You will just have to buy CDs from people like me who are putting out genuine uncompressed Red Book compliant CDs in the indie world. Generally it is easy to find the 'evil disc' status of such indies. I happen to know that there is not one CD out of the over 700 that Ampcast produces, which will do you any harm or refuse to play/rip/share/etc.
Of course, there are financial concerns inherent in choosing indie music distributors rather than the big record companies with their economies of scale.
In order to be able to play real CDs that are not booby-trapped to destroy your computer... you will have to pay less.:D
But I'm sure we will be understanding if you cannot afford this, and feel you have to pay twice the money to companies who take the money and spend it on ways to make the 'discs' destroy your computer when you attempt to play them. Better the devil you know than the starving, talented, honest and cooperative musician you don't, huh? >;)
Slashdot geeks can rant and rave all they want about these horrible booby-trapped 'discs', but the outside world must respond for anything to happen- either endorsing the legitimacy of the 'discs' or rejecting it.
Well, this is a start.
Playing these things on an iMac means basically voiding the warranty. If, God knows how, the corrupted and intentionally damaging 'disc' manages to actually kill the iMac, Apple says it is your fault for trying to put booby-trapped, intentionally destructive junk in the machine!
This is a GOOD thing, and I hope other computer manufacturers do likewise. I wouldn't have believed that such a thing could kill an iMac, but note this: iMacs ARE BOOTABLE FROM CD. It seems possible that these 'discs' could contain something like a boot sector, to trick the machine into trying to boot off the 'disc' and then munging its BIOS. Viruses have been able to do stuff like that for years and years- this is simply the first time the RIAA has made a concerted effort to destroy people's computers.
Apple cannot possibly take responsibility for this. They're doing the right thing- staring in shock, and then quickly announcing, "We will not be held responsible for interoperating with THIS BULLSHIT!"
I say support Apple for this stance, don't criticise them. Or do you feel that computer manufacturers should now be held responsible for maintaining interoperability with VIRUSES?
The trouble is, in a digital society, intellectual works have only functional value. Any intrinsic value of a copy (printing costs, materials etc) is nil.
It's like talking about the value of a James Brown record as art and arguing it can't be art because it's mass-produced. It depends on how you define it, and there is no one 'hand-crafted' record out there from which all the others are prints (a master isn't the final product and can't be played on record players), but even though the James Brown record is a mass-produced object it has use-value that makes it more than a chunk of plastic.
Well, in digital society, the medium is even more worthless than a chunk of plastic- and even transporting the bits around will typically involve making lots of copies of the work. Every time this very sentence goes to one of the half-million Slashdot readers, a copy is made. You're not 'going' anywhere to see it, a copy of the IP is made on your local computer to show you, assembled bit by bit from instructions given by another computer. In fact, a quick traceroute shows my own path to Slashdot as containing more than 20 hops- sprintlink, newyork.cw.net, exodus.net... so we're talking about 10 million copies of the IP made in order to bring the sentence to the eyes of Slashdotters.
Yet these copies are valueless- the only value present is if someone reads it, and goes 'hey!' and decides it's a good, insightful argument on the reality of digital media. Perhaps the reader is a lawyer- and wins a court case by making the points I'm outlining. Suddenly, this IP has value- suddenly it's serving a functional purpose.
Imagine a James Brown record travelling around on the Internet as mp3s. As it goes from server to server, local copies are made and discarded- and have no value. 90% of the time, it ends up on the hard drives of data-hoarders who don't even play it- again, resulting in no value. And then it finds its way to the hard drive of a DJ who works playing music at dances, raves etc: and that DJ sets it aside specially, for times when he needs to make people get up offa that thing! And when he plays it, people dance! THEN it has value, huge value- it can move people who otherwise wouldn't be dancing. Use-value means you look at what it's DOING, not what it IS. It's only a string of bits, when you look at what it IS.
The trouble with copyright is, it's not equipped to make any sense of the digital situation. It focusses solely on what the IP IS, on whether a string of bits is effectively the IP (a 128K and a 256K mp3 are different strings of bits, but can both be the 'same' IP). Copyright cannot comprehend the notion of IP being copied willy-nilly as a normal activity. You don't transport books by lining up a bunch of people with pencils and having them looking over each other's shoulders and copying what they see- yet this is how digital data is transported over networks. In some cases, it's only the 'stream of letters' being carried, and in others the whole work is stored temporarily on the server, such as Usenet posts. It's all copying.
By the same token, copyright cannot distinguish between IP being copied into a totally meaningless, no-value situation, and being copied into a situation where it has the same value a physical item would have. Copying a James Brown record into a James Brown fanatic's collection is the same as buying the record, functionally. Copying the James Brown record to border11.ge3-0-bbnet2.nyc.pynap.net as part of the working of the internet carries NO value- yet both of these copyings are the same to the computer.
Copyright is worthless if it cannot make these distinctions- and actively harmful if it gets in the way of the workings of modern communications networks. And it's not unthinkable to count Napster users (or their current equivalents) as communications networks themselves. Which of them are making use of the IP, and which of them are serving basically as organic components in a titanic data caching scheme?
The future is this: if you can think of a thing, you can see it, read it, listen to it, watch it, within seconds. It's not just the computer networks but the human networks bringing this about. You can get ANYTHING within seconds. Once I was reading a Hunter S. Thompson book, in which he referenced Mencken's famous, brutal obituary of William Jennings Bryan. Half a minute with Google, and I was reading that obituary, like a footnote Thompson hadn't bothered to add. It's possible he didn't have rights to reproduce it- but could he have envisioned a world in which any online reader of his book could go find that reference in seconds? If so, would he have seen it as a dangerous crime, or as a public benefit? Would Mencken have seen this as a crime or a benefit, to so easily place his work before a curious reader- given that Mencken's agenda was to expose Bryan as a dangerous, stupid, destructive fool and buffoon? Mencken wanted to be read and understood. I'm not sure who owns the copyright to his words now...
