I'm starting a new recording label too, but in a different way.
It sounds like you're trying to do 'release the source of the music to other musicians, get a royalty on any sales from it (note: no longer 'open'), and encourage copying. Your label will be associated with types of behavior around copyright, particularly encouraging derivative use and home copying.
I'm starting 'Airwindows Artist Pressings' with my own stuff (eleven CD catalog of wildly varying content) and hope to have other people on it eventually, but by contrast AAP are as follows:
get music that's really good at being SOMETHING- no specific genre, otherwise I'd be hosed from the start because I cover too many weird genres:)
master it to conform to certain technical standards. Ideally it'll be 15/12 (15 db peak headroom evenly distributed, 12 db microdynamics) though some releases will be denser/louder. Final processing is always done at 64 bit floating point, and slew rate is ALWAYS restricted to less than 14,000 slew per sample. This is necessary to prevent Gibb phenomenon which overloads DACs by stressing the reconstruction filter: it's what gives many CDs their 'shattered treble' sound. You can distort DACs even without going to clipped samples, and it happens a lot on bright treble and on loud CDs. That is the one big technical difference between Airwindows Artist Pressings and regular CDs.
I'll produce a master CD, with ISRC codes that allow it to get radio airplay on modern computerized stations, and will produce standardized artwork for the CD jewel case (basically a clean text layout with the name of the band, album, and on the back the names of songs. I also produce a CD label template.
These are to be printed on laser printer of not less than 300 dpi, on "Great White Glossy Photo Paper" stock for tray liner and insert, and on Avery laser CD label 5692 (NOT earlier Avery or randomly picked brands), the CDRs to be something that gives reliable results, probably a name brand like Fuji which I'm currently using.
Having done this, I turn all the tools and files for producing an Airwindows Artist Pressing over to the artist, who must have a CD burner, the correct materials, and a laser printer- and they produce ALL their own CDs and take all the money from their sale. As a label I get no royalty at all, but also my involvement stops once I've set the artist up with all the tools to release CDs at the required level of quality.
So, I'd be getting paid by the artist for the mastering work and for putting together the files and stuff, but after that I could guarantee that if you bought a CD with the 'Airwindows Artist Pressing' logo on it, you'd know the artist was getting ALL the money. Not some, or part, ALL of it. The difference there is, if you saw that logo you'd also know that the content met certain standards for technical quality and would SOUND better than usual, which you don't know for random self-produced stuff, and you also don't know that the artist is getting all the profit just because the package looks amateur, you only assume they are. With Airwindows Artist Pressings you KNOW.
They'll sell for $10 through the mail, which covers postage inside the US.
So far I have 'Unauthorized Music', 'Full Day' and 'Marginal Theorems' in stock and I'm working on remastering other albums. I hope to begin doing albums by other artists under this imprint. Mind you, for other artists you'd be contacting THEM to buy CDs, maybe referring to airwindows.com for contact information only.
The big deal about this approach is it becomes possible for an artist to maintain inventory of a BIG catalog, and unlike outsourcing CD production it becomes a hell of a lot more possible for the artist to generate 'free goods' for promotional purposes. Just put together a bunch of copies and start sending them to places- it makes a really big difference if you can do this for $10 that month, compared to $100 or $1000. The whole point here is to put the means of production directly in the hands of the artist and allow them to function and stay visible even if they are making NO income at all- because eventually it'll turn around and people will be less hostile to paying money for music, and the people who didn't drop out of sight in the meantime are the ones who'll do well.
That's very cool- I love that there are people like you. I'm currently gearing up to sell CDs directly to people for yeah, 10 bucks (which includes postage- I'll just mail 'em). You gotta be a fiend for cost controlling to make that work- I know some places where to get a CD made, it'd run you six bucks a CD just to make it. To beat that you have to be creative.
Um, outright buggery certainly qualifies as CLOSE, in fact closer than a lot of people would want, but I'm not sure where the money enters into it- they already have all the artists' money. How could they get more unless they ask the artists to get jobs at Wal-Mart and give the proceeds to the RIAA?:)
As for professional sounding, they're screwing that up badly due to wars over CD output level. There's a batch of mastering engineers doing most of the big label work these days because they are known to distort stuff dreadfully in order to make it louder. This combined with Gibb phenomenon (in which high slew rates on a CD overdrive the DACs post reconstruction filter) means that it's very unlikely for major label output to be as good as the output of a reasonably clueful geek musician: you CANNOT have sound be both good and that loud, and only independents these days have the percieved freedom to choose good over loud- the majors cannot possibly risk losing rack-jobber business to the other majors, so they're basically trapped.
