He has a bit of a point, but takes it in a very naive direction, I think.
I'm an artist of sorts- been doing that sort of thing all my life, and in fact I've won my share of awards and prizes (not a huge share: I had an acrylic painting displayed in the Prudential Center in Boston, won a web-gif design contest, that sort of thing).
These days? Let me see. Yesterday, I bought several magazines on ultralight aircraft, because I have been getting a kick out of designing aircraft in the flight simulator 'X-Plane', which does blade element modelling which genuine aircraft designers would have killed for in 1970. I get a huge charge out of applying extra realworld constraints to the design and making a beautiful aircraft that could actually be built- part of the artistic thrill is in making the plane fly a certain way as well as look a certain way. Nothing could be farther from painting pictures on canvases- and if you're good and really get into it, the sense of the limitless interactions of factors is very tangible, and exactly the sort of thing Sterling is talking about.
Instead I started playing with Myth II mapmaking for the first time, figuring out processes for making each type of map in Photoshop. Again, a Sterling-esque experience- first it was using several tricks for making an interesting texturemap, then a bunch of different emboss effects to produce a shadowmap, more GFX hacks to make a texturemap, back to the shadowmap to add some extra shading to the texturemap, then hunt down the information for a terrain map and evolve ways to produce a slope map and changing the colormap to produce rocky impassable areas algorithmically and so on and so on- finally taking the whole conglomeration into the game and 'walking around' in it, having archers fire arrows from the tops of rocky embankments incredibly far and feeling the complexity and interest of this entirely imaginary environment- the entire process a series of artistic judgement calls but built upon a collection of obscure information and hacks which again are very much what Sterling is talking about.
Yet having worked out this much, that the artistic and creative impulse faces incomprehensible freedoms (you can build ultralights and fly them without a license, you could take those VR concepts and build a whole world as an art statement on the computer), Sterling trips up when looking at what this means.
Yes, it is possible to distribute art and creation with absurd reach and little cost. (As someone with about 1 5/6 novels, a bunch of visual arts, video clips, and a series of essays and rants on his website, I can vouch for this;) ) However, this does not necessarily mean 'fame and fortune comes to everyone'. With billions of people following their muse, the chances of this are even rarer than they once were. The ideal of 'give it away' becomes a philosophical position, not a means to an end. You end up practicing generosity because you are disenfranchised, have no control or input, but you still have the ability to exchange work, art, creations with other people like you. It's a small pleasure, but a honest one.
Who gets rich? Not a very difficult question. Nobody seems to have informed the corporations, the governments, that their job is picking daisies and knitting quilts out of electronic parts. The expression of technology or government on a large scale is never simply about technology or government- it's always tempered with a hefty dose of self-perpetuation, of power for its own sake. Sterling sees this (in the Gilded Age comments) but doesn't follow the logic of it: the result is that while the masses of people increasingly turn to entertaining frivolity, frivolity of undreamed of interest and usefulness (designing planes on the computer? designing architecture, or governing cities on the computer?), the ruling forces (government _and_ corporate) cling to their secondary value, power for the sake of it. Given new tools to maintain this power, to extend it by surveillance and controlling the masses, these ruling forces do so without even a second thought.
Many of us will be best suited to Sterling's utopian dreams- creating, giving, sharing, laying the foundation for a populist society that breaks national and economic borders. That's a powerful new force, for which communications is responsible.
Some people will need to look beyond that, to answer the trend of corporations and governments seizing ever-more power over the individual. The power to control is the power to profit and thrive and get rich, and there has traditionally been no off switch on this desire, nor is there any reason to believe that 2000 will bring one.
In a way it's like natural populations of animals- populations of governments and corporations do have a place in the 'ecosystem' but they WILL not control themselves automatically. Without predation, the populations explode and eventually succumb to natural disasters of one sort or another. Example: the Gilded Age leading to stock market crash and the Great Depression.
To some extent, government and corporations predate on each other, which is desirable. Where Sterling goes wrong is failing to see these entities in their true light- competitive, hostile forces slugging it out like competing animals, with the condition of struggle and battle being not only the norm, but the only desirable state. Doubters might consider what's happened to the populations of computer operating systems and application software in a time when one 'competitor' has managed to effectively win. Rather than bringing in a new era of peace and affluence, this 'winning' has brought imbalance, stagnation... in all, a perfect picture of a natural population of animals plunged into comparative suffering through overpopulation.
Sterling's vision seems far too prone to believe in the Magic Plateau (him and The Well and Wired are all horribly guilty of this). Unfortunately, any such stagnation can only be harmful. As with the natural world, the only healthy condition is the balance of opposing forces- of conflict, the inefficiency and sordid reality of not always winning, of not everybody agreeing, of struggle.
Living in a sterile plastic bubble may be peaceful, undistracting, may even seem like a utopian existence, but it is both vulnerable and bland. Life thrives on conflict, and conflict springs eternal- even in the era of Microsoft (which claims to love conflict but acts to eliminate anything that might conflict with it, whether that is competition or government) conflict produces Linux, which is partly driven by needs MS doesn't want to fill, and partly driven by this latent need for conflict- by the "So MS will fill all my needs, huh? Well what if I want X?" (pun intended;) ) and the "So MS will crush Linux because of x, y, and z? Like hell it will!". It's only partly about the abstract fulfilling of purposes. The rest is about life- and the spilling over of will to live, the spirit of living things coloring even these abstract computer interfaces which aren't themselves alive.
Sterling's call to the aesthetic seems to be announcing a plateau. This is nonsense- but his means may be perfectly legitimate. There is no reason not to share and create and give away- indeed, this is one of the natural counterbalances to the disempowerment Sterling denies. Just as one arm of society, the corporations, hits new peaks of control, victory and domination based on sheer capitalism, another arm begins to counterbalance this by setting up a barter and gift culture that's not so beholden to the corporations. One could predict these things- as long as you don't make the error of thinking the world is a stable plateau, or ever will be.
Cheers, to fellow slashdot conflicters;) now, in the spirit of conflict, I ask that anyone bravely still reading both mark me Flamebait and also write a flame in response;)
Why do you assume that if Apple succeeded, everything else would have to die? That seems a very odd conclusion to draw, as if you have learned economics solely from watching Microsoft expend huge amounts of effort to scorch the earth of the computer industry. Wouldn't it be more likely that Apple would simply take and hold a decent big percentage, but not a stranglingly huge majority?
Oddly enough, I'd put up everything graphical I could come up with, _months_ ago. I didn't do this because I wanted to get an award, or because I thought anybody was going to jump around cheering: I did it because it was the right thing to do.
I made a point of producing all these textures in.xpm format (_months_ ago) so they could be native Linux tiles and background textures. On the agenda, I need to go make.bmp versions of everything available for the underprivileged- I didn't know until recently that Windows could not use a simple gif or jpg as a background unless the hapless Windows user turned on Active Desktop.
All these things are absolutely original work, put out there just to use with no strings attached and the sincere request of 'Just don't claim these as your own OK?'.
Anyone griping about there being gifs should be pleased that at least I don't have Windows.bmps yet;) well, whatever. I'm sure Enlightenment is going to win or something, but I don't care- I have been fighting for a loan to get an ADAT recorder (to help people record unauthorized music and put out mp3s;) ) and will keep on doing so. If I win $2000 I pledge I will buy a x86 Linux box to go with my PPC dualboot:)
First of all, you yourself cite the bit of US Code that specifies purpose and character of the use is to be taken into account: the _first_ concern is whether the use is commercial. That means 'is the exchange being done for money, or for nothing?'. That is the _first_ concern: or if you like, loophole.
More importantly, I can't help but think you intentionally ignore Sec. 1008 of title 17 (you're not the only non-lawyer computer dweeb that can use Google to look up genuine US Code to back his position):
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.
I say Napster is distribution of a digital audio recording medium based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of that medium, and it's on you to explain away the law. Please explain how swapping music on Napster is a commercial act.
I am aware that there are amicus briefs desperately trying to argue that mp3 is not a digital recording medium. I give in, I concede: mp3s are a cassette tape. No, wait, that too is protected! Let me rephrase that: mp3s are a ham sandwich. If you'd like to join me in insisting that mp3s are not a digital recording medium, but a ham sandwich, together we can explain away sec. 1008. On the other hand if you're not a gibbering psychotic you might be more inclined to take the natural view that mp3s are precisely a digital recording medium.
Failing that you may wish to skip over this bit of the argument and lean on another poor bit of argument- that sec 1008 does not make infringing use into non-infringing use: it just permanently exempts that class of users from prosecution or harassment. Which would mean that although you may feel Napster users are thieves, all you _can_ do is taunt them about it, as you are barred from filing suit against them.
Which is just what you're doing, isn't it? I'm glad we understand each other, and no wonder you're upset. Call me a thief some more, maybe it will soothe you despite being an entirely impotent act- and despite the fact that when I talk about putting mp3s on the web I'm talking about my freaking music, which does not even have samples in it.
Honestly, I'd think you'd give up at some point. I can tell you why I don't: what happens to the concept of intellectual property in the music and entertainment industries is of direct interest to me. What's your excuse? Personally, I would like to see intellectual property abolished outright, and for the content creators to fall back on protection against simple fraud and loss of credit: rather than it being illegal to (costlessly, trivially) copy the actual content, it should simply be illegal to claim the content as your own, because that would constitute fraud. I daresay there is considerable justification for prohibiting dilution: I would consider it a violation for someone to take a musical piece of mine, overdub singing munchkins and use it in an advertisement, because that seriously dilutes the recognizability and integrity of my original piece. However, people swapping and checking out my stuff? Sure, not a problem. If there's a black market for people copying and _selling_ my stuff parallel to my own sales, that simply means I'm not competing effectively with their distribution channels.
We can go on like this for weeks: why don't you just give up? You're not winning, you're just pounding the table and referring only to the parts of the US Code you like. That's dishonest. Not that I would expect someone siding noisily with the RIAA of _dishonesty_:P
Wasn't it Hatch who made a point of formally stating that the Clinton administration's take on Napster (their very negative amicus brief) did NOT represent Congress's viewpoint?
