Hmmm. "...increased information sharing... among various law enforcement agencies, copyright owners, and Internet service providers..." Maybe they need to set up their own P2P network to handle all the information sharing. Then they'd need to police that for copyright violations, and then the database would grow, and require more effort to police. Suddenly this is a much more profitable and self-sustaining enterprise than I thought! Although how you prosecute yourself, I'm not sure...
My husband and I are actually working on this. Any suggestions are welcome. Check out http://www.emergentsound.com (or click on the link in my sig).
The main problem with $.50 songs is that the credit card companies charge a minimum flat fee per transaction, on top of the percent-of-transaction fee and the monthly account charge, so it's close to impossible to sell anything for less than a dollar or so.
Example: If you've got a $.35 flat fee plus a 2% transaction fee (and you ignore the monthly fee since you hopefully have lots of transactions to spread it out over), you're looking at having a maximum of $.12 to cover the expenses of the seller and recompense the composer and artists. Let's assume the seller can make back their expenses including bandwidth and web hosting fees, plus computer upgrades and a sysadmin to keep track of all the database issues and automation, with only $.04 per track. (This seems fairly optimistic to me unless you're a huge corporation subsidizing this sevice in some way.) That means that each person in the band will make $.02 every time a track is sold/downloaded. If we further assume that all four artists want to earn close to minimum wage (say low end of $5.00/hour, 40 hours/week), they need to sell 10000 songs per week to earn just over $10,000 a year each. That might be a little difficult for an independent musician without access to radio air time.
You're right about quality. If it was all about quality, we'd be transitioning from beta to DVD, not from VHS to DVD.
I disagree with your other points, though. People don't always want just the music or the movie. Sometimes they want liner notes, documentaries on the production process, a poster for their wall, or simply a physical presence so their small pre-literate child can let them know WHICH movie or show they want to watch with a minimum of whining. Not only that, but when we bring home a DVD my child wants desperately, he is busy for hours and carries it around with him, and practices the alphabet, and wants to learn to read so he can read all the words on the cover himself. Sitting at a computer browsing through a catalog simply doesn't provide the same experience.
And yes, go ahead and ask Blockbuster how adamant people are about keeping their own discs. Haven't you noticed the new "get a discount when you buy a movie you've rented" program? I'd say they're trying to capitalize on the people like me, who rent a movie solely to find out if they like it enough to buy it, and then buy it somewhere cheaper! However, there's currently no way to tell which people purchase for economic reasons (it's cheaper to buy than to rent over and over) or hard copy reasons (simply liking to own a physical copy). The people who buy for economic reasons would probably love VOD if it was a purchase, rather than a rental scheme. However, the people who simply like hard copy are unlikely to ever embrace something so ephemeral.
...I find two points that seem to need clarification. First, the patent is solely concerned with forms where the person using the web browser (must be a web browser interface, command line usage of "|" doesn't apply) is given a separate opportunity to ask for the data to be submitted to different search engines/stores. Dogpile might count as prior art, since if you get a lot of responses you may be asked whether you want your search query submitted to more engines, but might not, since neither the search query nor the engines it would be submitted to are displayed near the link to search additional engines. Second, the submission date is November, 1999. Make sure your prior art suggestions are before then!
The poll I saw showed that ~65% supported the war on Iraq, but ~20% believed that all the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi and ~25% believed that at least one of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. If you assume that the people who believe that at least one hijacker was Iraqi support the war and eliminate them (basing their support on incorrect information spun by the US Government), that's 20% (of the original total) supporting the war with correct information and 35% (of the original total) not supporting the war. Suddenly, it's not so popular anymore...
If you'd read the original article about the benchmarks from a few weeks ago, you'd know that the guy coming up with the tests was a Mac person. After using XP for a while, he wanted to know which one was faster at doing the tasks he routinely needed done. I absolutely agree about kudos to the MacBibble people and the reasons why people who stay with a Mac are attached to it. However, you should read the original article, and the comments responding to it (which include feedback from the original author clarifying some of his statements and expanding on his Windows and Mac experience) before assuming that negative comments are the work of people who dislike the platform/processor.