Copyright IS incompatible with the future- unless we're seeking to bring about a new Dark Ages in which the common people don't have access to education, information- don't have access to IP. Intellectual property is knowledge, information. It's fine to want people to be compensated, but to seriously work to cut off access to knowledge and information means something is wrong.
The thing that is wrong is this: we're heading into a future where nobody ever need be illiterate or uneducated- where we're swimming in an absolute sea of information for all, rather than dying of a drought of it- and we have people wanting to stop that, because they want people to be only as informed and educated as they can afford to be.
Copyright as it's being extended is wrong, and it must be thrown out.
Markets ARE chaos. If you can't make a dumb choice, it's not really a market, you're being controlled.
I'm seeing people side with Microsoft over this without understanding the bottom line: it's not wrong for some dimbulb to do a rotten job and put it out there in the market.
You guys are basically arguing a socialist viewpoint that consumers must be protected from the consequences of bad actions or their own weakness- which is not, I think, intrinsically wrong- but you're casting Microsoft as the appropriate protector. Isn't that a little bit stark gibbering drooling ankle-gnawing crazy?:)
Yeah, but the alternative is already underway, and it's "all MS stuff works with other MS stuff as long as you keep really up to date, but everything else breaks a lot". The degree of integration continually shuts out other products.
You're arguing for a state of affairs that is putting you out of business: the simplest baseline configuration is "We supply all the software, why would you ever need anything else?". And that's what MS is driving towards.
Are you really so dedicated to user simplicity that you're willing to stake your career as a Windows developer on it, and side with Microsoft on this issue? Very noble, but I'd question how smart it is. Maybe you should consider making life a little harder and riskier for those consumers so YOU can have room to move, and to sell them stuff.
Is it perhaps possible that if there was a 'market' for this sort of software, and no monopolist turning the screws, there might be choices BESIDES WMA and its evil twin and the determinedly-trying-to-play-just-as-rough Quicktime?
You're not listening, and you're talking like some sort of libertarian- by this I mean, the sort that makes Randites look well-adjusted.
It's like being mad at OEMs for permitting horrible Microsoft terms. I suppose in somebody's insane fantasy, the OEM could say "Hah! A is A! And furthermore, we will roll our own operating system with Linux and compete in the free market against you!"
In reality, for an OEM, making PCs without permission to ship Windows is suicide- so there can be no 'agreement'. It's a kind of force some of you guys seem ill-equipped to comprehend. It's the reason antitrust law exists.
For the edu market, refusing Microsoft terms is less obviously suicidal, but it is still dangerous to try and sell students and parents on a computer department that is all Linux or Mac, particularly for non-CS departments. It's far from the suicidal hopelessness of being an OEM sans Windows, but it's still going to lose you money, by having some students and parents rejecting the school simply on grounds of their not using Windows. The difference is, this is more of a risk that can reasonably be taken.
Backbone is all well and good. It is not always enough. There are situations, like with the OEMs, with printer manufacturers, possibly with ISPs over.NET, in which backbone means nothing because the power relationship is so out of balance that no amount of volition or free will could possibly matter. It's like a really PISSED OFF ant having a fight with a human over whether it should be stepped on. It really doesn't matter.
There are too many situations now where the Microsoft/world power relationship is completely one-sided, and it's only getting worse with every new area Microsoft seizes. I think it's great that you show backbone! However, we also need governments everywhere to recognize the situation and forcibly balance the power relationships.
It doesn't matter one bit how hard Microsoft may have worked to establish such unbalanced power relationships- operative phrase is 'sucks to be them'. They could have just delivered value propositions instead of being masters of establishing unbalanced power relationships and leveraging them. In order to have a functioning market, the power relationships have to be brought back nearer to balancing. Otherwise, you only have a nice example of how free markets are not a stable structure, and left to their own devices can only produce their benefits so long as there is liquidity and risks as well as benefits to all parties.
The judge is a woman- and she seems to be well aware of this strategy of theirs.
I would be very surprised if she isn't sitting back, watching carefully, and getting mad at the States every time they stumble or screw up. If they make an error, she pounces on it and refuses to let them put any weight on the error.
I think she sees quite plainly that Microsoft is an illegal monopolist running amok- and she's damned if she's going to screw up like Jackson did, by betraying any sort of bias that could be used to vacate her judgement. She's gonna put forth a very _controlled_ judgement that happens to make MS very, very unhappy.
Of course. Unless you figure they're all really stupid. Don't you think some of the people at Microsoft are smart enough to keep things under wraps? It's a mercy that some of them ARE stupid enough to break 'radio silence'.
That, or the culture they're in is so utterly 'kill everybody else, rule for 1000 years' that it's a constant struggle for them NOT to publically go "hey, wreck the competing software! Embrace and extend, jerk them around, run them out of business and be the only person making commercial software anymore! 100%! 100%!"
These are the people who were led in chants of 'Microsoft, kill 'em!' by Steve Ballmer. You have to wonder what they're really after? Wonder, instead, what they consider a legitimate boundary. Are they satisfied with ruling only all software and computers?
