All Bush can and will do is speak out against the trial. Expect a lot of "Ya know, if _I'd_ been running this show this never would have happened!". Expect it to be really upfront and overt- and expect it to strictly stick to just words, empty words.
Bush needs to woo tech people (who can be gullible) by _talking_ big, but there is no chance he is going to blow vital political capital interceding for Microsoft. It's ridiculous to expect that- he stands to benefit more by interceding for AOL/Time Warner, or Texas oil billionaires etc. Interceding for Microsoft would be political suicide.
He can, and will, _talk_ all he likes- expect to see the word 'tragic'. "This tragic and senseless destruction of America's great technological resource." Here's the deal: Microsoft is worth more to Bush dead than alive. If they are seriously damaged by the court's actions started _before_ Bush was 'running the show' (note: riiiight. Dubya? Figurehead), then it is a very effective example. It's a way to marshal public opinion and soften them up for _other_ big-business friendly moves, and it's a way to put a big scare into the businesses and make them willing to bribe Bush's government hugely so they don't suffer the same fate. Win/win situation for the Bush camp. No-brainer.
In fact it could be tougher for MS with Bush than if Gore had won. Ever heard the saying, "Only Nixon could go to China"? Only Gore could intercede for MS without _seriously_ blowing political capital in the process. Bush just has way too much to gain from making sure Microsoft ends up being the bad example of what happens when those commie socialist antitrust weenies get their way. Watch for the backstab. Bush will say many things supportive of Microsoft, but watch for the backstab. He'll quietly make sure Microsoft go _down_. They're worth more dead.
Are you completely insane? Try saying 'AMD-based architecture' and it will sound a little less crazy. The Athlon is really pretty decent (though god, do those x86 chips waste power- blech!) but the P4 is a trainwreck. The last thing you want to do is be all gung ho for Intel _now_. A few years ago you might have had a point but they are screwing up...
Dunno where you get _that_. I've seen a G4 just once: it was in the house of a guy doing prepress work. Nothing was launched, then he doubleclicked on a Quark document and BAM it was there. Maybe half a second or less to launch Quark off the hard disk and open and display the file. Are you perhaps using Microsoft applications? Microsoft has been known to put in delay timing loops to make sure the Mac versions aren't quicker than the Windows versions.
That just woke me up _real_ fast. (wish I had a G4 instead of G3, too). The thing is, it's Linux- it doesn't have to be just a distribution, you can maintain things yourself. The important thing is the compiler because if you are a good little linux user and know how to compile all stuff with./configure, make, make install (or whatever the RTFDirections says), you get all the software set up for your processor- given certain conditions.
Altivec can be used for block moves, for a wide variety of big-data-handling operations. It can be _general_ _purpose_. Does this GCC simply allow for software to be written using Altivec (as if it was some sort of very specialised MMX) or does it dynamically take advantage of the 128-bit registers wherever possible? Whether or not it _does_, it _could_ in future do that: particularly if the C libs are written to be Altivec optimised where possible (again, such as using the registers to move large chunks of data).
Very cool, can't wait for it to become more generally useful- I sort of doubt that all of GCC can make use of Altivec (in the way that Quicktime and Quickdraw were rewritten to make use of it, and that OSX's rendering layer does) but it's just a matter of time because we _are_ talking about a current-generation powerful consumer-level architecture with special characteristics. Linux has a way of adapting itself to these. Eventually, not only will PPC look like a very sensible choice for Linux deployment, but Linux will look like a very sensible option for Mac alternate OS choice.
Actually the Athlon is probably going to be pretty OK. What'll kill you is a 1.5Ghz P4. Ugly design, go with the AMD for general purpose performance if you're on X86.
Only the government prevents corporations from maintaining private police forces and literally shooting you if you disagree with them. Back in the 20s, when the political and economic climate was much as it is now, corporations did just this, hiring detectives and Pinkertons as thugs and assassins, and the hired thugs literally attacked, killed, people. In addition, corporate mercenaries have literally carried out assasinations of people opposed to the corporate policy. This is simple history: read any account of 1920s labor disputes.
Corporations have also burned people to death (a noteworthy case in which seamstresses burned to death or leapt out 10th-story windows because the corporate policy was that all doors to the workplace be locked from the outside to prevent malingering). This decision to lock the doors from the outside was entirely a business decision: the seamstresses were not consulted in the matter.
It is... odd, that your argument of the virtue and harmlessness of corporations _entirely_ depends on the government involvement brought about specifically because of the abuses of corporations and Big Business: in particular, you seem entirely unaware that corporations in the past could and did hire gunmen to kill those who opposed the corporation. Want to thank someone for stopping that state of affairs? Thank government: no lesser force had the faintest chance of doing it.
If you'd like to bring _back_ a state of affairs where corporations can basically hire private armies to kill anyone that opposes them (hint: if it happened in the Third World, would you have heard about it on the nightly news?), I can only say that I would have to consider you an enemy.
Don't be lightly criticising the New Deal my friend. How the hell do you think we got out of the _last_ Great Depression slash collapse of an obscenely hypothetical stock valuation wealth culture? Apart from going to war, that is.
I'm with a poster above: if you want no socialism, no government, just pure capitalism: go to Somalia. And hope your gun doesn't jam. Enjoy your stay, and may you feel very smart and superior and Darwinistically worthy of survival for as long as you survive.
The rest of us might be more interested in taking care of _all_ of the 'tribe'. Social Darwinism is a really _dumb-ass_ way to maintain a heterogenous culture in any sense of the word...
Doh! Fidel Castro is making very good sense (when he isn't arguing that _all_ Cubans are happy wellbehaved socialists: riiiiiight, he's blowing smoke there, he can't make _all_ people agree to one thing).
How disturbing. After all, the guy is supposed to be a raving Commie loon, or _something_ that's massively 'unAmerican' and therefore not to be respected in the least. To read his views on this country and have them making very good sense is extremely disconcerting.
But no more so than "Speeches should be short" -Fidel Castro. (doh!!!)
I guess it depends who you look at. I know I often take time out of my day to try and skewer Randite-style fascists on Slashdot- but my anarchistic view is not Darwinism, but community. Anarchism is _meaningless_ except in the context of a community, and in that context it means 'you have to maintain good relations with those you encounter, instead of simply asserting authority and stomping those in your path'.
From this perspective, spamming is a particularly ugly form of asserting authority. "You can't stop me! Read more benchmark print supply spam! Store it on your hard disk, use your electricity for me!" This is authoritarian in a primitive way.
As for the jail: I dunno. What would you rather they do? I prefer the spammers to be jailed rather than lynched by a mob of Slashdotters, frankly. It's more socialist to maintain a community punishment mechanism than to make it the responsibility of the individual to exact vengeance.
Thankfully this sort of crazed pre-death-of-dotcom thinking is increasingly an endangered species...
