I used to say that. Loudly. Publically. That's because it used to be true. It's not true any longer, because they changed it. I can't in good conscience recommend that anyone agree to the new one, primarily because it's unilaterally negotiable on only five days notice and they're not required to _contact_ or alert you, only to make notice available somewhere. That's a very 'record company' clause. Formerly the mp3.com contract required you the artist to sign off on any changes with essentially a confirmation email, or the changes wouldn't apply.
emusic appears to be iuma, for an indie artist. You have to go through iuma. This permits only 10 songs (a major drawback for someone like me with (a) a huge catalog and (b) wanting to make it ALL downloadable). I wasn't able to get to anything resembling a contract from iuma because 'Artist Uplink' was down;P:)
Don't know what to tell you. I'm going off to delete the rest of my mp3.com site right now (got interrupted mid-site-shutdown) and still don't know where I'll end up, except that I'm going to be producing and selling CDs that are _way_ better than what I was offering through mp3.com DAM CDs (I will be selling Red Book Audio full quality CD rather than stuff ripped off mp3s- all DAM CDs are actually burned from the mp3s you send mp3.com, though they can still sound nice)
Anyhow, the important thing for _you_ is that mp3.com no longer has a decent contract. I'll be looking at iuma's when I can- you can't host on EMusic directly, you have to do it through iuma with the reservations and limitations inherent in that. (for instance, I could just barely host _one_ album if that album was 'Dragons' (10 tracks), and wouldn't be allowed to put anything else up. This is not the way to host a substantial discography;) )
mp3.com paid me:) I got a check which I _ran_ to deposit, for a bit over $250. (Supposed to be over $400 but that was before taxes... I'm not even going to ask, lucky to have anything.)
I never did agree to their new artist agreement- slashdotter mp3.com artists, don't agree to it, it gives mp3.com perpetual rights to your stuff and is unilaterally changeable by mp3.com on five days notice and _you_ have to keep hunting for notices, they won't actually _inform_ you of a change. Anyhow _I_ didn't agree to this and I'm now busily taking over for what they used to do for me, with a twist.
I'll be getting rid of the mp3.com site ASAP- go ahead and download anything if you want but I don't expect to get a cent from this or from any current CD sales. The other local bands ought to be happy 'cos I tend to monopolise the top 20 charts in my town *g* sometimes my stuff has _been_ the top 20. Now they can feel like rockstars- paying a damned high price for it with that dangerous artist agreement. Again, mp3.com is no longer safe to host your music at- they're not as bad as farmclub but they could be just as bad in five days flat with no direct notice to you.
I've ordered a CD burner- and I'm making an order for 100 Mitsui gold/gold _printed_ CD-Rs. We're talking over three dollar media here- $3.29 _per_ _blank_. I'm setting up a situation where I have a 'house label' with _extremely_ posh impressive media and packaging- which has a lighter area, to silkscreen or simply _write_ in specific information about the CD. The place I'm getting the CDs from is synthemedia.com, let me get my orders in first now;) there are some lovely details about this arrangement, for instance the full-bleed printed-white-surface CDs not only look terrific but Mitsui gold/gold is supposed to have better archival status than even commercial aluminum CDs, lasting for over 100 simulated years in destructive climate testing.
The neatest part is- instant super small pressing runs with flashy packaging. I'm going to start fishing for recording studio business at my usual $75 an hour- and each hour gets a free fancy CD of the final project. (haven't worked out the details on stuff like 'burn time' for large numbers of CDs- should talk to my bank about financing a duplicator if it becomes a serious constraint). For advertisement I can have a bunch of the CDs around town, with an audio demo recorded on it.
The overall idea is to assault the major label industry machine on a basis of quality- hit them with the appearance of indie CDs coming out, that are not only higher quality audio, but are flashier CD prints (a lot of major label CD prints seem to be one or two color prints! Cheap bastards...) and a range of music availability that (due to extremely low production runs) can afford to be absurdly eclectic and specialised- and the media is rated to last much longer under normal conditions- AND you're allowed to copy it and make mp3s of it and put it on your computer for noncommercial use- 'fair use'. (*g* I'm tempted to start talking in terms of warranty replacement of media. What kind of warranty do you get on major label releases?;) )
Looks like airwindows will finally start to come into its own with all this- I have to be grateful to mp3.com for going down in flames at this time, because it gave me the massive kick in the butt to stop thinking like a musician (wanting to buy a Yamaha DX7 and rebuild my fretless electric guitar) and start thinking like a studio owner/indie label (buying the MEANS OF PRODUCTION). Looks like it's about time to revise airwindows.com to focus on the stuff I'll be doing along these lines, too. It's more fun sweeping the floor when it's your own store;) and I hope to be doing stuff that slashdotters will find insanely cool.
Thanks mp3.com- it's been real- hope your bigwigs have good golden parachutes. Thanks for the $260, keep the change, and who _did_ you get to write up that new artists' agreement? Universal lawyers?
See www.mp3licensing.com if you don't believe that. If you're distributing YOUR OWN stuff commercially, these clowns will come demanding a penny per download- minimum of $15,000. This is a very real threat, and I personally cannot wait for Mac ports of Ogg Vorbis and hosting services that appreciate ogg files.
Until then, I will continue scouting for mp3 hosting sites to let _them_ deal with the risk of this kind of squeeze- if there are any out there which don't have insane clickthrough contracts. I'm a dangerous client- I can read. *g* I swear, too many of these damned contracts and agreements seem to assume the artist doesn't have a functioning brain...
Well... Musicians usually _don't_ get paid: instead they are given services in exchange for their work. These services include going and recording the work in the first place- the best analogy would be if you, as a computer programmer, were paid by being allowed to use the computer which you were programming on. To make this a better argument let's imagine it's a Cray supercomputer. Then you would be paid by being allowed to program on the Cray supercomputer, and if you do a really good job you lose ownership of your program but don't necessarily end up owing the owner of the Cray a lot of money:)
There's a reason why programmers buy houses in Silicon Valley and major label musicians file for bankruptcy- programmers are paid for what they do, and major label musicians are not (if they have attack dog lawyers, like Metallica, and a really hard-nosed business sense, they have a better chance, though they still won't be in the same income bracket as the comparable tech professional)
Oh, and musicians don't necessarily get money from their works after they die, either. Though the power-grab assigning copyright to the labels forever seems to have been disabled AFAIK (due to much lobbying by high profile artists like Don Henley), artists still don't own their mechanicals- the 'masters'- just (hopefully) ownership of the song itself- and even then, only after 20 years when the label can't hang onto it any longer.
Frankly I think we'd be better off paid _your_ way: a flat salary, something nice and cushy but nothing like winning the lottery. We already have the 'my work belongs to the company' part;) (no, I'm not actually a major label artist _really_;) )
Don't laugh too quickly. All they have to do is talk with the computer industry people who pushed through the DMCA and gave themselves the ability to set contract terms that forbid things like 'bad reviews'.:)
Why _shouldn't_ buying a ticket be a contract? Surely there's something that can be done to lay out a movie-viewer's contract, perhaps in fine print near the ticket booth. Buying the ticket means accepting the contract. It's not even 'virtual', but real money and a real ticket!
Then the contract merely has to punish transfer of the movie's intellectual property with death, or imprisonment:)
In fairness, w2k is not the only operating system that suffers from this. I recently tried to install a recent version of Macster (a Napster clone) onto my Powermac, which runs sys 8.1. The installer forcibly installed CarbonLib and did _something_ (not sure what) that killed the Wacom tablet software. At that point, through only installing software that added extensions and made mysterious system changes (patching traps, I assume) the machine was rendered unusable, the mouse pointer either twitching violently or the machine basically locking up in a characteristic manner, as if you were holding down the mouse button in the menu bar (Finder wouldn't finish loading). Toast.