If you cannot comprehend a world where something like Microsoft can hunt down and make use of ways to use some people's need or desire to run Windows, to strike bargains where EVERYONE is required to pay for and get Windows like it or not... even to the extent where, as in the Reg's report, Macintosh seats in the edu market are required to pay for Windows Upgrades they cannot even run, then how about you shut up?
I mean, it's like you're talking about a free market or something.
When a Microsoft can say, "Oh, you have to buy copies of our stuff for EVERYTHING, in fact every person who sets foot on campus, including dogs and pigeons" and get away with it because the 70%-90% of Windows seats MUST be served...
When those seats MUST get current Windows OSes because Microsoft bundles stuff with the OS and makes it compulsory to make use of other aspects of the Windows environment, whether that be IMing or a new media codec or web pages in the wild that require the version of IE only bundled with the system...
Then you don't have a free market anyway, so enough with your 'just choooooose something else'. It won't work. Without a free market choice is vanity. Trust me on this, I've exercised the vanity of choosing Macs for _years_ and look where MS is now! Like I hurt them. Sheesh.
If they can't spend this money, they must be hitting limits on growth. There must not be any new ideas in Microsoftland worth investing in- at least, not to that extent. That does spell catastrophe- but hoarding money is not the way to deal with it, because Microsoft is not a bank.
But they are not. That's the whole POINT! The whole IDEA of a corporation is to transfer liability to a legal fiction.
If you don't know that, maybe you shouldn't defend corporations so quickly? The whole CONCEPT is that if the business does criminal acts, it is the corporation that takes the rap and the people running it are not held personally responsible.
Another very fundamental concept (perhaps even more fundamental) is that the corporation also shields the people running it from financial liability. If the corporation goes 60 billion dollars in debt, you can't go after the people who made the decisions for the money. They can keep on doing it without ever having to be confronted with a personal side to the indebtedness of their corporation. This helps them remain undistracted by responsibility while they do all the things we've seen corporations do, like rip off all their employees and implode.
In all of these examples, why do you act as if it is a natural right to be able to disclaim any personal responsibility for what you do?
Sole proprietorships, partnerships, are all liable. It is only the incorporated company that gets to disclaim personal responsibility.
I have NO problem with the IRS walking into a corporation's premises and taking stuff, if they feel a need to- without any sort of legal process.
Because the corporation itself is an end-run around legal process, allowing people to conduct business without any trace of responsibility.
Now, if you have Uncle Sam walking into a sole proprietorship and taking stuff, when the sole proprietorship means a person IS LIABLE for the acts of the business and NOT exempt from this, well, then I have a problem, and I see your point.
Since a corporation gets to completely shrug off legal liability why should they get the privacy, property, speech rights of entities (people) which ARE liable?
How can a corporation's announcements NOT be commercial speech? Corporations do not have _hobbies_. They do not go fscking _bowling_. As an entity, they are more akin to a mathematical equation than a person. Name ONE statement by a corporation (not by a person off the record but by a corporation) that constitutes free rather than commercial speech.
The prosecution is establishing that every single Microsoft witness are lying like rugs and sometimes, like Jerry Sanders, are doing nothing but parroting lines fed them by Microsoft Legal, without even having paid attention to the case at all.
In other words, the Microsoft witnesses are either perjurers or puppets, or in some cases may be pointedly trying not to know about the case so they can parrot off their prewritten lines without being too troubled by the fact that they're talking intentional nonsense.
Showing that the Microsoft witnesses are all sock-puppets is very, very relevant to the case.
At Ampcast, we (I'm part of the artist community there and 'on call' for audio tech questions and advice) are just beginning to explore a micropayment experiment. Keep an eye on us at Ampcast for some feedback on this concept...
What is happening is this: the site is going from a five-cent download royalty to the artist for full downloads by registered users (NOT charged to the user) to a double-option scenario:
no charge to user, NO royalty to artist, or
ONE DOLLAR charge to user for a download. Of this, artist gets 50 cents and Ampcast gets 50 cents, of which at least 33 cents goes directly to credit card processing.
There was immediate talk of trying to offer a sliding scale, to allow downloads for less than a dollar- the trouble is, you can't really go less than the credit card processing. At fifty cents a download, Ampcast and the artist split seventeen cents and the credit card company of course still takes its full share...
I haven't been on Ampcast long enough to get serious money out of the nickel-a-download thing, and I'd been trying to persuade the site to simply drop it, because I didn't think there was a future in it. Right now, the main idealistic rah-for-the-artists guy at Ampcast, Jim Waskovich, is trying to sell artists on the dollar-download option on the grounds that artists are worth something. I admire his gumption- but we aren't talking about artists. We're talking about downloads- and I don't think digital files are intrinsically worth anything.
I'd love to sit in on some of your discussions as it's a subject that fascinates me, but the solution may have to involve accepting the ground rules of a new situation. Information is no longer a physical good, in practice. You used to have to truck goods around in order to get records, CDs etc in people's hands. That's no longer true- and it's only going to get worse as communications technology improves. In 2020, your spam will contain small feature films by way of 'multimedia'... and you'll gripe because it takes several seconds to download. How many complete books can you download per minute now? How many two-hour feature films at DVD resolution will you be able to download per minute in 2020?
It may never again be possible to strictly couple the distribution of information with compensation for artists.
The area to watch is the post-apocalyptic area. Assume that because of digital copying, both the RIAA and the MPAA go belly-up. They collapse- already they can't budget for serious artworks and have to hit lowest common denominator, let's assume even that doesn't help.