Personally, I am more of a social anarchist, but see the best path to that as _playing_ _off_ the power of government against the power of corporations and economic force. It's completely stupid to just throw out government and leave business free to run amok.
I think what puzzles me most is the peculiar and arbitrary dividing line used- between 'powerless' business and 'all-powerful' government. How often, exactly, does government really, actually point guns and tanks and bombers at people to exert force? Isn't it normally done through bureaucracy, rules, and centralised authority dictating what can be allowed? And don't we have, in business, exactly that- bureaucracy, rules, and centralised authority dictating what can be allowed?
Do you really think that, in the absence of government, Microsoft _wouldn't_ send people with guns and truncheons to break your kneecaps if you start selling home-duplicated copies of W2K? In the absence of government, business takes on these functions itself. Are you completely unaware of the role of Pinkertons in early labor disputes? Corporate armies with guns and baseball bats are not a new thing: it is only government that moderates this tendency, and that only because it promises to take over this sort of 'law enforcement'.
There is no difference from a company and a government except scale. You say "How in hell can a corporation take away your freedom? They can't." Do a google search on 'Pinkerton labor deaths'. Some highlights:
6 July 1892: The Homestead Strike. Pinkerton Guards, trying to pave the way for the introduction of scabs, opened fire on striking Carnegie mill steel- workers in Homestead,
Pennsylvania. In the ensuing battle, three Pinkertons surrendered; then, unarmed, they were set upon and beaten by a mob of townspeople, most of them women. Seven guards and eleven strikers and spectators were shot to death.
25 March 1911: The Triangle Shirtwaist Company, occupying the top three floors of a ten-story building in New York City, was consumed by fire. One hundred and forty-seven people, mostly women and young girls working in sweatshop conditions, lost their lives. Approximately 50 died as they leapt from windows to the street; the
others were burned or trampled to death as they desperately attempted to escape through stairway exits locked as a precaution against "the interruption of work". On 11 April the company's owners were indicted for manslaughter.
20 April 1914: The "Ludlow Massacre." In an attempt to persuade strikers at Colorado's Ludlow Mine Field to return to work, company "guards," engaged by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and other mine operators and sworn into the State Militia just for the occasion, attacked a union tent camp with machine guns, then set it afire. Five men, two women and 12 children died as a result.
27 July 1918: United Mine Workers organizer Ginger Goodwin was shot by a hired private policeman outside Cumberland, British Columbia.
19 May 1920: The Battle of Matewan. Despite efforts by police chief (and former miner) Sid Hatfield and Mayor C. Testerman to protect miners from interference in their union drive in Matewan, West Virginia, Baldwin-Felts detectives hired by the local mining company and thirteen of the company's managers arrived to evict miners
and their families from the Stone Mountain Mine camp. A gun battle ensued, resulting in the deaths of 7 detectives, Mayor Testerman, and 2 miners.
Baldwin-Felts detectives assasinated Sid Hatfield 15 months later.
Good god, no. Are you not paying attention to industry developments at all? Microsoft is OFFICIALLY trying to transition to a 'culture of economy'- and release this- both at the same time. They've been hammered by the miserable seasonal PC sales doldrums. You're a couple years late: you're still talking 1999, and it's 2001 and things are different now.
Personally, I'm amazed that they appear to be going through with it- X-Box will bankrupt them. The smart thing to do would have been hyping it to kill PS2 adoption, and then quietly let it die like Farenheit or.NET without spending too much. They may be actually trying to go through with it- I didn't think they were that stupid. I guess they mix the Kool-Aid pretty strong up there in Redmond:)
*g* I see we have another college kid who hasn't yet figured out that there's such a thing as _social_ evolution.
What use is a drone bee to a beehive? It doesn't do work like worker bees.;)
I think in the new millenium people will be dragged kicking and screaming into a better understanding of _social_ wellbeing, largely due to a terrible decay of social healthiness brought about by just such opinions as the one I'm replying to, though it may be simply a joke. The freaky thing is, it may well be no joke on the part of 'ezzewezza', as it's sort of a Randite wet dream and there's a lot of that about.
Humanity _is_ a hive organism. Corporations are also a hive organism. The difference is, humans evolved politics and government to try and keep the collective organism healthier, after many centuries of watching how little cancerous individuals tore hell out of the collective organism, and then, inevitably, died, leaving nothing but a bloody history and sometimes a list of children worked to death in sweatshops or something.
I would say there's a very good chance of society recognizing that societal health is real, tangible, desirable: I would also say it is only going to happen through unthinkable abuses and assaults on social wellbeing by rugged individualists (with bombs, pollution, computer programs, tricks to profit by others' gullibility). So cheers Randites: even you have your place!:) You can be the poison that builds social immunity to your form of sickness:)
Good lord, I'm not demanding to be supported- that has to be earned.
All I'm saying is- be wary, don't get tricked into a music biz situation that is like Windows per-processor licensing- in which, just because you DL lots of RIAA mp3s, you agree to pay RIAA.001 cent for every mp3 you download, no matter whose it is. These bastards are quite capable of setting up such a system if they try, and making it sound quite reasonable: it would just, in effect, raise the price of 'free' mp3s by making them conform by default to a flat tax, possibly even some form of legal taxation to take effect on the transmission of mp3s to consumers. Who gets paid on that? Certainly not _me_. Instead the cost of my distributing music to people gets raised, I keep none of the money being charged, and it goes straight to my arch rivals there. Hardly equitable!
I'm not arguing that average people will turn heavily to indie music, or begin making it themselves, or abandon the media machine. All I'm saying is be aware, OK? I think the 'Windows per-processor licensing' is a _very_ good analogy for what could happen, puts it in terms instinctively recognised by most linux people as 'not good'.
Would you be willing to go with a flat-rate scheme on the mp3 format in general, that caused you to pay for _my_ mp3s... which I am trying to provide at no cost?
If so, you are consenting to being taxed on independent work, the money of which goes directly to my worst competitors. It effectively negates my attempts to undercut the majors via mp3, if you decide to pay this flat tax like you propose.
It's kind of like 'music CDRs': as an indy guy I would kind of like to see people outright boycott that stuff: all it's doing is adding X amount of surcharge, which goes straight to the RIAA as if it were some government authority, which then turns about and uses that money to try and shut me down or impose taxes any way they can. Please don't give them _more_ ideas:P:)
I am also an author, and I have to say I resent the generalisation there. Or perhaps I should say this: you don't even know what you're doing to yourself with your mental categories there.
I suspect it's a thing like 'REAL musicians', 'REAL authors' want everything to be pay-per-view, kaching, next! There is some validity to this but it breaks down pretty rapidly- where do you fit, say, Emily Dickinson into that scheme? There's someone who stood the test of time as a great writer but never pursued any sort of recognition, much less reward, for her work during her life. There are more people like that than you'd think: you haven't heard of them for the obvious reason that they're not hawking their wares brazenly on the open market.