These are very, very interesting times- especially if you're an indie. We're probably looking at some years of severe customer alienation, but those who can avoid going out of business during this period could be the big guns of the next phase.
Main rules for indies: don't overextend yourself financially, and be able to give away large amounts of free goods to remain visible. These things seem contradictory: nobody said it was going to be easy.
No no, control of all broadcast communications (radio and television, plus cable) is 3. Take over the government isn't on the list because it's pointless- 1, 2, and 3 are GLOBAL, which government did you want to have taken over again? What would be the point when it is unnecessary?
If you think I'm kidding you haven't been paying attention- oh, and the 'stifle innovation' is not a stated goal, you know. They just believe innovation doesn't exist outside themselves, and you will bloody well like their version of it or eat it anyway, thank you.
Oddly enough I was laying plans just tonight for doing this. Got pretty psyched, too, because it solves a number of problems.
Studio time, production time, artwork are sunk costs. You need to let go of those and not kid yourself- for most of us it's our little obsession and hobby and the expense of it would still happen even if we never tried to sell a thing. Here, the important thing is simply not to overextend yourself, because the next step is:
Duplication- which can become a problem. This is what nailed me with ampcast.com (which I do still support): with all the nice double sided laser color booklets and UPC codes and all that stuff they made (and make) available, a CD cost more than six dollars just to make. Granted, it looked pretty darn 'pro'- but it wasn't economic to use those as 'free goods'. Know what 'free goods' are? That's when the label GIVES copies of your CD- lots of them- to movers and shakers and DJs and just people who might help produce sales. You cannot expect reviewers etc. to BUY copies of your CD. Nobody in the damn industry buys anything.
So- the challenge was to produce a CD package that could be sold but which is cheap enough to make that it could be distributed as free goods. Solution: graphic and package design that takes advantage of available resources. I can come up wtih laser printing, CDR burning of very high quality (2X burns with no background processes- super low jitter) and the technical quality of the CD is very high. I _can't_ reasonably do color, or screen-printed CD blanks. On the bright side CD replicators have taken to sometimes sneaking in CDR duplication without telling their customers (shame!) so the CDR is less of a 'indie' sign than it used to be- it's ubiquitous.
The answer: regular (but name brand- Fuji, ATM) CDR blanks, current Avery laser CD labels (note: earlier Avery CD labels were recalled for causing problems in some CD drives), fancy glossy laser photo paper, and a graphic design emphasizing stark simplicity. No attempt to do grayscale or pictorial content at 300 dpi laser monochrome- except for two logos, one the Compact Disc logo, and one a cartoon I came up with- a parody of the RCA dog 'Nipper' listening at a gramophone, this one's a cowering dog with its back turned and paws over its ears, and is the new trademark for Airwindows CD mastering, representing the nasty grating CD sound none of my CDs are allowed to have;) Spine labelling is a set font and size for consistency, title/artist and track list are laid out minimally using font selection as the main graphical element. The whole thing is about looking hip in stacks, elegant as units, and not making people spend money on pictures they probably don't even care about anyway (It's not like they're LP size anymore...) while still being as crisp and high-contrast as any major label release, if not more so.
8$ or 10$ by mail (including shipping), for a 'Airwindows Artist Pressing'. I intend to set other people up with the ability to do these, provided I do the mastering work: the 'Clipper' cowering dog logo will not go on anything that doesn't meet my technical standards, which are actually more stringent than 'HDCD' releases (they don't require an absence of 'Gibb phenomenon' D/A stage overloading from slew rate, and I do. This can easily be measured: with samples -32768 to 32767, any change of more than 14,000 between samples will produce D/A overload even if the peaks don't exceed 0 db.) The deal is, 'artist pressings' means the artist does the burning and printing etc. and keeps ALL the money from sales. When it's my own stuff this is easy, but if other people get to piggyback on this concept the idea is I do the prep work for them for money, set them up with the tools to DIY and let them go to it, and I never see a penny from the CD after that (which is why I can't take on the burden of producing 'em).
So: artist gets everything, has the capacity to put forth true audio CDs with better sound than the major labels, for a few hundred/thousand dollars sunk costs and very reasonable ongoing costs, making it WAY easier to do what must be done: give away free goods to industry insiders in order to get attention and promote sales.
Which is all Kazaa is anyway- free goods promoting sales. The record industry is just pissed because rather than just THEM being given any CD free for the asking, it's the whole world being given any CD free for the asking (in a degraded format).
I make and record music and make use of the Internet for its distribution.