In this post-mainstream era, everything is out there as data. The entire history of the entertainment industry, tons of 'fan-films' and filks, and various independent contributions. Nothing new is being produced in a mainstream sense.
Now what?
What entreprenurial opportunities are there? If large-scale high-budget works cannot survive, does this produce a demand for them in their absence? It's rather like asking what the demand would be for saxophones in the Middle Ages: impossible to predict Coltrane or Ian Underwood from the idea of a brass thing with a reed on it. In a sense, we don't know what's ahead at all.
One thing I can predict with great authority, though- by 2010, the biggest mainstream pop star will be virtual. This solves the 'artist compensating' problem by inventing a kind of artist that is a fiction and can't be compensated except with other fiction ('Cribs' visits the artist's CGI mansion. Posh!).
By 2020, home computer users will have the capacity to do the same degree of synthesis and animation on their desktops, though...
The trouble with this, and with EULAs in general, is that the legal system assumes people will be using it at least SOMEWHAT in good faith.
The onslaught of psychotic powermongers causes problems because the legal system isn't really geared towards asking, 'wait a minute, does this make any sense or is it just a deranged outburst in legal form?'.
No, the lesson is, 'ditch Outlook and IE and Windows for that matter, and run something that has the decency to treat mail and news as freaking text' O_O
While you're talking about doing that and figuring out graphics for installers, I have got...
ten thousand copies of the GPL onto Macintoshes with my CD mastering program, Mastering Tools
Three hundred and seventy copies of the GPL onto an entirely different set of Macintoshes with Filmpaper, a new program I just put out a couple days ago, for screenwriting.
Both of these are seriously hardcore programs aimed at markets that are jammed with software so proprietary that in some cases it uses dongles and key disks. Both pro audio and professional screenwriting are full of relentlessly un-free, user-hostile software- some of the best apps in terms of performance have some of the worst copy-protection. Every copy of one of my programs that goes into such a market goes with source, 'COPYING' and a glimpse of another world- a world where you aren't jerked around by 'godlike software developers' but are allowed to take matters into your own hands if you need to, a world where you could take an active instead of a passive role with the software you use- not to mention a world where your software won't expire, annoy or selfdestruct.
It's pretty funny, actually, when you think about it- lots of Linux open source coders, deities at kernel hacking and C++ multiple inheritance, capable of coding back-end that REALLY WORKS, sitting around trying to figure out why GFX tweaks aren't loving The GIMP or why Windows consumers aren't rushing to grab ISO images of Linux for free. It's simple- DO WHAT YOU LOVE. And if all you love is heavy-duty code-monkeying, do back-end coding. But if you want free software to really build up steam, get passionate about something other than coding and apply your coding skills to it.
The important thing is to have the ONE BEST PROGRAM in any given situation be a Free Software program. I have done this in part with my CD mastering software- the area where it beats anything else out there is output sound quality, so far I can't get other aspects up to professional quality (like workflow, realtime audio and response to control adjusting). Someday I'll have that stuff together too.
You will never, never get to be the 'new Photoshop' by targetting the 'masses'. Ever. Not happening. Forget it. Guy Kawasaki had it figured out back when he was getting the Mac started- you target the TWEAKS. Do everything to target the uber-tweak heavy hitters, the early adopters, the influencers. If you are writing an OSS 'Pro Tools', talk to people in LA and Nashville- better still, BE one of the people in LA and Nashville, and code what YOU need, only then will you get it right. You have to be coding what you personally will need to put hours of use on.
We gotta find more reinassance-geeks. Biotech, robotics- I have sound engineering pretty well covered, but don't use a DAW- if you're writing a spreadsheet it had better be because YOU need to make heavy, heavy use of a spreadsheet, not because 'people in offices use these!'
This pep talk has been brought to you by Chris Johnson, who's placed over 10,000 copies of the GPL on computers where it had never been seen. He's going to continue doing this whatever you do- but if you want to show some freaking support, don't be paying for the SOFTWARE, instead go look into some of the stuff Chris cares about a lot, like his music... be totally unlike most people and buy a CD while you're at it, or just download + rate tunes left and right. Or please yourself- but that would be a BIG help
There's a limit to how much they can keep themselves going, though, because they aren't based on being a sustainable business. They're based on being a rapidly expanding business, their whole earnings structure and valuation is based on that. It is IMPOSSIBLE for them to go forever on that basis. So you might ask, at what point would it be good to stop them and ride out the crash, given that it's gotta happen at some point?
Start to MAKE music of your own! Not only do you have the freedom to do so, not only do you probably already have a CD burner that is the modern-day equivalent of a million-dollar mastering lathe in the 60s and 70s, but more and more software for working with music data is not only out there at no cost, but even Free.
I know I'd benefit if people started a movement to consume only music-libre artists, but to consume is not enough. I have people writing me to say "My tastes are really strange so it probably is a bad look-out for you, but I loved your bizarre music!" and I would be still happier to have people saying, "Since listening to the music you do, I decided to go out and make my OWN music!". So far, I don't seem to have motivated anyone to go out and compose, play, record themselves. But if I was to be remembered for something that is about the coolest thing I could ever have done...
So get out there and get more involved than just consuming!
(side note: mind you, I would still be quite happy if people decided to dig through my 10-CD discography and pick out something to buy- for one, I really worked on the uncompressed Red Book CD versions, for two I'm freaking starving, and for three, when I do have money I always spend it on gear, and I'd be growing my GPLed music software more quickly if I was compelled to, for instance by being able to get a newer Mac and having to port the software to OSX, which would be significantly closer to an easy Linux port. I am NOT pleading with people to not buy my CDs- it's more like what Tim O'Reilly said once, that if information sharing meant that he couldn't be a publisher anymore he would willingly give that up rather than try and stamp out information sharing. I'm ready to accept that music is worthless and costs money to do, if that's the true reality, and it wouldn't stop me from occasionally doing it. But it's too early to tell, it really is...)