It was so bad that I had to boot the machine with shift held down, getting rid of all extensions and patches. Various attempts at moving stuff around (like removing CarbonLib) weren't effective and it eventually proved necessary to reinstall ALL the third party control panels having to do with the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB- wacom tablet, Gravis joystick). Upon doing this, the machine booted happily again with no other changes, but an attempt to run Macster returned the error that the (still present!) CarbonLib library wasn't available! At this point I ditched the new version of Macster _and_ the CarbonLib extension that had caused so much trouble.
...um, so I guess the point is that just installing an application _can't_ necessarily destroy an old MacOS install even when it wreaks total havoc on delicate system files and hoses things, unlike w2k. Ouch. Of course the old MacOS wasn't trying to 'fix itself', unlike the w2k.
'nevermind!';)
Re:If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
on
Qt Going GPL
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· Score: 2
Ironically, if in this case they _did_, it would have better survival value.
The changes are as follows- they're arranging to be able to keep materials given to them forever, for certain purposes ('secure accounts'). I assume this is so they can promise to supply X,Y and Z bands for my.mp3.com customers and not have to face ever removing stuff from their playlists if one of their artists quits. This is NOT the same as mp3.com keeping 'your songs' forever: they don't get copyright and don't get exclusive rights either, that's still unchanged at the moment. It is strictly a change giving them rights to CONTINUE using what you give them (access to your stuff, legally) perpetually, for certain types of use.
More disturbing is the change dealing with ways of altering the terms of the agreement. The original agreement specifies that the artist must sign off on any changes before they take effect: a simple email is considered enough evidence of consent but the artist must consent to any changes or they don't happen. This can be considered an equitable contract, as it protects both parties. (no, I'm not AL, I just can read the language...) The new agreement specifically gives mp3.com the ability to make changes which take effect within five days- if you don't keep aware of any changes they can go into effect behind your back. Such changes could be anything, for instance mp3.com could seize copyright to all the songs it hosts or change the nonexclusive rights to exclusive rights. The warning they provide is five days warning, during which time you're supposed to terminate the contract if they do anything you find unacceptable. Unfortunately the agreement says that a posting on the mp3.com bulletin board can constitute notice- and those familiar with it have often gone days without being able to post to the insanely overloaded and unreliable mp3.com bulletin board. So, mp3.com is allowed to post notice of changes in a place that can be entirely inaccessible, and you must take it upon yourself to check every day that they haven't made changes to your agreement, or however often you feel necessary as long as that's oftener than five days. If you don't check for five days it can be assumed that you don't care about your agreement and mp3.com gets to do whatever they want to it.
Is that what you wanted to know about the changes in their terms for new artists? Unfortunately, many of the more particular artists left mp3.com over unrelated issues, such as outrage that mp3.com posted their earnings on their pages for people to gawk at (some of the artier types found this really offensive, and some people who'd earned $0.00 found it insulting). At the moment there are very few indie artists on mp3.com interested in their contracts, and very little interest in the change, partly because there have been many trolls raising havoc and accusing mp3.com of all sorts of nonsensical things: thus when they do take an action that affects matters, nobody is paying attention anymore. I'm not sure how many artists will leave over this: I'm staying, in a limbo of 'has not agreed to the new agreement', until they pay me what they've decided they owe me. I wouldn't recommend signing up with them, but I know for a fact that even so there are other sites that have far worse terms: Seagram/Universal's 'Farmclub.com', for instance, is much worse than mp3.com even now. If I find anything else out there that cuts an equitable deal with artists I'll say so:)
"Antipatents" should not be thought of as a weapon against patents, even bad patents- they are not an effective approach to doing this, and they're still less effective at punishing patent filers (in much the same way that the GPL is not effective at punishing programmers for working at Microsoft).
What they are is a very effective tool for fulfilling the ORIGINAL INTENT of the patent system- furthering the arts and sciences. This is a social benefit and those who cannot see beyond individual benefit will be at a disadvantage in understanding it, but there are individual benefits to antipatents too, again in the same way that there are individual benefits in GPLed software authoring. The significant factor is that the creator of the idea must be thought of in a context of 'what other ideas might this person produce?' rather than 'how much money's worth of ideas does this person keep control over?'.
Phrased that way, maybe it might make more sense to people who can only think in terms of how much idea-property is controlled by a given person. Ideas, code are all well and good, but the real jackpot comes from implementation- putting the idea into action- and a person's real value can be considered in terms of their capacity to adapt to new situations and environments and get the most out of the new situations.
In a way this is strikingly reminiscent of Alvin Toffler's pontifications: he postulates a future in which change accelerates so unbearably that only the most adaptable people will thrive. We are in fact seeing that- Napster, for instance, is a type of change that few people predicted, and the environment of music distribution is still changing. The key concept to remain aware of is that the change can't be willed away- in the case of Napster, the RIAA is already dead, even with all its money, because it is determined to prevent the change in its mode of business, and in the long run it must fail. If it succeeds in totally controlling audio, suppose people begin producing and exchanging forms of interpretive dance, or audiovisual media like film off their desktops? To completely bind a media (like audio) and force it to be an unchanging 'cash cow' is dooming it to irrelevance as the change will swirl on without it.
To apply this to patents/antipatents, it's instructive to consider that patents are by nature denials of change. They are attempts to define ideas as if they were indispensable as laws of nature, and charge a toll for them- as if the context for the ideas won't change and leave the idea as orphaned as a patent bull-powered combine harvester. By contrast, antipatents are by nature completely dependent on change, as is the GPLing of software- to put out an idea as utterly free and unencumbered (i.e. antipatent, the only restriction is that someone else can't patent it) is by nature accepting that the idea itself is of transient use- the important thing is on the one hand showing "Hey, I can think of ideas like this!" which has value, and on the other hand putting an unencumbered idea into the hands of others who might find it inspires other ideas- cross-pollination.
The more hysteria over all these IP issues I see, the more I think that Toffler was right- the rules are changing faster and faster, and the only survival technique worth a damn is to develop the capacity to react to new situations and make the most of them. Establishing a community that can communicate ideas is a very good way to do this- as illustrated by the rise of Linux. There's no reason to believe this is any different when it comes to _physical_ inventions, or for that matter business models- as interactivity rises, rigidity is death, and patents and hysterical IP protectionism are rigidity, with very bad survival value.
In the spirit of change and getting thrown nasty curve balls by life, might I make note that mp3.com has begun committing suicide by changing their contracts and embarking on a brave new learn-to-spam-hopefully-responsibly-to-appease-RIA A-labels program? So as a _result_ of this, if you ever wanted to check out that music I so often go on about, OR BUY ONE OF THE 5.99$ CDS that mp3.com makes, be advised that now would be a good time because my page with them is going to go AWAY once small issues like payment are resolved. In the future I will repeat WILL be selling CDs myself, probably not as cheaply as that but better quality audio (mp3.com CDs are a convenience burning of the mp3s to Red Book CD, with nice cover art and labeled media) but I'm not going to have squat for a while. So if anyone ever considered picking up some of that music on CD, do it before the music goes away, 'cos it WILL go away at some point- I am absolutely not going to consent to mp3.com's new artist agreement terms, so our relationship is maintaining under the old agreement and no future development will be possible.
Don't you just _love_ change?;P now I gotta start pricing _CD_ _duplicators_ and stuff like that, oh joy. But at least I understand the importance of being ready to adapt to such change. I think mp3.com are going to die by the side of the major labels they're trying so hard to appease.
That can happen, but it's dependent on certain technological breakthroughs. Currently, the avenues for getting publicity for artwork are controlled by the industry- if you want to be in record stores you need to stick to maybe a couple local ones just so you can say you have a record bin with your name on it- if you tried to social-engineer your way into a _lot_ of record stores your costs of interacting with all those stores would _rapidly_ overwhelm any income you might get from it. You can't talk your way into being a 'Billboard top 10'- you can't have that no matter how much you sell unless you're an RIAA label.