Does the RIAA propose to pay me? Or do they plan to try and charge me money for competing with them?
Funny how that works, isn't it? Your average slashdotter is too soft on the RIAA, really. If there was a press release tomorrow in which Linux users were to be charged money for using the Internet to compete with Microsoft (said money going to Microsoft), then you'd see real outrage. Not enough slashdotters are themselves indie music producers, so they are really too generous to the RIAA.
No no- it is 'copying'. Stealing is taking something away. Like, you can steal music from a store by taking it away, at which point the store doesn't have it and can't sell it to a more honest customer.
Sorry to nitpick, but comprehension IS important!:)
At least for me, it's not so much about the Lindows people 'taking my work' (even if they were interested in my specific work, which they're not) as they are only taking advantage of the availability of said work. It's available by design. It's MEANT to be available.
No, the problem is that they are trying to con other people, and worse, they are setting up a situation where they are intentionally misleading people about that very availability and freeness, which is an absolute slap in the face to everyone who has made some sacrifices to help establish the idea of that availability.
Unless you can show me where the Lindows people are saying "Oh, and by the way here's where you can get all this stuff just by going and downloading it without having to get anyone's permission or pay off anybody", the problem remains.
Those of you (astroturf?) who are all 'oh, I am a $99 Lindows insider, it's so cool since trolls don't pay for access', what happens if you try to inform people about how Linux and Free Software means availability, and show them where they can download software for themselves with no gatekeepers?
I'd bet money that you will mysteriously vanish from the sight of good little Lindowers, and your information will be mysteriously deleted. Some truths are too dangerous to relate. You can enjoy yourselves just as long as you never tell anyone about the software that can be freely downloaded, about the programmers who have made moderate sacrifices for the greater good of making huge masses of software openly available to all...
This is why Mike Robertson really, really makes me sick. What on earth do YOU think the point of Free Software is, if it is not to further the understanding of the wealth of information and software available to all?
Um, 'Sid', he sells out. He sold mp3.com TO AN RIAA LABEL. 'doesn't back down' my ass. Are you real? You spin a good Astroturf, but the fact is you're wrong.
I think you'd be well advised to look at the record. Michael Robertson has done this before. He built the largest free mp3 hosting site in the world (mp3.com) by leveraging the hard work of lots of indie musicians. He then changed the contract terms repeatedly, set himself up for a total IP grab anytime he wanted, claimed perpetual rights to all those people's music, and finally sold the whole thing to Vivendi International and bailed out, leaving countless indie musicians stuck in bad contracts that give Vivendi permanent rights to their music with no royalties at all.
If he runs to form, he'll sell Lindows to Microsoft after causing problems for open source licenses in general.
I'm not much of a Linux geek but I feel really sorry for you guys that M.R. is directing his attention your way. You would not believe the amount of trouble this man can cause for you. Treacherous is a pitiably inadequate word.
*feh* "Insiders can download source" indeed. I am not sure I could even come up with four words more antithetical to the WHOLE FREE SOFTWARE CONCEPT and yet this guy is already creating that situation?
I could see RMS suing to STOP Mike calling his thing 'GNU/Linux';)
Um, it sounds to me like Hollywood and Silicon Valley have not only done that but also control the news media. Please do keep close track of brief media slipups like that. After all we have ALWAYS been at war with EastAsia- it says so on the news, right? O_O
Um, more accurately it means that if they have IP restrictions that prevent them from allowing recipients of their Linux to freely distribute it to others, THEY do not have permission to release under the GPL.
So either this is all a load of crap, or SCO are in violation of the GPL with regard to their own releases. This would explain why they 'haven't reached any decision': their lawyers haven't figured out a way to resolve this issue yet.
And they won't, because the GPL is their only recourse for being a Linux distributor. If they ended up trying to abandon their own Linux ambitions but sue the rest of the Linux industry, they would be, rather than forcing the industry to use some IP of theirs, forcing the industry to immediately and completely cease using anything of SCO's, whatever the cost. There's no way anything of theirs is that indispensable that this couldn't happen, so they're hemming and hawing because what they want to do here, really can't be done.
You can't have such a thing succeed without objectives.
I know of 'hang-out' virtual places, which to some extent don't have objectives, but in every case you have two additional factors:
(1) personas you can't have in real life. In one place, I'm an anthropomorphic cat, just to be one. If you're offering a persona a person can't be in real life that's a kind of objective.
(2) sex. (mreeeow!) *G* now that's an objective.
No freaking way will this fly, if you can't have sex, or transform into strange creative personas, or do anything besides the boring consumerism you're already expected to do in real life. It's gonna fail unless it learns this.