You have the option to not inload the ditto's memories if you don't want to. That's one of the things they mention under the "people sure do strange things" topic. There are people who deliberately make dittos to go out and do things with the understanding that the dittos will NEVER return for inloading! The dittos that are treated really badly are the ones that don't make it back, or that you choose not to inload if they do make it back, so there's no incentive to be nice. It says at the beginning that the hero is one of the few people that actually do inload memories from damaged/brutalized dittos, so the implication is that in the society as a whole, those memories are lost.
That's one of the points the book addresses. In general, a ditto can't make a ditto of itself. Only the real body can make dittos, which is why it's so important for the person to keep his real body in good physical condition.
Let's look at an example: You're an independent musician, trying to build a following. You play gigs and even make a little money. You are not an "amateur" but you are not signed with a major label, either. You release a CD, but you want to make one track available for publicity purposes, such as use by net radio stations. You release that track under whichever license you prefer (for example, the "attribute it to me" license) and make it available. Now you've made it clear that people who might want to publicize your work are allowed to post this track wherever they want, as long as your name is attached. Hopefully, if it's a good track, your name will get out (via the "attribute it to me" license) and your following will increase. You don't need to make special arrangements with each person who wants to play your song.
Basically, you just increased your potential sales via word-of-mouth exponentially, without anyone involved having to worry about whether or not they're breaking the law or having to contact you for explicit permission. This isn't about "the industry"; they've already designed their business models around the traditional approach to copyright. This is for artists.
Excuse me? What part of "charge more than before" don't you understand? These companies are not being given any money to develop new rates. They are being given money to implement a new way to access their existing rates. The first ("charge more than before") implies that the rates are changed. The second ("pay only for the licenses they need") is independent of the rates. NONE of the money these companies are getting is for work related to the length of the copyright term or to the rates.
Access Canada doesn't even provide licenses to copy an entire work unless it's out of print. Their primary market is libraries and other institutions that need a blanket advance permission for what we here at/. often call "fair use", such as copying less than 2% of a book for a report. They also offer licenses to copy entire books, but only for out-of-print works. Strangely enough, I often come across posts on Slashdot asking for that very service!
If you read the document, it's pretty clear what the money is going for. Each of the three companies was given a chunk to streamline access and payments. I quote:
Access Copyright:
Funding under the Electronic Copyright Fund will allow Access Copyright to provide a variety of online transactional services to clear both photocopying and digital rights. Whereas the bulk of current activity is tied to blanket photocopy licensing, it is anticipated that within the next few years the balance of clearances will tend towards transactional single-use licensing. This type of licensing can only be adequately served by a sophisticated interactive management system. It is the licensing methodology that is required by the multimedia industry.
They're going to have to develop a system for processing single-transaction requests, rather than licenses for people to make as many hard copies as they want. The money is not to develop some evil "let's charge more than before and scare people to death scheme," it's to create a system so people can pay only for the licenses they need, and so they can do it as efficiently as possible. This is the only one that seems to have the potential to be scary, because it really seems like they're being paid to develop the licensing methodology, rather than just the interactive management system.
COPIBEC:
The Department of Canadian Heritage is providing this support under the Electronic Copyright Fund, enabling COPIBEC to continue to develop the on-line system for managing copyright clearance for the entire literary sector. Once it is completed, the system will offer all users a common portal for accessing Canadian works in conformance with the rights of authors and publishers. It will also make it possible to legally license rights on all Canadian and foreign works available in the database. In addition, it will include digitized dramatic works, which for the first time will become easily available to all users of the Internet.
Basically, they're going to provide a single site to do all your licensing stuff for literary works. As far as I can tell, they're not changing anything about the current regulations of copyright in Canada. They're simply trying to expand their services to include online options. They're also going to put plays online, so you don't have to snail mail at least one hard copy and get permission to copy it if you want to put on a play. Instead, you download it. You might even have the option of reading the play before you choose it, meaning that community theatres in outlying areas (much of Canada) will have more options for plays than just those that they're familiar with.
