"At the Computer and Technology Show (CTS) in Clearwater, Fla., this week, there were blue Microsoft footsteps pasted on the floor, showing the way to the sparsely populated MS demonstration area. Linux people must be smarter, or maybe just more fun. Even though they had no such navigational aids, their booth and demo floor lured thousands of visitors, and was a hive of activity on both days."
Maybe that would be a good thing. If you have ever studied Disney cultural history and their exports to foriegn countries, you'd be perfectly aware that Disney pushes a _weird_ agenda, _hard_, and deserves to be called on it. Disney is actually a terrific example of this type of cultural violence. For instance, how many smallpox-infected blankets or massacres were in 'Pocahontas'?
Disney's at least as good as 'Pravda' at reinventing history and truth for pragmatic reasons- and they are believed every bit as unquestioningly. This bears watching.
No, he means 'available to everybody' in the sense of the IE-only British Government website recently in the news. Everybody has to have IE and Windows. Government should not fund anything unless it makes people have IE and Windows:)
At any rate, Ballmer is psychotic. I don't see how his perceptions jibe with the real world at all. It's basically a 'nyah nyah I'm not listening' reaction. I believe he's totally sincere when he doesn't attempt to identify ANY area Microsoft doesn't plan to control, and I believe he's equally sincere when he says they're acting just as they always have: which we have a very clear picture of, thanks to the DoJ.
The only remaining question to my mind is, at what point does government (ANY government) begin to realise Microsoft wants all of THEIR turf as well? They really are going for direct control. They really are. What else would they be doing around about now?
mp3.com is now owned by Universal. Artists have to pay off mp3.com to get timely service and be eligible for 'payback', and agree to a contract that Universal can change at any time with no warning. Plus, artists also agree to give Universal perpetual nonexclusive rights to their material, and give blanket permission for editing and alterations to take place at Universal's discretion.
When mp3.com blew it, it blew it BIG.
What you are thinking about is currently more like ampcast.com. Ampcast has an infinitely better contract, has just gone live with a _true_ audio CD program (send in a Red Book master and they dupe it as needed- full CD quality for indies at burn-to-order availability), and seems to be dedicated (even down to their mission statement) to providing an alternative to the majors.
Ampcast isn't big, but doesn't look to be blowing it any time soon. If they did, there will just be somebody else, because it's simply not that hard to dupe and print up full quality CDs anymore. Just because mp3.com blew it doesn't mean there won't be others.
13% of gross? *ROFL!* Talk to some insiders. Talk to some _lawyers_. The situation is a heck of a lot worse than that, let me tell you.
If you're really interested, go read this book: it's _by_ an entertainment lawyer.
"All You Need To Know About The Music Business", by Donald S. Passman.
Especially part II, "Record Deals", which covers every imaginable aspect of that '13%' and many that you would not have begun to imagine, or even think possible.
You've got to also remember that copyright HOLDERS are privileged to set the terms for their stuff. This:
All commercial rights reserved: noncommercial copying allowed
...is a perfectly legitimate copyright statement. You are ALLOWED to place those terms on your music, if it's YOUR music.
It is impossible to drive up the costs and risks of free access to THAT sort of music, because if the freeness (like grateful dead concert tapes...) is authorised by the copyright holder, the legal system supports it.
The legal system does not make any guarantee that the MEANS of communication of this free stuff is protected, and this is worth watching out for. But as long as there are people wishing to further electronic distribution of 'just the bits' of their creations, there will be means of doing so. The trick is to try to get one of those methods to go mainstream on as big a scale as mp3.
Finally, as an artist, I am not saying that the RIAA is NOT going to make it difficult for me to legally offer my music for download. They will, to the limit of their ability. They have also been involved in price-fixing and tied to the Mob, and certainly would not balk at 'cutting off my air supply' just because I wasn't affiliated with them, quite impersonally. They can and will TRY to do this. They are.
I'm just saying- the law is on MY side here. For that matter, so is capitalism;)
Yes, that's true- my favorite at the moment is www.ampcast.com which is a lot like an independent label. They're a company but not publically held that I can tell, and the mission statement is very specifically targetting Ampcast as being an alternative to the majors.
That doesn't make them a radio station, mind you (though they do streaming- using Quicktime:P ) but I couldn't help noticing that they were totally not mentioned at all in the Salon article. Maybe that's good. Flying under the radar, eh?
All I care about is, they have a terrific artist's agreement/contract, and they have just gone live on their CD program- which allows for selling CDs online that are duped FROM RED BOOK MASTERS. Yes! REAL CDs! And they hold no monopoly on that, they're just the first to go that far. The more indie internet 'labels' selling full-on CDs over the net, the better. Indie is NOT just all about mp3 anymore. We have control of the means of production >:)
1: Hah! As if! They'll offer you $5000 and tell you they're going to make you a star. Ask for how long: they no longer build careers. Since 1990, most multiplatinum acts stop selling once the RIAA stops pushing 'em.
2: Yes please. John Perry Barlow of the EFF would like you to do this, as well. Consider yourself the shock troops for a new era of communications liquidity. It is WRONG for the Internet to act like brick-and-mortar distribution.
3: Especially if _you_ wrote the music...
4: Speaking of which- WRITE MUSIC! The difference between RIAA A-list and garage has _never_ been so tiny. The labels have actually been turning away from their wonderful resources as in huge studios with millions of dollars worth of gear, and turning to "Pro Tools". Because it's cheaper, and they don't think anyone can tell the difference. This puts just about everybody on the same footing. Go out and do the kind of music _you_ would want to hear.
