skills (which are better than my writing or coding skills) for the purpose of the new media- putting a big-ass stake in the ground of mp3, lest trendy encrypted _crap_ wash it away. And yeah, I'd give up profit for that cause. It's not so much about 'where I want to be' as 'where I'm just not willing to go', and I confess to serious dread and ill feeling over the rage for encryption and redefinition of entertainment media as stuff that's owned by big corporations and only _lent_ to consumers on promise of good behavior. I do not think my behavior warrants my 'license to own music data' being revoked unconditionally- I don't think it's reasonable that I not be allowed to open the box and poke around inside it to see how it works and maybe break it, or maybe get it to work better.
I build audio gear now- but when I was a kid I killed something like four cassette 4-tracks:) I wanted them to do more! sound better! and I took them apart and tried to do things to make the sound bigger or brighter or just generally more amazing. This usually did not work, but eventually I learned neat and useful things.
It horrifies me that the kid like me, today, trying to take apart digital media and make it bigger and better, is a criminal- not for plans to make bootleg copies for all his little friends (that wasn't my concern either), but for having the arrogance to want to take apart the media and do it a different way. We now have a situation in which people are harrassed as criminals for simply grappling with information- not government secrets, not 'if you open this the warranty is *buahahaha!*', but criminal liability and court involvement to punish what I was doing for years as a reclusive geeky kid. And I find that quietly intolerable, and cannot coexist with it.
So geek musicians, keep posted, be ready to travel to Vermont (not like I can afford to do road trips!), because I'm moving as fast as I can, trying to answer this situation with action. I want to get _great_ music out there with sound that meets or beats the best the industry can offer, and have it be data that people can _have_ and do what they wish with. I've made that rant before. On the eve of my wonderful 20 bit adat arriving (yaaaaay!) I am ranting it again. There can be no coexistence with me and the industry- I hope more people come to that realisation within themselves. I'm no pirate and do not steal the music industry's so-paranoidly-guarded wares. In fact, I don't even download mp3s- I intend to make them and _upload_ them. I don't want to make the industry poor, I want to make them irrelevant. >:)
Imagine Dan Rather interviewing some deathly ill person in the hospital. The sponsor is a drug supplier. The segment airs, and a producer pulls Rather aside.
"Dan, there's something you should know in case you talk to anyone about the Vivmotrinox clip."
"Yes, that was heart-rending. Did you notice as I interviewed that brave man, the patient in the bed next to us died?"
"Er.... no."
"Whudddyuhmean 'no'?"
"Dan, don't talk about that to anyone. We fixed it. When the clip aired that patient did not die. It's not like he was the subject of the interview, you know. The sponsor wanted it more upbeat. You know, it's a story about hope."
"I see. Well, I'm sure his family will be delighted to hear of his miraculous rescue from death."
"Don't carry on like that, nobody will recognize him. We changed his hair color and put a mustache on him! Everything's taken care of."
"Everything?!? Ev... Now, I hope you're not going to lie to me, friend. Have you been 'taking care' of my hair on TV, too?"
"Dan, baby, that's our job! Oh, one other thing?"
"You're going to tell me anyway, so just spit it out like a good fellow. What?"
"Your closing, that 'The benefits of this treatment remain to be seen, but this patient's fight is an inspiration to behold'?"
"What about it?"
"We lost the 'to be seen, but'. Don't worry, it looks very natural, they had to morph to your 'b' mouth position and hold it about ten frames to match the timing with that damned leaf falling past the window. Piece of cake. You looked great."
"AND WHY, MIGHT I... scuse me, and why might I ask was this _belated_ script change made?"
"The sponsor. Wanted it to come off more upbeat, you know?"
(Though this scenario was written for joke value, ponder a little bit on how plausible the reasoning can be for changing the entire import and tone of a person's delivery of news or information- and consider that everything described here (especially w.r.t taped footage) is possible today without vast expenditures of effort and skill...)
Slashdot Mirror
My problem is this: I have a VERY LARGE amount of technical innovation concentrated in the equipment of this studio. Some of it is as simple as circuit tweaks for the equipment (such as a set of modifications for my vintage Small Stone phase shifter, or the rebuilt mixer and soon-to-be-rebuilt analog daughter card of the LX20 ADAT), and some of it is considerably more elaborate, most of all the monitor speakers which involve processes that are outright patentable. In addition there's a vinyl record turntable design which my scientist father (who holds several patents himself, in infrared sensor instrumentation) feels is also patentable.
I want to make all this available to OSS hardware hackers and audio geeks, but I don't want anyone to rip it all off my website and publish a book, basically. I don't mind people working with the ideas, even companies selling stuff based on them, but I don't want restrictions placed on 'em or to be eclipsed by a more well-funded operation that can move quicker and publish on a large scale to people who've never heard of me.
I'm very enthusiastic about RMS's proposed license! I'd like to know when he has a final version worked out, and if my needs can help shape this I'd like to become involved. Basically, where the soul of free software lies in the code, and the key concept is keeping it flowing freely, the soul of writing is in attribution- and the problem is not in making it flow, but in keeping reference to those who created it. It's not _hard_ to keep writing flowing freely, the hard part is doing anything other than hosing the original 'developer' of the writing. The problem is that you _want_ J. Random Whoever to be able to shop a version of the work to a publisher, and let them print up a copy- but you also want to be able to specify that the cover has to say "This is a version of Book X, which is freely available for download on the Web at (foo.bar.baz.com)" so people know they are not forced to spend money for that person's modification of your work. But they still get to make the published version, if they feel a strong market exists for such a paper printed volume! So can you- or you can just web-publish and if anyone wants a paper version in stores they can go to the trouble of doing so.
With all the hysteria over intellectual property these days, I have to wonder whether the future will be very different- with such wide access to ideas and data, it seems that information will be valueless- and only WHAT YOU DO WITH IT will have value. If somebody can print up a wonderfully well organised and illustrated version of a pile of great but unkempt ideas I put on the web- THEY SHOULD. I still get to have the ideas, but if there's a market for a cleaned up polished 'rendition' of those ideas, why shouldn't someone get a chance at selling this additional effort they put in?
Typically, there's one caveat- watch out for the corporations, any such proposal needs to at least understand the potential for aggregate entities like corporations to steamroller anything in their path. However, the inequity of this mustn't stop individuals from trying to interact socially in a world of ideas and exchange them freely- because frankly, you still lose if you become paranoid and do nothing and hide every bright notion you have. It is simply impossible to coexist or compete with corporations- so the idea is to somewhat ignore them in such a way that, although you're arguably giving them the ability to steamroller you, you're also cooperating with other individuals in a mutually beneficial way.