It's pretty alarming that we have psychos for citizens, but it looks like we do. The kind of people who will in all seriousness think the question is whether to exterminate all the Arabs now or later, the kind of person who will SERIOUSLY claim that the trouble is people who hate us because we have freedom- not because PR handlers have fed them that soundbite to learn, but because they seriously believe it! And yet we do have people like that. On another thread about the Nike case it turned out we have people who consider the main problem with Indonesian sweatshops is public image, and people shouldn't be allowed to use the word. I wonder if you're allowed to use the word 'whip' or 'club', or whether you are supposed to call it 'factory security enforcement mechanism'.
It would be really, really nice if we didn't have psychotics for citizens. Things would be so simple, we could point at other countries' psychotics and say 'You keep those people in line!'.
And we still should, because we are NOT the only country with psychotics and maniacs running around loose.
But we gotta remember to smack our OWN psychotics down if we expect anyone else to do the same in our support.
If anyone reading this (who's not a psychotic) is nodding thoughtfully, I hope to hell you vote. It looks like a citizen's obligation to society is not as passive as it appeared to be. It looks like we have to continually make some efforts to clean our government just like you have to clean a stove that gets used to cook on. Here's hoping our government doesn't get so filthy it's not worth cleaning...
Only in the sense of breaking down some of the basic functional requirements of capitalism, by making great strides in obliterating the very existence of diverse markets.
If you viewed them as a government this would seem nowhere near as unusual. It's similar to some of the more notorious experiments with applied Marxism. If you want to call that business innovation I guess I can't stop you, but I hesitate to even call it business since it's not about functioning in a diverse market environment. It's about establishing and maintaining a 'State Product' in whatever category is being controlled, by suppressing other options. If Microsoft were a government it would be even easier and more direct to do this. They would send their own soldiers and police to punish you, rather than having the BSA send Federal marshals to punish you.
Mm, apart from Office and Windows licensing itself they are more likely to go for CONTROL than immediate profit. I think it wouldn't be half as much of a problem if they were only out for money- then they'd just charge a buttload and the system would work, with price-sensitive buyers turning to other stuff. Instead, they want to control what you do and be the gatekeeper for pretty much anything you can think of. No government in the world has approached the level of intrusiveness into your life that Microsoft would like to have.
But that's not the point- the point is, if lots of people hate you BUT you have a coherent position and your word is good, you can thrive through negotiating.
If your word is shit and you're incoherent and treacherous, you're meat- not necessarily because people hate you, but because they have no reason to listen to what you have to say.
If they cannot count on getting a coherent position out of you, they are forced to treat you as an unpredictable object or inconvenient fact, rather than negotiating with you. They have no reason to do anything but kill you. This is the position Microsoft's put itself in. (the U.S. government might also pay better attention to this lesson)
It doesn't matter how many enemies you have, if you can negotiate with them and they'll take your word. They can HATE you and still let you live if you convince them it's in their best interest, and if they can believe what you say. As soon as your enemies have no reason to negotiate with you- such as if you still have power but your word is shit and they give up even bothering to ask you what you're trying to do, because you lie and break your word- that's when you're in real trouble.
Again, being hated is not the problem. It's being openly treacherous that's the problem, because it undercuts anybody's reason to even inquire what your position is, and that guts your ability to negotiate for what you want.
That, or Fortune's notion of what constitutes 'good' is insane and worthless in practical terms:)
Perhaps they are so rabidly far-gone in an ubercapitalist direction that they have no comprehension of any human concerns beyond stock option packages? *g*
Right, time to actually read the article even though I was a lot more interested in Slashdotter reactions to it than I was in the article itself:)
Somehow I am not sure you meant to inspire instant raging browser-lust in those reading;)
I realise you meant that as a form of mockery, but I guess you didn't USE Cyberdog. I did, and it was absolutely addictive. It was 'integrated' in the sense of being quite faceless and characterless, no splash screens, clean, elegant, nifty UI, everything about it would've been perfect if it had only been a normal program using current but not too ornate HTML.
Now, Safari is some form of that, only using current but not too ornate HTML. What's not to like?
No no- you're slightly mistaken. Instead, Bush has turned the National Economic Council over to Stephen Friedman, an investment banker on the board of directors of Wal-Mart. Friedman will be the administration's primary economic policy adviser.
There actually was some concern from conservative activists that the man was not sufficently in favor of supply-side economics and tax cuts for corporations and the rich, even so! But Bush has reassured the conservative activists that Friedman has been whipped into shape. The photograph shows he is recovering well, promises to do whatever Ashcroft says to, and is only slightly pale and wan from his indoctrination.