5: Better than that, use it against itself. Make music and have the 'small print' say "All commercial rights reserved- noncommercial copying OKAY". Hang on to your rights to stop Sony or Universal from ripping you off, but extend rights to your peers and specifically allow free copying. There needs to be a lot of ARTISTS out there doing this. Besides, it's a damned good selling point- proves you're NOT RIAA.
Get out there and do stuff! The next 'Santana' isn't gonna come from the RIAA labels. DIY and believe in yourself (and do your homework about how to run and finance a small business, because if you're serious that is what you are).
I'd have to agree. Here in Vermont we just had a New England Republican _quit_ being Republican in protest of Bush's education plans. Standing on principle or standing up for constituencies is sure as hell not something confined to Democrats at this point.
If anything, it looks as if _both_ major parties are so far out to lunch that _both_ of them are capable of producing rebels who can't tolerate the nonsense anymore.
I'm reminded of a statement of, I think, Lawrence Lessig- in a roundtable on electronic freedoms held by O'Reilly, he said "Where are the Republicans when you need them? When it comes to these sorts of regulatory actions- I want to see a regulatory impact statement!". The fact is, it's just as likely to see the current political climate rubbing diehard Republicans the wrong way as Democrats.
The Democrats might go "What the HELL are we doing, dismantling every damn mechanism the government has come up with for actually doing some good? What good are we supposed to be if we're not funding government programs to prop up society? It doesn't run itself. That's what we _have_ a government for."
The Republicans might go "What the HELL are we doing, writing new laws faster than we can think or read them? What are we going to do, put video arcade owners in jail? We're spinning a web of government regulation so thick that _nobody_ will be able to move, call that freedom? Let's call it maternalism. Let's call it damned interferingness. In fact, let's get rid of it!"
Expect to continue to be surprised by small rebellions and defiances by the politicians whom you thought were bought and paid for employees of Corporate America. They _do_ have beliefs- you just might not be aware of what they are. Who knew that Jeffords would throw the Senate into upheaval and destroy the Republican lock on White House, Senate and House simply over education and being treated with contempt over his centrism? More importantly, who will be next- and from which side will he or she abandon ship?
Hell, I don't see how you aren't qualified for the Senate. Are you willing to read shitloads of information and try your best to make the right decisions? Can you be bribed or bought? Are you good at public speaking- or can you learn? Most of all, will you hang on to your essentially non-corrupt perspective while trying to remember that your fellow reps or senators are just flawed people and that's why they fail you and their own constituents?
Please do run. Go find out. We need you- or to be specific (and don't you forget this), we need your _values_ and will support you, most likely, as long as you're true to them.
I'm a Vermonter- look at _our_ senator, Jim Jeffords. He's far from perfect- takes a lot of money from PACs etc- but when Bush put forth a nonsensical, meaningless education plan that would gut our schools, Jeffords couldn't go along with the game any more, no matter how well he was paid off to do it. And he quit the Republican party, threw the Senate into upheaval, switched control of important subcommittees over to Democrats- and got _cheers_ in Vermont for it. People understood. They understood that for once, and despite his other faults, a senator was siding with his constituents- specifically, he was refusing to see American education flushed down the toilet just because his party wanted to play ultraconservative and gut funding for it.
I bet he still takes bribes, but don't forget he was cheered in Vermont for his action against his own party. People _will_ back you if you are true to them. Otherwise they'll totally ignore you like all other politicians, and you'll have to whore yourself to the PACs to get elected. You've got to prove that you'll represent your people. I bet anything Jeffords gets re-elected. Hell, he earned some respect from me, and I don't like his taking bribes at all and I voted for Progressives and Green candidates.
You want a seat in the House or Senate? Find a way to _prove_ that you are what you say you are. Anybody can talk. Get busy in politics.
I'm currently studying longterm sales in the music business, and here's the deal: the bands being sought after to sell beer and things (Bob Seger, et al), are the A-List of twenty years ago.
Around ten years ago, the music business shifted to all-out A-List promotion rather than any attempt at career building. This is when you began to see bands that came out, did double platinum in less than a year, and then _vanished_. I don't mean broke up- the record remains in the catalog whether the band's still around or not, but when the record industry does this, they do incredible volume for a very brief time and when they stop promoting, NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR ANY MORE.
Beer companies don't want to use bands like that to sell beer, either. They want Bob Seger or Brooce- catalog sellers from at least 20 years ago.
What the A-List artists are these days is processed stuff- 'N Sync etc. The RIAA _can't_ lose control of artists like that, because history shows that when the RIAA quits pushing that kind of act, the sales STOP. With real bands, the sales continue- sometimes in a big way, for what's called a 'catalog killer' album. There are no such albums being made these days, and that's intentional.
This is because dealing with always new and inexperienced artists means no nasty skepticism about deal terms, no griping about contracts, no questions about what's recoupable expenses: using only new inexperienced artists means they can be contractually hosed, wrung out until all the money is squeezed out, and then dropped. If the RIAA labels had to maintain careers they wouldn't earn as much relative to the artist because the artist would develop savvy and clout and ability to negotiate contracts. The RIAA needs _virgin_ artists with no savvy or clout in order to get away with the margins it needs to survive.
It needs these margins because it's viciously squeezed by rack jobbers and independent promotion- both of which have been consolidating, bigtime. The RIAA doesn't _keep_ its money- it's gotta pay a LOT of 'protection' to independent promotion, which controls radio. It's gotta bribe people to get CDs placed in Wal-Mart, when there's only 2 slots available and they're being viciously fought over. You can see why the RIAA doesn't dare allow genuine careers to develop- it needs puppet artists to manipulate and discard. They come cheaper.
The trouble is, once you quit pulling the strings, the puppet artists collapse, and sales completely stop. When you pick an act and a single and a video specifically because it's horrible enough to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and then you dump lots of it on the market, you can move a lot of units to half-interested people- then when you have to rely on the value of the material for back catalog sales, the sales absolutely fall off a cliff because nobody really wants to hear it- it's fake.