In this day and age, you're cheating yourself if you assume the only real artists are the ones under contract to some industry conglomerate. There isn't even that much of a correlation- there's an awful lot of commercial tripe out there, and an awful lot of sincere if unpolished art. You simply cannot make the assumption that artists primarily want to be paid. Most would like that, but what they primarily want is ATTENTION. Applause! Recognition. And, as every major avenue to mass market art is increasingly controlled by corporations with a $$$$$$$$ bottom line, more and more artists are turning away from the prospect of money so they can at least have a shot at that ATTENTION.
If you define artist (author, musician, whatever) as "that which wants to be paid and is willing to hit the mass market, be published, get signed etc", then you are stripping the 'indie' folks of even the dignity of being considered artists themselves. You're calling them hobbyists, or amateurs, which denies them the respect and attention they might otherwise be able to achieve on the merits of their work.
Please don't do that. Learn to tell the difference between a pretty face and $30,000 of makeup and photographic lighting. No matter what the field of art, it's possible to go mass media and throw resources at it to make it seem way cooler than the output of individual artists with nothing but a vision and minimal resources. It is your responsibility to be able to recognise the real stuff when you see it, and learn to value it for what it is. Otherwise the word 'artist' will end up meaning nothing more than 'merchant'- or possibly 'lawyer'. o_O
How about a counter-example? Why should an author keep getting paid when people continue to transfer ideas the author had years ago? Pretty much any serious working author _continues_ to have new ideas. Why should authors be paid on a basis of intellectual property when they can be paid on the basis of being skilled idea-producers: paid not on a basis of (futilely) controlling 'property' of ideas, but on the basis of being the preferred source of _new_ idea-having work?
If I wanted to be told a _new_ scary story, one I hadn't heard before, whom would I rather pay- you, or Stephen King? Stephen King has a much better reputation for being able to tell such a story, and he also continues to make up new stories, he does not ride on his back catalog. That's the only way to be successful as an author- nobody said it was supposed to be a free ride.
It is absurd to expect to be paid as an idea-creator in the sense of manufacturing widgets or physical objects. If you are an author you are selling your capacity to _produce_ such ideas, not the ideas themselves (there's a million of them).
If you doubt that, write a brilliant book and try to get a publication deal while saying, "I don't think I'm going to write any more books. Isn't this one enough?"
Nah. I am happy to say I have VHS copies of the _original_ cuts of Eps 4 and 5 and the very technical limitations that hobbled Lucas are what makes them great. There was never the budget or the technical capacity for a cast of a thousand Gungans- though the vast scenes of Ep 1 are great in their own way, too much of the focus went to them, and Lucas lost the space opera feel of the series by moving to EFX that resemble _hard_ science fiction (attempts to really make stuff realistic, successful or not) and a story arc that belongs more to some weird historical fiction rather than space opera.
Because A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back were so limited (especially ANH!), Lucas had to constantly fake- have you ever read an analysis of the shower scene in Psycho? The knife never actually touches Janet Leigh- it's a brutal onslaught of quick violent cuts that convey the _feel_ of a horrific attack more than a fully 'realistic' and straight filming of such an attack, no matter how harrowingly acted. Well, the first Star Wars films were like that- here's a shot of Imperial Walkers slowly arriving and BAM here's a reaction shot of a guy in a snowspeeder that does NOT also include the Walkers seen through the window, in fact the background is a snowy blur- and BAM we're attacking a Walker and all the other Walkers are NOT shown in wide-angle. The 'lens' of directorial field of view is always portrait- hell, in ANH it's like a telephoto or something, you _never_ get anything resembling a Phantom Menace cast of thousands battle scene. Speed of motion through the frame is high but most importantly FOV is radically confined to just the elements that make the shot. That's ANH and Empire in a nutshell- I _just_ watched Empire (original version!) coincidentally and am very confident in saying that.
For Phantom Menace, Lucas is on record for what he was trying to get- he wanted the scope, those cast of thousands shots, massively wide-angle stuff, and he got it- pulled it off really well. However, that's not what the franchise was built on- Star Wars is about space opera, hokey/thrilling operatic emotional stories that are in your face and don't let up, with cinematography that is just as aggressive. Phantom Menace backs way off- and that's why it fails to continue the tradition. (It still kicks ass over most kid movies though).
A New Hope: young man gets mentor, becomes warrior, has mentor torn from him and then avenges the loss and saves the world
Empire: young man gets pressed and tormented by increasingly horrible trials- exposure, exile (from Hoth anyway), tormented by conflict between his destiny and the immediate rescue of his friends, and makes the Wrong Move, punished by the brutal knowledge that his enemy is himself and his most hated rival is in fact his farther- yet he manages to survive all this and is not destroyed by it, just made much older and somewhat wiser.
Phantom Menace: little kid wins the big race, and a lot of guys fight a lot of robots and win. Yay!
Granted, that's a particularly brutal way to mock TPM: the good bits in it are often stage-setting for more serious drama ahead, such as the marvellous Palpatine. But it's all just too damn light- rotten opera. If Anakin _knew_ what was to happen to him (compare to Luke, abandoning his studies despite the _dire_ warnings of both Obi-Wan and Yoda, and going off to save his friends _knowing_ his mentors swear it will be a disaster) then there would be some drama. Having Jedi fussing and expressing great forebodings about the kid is _not_ the same: they are spearcarriers, they are not the protagonist no matter how well they act. If Obi-Wan was meant to be the big hero of the series, there would be some chance of drama as he suffers genuine conflict in TPM- but he's not! Anakin is to be the hero! So it's a total mess, as most people have instinctively recognised.
I hope he does better in Ep 2, I really do. The thing is, Lucas has a chance to top anything he's done in the series so far, in showing the fall of Anakin, giving him real, brutal conflicts and pain and trapping him into a corner where Anakin's basically good instincts turn him to evil by leading him to do bad things out of fear and grief. It really could be fantastic drama in the space opera style.
Lucas could also do buttloads of special effects, cute characters, and fumble things so that Anakin's fall becomes simply a matter of him being victimised by mean nasty evil folk, and I am afraid Lucas may do just that.
The litmus test is this: when all is said and done, if we feel sorry for Anakin, just plain sorry for him, Lucas has failed. But if we feel shaken and sick at heart, because we see that it could be us making those choices and _choosing_ the dark side- Lucas will have succeeded.
Yes, it's perfectly sensible to say it doesn't apply if you CLAIM outage which is actually scheduled maintenance.
That's not what this says. This says if you HAVE any outage you get no credit. I'd be inclined to take it literally: words like 'any' are peculiarly potent things in a contract. I read this as saying, if there is ever scheduled maintenance you're out of luck: you have outage as a result of scheduled maintenance, hence you get no credit.