Call me what you like (I'm not primarily a computer geek- I'm a musician- and clearly oh such a criminal in putting my music out as mp3s) but I'm not impressed by your abuse, nor do I find it very persuasive. I think I know what fair use is better than you, regardless of whether you are a RIAA lawyer or usenet troll or whatever explanation you have for your oddly familiar, take-no-prisoners-concede-no-losses rhetoric.
To put it simply, I see a qualitative difference in the new technology, very similar to 'Star Trek' concepts. People sometimes discuss what would happen to economics when 'replicators' are invented for physical objects. What does that do to the proposition of value? Well, in the music business we have exactly that: it's called digital copying, and we even have quick cheapo copies called mp3s that aren't as good as the real thing but even easier to copy and transmit.
Like it or not (for you, I'd guess it's 'not'), this changes everything. I for one am not willing to stand in the path of progress: it is entirely obvious that this form of property is made absurd when you can download innumerable copies of the 'product' at no cost without depriving the original owner of their copy.
Yet what is the product? You don't get the physical media- did you want that? How much will you pay? Your downloading a thing will not make it hit Top 40 radio- how much value is in that? Your downloading it doesn't necessarily mean you get to make the soundtrack of your film out of it and charge money to see it- that is a more traditional form of copyright, like repackaging, and there's an argument for controlling that, such as Lucas is making against Dr. Dre for ripping the THX sound and _using_ it to open his album.
All these things are forms of value entirely independent from the proposition that music's value is derived from control of the sounds themselves. Anyone with _any_ experience in the business knows the sound is almost irrelevant- it hardly _matters_ what the sound is. The important thing in the business is distribution channels, the independent promotion network (not 'indie labels', the payola stuff for radio), doing tonnage on physical media and getting it to the stores and saturating media with your promotional message. Nothing done on Napster can affect this.
How old are you, "FatHogByTheAss" (cute), and what are your credentials? Hell, never mind credentials: tell me three books on the music industry that you have read that qualify you to have even half a clue here. I will be happy to give you a list of titles if that will help. The problem here is that you're spazzing out with wild accusations in a very pedantic way and being no help at all with the very real problem of figuring out where the industry is heading- now that 'replicating' music is trivially easy and costless. That's a really big change! Sticking your head in the sand is a really stupid way to react to it.
Me? I'm going off right now to upload still more music to besonic.com/chrisj: latest album is fretless guitar Frippertronics ambient music with a very rich deep reverb sound probably beyond anything you'll ever hear off the major labels. Then I'm going to leave the files uploading, and go get the makings for tacos, and make myself a delicious taco dinner. I wish you a good dinner as well- if the acidic churnings of your worry-racked gut will allow it, what with all the criminals and all, who aren't even ashamed. I'm not worried though I am busy- I may never make money off my music directly (actually I've made hundreds of dollars, but you know what I mean), but I build equipment as well, and I have many people encouraging me to go into business with this. The technological changes that have radically altered the music business have evened the playing field for me as a designer- now I can encode mp3s with example sounds and put them up on my website, use my music as further demonstrations (like Tom Scholz did with the Rockman and the Boston albums), and appreciate REAL 'network marketing': not clowns trying to rope their friends into flogging cheap junk, but the ability to (through mp3, eBay, the net) promote stuff _purely_ by people discovering it on their own with no ad budget or spamming or mass media coverage, and (through UPS, the post office, etc) ship directly to customers without having to maintain brick and mortar storefronts.
It's a pretty exciting time to be in this business.
So, I have very little sympathy for your position. I hope _more_ people become 'thieves' by your definition. They are establishing habits of information exchange that will serve them well in future years, and will make for more of a free market, because the information they're exchanging and picking up is not centrally controlled anymore. This means it has the potential to build support for areas of the market that were being stifled- for instance, classical and jazz. I can't tell you whether this type of networking will lead to new genuine classical recordings being made with real orchestras- unlike chamber or jazz music, some classical costs a lot to produce. However, it's dying off anyhow because the controlled market doesn't have a place for it, so how could a digital underground hurt matters? In this area the situation for years has been 'we cannot get the labels to _put_ _out_ what we want. Plus they're destroying 10,000 irreplacable jazz and classical master tapes to make way for new Britney Spears'. I'm not making this up.
To paraphrase Darwin (and you should be thinking about what the straight Darwinistic view of this Napster development would be), "I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the thieves."
#1: money doesn't change hands. The law is based on theft being monetary loss, and/or the taking of tangible stuff. If you are so certain that depriving the record company of a _potential_ sale by costlessly duplicating a degenerate copy is a criminal act, shouldn't you be just as tough on other types of deprivation, such as bad PR? Here, have an opinion: "Metallica's new albums are not as good as the old ones and you should not buy the new ones". I have (possibly) deprived Metallica of a potential sale. Arrest me.
#2: the artists making that 'more money' ARE THE FREAKING BIG-LABEL ARTISTS, thank you. What gives you the idea that they are not? Do you seriously think sales are hurting? You're wrong. In addition to that, the little indie acts are NOT making more money than they used to- they are just not having to SPEND as much for exposure.
Take me for instance, I've made money off mp3s. I was at mp3.com until they did nasty things to my contract with a fork and I left. (Now I'm at besonic.com/chrisj, still doing noncommercial stuff with very commercial production and engineering.) I made hundreds of dollars which is chicken feed compared to the big label machinery- but unlike the days when I duplicated cassette tapes and printed up J-cards, this time I did not SPEND as much for that level of distribution! That is really the key. It's not even about raking in lots of money as an indie artist- never happened, never will.
Indie is sort of a trial balloon for the REAL value of distributed music. The value of mass media marketing and fads and heavy brick and mortar distribution... is different. Hell, almost half of a CD's list price goes to independent promotion- you might know it as payola, and the record labels don't like being dependent on it one bit, but they tried to kill the independent promoter network in the 80s and totally failed. My chances of cracking that independent promoter network are approximately 2,000,000 percent less than nil, so no matter how much copying goes on, the big labels DO at least have an absolute lock on traditional media. I think they should be grateful for that instead of whining when alternate media turns up.
Oh- and is anyone _ever_ going to do a little tiny bit of homework and clue that noncommercial copying and distribution was formally legalized under the Home Recording Act for the benefit of tape cassette users, and taxation put in place to compensate the RIAA directly? I'm sorry, but 'crime' is not 'that which I think is bad', 'crime' is what's spelled out in the law books, and our government SPECIFICALLY LEGALISED noncommercial copying and exchange when the Philips compact cassette became popular. I just wish, I really wish that people would confine their arguments to reality or stick to emotional squawks. Noncommercial copying and exchange is legal. Period. _Digital_ versions of that are subject to the DMCA and even that has fair use provisions- they just suck, and the guy who put through the DMCA, Orrin Hatch, is very unhappy with what's happened to fair use, and we haven't seen the end of this.
But the bottom line is: crime is what the law says it is. _Morality_ is different, and you may feel it is immoral to copy major label music at no cost and take no money for exchanging it. However, your feelings are _your_ problem because the law does not support you.
Let's skip the bit about giant corporations (how charming to define 'music' as 'that which is controlled by the giant corporations' and disenfranchise anyone else's music) and get to the meat of the question: where is the line drawn, _what_ exactly do they own?
Do they own the physical media in the stores you haven't bought?
Do they own the physical media after you've bought it?
Do they own the 'recipe' for the music: publishing, music, lyrics, the same tune done by a different artist?
Do they own that recipe if you cover the tune only to test out your recorder or something and don't try to distribute?
Do they own the pattern of bits encoded in PCM 44.1K 16 bit encoding?
Do they own the pattern of _sound_ as presented on CD?
Do they own the pattern of sound in the event of your making crude copies (audiocassette, mp3) and selling them as bootlegs?
Do they own the pattern of sound in the event of your making crude copies (audiocassette, mp3) and giving them to your Mom, or your friends?
Do they own the pattern of sound in the event of your making crude copies (audiocassette, mp3) and giving them to strangers on request?
Do they own the pattern of sound if you hum it walking down the street?
Do they own the pattern of sound if you sing it at a Girl Scout campfire gathering?
Do they own the pattern of sound if you hum it or sing it to yourself?
Do they own your _thinking_ of the music to yourself and 'playing' it within the confines of your own head? (thinks of Metallica's 'Sad But True' by way of example. There- if you've heard it and remember it, I have just conspired to make _you_ think the song, without paying the record company >:) )
Many of these situations have been tested in court and found to be fair use. If you side with the record companies unthinkingly, you're just stupid: they push the limits, that is what being a money-grubbing corporation is all about, and you cannot simply take their claims at face value. In the event that they manage to pass laws that forbid you thinking their music without paying per thought, I daresay just about anyone would see it as a moral obligation to resist the situation and deny them that 'right'. How is it so difficult to see that copying degraded versions of the music noncommercially without stealing one single CD of physical product off store shelves is equally a natural sort of fair use? Ask me whether shoplifting CDs is theft, you'll get a different answer. Ask me whether making bit for bit clones and SELLING THEM AS BOOTLEGS is piracy and you'll get no argument.
However, if one person wants to borrow a cheap dub of some commercial music from someone else without money changing hands, it's none of the record companies' business- and if technology has moved music into the 'Star Trek Replicator' era where that person just goes 'poof' and another copy exists without depriving the original owner of his copy, well... that says very obvious things about scarcity and value, and we're seeing the results. You'll notice that the swappers are not GETTING physical media. You'll notice that physical media is not suffering financial losses- business is as good as ever!
You're a fool to take the record industry lawyer side of things. Period. Because you're not making sensible arguments, you're making arguments based on ignoring economic and social realities. It's not a smart position to take.
"Foo says the world is round, but Bar says the world is flat. Now, the problem here is that you two are fighting and not even trying to listen to each other. You need to settle down and find some kind of neutral ground, because that's where the truth always lies- when people fight this bitterly, they are always both wrong."