(+1 funny, -2 'yeah right, parody much?', +3 'what do you mean, that was straight news?')
This actually warrants an 'insightful'. Organized crime bosses have to have subtlety- that Machiavellian thing going on- they have to do the smart thing to hold on to power, which will often mean establishing that their word is good.
Microsoft has shown no interest whatsoever in having subtlety, or being trustworthy. In fact, they have filed amicus briefs supporting Nike in Nike's legal attempt to establish that corporations have the same rights to lie outright in public statements that a human being would have, so Microsoft is officially in favor of having their word be worthless.
Any living Mafia don would tell you this was very foolish. If you expect EVER to deal with others who have power, you have to have them treating you as a person or entity with a position and coherent issues and concerns, rather than have them treat you as an essentially unpredictable object or inconvenient fact. When they no longer have reason to consider your stated wishes, you're in trouble even if you have power, because you've lost the ability to direct others through persuasion. All you have is brute force- and the 'uptime' of brute force is not 100%, ever.
Actually that's not proper anarchy because the most bad-faith person becomes the most powerful and hence the greatest authority. Anarchy is 'NOT-authority', not 'turn everything over to the meanest person and have them take authority'. Anarchy may not be practical on a large scale but it only works when people practice good faith.
"GPL does NOT guarantee continued access for all citizens any more than BSD or public domain does. The reason is that under GPL, a lot of code that would have gotten written will not be. It is really that simple."
Okay, so the GPL doesn't guarantee access to code for citizens because there might possibly exist code that hasn't been written yet? Or to put it another way, we should sacrifice the code that is in fact written for the sake of other code that doesn't actually exist?
Too damn simple for me;)
And you've got a deft way of assuming all intellectual property must follow the rules of physical property. I don't agree that people have no right to code ideas that stem from other ideas developed on government budgets. I think the ideas need to remain available, and closing them would be harmful, and setting up a situation where government expense goes towards enabling corporations to close ideas is more harmful still. Code is not OBJECTS (well, except OOP;) ). It is the expression of ideas in functional form and citizens are entitled to continued access to the ideas they pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you're trying to do 'release the source of the music to other musicians, get a royalty on any sales from it (note: no longer 'open'), and encourage copying. Your label will be associated with types of behavior around copyright, particularly encouraging derivative use and home copying.
I'm starting 'Airwindows Artist Pressings' with my own stuff (eleven CD catalog of wildly varying content) and hope to have other people on it eventually, but by contrast AAP are as follows:
So, I'd be getting paid by the artist for the mastering work and for putting together the files and stuff, but after that I could guarantee that if you bought a CD with the 'Airwindows Artist Pressing' logo on it, you'd know the artist was getting ALL the money. Not some, or part, ALL of it. The difference there is, if you saw that logo you'd also know that the content met certain standards for technical quality and would SOUND better than usual, which you don't know for random self-produced stuff, and you also don't know that the artist is getting all the profit just because the package looks amateur, you only assume they are. With Airwindows Artist Pressings you KNOW.
They'll sell for $10 through the mail, which covers postage inside the US.
So far I have 'Unauthorized Music', 'Full Day' and 'Marginal Theorems' in stock and I'm working on remastering other albums. I hope to begin doing albums by other artists under this imprint. Mind you, for other artists you'd be contacting THEM to buy CDs, maybe referring to airwindows.com for contact information only.
The big deal about this approach is it becomes possible for an artist to maintain inventory of a BIG catalog, and unlike outsourcing CD production it becomes a hell of a lot more possible for the artist to generate 'free goods' for promotional purposes. Just put together a bunch of copies and start sending them to places- it makes a really big difference if you can do this for $10 that month, compared to $100 or $1000. The whole point here is to put the means of production directly in the hands of the artist and allow them to function and stay visible even if they are making NO income at all- because eventually it'll turn around and people will be less hostile to paying money for music, and the people who didn't drop out of sight in the meantime are the ones who'll do well.
That's very cool- I love that there are people like you. I'm currently gearing up to sell CDs directly to people for yeah, 10 bucks (which includes postage- I'll just mail 'em). You gotta be a fiend for cost controlling to make that work- I know some places where to get a CD made, it'd run you six bucks a CD just to make it. To beat that you have to be creative.