Granted, there are much better reasons to slam this loony scam artist kid, but perverse contractual terms are sort of a hobby of mine and I love the twists in logic that you find:)
II d: Essentially, they make all this fuss about 99.9 uptime guarantee and credits for you if they fail to do that, and then it says right there in plain language, "Credits shall not be provided to you in the event that you have any outage resulting from the following: 1. Scheduled maintenance..."
So their doing of scheduled maintenance makes you not qualify for credit:) tres cute:)
It's very simple: he's already taken their money, and they look to be heading for financial trouble. Bush's people are a lot more concerned with appeasing business in _general_ than spending precious and bitterly contested political capital in bailing out a haughty monopoly.
Here is what to expect: "If _I'd_ been running the show when the whole thing started, this never would have happened!"
Microsoft are not going to be rescued by Bush. Microsoft is slated to be the bad example- "look what happens when these left wing pinkos get their way!". I would be very surprised if Bush's people don't appreciate the potential benefits of allowing the (difficult to overturn) antitrust case to go through- they may possibly even be counseling the Supreme Court to go ahead and hose Microsoft rather than be partisan again on behalf of Bush's interests. It makes for potentially a very good argument to avoid breaking up or regulating _other_ monopolies that are less financially overextended, more capable of massive kickbacks. Microsoft is rationing freaking paper clips at this point: Ballmer is trying to instill a new culture of economy. Do you know what that means to Bush's people? "This one's empty- time to let it drop and start sucking on another"
That's business.
Get ready to start doing things without Microsoft, because they are in for a very _hard_ fall: I don't think they believe they will be thrown away like a used candy wrapper. They believe passionately, fanatically, in the _principle_ of full-throttle unregulated free-market capitalism. Unfortunately, politics is about expediency, and there are better monopolies to cultivate at this point, for a politician: ones with better public image, no nasty court record, more MONEY available to give to pols.
Bush is not going to cave to Gates: what's in it for Bush? He's only going to keep saying Darn it! If only I'd been in time! He's dumb but his people are not that kind of fool.
Actually, very bad example. Even a cursory investigation into Metallica's history reveals that they clawed their way to the top in a viciously competitive local music market, sold their own records until their success _forced_ the Big Labels to take notice and step in, and in general fought like rabid wolverines to pursue their 'art' at all costs no matter what stood in the way.
You couldn't stop Metallica recording their CDs (especially in the early days!) if you formed a freaking shield wall and hit at them with riot clubs. You'd end up flat on your back with teeth marks all over you and Metallica would be recording their CDs anyway.
That's what you have to do if you want a place in a very ruthless business. Priority One is you get what you want- at all costs- and Metallica wants, or wanted, to make CDs and very loud aggressive heavy metal music: if they'd wanted money there are far better ways and they surely knew that the whole time.
What they've been so upset about is simply an extension of their whole attitude so far- Napster and Napster users appeared to be just more obstacles, this time to getting paid. I wonder if they were just as rabid and fanatic about attacking things like the customary music industry 90% charge for media breakage (basically artists are given X% royalty- but after all other subtractions are done, the artist then is docked another 10% for breakage, a charge dating back to the days of shellac records. I'm not making this up) I think Metallica might well have been just as frenzied in their attack on inequities of that sort- we'd just never hear about it, it is contract business between the band and their label. At any rate, it's not Metallica being exclusively centered on money: it's more Metallica being Metallica. Anyone could have seen that coming.
Anybody seriously worrying about an artist's need to earn a living could do much more good by trying to attack the RIAA and the labels by any means necessary: heck, you could leave the RIAA and labels alone and just attack the independent promoters! (i.e. payola, which never died and now makes up roughly a third to half of your retail CD price) That's if you trust the labels to go "Yay! We don't have to dump billions to these mafialike creeps anymore! Let's lower prices!" which I don't.
The point is, going after peer-to-peer and the _fans_ is the most asinine way to try to help the artists earn a living that could be imagined. Yes, there are major things wrong with the situation, but attacking the natural adaptation to an increasingly monopolized, unfree industry is not the way to fix it- or even to help artists be paid.
Or, acknowledge that in some fields the competition is so completely brutal that authors, musicians, artists customarily need to prove their dedication and tenacity by continuing to produce, spending their own money on their art and working and working until they are good enough that they _deserve_ to be paid anything.
Or, indeed, consider that 'listen to me' is in some ways even a more powerful call than 'pay me'. Note that both phrases end with ME! A lot of art is about Me, Me... it's "look at the art _I_ did! Listen to the song about _my_ feelings!" Is it any wonder that, for example, musicians in the brutally competitive music market of LA customarily PAY to play gigs? Does this free-market development fit nicely with your notion that under capitalism artists get paid to make art- if it wasn't for those dastardly intellectual property criminals- and those pesky kids!;P
Let me put it this way. (the same link) Is that free music? Just because you can download it?
I prefer to see it as over 100M of web hosting for which I pay nothing. Priced out well-connected web hosting of that size lately?
The bottom line is, people who really love what they do will do it for not-money. This does not mean the same people will turn down money if it's offered- hey, I wouldn't! *g* Do please throw money! Or book studio time with me and travel to Vermont and cut a killer album. It's not just about the artistic expression. But that artistic expression is going to be there whether the money is or not...
And that's what I am not seeing in so many of these arguments- people who have no idea from 'pay to play', no clue what the entertainment business is _really_ like, are rabid to defend the 'rights' of a few 'winners' who are milking the hell out of the system. Rather than saying "OK, you're not signed so you don't _deserve_ to have money, but Britney is a great artist because she's signed so she deserves to earn fifty billion times what you could possibly earn, and keep a millionth of that if she has a smart manager!", what is so wrong with asking "What could happen to even the odds a bit? What could technology bring that would make artists compete more on the merits, rather than politics, money and the ability to be chosen by a power elite which controls the mass media completely?"
I would humbly suggest that 'cutting back intellectual property rights' would go quite a ways toward accomplishing the latter. I don't think it would be necessary to obliterate it so much that, for example, I could claim I wrote "Oops I Did It Again" (pop quiz: who _did_ write that? Prove it wasn't me. Were they paid? As much as Britney? As much as the producer? Did they get points? A royalty?). However, it is reasonable to expect I could sing "Oops I Did It Again" while walking down the street and suffer no worse than physical attacks by music lovers. I could tell a friend the words to it, or hum them the tune. In a digital world I could beam the digital audio to their wristband mp3 player so they could hear what I was talking about. I could make a "I Love Britney Spears!" page at ilovebritneyspears.com and put the digital audio and lyrics on the webpage, at as high a quality as possible since I love it so much and want everyone to agree how wonderful it is. And everyone who visits the page would have a chance for me to do everything I possibly could do to _persuade_ them that "Oops I Did It Again" was the most phenomenal audio art the world has ever known...