The money is, indeed, not in holding copyright- if you have a lot of clout and write a 'Yesterday' or 'Can You Feel The Love Tonight' (i.e. pretty darn mainstream if you think about it!) then it may be possible to earn money on your songwriting. In both cases note the songwriter was already a star...
You're right that touring is important: bear in mind, though, how prevalent 'pay-to-play' is, it's frankly pretty uncommon for a band to earn any significant amount touring unless they are quite a big act.
The serious money is where it's always been: merchandising. How many of you have a vi mug, or slashdot T-shirt, or copyleft T-shirt? From Elvis to the Beatles' cut-up hotel sheets and pillowcases to entire Jackson 5 fan kits to KISS figurines to Lion King electronic picturebooks that beep 'Can You Feel The Love Tonight' (beeep beeep beeep beep beeeeeeeep bebeeep...), it's _stuff_ that brings in the actual money.
Yes, I'm making fun of this to some extent, but it's still true- and it's very good advice. If you're a band, making friends with some T-shirt printer (if you're a techno act have 'em make you mousepads or something) might be a tremendously useful move. Basically, it's a matter of being a businessman as well as a musician- and those who can do this are the ones who aren't starving, to some extent regardless of their actual talent. When I look at a band like Hootie and the Blowfish (so often mocked) I see a marketing machine, but unlike so many who think it's the record company's machine, I figure it's Hootie's machine- that Hootie got a management team together and started earning so much money and moving so much _stuff_ that the record companies came to him. I could be wrong- but that's how it's done these days, plain and simple.
It's interesting to reflect that none of this _requires_ the distributed music to be a commercial product. I strongly suspect this battle for attention and merchandising will extend into mp3 territory quite naturally- the first people to realize that they can work very hard to make music to give away over the net for free and make money on _derivative_ stuff will be positioned very well- because most acts still think the money is in selling the music itself, and it's not, and never has been, especially not to the extent that some think.
And it might seem like making a few extra cents by controlling the music and distribution and charging for it is a no-brainer... what could it hurt? But this is a business of exposure and popularity- and the most popular word in the English language (as a selling point) is 'free'. Ignoring that is setting yourself up to be at a disadvantage.
Tom, it's not primarily about 'the freedom to make a backup copy of the Matrix'. You're responding to the constant surface diatribes, and yes, they are trivial and rather embarrassing.
What is more important is where all this is leading, and to understand that you need to look at it from the perspective of a content creator, not a consumer. There may be an argument that consumer rights mean being allowed to keep personal copies- there's also an argument that it's as silly as trying to make a copy of your toaster- either way, it is not a major issue, it's a smallish financial hassle if you have to buy multiple instances of a product for whatever reason.
From the perspective of a content creator, we are rapidly moving towards a world where I (a musician) have no access to the popular media formats at all, unless I go through the DVD or recording industry. This, not the consumer angle, is a serious, serious problem.
I'd just made this point in another thread so with your pardon I'll simply copy over the relevant points...
There was a time when access to the media (vinyl records, reel-to-reel tape recorders) was pretty costly and inaccessible, but it was strictly a matter of price- if you bought the gear, you were good to go, you could try wrestling with other players for distribution and sales just like you were an equal citizen.
Then it was cassette multitracks and the Philips cassette taking over from records. Suddenly, every musician in the world was flooding record company agents with tapes. Most were ignored- but I'll tell you, I've walked down the street and heard a random car drive by with a tape I've produced blaring out the windows. It's a hell of a feeling, that is. You get to produce art that is _used_ and enjoyed by people. At the same time, if you get tapes from stores, they are taxed and the industry's cheap bulk tape is not- below a certain level, you'd have the deck stacked against you financially. (After posting this I was reminded that in Canada there's a stiff tax on CD-recordable blanks for just the same reason. This is not history, this is now and it continues to get worse)
Then it was the CD. At first this was just as forbidding as the vinyl record to produce- you'd pay a lot to get digital mastering done, you'd have to buy CD pressings in lots of 500 or 1000: but startlingly, the technology advanced to where we can now press CDs on our computers just like making cassette tapes one at a time. Anybody who's had a dual cassette deck running for days making 20 copies of their album will recognize what this means. And again, there's the desire by the industry to tax this- purportedly to recoup losses from not selling you the same music 6 times, but also effectively handicapping 'unauthorized' artists and putting a spoke in the wheels of anyone trying to get a competing organisation started. We've come a long way from when you could save up to get an LP mastering lathe and try to be a record company, haven't we?
And now we have DVD. Now we have an increasing emphasis on 'security'. Whose? Well, considering that the direction is toward a world where script kiddies can still copy anything they want, but you can't legitimately start a record company and distribute media without either coughing up millions to a conglomerate for a 'security key', or pirating one for original material and being liable for stealing that key, we are talking about security for monopolists.
We're not talking about the script kiddie being unable to copy the Matrix and never have been- who will prosecute, the same ones who arrested you for making a mix tape for the car? Instead we're talking about a very intentional spoke in the wheels of anyone who wants to be in the business of media. It doesn't affect you, the script kiddy- or even you, the consumer. (you're out maybe 20 bucks in the worst case, having to buy an extra copy of the Matrix. Oh horrors, call Reuters and MSNBC.) It affects anyone who wants to produce original content, or distribute it, or help people do that. It's a roadblock- the ideal end situation here is to have all the DVD players require truly uncrackable encodings that only licensees have access to.
People hear things like that, follow the logic, and then mysteriously can only see how it affects them as consumers. But the direction is clear as day, and there are certain implications I'm spelling out here.
My question is, what exactly gives the recording/movie/etc industry (who are not a government the last I heard) the right to openly, upfront and with the approval of society, set up a situation where anyone wishing to make media for the public can only go through them, or be forced to become a licensor by spending a comparable amount of money for a security key normally sold to huge corporate conglomerates?
I hope this answers some of your questions, Tom. You're right that it seems a lot of fuss to make just to get to watch The Matrix on a linux box, or make a backup of it. But it's not really about consumer rights at all- the real damage is done by delivering control of the media itself over to the corporations, who then withhold access to media.
As far as I know it is still possible to produce non-CSS DVDs, ones with no encryption, and play them on mainstream consumer decks. For how much longer will that be true?
"One of Gore's bludgeons against Bradley for the last several months has been Gore's assertion that Bradley is not sufficiently loyal to the Democratic party. He'd lose that issue if he were perceived as being too close to the Greens."
That's it, I'm for Bradley;)
Seriously- when I did the selector thing (ack, I'm bushifying!) my top three were: Nader by a definite amount, then Bradley and Gore almost exactly tied (!). This illustrated for me how peculiar such quizzes can be, since I think of Tipper and the PMRC when I think of Gore (I do _not_ want Tipper as First Lady).
I am very leery of voting for Nader, only in part because I figure he can't win- I also think he's too rabid about some things, even things I agree with. I wouldn't want a president who frothed at the mouth over consumer protection, just one who _supported_ it (if you follow me).
Hearing that Bradley is not a sufficiently loyal democrat makes my day:) good, I hope he's not. I think the two-party system is a mess, and I like him better if he's not bought and paid for by the Party. Hopefully he's not _too_ alienated from them- Hunter S. Thompson, covering the '72 race, figured out some very disturbing things about party politics, basically that the party was happy to backstab George McGovern in exchange for losing the current election and then being able to move in four years later after Nixon was all done. It's paranoid, it's twisted, but the analysis was very convincing.
*hums to the tune of Pinball Wizard* "...that President Bradley, sure plays a mean basketballll.."
To me, it's a matter of making sure people have some vague pretense of control of the means of distribution. I'm a musician- I frankly don't give a damn about whether I can make backup copies of movies I own. I mean, it sounds reasonable, I'm not arguing against it, but that's a very trivial thing in some ways, comparable to not being able to make backup copies of my toaster in case it breaks.
The bit that gets my attention is the continued, relentless emphasis on authorization. I mean, in some articles (typically on mp3, naturally) you'll see terms like 'authorized music'! I'm in the process of upgrading my recording studio to record a new album, and at that point I've been planning to release an older album as well, plus some experimental music here and there. I'm more and more convinced I should call the newer album 'Unauthorized Music'! Probably will- there are actually topical songs that would be of interest to slashdotgeeks in there, but more significantly, my releasing this stuff is directly opposed to what the entertainment industry would allow...
And that is where I fit in this equation. It's not about being able to make a backup copy of the matrix (yeesh, as if you can't spring for another copy years down the line if the first one breaks). That's a total smokescreen. What's going on here is a powerplay to control the media, as in physical media. We already pay record industry taxes on blank tapes- purportedly because of copying, but it just so happens that if you're some smalltime musician trying to promote your own music, you're going to pay taxes to the music industry for the privilege of competing with them. Part of your expenditure for tapes goes to the same people you're up against.
This isn't good enough? Apparently not. What I'm seeing with mp3 and the wish for a 'secure' format (and who, pray tell, is to feel this sense of security?) and DVD and the struggles over that 'secure' format (and how secure are they entitled to feel?), is the powerful desire to entirely withhold access to the (hoped-for) mainstream physical media by the 'unauthorized'.
That's me. I am unauthorized.
There was a time when access to the media (vinyl records, reel-to-reel tape recorders) was pretty costly and inaccessible, but it was strictly a matter of price- if you bought the gear, you were good to go, you could try wrestling with other players for distribution and sales just like you were an equal citizen.
Then it was cassette multitracks and the Philips cassette taking over from records. Suddenly, every musician in the world was flooding record company agents with tapes. Most were ignored- but I'll tell you, I've walked down the street and heard a random car drive by with a tape I've produced blaring out the windows. It's a hell of a feeling, that is. You get to produce art that is _used_ and enjoyed by people. At the same time, if you get tapes from stores, they are taxed and the industry's cheap bulk tape is not- below a certain level, you'd have the deck stacked against you financially.