As for professional sounding, they're screwing that up badly due to wars over CD output level. There's a batch of mastering engineers doing most of the big label work these days because they are known to distort stuff dreadfully in order to make it louder. This combined with Gibb phenomenon (in which high slew rates on a CD overdrive the DACs post reconstruction filter) means that it's very unlikely for major label output to be as good as the output of a reasonably clueful geek musician: you CANNOT have sound be both good and that loud, and only independents these days have the percieved freedom to choose good over loud- the majors cannot possibly risk losing rack-jobber business to the other majors, so they're basically trapped.
These are very, very interesting times- especially if you're an indie. We're probably looking at some years of severe customer alienation, but those who can avoid going out of business during this period could be the big guns of the next phase.
Main rules for indies: don't overextend yourself financially, and be able to give away large amounts of free goods to remain visible. These things seem contradictory: nobody said it was going to be easy.
If you think I'm kidding you haven't been paying attention- oh, and the 'stifle innovation' is not a stated goal, you know. They just believe innovation doesn't exist outside themselves, and you will bloody well like their version of it or eat it anyway, thank you.
*G*
(disclaimer: actually I like RMS a whole lot, I'm just not at all sure I'd want him on the payroll in corporate-land ;) )
Studio time, production time, artwork are sunk costs. You need to let go of those and not kid yourself- for most of us it's our little obsession and hobby and the expense of it would still happen even if we never tried to sell a thing. Here, the important thing is simply not to overextend yourself, because the next step is:
Duplication- which can become a problem. This is what nailed me with ampcast.com (which I do still support): with all the nice double sided laser color booklets and UPC codes and all that stuff they made (and make) available, a CD cost more than six dollars just to make. Granted, it looked pretty darn 'pro'- but it wasn't economic to use those as 'free goods'. Know what 'free goods' are? That's when the label GIVES copies of your CD- lots of them- to movers and shakers and DJs and just people who might help produce sales. You cannot expect reviewers etc. to BUY copies of your CD. Nobody in the damn industry buys anything.
So- the challenge was to produce a CD package that could be sold but which is cheap enough to make that it could be distributed as free goods. Solution: graphic and package design that takes advantage of available resources. I can come up wtih laser printing, CDR burning of very high quality (2X burns with no background processes- super low jitter) and the technical quality of the CD is very high. I _can't_ reasonably do color, or screen-printed CD blanks. On the bright side CD replicators have taken to sometimes sneaking in CDR duplication without telling their customers (shame!) so the CDR is less of a 'indie' sign than it used to be- it's ubiquitous.
The answer: regular (but name brand- Fuji, ATM) CDR blanks, current Avery laser CD labels (note: earlier Avery CD labels were recalled for causing problems in some CD drives), fancy glossy laser photo paper, and a graphic design emphasizing stark simplicity. No attempt to do grayscale or pictorial content at 300 dpi laser monochrome- except for two logos, one the Compact Disc logo, and one a cartoon I came up with- a parody of the RCA dog 'Nipper' listening at a gramophone, this one's a cowering dog with its back turned and paws over its ears, and is the new trademark for Airwindows CD mastering, representing the nasty grating CD sound none of my CDs are allowed to have ;) Spine labelling is a set font and size for consistency, title/artist and track list are laid out minimally using font selection as the main graphical element. The whole thing is about looking hip in stacks, elegant as units, and not making people spend money on pictures they probably don't even care about anyway (It's not like they're LP size anymore...) while still being as crisp and high-contrast as any major label release, if not more so.
8$ or 10$ by mail (including shipping), for a 'Airwindows Artist Pressing'. I intend to set other people up with the ability to do these, provided I do the mastering work: the 'Clipper' cowering dog logo will not go on anything that doesn't meet my technical standards, which are actually more stringent than 'HDCD' releases (they don't require an absence of 'Gibb phenomenon' D/A stage overloading from slew rate, and I do. This can easily be measured: with samples -32768 to 32767, any change of more than 14,000 between samples will produce D/A overload even if the peaks don't exceed 0 db.) The deal is, 'artist pressings' means the artist does the burning and printing etc. and keeps ALL the money from sales. When it's my own stuff this is easy, but if other people get to piggyback on this concept the idea is I do the prep work for them for money, set them up with the tools to DIY and let them go to it, and I never see a penny from the CD after that (which is why I can't take on the burden of producing 'em).
So: artist gets everything, has the capacity to put forth true audio CDs with better sound than the major labels, for a few hundred/thousand dollars sunk costs and very reasonable ongoing costs, making it WAY easier to do what must be done: give away free goods to industry insiders in order to get attention and promote sales.
Which is all Kazaa is anyway- free goods promoting sales. The record industry is just pissed because rather than just THEM being given any CD free for the asking, it's the whole world being given any CD free for the asking (in a degraded format).