And this is shown by the tendency of commercial music (the beer manufacturers and so on) to want guys like Bob Seger in preference to fake A-List pop stars that have sold three times as many records as Seger ever did. They know that the fake stuff will stop selling the instant the RIAA label stops pushing- and they need more appeal than that, to sell beer. They know that the RIAA is operating on a 'push' basis and can't or won't invest in developing artists that people _want_ to hear.
And THAT is what the RIAA is so scared of.
Do the math: it's all a matter of public record. You can get the information online, about sales of platinum and gold albums, and look at the sales curves before and after 1990. That seems to be roughly the dividing point.
This would not be difficult to illustrate since music sales by the RIAA's OWN figures have been exploding, increasing almost exponentially.
Of course, this _is_ almost completely hit-and-run tactics and has been since around 1990: release, go multiplatinum within a year, discard, repeat. It hugely drives RIAA label sales, but it doesn't make any new artist careers. Britney Spears is the Warrant ('Cherry Pie') of 2001. Warrant went double platinum back in '91 with that- and in ten years has not added another platinum to that total. TEN years with no further sales, after double platinum in the first year. The only difference between that and Britney is that these days, sales are up so much that Britney goes _13_ platinums in the same time period... and then, nothing, when they tire of her or when she starts demanding a career, or gets too old (say, 20...).
It's sick. But it sure as hell sells a lot of records. There is no way to sanely argue that sales are down.
Annoying advertising gets results? Yes, right: and the result, you've mentioned. Annoyance.
Don't ever think of 'the consumer' as something mysterious and targettable. David Ogilvy (who wrote more advertisements than you've ever seen) said, "The consumer is not an idiot, she is your wife". The consumer is you. What is _your_ reaction to being annoyed?
Instead of microsoftsux.com you'd have microsoft.sux. Problems of confusion would be directly addressed by saying 'No, of course microsoft.sux is not the Microsoft site- NONE of the.sux sites are the official sites, are you nuts?'
The cost of registering every last tld is not prohibitive but perhaps it could be _forbidden_ to own every one. Personally I'd be in favor of a 'you only get to own one' rule, but that's very restrictive. Maybe 'business units' could be allowed to own their own name.
Imagine the possibilities: pizza.hut, shipping.ups, slashslash.dot, natalieportman.rok:) The sheer scope of it tends to defuse concerns about trademarked names. So natalieportman.com gets to be the actress (most likely), but slashdot trolls of the old school would get to register the.rok because it would obviously be a different story, and most notably because the SCALE of the undertaking makes the idea of 'confusion among TLDs' unpracticable- it would be ridiculous to make claims that because you had.com you had rights to.net and.rok and.sux etc.
Most of all, the idea would SCALE. Bigtime. Compare that to the 'There's 3/7/X TLDs so obviously we need to own them all' mentality so prevalent today. It's not even about the cost so much as it is a matter of expanding the TLD space to where it makes no logical sense to treat it as an insignificant addendum to the primary namespace. What we need is.sux, and total access to stuff like microsoft.sux, and support for the OBVIOUS fact that microsoft.sux is not microsoft.com. You could argue that microsoftsucks.com might be confused with MS because the part that changes is a part normally used to specify sub-categories: microsoftoffice.com, microsoftword.com etc. (there's another great one-.etc would rule. What would be better for mailboxes.etc?) But you can't argue that microsoft.sux is confused with MS because the whole TLD will rapidly fill with 'annoy' sites, that is its obvious purpose in life.
17576 TLDs is a complete winner of an idea! Let's bear that in mind and keep raising it every time the namespace is forced to scale and add new TLDs. Because it is GOING to keep scaling, like it or not- why not go for the full deal immediately?
Maybe he missed _your_ boat but he certainly got in the one I customarily use:)
You _cannot_ produce sharing, cooperation, society, on the grounds of direct self-benefit and greed. Actually I think the crux of the biscuit here is greed: it seems quite reasonable that you can have a gentle self-benefit through sharing and cooperation, but you can't have greed. It is always possible to take and refuse to give, and thereby to get a temporary, isolated advantage, and greed mandates that you MUST take every advantage, that you can't pass up any chance at personal gain. Otherwise it wouldn't be greed, just only need.
Those of us who are normal people with normal need, but who are not obliged or accustomed to operate on a basis of greed, have an easier time indulging in sharing and cooperation- historically this has led to great benefits in science and industry. You can zoom down the road a hell of a lot quicker if you don't feel compelled to dig it up each step of the way and take it with you so nobody else can have it... or maybe just no slower, but you have more company when you leave the road there for other people to follow you on...
bleh, metaphor madness. All I'm trying to say is that fixating on the economic benefit is wrong because it allows an underlying assumption, greed, to go unquestioned. And cooperation and sharing may be better at furthering knowledge and science, but nobody ever claimed they were better at furthering greed. If a person's gotta have greed, if they insist on being able to _impede_ others as well as furthering themselves, they really shouldn't be messing around with Free software at all as it will only frustrate them. They should be true to their beliefs and go act on them, for instance writing a commercial web browser to defeat IE, or an OS to unseat Windows, or a word processor to replace Word. That would be fairly useful.
Those of us who are ready to give up greed and settle for just furthering our own goals, will instead choose to ignore all that, and write Free software to share amongst ourselves. We may never get rich but at least we can take care of ourselves. At bottom, GNU _is_ a philosophical argument, and no sort of economic or pragmatic argument. The fact that aspects of free software are competitive in realworld situations with proprietary software is just gravy. People don't always choose things based on rigid estimation of immediate benefits.