Then it was the CD. At first this was just as forbidding as the vinyl record to produce- you'd pay a lot to get digital mastering done, you'd have to buy CD pressings in lots of 500 or 1000: but startlingly, the technology advanced to where we can now press CDs on our computers just like making cassette tapes one at a time. Anybody who's had a dual cassette deck running for days making 20 copies of their album will recognize what this means. And again, there's the desire by the industry to tax this- purportedly to recoup losses from not selling you the same music 6 times, but also effectively handicapping 'unauthorized' artists and putting a spoke in the wheels of anyone trying to get a competing organisation started. We've come a long way from when you could save up to get an LP mastering lathe and try to be a record company, haven't we?
And now we have DVD. Now we have an increasing emphasis on 'security'. Whose? Well, considering that the direction is toward a world where script kiddies can still copy anything they want, but you can't legitimately start a record company and distribute media without either coughing up millions to a conglomerate for a 'security key', or pirating one for original material and being liable for stealing that key, we are talking about security for monopolists.
We're not talking about the script kiddie being unable to copy the Matrix and never have been- who will prosecute, the same ones who arrested you for making a mix tape for the car? Instead we're talking about a very intentional spoke in the wheels of anyone who wants to be in the business of media. It doesn't affect you, the script kiddy- or even you, the consumer. (you're out maybe 20 bucks in the worst case, having to buy an extra copy of the Matrix. Oh horrors, call Reuters and MSNBC.) It affects anyone who wants to produce original content, or distribute it, or help people do that. It's a roadblock- the ideal end situation here is to have all the DVD players require truly uncrackable encodings that only licensees have access to.
People hear things like that, follow the logic, and then mysteriously can only see how it affects them as consumers. But the direction is clear as day, and there are certain implications I'm spelling out here.
My question is, what exactly gives the recording/movie/etc industry (who are not a government the last I heard) the right to openly, upfront and with the approval of society, set up a situation where anyone wishing to make media for the public can only go through them, or be forced to become a licensor by spending a comparable amount of money for a security key normally sold to huge corporate conglomerates?
If it's Open Source Reviewing, Jon, why is your name on the masthead?
However, that aside- congratulations on the new 'hr' tags! Maybe I'm weird but to me, seeing you pick up new bits of tech and knowledge (rather than ossify and rot in a rut) is more exciting than any of the movies you're talking about.
Any chance of a 'Slashdot HTML for Beginners' article by you? I'm sure there are some slashdotters who don't know what a horizontal rule tag is, and now you do (dear god, let him not be doing these things in word). If you posted such an article, it would immediately be pounced upon by legions of clued slashdotters- who would probably end up providing huge amounts of education for all. Care to give it a try?
The Internet wouldn't be here without Arpanet, which was a Department of Defense project and thus more socialist than capitalist (in that it was decreed by the government and made to happen using government money).
PCs would very likely not be here without the original 6502-based Apple computers, which were designed in a garage by a ubergeek named Woz, or Steve Wozniak, who was, is and remains uninterested in the profit motive, and currently teaches children if I'm not mistaken. It was done for coolness factor entirely, and Woz had to be argued into even starting a business- and initially balked and refused to do so! He was persuaded by...
Steve Jobs, who is more responsible for 'Microsoft's ease of use' than they are. In a situation where everybody did DOS, and he could have done well by using his Svengali-like talents to sell DOS better than the next guy, Jobs wanted more. He was always pushing for something though he didn't himself know what he wanted- after seeing the Xerox PARC demos he wanted that and more, and personally berated, inspired, terrified and hijacked an entire team of geeks into creating the next-generation Alto and inventing most of the territory in the bargain. Jobs is not and has never been particularly interested in money either- he wants rock-star like fame and influence, and wants to be the one to revolutionise the world. He sort of managed it once, and continues to be very good PR specifically because he's more interested in the ability to shock and impress than he is in the likelihood of delivering reliable value to stockholders.
It looks like most of your examples for the benefits of greed actually refer to people who were and are motivated by completely different reasons! The reason isn't the same- curiosity, geek value, ego, government socialism- but it seems that in every case it's something other than capitalist greed that produces results.
Is there _anything_ useful that classic unadulterated greed has produced? What's the percentage in innovation, cooperation, progress? Isn't it true that greed _never_ produces anything worthwhile, only seizes on existing things and magnifies/hypes/ruins them? Granted, the magnification and hype can have uses, but one would not want to rely on a greed-motivated world. Nothing would get done!
If Bezos truly represents all that could go wrong or all that has gone wrong...
(let's see- 'e-business' that doesn't make money but produces absurdly high stock valuations and copycat ventures, doesn't even necessarily deliver the lowest prices and is also using patents as a weapon to seize big and obvious areas of pseudo-intellectual property)
...then isn't he in fact the ideal choice for Man Of The Year in the same sense that Hitler was Time's Man Of The Year? Nobody has ever suggested that all these people were _good_: Time may have one view of Bezos now, but may also be quite aware that the whole thing could be a massive, damaging and dangerous con game- and _still_ would choose Bezos as Man Of The Year, because if it _is_ a con it's very big news and Bezos still represents it very effectively.
It's a GNU joke. He is to be made the Impaladin, Gnuser of free software and Mooseter of all he surveys:) ever Gazeelepful, uh... *runs away before being arrested as a pundit;) *
One thing I've been noticing is that a lot of post-cyberpunk (even the most brilliant stuff, for instance Pat Cadigan's newest book) seems trapped in oversophistication. I've read multiple books by Cadigan and William Gibson (really _good_ writers) and see the same pattern- a groundbreaking initial book that was really clear and powerful- and then, without necessarily lowering the quality much, the works get _baroque_, so ornate and hard to follow and cynical/detached that you can't latch onto anything. Pat Cadigan's 'Fools' used _typefaces_ as a literary device to depict a multiple-personality viewpoint. It's like as this literature progresses, the writers try to make bigger and bigger points until they're so big as to be meaningless. By comparison, Clarke, Asimov etc. were from an older school of literature. It's tempting to say they were trying to write for the reader instead of just for high art's sake- but the modern writers are also trying to write to be read- it's just that if the reader wants to be wowed, overwhelmed and left stunned, tying things up in neat little endings won't make it anymore...
Compare Neuromancer with, say, 'Imperial Earth' by Clarke. The tones are utterly unlike. Both books conclude with a clear finishing point, but again they're totally unlike. The Gibson book concludes with a big conceptual leap played very deadpan, and the idea is on a cosmic scale, also nihilistic (as it will mean very little to the protagonist who's left behind by the lessons of the narrative). The Clarke book concludes with a small choice played up for effect, and the idea is small and personal and rather sentimental- but will affect everyone in the story, and (it's suggested) for the better.
Why would the latter be _worse_? It's hard to argue that the William Gibson universe is better than the perhaps sentimental Clarke universe (or indeed Asimov's universe). It is as if people wearing Nike sneakers and waiting for their stock options to vest want to find a vicarious nihilism through modern SF writing, a bleakness that they are looking for and not finding in their own lives. One might well wonder whether there will be a recurrence of hope and meaning in SF literature in the next five years- since the Real World is poised to deliver another wake-up call.
Of course, if you read and believe 'The Long Boom' voodoo happytalk, you might as well get heavily into reading the most nihilistic and meaningless cyberpunk you can possibly find: it might be your subconscious trying to tell you not to be too much of an idiot:)
...but you made an elaborate site entirely dependent on Microsoft Active Server Pages, and you're expecting it to work with _any_ web standards, much less be indexable and spiderable as if it was proper HTML? I'm afraid that you stepped right into that one. Look on the bright side- were it not for this Ask Slashdot article, you might never have known you weren't indexable, as this seems to be a little known fact! That alone is rather shocking.
I've gotten at least one of those addresses _killed_, so it'll only bounce. So your giving it to other spammers isn't really helping much as the account is already dead:) why not learn how to responsibly use a tracking service such as http://spamcop.net/?
BAntiSpammerFH motto: "Why hide from spam when you can go out and have the spammers killed?":) (please don't be a fscking idiot about it, tho- forwarded lists of jokes are not commercial spam, they are some friend of yours being a luser. Spam goes to huge monster lists of addresses, it's not merely email you don't like.)
I refuse nothing. It's just that if what I get is spam, I will be taking some time out of my day to use the great spam-tracking resources we have available, use my attention to discern if it's a mistake or false alarm (something that really does rate a human attention to check out) and if all systems are go, the admins in control of EVERY POINT OF CONTACT (the true source email addresses, the 'remove me' addresses for harvesting 'live ones' and even web sites that are clearly spam oriented) are asked to kill the accounts.
I've killed sixteen. I'm prouder of this than my slashdot karma;)
So it's fine to use technological means to haven from spam, but personally, I will always choose to be down there in the trenches:) for every means to be shielded from spam, there's an equally convenient and effective means to track it and take action against the responsible ISPs. I _especially_ enjoy attacking the ones that make a big fuss about how legal they are being, citing legal-sounding legislation about how they're allowed to do this. They don't seem to understand that they're not dialling in to their government, they're dialling into ISPs to spam. Their ignorance does not save them >:)
I'd separate chain letters from UCE. To me there's a really substantial difference between commercial spam and commercial spammers, and people being idiots. I'm constantly annoyed and driven to distraction (maybe not _constantly_) by people, particularly friends, being idiots and forwarding lists of jokes or chain letters or chain 'inspiring emails' etc. ad nauseam. Yet for commercial Email I go after the spammers and try to get their accounts pulled (have killed 16 as of today), something which I would never do to a poor newbie fool forwarding stupid things because they don't know any better.
Re:Telemarketers and other annoyances
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Suing the Spammers
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The trouble with this is that you'd have to contact the spammers to tell them not to call again. I don't have any figures but I would be surprised if more than half of 'opt out' spammer addresses were legit, so it seems likely that contacting the spammers at all is the worst thing you could do. I am pretty visible on the net but do not ever respond to 'remove me' ploys, and I get a fairly limited load of spam.
