"There is no point in inventing the wheel again and again..."
But so MANY developers love doing it! Everyone knows that the previous developer's code is crap, and that a real pro like youself can rewrite it in half the time it would take to figure it out...
"Because it doesn't *cost* us anything (since people writing F/OSS would do it anyway)..."
Yes, but the article points towards corporate backing of OSS projects, which means that quite a few people are paid full time to work on it. Take away those jobs, and those people "might" work on OSS for free, but I guarantee you that most of them are going to be spending a lot less time on it... as the kids need to be fed and the rent needs to be paid.
"...seriously, how do they come up with the price of MS Office..."
Seriously, are business concepts like salaries, overhead, marketing, distribution, maintenance, ROI, and (gasp) profit that foreign to you? Even I can figure out how much I spent to create a product, how many I might sell, and as such how much I need to charge to break even and then (hopefully) make a profit.
"People who wouldn't steal because they believe it to be wrong (rather than because they think they might get caught) will breach copyright without a second thought."
I have to question this statement, because even the one's who think it's okay to steal off the web, will not do so from a bricks and mortar store... and that, to me, suggests that they do it: because they can, because it's relatively easy to do so, and because the odds are extremely low they'd be caught doing it. Whereas doing the same in a physical store can easily end you up in a pair of handcuffs and generally spoil your entire day.
Unfortunately, lots of people steal (even from stores) when they think they can get away with it. They may throw out rationalizations like "information wants to be free" or "corporations are evil" or "it [whatever IT is] is overpriced" or "no one gets hurt", but the truth is that they wanted it, and they took what they wanted... plain and simple.
But as you point out, the bulk of the costs come not from the upload and storage of the file, but from the servers to download and the bandwidth needed to stream those files to the hundreds, if not thousands of people who want to see it.
Why should not the people responsible for inflicting the majority of the costs also be the ones responsible for recouping them?
Again you miss the point. YT gathers movies up and makes them easy to access. It's a place to send your stuff and have it be seen. Scattering things hither-and-yon across the web makes it harder. BT makes it harder. The explosion of different formats will make it harder. Not having categorization and rating and commenting systems makes it harder and much, much less useful.
YT could use BT to distibute files and STILL need to pay for the millions of page views needed to host those other services, because it's those services that MAKE the content useful and accessible. It's not technology issues like having BT in a browser.
If a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear? If a movie lies unnoticed and unseen on a torrent server, does it really have any value?
You're missing his point. Any large content aggregation site that attracts a big audience and serves up content off it's own servers has to pay for those servers and for all of that bandwidth somehow. It's the nature of the beast.
It could be with ads, or donations (doubtful), or paid placements, or by corporate sponsorship (aka Wikipedia), but SOMEONE has to pay the bills. It could be "scattered arount the 'net" as you say, but then you lose one the biggest things that makes a site like YT popular: it's gathered all of that stuff up in one place AND made it easy to access.
Not to mention that a popular video on someone's hosted server will kill THAT person's bandwidth and tend to/. out of existence. And yes, I've heard of BT, but now we have another level of complexity.
Members of the "everything should be free" crowd need to recognize the fact that someone, somewhere, is paying all of the bills, and that, occasionally and in all fairness, that person needs to be them...
It was about a specific group of people in a future "what if and when" type of environment. Good SciFi is ALWAYS about the people, even when it's as hard core as it gets. Even "The Cold Equations" would be nothing if you didn't care for the girl and the pilot.
Well, I have a bunch of VHS movies that no longer seem to fit into the little slot in the front of the DVD player. Those I really liked I bought again; those I didn't... well, I knew that when I bought into the new format.
I totally agree, but if they have any kind of rating system system at all (voting, most downloaded, whatever) then the cream WILL rise to the top. It might be a very thin layer, but it will be there.
No BS at all. If BT was used only for the "legitimate" uses mentioned, traffic would be by cut 90%, and it wouldn't be a big enough problem for them to worry about.
"However, BitTorrent is an extremely important tool that has many uses other than what everyone assumes it is good for, namely movie piracy."
Yeah. Too bad those "important" uses only account for 5% of the total traffic.
Okay, now a while back when ISPs first started throttling traffic the big workaround was encryption. Now it seems that encryption isn't a silver bullet either. Other sources have indicated that pattern analysis would catch attempts to emulate other protocols, such as secure VPN connections.
So is the war over? Or is everyone going to focus on other ways to outsmart the system?