It was a troll because it's just another libertarian arguing that the way to make corporations behave better is to remove all conceivable restrictions on them: namely, government restrictions.
Troll is a fairly strong term for it- I guess someone was having a bad day and got more annoyed than usual at the foolishness:) really, in 2001 that's a very odd opinion to hold. Maybe if we get rid of Congress too and let the RIAA and MPAA write laws directly, and get rid of the police and let the RIAA and MPAA furnish their own cops, our liberties will be improved;) ya think?
Watch out for network effects. Network effects means, "In the absense of any outside influence, the biggest options will squish the smallest options and make the total situation blatantly sub-optimal." Applies to a lot of things, but it sure as hell applies to Wal-Mart and McDonalds. It's necessary to hobble the giants a bit, they can well afford it- and otherwise you're just intentionally settling for an inferior competitive situation. And who wants to settle for an inferior competitive situation? Do you not _like_ competition?
No no- a representative republic is NOT majority rule. It tries to force a synthesis of ideas and is especially crafted to resist the evils of faction. Read Federalist Paper #10, okay? Democracy is a nice word but it's not what we in the USA do, in theory or in practice: that's because it's been done throughout history and it always crashes- 'bread and circuses', get it?
That is assuming that all the Linux scripting tools will default to 'let lusers auto-run all types of scripting things whether they understand them or not. In fact, ship the stuff with it all turned on!'.
And that's a hell of a big assumption, considering that this is a really stupid thing to do, and that you can just as legitimately claim you 'have' all that scripting even if it defaults to off and does not autorun on incoming email scripts.
Don't get ahead of yourself. You're making a lot of assumptions- among others, you're assuming that this happens in a complete legislative vacuum, and you're assuming that no governments anywhere will decide this is a threat to their interests- and that's just dumb! Communications are important, and control of communications is vital.
That is why you are wrong (not that you should sit back and be complacent, of course). However, if you are right, then you're still wrong, because in the event that no government will restrain the new power balance in the world, in the event that it all becomes puppet governments tied together by a 'world citizen electronic ID' sort of system by Microsoft (which doesn't even _care_ about governing, it just wants your money), you still have the option of guerrilla warfare, and so does everyone else.
"Microsoft, kill them!" like hell! I'd like to see how well they like that point of view if, all over the world, Microsoft employees are literally being killed, shot, mugged, bombed, mowed down by people with real weapons who aren't afraid to die themselves. It is my fond hope that it will not take something like that to get Microsoft people to see the societal harm caused by their 'Microsoft, kill them!' attitude. That has got to stop. That will stop. It is just a question of whether it can be stopped without taking them at their rhetoric and literally starting to kill them. That's a hell of a step, there's got to be some way to get the message through without that. Bill Gates getting pie in the face should have illustrated the personal vulnerability, but obviously nobody took the hint. They are NOT BULLETPROOF and they need to STOP with the 'Microsoft, kill them!', immediately if not sooner.
"If this is what the public finds harmful to its interests, let the public destroy me."
Sounds good to me. Let's do it.
And if you are admittedly harmful to the public interests, what business do you have bitching about being destroyed, anyway? The public has a collective will, too. If you won't appease it and subjugate your own raw unmoderated desires to what will work in community with others, you deserve to be destroyed, and quit whining.:)
McNealy raises an incredibly good point, and I suspect he entirely fails to notice it himself. He's a laissez-faire guy, right? He's bringing up the exact reason laissez-faire can't work.
It's impossible to have privacy- he's right about that. It reminds me of a Rex Stout ('Nero Wolfe') story I've read, in which the detective, Wolfe, is being consulted by a woman who claims someone is trying to kill her husband. Wolfe's response? "Go talk to police. I can't stop anyone from trying to kill your husband- killing a man is the easiest thing in the world. That is why we have the social contract to protect and defend each other- because the practical difficulty in killing a man is nil."
Well, it's the same with privacy- the practical difficulty in violating privacy is nil. Buy something, there's a record. Make a remark to somebody, there's a record. Make it by email- a spyable record! It's completely ridiculous to expect there to be technological, mechanical means to protect privacy. Privacy is a myth. You _can_ know pretty much whatever you want, to a greater or lesser extent. You could probably get Scott's credit card records if you had the money to pay for the process- go through banks, manufacture a likely reason why you'd need to audit them and no problem.
However, what people are really concerned about is not literal privacy. It is being singled out and attacked based on some cross-correlated weakness. If you have some gene out of place, or bought a friend a bottle of whisky before you left for a long road trip, you don't want to have your driver's license revoked. Maybe if you're very wise you want your car to go dead intentionally if you get behind the wheel while drunk, but you don't want it to go dead because someone in another state determined that your statistical likelihood of having an accident increased beyond acceptable limits: that would be a violation of a personal liberty based on an impersonal criterion.
By the same token, you don't want to be tracked down and killed/beaten up by gaybashers/basherbashers/Microsoft employees/opensource zealots/abortion activists/antiabortion activists/etc. There are loads of potential reasons why someone might want to injure or kill almost any specific person, and loss of privacy simply means that anyone with a serious bone to pick has the technical ability to hunt down any such target- just the same as, if you're cooking dinner and cutting up food with a knife, you technically have the ability to leap out and sink the knive into the chest of any or all of your dinner guests. But you don't... it's not about _ability_ to do such things, ability is assumed.
Loss of privacy must be assumed, too.
Which only means that, perhaps to McNealy's chagrin, the social contract's gotta be taken seriously. 'Free behavior' ain't gonna cut it. In the no-walls world of the future, people will have to be _forced_ to show respect (including respect for privacy in another sense- akin to how Japanese houses can have paper walls: if you're not in the room you must fail to notice anything going on behind the paper wall).