What do I do with it? http://spamcop.net/. I own airwindows.com, so the address I sign to my reports is postmaster@airwindows.com, which I think is a nice touch (yes, I do get that mail). I've killed sixteen spammer's accounts, and that's only the instances where I was told directly by the ISP that the account was killed.
I really _like_ knowing that I killed sixteen spammers' accounts through personal action (with much help from spamcop). If you spam me you are taking a definite risk. I'm not a safe dude to spam. >:)
I for one am _very_ curious to see whether his championing of the geek cause is just a pose of convenience. I don't believe for a second that Amazon is a substantial chunk of his income. Let's see him get some of that publicity he likes by publically repudiating Amazon and pulling his work off their shelves! Looking at it cynically, this could also be a very effective way to keep his name in the public view and spur interest in his writing.
Well, Jon? We're waiting. What's it going to be?
Personally, I just put my stuff online and allow people to read it. However, I'm more pleased than ever that I'm ordering books from a local bookstore as gifts this Xmas season.
The guy who runs the bookstore (Mystery/Trek, in Brattleboro Vermont) is a good guy, smart, will talk your ear off for hours and knows his stuff and will order all sorts of things for you if he doesn't have them in. I've basically bought all the US pterrybooks from him.
In talking with him I've learned about how he likes some distributors better than others- because some of them fund the big corporate bookstores and any money he gives them tends to go directly to stamping him and his little bookstore out through economic action and the 'network effects' we're so familiar with in the computer industry. I can't help but sympathise with this point of view, so it gives me particular pleasure to publically jump up and cry out GO BUY STUFF AT MYSTERY/TREK! Go forth and journey to the charming Mystery/Trek! Browse mystery, trek, gothic, thriller, science fiction and fantasy books both old and new, make a pilgrimage to... well anyway:)
Seriously- if you have a local bookstore that doesn't totally suck, why not go there instead of to yet another random web site driven only by price? Go out and chat with a bookseller. A lot of them are book geeks and interesting people, and some are fascinating conversationalists like the guy at Mystery/Trek who can converse intelligently on lots of subjects. (Leave computers out of it- he knows little about them but instinctively mistrusts the usual thundering Windows hype, which is all he's really aware of. He does database searches through _microfilm_. Yes, it still exists:) )
Anyhow... I'm still curious what Jon Katz's response to this is. Any chance of a statement? Or, God forbid, an article?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an artist of sorts- been doing that sort of thing all my life, and in fact I've won my share of awards and prizes (not a huge share: I had an acrylic painting displayed in the Prudential Center in Boston, won a web-gif design contest, that sort of thing).
These days? Let me see. Yesterday, I bought several magazines on ultralight aircraft, because I have been getting a kick out of designing aircraft in the flight simulator 'X-Plane', which does blade element modelling which genuine aircraft designers would have killed for in 1970. I get a huge charge out of applying extra realworld constraints to the design and making a beautiful aircraft that could actually be built- part of the artistic thrill is in making the plane fly a certain way as well as look a certain way. Nothing could be farther from painting pictures on canvases- and if you're good and really get into it, the sense of the limitless interactions of factors is very tangible, and exactly the sort of thing Sterling is talking about.
Instead I started playing with Myth II mapmaking for the first time, figuring out processes for making each type of map in Photoshop. Again, a Sterling-esque experience- first it was using several tricks for making an interesting texturemap, then a bunch of different emboss effects to produce a shadowmap, more GFX hacks to make a texturemap, back to the shadowmap to add some extra shading to the texturemap, then hunt down the information for a terrain map and evolve ways to produce a slope map and changing the colormap to produce rocky impassable areas algorithmically and so on and so on- finally taking the whole conglomeration into the game and 'walking around' in it, having archers fire arrows from the tops of rocky embankments incredibly far and feeling the complexity and interest of this entirely imaginary environment- the entire process a series of artistic judgement calls but built upon a collection of obscure information and hacks which again are very much what Sterling is talking about.
Yet having worked out this much, that the artistic and creative impulse faces incomprehensible freedoms (you can build ultralights and fly them without a license, you could take those VR concepts and build a whole world as an art statement on the computer), Sterling trips up when looking at what this means.
Yes, it is possible to distribute art and creation with absurd reach and little cost. (As someone with about 1 5/6 novels, a bunch of visual arts, video clips, and a series of essays and rants on his website, I can vouch for this ;) ) However, this does not necessarily mean 'fame and fortune comes to everyone'. With billions of people following their muse, the chances of this are even rarer than they once were. The ideal of 'give it away' becomes a philosophical position, not a means to an end. You end up practicing generosity because you are disenfranchised, have no control or input, but you still have the ability to exchange work, art, creations with other people like you. It's a small pleasure, but a honest one.
Who gets rich? Not a very difficult question. Nobody seems to have informed the corporations, the governments, that their job is picking daisies and knitting quilts out of electronic parts. The expression of technology or government on a large scale is never simply about technology or government- it's always tempered with a hefty dose of self-perpetuation, of power for its own sake. Sterling sees this (in the Gilded Age comments) but doesn't follow the logic of it: the result is that while the masses of people increasingly turn to entertaining frivolity, frivolity of undreamed of interest and usefulness (designing planes on the computer? designing architecture, or governing cities on the computer?), the ruling forces (government _and_ corporate) cling to their secondary value, power for the sake of it. Given new tools to maintain this power, to extend it by surveillance and controlling the masses, these ruling forces do so without even a second thought.
Many of us will be best suited to Sterling's utopian dreams- creating, giving, sharing, laying the foundation for a populist society that breaks national and economic borders. That's a powerful new force, for which communications is responsible.
Some people will need to look beyond that, to answer the trend of corporations and governments seizing ever-more power over the individual. The power to control is the power to profit and thrive and get rich, and there has traditionally been no off switch on this desire, nor is there any reason to believe that 2000 will bring one.
In a way it's like natural populations of animals- populations of governments and corporations do have a place in the 'ecosystem' but they WILL not control themselves automatically. Without predation, the populations explode and eventually succumb to natural disasters of one sort or another. Example: the Gilded Age leading to stock market crash and the Great Depression.
To some extent, government and corporations predate on each other, which is desirable. Where Sterling goes wrong is failing to see these entities in their true light- competitive, hostile forces slugging it out like competing animals, with the condition of struggle and battle being not only the norm, but the only desirable state. Doubters might consider what's happened to the populations of computer operating systems and application software in a time when one 'competitor' has managed to effectively win. Rather than bringing in a new era of peace and affluence, this 'winning' has brought imbalance, stagnation... in all, a perfect picture of a natural population of animals plunged into comparative suffering through overpopulation.
Sterling's vision seems far too prone to believe in the Magic Plateau (him and The Well and Wired are all horribly guilty of this). Unfortunately, any such stagnation can only be harmful. As with the natural world, the only healthy condition is the balance of opposing forces- of conflict, the inefficiency and sordid reality of not always winning, of not everybody agreeing, of struggle.
Living in a sterile plastic bubble may be peaceful, undistracting, may even seem like a utopian existence, but it is both vulnerable and bland. Life thrives on conflict, and conflict springs eternal- even in the era of Microsoft (which claims to love conflict but acts to eliminate anything that might conflict with it, whether that is competition or government) conflict produces Linux, which is partly driven by needs MS doesn't want to fill, and partly driven by this latent need for conflict- by the "So MS will fill all my needs, huh? Well what if I want X?" (pun intended ;) ) and the "So MS will crush Linux because of x, y, and z? Like hell it will!". It's only partly about the abstract fulfilling of purposes. The rest is about life- and the spilling over of will to live, the spirit of living things coloring even these abstract computer interfaces which aren't themselves alive.
Sterling's call to the aesthetic seems to be announcing a plateau. This is nonsense- but his means may be perfectly legitimate. There is no reason not to share and create and give away- indeed, this is one of the natural counterbalances to the disempowerment Sterling denies. Just as one arm of society, the corporations, hits new peaks of control, victory and domination based on sheer capitalism, another arm begins to counterbalance this by setting up a barter and gift culture that's not so beholden to the corporations. One could predict these things- as long as you don't make the error of thinking the world is a stable plateau, or ever will be.
Cheers, to fellow slashdot conflicters ;) now, in the spirit of conflict, I ask that anyone bravely still reading both mark me Flamebait and also write a flame in response ;)
Why do you assume that if Apple succeeded, everything else would have to die? That seems a very odd conclusion to draw, as if you have learned economics solely from watching Microsoft expend huge amounts of effort to scorch the earth of the computer industry. Wouldn't it be more likely that Apple would simply take and hold a decent big percentage, but not a stranglingly huge majority?
I made a point of producing all these textures in .xpm format (_months_ ago) so they could be native Linux tiles and background textures. On the agenda, I need to go make .bmp versions of everything available for the underprivileged- I didn't know until recently that Windows could not use a simple gif or jpg as a background unless the hapless Windows user turned on Active Desktop.
All these things are absolutely original work, put out there just to use with no strings attached and the sincere request of 'Just don't claim these as your own OK?'.
http://www.airwindows.com/desktops/index.html- Desktop pictures
http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/backgrounds/ind ex.html- Tiling backgrounds
http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/tiles/index.htm l- Window manager tiles, including treatments such as vertically tiling effects and 3D effects, plus stuff like wood tiles with binding like on a guitar
http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/titlebars/index .html- Intended as Window Maker titlebars, very likely usable in other WMs as well
http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/webgifs/index.h tml- Textured but undistracting 'paper' backgrounds. All available in .xpm as well: designed to be completely compliant with the Web Safe 216 color palette.
Anyone griping about there being gifs should be pleased that at least I don't have Windows .bmps yet ;) well, whatever. I'm sure Enlightenment is going to win or something, but I don't care- I have been fighting for a loan to get an ADAT recorder (to help people record unauthorized music and put out mp3s ;) ) and will keep on doing so. If I win $2000 I pledge I will buy a x86 Linux box to go with my PPC dualboot :)
Cheers, slashdotters. *back to real life*
First of all, you yourself cite the bit of US Code that specifies purpose and character of the use is to be taken into account: the _first_ concern is whether the use is commercial. That means 'is the exchange being done for money, or for nothing?'. That is the _first_ concern: or if you like, loophole.