Intellectual property, as it's currently practiced, is tremendously biased against this behavior, in a frankly classist sense. I cannot be the scout, the evangelist, the fanatic- it isn't my place. That which I am so passionate about is not 'my property': I must keep my place, I must be subservient. "Um, I know this wonderful song- I can't give it to you, I'm not allowed to, in fact I wasn't allowed to make a web domain about it either, but you should go to BigRecordCompany.com and search for 'Britney'..."
That's obscene. It's behavior like the art, the product, is some sort of oxygen indispensable to life. The Merry Pranksters of the 60s had a catchphrase that remains relevant to this day: Art is not eternal!
I don't think Britney's 'right' to snatch a tiny percentage of unthinkable sums of CD gross sales is any more important than any other artist's 'right' to produce some income, no matter how small, just for having tried to produce art. I don't see this as a right at all. If you have something to say, say it- if you have a sound you want to make, make it- the way things are, it's virtually impossible for you to earn any sort of money on that anyhow, and although this is the result of a very sick business, intrinsically that's not wrong.
What is wrong is stepping on the fans, the enthusiasts and evangelists who give that _praise_ and appreciation that is _really_ the coin of the artist's realm. What's wrong is shutting those people off, making them go "Um, I could give you a copy of this art I really love (without me having to go without) but I'm not allowed to...", stifling them, damping their fires. Their place is not 'subservient passive consumers'. They are the freaking _lifeblood_ of any entertainment industry, and the only reason they can be so lightly suppressed and stamped on and trodden into the dirt is that the music industry genuinely does not believe in them anymore- it's all 'push' media now. Except for the Net, and the rest of the world- except for the same 'consumers' who are thought to be nothing more than passive buckets into which you can dump any old slop, given a hot mix and a big marketing budget.
That's where money has led: do the homework, work it out for yourself. That has been the result of intellectual property, in practice.
There have been examples, in history, of un-IP: situations where there was great artistic work being done without it being primarily considered intellectual property. An example would be: blues. What did blues produce? Rock and roll, R+B, the Beatles etc. The 'floating phrases' of blues, too general to belong to anyone, became a universal language open to anyone with a voice and a personality to express. Access to this pool of ideas allowed new forms of music to burgeon and arise.
I more than suspect that if we wish to ever have another artistic reinassance as significant as the birth of rock and roll, we will have to do it in _spite_ of Intellectual Property: or as if IP did not exist.
But the most important prerequisite would be a feeling from the people that they too can create, rap, sample, whatever: that they are not subservient consumer nonentities, that they have a voice. And we may get it.
The revolution is not Napster. The revolution is 1,000,000 people making their _own_ music getting _ideas_ from Napster. Getting total access to all forms of music as freely as breathing. Stifling access to culture and putting up toll booths is akin to stifling art.
Slashdot Mirror
Bush needs to woo tech people (who can be gullible) by _talking_ big, but there is no chance he is going to blow vital political capital interceding for Microsoft. It's ridiculous to expect that- he stands to benefit more by interceding for AOL/Time Warner, or Texas oil billionaires etc. Interceding for Microsoft would be political suicide.
He can, and will, _talk_ all he likes- expect to see the word 'tragic'. "This tragic and senseless destruction of America's great technological resource." Here's the deal: Microsoft is worth more to Bush dead than alive. If they are seriously damaged by the court's actions started _before_ Bush was 'running the show' (note: riiiight. Dubya? Figurehead), then it is a very effective example. It's a way to marshal public opinion and soften them up for _other_ big-business friendly moves, and it's a way to put a big scare into the businesses and make them willing to bribe Bush's government hugely so they don't suffer the same fate. Win/win situation for the Bush camp. No-brainer.
In fact it could be tougher for MS with Bush than if Gore had won. Ever heard the saying, "Only Nixon could go to China"? Only Gore could intercede for MS without _seriously_ blowing political capital in the process. Bush just has way too much to gain from making sure Microsoft ends up being the bad example of what happens when those commie socialist antitrust weenies get their way. Watch for the backstab. Bush will say many things supportive of Microsoft, but watch for the backstab. He'll quietly make sure Microsoft go _down_. They're worth more dead.
Installed base rules.
Live by the installed base: die by the installed base.
Are you completely insane? Try saying 'AMD-based architecture' and it will sound a little less crazy. The Athlon is really pretty decent (though god, do those x86 chips waste power- blech!) but the P4 is a trainwreck. The last thing you want to do is be all gung ho for Intel _now_. A few years ago you might have had a point but they are screwing up...
Dunno where you get _that_. I've seen a G4 just once: it was in the house of a guy doing prepress work. Nothing was launched, then he doubleclicked on a Quark document and BAM it was there. Maybe half a second or less to launch Quark off the hard disk and open and display the file. Are you perhaps using Microsoft applications? Microsoft has been known to put in delay timing loops to make sure the Mac versions aren't quicker than the Windows versions.
That just woke me up _real_ fast. (wish I had a G4 instead of G3, too). The thing is, it's Linux- it doesn't have to be just a distribution, you can maintain things yourself. The important thing is the compiler because if you are a good little linux user and know how to compile all stuff with ./configure, make, make install (or whatever the RTFDirections says), you get all the software set up for your processor- given certain conditions.
Altivec can be used for block moves, for a wide variety of big-data-handling operations. It can be _general_ _purpose_. Does this GCC simply allow for software to be written using Altivec (as if it was some sort of very specialised MMX) or does it dynamically take advantage of the 128-bit registers wherever possible? Whether or not it _does_, it _could_ in future do that: particularly if the C libs are written to be Altivec optimised where possible (again, such as using the registers to move large chunks of data).
Very cool, can't wait for it to become more generally useful- I sort of doubt that all of GCC can make use of Altivec (in the way that Quicktime and Quickdraw were rewritten to make use of it, and that OSX's rendering layer does) but it's just a matter of time because we _are_ talking about a current-generation powerful consumer-level architecture with special characteristics. Linux has a way of adapting itself to these. Eventually, not only will PPC look like a very sensible choice for Linux deployment, but Linux will look like a very sensible option for Mac alternate OS choice.
Actually the Athlon is probably going to be pretty OK. What'll kill you is a 1.5Ghz P4. Ugly design, go with the AMD for general purpose performance if you're on X86.
Corporations have also burned people to death (a noteworthy case in which seamstresses burned to death or leapt out 10th-story windows because the corporate policy was that all doors to the workplace be locked from the outside to prevent malingering). This decision to lock the doors from the outside was entirely a business decision: the seamstresses were not consulted in the matter.