Failure to do this will have roughly the same effect as leaping out and plunging a knife into your dinner guests: the important thing is to address the problem appropriately. Putting everyone at the dinner party into straitjackets and handcuffs is NOT the answer, even though it IS the only way to technically stop knife attacks on dinner guests.
Really. If they were a country, how would that seem? "USA, kill them! USA, kill them!" or "Iraq, kill them! Iraq, kill them!" It would cause comment;)
But because Microsoft is only more powerful and influential than most countries, and fights by causing economic disaster and poverty to its enemies rather than literally shooting them, people are slower to take 'em literally there.
But you should still take them literally there. If you are not with them, they want to kill you. Particularly if you try to earn a living doing stuff that they consider their property. The Gateser wishes that there be only one word processor! And web browser, and internet server, and game console, and official government internet site (which government? All governments!)
You'd think people would figure this out quicker. Is power that much harder to see when it's not wearing a soldier uniform?
I think that's seriously debatable. Is that _gross_ or _net_? I bet you this 'one billion a month' is gross profit- and that they've been spending considerably more than they're taking in, for a long time now.
It's all very well to buy into the myth of invincibility, but they have other problems than just competition. Office sales are stagnating, OS sales are a very hard sell in a 'good enough' world (how many people do you know who are on W98?), and their costs are unimaginable (.NET, XBox). You can talk all day long about how they have an attitude more like Stalin or something than a product vendor, but attitude is not everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright! Best slashdot news I've read all day!
"You can't pass out free software here!" *G*
Disney's at least as good as 'Pravda' at reinventing history and truth for pragmatic reasons- and they are believed every bit as unquestioningly. This bears watching.
No, he means 'available to everybody' in the sense of the IE-only British Government website recently in the news. Everybody has to have IE and Windows. Government should not fund anything unless it makes people have IE and Windows :)
At any rate, Ballmer is psychotic. I don't see how his perceptions jibe with the real world at all. It's basically a 'nyah nyah I'm not listening' reaction. I believe he's totally sincere when he doesn't attempt to identify ANY area Microsoft doesn't plan to control, and I believe he's equally sincere when he says they're acting just as they always have: which we have a very clear picture of, thanks to the DoJ.
The only remaining question to my mind is, at what point does government (ANY government) begin to realise Microsoft wants all of THEIR turf as well? They really are going for direct control. They really are. What else would they be doing around about now?
mp3.com is now owned by Universal. Artists have to pay off mp3.com to get timely service and be eligible for 'payback', and agree to a contract that Universal can change at any time with no warning. Plus, artists also agree to give Universal perpetual nonexclusive rights to their material, and give blanket permission for editing and alterations to take place at Universal's discretion.
When mp3.com blew it, it blew it BIG.
What you are thinking about is currently more like ampcast.com. Ampcast has an infinitely better contract, has just gone live with a _true_ audio CD program (send in a Red Book master and they dupe it as needed- full CD quality for indies at burn-to-order availability), and seems to be dedicated (even down to their mission statement) to providing an alternative to the majors.
Ampcast isn't big, but doesn't look to be blowing it any time soon. If they did, there will just be somebody else, because it's simply not that hard to dupe and print up full quality CDs anymore. Just because mp3.com blew it doesn't mean there won't be others.
13% of gross? *ROFL!* Talk to some insiders. Talk to some _lawyers_. The situation is a heck of a lot worse than that, let me tell you. If you're really interested, go read this book: it's _by_ an entertainment lawyer. "All You Need To Know About The Music Business", by Donald S. Passman. Especially part II, "Record Deals", which covers every imaginable aspect of that '13%' and many that you would not have begun to imagine, or even think possible.
All commercial rights reserved: noncommercial copying allowed
It is impossible to drive up the costs and risks of free access to THAT sort of music, because if the freeness (like grateful dead concert tapes...) is authorised by the copyright holder, the legal system supports it.
The legal system does not make any guarantee that the MEANS of communication of this free stuff is protected, and this is worth watching out for. But as long as there are people wishing to further electronic distribution of 'just the bits' of their creations, there will be means of doing so. The trick is to try to get one of those methods to go mainstream on as big a scale as mp3.
Finally, as an artist, I am not saying that the RIAA is NOT going to make it difficult for me to legally offer my music for download. They will, to the limit of their ability. They have also been involved in price-fixing and tied to the Mob, and certainly would not balk at 'cutting off my air supply' just because I wasn't affiliated with them, quite impersonally. They can and will TRY to do this. They are.
I'm just saying- the law is on MY side here. For that matter, so is capitalism ;)
That doesn't make them a radio station, mind you (though they do streaming- using Quicktime :P ) but I couldn't help noticing that they were totally not mentioned at all in the Salon article. Maybe that's good. Flying under the radar, eh?
All I care about is, they have a terrific artist's agreement/contract, and they have just gone live on their CD program- which allows for selling CDs online that are duped FROM RED BOOK MASTERS. Yes! REAL CDs! And they hold no monopoly on that, they're just the first to go that far. The more indie internet 'labels' selling full-on CDs over the net, the better. Indie is NOT just all about mp3 anymore. We have control of the means of production >:)
2: Yes please. John Perry Barlow of the EFF would like you to do this, as well. Consider yourself the shock troops for a new era of communications liquidity. It is WRONG for the Internet to act like brick-and-mortar distribution.
3: Especially if _you_ wrote the music...
4: Speaking of which- WRITE MUSIC! The difference between RIAA A-list and garage has _never_ been so tiny. The labels have actually been turning away from their wonderful resources as in huge studios with millions of dollars worth of gear, and turning to "Pro Tools". Because it's cheaper, and they don't think anyone can tell the difference. This puts just about everybody on the same footing. Go out and do the kind of music _you_ would want to hear.