Rights Market:
Funding under the Electronic Copyright Fund will allow RightsMarket Inc. to build a streamlined copyright licensing portal, in Canada's two official languages, that will significantly simplify the process of licensing copyrighted works and remitting payment. Initially, the Rights Clearing House (RCH) will manage musical works only. However, the portal will be built on an industry-standard framework that will be capable of handling all types of artistic, dramatic, literary and musical works in both single and multi-media forms. With the support of copyright collectives, RCH is uniquely positioned to deliver an optimal service, harnessing the power of the Internet for the simple and efficient clearing of usage rights. This service will improve copyright compliance, increase royalties to Canadian content creators, and promote the use of Canadian content throughout the world.
These guys are setting up a bilingual web site to do the same kind of thing as the other two. They want to create simple and efficient clearing of usage rights on a bilingual web site. How is this scary?
Fundamentally, all this money is going to companies whose function is to collect licensing fees. Each company represents a fairly large group of artists. The government is putting money into these companies so they can set up (bilingual!) web sites to simplify the process of getting permissions. They're not enforcing anything. All they're doing is making it easier for people who are already paying for licenses to keep doing it.
I'm sorry, I just can't take another "I'd pay $.25 to $.50 per track" argument. My husband and I are setting up a web store with a net radio and CD sales for independent musicians. The minimum fee we've been able to find for credit card transactions is $.35 each, and that's through PayPal, not a merchant account which charges an additional percentage-of-transaction fee. If they charge $.25 per track and someone buys a single track, they just paid the credit card transaction people $.10 before covering their own expenses.
The bare minimum you could realistically charge per song depends on infrastructure costs as well as transaction fees and would probably be between $.50 and $1.00 if you didn't need any kind of customer support, you had vast numbers of customers, and you didn't pay the artist anything. This estimate is just that; an estimate, since I don't know what the incremental cost of a single customer buying a single song would be. Of course, if you mandate a 5 or 10 song minimum purchase, the transaction fees go down as a proportion of the total, so you can afford to charge less per song. You may even be able to get your costs down to a point where the artist is actually making a small amount of money from each song.
I guess I'm just asking you not to assume that your idea of a "reasonable" cost per song translates in any way to the actual costs incurred in providing the service, much less to any compensation for the artist in question.
You forget; these librarians have so little experience with software, they're relying on Net Nanny! I'd say three months is admirable, especially given that this is almost certainly something a librarian worked on in addition to his/her normal duties.
Sexual maturity doesn't equate to physical maturity. A girl may have passed puberty at 11 or 12, but she won't be physically mature (and capable of having healthy babies while staying healthy herself without lots of additional attention to nutrition during the pregnancy) until she's 17 or 18. Emotional maturity doesn't necessarily follow from either sexual or physical maturity. Not to mention that you can't set a single age limit on sexual maturity, as boys and girls mature differently.
I do agree that desiring teenagers (when they are physically mature and look just like adults!) is a completely different thing from "real" pedophilia. However, we, as a society, have determined (or have had it determined for us) that we want even sexual relations between consenting sexually mature teenagers considered with the same gravity as pedophilia. I feel that this is simply the most conservative approach. Pedophilia towards children (who are still physically children) is terrible enough that we want to be as sure as possible that even the "late bloomers" who may not hit puberty until 17 have protection under the law. 18 is a convenient age for these thresholds because physical maturity can be presumed. That said, I think it's ridiculous to make the legal age for drinking alcohol 21.
The major problem with the law as it stands is that it places consenting mature teenagers in the same category as molested children. Parents who believe, as you seem to, that their children should be given the opportunity to make choices and take responsibility BEFORE they become adults will not prosecute consenting mature teenagers. However, parents who truly believe their sweet, angelic little 17 year old baby was molested by that evil, sweaty, stubbly, drunk 18 year old in the black leather jacket will prosecute, even if she initiated the relationship. I'm sure the girl's parents are happy with that. The boy's parents probably are not, and that is where the problem lies.