It is... odd, that your argument of the virtue and harmlessness of corporations _entirely_ depends on the government involvement brought about specifically because of the abuses of corporations and Big Business: in particular, you seem entirely unaware that corporations in the past could and did hire gunmen to kill those who opposed the corporation. Want to thank someone for stopping that state of affairs? Thank government: no lesser force had the faintest chance of doing it.
If you'd like to bring _back_ a state of affairs where corporations can basically hire private armies to kill anyone that opposes them (hint: if it happened in the Third World, would you have heard about it on the nightly news?), I can only say that I would have to consider you an enemy.
I'm with a poster above: if you want no socialism, no government, just pure capitalism: go to Somalia. And hope your gun doesn't jam. Enjoy your stay, and may you feel very smart and superior and Darwinistically worthy of survival for as long as you survive.
The rest of us might be more interested in taking care of _all_ of the 'tribe'. Social Darwinism is a really _dumb-ass_ way to maintain a heterogenous culture in any sense of the word...
How disturbing. After all, the guy is supposed to be a raving Commie loon, or _something_ that's massively 'unAmerican' and therefore not to be respected in the least. To read his views on this country and have them making very good sense is extremely disconcerting.
But no more so than "Speeches should be short" -Fidel Castro. (doh!!!)
From this perspective, spamming is a particularly ugly form of asserting authority. "You can't stop me! Read more benchmark print supply spam! Store it on your hard disk, use your electricity for me!" This is authoritarian in a primitive way.
As for the jail: I dunno. What would you rather they do? I prefer the spammers to be jailed rather than lynched by a mob of Slashdotters, frankly. It's more socialist to maintain a community punishment mechanism than to make it the responsibility of the individual to exact vengeance.
They should name the suckers on national television as a warning to others >:)
Personally, I am more of a social anarchist, but see the best path to that as _playing_ _off_ the power of government against the power of corporations and economic force. It's completely stupid to just throw out government and leave business free to run amok.
I think what puzzles me most is the peculiar and arbitrary dividing line used- between 'powerless' business and 'all-powerful' government. How often, exactly, does government really, actually point guns and tanks and bombers at people to exert force? Isn't it normally done through bureaucracy, rules, and centralised authority dictating what can be allowed? And don't we have, in business, exactly that- bureaucracy, rules, and centralised authority dictating what can be allowed?
Do you really think that, in the absence of government, Microsoft _wouldn't_ send people with guns and truncheons to break your kneecaps if you start selling home-duplicated copies of W2K? In the absence of government, business takes on these functions itself. Are you completely unaware of the role of Pinkertons in early labor disputes? Corporate armies with guns and baseball bats are not a new thing: it is only government that moderates this tendency, and that only because it promises to take over this sort of 'law enforcement'.
There is no difference from a company and a government except scale. You say "How in hell can a corporation take away your freedom? They can't." Do a google search on 'Pinkerton labor deaths'. Some highlights:
"They can't", hell. Grow up!
Personally, I'm amazed that they appear to be going through with it- X-Box will bankrupt them. The smart thing to do would have been hyping it to kill PS2 adoption, and then quietly let it die like Farenheit or .NET without spending too much. They may be actually trying to go through with it- I didn't think they were that stupid. I guess they mix the Kool-Aid pretty strong up there in Redmond :)
I always thought it was very funny that it was predominantly the computer geeks who had a big problem with counting from zero. Who knew? :)
What use is a drone bee to a beehive? It doesn't do work like worker bees. ;)
I think in the new millenium people will be dragged kicking and screaming into a better understanding of _social_ wellbeing, largely due to a terrible decay of social healthiness brought about by just such opinions as the one I'm replying to, though it may be simply a joke. The freaky thing is, it may well be no joke on the part of 'ezzewezza', as it's sort of a Randite wet dream and there's a lot of that about.
Humanity _is_ a hive organism. Corporations are also a hive organism. The difference is, humans evolved politics and government to try and keep the collective organism healthier, after many centuries of watching how little cancerous individuals tore hell out of the collective organism, and then, inevitably, died, leaving nothing but a bloody history and sometimes a list of children worked to death in sweatshops or something.
I would say there's a very good chance of society recognizing that societal health is real, tangible, desirable: I would also say it is only going to happen through unthinkable abuses and assaults on social wellbeing by rugged individualists (with bombs, pollution, computer programs, tricks to profit by others' gullibility). So cheers Randites: even you have your place! :) You can be the poison that builds social immunity to your form of sickness :)
All I'm saying is- be wary, don't get tricked into a music biz situation that is like Windows per-processor licensing- in which, just because you DL lots of RIAA mp3s, you agree to pay RIAA .001 cent for every mp3 you download, no matter whose it is. These bastards are quite capable of setting up such a system if they try, and making it sound quite reasonable: it would just, in effect, raise the price of 'free' mp3s by making them conform by default to a flat tax, possibly even some form of legal taxation to take effect on the transmission of mp3s to consumers. Who gets paid on that? Certainly not _me_. Instead the cost of my distributing music to people gets raised, I keep none of the money being charged, and it goes straight to my arch rivals there. Hardly equitable!
I'm not arguing that average people will turn heavily to indie music, or begin making it themselves, or abandon the media machine. All I'm saying is be aware, OK? I think the 'Windows per-processor licensing' is a _very_ good analogy for what could happen, puts it in terms instinctively recognised by most linux people as 'not good'.
If so, you are consenting to being taxed on independent work, the money of which goes directly to my worst competitors. It effectively negates my attempts to undercut the majors via mp3, if you decide to pay this flat tax like you propose.
It's kind of like 'music CDRs': as an indy guy I would kind of like to see people outright boycott that stuff: all it's doing is adding X amount of surcharge, which goes straight to the RIAA as if it were some government authority, which then turns about and uses that money to try and shut me down or impose taxes any way they can. Please don't give them _more_ ideas :P :)
I am also an author, and I have to say I resent the generalisation there. Or perhaps I should say this: you don't even know what you're doing to yourself with your mental categories there.
I suspect it's a thing like 'REAL musicians', 'REAL authors' want everything to be pay-per-view, kaching, next! There is some validity to this but it breaks down pretty rapidly- where do you fit, say, Emily Dickinson into that scheme? There's someone who stood the test of time as a great writer but never pursued any sort of recognition, much less reward, for her work during her life. There are more people like that than you'd think: you haven't heard of them for the obvious reason that they're not hawking their wares brazenly on the open market.
In this day and age, you're cheating yourself if you assume the only real artists are the ones under contract to some industry conglomerate. There isn't even that much of a correlation- there's an awful lot of commercial tripe out there, and an awful lot of sincere if unpolished art. You simply cannot make the assumption that artists primarily want to be paid. Most would like that, but what they primarily want is ATTENTION. Applause! Recognition. And, as every major avenue to mass market art is increasingly controlled by corporations with a $$$$$$$$ bottom line, more and more artists are turning away from the prospect of money so they can at least have a shot at that ATTENTION.