5: Better than that, use it against itself. Make music and have the 'small print' say "All commercial rights reserved- noncommercial copying OKAY". Hang on to your rights to stop Sony or Universal from ripping you off, but extend rights to your peers and specifically allow free copying. There needs to be a lot of ARTISTS out there doing this. Besides, it's a damned good selling point- proves you're NOT RIAA.
Get out there and do stuff! The next 'Santana' isn't gonna come from the RIAA labels. DIY and believe in yourself (and do your homework about how to run and finance a small business, because if you're serious that is what you are).
If anything, it looks as if _both_ major parties are so far out to lunch that _both_ of them are capable of producing rebels who can't tolerate the nonsense anymore.
I'm reminded of a statement of, I think, Lawrence Lessig- in a roundtable on electronic freedoms held by O'Reilly, he said "Where are the Republicans when you need them? When it comes to these sorts of regulatory actions- I want to see a regulatory impact statement!". The fact is, it's just as likely to see the current political climate rubbing diehard Republicans the wrong way as Democrats.
The Democrats might go "What the HELL are we doing, dismantling every damn mechanism the government has come up with for actually doing some good? What good are we supposed to be if we're not funding government programs to prop up society? It doesn't run itself. That's what we _have_ a government for."
The Republicans might go "What the HELL are we doing, writing new laws faster than we can think or read them? What are we going to do, put video arcade owners in jail? We're spinning a web of government regulation so thick that _nobody_ will be able to move, call that freedom? Let's call it maternalism. Let's call it damned interferingness. In fact, let's get rid of it!"
Expect to continue to be surprised by small rebellions and defiances by the politicians whom you thought were bought and paid for employees of Corporate America. They _do_ have beliefs- you just might not be aware of what they are. Who knew that Jeffords would throw the Senate into upheaval and destroy the Republican lock on White House, Senate and House simply over education and being treated with contempt over his centrism? More importantly, who will be next- and from which side will he or she abandon ship?
Hell, I don't see how you aren't qualified for the Senate. Are you willing to read shitloads of information and try your best to make the right decisions? Can you be bribed or bought? Are you good at public speaking- or can you learn? Most of all, will you hang on to your essentially non-corrupt perspective while trying to remember that your fellow reps or senators are just flawed people and that's why they fail you and their own constituents?
Please do run. Go find out. We need you- or to be specific (and don't you forget this), we need your _values_ and will support you, most likely, as long as you're true to them.
I'm a Vermonter- look at _our_ senator, Jim Jeffords. He's far from perfect- takes a lot of money from PACs etc- but when Bush put forth a nonsensical, meaningless education plan that would gut our schools, Jeffords couldn't go along with the game any more, no matter how well he was paid off to do it. And he quit the Republican party, threw the Senate into upheaval, switched control of important subcommittees over to Democrats- and got _cheers_ in Vermont for it. People understood. They understood that for once, and despite his other faults, a senator was siding with his constituents- specifically, he was refusing to see American education flushed down the toilet just because his party wanted to play ultraconservative and gut funding for it.
I bet he still takes bribes, but don't forget he was cheered in Vermont for his action against his own party. People _will_ back you if you are true to them. Otherwise they'll totally ignore you like all other politicians, and you'll have to whore yourself to the PACs to get elected. You've got to prove that you'll represent your people. I bet anything Jeffords gets re-elected. Hell, he earned some respect from me, and I don't like his taking bribes at all and I voted for Progressives and Green candidates.
You want a seat in the House or Senate? Find a way to _prove_ that you are what you say you are. Anybody can talk. Get busy in politics.
Need a speechwriter? ;) *g*
I'm currently studying longterm sales in the music business, and here's the deal: the bands being sought after to sell beer and things (Bob Seger, et al), are the A-List of twenty years ago.
Around ten years ago, the music business shifted to all-out A-List promotion rather than any attempt at career building. This is when you began to see bands that came out, did double platinum in less than a year, and then _vanished_. I don't mean broke up- the record remains in the catalog whether the band's still around or not, but when the record industry does this, they do incredible volume for a very brief time and when they stop promoting, NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR ANY MORE.
Beer companies don't want to use bands like that to sell beer, either. They want Bob Seger or Brooce- catalog sellers from at least 20 years ago.
What the A-List artists are these days is processed stuff- 'N Sync etc. The RIAA _can't_ lose control of artists like that, because history shows that when the RIAA quits pushing that kind of act, the sales STOP. With real bands, the sales continue- sometimes in a big way, for what's called a 'catalog killer' album. There are no such albums being made these days, and that's intentional.
This is because dealing with always new and inexperienced artists means no nasty skepticism about deal terms, no griping about contracts, no questions about what's recoupable expenses: using only new inexperienced artists means they can be contractually hosed, wrung out until all the money is squeezed out, and then dropped. If the RIAA labels had to maintain careers they wouldn't earn as much relative to the artist because the artist would develop savvy and clout and ability to negotiate contracts. The RIAA needs _virgin_ artists with no savvy or clout in order to get away with the margins it needs to survive.
It needs these margins because it's viciously squeezed by rack jobbers and independent promotion- both of which have been consolidating, bigtime. The RIAA doesn't _keep_ its money- it's gotta pay a LOT of 'protection' to independent promotion, which controls radio. It's gotta bribe people to get CDs placed in Wal-Mart, when there's only 2 slots available and they're being viciously fought over. You can see why the RIAA doesn't dare allow genuine careers to develop- it needs puppet artists to manipulate and discard. They come cheaper.
The trouble is, once you quit pulling the strings, the puppet artists collapse, and sales completely stop. When you pick an act and a single and a video specifically because it's horrible enough to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and then you dump lots of it on the market, you can move a lot of units to half-interested people- then when you have to rely on the value of the material for back catalog sales, the sales absolutely fall off a cliff because nobody really wants to hear it- it's fake.