Well- most of the ones not in such a position (there's a very limited number of artists who can even pretend to such an opulent lifestyle) are not actually getting paid by their labels. Issues like cross-collateralization ensure that the artists may get a recording budget but aren't making money for themselves. It's not unusual to have as many as seven albums under contract, all cross-collateralized. If one hits big, the artist is made to produce another album, and then has to recoup the costs of THAT as well, and so on, and so on.
So the reality is: 'piracy' SHOULD hurt the artists, the ones who aren't all over the Top 40. However, that would assume fair dealing on the record label's part. Few artists (apart from fierce self-motivated acts like Metallica) can even negotiate for fair dealing, so in PRACTICE, 'piracy' doesn't hurt the artists, because they are already making zero money and have zero chance and zero hope.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, there are financial concerns inherent in choosing indie music distributors rather than the big record companies with their economies of scale.
In order to be able to play real CDs that are not booby-trapped to destroy your computer... you will have to pay less. :D
But I'm sure we will be understanding if you cannot afford this, and feel you have to pay twice the money to companies who take the money and spend it on ways to make the 'discs' destroy your computer when you attempt to play them. Better the devil you know than the starving, talented, honest and cooperative musician you don't, huh? >;)
Chris Johnson
Slashdot geeks can rant and rave all they want about these horrible booby-trapped 'discs', but the outside world must respond for anything to happen- either endorsing the legitimacy of the 'discs' or rejecting it.
Well, this is a start.
Playing these things on an iMac means basically voiding the warranty. If, God knows how, the corrupted and intentionally damaging 'disc' manages to actually kill the iMac, Apple says it is your fault for trying to put booby-trapped, intentionally destructive junk in the machine!
This is a GOOD thing, and I hope other computer manufacturers do likewise. I wouldn't have believed that such a thing could kill an iMac, but note this: iMacs ARE BOOTABLE FROM CD. It seems possible that these 'discs' could contain something like a boot sector, to trick the machine into trying to boot off the 'disc' and then munging its BIOS. Viruses have been able to do stuff like that for years and years- this is simply the first time the RIAA has made a concerted effort to destroy people's computers.
Apple cannot possibly take responsibility for this. They're doing the right thing- staring in shock, and then quickly announcing, "We will not be held responsible for interoperating with THIS BULLSHIT!"
I say support Apple for this stance, don't criticise them. Or do you feel that computer manufacturers should now be held responsible for maintaining interoperability with VIRUSES?
How do you UN-punch this button when you've hit it by accident, in traffic?
It's like talking about the value of a James Brown record as art and arguing it can't be art because it's mass-produced. It depends on how you define it, and there is no one 'hand-crafted' record out there from which all the others are prints (a master isn't the final product and can't be played on record players), but even though the James Brown record is a mass-produced object it has use-value that makes it more than a chunk of plastic.
Well, in digital society, the medium is even more worthless than a chunk of plastic- and even transporting the bits around will typically involve making lots of copies of the work. Every time this very sentence goes to one of the half-million Slashdot readers, a copy is made. You're not 'going' anywhere to see it, a copy of the IP is made on your local computer to show you, assembled bit by bit from instructions given by another computer. In fact, a quick traceroute shows my own path to Slashdot as containing more than 20 hops- sprintlink, newyork.cw.net, exodus.net... so we're talking about 10 million copies of the IP made in order to bring the sentence to the eyes of Slashdotters.
Yet these copies are valueless- the only value present is if someone reads it, and goes 'hey!' and decides it's a good, insightful argument on the reality of digital media. Perhaps the reader is a lawyer- and wins a court case by making the points I'm outlining. Suddenly, this IP has value- suddenly it's serving a functional purpose.
Imagine a James Brown record travelling around on the Internet as mp3s. As it goes from server to server, local copies are made and discarded- and have no value. 90% of the time, it ends up on the hard drives of data-hoarders who don't even play it- again, resulting in no value. And then it finds its way to the hard drive of a DJ who works playing music at dances, raves etc: and that DJ sets it aside specially, for times when he needs to make people get up offa that thing! And when he plays it, people dance! THEN it has value, huge value- it can move people who otherwise wouldn't be dancing. Use-value means you look at what it's DOING, not what it IS. It's only a string of bits, when you look at what it IS.
The trouble with copyright is, it's not equipped to make any sense of the digital situation. It focusses solely on what the IP IS, on whether a string of bits is effectively the IP (a 128K and a 256K mp3 are different strings of bits, but can both be the 'same' IP). Copyright cannot comprehend the notion of IP being copied willy-nilly as a normal activity. You don't transport books by lining up a bunch of people with pencils and having them looking over each other's shoulders and copying what they see- yet this is how digital data is transported over networks. In some cases, it's only the 'stream of letters' being carried, and in others the whole work is stored temporarily on the server, such as Usenet posts. It's all copying.
By the same token, copyright cannot distinguish between IP being copied into a totally meaningless, no-value situation, and being copied into a situation where it has the same value a physical item would have. Copying a James Brown record into a James Brown fanatic's collection is the same as buying the record, functionally. Copying the James Brown record to border11.ge3-0-bbnet2.nyc.pynap.net as part of the working of the internet carries NO value- yet both of these copyings are the same to the computer.