If you define artist (author, musician, whatever) as "that which wants to be paid and is willing to hit the mass market, be published, get signed etc", then you are stripping the 'indie' folks of even the dignity of being considered artists themselves. You're calling them hobbyists, or amateurs, which denies them the respect and attention they might otherwise be able to achieve on the merits of their work.
Please don't do that. Learn to tell the difference between a pretty face and $30,000 of makeup and photographic lighting. No matter what the field of art, it's possible to go mass media and throw resources at it to make it seem way cooler than the output of individual artists with nothing but a vision and minimal resources. It is your responsibility to be able to recognise the real stuff when you see it, and learn to value it for what it is. Otherwise the word 'artist' will end up meaning nothing more than 'merchant'- or possibly 'lawyer'. o_O
If I wanted to be told a _new_ scary story, one I hadn't heard before, whom would I rather pay- you, or Stephen King? Stephen King has a much better reputation for being able to tell such a story, and he also continues to make up new stories, he does not ride on his back catalog. That's the only way to be successful as an author- nobody said it was supposed to be a free ride.
It is absurd to expect to be paid as an idea-creator in the sense of manufacturing widgets or physical objects. If you are an author you are selling your capacity to _produce_ such ideas, not the ideas themselves (there's a million of them).
If you doubt that, write a brilliant book and try to get a publication deal while saying, "I don't think I'm going to write any more books. Isn't this one enough?"
Because A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back were so limited (especially ANH!), Lucas had to constantly fake- have you ever read an analysis of the shower scene in Psycho? The knife never actually touches Janet Leigh- it's a brutal onslaught of quick violent cuts that convey the _feel_ of a horrific attack more than a fully 'realistic' and straight filming of such an attack, no matter how harrowingly acted. Well, the first Star Wars films were like that- here's a shot of Imperial Walkers slowly arriving and BAM here's a reaction shot of a guy in a snowspeeder that does NOT also include the Walkers seen through the window, in fact the background is a snowy blur- and BAM we're attacking a Walker and all the other Walkers are NOT shown in wide-angle. The 'lens' of directorial field of view is always portrait- hell, in ANH it's like a telephoto or something, you _never_ get anything resembling a Phantom Menace cast of thousands battle scene. Speed of motion through the frame is high but most importantly FOV is radically confined to just the elements that make the shot. That's ANH and Empire in a nutshell- I _just_ watched Empire (original version!) coincidentally and am very confident in saying that.
For Phantom Menace, Lucas is on record for what he was trying to get- he wanted the scope, those cast of thousands shots, massively wide-angle stuff, and he got it- pulled it off really well. However, that's not what the franchise was built on- Star Wars is about space opera, hokey/thrilling operatic emotional stories that are in your face and don't let up, with cinematography that is just as aggressive. Phantom Menace backs way off- and that's why it fails to continue the tradition. (It still kicks ass over most kid movies though).
Granted, that's a particularly brutal way to mock TPM: the good bits in it are often stage-setting for more serious drama ahead, such as the marvellous Palpatine. But it's all just too damn light- rotten opera. If Anakin _knew_ what was to happen to him (compare to Luke, abandoning his studies despite the _dire_ warnings of both Obi-Wan and Yoda, and going off to save his friends _knowing_ his mentors swear it will be a disaster) then there would be some drama. Having Jedi fussing and expressing great forebodings about the kid is _not_ the same: they are spearcarriers, they are not the protagonist no matter how well they act. If Obi-Wan was meant to be the big hero of the series, there would be some chance of drama as he suffers genuine conflict in TPM- but he's not! Anakin is to be the hero! So it's a total mess, as most people have instinctively recognised.
I hope he does better in Ep 2, I really do. The thing is, Lucas has a chance to top anything he's done in the series so far, in showing the fall of Anakin, giving him real, brutal conflicts and pain and trapping him into a corner where Anakin's basically good instincts turn him to evil by leading him to do bad things out of fear and grief. It really could be fantastic drama in the space opera style.
Lucas could also do buttloads of special effects, cute characters, and fumble things so that Anakin's fall becomes simply a matter of him being victimised by mean nasty evil folk, and I am afraid Lucas may do just that.
The litmus test is this: when all is said and done, if we feel sorry for Anakin, just plain sorry for him, Lucas has failed. But if we feel shaken and sick at heart, because we see that it could be us making those choices and _choosing_ the dark side- Lucas will have succeeded.
Good luck, George :)
That's not what this says. This says if you HAVE any outage you get no credit. I'd be inclined to take it literally: words like 'any' are peculiarly potent things in a contract. I read this as saying, if there is ever scheduled maintenance you're out of luck: you have outage as a result of scheduled maintenance, hence you get no credit.
Granted, there are much better reasons to slam this loony scam artist kid, but perverse contractual terms are sort of a hobby of mine and I love the twists in logic that you find :)
So their doing of scheduled maintenance makes you not qualify for credit :) tres cute :)
Here is what to expect: "If _I'd_ been running the show when the whole thing started, this never would have happened!"
Microsoft are not going to be rescued by Bush. Microsoft is slated to be the bad example- "look what happens when these left wing pinkos get their way!". I would be very surprised if Bush's people don't appreciate the potential benefits of allowing the (difficult to overturn) antitrust case to go through- they may possibly even be counseling the Supreme Court to go ahead and hose Microsoft rather than be partisan again on behalf of Bush's interests. It makes for potentially a very good argument to avoid breaking up or regulating _other_ monopolies that are less financially overextended, more capable of massive kickbacks. Microsoft is rationing freaking paper clips at this point: Ballmer is trying to instill a new culture of economy. Do you know what that means to Bush's people? "This one's empty- time to let it drop and start sucking on another"
That's business.
Get ready to start doing things without Microsoft, because they are in for a very _hard_ fall: I don't think they believe they will be thrown away like a used candy wrapper. They believe passionately, fanatically, in the _principle_ of full-throttle unregulated free-market capitalism. Unfortunately, politics is about expediency, and there are better monopolies to cultivate at this point, for a politician: ones with better public image, no nasty court record, more MONEY available to give to pols.
Bush is not going to cave to Gates: what's in it for Bush? He's only going to keep saying Darn it! If only I'd been in time! He's dumb but his people are not that kind of fool.
You couldn't stop Metallica recording their CDs (especially in the early days!) if you formed a freaking shield wall and hit at them with riot clubs. You'd end up flat on your back with teeth marks all over you and Metallica would be recording their CDs anyway.
That's what you have to do if you want a place in a very ruthless business. Priority One is you get what you want- at all costs- and Metallica wants, or wanted, to make CDs and very loud aggressive heavy metal music: if they'd wanted money there are far better ways and they surely knew that the whole time.