On the Internet, it becomes possible to ignore distribution completely- get a bunch of CDs made, order up a bunch of little CD mailers and you're ready to go. You might or might not want to be asking similar prices to what the industry asks- after all you're hand-packaging everything- but your problem is recognition and publicity, again. Free mp3s might help- but then you might get hit with a $15,000 fee for use of the format (see www.mp3licensing.com) making it damned risky, and you've got to maintain a website with a decent amount of storage and bandwidth. Napster is almost useless- it doesn't link the listener very closely to you, they may have quite a bit of searching to do to hunt you down, particularly if the ID3 tags aren't helpful.
The one technological development that could drastically change all this has already been covered by Slashdot- it's the 'audio fingerprinting' concept. This basically takes a very broad imprint of audio and reduces it to a digital recognition code- it's _not_ watermarking. It could be sold to the RIAA labels as copy authentication, which it is- ignoring the fact that they have _never_ needed such authentication to file suit on someone's infringings- but the true usefulness of the technique comes when the database of 'fingerprints' starts to get really huge and includes countless prints from indie artists' songs, even audio doodles recorded by kids in those loop-mixing programs (some of which would end up as already taken by another kid, of course).
At that point it becomes part of cultural expectations to be able to hear any snippet of any song and _immediately_ look it up given only a bit of digital audio of it. The selling point for consumers would be 'instantly look up any tune you hear and like', curiosity value and ability to buy the CD or whatever- curiosity value is quite a good bait all by itself. The mechanism would be like a search engine, something that's already culturally accepted and understood. The kicker is, ANY audio creator suddenly becomes searchable and traceable, as long as they have their 'prints' on file. When you consider that the purpose of this 'tracing' is 'where can I buy that CD?' and the result can be 'from me directly, for $12 including shipping and handling and I keep ALL of the profit, none of it goes to the RIAA', it starts to look very exciting.
The fact is, without an ability to cross-reference and deliver such information, proliferation of free 'music samples' isn't that useful. I've sold many tapes at a loss with lots of information on them about websites- but some of that becomes irrelevant- for instance, I still have the mp3.com site but don't expect to be adding any music to it from now on, as they have changed their contract unacceptably and I don't accept their new contract. Relying on the information printed on the tape means being pointed to mp3.com and airwindows.com, only one of which is truly current, and that one doesn't have music hosted on it. If you could consult the 'print' database it becomes trivial to have any 'searchers' directed to the most current information- you just update it if there's a change. If I ditched mp3.com I'd be able to just update that to whatever new music site I used- and you could download a tune from mp3.com, 'print' it, and use that to learn my new site. The fluidity of this is terrific! That, not Napster per se, is what would fragment the RIAA control. Napster does not direct people to a musician's page. This would (at which point Napster and its ilk would take on their real role of proliferating those 'pointers' to the musician's page widely)
These are the same people who had 2+2=3.999999... I think I'll side with whoever can do the math and come up with a sensible answer. If that is Intel, then cheers to them. If, on the other hand, Intel is desperately kluging a dying architecture and trying to create enough mindless publicity to avoid people's learning that they are on a downward spiral, riding on legacy dominance and suffering horribly from the most ruinous internal politics in the business... then why do they deserve an iota of respect simply because they haven't fallen over yet?
In the final analysis we can know what is savvy or correct at that scale much the same way we know what is savvy or correct at any scale- by looking at it and listening to people who know something about it. There are an awful lot of slashdotters with special knowledge on one thing or another, and many of them post. There are also a lot of slashdotters who say nonsensical things (like "All CPUs consume lots more power as they get more capable", which is not only contradicted by reality but obliterated by the nanotech concept for computations), and there's no label on them reading 'total fool, disregard'. You have to figure that out for yourself.
Personally, when I am confronted with a syllogism like "We often tend to doubt these 'captains of industry' from the safety of our armchairs, here on slashdot, but few of us can ever hope to approach this kind of success.", I find it much easier to stick on the 'total fool, disregard' label. But it can be fun to explain _why_ such a judgement gets made. Someone might even learn something:)
If you don't know enough to take all of the Microsoft and AOL stuff that's built right into the system out, how could you possibly be clever enough to operate linux?
*reread*
Oh- 'W2K'. My condolences. If you ever do actually get an iMac, rather than just making stuff up on slashdot, hope you figure out how to throw away 90% of the crud and cruft it ships with:)
*g* anecdotal evidence != 'open mind'. I hammer on my ol' upgraded 9500 day in day out for years on end and never need to take it anywhere to get it fixed. It's the most user-maintainable thing you could want, doesn't exhibit 'OS rot' like windows installations. Given initiative I could go find software to crash it and freeze it (hell, I use netscape every day, and that is the _king_ of non-deterministic crashability- months go by without a hitch and then WHAM WHAM WHAM *g*) but why should I, when I have tons of apps, including ones I can write myself, that don't crash?
*hee* some open mind there, fellow slashdot user #210999;) next you'll be saying that linux can't be used on the desktop;)
I went from a 200mhz 604e with a HUGE HONKIN' HEATSINK (but it didn't need a fan on the heatsink) to a 300mhz G3 that gets easily twice as much done (easily verifiable on, say, renders in POV) and has a tiny purple heatsink the size of an ornate postage stamp. And still no CPU fan.:)
When the dust settled, and the cnet story had been revised three times, it looks like mp3.com will not be spamming in the normally understood sense (thankfully). They will be mailing links to streaming media to people who have already established some sort of mp3.com account and specifically asked to be mailed stuff- worst case, to all the hapless netsurfers who didn't go and uncheck all the little 'yes, send me email adverts!' checkboxes that default on. This isn't quite the same thing as UCE to lists of bystanders, and the story changed several times over the course of the day.
The changes in their artists' agreement are still problematic, and still a dealbreaker for me, personally. What is so wrong with wanting to be asked to sign off on major changes to a contract over MY WORK? _Why_ do they need to sneak in this crap about keeping your stuff in perpetuity, and being allowed to change anything they want in the agreement on five days notice with your only recourse to terminate (but then they get to keep anything associated with a 'Secure Account' in perpetuity anyway!)? We already _have_ a major label record industry, we don't need another:P oh well, time to re-evaluate all my plans yet again. Sometimes I really get this gut level sense that Alvin Toffler was right...
My take on the mp3 patent issue is that the mp3 patent holders are gearing up to act just like the GIF patent holders- if you use mp3 in your business plan they come for you. My $30,000 figure is in error- I misremembered. The relevant information is, "1.0 % of revenue; minimum US$ 0.01 per download (pay-audio, music-on-demand, internet-radio and other types of selling mp3 files)." which is copied from the mp3licensing.com site, and "All agreements with running royalties have an annual minimum of US$ 15,000, creditable against annual royalties.". So the bill would start at $15,000, not $30,000 as I misremembered. *yay*:P I'm not comfortable assuming that free mp3 downloads TO SELL CDS would be considered exempt from this.
I am certainly going to be looking at other hosting services. I'd like to hook up with one that's got the right motivations- sort of the mp3 or vorbis equivalent of sourceforge. It obviously looks like no free mp3 hosting service can survive if they will be subject to royalties, and again I'm not ready to assume these services won't be held responsible for paying royalties at the minimum one cent per download. If the service has no income and makes no money in any way, how does it operate a server?
Yes, mp3.com is now operating like any other record label (I can't take the remaining decent bits of the contract seriously when they're so volatile). It didn't used to be- it used to offer a very reasonable, businesslike deal to artists. We need something like that out there.