It looks like RMS's Free Documentation License could be an important part of this equation, and if he doesn't get it finished soon I may have to start using the draft ;)
If your favorite artist is some sort of internet artist with no industry contract (note: most 'indie labels' you may have heard of are also owned outright by the industry labels, they are fake), then you can support your favorite artist directly.
If they signed, you probably can't help them at all, certainly not by buying their record- you probably don't have the power to help them break even, so they are going to be going up for contract renegotiation from a position of weakness and debt anyhow. Being in such a position of weakness is even worse than being in a position of naivete- many bands simply break up under the stress, typically to be not allowed to perform or record music independently (gee, like kevin mitnick not being allowed to hack), due to the contracts they signed off on, for a period of time that can be quite arbitrary, say five years perhaps.
Regarding your 'maybe I'm too naive but': who are you going to believe, your optimistic sense that is not backed up by observation and reality, or Steve Albini, who's been working in the industry as a producer and engineer for years, decades, and has been responsible for hit albums?
Better you should turn to the real indie scene (still vaguely happening) and the mp3 scene, and be optimistic about that, and optimistic about those people having a chance to work hard for their money and earn a little of it. Being optimistic about the industry is kind of like being optimistic about AOL or Microsoft- you get to feel nicely fairminded for a few minutes, and then you get proven wrong yet again. At what point will you set aside the 'can't be all bad' concept (which is VERY VAGUE- you think I'm claiming they eat babies or something?) and figure out, "This is exactly how bad they are. The individual people may have these various merits and be fine people, but as a collective entity (a corporation), they are THIS bad and you gain nothing by going along with it."
Your figure for the artist's dollar is gross. Subtract a fixed ten percent for record breakage (yes, I know they are CDs and don't break, but the charge is still taken out of the artist's cut). Then take the remaining amount and write it off against the advance, from which the artist PAYS FOR ALL THE STUDIO RECORDING, all the MANAGEMENT, all the TECHS and in fact any TOUR involved as well, meaning that the advance gets spent doing all the things you think the label pays for.
Guess what? The artist did not recoup the advance. The artist did not earn money- the artist _owes_ money for his trouble. This happens most of the time- do some homework, find out what the reality of the situation is.
This sort of comment reminds me of a common logical fallacy- imagine Johnny and Jimmy arguing about the shape of the world. Johnny says, "The earth is round!" Jimmy says "The earth is flat!" Their mom comes around and tries to calm the argument: "You should compromise. The truth is usually somewhere between the extreme points of an argument. So, the earth is a cube."
Sorry, Etam: though you may think it is unreasonable and hard to believe, the earth is round, and artists DO NOT get a dollar per CD. As I explained, pro music is about the most expensive hobby you could have- and after all the contractual requirements of signed bands are fulfilled (thou shalt make a video, thou shalt do a tour, thou shalt record at a good studio, paying for ALL OF THIS out of the advance which your royalties go toward repaying) the artist, far from getting 'a share of the pie', works very hard for absolutely nothing to subsidise the corporation that signed them.
Still don't believe me? Read this. Steve Albini is the producer/engineer who did The Pixie's 'Surfer Rosa', PJ Harvey's 'Rid Of Me' and many other great albums. Scroll to the bottom and read the figures on what happens to three million dollars worth of CD sales, and exactly why the artists come away with four thousand and thirty-one dollars each after a quarter of their contract is through, and are fourteen thousand dollars in debt to the record company, after selling A QUARTER MILLION COPIES.
DO the math.
It's lunacy to believe that they are licensed to 'perform' or distribute spare copies of someone's music to them just because the person owns the music. THEY do not. Can we say 'sickeningly obvious'? Can we say 'guilty, guilty, guilty'? Any judge can, and will.
The frustrating part is that I'd been subconsciously counting on mp3.com to be there for me when I started putting large amounts of material out there. I don't have anywhere near the resources to host even my back catalog on my own web server, it'd break me. mp3.com were ready to host as much as I could come up with, for equal rights to distribute it and the banner ad revenue. It was a truly win/win situation, and now they've totally obliterated their perfectly legitimate stance as a hosting service for all the LEGAL mp3 artists, by attempting to also host everything they have no rights to.
For God's sake, they wouldn't host cover tunes from their artists, and now this? Please tell me there's an mp3 site out there which will host _many_ megs of data for nothing, and which ISN'T STUPID? It'd be better still if it was a big name, but AFAIK mp3.com is _the_ big name in this area, and they're absolutely blowing it and endangering the wellbeing of all the artists who believed in them- and screwing up the plans of the artists who hadn't got round to establishing a serious mp3 presence yet.
Or, perhaps, is this a rock-and-roll style publicity stunt? Could mp3.com be planning to cave at the last minute, _after_ becoming front page news all over the world, but before actually taking any damage? And then turning around and going 'Why, it's OK, really- look at ALL THE GREAT BANDS we LEGALLY have! Why, we don't need those stinky old mainstream CDs at all!'
Oh, I hope it's something like that. That'd be worthy of Malcolm McLaren- truly a cynical and ruthless bid to manipulate the media and the industry. Please, mp3.com, be that cynical! You're not helping anybody one bit if you're serious about this Beam-It stuff. It's crazy, it's stupid, you're guilty, you have no right and no reason to believe you should have such a right and IT'S A SIDESHOW TO YOUR REAL PURPOSE! Support your own damn bands, not the industry!
Did you think these industries _haven't_ doubled and quadrupled their profit margins in recent years, or that they _aren't_ attempting to continue this doubling of profit margins past all boundaries of common sense and free market economics? Welcome to the Machine. Don't feel so bad- look on the bright side, the musicians and artists pay even _more_ for the privilege of being on the other end of the megaphone! :P you almost certainly make more than they do, even if you work at Wal-Mart!
This is even more apropos given mp3s, as they are as 'free as radio' for all practical purposes, but they are not a desirable audio quality compared to the source material. They can be quite listenable but nobody would argue they are a fidelity improvement over the original full-bandwidth data.
So, it's like a realworld of that AT+T feel-good ad, "One day you can watch the movie you want.... _when_ you want", only it's happening with audio first. It's like massively parallel radio- a lower fidelity version of the music is broadcast from somewhere- as a CD- and then countless people 'tune in' to the signal, and keep 'rebroadcasting' it, causing the effective bandwidth to become nearly infinite. A song released today need never die or drop off the charts- mp3 can keep it before the attention of the interested listeners for months, years. Any of those people can seek out the source CD and buy it if they like, just as if they were hearing the tune on the radio and wanted to own their own copy.