What they've been so upset about is simply an extension of their whole attitude so far- Napster and Napster users appeared to be just more obstacles, this time to getting paid. I wonder if they were just as rabid and fanatic about attacking things like the customary music industry 90% charge for media breakage (basically artists are given X% royalty- but after all other subtractions are done, the artist then is docked another 10% for breakage, a charge dating back to the days of shellac records. I'm not making this up) I think Metallica might well have been just as frenzied in their attack on inequities of that sort- we'd just never hear about it, it is contract business between the band and their label. At any rate, it's not Metallica being exclusively centered on money: it's more Metallica being Metallica. Anyone could have seen that coming.
Anybody seriously worrying about an artist's need to earn a living could do much more good by trying to attack the RIAA and the labels by any means necessary: heck, you could leave the RIAA and labels alone and just attack the independent promoters! (i.e. payola, which never died and now makes up roughly a third to half of your retail CD price) That's if you trust the labels to go "Yay! We don't have to dump billions to these mafialike creeps anymore! Let's lower prices!" which I don't.
The point is, going after peer-to-peer and the _fans_ is the most asinine way to try to help the artists earn a living that could be imagined. Yes, there are major things wrong with the situation, but attacking the natural adaptation to an increasingly monopolized, unfree industry is not the way to fix it- or even to help artists be paid.
besonic.com/chrisj ...so pay me!
Or, acknowledge that in some fields the competition is so completely brutal that authors, musicians, artists customarily need to prove their dedication and tenacity by continuing to produce, spending their own money on their art and working and working until they are good enough that they _deserve_ to be paid anything.
Or, indeed, consider that 'listen to me' is in some ways even a more powerful call than 'pay me'. Note that both phrases end with ME! A lot of art is about Me, Me... it's "look at the art _I_ did! Listen to the song about _my_ feelings!" Is it any wonder that, for example, musicians in the brutally competitive music market of LA customarily PAY to play gigs? Does this free-market development fit nicely with your notion that under capitalism artists get paid to make art- if it wasn't for those dastardly intellectual property criminals- and those pesky kids! ;P
Let me put it this way. (the same link) Is that free music? Just because you can download it?
I prefer to see it as over 100M of web hosting for which I pay nothing. Priced out well-connected web hosting of that size lately?
The bottom line is, people who really love what they do will do it for not-money. This does not mean the same people will turn down money if it's offered- hey, I wouldn't! *g* Do please throw money! Or book studio time with me and travel to Vermont and cut a killer album. It's not just about the artistic expression. But that artistic expression is going to be there whether the money is or not...
And that's what I am not seeing in so many of these arguments- people who have no idea from 'pay to play', no clue what the entertainment business is _really_ like, are rabid to defend the 'rights' of a few 'winners' who are milking the hell out of the system. Rather than saying "OK, you're not signed so you don't _deserve_ to have money, but Britney is a great artist because she's signed so she deserves to earn fifty billion times what you could possibly earn, and keep a millionth of that if she has a smart manager!", what is so wrong with asking "What could happen to even the odds a bit? What could technology bring that would make artists compete more on the merits, rather than politics, money and the ability to be chosen by a power elite which controls the mass media completely?"
I would humbly suggest that 'cutting back intellectual property rights' would go quite a ways toward accomplishing the latter. I don't think it would be necessary to obliterate it so much that, for example, I could claim I wrote "Oops I Did It Again" (pop quiz: who _did_ write that? Prove it wasn't me. Were they paid? As much as Britney? As much as the producer? Did they get points? A royalty?). However, it is reasonable to expect I could sing "Oops I Did It Again" while walking down the street and suffer no worse than physical attacks by music lovers. I could tell a friend the words to it, or hum them the tune. In a digital world I could beam the digital audio to their wristband mp3 player so they could hear what I was talking about. I could make a "I Love Britney Spears!" page at ilovebritneyspears.com and put the digital audio and lyrics on the webpage, at as high a quality as possible since I love it so much and want everyone to agree how wonderful it is. And everyone who visits the page would have a chance for me to do everything I possibly could do to _persuade_ them that "Oops I Did It Again" was the most phenomenal audio art the world has ever known...
Intellectual property, as it's currently practiced, is tremendously biased against this behavior, in a frankly classist sense. I cannot be the scout, the evangelist, the fanatic- it isn't my place. That which I am so passionate about is not 'my property': I must keep my place, I must be subservient. "Um, I know this wonderful song- I can't give it to you, I'm not allowed to, in fact I wasn't allowed to make a web domain about it either, but you should go to BigRecordCompany.com and search for 'Britney'..."
That's obscene. It's behavior like the art, the product, is some sort of oxygen indispensable to life. The Merry Pranksters of the 60s had a catchphrase that remains relevant to this day: Art is not eternal!
I don't think Britney's 'right' to snatch a tiny percentage of unthinkable sums of CD gross sales is any more important than any other artist's 'right' to produce some income, no matter how small, just for having tried to produce art. I don't see this as a right at all. If you have something to say, say it- if you have a sound you want to make, make it- the way things are, it's virtually impossible for you to earn any sort of money on that anyhow, and although this is the result of a very sick business, intrinsically that's not wrong.
What is wrong is stepping on the fans, the enthusiasts and evangelists who give that _praise_ and appreciation that is _really_ the coin of the artist's realm. What's wrong is shutting those people off, making them go "Um, I could give you a copy of this art I really love (without me having to go without) but I'm not allowed to...", stifling them, damping their fires. Their place is not 'subservient passive consumers'. They are the freaking _lifeblood_ of any entertainment industry, and the only reason they can be so lightly suppressed and stamped on and trodden into the dirt is that the music industry genuinely does not believe in them anymore- it's all 'push' media now. Except for the Net, and the rest of the world- except for the same 'consumers' who are thought to be nothing more than passive buckets into which you can dump any old slop, given a hot mix and a big marketing budget.
That's where money has led: do the homework, work it out for yourself. That has been the result of intellectual property, in practice.
There have been examples, in history, of un-IP: situations where there was great artistic work being done without it being primarily considered intellectual property. An example would be: blues. What did blues produce? Rock and roll, R+B, the Beatles etc. The 'floating phrases' of blues, too general to belong to anyone, became a universal language open to anyone with a voice and a personality to express. Access to this pool of ideas allowed new forms of music to burgeon and arise.
I more than suspect that if we wish to ever have another artistic reinassance as significant as the birth of rock and roll, we will have to do it in _spite_ of Intellectual Property: or as if IP did not exist.
But the most important prerequisite would be a feeling from the people that they too can create, rap, sample, whatever: that they are not subservient consumer nonentities, that they have a voice. And we may get it.
The revolution is not Napster. The revolution is 1,000,000 people making their _own_ music getting _ideas_ from Napster. Getting total access to all forms of music as freely as breathing. Stifling access to culture and putting up toll booths is akin to stifling art.