It embarrasses me a great deal to have to post this, but I am wrong. I've just learned two things today:
mp3.com plans to email spam on behalf of RIAA labels' acts
the artist's agreement I've been talking about so much is being CHANGED.
I've studied the changes in the agreement and can no longer stand by my claims that mp3.com is such a great deal, because of one CRUCIAL change in the agreement: rather than the contract only being renegotiable with _signed_ consent of the artist (email receipt counts), under the new rules almost everything is the same- except that the contract is, like a major label contract, renegotiable by mp3.com at any time with merely an announcement on the artist board five days before any given change. The sole recourse is to terminate- implying that the changes take effect.
This is jarringly different from the original contract, in which you had to _sign_ _off_ on changes before they took effect. I, personally, am refusing to accept this new contract, and will see how this plays out. I am very likely going to have to leave mp3.com and scout around to see if there is one single music hosting site anywhere on the net that doesn't attempt abusive practices. I'm not certain I'll find one- and if I try to put up my own stuff, the mp3 patent holders get to come and hit me for a $30,000 fee.
I am not joyous today.
Again, I must entirely recant what I've said about mp3.com- that was the old contract, which I'm keeping a copy of. The new one is _very_ different and the difference is wide open to abuse, something that I cannot condone at all. Would you sign an employment contract with a company that said they got to change anything in the contract without needing to get your okay, and didn't even need to _tell_ you, merely do the proverbial 'locked disused filing cabinet with a sign on front saying 'Beware of the Leopard'? If that seems exaggerated, I might add that the only required announcement for contract changes under the new agreement is an announcement in the mp3.com artist's area bulletin board- which is usually completely unavailable due to the bulletin board's deep unreliability.
I'd _really_ like to see a bit of Slashdot networking to the effect of setting up some way for musicians to host their music (even for totally free- at this point I'll give up payment, if I must, to get a fair contract) in some unencumbered format like Vorbis. And does ANYBODY have the Mac vorbis codec authored at MacHack, seeing as right now I can't put my _own_ mp3s on my own website without being hunted down by the patent holders and billed $30,000 for use of the format commercially?
Whoa, hang on a second! (yah it's me again, obGoDownloadTunes mp3.com/chrisj bla bla bla)
You need to pay a little more attention to the intellectual property implications of labels vs. mp3.com. mp3.com does many things horribly (annoying page layout, tottering servers, terrible messageboards) but if you look at their artist agreement there are some extremely important points that I sure hope potential competitors take seriously:
Nonexclusive contract, with the artist continuing to OWN the mechanicals. Contrast this with any majors contract in which the label owns the mechanicals, the songs, even the band name and the website or the Artist's name itself (!)
Contract is only renegotiable with the agreement and acknowledgement of the artist! If this seems obvious check out some music biz contracts- see how often the contract is unilaterally renegotiable by the label. That means 'we can change it to whatever we want, after the fact, and you already signed off on it'.
49.9999% royalty none of which is recoupable- compared to a tenth or hundredth of that much, already pledged to recoup recording costs mandated by the label. In other words, on mp3.com you get $40, or maybe $400 (what I'm hoping for in the mail) or even $4000 if you have a _lot_ of listens and CD sales- and on the major labels you watch a lot of money go by and keep none of it, nada.
Honestly- it's good to be skeptical, and there are plenty of reasons to knock mp3.com. The deal they offer is not one of them. For all intents and purposes, and even with all their flaws, mp3.com is something new, and the key point (to me) proving that is the nonexclusive nature of their deal- 'sign' with mp3.com and you continue to be totally free to move. Worst that can happen is that you decide to remove your stuff and mp3.com are slow to do it- they make no claim or attempt to own your IP, they just ask for very extensive RIGHTS to USE it, which is waaaaay different, and nothing like as harmful as signing away your creative work to a label.
I try to avoid obsessively posting all over mp3 threads with my little links and all;P but I needed to open my mouth here, because even if mp3.com itself doesn't survive the next decade, as an artist I need something LIKE mp3.com, something that will strike the same terms for use of my music. I'm happy to sign over quite extensive rights to _use_ the stuff- but I'm going to keep the mechanicals, and keep ownership of myself and my name and the tunes, and I'm going to want to see that the contract doesn't get to change the rules about this without my okaying it. And mp3.com walks this line very honorably. It's almost as if they were behaving like some more honorable industry and trying to come up with a fair contract for artists. *shock!* *horror!*;)
Um, since both xemacs and GNU emacs (and vim) are ported to regular old MacOS, if all else failed and nobody ever lifted a finger to port them to OSX you'd still be able to run them in the Classic environment, as in 'right away':)
I'm having a hard time getting to http://my.ispchannel.com/~pjarvis/xemacs.html (the site for the Mac port of xemacs) but that's where it's supposed to be:)
This is a very true observation. It is because Microsoft lie, cheat, steal and destroy. People with a clue tend not to be 'pro' these things, whether it's Microsoft doing them or, say, Sun. Since Microsoft does them a lot more than any other company I've ever heard of, it's understandable that people will tend to form a bias against them. This bias could be termed 'common sense' or 'ability to learn from experience'.
The article made me yearn to slap the author around a bit, repeating 'Being open minded is good. Being so open minded your brain falls out is NOT!'. Either the author is a total gullible fool, or a hired gun for Microsoft itself, or perhaps simply a person who bases their entire concept of how the world works off their observations of the computer industry over the last decade or so. Whichever it is, the end result is that the author is nothing more than a propagandist, attempting to argue people into the embrace of yet another 'trust' in the making, harmful to capitalism.
If not having a choice is so wonderful, why don't we just ditch democracy, crown a King, and nationalise every form of industry so that nobody ever offers a choice again? Doubtless then creativity will simply _burgeon_:P
If there's one thing above all else I hold Microsoft responsible for, one sort of damage that I consider most appalling, it is the systematic brainwashing of human thinking into ludicrous, harmful nonsense. Consider:
People will be MUCH MORE creative for X-Box
-because they will not be presented with any divergent features or unexpected hardware to develop for
-and because they will not be expected to produce products for anything beyond the Wal-Mart mentality
-and because anybody developing for anything else is doomed, because
...see item one, repeat ad infinitum
What?? It's flat ludicrous. Most of the factors promised for X-Box (assuming it even ships! "Oh, it turns out if you buy this new version of WINDOWS it's much better than any console... what X-Box?") are _detrimental_ to creativity and advancement of the gaming art. It is a potential of pure mass market pressure _with_ the ability of the console maker to manipulate and control any and all developers. It would be fatal to all but entrenched corporate developers- and even those had better stick to well-established genres and utilise X number of X-Box features just the right way, or risk offending Microsoft, risk not getting the shelf space and promotional perks that would be available. This is a poisoned platform from the outset.
I can give an example, as I occasionally do genuinely patentable work myself in the fields where I have the most experience. Here's the most recent one- I am deeply skeptical of intellectual property and poor as dirt so I am not actually attempting to file such a patent, but if you don't think this would fly with the patent office you're out of your mind;)
Configuration for a Linear-Tracking Turntable's Tonearm And Supporting Bar
Invention consists of a supporting bar and eight main structural elements supporting and orienting a phonograph cartridge. Structural elements are in the form of rods and can be made of various materials- ideally light material, even moderately flexible material such as balsa wood (see photographs of prototype (yes I've built this)). These are the major design points covered:
Each side of cartridge receives four rods affixed to the corners of the cartridge, stretching back to meet at a point where the linear tracking bar is located. The shape produced is of two elongated square-based pyramids stretching back to the positioning bar.
These points are separated by greater distance than the distance of the cartridge from the bar, requiring the entire turntable to be unusually large- the cartridge will typically be at the 90 degree point of a right triangle formed by the cartridge and the sliders on the bar.