In an age when you have stuff like the Klipsch Permedia computer speaker system sneaking formidable audio performance into people's lives by disguising itself as a home theater system- it will become more significant, this distinction between the lower quality 'broadcast' of mp3s, and the performance of CDs or audio DVDs. What the industry _should_ be doing if it wasn't corrupt, insane, and bereft of common sense, is this: encourage mp3s as much as possible, especially 128K encoded ones that really compress a lot, and discourage _other_ types of downloadable digital media which might in future deliver performance closer to the store-bought physical media. I can tell you that you can get _very_ good sound out of mp3, but there are limits- the risk is that if the industry can step on mp3s and push some encrypted higher-quality format, said format would only get cracked eventually leaving the industry with the same problem and even less incentive for people to buy the physical media.
'Secure format' is an absurd term. Whose security is at stake? Not the consumer's, the record industry's. How secure is it? Completely unsecure- the better the format, the more of a risk it poses when it's eventually cracked and turned to 'warez', as you call it. They need to rent a clue and figure out that digital formats are like radio- and set things up so that everybody's happily swapping the equivalent of AM radio, rather than invent stereo FM radio and then attempt to build a coin-slot into all receivers which is only going to be massively defeated by the listening public.
If you're so ready to give 50 cents to a musician you like, bless you my friend ;) and I'd rather give the music to you, and then offer you EXTRA FINE versions of the same music for if you want it to sound extra nice. That way, you can have it when you're hurting for money, but if you can afford it, then I can sell you something _real_ that you can have and do what you like with, even sample bits of it and make your own music.
'Some of your friends are probably already this fucked'
Check _that_ out- a balance sheet for a typical major act _success_ on the order of 3 _million_ dollars of sales selling a quarter million copies.
Gross profit, $710,000.
Artist Royalties, $351,000.
Actual artist _income_ after all items on balance sheet and recouping of advance- $4,031.25!
That's right- after paying for the studio, mastering, video budget, processing+transfers etc, after the tour (earning 50,000 gross on expenses of 50,875 not counting manager or agent's cut), the band that got a 'quarter million dollar' advance to pay for all the tech toys and tours and professionals, the band that made THREE MILLION dollars of business for the record company, have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.
You're crazy if you think almost anything wouldn't be an improvement. I don't know, maybe I can't satisfy you that mp3s can help artists. How exactly is mp3 exposure going to cost the artists _more_ than pay to play in LA and all that crap? At what point does mp3, free-as-spam-but-less-annoying distribution start to make artists capable of doing better than the industry- say, earning them _half_ as much as they'd make working at 7-11? You have no idea how fucked musicians actually are (to use Steve Albini's apt term for the condition...). Are you a musician? I am, and I'm building a studio- I've already talked with one slashdotter about recording him free for the purpose of making mp3s, and I've been talking to another artist I recorded who's currently living in Lithuania, about putting some of his back catalogue out there. Exposure is life- but there's something more important that that, and it's control and cashflow.
When artists don't have control over their own businesses, they're hosed- and that's what happens with the normal industry, it's 'Let us take care of it!' and the results are a damned wasteland. mp3 does not directly make artists money- but guess what? It is a key part of a strategy for the artist to take control of their own destiny and start running things themselves. Some might be tour-minded, and build on their talent and a popularity in mp3 to travel the world on a shoestring, paying their way by booking small gigs, saving up for their own PA and equipment and RUNNING THE BUSINESS effectively. They might make a bit more than working at a 7-11! But they'd be living their dream and not paying to play. Some (I like this option) will do extensive studio work, to become able to create amazing high-fidelity sonic experiences in music- and would give away the mp3s forever, but if you want to help them, BUY A CD. Not even an mp3.com cd (interestingly, mp3.com does not go for exclusive rights like a record label does), but a homegrown CD. First few, burned off a CD-Rom burner, and then it's time to save up and have a crate of CDs burned professionally- there are loads of people who can do this and throw in 1, 2, 3 or 4 color process inserts, even shrinkwrap, having the whole thing done to a 'mainstream' quality level. Of course if you're in it for the long term you set yourself up with the physical plant, printing your own art or pressing your own CDs in industrial duplicators... and so it goes.
Yeah, it's hard work, but you can earn money through hard work, and you can't really earn money with the industry, so why not? And mp3 is one very important thing- it is promotional material that YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR! You don't have to PAY people to distribute mp3s of your work. They will anyway, particularly if it's any good! What you do from that point will illustrate who you really are, and whether you deserve to earn anything...
Go read this: Major Labels: some of your friends are probably already this fucked. Think about it. One part of Tim Yohannon's intro article is particularly telling, I think:
1.It doesn't really matter what you say or what you sing, but how you conduct your business and what your motivation for doing it is.
2.It is only by being completely separated from governmental and corporate sponsorship, collusion, or connections that one can really claim to be "alternative" or "independent".
3.Unless there is an ongoing class consciousness to one's communication and expression, then it is inevitable that you will be assimilated into mainstream values, no matter how culturally "hip" you attempt to be."
This neatly sums up what I want to do with my abilities as a musician and sound engineer. It's not _about_ what style I use or what gear I can offer in my studio- it's about why I'm doing it and where I'm going with it.
For a long time, I didn't know what I wanted to do with that side of my life. I knew that the dream of being a musician for money was a fantasy, but I didn't have what you might call the radical consciousness to come up with any alternative. I sort of wanted to work with the tech side of things, but to what end? To be signed to a corrupt machine and help con other people and probably spend all my own money doing it? To languish obscurely playing with mixers? Who's listening? What would I be doing it for?
I think I have a better handle on these questions now. I'm siding with the punks, the indies, freaks like Zappa (the greatest independent music businessman ever, long live Zappa!). I am dedicating myself to giving people access to tools and information they need to do this kind of work and produce this kind of art themselves, rather than thinking they need to buy into the industry game to get it done. Sometimes I'll make money. Sometimes I'll spend it. Right now I'm in debt and am sorting out the hopped-up ADAT I'll be basing the studio around. (tweaker alert- Alesis LX-20 is a _beautiful_ machine to soup up, all the audio circuitry is on a daughtercard you can remove and tinker with! And there's loads of clearance for substitute parts, and you could shield the whole audio daughtercard. Sweeeeet).
So, highly-scored AC, you may say MP3 is just another word for warez to you- I say you don't sound like a musician yourself, and are not qualified to pass judgement on this. I am, and I've done more homework than you- and I would say conclusively that MP3 is the new radio, and furthermore it is a breakthrough in public access to production of media that's equal to open source and Internet collaboration on software. There are many similarities.