On a side note, to those who feel that the bible is a valid reason for society's interference, the bible may be a valid reason for Christians. However, in the States, those of other faiths should not be bound by someone else's religious precepts. Therefore the bible should not be used as the sole support for civil or criminal law.
I just checked out ciphertrust on Dogpile. Guess what? They're an email security company that makes spam filters, based in Atlanta! Looks like this might be for real after all...
"I'm of the opinion that we have a very long way to go till we achieve what was aimed at when the IQ test was developed."
Actually, the IQ test was developed simply to identify people likely to have difficulty in school, and as far as I can remember, it fulfilled that goal. As originally designed, it was not intended to test "intelligence" as such.
Slashdot Mirror
Or very concerned...
Hmmm. "...increased information sharing ... among various law enforcement agencies, copyright owners, and Internet service providers ..." Maybe they need to set up their own P2P network to handle all the information sharing. Then they'd need to police that for copyright violations, and then the database would grow, and require more effort to police. Suddenly this is a much more profitable and self-sustaining enterprise than I thought! Although how you prosecute yourself, I'm not sure...
The main problem with $.50 songs is that the credit card companies charge a minimum flat fee per transaction, on top of the percent-of-transaction fee and the monthly account charge, so it's close to impossible to sell anything for less than a dollar or so.
Example: If you've got a $.35 flat fee plus a 2% transaction fee (and you ignore the monthly fee since you hopefully have lots of transactions to spread it out over), you're looking at having a maximum of $.12 to cover the expenses of the seller and recompense the composer and artists. Let's assume the seller can make back their expenses including bandwidth and web hosting fees, plus computer upgrades and a sysadmin to keep track of all the database issues and automation, with only $.04 per track. (This seems fairly optimistic to me unless you're a huge corporation subsidizing this sevice in some way.) That means that each person in the band will make $.02 every time a track is sold/downloaded. If we further assume that all four artists want to earn close to minimum wage (say low end of $5.00/hour, 40 hours/week), they need to sell 10000 songs per week to earn just over $10,000 a year each. That might be a little difficult for an independent musician without access to radio air time.
I disagree with your other points, though. People don't always want just the music or the movie. Sometimes they want liner notes, documentaries on the production process, a poster for their wall, or simply a physical presence so their small pre-literate child can let them know WHICH movie or show they want to watch with a minimum of whining. Not only that, but when we bring home a DVD my child wants desperately, he is busy for hours and carries it around with him, and practices the alphabet, and wants to learn to read so he can read all the words on the cover himself. Sitting at a computer browsing through a catalog simply doesn't provide the same experience.
And yes, go ahead and ask Blockbuster how adamant people are about keeping their own discs. Haven't you noticed the new "get a discount when you buy a movie you've rented" program? I'd say they're trying to capitalize on the people like me, who rent a movie solely to find out if they like it enough to buy it, and then buy it somewhere cheaper! However, there's currently no way to tell which people purchase for economic reasons (it's cheaper to buy than to rent over and over) or hard copy reasons (simply liking to own a physical copy). The people who buy for economic reasons would probably love VOD if it was a purchase, rather than a rental scheme. However, the people who simply like hard copy are unlikely to ever embrace something so ephemeral.
...I find two points that seem to need clarification. First, the patent is solely concerned with forms where the person using the web browser (must be a web browser interface, command line usage of "|" doesn't apply) is given a separate opportunity to ask for the data to be submitted to different search engines/stores. Dogpile might count as prior art, since if you get a lot of responses you may be asked whether you want your search query submitted to more engines, but might not, since neither the search query nor the engines it would be submitted to are displayed near the link to search additional engines. Second, the submission date is November, 1999. Make sure your prior art suggestions are before then!
The poll I saw showed that ~65% supported the war on Iraq, but ~20% believed that all the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi and ~25% believed that at least one of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. If you assume that the people who believe that at least one hijacker was Iraqi support the war and eliminate them (basing their support on incorrect information spun by the US Government), that's 20% (of the original total) supporting the war with correct information and 35% (of the original total) not supporting the war. Suddenly, it's not so popular anymore...