Does the RIAA propose to pay me? Or do they plan to try and charge me money for competing with them?
Funny how that works, isn't it? Your average slashdotter is too soft on the RIAA, really. If there was a press release tomorrow in which Linux users were to be charged money for using the Internet to compete with Microsoft (said money going to Microsoft), then you'd see real outrage. Not enough slashdotters are themselves indie music producers, so they are really too generous to the RIAA.
Sorry to nitpick, but comprehension IS important! :)
At least for me, it's not so much about the Lindows people 'taking my work' (even if they were interested in my specific work, which they're not) as they are only taking advantage of the availability of said work. It's available by design. It's MEANT to be available.
No, the problem is that they are trying to con other people, and worse, they are setting up a situation where they are intentionally misleading people about that very availability and freeness, which is an absolute slap in the face to everyone who has made some sacrifices to help establish the idea of that availability.
Unless you can show me where the Lindows people are saying "Oh, and by the way here's where you can get all this stuff just by going and downloading it without having to get anyone's permission or pay off anybody", the problem remains.
Those of you (astroturf?) who are all 'oh, I am a $99 Lindows insider, it's so cool since trolls don't pay for access', what happens if you try to inform people about how Linux and Free Software means availability, and show them where they can download software for themselves with no gatekeepers?
I'd bet money that you will mysteriously vanish from the sight of good little Lindowers, and your information will be mysteriously deleted. Some truths are too dangerous to relate. You can enjoy yourselves just as long as you never tell anyone about the software that can be freely downloaded, about the programmers who have made moderate sacrifices for the greater good of making huge masses of software openly available to all...
This is why Mike Robertson really, really makes me sick. What on earth do YOU think the point of Free Software is, if it is not to further the understanding of the wealth of information and software available to all?
Um, 'Sid', he sells out. He sold mp3.com TO AN RIAA LABEL. 'doesn't back down' my ass. Are you real? You spin a good Astroturf, but the fact is you're wrong.
If he runs to form, he'll sell Lindows to Microsoft after causing problems for open source licenses in general.
I'm not much of a Linux geek but I feel really sorry for you guys that M.R. is directing his attention your way. You would not believe the amount of trouble this man can cause for you. Treacherous is a pitiably inadequate word.
*feh* "Insiders can download source" indeed. I am not sure I could even come up with four words more antithetical to the WHOLE FREE SOFTWARE CONCEPT and yet this guy is already creating that situation?
I could see RMS suing to STOP Mike calling his thing 'GNU/Linux' ;)
Um, it sounds to me like Hollywood and Silicon Valley have not only done that but also control the news media. Please do keep close track of brief media slipups like that. After all we have ALWAYS been at war with EastAsia- it says so on the news, right? O_O
So either this is all a load of crap, or SCO are in violation of the GPL with regard to their own releases. This would explain why they 'haven't reached any decision': their lawyers haven't figured out a way to resolve this issue yet.
And they won't, because the GPL is their only recourse for being a Linux distributor. If they ended up trying to abandon their own Linux ambitions but sue the rest of the Linux industry, they would be, rather than forcing the industry to use some IP of theirs, forcing the industry to immediately and completely cease using anything of SCO's, whatever the cost. There's no way anything of theirs is that indispensable that this couldn't happen, so they're hemming and hawing because what they want to do here, really can't be done.
I know of 'hang-out' virtual places, which to some extent don't have objectives, but in every case you have two additional factors:
(1) personas you can't have in real life. In one place, I'm an anthropomorphic cat, just to be one. If you're offering a persona a person can't be in real life that's a kind of objective.
(2) sex. (mreeeow!) *G* now that's an objective.
No freaking way will this fly, if you can't have sex, or transform into strange creative personas, or do anything besides the boring consumerism you're already expected to do in real life. It's gonna fail unless it learns this.
It would be really, really nice if we didn't have psychotics for citizens. Things would be so simple, we could point at other countries' psychotics and say 'You keep those people in line!'.
And we still should, because we are NOT the only country with psychotics and maniacs running around loose.
But we gotta remember to smack our OWN psychotics down if we expect anyone else to do the same in our support.
If anyone reading this (who's not a psychotic) is nodding thoughtfully, I hope to hell you vote. It looks like a citizen's obligation to society is not as passive as it appeared to be. It looks like we have to continually make some efforts to clean our government just like you have to clean a stove that gets used to cook on. Here's hoping our government doesn't get so filthy it's not worth cleaning...