You don't directly make money on mp3. You don't directly make money on commercial music publishing either, you can play rock star for a few months if you're lucky and end up in debt for thousands of dollars. The difference is that with mp3 YOU GET TO CONTROL your business- if your music doesn't have a business, don't expect to make money, but if you do, even something as random as selling band mousepads or nerf guns imprinted with the band logo or pet rocks, you get to totally control your mp3 output, use your own mixes, sell your own merchandise and hire your own people and run all this yourself, taking whatever profit there is for yourself.
Do you really think major label acts get to choose their own mixes (hint: Nirvana was not allowed to use their own mix for "In Utero", you think you'd get more clout than Nirvana circa 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'?), manage their own expenditures (bands are legally required to produce things like videos under contract, but it is the band that pays for ALL aspects of this, not the label) and so on?
It's not so different from open source. It's really not. Power is being able to control YOUR OWN situation. Using mp3 as a promotional tool is an important part of being able to control the other aspects of your own music business- you give it away but you're not signing yourself over to any contractual requirements, are not waiving your rights to your own material or signing it over to the corporation outright. This is incredibly powerful.
Or would you rather go and personally try to buy space for your single on Top 40 radio?
In all seriousness, as the movie industry enters an era where production costs are made cheaper through use of computers (if not now then in two years) and duplication and distribution costs are an order of magnitude cheaper (quiz: how much merchandise as VHS tapes can you fit in a truck? Now, how much as DVDs?), wouldn't a real free market _have_ them take a serious blow in the form of competition doing the same thing at the _real_ profit margins of the industry? Apparently the actual breakeven costs of DVDs are nearer three dollars, as the modified 'disposable' DVDs are being suggested at such a price, and all the copying and transportation costs are a tiny bit higher than regular DVDs due to an additional process.
The movie industry _should_ take a serious blow to their pricing structure. It is foolish to argue that they should be protected from capitalism- look at what the opposite condition did to the computer hardware industry! Sure things have been a bit tough for computer hardware makers, but huge progress was made. Why shouldn't there be huge progress in the movie industry? What gives them the right to rot happily on piles of money? Let them fight it out in the marketplace like normal people.
Hey, who would have assumed that Katz would carry on like that? I only wish I hadn't read it either :)
Of course, why the hell would you want your advertising circular to _expire?_ You'd want it to be permanent. You wouldn't pay an extra 2 cents for the tech to make your DVD quit working. That's crazy. Now for the evil part- brace yourself ;)
If you can sell disposable DVDs at a profit of a penny for $3.00, and the degradation tech costs a penny and all of shipping and distribution costs a penny and the entire content costs a penny, then making your advertisement DVD as a disposable will cost you $2.96 for the media. On the other hand, it costs less to make the permanent sort of DVDs that are sold for $20 and up...
Isn't it interesting that this proposal reveals the true profit margins for the industry? The media clearly costs well under $3. So why are unit costs higher than VHS tapes, for which the media and duplication costs are drastically, drastically higher? Something stinks here.
I just hope we (as in, the public) end up eventually being able to do things like make little films or advertisements using this type of media, and being able to distribute them. It concerns me that these people on the one hand are successfully maintaining a trust holding the cost of DVD media at many times its free-market value (it should be _less_ than VHS, with some allowances made for additional media, but duplication and media costs are orders of magnitude lower than VHS), and on the other hand are also wanting to keep access to this technology out of our hands so only they can produce the media. That's just wrong, wrong, wrong...
There are flame-free zones on the net- I've seen one. It was and is a Usenet newsgroup, co-hosted on a private news network dedicated to that group and others like it, and it was created as refuge from a flame-saturated situation which showed no signs of ever easing up, i.e. the group alt.fan.furry. (If you want to see what real flames look like, go look at that- even so, there is some normal dialogue there).
A subgroup was tired of being flamed and left to create this new group, and in the charter specified that it was orthoganal to AFF interests and also specified that flaming and argument was offtopic, that nobody's opinions were to be denigrated but also that you weren't to denigrate anybody or anything. THIS WORKED. It continues to work and has worked even in the face of the occasional attack from flamers or 'meowers' or whoever. But it asks a lot- more, I think, than you, Jon, can give.
How often, Jon, do you refrain from denigrating people or things? It appears to me that you wish to have flames against you outlawed by rule or peer pressure, but you still want to flame hotheaded adolescents, corporations, movie theaters, you name it. This is unfair- and you don't deserve peace unless you are willing to start extending it.
As for myself, I've spent a lot of effort mediating and protecting this mysterious non-flame newsgroup I speak of (in which everyone has every freedom except the freedom to denigrate which must be exercised elsewhere). I compare it to Slashdot and I think it would be vastly inappropriate to subject Slashdot to such conditions. Never mind that it can't happen because it'd have to be written into the charter and have all slashdotters agree on it- even so, Slashdot is simply too feisty and controversial to function under such a system. Its primary value is that of a crucible in which the newest tech and the most bitterly contested issues are brought to light and argued about by the readership until a reader can see all the points of view and find a personal viewpoint on the matter. Even in your own articles the most important work is done by the readership, not you. Far from 'self-appointed border guards', a deeply derogatory description, these people are Slashdot.org, something you seem to not understand in your desire to be superior to them and control or silence them.
And on a personal note, I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with your characterisations of your enemies. Am I the 'Invisible Katz-Critic'? To read your take on the matter, I am an illiterate, adolescent, cowardly hothead primarily motivated by jealousy and spite, with nothing to say. I just want to take a minute to rebut this, knowing that you are not even deigning to read this, but that others are, and can form their own opinions on my character.
- I am not illiterate. I've been a writer for years, and have written for the international audio journal "The Absolute Sound" (v18, issues 87 and 88). I have fiction writing up on the web, including my first novel, "The Kings of Rainmoor".
- I am not adolescent. I was born in '68 and am 31 years old. Maybe this is not the ravages of old age, but it is certainly not adolescence, and I prefer it that way. I hated my adolescence and prefer being an adult.
- I am not a coward. It particularly rankles after I've constantly put myself out there, willingly risking 'dekarmaization' from what fans of yours remain, to criticise your failings publically, under my own name. My email is available- you certainly have not used it. I'll make a special one, just for you: IKatz@airwindows.com to make replying as easy as a single click on a word in the middle of the text you're (not) reading. I don't believe for a second this will work, but what more can I do? I honestly considered posting my full address and telephone number, might still do so someday in a fit of bravado, but this would fall more accurately under 'I am not stupid'
;) - I am not motivated by jealousy. Jon, I've had a feature all to myself on Slashdot too. I can have another one any time I want, under two conditions- one, that I come up with a topic that is genuinely interesting and worthy of Slashdot and the attention of its readers, and two, that I put enough effort into writing it to justify its massive virtual publication. You seem to be free of either of these restrictions- am I jealous of that? No, because they are self-imposed restrictions reinforced by the necessity of going through Slashdot editorial circles. If I had story posting access like you, I can only say that I would be a great deal more sensitive to the responsibility of it.