The sliders may consist of small rollers on a little half-loop of rigid material- the points of the positioning arms must connect to a positioning element on the nearest point of the positioning bar, and not, for instance, to the top of the slider.
The orientation of the cartridge can be adjusted finely by changing the lengths of individual struts in the positioning arms. If they are very rigid, all struts must be adjusted at once. If they flex, they may be adjusted in pairs.
An additional strut or struts may be added from one of the cartridge corners to the top of the slider, forming a shallow triangular structure to some struts and running parallel to others.
Primary feature is that all twisting, turning or yawing motions of the cartridge are rigidly braced along the long arm of the various struts, while linear sliding is entirely unimpeded. This also causes any bass frequencies presented by the phonograph needle to be braced along the long arm of the struts, rather than along the bending moment of the tonearm as in normal tonearm designs. This also makes it possible to use extremely light and non-ringy materials, such as balsa wood struts, for the mechanical supports- the arms entirely confine themselves to orienting the cartridge and the mass to permit bass reproduction is centered on the cartridge itself, minimising resonance and distortion.
It goes on and on and I have to run (annoyingly)- but really, patents are about _this_ sort of thing, something that is not done but works brilliantly. I've described (and built) a tonearm for phonographs that uses entirely non-rigid braces to achieve a phenomenally rigid result- the positioning arms can be twisted along their axes at the slightest pressure! But that mode of distortion is completely irrelevant to the bracing of the cartridge...
I'm late late LATE dammit. But seriously- 'ordering through one click' is NOT what patents should be about.
What you're describing is not business. It is more akin to the motivations of warfare in which the civilians are getting flattened by stray shells and bullets.
Business is fulfilling a need and getting paid for it. This need can be practical (selling food, selling air if you happen to be selling it on the Moon) or indirect (...you are getting sleepy...you NEED to collect all the pokemon) but either way the purpose of business is to fulfill the need and be paid. That's the name of the game.
It's a hideous distortion of capitalism that people no longer believe this to be the case- and a fatal error- because this new model of Battling Corpora-Mechs flattening the terrain is NOT SUSTAINABLE. It's not a zero-sum game even- it's a losing game and they are all trying not to lose faster than the others.
Any chance I get I try to encourage the people I know, the ones doing small scale business of some sort, to NOT FOLLOW the Corpora-Mech model. In that model only the biggest one gets to survive and when the dust settles everybody is a hell of a lot worse off than if we were doing capitalism. The only way to get by as one of the 'small mammal' businesses sneaking around in the undergrowth and trying not to be noticed by Corporate Dinosaurs (to mix mech-aphors) is to fall back on the business models which make sense- fulfilling a need and getting paid for it, networking like mad which means doing good things for other people to build goodwill, and being able to offer something real, whether that's a product or service or whatever. That's sustainable. That's business. That's capitalism.
Your depiction of corporate motives ain't business. In a very real sense it is fantasy. Fantasy, and a baseball bat, can get other people to give lip service to your fantasy. That doesn't make it reality. On a very deep level this whole motivation is wrong and unsustainable...
Slashdot Mirror
emusic appears to be iuma, for an indie artist. You have to go through iuma. This permits only 10 songs (a major drawback for someone like me with (a) a huge catalog and (b) wanting to make it ALL downloadable). I wasn't able to get to anything resembling a contract from iuma because 'Artist Uplink' was down ;P :)
Don't know what to tell you. I'm going off to delete the rest of my mp3.com site right now (got interrupted mid-site-shutdown) and still don't know where I'll end up, except that I'm going to be producing and selling CDs that are _way_ better than what I was offering through mp3.com DAM CDs (I will be selling Red Book Audio full quality CD rather than stuff ripped off mp3s- all DAM CDs are actually burned from the mp3s you send mp3.com, though they can still sound nice)
Anyhow, the important thing for _you_ is that mp3.com no longer has a decent contract. I'll be looking at iuma's when I can- you can't host on EMusic directly, you have to do it through iuma with the reservations and limitations inherent in that. (for instance, I could just barely host _one_ album if that album was 'Dragons' (10 tracks), and wouldn't be allowed to put anything else up. This is not the way to host a substantial discography ;) )
I never did agree to their new artist agreement- slashdotter mp3.com artists, don't agree to it, it gives mp3.com perpetual rights to your stuff and is unilaterally changeable by mp3.com on five days notice and _you_ have to keep hunting for notices, they won't actually _inform_ you of a change. Anyhow _I_ didn't agree to this and I'm now busily taking over for what they used to do for me, with a twist.
I'll be getting rid of the mp3.com site ASAP- go ahead and download anything if you want but I don't expect to get a cent from this or from any current CD sales. The other local bands ought to be happy 'cos I tend to monopolise the top 20 charts in my town *g* sometimes my stuff has _been_ the top 20. Now they can feel like rockstars- paying a damned high price for it with that dangerous artist agreement. Again, mp3.com is no longer safe to host your music at- they're not as bad as farmclub but they could be just as bad in five days flat with no direct notice to you.
I've ordered a CD burner- and I'm making an order for 100 Mitsui gold/gold _printed_ CD-Rs. We're talking over three dollar media here- $3.29 _per_ _blank_. I'm setting up a situation where I have a 'house label' with _extremely_ posh impressive media and packaging- which has a lighter area, to silkscreen or simply _write_ in specific information about the CD. The place I'm getting the CDs from is synthemedia.com, let me get my orders in first now ;) there are some lovely details about this arrangement, for instance the full-bleed printed-white-surface CDs not only look terrific but Mitsui gold/gold is supposed to have better archival status than even commercial aluminum CDs, lasting for over 100 simulated years in destructive climate testing.
The neatest part is- instant super small pressing runs with flashy packaging. I'm going to start fishing for recording studio business at my usual $75 an hour- and each hour gets a free fancy CD of the final project. (haven't worked out the details on stuff like 'burn time' for large numbers of CDs- should talk to my bank about financing a duplicator if it becomes a serious constraint). For advertisement I can have a bunch of the CDs around town, with an audio demo recorded on it.
The overall idea is to assault the major label industry machine on a basis of quality- hit them with the appearance of indie CDs coming out, that are not only higher quality audio, but are flashier CD prints (a lot of major label CD prints seem to be one or two color prints! Cheap bastards...) and a range of music availability that (due to extremely low production runs) can afford to be absurdly eclectic and specialised- and the media is rated to last much longer under normal conditions- AND you're allowed to copy it and make mp3s of it and put it on your computer for noncommercial use- 'fair use'. (*g* I'm tempted to start talking in terms of warranty replacement of media. What kind of warranty do you get on major label releases? ;) )
Looks like airwindows will finally start to come into its own with all this- I have to be grateful to mp3.com for going down in flames at this time, because it gave me the massive kick in the butt to stop thinking like a musician (wanting to buy a Yamaha DX7 and rebuild my fretless electric guitar) and start thinking like a studio owner/indie label (buying the MEANS OF PRODUCTION). Looks like it's about time to revise airwindows.com to focus on the stuff I'll be doing along these lines, too. It's more fun sweeping the floor when it's your own store ;) and I hope to be doing stuff that slashdotters will find insanely cool.
Thanks mp3.com- it's been real- hope your bigwigs have good golden parachutes. Thanks for the $260, keep the change, and who _did_ you get to write up that new artists' agreement? Universal lawyers?
Until then, I will continue scouting for mp3 hosting sites to let _them_ deal with the risk of this kind of squeeze- if there are any out there which don't have insane clickthrough contracts. I'm a dangerous client- I can read. *g* I swear, too many of these damned contracts and agreements seem to assume the artist doesn't have a functioning brain...