Copyright is worthless if it cannot make these distinctions- and actively harmful if it gets in the way of the workings of modern communications networks. And it's not unthinkable to count Napster users (or their current equivalents) as communications networks themselves. Which of them are making use of the IP, and which of them are serving basically as organic components in a titanic data caching scheme?
The future is this: if you can think of a thing, you can see it, read it, listen to it, watch it, within seconds. It's not just the computer networks but the human networks bringing this about. You can get ANYTHING within seconds. Once I was reading a Hunter S. Thompson book, in which he referenced Mencken's famous, brutal obituary of William Jennings Bryan. Half a minute with Google, and I was reading that obituary, like a footnote Thompson hadn't bothered to add. It's possible he didn't have rights to reproduce it- but could he have envisioned a world in which any online reader of his book could go find that reference in seconds? If so, would he have seen it as a dangerous crime, or as a public benefit? Would Mencken have seen this as a crime or a benefit, to so easily place his work before a curious reader- given that Mencken's agenda was to expose Bryan as a dangerous, stupid, destructive fool and buffoon? Mencken wanted to be read and understood. I'm not sure who owns the copyright to his words now...
Copyright IS incompatible with the future- unless we're seeking to bring about a new Dark Ages in which the common people don't have access to education, information- don't have access to IP. Intellectual property is knowledge, information. It's fine to want people to be compensated, but to seriously work to cut off access to knowledge and information means something is wrong.
The thing that is wrong is this: we're heading into a future where nobody ever need be illiterate or uneducated- where we're swimming in an absolute sea of information for all, rather than dying of a drought of it- and we have people wanting to stop that, because they want people to be only as informed and educated as they can afford to be.
Copyright as it's being extended is wrong, and it must be thrown out.
I'm seeing people side with Microsoft over this without understanding the bottom line: it's not wrong for some dimbulb to do a rotten job and put it out there in the market.
You guys are basically arguing a socialist viewpoint that consumers must be protected from the consequences of bad actions or their own weakness- which is not, I think, intrinsically wrong- but you're casting Microsoft as the appropriate protector. Isn't that a little bit stark gibbering drooling ankle-gnawing crazy? :)
You're arguing for a state of affairs that is putting you out of business: the simplest baseline configuration is "We supply all the software, why would you ever need anything else?". And that's what MS is driving towards.
Are you really so dedicated to user simplicity that you're willing to stake your career as a Windows developer on it, and side with Microsoft on this issue? Very noble, but I'd question how smart it is. Maybe you should consider making life a little harder and riskier for those consumers so YOU can have room to move, and to sell them stuff.
Imagine interoperability O_O
It's like being mad at OEMs for permitting horrible Microsoft terms. I suppose in somebody's insane fantasy, the OEM could say "Hah! A is A! And furthermore, we will roll our own operating system with Linux and compete in the free market against you!"
In reality, for an OEM, making PCs without permission to ship Windows is suicide- so there can be no 'agreement'. It's a kind of force some of you guys seem ill-equipped to comprehend. It's the reason antitrust law exists.
For the edu market, refusing Microsoft terms is less obviously suicidal, but it is still dangerous to try and sell students and parents on a computer department that is all Linux or Mac, particularly for non-CS departments. It's far from the suicidal hopelessness of being an OEM sans Windows, but it's still going to lose you money, by having some students and parents rejecting the school simply on grounds of their not using Windows. The difference is, this is more of a risk that can reasonably be taken.
Backbone is all well and good. It is not always enough. There are situations, like with the OEMs, with printer manufacturers, possibly with ISPs over .NET, in which backbone means nothing because the power relationship is so out of balance that no amount of volition or free will could possibly matter. It's like a really PISSED OFF ant having a fight with a human over whether it should be stepped on. It really doesn't matter.
There are too many situations now where the Microsoft/world power relationship is completely one-sided, and it's only getting worse with every new area Microsoft seizes. I think it's great that you show backbone! However, we also need governments everywhere to recognize the situation and forcibly balance the power relationships.
It doesn't matter one bit how hard Microsoft may have worked to establish such unbalanced power relationships- operative phrase is 'sucks to be them'. They could have just delivered value propositions instead of being masters of establishing unbalanced power relationships and leveraging them. In order to have a functioning market, the power relationships have to be brought back nearer to balancing. Otherwise, you only have a nice example of how free markets are not a stable structure, and left to their own devices can only produce their benefits so long as there is liquidity and risks as well as benefits to all parties.
The judge is a woman- and she seems to be well aware of this strategy of theirs.
I would be very surprised if she isn't sitting back, watching carefully, and getting mad at the States every time they stumble or screw up. If they make an error, she pounces on it and refuses to let them put any weight on the error.
I think she sees quite plainly that Microsoft is an illegal monopolist running amok- and she's damned if she's going to screw up like Jackson did, by betraying any sort of bias that could be used to vacate her judgement. She's gonna put forth a very _controlled_ judgement that happens to make MS very, very unhappy.
That, or the culture they're in is so utterly 'kill everybody else, rule for 1000 years' that it's a constant struggle for them NOT to publically go "hey, wreck the competing software! Embrace and extend, jerk them around, run them out of business and be the only person making commercial software anymore! 100%! 100%!"
These are the people who were led in chants of 'Microsoft, kill 'em!' by Steve Ballmer. You have to wonder what they're really after? Wonder, instead, what they consider a legitimate boundary. Are they satisfied with ruling only all software and computers?