If you'd read the original article about the benchmarks from a few weeks ago, you'd know that the guy coming up with the tests was a Mac person. After using XP for a while, he wanted to know which one was faster at doing the tasks he routinely needed done. I absolutely agree about kudos to the MacBibble people and the reasons why people who stay with a Mac are attached to it. However, you should read the original article, and the comments responding to it (which include feedback from the original author clarifying some of his statements and expanding on his Windows and Mac experience) before assuming that negative comments are the work of people who dislike the platform/processor.
You have the option to not inload the ditto's memories if you don't want to. That's one of the things they mention under the "people sure do strange things" topic. There are people who deliberately make dittos to go out and do things with the understanding that the dittos will NEVER return for inloading! The dittos that are treated really badly are the ones that don't make it back, or that you choose not to inload if they do make it back, so there's no incentive to be nice. It says at the beginning that the hero is one of the few people that actually do inload memories from damaged/brutalized dittos, so the implication is that in the society as a whole, those memories are lost.
That's one of the points the book addresses. In general, a ditto can't make a ditto of itself. Only the real body can make dittos, which is why it's so important for the person to keep his real body in good physical condition.
Basically, you just increased your potential sales via word-of-mouth exponentially, without anyone involved having to worry about whether or not they're breaking the law or having to contact you for explicit permission. This isn't about "the industry"; they've already designed their business models around the traditional approach to copyright. This is for artists.
I believe the Lego robots are $200, not $20...
Access Canada doesn't even provide licenses to copy an entire work unless it's out of print. Their primary market is libraries and other institutions that need a blanket advance permission for what we here at /. often call "fair use", such as copying less than 2% of a book for a report. They also offer licenses to copy entire books, but only for out-of-print works. Strangely enough, I often come across posts on Slashdot asking for that very service!
Access Copyright:
Funding under the Electronic Copyright Fund will allow Access Copyright to provide a variety of online transactional services to clear both photocopying and digital rights. Whereas the bulk of current activity is tied to blanket photocopy licensing, it is anticipated that within the next few years the balance of clearances will tend towards transactional single-use licensing. This type of licensing can only be adequately served by a sophisticated interactive management system. It is the licensing methodology that is required by the multimedia industry.
They're going to have to develop a system for processing single-transaction requests, rather than licenses for people to make as many hard copies as they want. The money is not to develop some evil "let's charge more than before and scare people to death scheme," it's to create a system so people can pay only for the licenses they need, and so they can do it as efficiently as possible. This is the only one that seems to have the potential to be scary, because it really seems like they're being paid to develop the licensing methodology, rather than just the interactive management system.
COPIBEC:
The Department of Canadian Heritage is providing this support under the Electronic Copyright Fund, enabling COPIBEC to continue to develop the on-line system for managing copyright clearance for the entire literary sector. Once it is completed, the system will offer all users a common portal for accessing Canadian works in conformance with the rights of authors and publishers. It will also make it possible to legally license rights on all Canadian and foreign works available in the database. In addition, it will include digitized dramatic works, which for the first time will become easily available to all users of the Internet.
Basically, they're going to provide a single site to do all your licensing stuff for literary works. As far as I can tell, they're not changing anything about the current regulations of copyright in Canada. They're simply trying to expand their services to include online options. They're also going to put plays online, so you don't have to snail mail at least one hard copy and get permission to copy it if you want to put on a play. Instead, you download it. You might even have the option of reading the play before you choose it, meaning that community theatres in outlying areas (much of Canada) will have more options for plays than just those that they're familiar with.