There's a reason why programmers buy houses in Silicon Valley and major label musicians file for bankruptcy- programmers are paid for what they do, and major label musicians are not (if they have attack dog lawyers, like Metallica, and a really hard-nosed business sense, they have a better chance, though they still won't be in the same income bracket as the comparable tech professional)
Oh, and musicians don't necessarily get money from their works after they die, either. Though the power-grab assigning copyright to the labels forever seems to have been disabled AFAIK (due to much lobbying by high profile artists like Don Henley), artists still don't own their mechanicals- the 'masters'- just (hopefully) ownership of the song itself- and even then, only after 20 years when the label can't hang onto it any longer.
Frankly I think we'd be better off paid _your_ way: a flat salary, something nice and cushy but nothing like winning the lottery. We already have the 'my work belongs to the company' part ;) (no, I'm not actually a major label artist _really_ ;) )
Why _shouldn't_ buying a ticket be a contract? Surely there's something that can be done to lay out a movie-viewer's contract, perhaps in fine print near the ticket booth. Buying the ticket means accepting the contract. It's not even 'virtual', but real money and a real ticket!
Then the contract merely has to punish transfer of the movie's intellectual property with death, or imprisonment :)
One question for you, please.
WHY should email be executable?
If you can't answer that you aren't even acknowledging the problem, and that's not good.
It was so bad that I had to boot the machine with shift held down, getting rid of all extensions and patches. Various attempts at moving stuff around (like removing CarbonLib) weren't effective and it eventually proved necessary to reinstall ALL the third party control panels having to do with the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB- wacom tablet, Gravis joystick). Upon doing this, the machine booted happily again with no other changes, but an attempt to run Macster returned the error that the (still present!) CarbonLib library wasn't available! At this point I ditched the new version of Macster _and_ the CarbonLib extension that had caused so much trouble.
'nevermind!' ;)
Just a thought...
Don't worry about it :) you PC guys so often are! One gets used to it :)
Here are lots of links to the error messages.
More disturbing is the change dealing with ways of altering the terms of the agreement. The original agreement specifies that the artist must sign off on any changes before they take effect: a simple email is considered enough evidence of consent but the artist must consent to any changes or they don't happen. This can be considered an equitable contract, as it protects both parties. (no, I'm not AL, I just can read the language...) The new agreement specifically gives mp3.com the ability to make changes which take effect within five days- if you don't keep aware of any changes they can go into effect behind your back. Such changes could be anything, for instance mp3.com could seize copyright to all the songs it hosts or change the nonexclusive rights to exclusive rights. The warning they provide is five days warning, during which time you're supposed to terminate the contract if they do anything you find unacceptable. Unfortunately the agreement says that a posting on the mp3.com bulletin board can constitute notice- and those familiar with it have often gone days without being able to post to the insanely overloaded and unreliable mp3.com bulletin board. So, mp3.com is allowed to post notice of changes in a place that can be entirely inaccessible, and you must take it upon yourself to check every day that they haven't made changes to your agreement, or however often you feel necessary as long as that's oftener than five days. If you don't check for five days it can be assumed that you don't care about your agreement and mp3.com gets to do whatever they want to it.
Is that what you wanted to know about the changes in their terms for new artists? Unfortunately, many of the more particular artists left mp3.com over unrelated issues, such as outrage that mp3.com posted their earnings on their pages for people to gawk at (some of the artier types found this really offensive, and some people who'd earned $0.00 found it insulting). At the moment there are very few indie artists on mp3.com interested in their contracts, and very little interest in the change, partly because there have been many trolls raising havoc and accusing mp3.com of all sorts of nonsensical things: thus when they do take an action that affects matters, nobody is paying attention anymore. I'm not sure how many artists will leave over this: I'm staying, in a limbo of 'has not agreed to the new agreement', until they pay me what they've decided they owe me. I wouldn't recommend signing up with them, but I know for a fact that even so there are other sites that have far worse terms: Seagram/Universal's 'Farmclub.com', for instance, is much worse than mp3.com even now. If I find anything else out there that cuts an equitable deal with artists I'll say so :)
What they are is a very effective tool for fulfilling the ORIGINAL INTENT of the patent system- furthering the arts and sciences. This is a social benefit and those who cannot see beyond individual benefit will be at a disadvantage in understanding it, but there are individual benefits to antipatents too, again in the same way that there are individual benefits in GPLed software authoring. The significant factor is that the creator of the idea must be thought of in a context of 'what other ideas might this person produce?' rather than 'how much money's worth of ideas does this person keep control over?'.
Phrased that way, maybe it might make more sense to people who can only think in terms of how much idea-property is controlled by a given person. Ideas, code are all well and good, but the real jackpot comes from implementation- putting the idea into action- and a person's real value can be considered in terms of their capacity to adapt to new situations and environments and get the most out of the new situations.
In a way this is strikingly reminiscent of Alvin Toffler's pontifications: he postulates a future in which change accelerates so unbearably that only the most adaptable people will thrive. We are in fact seeing that- Napster, for instance, is a type of change that few people predicted, and the environment of music distribution is still changing. The key concept to remain aware of is that the change can't be willed away- in the case of Napster, the RIAA is already dead, even with all its money, because it is determined to prevent the change in its mode of business, and in the long run it must fail. If it succeeds in totally controlling audio, suppose people begin producing and exchanging forms of interpretive dance, or audiovisual media like film off their desktops? To completely bind a media (like audio) and force it to be an unchanging 'cash cow' is dooming it to irrelevance as the change will swirl on without it.
To apply this to patents/antipatents, it's instructive to consider that patents are by nature denials of change. They are attempts to define ideas as if they were indispensable as laws of nature, and charge a toll for them- as if the context for the ideas won't change and leave the idea as orphaned as a patent bull-powered combine harvester. By contrast, antipatents are by nature completely dependent on change, as is the GPLing of software- to put out an idea as utterly free and unencumbered (i.e. antipatent, the only restriction is that someone else can't patent it) is by nature accepting that the idea itself is of transient use- the important thing is on the one hand showing "Hey, I can think of ideas like this!" which has value, and on the other hand putting an unencumbered idea into the hands of others who might find it inspires other ideas- cross-pollination.
The more hysteria over all these IP issues I see, the more I think that Toffler was right- the rules are changing faster and faster, and the only survival technique worth a damn is to develop the capacity to react to new situations and make the most of them. Establishing a community that can communicate ideas is a very good way to do this- as illustrated by the rise of Linux. There's no reason to believe this is any different when it comes to _physical_ inventions, or for that matter business models- as interactivity rises, rigidity is death, and patents and hysterical IP protectionism are rigidity, with very bad survival value.
In the spirit of change and getting thrown nasty curve balls by life, might I make note that mp3.com has begun committing suicide by changing their contracts and embarking on a brave new learn-to-spam-hopefully-responsibly-to-appease-RIA A-labels program? So as a _result_ of this, if you ever wanted to check out that music I so often go on about, OR BUY ONE OF THE 5.99$ CDS that mp3.com makes, be advised that now would be a good time because my page with them is going to go AWAY once small issues like payment are resolved. In the future I will repeat WILL be selling CDs myself, probably not as cheaply as that but better quality audio (mp3.com CDs are a convenience burning of the mp3s to Red Book CD, with nice cover art and labeled media) but I'm not going to have squat for a while. So if anyone ever considered picking up some of that music on CD, do it before the music goes away, 'cos it WILL go away at some point- I am absolutely not going to consent to mp3.com's new artist agreement terms, so our relationship is maintaining under the old agreement and no future development will be possible.
Don't you just _love_ change? ;P now I gotta start pricing _CD_ _duplicators_ and stuff like that, oh joy. But at least I understand the importance of being ready to adapt to such change. I think mp3.com are going to die by the side of the major labels they're trying so hard to appease.