If you cannot comprehend a world where something like Microsoft can hunt down and make use of ways to use some people's need or desire to run Windows, to strike bargains where EVERYONE is required to pay for and get Windows like it or not... even to the extent where, as in the Reg's report, Macintosh seats in the edu market are required to pay for Windows Upgrades they cannot even run, then how about you shut up?
I mean, it's like you're talking about a free market or something.
When a Microsoft can say, "Oh, you have to buy copies of our stuff for EVERYTHING, in fact every person who sets foot on campus, including dogs and pigeons" and get away with it because the 70%-90% of Windows seats MUST be served...
When those seats MUST get current Windows OSes because Microsoft bundles stuff with the OS and makes it compulsory to make use of other aspects of the Windows environment, whether that be IMing or a new media codec or web pages in the wild that require the version of IE only bundled with the system...
Then you don't have a free market anyway, so enough with your 'just choooooose something else'. It won't work. Without a free market choice is vanity. Trust me on this, I've exercised the vanity of choosing Macs for _years_ and look where MS is now! Like I hurt them. Sheesh.
If they can't spend this money, they must be hitting limits on growth. There must not be any new ideas in Microsoftland worth investing in- at least, not to that extent. That does spell catastrophe- but hoarding money is not the way to deal with it, because Microsoft is not a bank.
If you don't know that, maybe you shouldn't defend corporations so quickly? The whole CONCEPT is that if the business does criminal acts, it is the corporation that takes the rap and the people running it are not held personally responsible.
Another very fundamental concept (perhaps even more fundamental) is that the corporation also shields the people running it from financial liability. If the corporation goes 60 billion dollars in debt, you can't go after the people who made the decisions for the money. They can keep on doing it without ever having to be confronted with a personal side to the indebtedness of their corporation. This helps them remain undistracted by responsibility while they do all the things we've seen corporations do, like rip off all their employees and implode.
I don't mean to be overly hostile, but wake up.
Sole proprietorships, partnerships, are all liable. It is only the incorporated company that gets to disclaim personal responsibility.
I have NO problem with the IRS walking into a corporation's premises and taking stuff, if they feel a need to- without any sort of legal process.
Because the corporation itself is an end-run around legal process, allowing people to conduct business without any trace of responsibility.
Now, if you have Uncle Sam walking into a sole proprietorship and taking stuff, when the sole proprietorship means a person IS LIABLE for the acts of the business and NOT exempt from this, well, then I have a problem, and I see your point.
Since a corporation gets to completely shrug off legal liability why should they get the privacy, property, speech rights of entities (people) which ARE liable?
How can a corporation's announcements NOT be commercial speech? Corporations do not have _hobbies_. They do not go fscking _bowling_. As an entity, they are more akin to a mathematical equation than a person. Name ONE statement by a corporation (not by a person off the record but by a corporation) that constitutes free rather than commercial speech.
In other words, the Microsoft witnesses are either perjurers or puppets, or in some cases may be pointedly trying not to know about the case so they can parrot off their prewritten lines without being too troubled by the fact that they're talking intentional nonsense.
Showing that the Microsoft witnesses are all sock-puppets is very, very relevant to the case.
What is happening is this: the site is going from a five-cent download royalty to the artist for full downloads by registered users (NOT charged to the user) to a double-option scenario:
There was immediate talk of trying to offer a sliding scale, to allow downloads for less than a dollar- the trouble is, you can't really go less than the credit card processing. At fifty cents a download, Ampcast and the artist split seventeen cents and the credit card company of course still takes its full share...
I haven't been on Ampcast long enough to get serious money out of the nickel-a-download thing, and I'd been trying to persuade the site to simply drop it, because I didn't think there was a future in it. Right now, the main idealistic rah-for-the-artists guy at Ampcast, Jim Waskovich, is trying to sell artists on the dollar-download option on the grounds that artists are worth something. I admire his gumption- but we aren't talking about artists. We're talking about downloads- and I don't think digital files are intrinsically worth anything.
I'd love to sit in on some of your discussions as it's a subject that fascinates me, but the solution may have to involve accepting the ground rules of a new situation. Information is no longer a physical good, in practice. You used to have to truck goods around in order to get records, CDs etc in people's hands. That's no longer true- and it's only going to get worse as communications technology improves. In 2020, your spam will contain small feature films by way of 'multimedia'... and you'll gripe because it takes several seconds to download. How many complete books can you download per minute now? How many two-hour feature films at DVD resolution will you be able to download per minute in 2020?
It may never again be possible to strictly couple the distribution of information with compensation for artists.
The area to watch is the post-apocalyptic area. Assume that because of digital copying, both the RIAA and the MPAA go belly-up. They collapse- already they can't budget for serious artworks and have to hit lowest common denominator, let's assume even that doesn't help.
In this post-mainstream era, everything is out there as data. The entire history of the entertainment industry, tons of 'fan-films' and filks, and various independent contributions. Nothing new is being produced in a mainstream sense.
Now what?
What entreprenurial opportunities are there? If large-scale high-budget works cannot survive, does this produce a demand for them in their absence? It's rather like asking what the demand would be for saxophones in the Middle Ages: impossible to predict Coltrane or Ian Underwood from the idea of a brass thing with a reed on it. In a sense, we don't know what's ahead at all.
One thing I can predict with great authority, though- by 2010, the biggest mainstream pop star will be virtual. This solves the 'artist compensating' problem by inventing a kind of artist that is a fiction and can't be compensated except with other fiction ('Cribs' visits the artist's CGI mansion. Posh!).
By 2020, home computer users will have the capacity to do the same degree of synthesis and animation on their desktops, though...