More importantly, I can't help but think you intentionally ignore Sec. 1008 of title 17 (you're not the only non-lawyer computer dweeb that can use Google to look up genuine US Code to back his position):
I say Napster is distribution of a digital audio recording medium based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of that medium, and it's on you to explain away the law. Please explain how swapping music on Napster is a commercial act.
I am aware that there are amicus briefs desperately trying to argue that mp3 is not a digital recording medium. I give in, I concede: mp3s are a cassette tape. No, wait, that too is protected! Let me rephrase that: mp3s are a ham sandwich. If you'd like to join me in insisting that mp3s are not a digital recording medium, but a ham sandwich, together we can explain away sec. 1008. On the other hand if you're not a gibbering psychotic you might be more inclined to take the natural view that mp3s are precisely a digital recording medium.
Failing that you may wish to skip over this bit of the argument and lean on another poor bit of argument- that sec 1008 does not make infringing use into non-infringing use: it just permanently exempts that class of users from prosecution or harassment. Which would mean that although you may feel Napster users are thieves, all you _can_ do is taunt them about it, as you are barred from filing suit against them.
Which is just what you're doing, isn't it? I'm glad we understand each other, and no wonder you're upset. Call me a thief some more, maybe it will soothe you despite being an entirely impotent act- and despite the fact that when I talk about putting mp3s on the web I'm talking about my freaking music, which does not even have samples in it.
Honestly, I'd think you'd give up at some point. I can tell you why I don't: what happens to the concept of intellectual property in the music and entertainment industries is of direct interest to me. What's your excuse? Personally, I would like to see intellectual property abolished outright, and for the content creators to fall back on protection against simple fraud and loss of credit: rather than it being illegal to (costlessly, trivially) copy the actual content, it should simply be illegal to claim the content as your own, because that would constitute fraud. I daresay there is considerable justification for prohibiting dilution: I would consider it a violation for someone to take a musical piece of mine, overdub singing munchkins and use it in an advertisement, because that seriously dilutes the recognizability and integrity of my original piece. However, people swapping and checking out my stuff? Sure, not a problem. If there's a black market for people copying and _selling_ my stuff parallel to my own sales, that simply means I'm not competing effectively with their distribution channels.
We can go on like this for weeks: why don't you just give up? You're not winning, you're just pounding the table and referring only to the parts of the US Code you like. That's dishonest. Not that I would expect someone siding noisily with the RIAA of _dishonesty_ :P
Wasn't it Hatch who made a point of formally stating that the Clinton administration's take on Napster (their very negative amicus brief) did NOT represent Congress's viewpoint?
Call me what you like (I'm not primarily a computer geek- I'm a musician- and clearly oh such a criminal in putting my music out as mp3s) but I'm not impressed by your abuse, nor do I find it very persuasive. I think I know what fair use is better than you, regardless of whether you are a RIAA lawyer or usenet troll or whatever explanation you have for your oddly familiar, take-no-prisoners-concede-no-losses rhetoric.
To put it simply, I see a qualitative difference in the new technology, very similar to 'Star Trek' concepts. People sometimes discuss what would happen to economics when 'replicators' are invented for physical objects. What does that do to the proposition of value? Well, in the music business we have exactly that: it's called digital copying, and we even have quick cheapo copies called mp3s that aren't as good as the real thing but even easier to copy and transmit.
Like it or not (for you, I'd guess it's 'not'), this changes everything. I for one am not willing to stand in the path of progress: it is entirely obvious that this form of property is made absurd when you can download innumerable copies of the 'product' at no cost without depriving the original owner of their copy.
Yet what is the product? You don't get the physical media- did you want that? How much will you pay? Your downloading a thing will not make it hit Top 40 radio- how much value is in that? Your downloading it doesn't necessarily mean you get to make the soundtrack of your film out of it and charge money to see it- that is a more traditional form of copyright, like repackaging, and there's an argument for controlling that, such as Lucas is making against Dr. Dre for ripping the THX sound and _using_ it to open his album.
All these things are forms of value entirely independent from the proposition that music's value is derived from control of the sounds themselves. Anyone with _any_ experience in the business knows the sound is almost irrelevant- it hardly _matters_ what the sound is. The important thing in the business is distribution channels, the independent promotion network (not 'indie labels', the payola stuff for radio), doing tonnage on physical media and getting it to the stores and saturating media with your promotional message. Nothing done on Napster can affect this.
How old are you, "FatHogByTheAss" (cute), and what are your credentials? Hell, never mind credentials: tell me three books on the music industry that you have read that qualify you to have even half a clue here. I will be happy to give you a list of titles if that will help. The problem here is that you're spazzing out with wild accusations in a very pedantic way and being no help at all with the very real problem of figuring out where the industry is heading- now that 'replicating' music is trivially easy and costless. That's a really big change! Sticking your head in the sand is a really stupid way to react to it.
Me? I'm going off right now to upload still more music to besonic.com/chrisj: latest album is fretless guitar Frippertronics ambient music with a very rich deep reverb sound probably beyond anything you'll ever hear off the major labels. Then I'm going to leave the files uploading, and go get the makings for tacos, and make myself a delicious taco dinner. I wish you a good dinner as well- if the acidic churnings of your worry-racked gut will allow it, what with all the criminals and all, who aren't even ashamed. I'm not worried though I am busy- I may never make money off my music directly (actually I've made hundreds of dollars, but you know what I mean), but I build equipment as well, and I have many people encouraging me to go into business with this. The technological changes that have radically altered the music business have evened the playing field for me as a designer- now I can encode mp3s with example sounds and put them up on my website, use my music as further demonstrations (like Tom Scholz did with the Rockman and the Boston albums), and appreciate REAL 'network marketing': not clowns trying to rope their friends into flogging cheap junk, but the ability to (through mp3, eBay, the net) promote stuff _purely_ by people discovering it on their own with no ad budget or spamming or mass media coverage, and (through UPS, the post office, etc) ship directly to customers without having to maintain brick and mortar storefronts.
It's a pretty exciting time to be in this business.
So, I have very little sympathy for your position. I hope _more_ people become 'thieves' by your definition. They are establishing habits of information exchange that will serve them well in future years, and will make for more of a free market, because the information they're exchanging and picking up is not centrally controlled anymore. This means it has the potential to build support for areas of the market that were being stifled- for instance, classical and jazz. I can't tell you whether this type of networking will lead to new genuine classical recordings being made with real orchestras- unlike chamber or jazz music, some classical costs a lot to produce. However, it's dying off anyhow because the controlled market doesn't have a place for it, so how could a digital underground hurt matters? In this area the situation for years has been 'we cannot get the labels to _put_ _out_ what we want. Plus they're destroying 10,000 irreplacable jazz and classical master tapes to make way for new Britney Spears'. I'm not making this up.
To paraphrase Darwin (and you should be thinking about what the straight Darwinistic view of this Napster development would be), "I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the thieves."
#2: the artists making that 'more money' ARE THE FREAKING BIG-LABEL ARTISTS, thank you. What gives you the idea that they are not? Do you seriously think sales are hurting? You're wrong. In addition to that, the little indie acts are NOT making more money than they used to- they are just not having to SPEND as much for exposure.
Take me for instance, I've made money off mp3s. I was at mp3.com until they did nasty things to my contract with a fork and I left. (Now I'm at besonic.com/chrisj, still doing noncommercial stuff with very commercial production and engineering.) I made hundreds of dollars which is chicken feed compared to the big label machinery- but unlike the days when I duplicated cassette tapes and printed up J-cards, this time I did not SPEND as much for that level of distribution! That is really the key. It's not even about raking in lots of money as an indie artist- never happened, never will.
Indie is sort of a trial balloon for the REAL value of distributed music. The value of mass media marketing and fads and heavy brick and mortar distribution... is different. Hell, almost half of a CD's list price goes to independent promotion- you might know it as payola, and the record labels don't like being dependent on it one bit, but they tried to kill the independent promoter network in the 80s and totally failed. My chances of cracking that independent promoter network are approximately 2,000,000 percent less than nil, so no matter how much copying goes on, the big labels DO at least have an absolute lock on traditional media. I think they should be grateful for that instead of whining when alternate media turns up.
Oh- and is anyone _ever_ going to do a little tiny bit of homework and clue that noncommercial copying and distribution was formally legalized under the Home Recording Act for the benefit of tape cassette users, and taxation put in place to compensate the RIAA directly? I'm sorry, but 'crime' is not 'that which I think is bad', 'crime' is what's spelled out in the law books, and our government SPECIFICALLY LEGALISED noncommercial copying and exchange when the Philips compact cassette became popular. I just wish, I really wish that people would confine their arguments to reality or stick to emotional squawks. Noncommercial copying and exchange is legal. Period. _Digital_ versions of that are subject to the DMCA and even that has fair use provisions- they just suck, and the guy who put through the DMCA, Orrin Hatch, is very unhappy with what's happened to fair use, and we haven't seen the end of this.
But the bottom line is: crime is what the law says it is. _Morality_ is different, and you may feel it is immoral to copy major label music at no cost and take no money for exchanging it. However, your feelings are _your_ problem because the law does not support you.
Do they own the physical media in the stores you haven't bought?
Do they own the physical media after you've bought it?
Do they own the 'recipe' for the music: publishing, music, lyrics, the same tune done by a different artist?
Do they own that recipe if you cover the tune only to test out your recorder or something and don't try to distribute?
Do they own the pattern of bits encoded in PCM 44.1K 16 bit encoding?
Do they own the pattern of _sound_ as presented on CD?
Do they own the pattern of sound in the event of your making crude copies (audiocassette, mp3) and selling them as bootlegs?
Do they own the pattern of sound in the event of your making crude copies (audiocassette, mp3) and giving them to your Mom, or your friends?
Do they own the pattern of sound in the event of your making crude copies (audiocassette, mp3) and giving them to strangers on request?