- I am not motivated by spite. Jon, you abuse your position. You come out with the damndest notions and use your access to media to dump them on the world without a thought to your responsibility.
I just replied to a poster on your last story- who thought I was making a straw man argument about your advocating (in the Ticket Booth Tyranny articles) that Slashdotters should go sneak children into dirty movies without consulting the childrens' parents. My reply was to _quote_ you directly, and you advocated just this. Can't you see this is wrong? Can't you see that you have responsibilities that come with access to media that reaches large numbers of people? You have been misbehaving, and continue to do so- now you are mounting a little crusade all your own, and can anyone guess the purpose? It's not landing that big movie deal, or sneaking kids into cinemas- no, what you are doing now is making a concerted effort to damage the reputation, the validity of Slashdot discussion forums, just because they criticise you!Rob Malda, do you really want this guy publically denigrating _your_ _creation_?? That's crazy! It's also harmful- if self-moderating discussion boards develop the public image of mere usenet groups (and who is to say even these are valueless? Russ Albery's Rant) then a major and novel mechanism for social equality is cut off at the knees. It is _important_ that people learn to respect the value, and tolerate the jarring nature, of an 'unfiltered feed' of opinion and information. It will be a tremendous victory if people can learn to coexist and thrive in an environment which contains both approval and bitter disapproval, and allow the full range of opinion to get out there, allow the public to get the whole story (including rants and even nonsense and spite) and make up their minds about it.
Except, Jon Katz does not _trust_ the new media. That which he likes, such as R-rated movies, he considers a freedom, and overrides anyone else's opinion thereof. That which he doesn't like, such as detailed, bitter criticism of himself and his whole ethic? Well, we'll assume that he does not try to have it silenced outright. (Only CmdrTaco and other Slashdot staffers can answer this, as they are the only ones who'd hear if Jon had been steadily canvassing for the banning of ACs, his pet peeve.) Assuming that he has not been surreptitiously trying to get ACs shut off, his reaction is instead to attack their reputation! It's been posted in this very thread that the overall karma value for the AC is 1975- that's a very positive moderation total! Yet to listen to Jon, they are all hothead adolescents- and the unstated implication here is that such people should not be listened to, do not have a right to an opinion. One wonders if Jon felt the same way about adolescents in the 60s when he was one...
Summary? Jon Katz abuses his position, and has increasingly been trying to discredit the very publically-moderated system that makes Slashdot what it is. He needs to be dropped. Period.
Please explain how this says what you thought it said. I realise it sounds like I was making a strawman, but read this quote from "Ticket Booth Tyranny, Part 2". I'm sorry, but Katz is not as responsible as you thought he was. You're confusing him with some of the legitimate gripes of parents who responded to the thread. Katz is the one who said, "Find a smart 13-year-old who wants to see something off-limits and take him to a movie" and "go to a nearby movie theater and help kids trying to get in". Then he suggests helping kids that you know "too".
I might be caught getting irate and making strawmen sometimes. Not this time. This time I derided Katz, uniformly, for his actual actions.
No, Jon, I'm afraid that these attacks often have much to do with what you think and write. The trouble is, you won't even entertain the idea, so instead you have to demonize people who (every so often) are trying to help you.
People were going nuts trying to get you help to use Linux, and you played with a storebought computer, let your dog play with the motherboard, and have then ignored it completely.
People were going nuts trying to get you to stop using _corrupted_ ASCII encodings (you see, Microsoft has changed the encodings for ISO/Latin in such a way that when you use Word and smartquotes it produces false characters when decoded with normal ASCII). You basically ignored this, and now that you seem to be doing it properly you've formed the opinion that people are mad at you over what brand of word processor you use (and not, instead, mad because of your going along with an embrace-and-extend tactic and bringing it even here to Slashdot and then behaving like it's insignificant).
People tried to make sense of your crusade to sneak minors into dirty movies. I saw responsible parents expressing their shock and outrage that you'd seek to overrule the parenting they wanted their own kids to have. Where are your words acknowledging the harm your misguided notions could do them? Where is the humility to let you admit that you are not the ranking parent of everyone else's children?
Lastly, I myself made all too much sense of your courting Hollywood- in an era where multinational corporations are (as you yourself argue!) gaining all too much power, in an era where Big Media (as you yourself argue!) has too much control and is rapidly gaining more under a smaller and smaller set of controlling players, you, Jon, chose to seek their approval all of a sudden, and I have some suspicion that by leveraging your 'street cred' at Slashdot and Rolling Stone, you may even get your movie, and then it will literally be true that you will be in the pay of Big Media. Choke that down if you can swallow nothing else I'm saying- it is the truth, and it is the essence of what you are really seeking for yourself.
And then you have to point out that you are a paid columnist! "Most people who aren't paid columnists will go elsewhere." Do tell, really? Is this the reason you stick around? As a matter of fact, I had a Slashdot column all to myself, and I can tell you that _I_ didn't get paid, nor did I ask to. I wrote an essay on levels of interface. Some people actually said things like 'brilliant' about this essay. Some people flamed it like crazy. Some people pointedly found fault with some of my ideas. And I LEARNED from the criticism.
I don't actually know if your 'paid columnist' remark means you're paid by Slashdot. It could be read that way, or it could be typically disjointed bluster to make you look like a professional (which is rather a stretch!) If this is true, then I can only say that I would very nearly pay you _not_ to post articles to Slashdot. It does honestly bug me that you are allowed free rein to bluster on, that you resent showing even the minor courtesy of using proper ASCII, language and spelling, that in effect you seem to have formed the opinion that you have a _right_ to be 'published' at Slashdot. There is no such right, and I still don't know what Rob Malda sees in you that he continues to put up with your unpleasant and touchy attitude towards Slashdot's readership.
The traditional journalism is dead here, Jon. If you cannot summon up the humility to exist in a context _with_ your own readers and suffer them to reply to you even when they aren't saying things you want to hear, then you're going to be left by the wayside in favor of people who can handle that more turbulent dynamic, thrive on it, and grow from it. There is no soapbox for you to stand on. You are no better than us.
-chris johnson
If you assume for someone else to profit, you have to lose, you will avoid this situation at all costs.
If you consider it possible for yourself and another to both profit in some manner, then you will be more inclined to allow this situation to happen.