The onslaught of psychotic powermongers causes problems because the legal system isn't really geared towards asking, 'wait a minute, does this make any sense or is it just a deranged outburst in legal form?'.
No, the lesson is, 'ditch Outlook and IE and Windows for that matter, and run something that has the decency to treat mail and news as freaking text' O_O
While you're talking about doing that and figuring out graphics for installers, I have got...
ten thousand copies of the GPL onto Macintoshes with my CD mastering program, Mastering Tools
Three hundred and seventy copies of the GPL onto an entirely different set of Macintoshes with Filmpaper, a new program I just put out a couple days ago, for screenwriting.
Both of these are seriously hardcore programs aimed at markets that are jammed with software so proprietary that in some cases it uses dongles and key disks. Both pro audio and professional screenwriting are full of relentlessly un-free, user-hostile software- some of the best apps in terms of performance have some of the worst copy-protection. Every copy of one of my programs that goes into such a market goes with source, 'COPYING' and a glimpse of another world- a world where you aren't jerked around by 'godlike software developers' but are allowed to take matters into your own hands if you need to, a world where you could take an active instead of a passive role with the software you use- not to mention a world where your software won't expire, annoy or selfdestruct.
It's pretty funny, actually, when you think about it- lots of Linux open source coders, deities at kernel hacking and C++ multiple inheritance, capable of coding back-end that REALLY WORKS, sitting around trying to figure out why GFX tweaks aren't loving The GIMP or why Windows consumers aren't rushing to grab ISO images of Linux for free. It's simple- DO WHAT YOU LOVE. And if all you love is heavy-duty code-monkeying, do back-end coding. But if you want free software to really build up steam, get passionate about something other than coding and apply your coding skills to it.
The important thing is to have the ONE BEST PROGRAM in any given situation be a Free Software program. I have done this in part with my CD mastering software- the area where it beats anything else out there is output sound quality, so far I can't get other aspects up to professional quality (like workflow, realtime audio and response to control adjusting). Someday I'll have that stuff together too.
You will never, never get to be the 'new Photoshop' by targetting the 'masses'. Ever. Not happening. Forget it. Guy Kawasaki had it figured out back when he was getting the Mac started- you target the TWEAKS. Do everything to target the uber-tweak heavy hitters, the early adopters, the influencers. If you are writing an OSS 'Pro Tools', talk to people in LA and Nashville- better still, BE one of the people in LA and Nashville, and code what YOU need, only then will you get it right. You have to be coding what you personally will need to put hours of use on.
We gotta find more reinassance-geeks. Biotech, robotics- I have sound engineering pretty well covered, but don't use a DAW- if you're writing a spreadsheet it had better be because YOU need to make heavy, heavy use of a spreadsheet, not because 'people in offices use these!'
This pep talk has been brought to you by Chris Johnson, who's placed over 10,000 copies of the GPL on computers where it had never been seen. He's going to continue doing this whatever you do- but if you want to show some freaking support, don't be paying for the SOFTWARE, instead go look into some of the stuff Chris cares about a lot, like his music... be totally unlike most people and buy a CD while you're at it, or just download + rate tunes left and right. Or please yourself- but that would be a BIG help
"I brought you into this world, and I can take you out!"
There's a limit to how much they can keep themselves going, though, because they aren't based on being a sustainable business. They're based on being a rapidly expanding business, their whole earnings structure and valuation is based on that. It is IMPOSSIBLE for them to go forever on that basis. So you might ask, at what point would it be good to stop them and ride out the crash, given that it's gotta happen at some point?
But you're thinking too small.
Start to MAKE music of your own! Not only do you have the freedom to do so, not only do you probably already have a CD burner that is the modern-day equivalent of a million-dollar mastering lathe in the 60s and 70s, but more and more software for working with music data is not only out there at no cost, but even Free.
I know I'd benefit if people started a movement to consume only music-libre artists, but to consume is not enough. I have people writing me to say "My tastes are really strange so it probably is a bad look-out for you, but I loved your bizarre music!" and I would be still happier to have people saying, "Since listening to the music you do, I decided to go out and make my OWN music!". So far, I don't seem to have motivated anyone to go out and compose, play, record themselves. But if I was to be remembered for something that is about the coolest thing I could ever have done...
So get out there and get more involved than just consuming!
(side note: mind you, I would still be quite happy if people decided to dig through my 10-CD discography and pick out something to buy- for one, I really worked on the uncompressed Red Book CD versions, for two I'm freaking starving, and for three, when I do have money I always spend it on gear, and I'd be growing my GPLed music software more quickly if I was compelled to, for instance by being able to get a newer Mac and having to port the software to OSX, which would be significantly closer to an easy Linux port. I am NOT pleading with people to not buy my CDs- it's more like what Tim O'Reilly said once, that if information sharing meant that he couldn't be a publisher anymore he would willingly give that up rather than try and stamp out information sharing. I'm ready to accept that music is worthless and costs money to do, if that's the true reality, and it wouldn't stop me from occasionally doing it. But it's too early to tell, it really is...)
So the reality is: 'piracy' SHOULD hurt the artists, the ones who aren't all over the Top 40. However, that would assume fair dealing on the record label's part. Few artists (apart from fierce self-motivated acts like Metallica) can even negotiate for fair dealing, so in PRACTICE, 'piracy' doesn't hurt the artists, because they are already making zero money and have zero chance and zero hope.
Of course, this puts him in bed with the MPAA, so it's rather easy to understand why his perspective is a bit shrill :)