And this is shown by the tendency of commercial music (the beer manufacturers and so on) to want guys like Bob Seger in preference to fake A-List pop stars that have sold three times as many records as Seger ever did. They know that the fake stuff will stop selling the instant the RIAA label stops pushing- and they need more appeal than that, to sell beer. They know that the RIAA is operating on a 'push' basis and can't or won't invest in developing artists that people _want_ to hear.
And THAT is what the RIAA is so scared of.
Do the math: it's all a matter of public record. You can get the information online, about sales of platinum and gold albums, and look at the sales curves before and after 1990. That seems to be roughly the dividing point.
Of course, this _is_ almost completely hit-and-run tactics and has been since around 1990: release, go multiplatinum within a year, discard, repeat. It hugely drives RIAA label sales, but it doesn't make any new artist careers. Britney Spears is the Warrant ('Cherry Pie') of 2001. Warrant went double platinum back in '91 with that- and in ten years has not added another platinum to that total. TEN years with no further sales, after double platinum in the first year. The only difference between that and Britney is that these days, sales are up so much that Britney goes _13_ platinums in the same time period... and then, nothing, when they tire of her or when she starts demanding a career, or gets too old (say, 20...).
It's sick. But it sure as hell sells a lot of records. There is no way to sanely argue that sales are down.
Don't ever think of 'the consumer' as something mysterious and targettable. David Ogilvy (who wrote more advertisements than you've ever seen) said, "The consumer is not an idiot, she is your wife". The consumer is you. What is _your_ reaction to being annoyed?
Instead of microsoftsux.com you'd have microsoft.sux. Problems of confusion would be directly addressed by saying 'No, of course microsoft.sux is not the Microsoft site- NONE of the .sux sites are the official sites, are you nuts?'
The cost of registering every last tld is not prohibitive but perhaps it could be _forbidden_ to own every one. Personally I'd be in favor of a 'you only get to own one' rule, but that's very restrictive. Maybe 'business units' could be allowed to own their own name.
Imagine the possibilities: pizza.hut, shipping.ups, slashslash.dot, natalieportman.rok :) The sheer scope of it tends to defuse concerns about trademarked names. So natalieportman.com gets to be the actress (most likely), but slashdot trolls of the old school would get to register the .rok because it would obviously be a different story, and most notably because the SCALE of the undertaking makes the idea of 'confusion among TLDs' unpracticable- it would be ridiculous to make claims that because you had .com you had rights to .net and .rok and .sux etc.
Most of all, the idea would SCALE. Bigtime. Compare that to the 'There's 3/7/X TLDs so obviously we need to own them all' mentality so prevalent today. It's not even about the cost so much as it is a matter of expanding the TLD space to where it makes no logical sense to treat it as an insignificant addendum to the primary namespace. What we need is .sux, and total access to stuff like microsoft.sux, and support for the OBVIOUS fact that microsoft.sux is not microsoft.com. You could argue that microsoftsucks.com might be confused with MS because the part that changes is a part normally used to specify sub-categories: microsoftoffice.com, microsoftword.com etc. (there's another great one- .etc would rule. What would be better for mailboxes.etc?) But you can't argue that microsoft.sux is confused with MS because the whole TLD will rapidly fill with 'annoy' sites, that is its obvious purpose in life.
17576 TLDs is a complete winner of an idea! Let's bear that in mind and keep raising it every time the namespace is forced to scale and add new TLDs. Because it is GOING to keep scaling, like it or not- why not go for the full deal immediately?
You _cannot_ produce sharing, cooperation, society, on the grounds of direct self-benefit and greed. Actually I think the crux of the biscuit here is greed: it seems quite reasonable that you can have a gentle self-benefit through sharing and cooperation, but you can't have greed. It is always possible to take and refuse to give, and thereby to get a temporary, isolated advantage, and greed mandates that you MUST take every advantage, that you can't pass up any chance at personal gain. Otherwise it wouldn't be greed, just only need.
Those of us who are normal people with normal need, but who are not obliged or accustomed to operate on a basis of greed, have an easier time indulging in sharing and cooperation- historically this has led to great benefits in science and industry. You can zoom down the road a hell of a lot quicker if you don't feel compelled to dig it up each step of the way and take it with you so nobody else can have it... or maybe just no slower, but you have more company when you leave the road there for other people to follow you on...
bleh, metaphor madness. All I'm trying to say is that fixating on the economic benefit is wrong because it allows an underlying assumption, greed, to go unquestioned. And cooperation and sharing may be better at furthering knowledge and science, but nobody ever claimed they were better at furthering greed. If a person's gotta have greed, if they insist on being able to _impede_ others as well as furthering themselves, they really shouldn't be messing around with Free software at all as it will only frustrate them. They should be true to their beliefs and go act on them, for instance writing a commercial web browser to defeat IE, or an OS to unseat Windows, or a word processor to replace Word. That would be fairly useful.
Those of us who are ready to give up greed and settle for just furthering our own goals, will instead choose to ignore all that, and write Free software to share amongst ourselves. We may never get rich but at least we can take care of ourselves. At bottom, GNU _is_ a philosophical argument, and no sort of economic or pragmatic argument. The fact that aspects of free software are competitive in realworld situations with proprietary software is just gravy. People don't always choose things based on rigid estimation of immediate benefits.
Troll is a fairly strong term for it- I guess someone was having a bad day and got more annoyed than usual at the foolishness :) really, in 2001 that's a very odd opinion to hold. Maybe if we get rid of Congress too and let the RIAA and MPAA write laws directly, and get rid of the police and let the RIAA and MPAA furnish their own cops, our liberties will be improved ;) ya think?