There are good arguments on both sides- for instance, when you include corporations in the equation you have to understand that, while you may wish a mutually-profitable situation, the corporation is legally bound to not only try to profit, but to try to hurt you and cause you to lose, if you are in the same line of business. It cannot cooperate with you. But at the same time, if the corporation is copying your GPLed source, there is a limit to how uncooperative it can be. It can take your code, use it, outmarket you and then withhold its changes until release- but then it has to let you have them, and even without using your code it still outmarketed you, get used to it ;)
The basic issue is simply this: how important is it that you be able to prevent someone else from profiting by your labors? Are your labors so miraculously advanced beyond the rest of the industry that (a) nobody can help you with them, and (b) they'd make a significant difference in the performance of your competitor? This is software, people- there's never been much of a link between quality and profitability. If there seems to be a gain from cooperating, consider the possibility that 'having someone else profit from your labors' is just a chance you'd have to take.
This whole 'winner takes all' concept seems to have grown out of the years of Microsoft monopoly. I suggest that this is not the only way the world works, and that the software industry is drifting back into regions where developers can profitably cooperate with each other. It's _normal_ to not need to take a 100% hostile ruthless attitude at all times. Such things are quirks of history, and we have lived through such a quirk. Amazingly enough, some things survived, such as Macintoshes and Linux. Now it's time to settle down a bit, quit scorching the earth, and get back to more normal interactions.
If you are a corporate employee, this can override certain 'human rights' you might think you have. You may not be entitled to your own thoughts, or ideas. You probably are safe from being legally tortured to death with pitchforks, look on the bright side :)
This fellow's hysteria seems to be based on the notion that people who are part of corporations have some sort of 'individual' rights. It's a pleasing argument, but largely hypothetical. Expect corporate powers over 'their own bodies' to become stronger and stronger as they are challenged.
To a corporation, firing and suing an employee to ruin the employee's life because the employee posted internal GPL code is the same as you cutting your toenails or burning off a _wart_. There is reason to believe that this perspective would hold up in court, because the employee theoretically had complete freedom to join, or not join, the corporation in the first place. Having joined, the employee's 'rights' or lack of same are spelled out in contract law... the person might find that they themselves did not own the ideas they used to modify the GPLed software, or any of the other ideas they talked about at work or came up with at home- so after being fired they could be left with _only_ publically GPLed work, and the company project which they forcibly publicized ahead of schedule- and everything else they did, not having been GPLed by anyone, is property of the company and if they tried doing anything with that, they'd be hosed, slammed into the pavement by a very slam-dunk sort of case in which they are STEALING TRADE SECRETS not theirs to GPL.
That is an ugly scenario, but it is quite real. So the trouble is not the corporate employee being harmed for exercising their right to GPL- they have no such right, they are a corporation's toenail in the legal sense and are not entitled to any such grandstanding. The trouble is on a more pragmatic level, and it's a medium sort of trouble, not a big trouble.
Basically, the corporation can fork a GPLed project and put massive resources behind trying to produce a significantly different version, all under tight wraps. It's allowed to discipline its parts as it sees fit, and is allowed to keep its work entirely to itself until it releases it with a well-funded publicity splash. At this point it must release source, and anyone can extend off this reference point- but the corporation can turn around and begin another round of complete revamping under complete secrecy, refusing to cooperate with outsiders.
I spoke to RMS about this, seeing it as a sort of loophole. He remained unperturbed, and I think I understand why- to RMS, 'free' development will always outpace, always outproduce such closed environments. For RMS this isn't even an issue, much less a loophole, to him it's the corporations being fools by turning away from a world full of willing helpers.
I don't know if he's right or not. Certainly he has a point- though there are also examples of types of work where a controlled team can outperform the bazaar- particularly game or art projects where the project's goals and values are very much a judgement call. On the other hand, OSS moves really fast- in the event of a radically altered GPLed codebase being sprung on the world, everything about it would be known and understood within days- there's not a lot of strategic advantage to keeping secrecy when you're inevitably going to make full disclosure anyhow.
Final analysis- this really isn't about the GPL so much as it's about corporatism. Like it or not, corporations get to own people and their ideas, legally. They also get to play in the fields of OSS alongside ill-funded hackers, and what they lack in nimbleness and cooperativeness they gain in sheer ability to market and distribute on a global scale.
It may be that eventually corporations will set the course for OSS by using their capacity to control collective programming skills and choke off communications. However, in a way this hardly matters- the source will get out there, no amount of GPL-allowable obfuscation (i.e. minimal) would stand up to the eyes of the world for longer than six hours or so, and frankly, if anyone thinks the amount of kluge and mess created by a world of corporate OSS 'coders' trying to trip each other up... would be worse than the current world of _closed_ corporate coders collectively trying to do exactly the same thing, with no expectation of eventual source disclosure.
Expect the corporations to abuse their privileges as hard as it can. It only adds a scattering of immensely rich, and twisted and obnoxious 'individuals' to the talent pool. Think of it like having some prima donnas who keep re-inventing everything, and just roll with it...
How are you going to stop people from using the GPLed or opensourced sections of your distribution without paying for them?
Does that help?
I don't buy that at all. Invalidate their position by becoming their worst nightmare and the fullest possible justification for their most psychotic excesses? Somehow I miss the logic in this action sequence ;)
Do what I do, what I am doing. GET THE TECHNOLOGY and then work for free with other geeks and artists who are in line to be cut off from access to media. Make CDs and work for free with artists who will release mp3s. Make video and movies and start an indie movie subculture, get the 3DSMax guys and the owners of linux rendering farms into it. CREATE. Spend your own money and your own goddamn sweat and blood and CREATE and get the work out there into the underground! Do it for free, give it away because the alternative is equally to make no money but to not have access to the media the world runs on!
I'm still waiting on my next-gen ADAT but I've been putting the rest of my studio through its paces, the hopped-up mixing board, the vast monitors, the custom low-capacitance shielded-strand snake, and I remain convinced that I can (cartman) club the industry's quality levels in the head and make it cry like Nancy Kerrigan(/cartman) >;)
Furthermore, I will not only record open-source oriented geek musicians (i.e. mp3-liking unsigned rebel sorts), I will not only do it for free, but I will provide the tape on top of that. I'm debating whether my next buy should be electronic parts for building submixers and hopping up the adat, or a Color Quickcam for showing pictures of the studio to you slashdotter rugrats ;) The more the media industry follows this scorch-the-earth path, the more determined I am to say 'hell with it!' and simply dump everything I have into an all-out assault on the status quo, using the popularity of formats like mp3 and the irresistable appeal of the free as weapons.