Rights Market:
Funding under the Electronic Copyright Fund will allow RightsMarket Inc. to build a streamlined copyright licensing portal, in Canada's two official languages, that will significantly simplify the process of licensing copyrighted works and remitting payment. Initially, the Rights Clearing House (RCH) will manage musical works only. However, the portal will be built on an industry-standard framework that will be capable of handling all types of artistic, dramatic, literary and musical works in both single and multi-media forms. With the support of copyright collectives, RCH is uniquely positioned to deliver an optimal service, harnessing the power of the Internet for the simple and efficient clearing of usage rights. This service will improve copyright compliance, increase royalties to Canadian content creators, and promote the use of Canadian content throughout the world.
These guys are setting up a bilingual web site to do the same kind of thing as the other two. They want to create simple and efficient clearing of usage rights on a bilingual web site. How is this scary?
Fundamentally, all this money is going to companies whose function is to collect licensing fees. Each company represents a fairly large group of artists. The government is putting money into these companies so they can set up (bilingual!) web sites to simplify the process of getting permissions. They're not enforcing anything. All they're doing is making it easier for people who are already paying for licenses to keep doing it.
The bare minimum you could realistically charge per song depends on infrastructure costs as well as transaction fees and would probably be between $.50 and $1.00 if you didn't need any kind of customer support, you had vast numbers of customers, and you didn't pay the artist anything. This estimate is just that; an estimate, since I don't know what the incremental cost of a single customer buying a single song would be. Of course, if you mandate a 5 or 10 song minimum purchase, the transaction fees go down as a proportion of the total, so you can afford to charge less per song. You may even be able to get your costs down to a point where the artist is actually making a small amount of money from each song.
I guess I'm just asking you not to assume that your idea of a "reasonable" cost per song translates in any way to the actual costs incurred in providing the service, much less to any compensation for the artist in question.
There was a large box? I don't have any blocking mechanisms at all (except mental blocks).
You forget; these librarians have so little experience with software, they're relying on Net Nanny! I'd say three months is admirable, especially given that this is almost certainly something a librarian worked on in addition to his/her normal duties.
Sexual maturity doesn't equate to physical maturity. A girl may have passed puberty at 11 or 12, but she won't be physically mature (and capable of having healthy babies while staying healthy herself without lots of additional attention to nutrition during the pregnancy) until she's 17 or 18. Emotional maturity doesn't necessarily follow from either sexual or physical maturity. Not to mention that you can't set a single age limit on sexual maturity, as boys and girls mature differently. I do agree that desiring teenagers (when they are physically mature and look just like adults!) is a completely different thing from "real" pedophilia. However, we, as a society, have determined (or have had it determined for us) that we want even sexual relations between consenting sexually mature teenagers considered with the same gravity as pedophilia. I feel that this is simply the most conservative approach. Pedophilia towards children (who are still physically children) is terrible enough that we want to be as sure as possible that even the "late bloomers" who may not hit puberty until 17 have protection under the law. 18 is a convenient age for these thresholds because physical maturity can be presumed. That said, I think it's ridiculous to make the legal age for drinking alcohol 21. The major problem with the law as it stands is that it places consenting mature teenagers in the same category as molested children. Parents who believe, as you seem to, that their children should be given the opportunity to make choices and take responsibility BEFORE they become adults will not prosecute consenting mature teenagers. However, parents who truly believe their sweet, angelic little 17 year old baby was molested by that evil, sweaty, stubbly, drunk 18 year old in the black leather jacket will prosecute, even if she initiated the relationship. I'm sure the girl's parents are happy with that. The boy's parents probably are not, and that is where the problem lies. On a side note, to those who feel that the bible is a valid reason for society's interference, the bible may be a valid reason for Christians. However, in the States, those of other faiths should not be bound by someone else's religious precepts. Therefore the bible should not be used as the sole support for civil or criminal law.
I just checked out ciphertrust on Dogpile. Guess what? They're an email security company that makes spam filters, based in Atlanta! Looks like this might be for real after all...
"I'm of the opinion that we have a very long way to go till we achieve what was aimed at when the IQ test was developed."
Actually, the IQ test was developed simply to identify people likely to have difficulty in school, and as far as I can remember, it fulfilled that goal. As originally designed, it was not intended to test "intelligence" as such.