Watch out for network effects. Network effects means, "In the absense of any outside influence, the biggest options will squish the smallest options and make the total situation blatantly sub-optimal." Applies to a lot of things, but it sure as hell applies to Wal-Mart and McDonalds. It's necessary to hobble the giants a bit, they can well afford it- and otherwise you're just intentionally settling for an inferior competitive situation. And who wants to settle for an inferior competitive situation? Do you not _like_ competition?
No no- a representative republic is NOT majority rule. It tries to force a synthesis of ideas and is especially crafted to resist the evils of faction. Read Federalist Paper #10, okay? Democracy is a nice word but it's not what we in the USA do, in theory or in practice: that's because it's been done throughout history and it always crashes- 'bread and circuses', get it?
And that's a hell of a big assumption, considering that this is a really stupid thing to do, and that you can just as legitimately claim you 'have' all that scripting even if it defaults to off and does not autorun on incoming email scripts.
That is why you are wrong (not that you should sit back and be complacent, of course). However, if you are right, then you're still wrong, because in the event that no government will restrain the new power balance in the world, in the event that it all becomes puppet governments tied together by a 'world citizen electronic ID' sort of system by Microsoft (which doesn't even _care_ about governing, it just wants your money), you still have the option of guerrilla warfare, and so does everyone else.
"Microsoft, kill them!" like hell! I'd like to see how well they like that point of view if, all over the world, Microsoft employees are literally being killed, shot, mugged, bombed, mowed down by people with real weapons who aren't afraid to die themselves. It is my fond hope that it will not take something like that to get Microsoft people to see the societal harm caused by their 'Microsoft, kill them!' attitude. That has got to stop. That will stop. It is just a question of whether it can be stopped without taking them at their rhetoric and literally starting to kill them. That's a hell of a step, there's got to be some way to get the message through without that. Bill Gates getting pie in the face should have illustrated the personal vulnerability, but obviously nobody took the hint. They are NOT BULLETPROOF and they need to STOP with the 'Microsoft, kill them!', immediately if not sooner.
Sounds good to me. Let's do it.
And if you are admittedly harmful to the public interests, what business do you have bitching about being destroyed, anyway? The public has a collective will, too. If you won't appease it and subjugate your own raw unmoderated desires to what will work in community with others, you deserve to be destroyed, and quit whining. :)
It's impossible to have privacy- he's right about that. It reminds me of a Rex Stout ('Nero Wolfe') story I've read, in which the detective, Wolfe, is being consulted by a woman who claims someone is trying to kill her husband. Wolfe's response? "Go talk to police. I can't stop anyone from trying to kill your husband- killing a man is the easiest thing in the world. That is why we have the social contract to protect and defend each other- because the practical difficulty in killing a man is nil."
Well, it's the same with privacy- the practical difficulty in violating privacy is nil. Buy something, there's a record. Make a remark to somebody, there's a record. Make it by email- a spyable record! It's completely ridiculous to expect there to be technological, mechanical means to protect privacy. Privacy is a myth. You _can_ know pretty much whatever you want, to a greater or lesser extent. You could probably get Scott's credit card records if you had the money to pay for the process- go through banks, manufacture a likely reason why you'd need to audit them and no problem.
However, what people are really concerned about is not literal privacy. It is being singled out and attacked based on some cross-correlated weakness. If you have some gene out of place, or bought a friend a bottle of whisky before you left for a long road trip, you don't want to have your driver's license revoked. Maybe if you're very wise you want your car to go dead intentionally if you get behind the wheel while drunk, but you don't want it to go dead because someone in another state determined that your statistical likelihood of having an accident increased beyond acceptable limits: that would be a violation of a personal liberty based on an impersonal criterion.
By the same token, you don't want to be tracked down and killed/beaten up by gaybashers/basherbashers/Microsoft employees/opensource zealots/abortion activists/antiabortion activists/etc. There are loads of potential reasons why someone might want to injure or kill almost any specific person, and loss of privacy simply means that anyone with a serious bone to pick has the technical ability to hunt down any such target- just the same as, if you're cooking dinner and cutting up food with a knife, you technically have the ability to leap out and sink the knive into the chest of any or all of your dinner guests. But you don't... it's not about _ability_ to do such things, ability is assumed.
Loss of privacy must be assumed, too.
Which only means that, perhaps to McNealy's chagrin, the social contract's gotta be taken seriously. 'Free behavior' ain't gonna cut it. In the no-walls world of the future, people will have to be _forced_ to show respect (including respect for privacy in another sense- akin to how Japanese houses can have paper walls: if you're not in the room you must fail to notice anything going on behind the paper wall).
Failure to do this will have roughly the same effect as leaping out and plunging a knife into your dinner guests: the important thing is to address the problem appropriately. Putting everyone at the dinner party into straitjackets and handcuffs is NOT the answer, even though it IS the only way to technically stop knife attacks on dinner guests.
But because Microsoft is only more powerful and influential than most countries, and fights by causing economic disaster and poverty to its enemies rather than literally shooting them, people are slower to take 'em literally there.
But you should still take them literally there. If you are not with them, they want to kill you. Particularly if you try to earn a living doing stuff that they consider their property. The Gateser wishes that there be only one word processor! And web browser, and internet server, and game console, and official government internet site (which government? All governments!)
You'd think people would figure this out quicker. Is power that much harder to see when it's not wearing a soldier uniform?
It's all very well to buy into the myth of invincibility, but they have other problems than just competition. Office sales are stagnating, OS sales are a very hard sell in a 'good enough' world (how many people do you know who are on W98?), and their costs are unimaginable (.NET, XBox). You can talk all day long about how they have an attitude more like Stalin or something than a product vendor, but attitude is not everything.