I consider cries of 'pirate everything the studios do!' to be pathetic wussy childish attempts to 'fight'. Exactly how does your redistribution of THEIR MEDIA! help matters? Exactly how brave do you have to be to take something at no cost to you, and give it to someone else? Unless the MPAA literally beat down your door you're risking absolutely squat. You're not DOING anything, except being a 'bad consumer' instead of a 'good consumer'. Either way you are a luser. You are sacrificing nothing and creating nothing.
If you want your fight to matter, CREATE media and get it out there as free data, to underscore the idea that in the 21st century data is too cheap to meter! Create AMAZING media. Do the most amazing music, the most incredible movie, outdo the industry at its own game and then have the guts to stand up for your convictions and keep that data free, make it possible for people to buy T-shirts or some damn thing so you can get by, so it can subsidize what you're doing. Apply for grants, I don't know- the point is, if the traditional media (being progressively concentrated in ever-fewer hands) is a magic circle, we need content creators outside the circle. We need _genius_ outside the circle. And we need it now, and we need it fast. And we can get it- if people are ready to face the situation and start pulling together.
"The revolution will not be televised" - Gil Scott-Heron ;) tell the people you meet offline about the great band you found, and how you found them, and then tell them 'It's free, this is the digital underground. It lives.'
Isn't it ironic- now that digital globalisation has made any person techically capable of expressing their message to the world, surprise- the revolution will still not be televised- because MS owns this television station, AOL/Time Warner owns that, and so on, a merry game of media restriction with no loopholes! There will be no shortcut to the real digital age- so we will just have to actually do the work. Cry me a river- then roll up your sleeves. If you can't actually sing or play or create media of some kind, then go forth and scour mp3.com or some such place (it is one huge 'slush pile', but no worse than what the industry has access to), and hunt down some band, some artist who is committed to a future of mp3 and free data. Buy one of their t-shirts. If they don't have any, buy them _a_ t-shirt
I will confess: I have wanted to be the great breakout hit from mp3-land. This, without even having stuff up yet, while still building and assembling the gear (in some cases, literally building it out of parts). And not breakout as in 'crossover', not as in getting signed with a major label- breakout as in making it completely separate from the labels, the industry, making it big enough and hitting hard enough that you wind up on the cover of Rolling Stone or Time because the story _cannot_ be ignored any longer- and still remaining a completely free-data, internet phenomenon, with no ties to the standard distribution chains. The money or lack of same isn't even important- I think done right you could be quite upper-middle class with all the tech toys you wanted, but I'm talking about being a massive breakout hit as a paradigm shift, about changing people's expectations of where you get music/movies/etc. Only that can truly fight the studios. Only that will win the war.
I still want this- who wouldn't? But I'm becoming increasingly convinced of one thing- it's not about who does it, the important thing is that someone must do that, must break the paradigm, for the benefit of all us artistic types who want to be able to control our own destinies. If it's not me, and hey, it wouldn't have to be, then it will just have to be somebody else- and I mean to throw everything I have behind that person, whoever they might be, if I get the chance. I'll record 'em for free. I'll give them the benefit of 20 years of audio hacker experience and producer savvy. I'll coax their ultimate performances out of them... anything, everything, to get someone who can break the paradigm.
When your 'wares people' are finally spending most of their time copying off free data with the blessings of the artists to distribute among the consumers... because nothing the recording or movie industries produce is anything near as good... THEN we will have won.
Awww, 20 dollars.. I wanted a peanut!
(Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts.)
Explain how!
(Money can be exchanged for goods and services.)
Woo hoo!
*gag*
Seriously, what the hell is going on here? I'm not so concerned with Taco and Hemos et al, they're just running a site and having a great time seeing what trouble they can stir up. I'm shocked (and some would say I shouldn't be) by what Katz will go along with.
Is it in fact true that Jon Katz is exactly the type of corrosive media trendy powerworshipper he purports to be against?
Does he have rationalizations already in place about how he's not really leveraging his new-media connections to gain special privileges with the very same corporate media dinosaur he claims to hate and fear?
Which would he choose, to have his film carefully sterilized to be suitable for general audiences, or to have 'his people' sneak children into theaters to see his film?
*sigh* really, this whole business is disgusting. I would have no gripe with Katz doing this if he was sincere in his desire to align himself with the existing power structures of media that so many of us have to fight against. But he is not- something is wrong with his mind, that he can't see the phenomenal hypocrisy of his actions and desires.
I'm looking at Jon's reaction to the AOL/Time Warner merger, and it's bitterly funny how the whole first paragraph is bitching not about social issues, or the media implications, but the gripes of a _disgruntled_ _consumer_. And then, the relevance... "Is individualism, free expression, diverse opinion advanced when the information economy breaks down into two or three "old and new" media conglomerates that control virtually all of the archived news and entertainment information online, and increasingly, the means to deliver it?"
Well, Jon, never mind that, eh? Which one of the media conglomerates do you like the best for your movie? It's true that taking an option doesn't mean squat in the biz, and the movie may never be made- but as we watch you dance with big media, first Amazon now the film industry in your ever-broadening search for an audience that will accept you as their guru, it's impossible to overlook some things now.
If your dream continues, you may continue to mouth the same words you've been reciting for years, and you may continue to make a pretense of outrage against corporatism and big media: but the truth will be this: You are not only supporting corporatism and big media... let me spell it out.
You. Are. In. Their. Pay.
Traitor.
Back when Katz was young and hadn't smoked too much dope, there was a subculture called 'hippies'. There were a certain amount of hippies that were perfectly sincere, and quite a lot of plastic imitations cruising over to the Haight on the weekends. (No, I wasn't one of the latter, I was about 3 months old at the time).
Eventually hippieness became a media explosion, infighting set in, and now hippie is largely an epithet, a term of abuse or embarrassment and something to be repudiated.
Thanks to Jon Katz, I can foresee a time when geek becomes equally an embarrassment. Where hippie became synonymous with an airheaded spacecase, geek will become synonymous with a sociopathic, daylight-fearing danger to society.
And maybe that's good, because then we can get back to being people for a change. :P
Much nicer. You should do desktop-picture sized ones :)
Put simply, technology never supported an encryption option before, nor would it have been a salable feature for consumers.
If someone put out a version of the Philips cassette which was impossible to duplicate from, this 'feature' would meet with a singular lack of enthusiasm from consumers. Let's get creative and add that the new Philips cassette not only can't be copied from, but will only play on the tape player that you have, plus there's the option of spending a dollar less for a tape that will play only ten times and then destroy itself neatly without injuring the drive.
Well, woo frickin' hoo- what a triumph of technology for purposes either orthoganal or hostile to what the consumer wants! This would not fly. At the time of the 33rpm LP, the Philips cassette, even the CD, this sort of thing was not attempted. DAT was 'secure' from unauthorised consumer use- and DAT died in the consumer market.