And if those legitimate uses were all it was used for they wouldn't be so interested in throttling it... as those probably amount to about 5-10% of the BT traffic.
Personally, I think one of them should go the other way. Blu-Ray, for example, should forsake the movie market and focus completey on drives for game consoles. If the only drive capable of playing that format was in the console, wasn't available for PCs, and would only play "glass-mastered" discs, they'ed kill off game piracy...
All of which have to produced in quantities up front, and cost money that may never be recouped if sales don't meet expectations, and when the pirates steal the game anyway.
That's why I expect to see the demise of the PC game, as developers move to consoles and proprietary hardware that is much, much more difficult to get around. Those that don't will consist more and more of "online" games, where you're going to need that SN and a valid account.
And make those accounts use vaild non-web based email addresses and that will only be activated upon receipt. Valid, non-thow-away emails, domains, and IPs give admin's a lot more control. Yes, it limits random small corrections by anonymous folk, but it also limits random acts of vandalism.
Okay, the equipment is cheap. Now, how much money do you pay in rent, for food, health insurance, car payments, put in retirement, use for clothing, furnature, appliances, child care, medicine, and so on? How many people in the band should we multiply those numbers by? What does it cost to pay someone good to run that equipment? Do album covers? Photography? Promotions? Flyers? How long does it take to get enough good material together to make an album? For that matter, how long does it take to hone your craft to the point where your music is worth paying for?
"If your work is of enough value, people will make enough small contributions to pay off."
That's called buying the CD.
And if the current system doesn't work because all you need is one jerk to upload the song to the PHP networks, what happens in the future when that same jerk does the same to your hostage?
"If it were possible to effortlessly and infinitely reproduce bread..."
That's the problem. It's not, and as such most people still need to buy it... including authors, musicians, actors, and developers. Yes, in a utopian world everything would be free. But I don't live in that world, and neither do you.
Slashdot Mirror
"There is no point in inventing the wheel again and again..."
But so MANY developers love doing it! Everyone knows that the previous developer's code is crap, and that a real pro like youself can rewrite it in half the time it would take to figure it out...
"Because it doesn't *cost* us anything (since people writing F/OSS would do it anyway)..."
Yes, but the article points towards corporate backing of OSS projects, which means that quite a few people are paid full time to work on it. Take away those jobs, and those people "might" work on OSS for free, but I guarantee you that most of them are going to be spending a lot less time on it... as the kids need to be fed and the rent needs to be paid.
"...seriously, how do they come up with the price of MS Office..."
Seriously, are business concepts like salaries, overhead, marketing, distribution, maintenance, ROI, and (gasp) profit that foreign to you? Even I can figure out how much I spent to create a product, how many I might sell, and as such how much I need to charge to break even and then (hopefully) make a profit.
"People who wouldn't steal because they believe it to be wrong (rather than because they think they might get caught) will breach copyright without a second thought."
I have to question this statement, because even the one's who think it's okay to steal off the web, will not do so from a bricks and mortar store... and that, to me, suggests that they do it: because they can, because it's relatively easy to do so, and because the odds are extremely low they'd be caught doing it. Whereas doing the same in a physical store can easily end you up in a pair of handcuffs and generally spoil your entire day.
Unfortunately, lots of people steal (even from stores) when they think they can get away with it. They may throw out rationalizations like "information wants to be free" or "corporations are evil" or "it [whatever IT is] is overpriced" or "no one gets hurt", but the truth is that they wanted it, and they took what they wanted... plain and simple.
But as you point out, the bulk of the costs come not from the upload and storage of the file, but from the servers to download and the bandwidth needed to stream those files to the hundreds, if not thousands of people who want to see it.
Why should not the people responsible for inflicting the majority of the costs also be the ones responsible for recouping them?
Again you miss the point. YT gathers movies up and makes them easy to access. It's a place to send your stuff and have it be seen. Scattering things hither-and-yon across the web makes it harder. BT makes it harder. The explosion of different formats will make it harder. Not having categorization and rating and commenting systems makes it harder and much, much less useful.
YT could use BT to distibute files and STILL need to pay for the millions of page views needed to host those other services, because it's those services that MAKE the content useful and accessible. It's not technology issues like having BT in a browser.
If a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear? If a movie lies unnoticed and unseen on a torrent server, does it really have any value?
You're missing his point. Any large content aggregation site that attracts a big audience and serves up content off it's own servers has to pay for those servers and for all of that bandwidth somehow. It's the nature of the beast.