On the Internet, it becomes possible to ignore distribution completely- get a bunch of CDs made, order up a bunch of little CD mailers and you're ready to go. You might or might not want to be asking similar prices to what the industry asks- after all you're hand-packaging everything- but your problem is recognition and publicity, again. Free mp3s might help- but then you might get hit with a $15,000 fee for use of the format (see www.mp3licensing.com) making it damned risky, and you've got to maintain a website with a decent amount of storage and bandwidth. Napster is almost useless- it doesn't link the listener very closely to you, they may have quite a bit of searching to do to hunt you down, particularly if the ID3 tags aren't helpful.
The one technological development that could drastically change all this has already been covered by Slashdot- it's the 'audio fingerprinting' concept. This basically takes a very broad imprint of audio and reduces it to a digital recognition code- it's _not_ watermarking. It could be sold to the RIAA labels as copy authentication, which it is- ignoring the fact that they have _never_ needed such authentication to file suit on someone's infringings- but the true usefulness of the technique comes when the database of 'fingerprints' starts to get really huge and includes countless prints from indie artists' songs, even audio doodles recorded by kids in those loop-mixing programs (some of which would end up as already taken by another kid, of course).
At that point it becomes part of cultural expectations to be able to hear any snippet of any song and _immediately_ look it up given only a bit of digital audio of it. The selling point for consumers would be 'instantly look up any tune you hear and like', curiosity value and ability to buy the CD or whatever- curiosity value is quite a good bait all by itself. The mechanism would be like a search engine, something that's already culturally accepted and understood. The kicker is, ANY audio creator suddenly becomes searchable and traceable, as long as they have their 'prints' on file. When you consider that the purpose of this 'tracing' is 'where can I buy that CD?' and the result can be 'from me directly, for $12 including shipping and handling and I keep ALL of the profit, none of it goes to the RIAA', it starts to look very exciting.
The fact is, without an ability to cross-reference and deliver such information, proliferation of free 'music samples' isn't that useful. I've sold many tapes at a loss with lots of information on them about websites- but some of that becomes irrelevant- for instance, I still have the mp3.com site but don't expect to be adding any music to it from now on, as they have changed their contract unacceptably and I don't accept their new contract. Relying on the information printed on the tape means being pointed to mp3.com and airwindows.com, only one of which is truly current, and that one doesn't have music hosted on it. If you could consult the 'print' database it becomes trivial to have any 'searchers' directed to the most current information- you just update it if there's a change. If I ditched mp3.com I'd be able to just update that to whatever new music site I used- and you could download a tune from mp3.com, 'print' it, and use that to learn my new site. The fluidity of this is terrific! That, not Napster per se, is what would fragment the RIAA control. Napster does not direct people to a musician's page. This would (at which point Napster and its ilk would take on their real role of proliferating those 'pointers' to the musician's page widely)
In the final analysis we can know what is savvy or correct at that scale much the same way we know what is savvy or correct at any scale- by looking at it and listening to people who know something about it. There are an awful lot of slashdotters with special knowledge on one thing or another, and many of them post. There are also a lot of slashdotters who say nonsensical things (like "All CPUs consume lots more power as they get more capable", which is not only contradicted by reality but obliterated by the nanotech concept for computations), and there's no label on them reading 'total fool, disregard'. You have to figure that out for yourself.
Personally, when I am confronted with a syllogism like "We often tend to doubt these 'captains of industry' from the safety of our armchairs, here on slashdot, but few of us can ever hope to approach this kind of success.", I find it much easier to stick on the 'total fool, disregard' label. But it can be fun to explain _why_ such a judgement gets made. Someone might even learn something :)
*reread*
Oh- 'W2K'. My condolences. If you ever do actually get an iMac, rather than just making stuff up on slashdot, hope you figure out how to throw away 90% of the crud and cruft it ships with :)
*g* anecdotal evidence != 'open mind'. I hammer on my ol' upgraded 9500 day in day out for years on end and never need to take it anywhere to get it fixed. It's the most user-maintainable thing you could want, doesn't exhibit 'OS rot' like windows installations. Given initiative I could go find software to crash it and freeze it (hell, I use netscape every day, and that is the _king_ of non-deterministic crashability- months go by without a hitch and then WHAM WHAM WHAM *g*) but why should I, when I have tons of apps, including ones I can write myself, that don't crash?
*hee* some open mind there, fellow slashdot user #210999 ;) next you'll be saying that linux can't be used on the desktop ;)
I went from a 200mhz 604e with a HUGE HONKIN' HEATSINK (but it didn't need a fan on the heatsink) to a 300mhz G3 that gets easily twice as much done (easily verifiable on, say, renders in POV) and has a tiny purple heatsink the size of an ornate postage stamp. And still no CPU fan. :)
You are most breathtakingly wrong :)
The changes in their artists' agreement are still problematic, and still a dealbreaker for me, personally. What is so wrong with wanting to be asked to sign off on major changes to a contract over MY WORK? _Why_ do they need to sneak in this crap about keeping your stuff in perpetuity, and being allowed to change anything they want in the agreement on five days notice with your only recourse to terminate (but then they get to keep anything associated with a 'Secure Account' in perpetuity anyway!)? We already _have_ a major label record industry, we don't need another :P oh well, time to re-evaluate all my plans yet again. Sometimes I really get this gut level sense that Alvin Toffler was right...
I am certainly going to be looking at other hosting services. I'd like to hook up with one that's got the right motivations- sort of the mp3 or vorbis equivalent of sourceforge. It obviously looks like no free mp3 hosting service can survive if they will be subject to royalties, and again I'm not ready to assume these services won't be held responsible for paying royalties at the minimum one cent per download. If the service has no income and makes no money in any way, how does it operate a server?
Yes, mp3.com is now operating like any other record label (I can't take the remaining decent bits of the contract seriously when they're so volatile). It didn't used to be- it used to offer a very reasonable, businesslike deal to artists. We need something like that out there.
- mp3.com plans to email spam on behalf of RIAA labels' acts
- the artist's agreement I've been talking about so much is being CHANGED.
I've studied the changes in the agreement and can no longer stand by my claims that mp3.com is such a great deal, because of one CRUCIAL change in the agreement: rather than the contract only being renegotiable with _signed_ consent of the artist (email receipt counts), under the new rules almost everything is the same- except that the contract is, like a major label contract, renegotiable by mp3.com at any time with merely an announcement on the artist board five days before any given change. The sole recourse is to terminate- implying that the changes take effect.This is jarringly different from the original contract, in which you had to _sign_ _off_ on changes before they took effect. I, personally, am refusing to accept this new contract, and will see how this plays out. I am very likely going to have to leave mp3.com and scout around to see if there is one single music hosting site anywhere on the net that doesn't attempt abusive practices. I'm not certain I'll find one- and if I try to put up my own stuff, the mp3 patent holders get to come and hit me for a $30,000 fee.
I am not joyous today.
Again, I must entirely recant what I've said about mp3.com- that was the old contract, which I'm keeping a copy of. The new one is _very_ different and the difference is wide open to abuse, something that I cannot condone at all. Would you sign an employment contract with a company that said they got to change anything in the contract without needing to get your okay, and didn't even need to _tell_ you, merely do the proverbial 'locked disused filing cabinet with a sign on front saying 'Beware of the Leopard'? If that seems exaggerated, I might add that the only required announcement for contract changes under the new agreement is an announcement in the mp3.com artist's area bulletin board- which is usually completely unavailable due to the bulletin board's deep unreliability.
I'd _really_ like to see a bit of Slashdot networking to the effect of setting up some way for musicians to host their music (even for totally free- at this point I'll give up payment, if I must, to get a fair contract) in some unencumbered format like Vorbis. And does ANYBODY have the Mac vorbis codec authored at MacHack, seeing as right now I can't put my _own_ mp3s on my own website without being hunted down by the patent holders and billed $30,000 for use of the format commercially?
I am _not_ joyous today.