Do they own the pattern of sound if you hum it walking down the street? Do they own the pattern of sound if you sing it at a Girl Scout campfire gathering? Do they own the pattern of sound if you hum it or sing it to yourself? Do they own your _thinking_ of the music to yourself and 'playing' it within the confines of your own head? (thinks of Metallica's 'Sad But True' by way of example. There- if you've heard it and remember it, I have just conspired to make _you_ think the song, without paying the record company >:) )
Many of these situations have been tested in court and found to be fair use. If you side with the record companies unthinkingly, you're just stupid: they push the limits, that is what being a money-grubbing corporation is all about, and you cannot simply take their claims at face value. In the event that they manage to pass laws that forbid you thinking their music without paying per thought, I daresay just about anyone would see it as a moral obligation to resist the situation and deny them that 'right'. How is it so difficult to see that copying degraded versions of the music noncommercially without stealing one single CD of physical product off store shelves is equally a natural sort of fair use? Ask me whether shoplifting CDs is theft, you'll get a different answer. Ask me whether making bit for bit clones and SELLING THEM AS BOOTLEGS is piracy and you'll get no argument.
However, if one person wants to borrow a cheap dub of some commercial music from someone else without money changing hands, it's none of the record companies' business- and if technology has moved music into the 'Star Trek Replicator' era where that person just goes 'poof' and another copy exists without depriving the original owner of his copy, well... that says very obvious things about scarcity and value, and we're seeing the results. You'll notice that the swappers are not GETTING physical media. You'll notice that physical media is not suffering financial losses- business is as good as ever!
You're a fool to take the record industry lawyer side of things. Period. Because you're not making sensible arguments, you're making arguments based on ignoring economic and social realities. It's not a smart position to take.
"Logically, then, the world is a cube."
You're right that touring is important: bear in mind, though, how prevalent 'pay-to-play' is, it's frankly pretty uncommon for a band to earn any significant amount touring unless they are quite a big act.
The serious money is where it's always been: merchandising. How many of you have a vi mug, or slashdot T-shirt, or copyleft T-shirt? From Elvis to the Beatles' cut-up hotel sheets and pillowcases to entire Jackson 5 fan kits to KISS figurines to Lion King electronic picturebooks that beep 'Can You Feel The Love Tonight' (beeep beeep beeep beep beeeeeeeep bebeeep...), it's _stuff_ that brings in the actual money.
Yes, I'm making fun of this to some extent, but it's still true- and it's very good advice. If you're a band, making friends with some T-shirt printer (if you're a techno act have 'em make you mousepads or something) might be a tremendously useful move. Basically, it's a matter of being a businessman as well as a musician- and those who can do this are the ones who aren't starving, to some extent regardless of their actual talent. When I look at a band like Hootie and the Blowfish (so often mocked) I see a marketing machine, but unlike so many who think it's the record company's machine, I figure it's Hootie's machine- that Hootie got a management team together and started earning so much money and moving so much _stuff_ that the record companies came to him. I could be wrong- but that's how it's done these days, plain and simple.
It's interesting to reflect that none of this _requires_ the distributed music to be a commercial product. I strongly suspect this battle for attention and merchandising will extend into mp3 territory quite naturally- the first people to realize that they can work very hard to make music to give away over the net for free and make money on _derivative_ stuff will be positioned very well- because most acts still think the money is in selling the music itself, and it's not, and never has been, especially not to the extent that some think.
And it might seem like making a few extra cents by controlling the music and distribution and charging for it is a no-brainer... what could it hurt? But this is a business of exposure and popularity- and the most popular word in the English language (as a selling point) is 'free'. Ignoring that is setting yourself up to be at a disadvantage.
What is more important is where all this is leading, and to understand that you need to look at it from the perspective of a content creator, not a consumer. There may be an argument that consumer rights mean being allowed to keep personal copies- there's also an argument that it's as silly as trying to make a copy of your toaster- either way, it is not a major issue, it's a smallish financial hassle if you have to buy multiple instances of a product for whatever reason.
From the perspective of a content creator, we are rapidly moving towards a world where I (a musician) have no access to the popular media formats at all, unless I go through the DVD or recording industry. This, not the consumer angle, is a serious, serious problem.
I'd just made this point in another thread so with your pardon I'll simply copy over the relevant points...
There was a time when access to the media (vinyl records, reel-to-reel tape recorders) was pretty costly and inaccessible, but it was strictly a matter of price- if you bought the gear, you were good to go, you could try wrestling with other players for distribution and sales just like you were an equal citizen.
Then it was cassette multitracks and the Philips cassette taking over from records. Suddenly, every musician in the world was flooding record company agents with tapes. Most were ignored- but I'll tell you, I've walked down the street and heard a random car drive by with a tape I've produced blaring out the windows. It's a hell of a feeling, that is. You get to produce art that is _used_ and enjoyed by people. At the same time, if you get tapes from stores, they are taxed and the industry's cheap bulk tape is not- below a certain level, you'd have the deck stacked against you financially. (After posting this I was reminded that in Canada there's a stiff tax on CD-recordable blanks for just the same reason. This is not history, this is now and it continues to get worse)
Then it was the CD. At first this was just as forbidding as the vinyl record to produce- you'd pay a lot to get digital mastering done, you'd have to buy CD pressings in lots of 500 or 1000: but startlingly, the technology advanced to where we can now press CDs on our computers just like making cassette tapes one at a time. Anybody who's had a dual cassette deck running for days making 20 copies of their album will recognize what this means. And again, there's the desire by the industry to tax this- purportedly to recoup losses from not selling you the same music 6 times, but also effectively handicapping 'unauthorized' artists and putting a spoke in the wheels of anyone trying to get a competing organisation started. We've come a long way from when you could save up to get an LP mastering lathe and try to be a record company, haven't we?
And now we have DVD. Now we have an increasing emphasis on 'security'. Whose? Well, considering that the direction is toward a world where script kiddies can still copy anything they want, but you can't legitimately start a record company and distribute media without either coughing up millions to a conglomerate for a 'security key', or pirating one for original material and being liable for stealing that key, we are talking about security for monopolists.
We're not talking about the script kiddie being unable to copy the Matrix and never have been- who will prosecute, the same ones who arrested you for making a mix tape for the car? Instead we're talking about a very intentional spoke in the wheels of anyone who wants to be in the business of media. It doesn't affect you, the script kiddy- or even you, the consumer. (you're out maybe 20 bucks in the worst case, having to buy an extra copy of the Matrix. Oh horrors, call Reuters and MSNBC.) It affects anyone who wants to produce original content, or distribute it, or help people do that. It's a roadblock- the ideal end situation here is to have all the DVD players require truly uncrackable encodings that only licensees have access to.
People hear things like that, follow the logic, and then mysteriously can only see how it affects them as consumers. But the direction is clear as day, and there are certain implications I'm spelling out here.
My question is, what exactly gives the recording/movie/etc industry (who are not a government the last I heard) the right to openly, upfront and with the approval of society, set up a situation where anyone wishing to make media for the public can only go through them, or be forced to become a licensor by spending a comparable amount of money for a security key normally sold to huge corporate conglomerates?
I hope this answers some of your questions, Tom. You're right that it seems a lot of fuss to make just to get to watch The Matrix on a linux box, or make a backup of it. But it's not really about consumer rights at all- the real damage is done by delivering control of the media itself over to the corporations, who then withhold access to media.
As far as I know it is still possible to produce non-CSS DVDs, ones with no encryption, and play them on mainstream consumer decks. For how much longer will that be true?
That's it, I'm for Bradley ;)
Seriously- when I did the selector thing (ack, I'm bushifying!) my top three were: Nader by a definite amount, then Bradley and Gore almost exactly tied (!). This illustrated for me how peculiar such quizzes can be, since I think of Tipper and the PMRC when I think of Gore (I do _not_ want Tipper as First Lady).
I am very leery of voting for Nader, only in part because I figure he can't win- I also think he's too rabid about some things, even things I agree with. I wouldn't want a president who frothed at the mouth over consumer protection, just one who _supported_ it (if you follow me).
Hearing that Bradley is not a sufficiently loyal democrat makes my day :) good, I hope he's not. I think the two-party system is a mess, and I like him better if he's not bought and paid for by the Party. Hopefully he's not _too_ alienated from them- Hunter S. Thompson, covering the '72 race, figured out some very disturbing things about party politics, basically that the party was happy to backstab George McGovern in exchange for losing the current election and then being able to move in four years later after Nixon was all done. It's paranoid, it's twisted, but the analysis was very convincing.
*hums to the tune of Pinball Wizard* "...that President Bradley, sure plays a mean basketballll.."
The bit that gets my attention is the continued, relentless emphasis on authorization. I mean, in some articles (typically on mp3, naturally) you'll see terms like 'authorized music'! I'm in the process of upgrading my recording studio to record a new album, and at that point I've been planning to release an older album as well, plus some experimental music here and there. I'm more and more convinced I should call the newer album 'Unauthorized Music'! Probably will- there are actually topical songs that would be of interest to slashdotgeeks in there, but more significantly, my releasing this stuff is directly opposed to what the entertainment industry would allow...
And that is where I fit in this equation. It's not about being able to make a backup copy of the matrix (yeesh, as if you can't spring for another copy years down the line if the first one breaks). That's a total smokescreen. What's going on here is a powerplay to control the media, as in physical media. We already pay record industry taxes on blank tapes- purportedly because of copying, but it just so happens that if you're some smalltime musician trying to promote your own music, you're going to pay taxes to the music industry for the privilege of competing with them. Part of your expenditure for tapes goes to the same people you're up against.
This isn't good enough? Apparently not. What I'm seeing with mp3 and the wish for a 'secure' format (and who, pray tell, is to feel this sense of security?) and DVD and the struggles over that 'secure' format (and how secure are they entitled to feel?), is the powerful desire to entirely withhold access to the (hoped-for) mainstream physical media by the 'unauthorized'.
That's me. I am unauthorized.