/. out of existence. And yes, I've heard of BT, but now we have another level of complexity.
It could be with ads, or donations (doubtful), or paid placements, or by corporate sponsorship (aka Wikipedia), but SOMEONE has to pay the bills. It could be "scattered arount the 'net" as you say, but then you lose one the biggest things that makes a site like YT popular: it's gathered all of that stuff up in one place AND made it easy to access.
Not to mention that a popular video on someone's hosted server will kill THAT person's bandwidth and tend to
Members of the "everything should be free" crowd need to recognize the fact that someone, somewhere, is paying all of the bills, and that, occasionally and in all fairness, that person needs to be them...
It was about a specific group of people in a future "what if and when" type of environment. Good SciFi is ALWAYS about the people, even when it's as hard core as it gets. Even "The Cold Equations" would be nothing if you didn't care for the girl and the pilot.
Well, I have a bunch of VHS movies that no longer seem to fit into the little slot in the front of the DVD player. Those I really liked I bought again; those I didn't... well, I knew that when I bought into the new format.
Since YOU had to put your own information on Facebook your analogy would be more like YOU putting a sign on your porch discussing your own DUI.
I can see a bit of the historical parallel, but.. racist?
Start making space on the PVR??? How about buying the damn DVDs and in the process convincing the powers that be there's a market for good SciFi?
Hey, way to switch arguments. Nice move from the cheap equipment so music should be cheap line...
I totally agree, but if they have any kind of rating system system at all (voting, most downloaded, whatever) then the cream WILL rise to the top. It might be a very thin layer, but it will be there.
No BS at all. If BT was used only for the "legitimate" uses mentioned, traffic would be by cut 90%, and it wouldn't be a big enough problem for them to worry about.
"However, BitTorrent is an extremely important tool that has many uses other than what everyone assumes it is good for, namely movie piracy."
Yeah. Too bad those "important" uses only account for 5% of the total traffic.
Okay, now a while back when ISPs first started throttling traffic the big workaround was encryption. Now it seems that encryption isn't a silver bullet either. Other sources have indicated that pattern analysis would catch attempts to emulate other protocols, such as secure VPN connections.
So is the war over? Or is everyone going to focus on other ways to outsmart the system?
And if those legitimate uses were all it was used for they wouldn't be so interested in throttling it... as those probably amount to about 5-10% of the BT traffic.
Personally, I think one of them should go the other way. Blu-Ray, for example, should forsake the movie market and focus completey on drives for game consoles. If the only drive capable of playing that format was in the console, wasn't available for PCs, and would only play "glass-mastered" discs, they'ed kill off game piracy...
All of which have to produced in quantities up front, and cost money that may never be recouped if sales don't meet expectations, and when the pirates steal the game anyway.
That's why I expect to see the demise of the PC game, as developers move to consoles and proprietary hardware that is much, much more difficult to get around. Those that don't will consist more and more of "online" games, where you're going to need that SN and a valid account.
And make those accounts use vaild non-web based email addresses and that will only be activated upon receipt. Valid, non-thow-away emails, domains, and IPs give admin's a lot more control. Yes, it limits random small corrections by anonymous folk, but it also limits random acts of vandalism.
Phase 2: Add advertising.
Duh!
"We in 21 century have youtube..."
Yeah, there's just tons of professional-grade content on youtube...
Okay, the equipment is cheap. Now, how much money do you pay in rent, for food, health insurance, car payments, put in retirement, use for clothing, furnature, appliances, child care, medicine, and so on? How many people in the band should we multiply those numbers by? What does it cost to pay someone good to run that equipment? Do album covers? Photography? Promotions? Flyers? How long does it take to get enough good material together to make an album? For that matter, how long does it take to hone your craft to the point where your music is worth paying for?
"If your work is of enough value, people will make enough small contributions to pay off."
That's called buying the CD.
And if the current system doesn't work because all you need is one jerk to upload the song to the PHP networks, what happens in the future when that same jerk does the same to your hostage?
You either value the work, or you don't.
"As someone in the executive side of the music industry there's just way too much good talent ..."
And 80% of everything is crap. Station managers, editors, reviewers, and the like weed through it.
"If it were possible to effortlessly and infinitely reproduce bread..."
That's the problem. It's not, and as such most people still need to buy it... including authors, musicians, actors, and developers. Yes, in a utopian world everything would be free. But I don't live in that world, and neither do you.