You need to pay a little more attention to the intellectual property implications of labels vs. mp3.com. mp3.com does many things horribly (annoying page layout, tottering servers, terrible messageboards) but if you look at their artist agreement there are some extremely important points that I sure hope potential competitors take seriously:
- Nonexclusive contract, with the artist continuing to OWN the mechanicals. Contrast this with any majors contract in which the label owns the mechanicals, the songs, even the band name and the website or the Artist's name itself (!)
- Contract is only renegotiable with the agreement and acknowledgement of the artist! If this seems obvious check out some music biz contracts- see how often the contract is unilaterally renegotiable by the label. That means 'we can change it to whatever we want, after the fact, and you already signed off on it'.
- 49.9999% royalty none of which is recoupable- compared to a tenth or hundredth of that much, already pledged to recoup recording costs mandated by the label. In other words, on mp3.com you get $40, or maybe $400 (what I'm hoping for in the mail) or even $4000 if you have a _lot_ of listens and CD sales- and on the major labels you watch a lot of money go by and keep none of it, nada.
Honestly- it's good to be skeptical, and there are plenty of reasons to knock mp3.com. The deal they offer is not one of them. For all intents and purposes, and even with all their flaws, mp3.com is something new, and the key point (to me) proving that is the nonexclusive nature of their deal- 'sign' with mp3.com and you continue to be totally free to move. Worst that can happen is that you decide to remove your stuff and mp3.com are slow to do it- they make no claim or attempt to own your IP, they just ask for very extensive RIGHTS to USE it, which is waaaaay different, and nothing like as harmful as signing away your creative work to a label.I try to avoid obsessively posting all over mp3 threads with my little links and all ;P but I needed to open my mouth here, because even if mp3.com itself doesn't survive the next decade, as an artist I need something LIKE mp3.com, something that will strike the same terms for use of my music. I'm happy to sign over quite extensive rights to _use_ the stuff- but I'm going to keep the mechanicals, and keep ownership of myself and my name and the tunes, and I'm going to want to see that the contract doesn't get to change the rules about this without my okaying it. And mp3.com walks this line very honorably. It's almost as if they were behaving like some more honorable industry and trying to come up with a fair contract for artists. *shock!* *horror!* ;)
I'm having a hard time getting to http://my.ispchannel.com/~pjarvis/xemacs.html (the site for the Mac port of xemacs) but that's where it's supposed to be :)
Well, I have just five words for this fellow: "greedy people make lousy networkers".
Except maybe to other Randites ;)
The article made me yearn to slap the author around a bit, repeating 'Being open minded is good. Being so open minded your brain falls out is NOT!'. Either the author is a total gullible fool, or a hired gun for Microsoft itself, or perhaps simply a person who bases their entire concept of how the world works off their observations of the computer industry over the last decade or so. Whichever it is, the end result is that the author is nothing more than a propagandist, attempting to argue people into the embrace of yet another 'trust' in the making, harmful to capitalism.
If not having a choice is so wonderful, why don't we just ditch democracy, crown a King, and nationalise every form of industry so that nobody ever offers a choice again? Doubtless then creativity will simply _burgeon_ :P
If there's one thing above all else I hold Microsoft responsible for, one sort of damage that I consider most appalling, it is the systematic brainwashing of human thinking into ludicrous, harmful nonsense. Consider:
- People will be MUCH MORE creative for X-Box
- -because they will not be presented with any divergent features or unexpected hardware to develop for
- -and because they will not be expected to produce products for anything beyond the Wal-Mart mentality
- -and because anybody developing for anything else is doomed, because
- ...see item one, repeat ad infinitum
What?? It's flat ludicrous. Most of the factors promised for X-Box (assuming it even ships! "Oh, it turns out if you buy this new version of WINDOWS it's much better than any console... what X-Box?") are _detrimental_ to creativity and advancement of the gaming art. It is a potential of pure mass market pressure _with_ the ability of the console maker to manipulate and control any and all developers. It would be fatal to all but entrenched corporate developers- and even those had better stick to well-established genres and utilise X number of X-Box features just the right way, or risk offending Microsoft, risk not getting the shelf space and promotional perks that would be available. This is a poisoned platform from the outset.Hell with it.
Configuration for a Linear-Tracking Turntable's Tonearm And Supporting Bar
Invention consists of a supporting bar and eight main structural elements supporting and orienting a phonograph cartridge. Structural elements are in the form of rods and can be made of various materials- ideally light material, even moderately flexible material such as balsa wood (see photographs of prototype (yes I've built this)). These are the major design points covered:
- Each side of cartridge receives four rods affixed to the corners of the cartridge, stretching back to meet at a point where the linear tracking bar is located. The shape produced is of two elongated square-based pyramids stretching back to the positioning bar.
- These points are separated by greater distance than the distance of the cartridge from the bar, requiring the entire turntable to be unusually large- the cartridge will typically be at the 90 degree point of a right triangle formed by the cartridge and the sliders on the bar.
- The sliders may consist of small rollers on a little half-loop of rigid material- the points of the positioning arms must connect to a positioning element on the nearest point of the positioning bar, and not, for instance, to the top of the slider.
- The orientation of the cartridge can be adjusted finely by changing the lengths of individual struts in the positioning arms. If they are very rigid, all struts must be adjusted at once. If they flex, they may be adjusted in pairs.
- An additional strut or struts may be added from one of the cartridge corners to the top of the slider, forming a shallow triangular structure to some struts and running parallel to others.
- Primary feature is that all twisting, turning or yawing motions of the cartridge are rigidly braced along the long arm of the various struts, while linear sliding is entirely unimpeded. This also causes any bass frequencies presented by the phonograph needle to be braced along the long arm of the struts, rather than along the bending moment of the tonearm as in normal tonearm designs. This also makes it possible to use extremely light and non-ringy materials, such as balsa wood struts, for the mechanical supports- the arms entirely confine themselves to orienting the cartridge and the mass to permit bass reproduction is centered on the cartridge itself, minimising resonance and distortion.
It goes on and on and I have to run (annoyingly)- but really, patents are about _this_ sort of thing, something that is not done but works brilliantly. I've described (and built) a tonearm for phonographs that uses entirely non-rigid braces to achieve a phenomenally rigid result- the positioning arms can be twisted along their axes at the slightest pressure! But that mode of distortion is completely irrelevant to the bracing of the cartridge...I'm late late LATE dammit. But seriously- 'ordering through one click' is NOT what patents should be about.
Business is fulfilling a need and getting paid for it. This need can be practical (selling food, selling air if you happen to be selling it on the Moon) or indirect (...you are getting sleepy ...you NEED to collect all the pokemon) but either way the purpose of business is to fulfill the need and be paid. That's the name of the game.
It's a hideous distortion of capitalism that people no longer believe this to be the case- and a fatal error- because this new model of Battling Corpora-Mechs flattening the terrain is NOT SUSTAINABLE. It's not a zero-sum game even- it's a losing game and they are all trying not to lose faster than the others.
Any chance I get I try to encourage the people I know, the ones doing small scale business of some sort, to NOT FOLLOW the Corpora-Mech model. In that model only the biggest one gets to survive and when the dust settles everybody is a hell of a lot worse off than if we were doing capitalism. The only way to get by as one of the 'small mammal' businesses sneaking around in the undergrowth and trying not to be noticed by Corporate Dinosaurs (to mix mech-aphors) is to fall back on the business models which make sense- fulfilling a need and getting paid for it, networking like mad which means doing good things for other people to build goodwill, and being able to offer something real, whether that's a product or service or whatever. That's sustainable. That's business. That's capitalism.
Your depiction of corporate motives ain't business. In a very real sense it is fantasy. Fantasy, and a baseball bat, can get other people to give lip service to your fantasy. That doesn't make it reality. On a very deep level this whole motivation is wrong and unsustainable...