There was a time when access to the media (vinyl records, reel-to-reel tape recorders) was pretty costly and inaccessible, but it was strictly a matter of price- if you bought the gear, you were good to go, you could try wrestling with other players for distribution and sales just like you were an equal citizen.
Then it was cassette multitracks and the Philips cassette taking over from records. Suddenly, every musician in the world was flooding record company agents with tapes. Most were ignored- but I'll tell you, I've walked down the street and heard a random car drive by with a tape I've produced blaring out the windows. It's a hell of a feeling, that is. You get to produce art that is _used_ and enjoyed by people. At the same time, if you get tapes from stores, they are taxed and the industry's cheap bulk tape is not- below a certain level, you'd have the deck stacked against you financially.
Then it was the CD. At first this was just as forbidding as the vinyl record to produce- you'd pay a lot to get digital mastering done, you'd have to buy CD pressings in lots of 500 or 1000: but startlingly, the technology advanced to where we can now press CDs on our computers just like making cassette tapes one at a time. Anybody who's had a dual cassette deck running for days making 20 copies of their album will recognize what this means. And again, there's the desire by the industry to tax this- purportedly to recoup losses from not selling you the same music 6 times, but also effectively handicapping 'unauthorized' artists and putting a spoke in the wheels of anyone trying to get a competing organisation started. We've come a long way from when you could save up to get an LP mastering lathe and try to be a record company, haven't we?
And now we have DVD. Now we have an increasing emphasis on 'security'. Whose? Well, considering that the direction is toward a world where script kiddies can still copy anything they want, but you can't legitimately start a record company and distribute media without either coughing up millions to a conglomerate for a 'security key', or pirating one for original material and being liable for stealing that key, we are talking about security for monopolists.
We're not talking about the script kiddie being unable to copy the Matrix and never have been- who will prosecute, the same ones who arrested you for making a mix tape for the car? Instead we're talking about a very intentional spoke in the wheels of anyone who wants to be in the business of media. It doesn't affect you, the script kiddy- or even you, the consumer. (you're out maybe 20 bucks in the worst case, having to buy an extra copy of the Matrix. Oh horrors, call Reuters and MSNBC.) It affects anyone who wants to produce original content, or distribute it, or help people do that. It's a roadblock- the ideal end situation here is to have all the DVD players require truly uncrackable encodings that only licensees have access to.
People hear things like that, follow the logic, and then mysteriously can only see how it affects them as consumers. But the direction is clear as day, and there are certain implications I'm spelling out here.
My question is, what exactly gives the recording/movie/etc industry (who are not a government the last I heard) the right to openly, upfront and with the approval of society, set up a situation where anyone wishing to make media for the public can only go through them, or be forced to become a licensor by spending a comparable amount of money for a security key normally sold to huge corporate conglomerates?
However, that aside- congratulations on the new 'hr' tags! Maybe I'm weird but to me, seeing you pick up new bits of tech and knowledge (rather than ossify and rot in a rut) is more exciting than any of the movies you're talking about.
Any chance of a 'Slashdot HTML for Beginners' article by you? I'm sure there are some slashdotters who don't know what a horizontal rule tag is, and now you do (dear god, let him not be doing these things in word). If you posted such an article, it would immediately be pounced upon by legions of clued slashdotters- who would probably end up providing huge amounts of education for all. Care to give it a try?
I don't know about you but I wouldn't subject even Microsoft to the horror of a confused Network Solutions :)
PCs would very likely not be here without the original 6502-based Apple computers, which were designed in a garage by a ubergeek named Woz, or Steve Wozniak, who was, is and remains uninterested in the profit motive, and currently teaches children if I'm not mistaken. It was done for coolness factor entirely, and Woz had to be argued into even starting a business- and initially balked and refused to do so! He was persuaded by...
Steve Jobs, who is more responsible for 'Microsoft's ease of use' than they are. In a situation where everybody did DOS, and he could have done well by using his Svengali-like talents to sell DOS better than the next guy, Jobs wanted more. He was always pushing for something though he didn't himself know what he wanted- after seeing the Xerox PARC demos he wanted that and more, and personally berated, inspired, terrified and hijacked an entire team of geeks into creating the next-generation Alto and inventing most of the territory in the bargain. Jobs is not and has never been particularly interested in money either- he wants rock-star like fame and influence, and wants to be the one to revolutionise the world. He sort of managed it once, and continues to be very good PR specifically because he's more interested in the ability to shock and impress than he is in the likelihood of delivering reliable value to stockholders.
It looks like most of your examples for the benefits of greed actually refer to people who were and are motivated by completely different reasons! The reason isn't the same- curiosity, geek value, ego, government socialism- but it seems that in every case it's something other than capitalist greed that produces results.
Is there _anything_ useful that classic unadulterated greed has produced? What's the percentage in innovation, cooperation, progress? Isn't it true that greed _never_ produces anything worthwhile, only seizes on existing things and magnifies/hypes/ruins them? Granted, the magnification and hype can have uses, but one would not want to rely on a greed-motivated world. Nothing would get done!
It's a GNU joke. He is to be made the Impaladin, Gnuser of free software and Mooseter of all he surveys :) ever Gazeelepful, uh... *runs away before being arrested as a pundit ;) *
Compare Neuromancer with, say, 'Imperial Earth' by Clarke. The tones are utterly unlike. Both books conclude with a clear finishing point, but again they're totally unlike. The Gibson book concludes with a big conceptual leap played very deadpan, and the idea is on a cosmic scale, also nihilistic (as it will mean very little to the protagonist who's left behind by the lessons of the narrative). The Clarke book concludes with a small choice played up for effect, and the idea is small and personal and rather sentimental- but will affect everyone in the story, and (it's suggested) for the better.
Why would the latter be _worse_? It's hard to argue that the William Gibson universe is better than the perhaps sentimental Clarke universe (or indeed Asimov's universe). It is as if people wearing Nike sneakers and waiting for their stock options to vest want to find a vicarious nihilism through modern SF writing, a bleakness that they are looking for and not finding in their own lives. One might well wonder whether there will be a recurrence of hope and meaning in SF literature in the next five years- since the Real World is poised to deliver another wake-up call.
Of course, if you read and believe 'The Long Boom' voodoo happytalk, you might as well get heavily into reading the most nihilistic and meaningless cyberpunk you can possibly find: it might be your subconscious trying to tell you not to be too much of an idiot :)
s/desired effect/desired effect on the internet/ There! :)
...but you made an elaborate site entirely dependent on Microsoft Active Server Pages, and you're expecting it to work with _any_ web standards, much less be indexable and spiderable as if it was proper HTML? I'm afraid that you stepped right into that one. Look on the bright side- were it not for this Ask Slashdot article, you might never have known you weren't indexable, as this seems to be a little known fact! That alone is rather shocking.
BAntiSpammerFH motto: "Why hide from spam when you can go out and have the spammers killed?" :) (please don't be a fscking idiot about it, tho- forwarded lists of jokes are not commercial spam, they are some friend of yours being a luser. Spam goes to huge monster lists of addresses, it's not merely email you don't like.)
I've killed sixteen. I'm prouder of this than my slashdot karma ;)
So it's fine to use technological means to haven from spam, but personally, I will always choose to be down there in the trenches :) for every means to be shielded from spam, there's an equally convenient and effective means to track it and take action against the responsible ISPs. I _especially_ enjoy attacking the ones that make a big fuss about how legal they are being, citing legal-sounding legislation about how they're allowed to do this. They don't seem to understand that they're not dialling in to their government, they're dialling into ISPs to spam. Their ignorance does not save them >:)
I'd separate chain letters from UCE. To me there's a really substantial difference between commercial spam and commercial spammers, and people being idiots. I'm constantly annoyed and driven to distraction (maybe not _constantly_) by people, particularly friends, being idiots and forwarding lists of jokes or chain letters or chain 'inspiring emails' etc. ad nauseam. Yet for commercial Email I go after the spammers and try to get their accounts pulled (have killed 16 as of today), something which I would never do to a poor newbie fool forwarding stupid things because they don't know any better.
What do I do with it? http://spamcop.net/. I own airwindows.com, so the address I sign to my reports is postmaster@airwindows.com, which I think is a nice touch (yes, I do get that mail). I've killed sixteen spammer's accounts, and that's only the instances where I was told directly by the ISP that the account was killed.
I really _like_ knowing that I killed sixteen spammers' accounts through personal action (with much help from spamcop). If you spam me you are taking a definite risk. I'm not a safe dude to spam. >:)
Well, Jon? We're waiting. What's it going to be?
Personally, I just put my stuff online and allow people to read it. However, I'm more pleased than ever that I'm ordering books from a local bookstore as gifts this Xmas season.
The guy who runs the bookstore (Mystery/Trek, in Brattleboro Vermont) is a good guy, smart, will talk your ear off for hours and knows his stuff and will order all sorts of things for you if he doesn't have them in. I've basically bought all the US pterrybooks from him.
In talking with him I've learned about how he likes some distributors better than others- because some of them fund the big corporate bookstores and any money he gives them tends to go directly to stamping him and his little bookstore out through economic action and the 'network effects' we're so familiar with in the computer industry. I can't help but sympathise with this point of view, so it gives me particular pleasure to publically jump up and cry out GO BUY STUFF AT MYSTERY/TREK! Go forth and journey to the charming Mystery/Trek! Browse mystery, trek, gothic, thriller, science fiction and fantasy books both old and new, make a pilgrimage to... well anyway :)
Seriously- if you have a local bookstore that doesn't totally suck, why not go there instead of to yet another random web site driven only by price? Go out and chat with a bookseller. A lot of them are book geeks and interesting people, and some are fascinating conversationalists like the guy at Mystery/Trek who can converse intelligently on lots of subjects. (Leave computers out of it- he knows little about them but instinctively mistrusts the usual thundering Windows hype, which is all he's really aware of. He does database searches through _microfilm_. Yes, it still exists :) )
Anyhow... I'm still curious what Jon Katz's response to this is. Any chance of a statement? Or, God forbid, an article?