If you viewed them as a government this would seem nowhere near as unusual. It's similar to some of the more notorious experiments with applied Marxism. If you want to call that business innovation I guess I can't stop you, but I hesitate to even call it business since it's not about functioning in a diverse market environment. It's about establishing and maintaining a 'State Product' in whatever category is being controlled, by suppressing other options. If Microsoft were a government it would be even easier and more direct to do this. They would send their own soldiers and police to punish you, rather than having the BSA send Federal marshals to punish you.
Mm, apart from Office and Windows licensing itself they are more likely to go for CONTROL than immediate profit. I think it wouldn't be half as much of a problem if they were only out for money- then they'd just charge a buttload and the system would work, with price-sensitive buyers turning to other stuff. Instead, they want to control what you do and be the gatekeeper for pretty much anything you can think of. No government in the world has approached the level of intrusiveness into your life that Microsoft would like to have.
If your word is shit and you're incoherent and treacherous, you're meat- not necessarily because people hate you, but because they have no reason to listen to what you have to say.
If they cannot count on getting a coherent position out of you, they are forced to treat you as an unpredictable object or inconvenient fact, rather than negotiating with you. They have no reason to do anything but kill you. This is the position Microsoft's put itself in. (the U.S. government might also pay better attention to this lesson)
It doesn't matter how many enemies you have, if you can negotiate with them and they'll take your word. They can HATE you and still let you live if you convince them it's in their best interest, and if they can believe what you say. As soon as your enemies have no reason to negotiate with you- such as if you still have power but your word is shit and they give up even bothering to ask you what you're trying to do, because you lie and break your word- that's when you're in real trouble.
Again, being hated is not the problem. It's being openly treacherous that's the problem, because it undercuts anybody's reason to even inquire what your position is, and that guts your ability to negotiate for what you want.
Perhaps they are so rabidly far-gone in an ubercapitalist direction that they have no comprehension of any human concerns beyond stock option packages? *g*
Right, time to actually read the article even though I was a lot more interested in Slashdotter reactions to it than I was in the article itself :)
Somehow I am not sure you meant to inspire instant raging browser-lust in those reading ;)
I realise you meant that as a form of mockery, but I guess you didn't USE Cyberdog. I did, and it was absolutely addictive. It was 'integrated' in the sense of being quite faceless and characterless, no splash screens, clean, elegant, nifty UI, everything about it would've been perfect if it had only been a normal program using current but not too ornate HTML.
Now, Safari is some form of that, only using current but not too ornate HTML. What's not to like?
There actually was some concern from conservative activists that the man was not sufficently in favor of supply-side economics and tax cuts for corporations and the rich, even so! But Bush has reassured the conservative activists that Friedman has been whipped into shape. The photograph shows he is recovering well, promises to do whatever Ashcroft says to, and is only slightly pale and wan from his indoctrination.
(+1 funny, -2 'yeah right, parody much?', +3 'what do you mean, that was straight news?')
Microsoft has shown no interest whatsoever in having subtlety, or being trustworthy. In fact, they have filed amicus briefs supporting Nike in Nike's legal attempt to establish that corporations have the same rights to lie outright in public statements that a human being would have, so Microsoft is officially in favor of having their word be worthless.
Any living Mafia don would tell you this was very foolish. If you expect EVER to deal with others who have power, you have to have them treating you as a person or entity with a position and coherent issues and concerns, rather than have them treat you as an essentially unpredictable object or inconvenient fact. When they no longer have reason to consider your stated wishes, you're in trouble even if you have power, because you've lost the ability to direct others through persuasion. All you have is brute force- and the 'uptime' of brute force is not 100%, ever.
Actually that's not proper anarchy because the most bad-faith person becomes the most powerful and hence the greatest authority. Anarchy is 'NOT-authority', not 'turn everything over to the meanest person and have them take authority'. Anarchy may not be practical on a large scale but it only works when people practice good faith.
It's funny, laugh!
Okay, so the GPL doesn't guarantee access to code for citizens because there might possibly exist code that hasn't been written yet? Or to put it another way, we should sacrifice the code that is in fact written for the sake of other code that doesn't actually exist?
Too damn simple for me ;)
And you've got a deft way of assuming all intellectual property must follow the rules of physical property. I don't agree that people have no right to code ideas that stem from other ideas developed on government budgets. I think the ideas need to remain available, and closing them would be harmful, and setting up a situation where government expense goes towards enabling corporations to close ideas is more harmful still. Code is not OBJECTS (well, except OOP ;) ). It is the expression of ideas in functional form and citizens are entitled to continued access to the ideas they pay for.