The goal of the recording industry, and indeed the movie industry as well, is to establish a new playing field in which none of the power falls into the consumers' hands. You buy your DVD- if you move to another area you have to buy another copy of the DVD for that area's players. Limited-play media are another recurring industry wet dream, especially when confronted with the specter of 'perfect media that lasts forever'. The fact of vastly cheaper media production than the old days combined with raised prices on the grounds of higher quality is nice for the industry, sure, but perfect media copying scares them... hence the paradigm change.
The change is from rude methods of interoperability (many people make audio cassettes, but they all pretty much play on all the decks you can buy, due to rigorous specs as to the dimensions of the cassette shell and standards for tape speed and dimensions), forced by the reliance on cruder analog media, to the new world of entirely virtual media- media that is no more and no less than a bunch of data. The data is easier to standardize- but it is too accessible! Any clown could write that format, or alternately could suck the data off the disk and start making identical copies. So the paradigm is to treat media, data, like it is hostile software- the word encryption, and especially the word security, give people a sense of potential danger safely contained.
But whose safety is being protected? Hint: it is not the consumer's. Indeed, in many ways the world of the media consumer, with data that can only be played on regionally localized players, data that is only rented and though you own the container you only are licensed to view the data in certain ways and don't own even the copy you purchased, data that is increasingly way beyond the consumer's ability to comprehend or control- this world is less safe for the consumer than the days of 45s and LPs. The consumer is increasingly restricted, controlled, and where once the idea of a consumer's copying off loads of tapes was seen as an intolerable abuse of the consumer's reasonable freedoms, now we approach an era where the consumer may be literally not allowed to own their own media. Instead, he or she can only be trusted to buy and care for the carrier media for streams of data- which are marked off as explicitly not the consumer's property, and which may be so well defended that the consumer can only plunk a dvd into a player and watch the fiberoptics deliver a tightly encrypted datastream into a black box in a _speaker_... inaccessible, unopenable. One wonders if the music and film industries are devising scuttling charges, so that if evil hacker people try to open the black boxes, they destroy themselves, thus preserving their secrets and forever withholding... the consumer's purchase from the consumer.
That's the paradigm change, bigtime. Are you buying the data of a song when you buy the CD, or are you only buying permission to listen to the sounds? If you analyzed the grooves of a record to determine the harmonic content of Pink Floyd, would you be thrown in jail for it? Obviously not- the concept is absurd, you own the physical record. Now, what if you crack the encryption to run a fast fourier analysis on the harmonic content of a Pink Floyd DVD? Curious how the activity is the same, but all of a sudden you're in jail for what you are doing with your possession... or is it your possession?
*sigh*
I don't know about anybody else but I know where I stand on the matter. I have purchased a modern 20-bit ADAT (an 8 track digital audio recorder) and will be producing music again, after rather a long hiatus. I'll be releasing this music in MP3 and seeing if maybe I sell 'original master' CDs on the side. I also intend to offer free recording to the likes of slashdot nerds who also intend to release mp3s for free. If I end up too busy I might also require that the musician code something and release it under the gpl ;) but anyway, each of us eventually find our own best battlefield. For me it is using my sound engineering and musical skills (which are better than my writing or coding skills) for the purpose of the new media- putting a big-ass stake in the ground of mp3, lest trendy encrypted _crap_ wash it away. And yeah, I'd give up profit for that cause. It's not so much about 'where I want to be' as 'where I'm just not willing to go', and I confess to serious dread and ill feeling over the rage for encryption and redefinition of entertainment media as stuff that's owned by big corporations and only _lent_ to consumers on promise of good behavior. I do not think my behavior warrants my 'license to own music data' being revoked unconditionally- I don't think it's reasonable that I not be allowed to open the box and poke around inside it to see how it works and maybe break it, or maybe get it to work better.
I build audio gear now- but when I was a kid I killed something like four cassette 4-tracks :) I wanted them to do more! sound better! and I took them apart and tried to do things to make the sound bigger or brighter or just generally more amazing. This usually did not work, but eventually I learned neat and useful things.
It horrifies me that the kid like me, today, trying to take apart digital media and make it bigger and better, is a criminal- not for plans to make bootleg copies for all his little friends (that wasn't my concern either), but for having the arrogance to want to take apart the media and do it a different way. We now have a situation in which people are harrassed as criminals for simply grappling with information- not government secrets, not 'if you open this the warranty is *buahahaha!*', but criminal liability and court involvement to punish what I was doing for years as a reclusive geeky kid. And I find that quietly intolerable, and cannot coexist with it.
So geek musicians, keep posted, be ready to travel to Vermont (not like I can afford to do road trips!), because I'm moving as fast as I can, trying to answer this situation with action. I want to get _great_ music out there with sound that meets or beats the best the industry can offer, and have it be data that people can _have_ and do what they wish with. I've made that rant before. On the eve of my wonderful 20 bit adat arriving (yaaaaay!) I am ranting it again. There can be no coexistence with me and the industry- I hope more people come to that realisation within themselves. I'm no pirate and do not steal the music industry's so-paranoidly-guarded wares. In fact, I don't even download mp3s- I intend to make them and _upload_ them. I don't want to make the industry poor, I want to make them irrelevant. >:)
Cheers, slashdotters. -chris
"Dan, there's something you should know in case you talk to anyone about the Vivmotrinox clip."
"Yes, that was heart-rending. Did you notice as I interviewed that brave man, the patient in the bed next to us died?"
"Er.... no."
"Whudddyuhmean 'no'?"
"Dan, don't talk about that to anyone. We fixed it. When the clip aired that patient did not die. It's not like he was the subject of the interview, you know. The sponsor wanted it more upbeat. You know, it's a story about hope."
"I see. Well, I'm sure his family will be delighted to hear of his miraculous rescue from death."
"Don't carry on like that, nobody will recognize him. We changed his hair color and put a mustache on him! Everything's taken care of."
"Everything?!? Ev... Now, I hope you're not going to lie to me, friend. Have you been 'taking care' of my hair on TV, too?"
"Dan, baby, that's our job! Oh, one other thing?"
"You're going to tell me anyway, so just spit it out like a good fellow. What?"
"Your closing, that 'The benefits of this treatment remain to be seen, but this patient's fight is an inspiration to behold'?"
"What about it?"
"We lost the 'to be seen, but'. Don't worry, it looks very natural, they had to morph to your 'b' mouth position and hold it about ten frames to match the timing with that damned leaf falling past the window. Piece of cake. You looked great."
"AND WHY, MIGHT I... scuse me, and why might I ask was this _belated_ script change made?"
"The sponsor. Wanted it to come off more upbeat, you know?"