When monopolistic behavior occurs, or when consumers or the development community are harmed, it scarcely matters whether it happens as a result of a centralized conspiracy or a grassroots random walk. The effect is the same.
If anything, it's scarier to realize that tens of thousands of individual people, all making micro-rational decisions for the sake of putting food on the table each week, can still make the computing world worse. It would be comforting to think that, left to themselves, people would all get along great, and it takes a brooding evil mastermind to force bad things to happen. That is not the case.
If you're looking for the computer conspiracy, get out a pocket mirror.
The first, as cvd6262 says, is whether Napster users were already predisposed to buy more music, period, so that comparing them to non-Napster-users doesn't tell you anything about Napster, but only that they were music fanatics to begin with.
The second question is whether -- even if it were somehow proved that using Napster increases your music buying appetite -- that makes it right to distribute copyrighted works without permission.
Should a songwriter or performer have the right to say: Do not reproduce my work without permission, whether it boosts my income slightly or not? Or does society have the right to say to an author or composer: We can prove that pirating your work yields you a slight material benefit, therefore your copyright is null and void?
We are indeed the the future, but not in the 21st century yet. That arrives in 6 1/2 months.
I don't blame a manned spaceflight director for ignoring closeups of Io and Ganymede and asteroids and comets and Martian plains and Venus's topography and so forth, but we should not confuse his parochial perspective with the bigger picture. We have not done everything we could have done in space in the last 30 years if we'd been spared the messy responsibility of actually surviving three decades of Earth history, but we have done a lot, and we have some amazing things to show for it.
I predict with every confidence that in the year 2201 we will be reading grumpy warnings from the former designer of the Pluto Station, accusing us of "running in place" instead of dashing out to the Kuiper Belt where we belong. It's a useful voice to hear, and you don't want to be complacent, but instead of beating ourselves up, let's just get to work on the next neat thing.
>> It makes me sick that they sued MP3.com who has done everything in their power to be legal all this time.
No sense getting sick over such a basic misunderstanding. The RIAA did not sue MP3.com over the MP3's they distribute legally, but over the separate "My MP3" service where they were streaming commercial CD's to people who could supposedly "prove" they owned them.
MP3.com did not do "everything in their power to be legal" when they thought that one up. Encoding Mariah Carey onto your servers and streaming it (without permission) to thousands of Internet users on demand is FLAGRANTLY outside the bounds of copyright protection.
Even if the validation system could have been made ironclad, it would have been argued by the RIAA that copyright law does not give you the right to stream a work to a third party -- even if that third party owns a copy of the same work.
However, since the validation system was porous as a popcorn ball, it was never really necessary to test that interesting point of law.
"My MP3" was [a] a very slippery concept even if you support the grassroots MP3 music revolution, and [b] grotesquely open to abuse, as its creators must have known and as immediate experience proved.
Remember how it worked: you put your CD into the slot, it read the TOC, computed a unique ID (a la CDDB), then connected to the central server which decided "This bloke appears to have a copy of SUPERNATURAL"... and from that point on, if you could validate yourself to My MP3 as the same user from anywhere in the world, it would STREAM that album to you, from a previously purchased and encoded copy on its central servers.
The album you originally inserted was not encoded, or ever referenced again. If it was a CD-R copy, My MP3 neither knew nor cared. If it had been handed to you by the chap at the next desk, and if after "registering" it you handed it onward down the line for the same purpose, so that everybody on an office floor registered SUPERNATURAL from one legit disc, My MP3 neither knew nor cared. Any album that anybody you knew had an original or copy of, and that you could borrow for 60 seconds, you now "owned" as far as My MP3 was concerned.
Buying one copy of every album in Christendom, encoding them all onto mass servers, then streaming them on demand for free to everyone in the world who satisfied some pathetically loosey-goosey "validation" scheme dreamed up by the streamer, is precisely the sort of violation that copyrights are asserted to prevent. My MP3 was a dead duck as soon as it reached a judge, and a lot of us knew it.
Anyway, it was all a sideshow to the real MP3 revolution, and if it damages MP3.com as a player in that revolution (no pun intended), it's their own darn fault, and someone else will take up the slack.
Trust me, they will keep making amazing little announcements three times a week until interest in the Mars Polar Explorer fiasco report dies down. NASA may not be able to control half of its space probes, but it does a masterful job of controlling the science news headlines.
Slashdot Mirror
When monopolistic behavior occurs, or when consumers or the development community are harmed, it scarcely matters whether it happens as a result of a centralized conspiracy or a grassroots random walk. The effect is the same.
If anything, it's scarier to realize that tens of thousands of individual people, all making micro-rational decisions for the sake of putting food on the table each week, can still make the computing world worse. It would be comforting to think that, left to themselves, people would all get along great, and it takes a brooding evil mastermind to force bad things to happen. That is not the case.
If you're looking for the computer conspiracy, get out a pocket mirror.
Actually there are two questions.
The first, as cvd6262 says, is whether Napster users were already predisposed to buy more music, period, so that comparing them to non-Napster-users doesn't tell you anything about Napster, but only that they were music fanatics to begin with.
The second question is whether -- even if it were somehow proved that using Napster increases your music buying appetite -- that makes it right to distribute copyrighted works without permission.
Should a songwriter or performer have the right to say: Do not reproduce my work without permission, whether it boosts my income slightly or not? Or does society have the right to say to an author or composer: We can prove that pirating your work yields you a slight material benefit, therefore your copyright is null and void?
We are indeed the the future, but not in the 21st century yet. That arrives in 6 1/2 months.
I don't blame a manned spaceflight director for ignoring closeups of Io and Ganymede and asteroids and comets and Martian plains and Venus's topography and so forth, but we should not confuse his parochial perspective with the bigger picture. We have not done everything we could have done in space in the last 30 years if we'd been spared the messy responsibility of actually surviving three decades of Earth history, but we have done a lot, and we have some amazing things to show for it.
I predict with every confidence that in the year 2201 we will be reading grumpy warnings from the former designer of the Pluto Station, accusing us of "running in place" instead of dashing out to the Kuiper Belt where we belong. It's a useful voice to hear, and you don't want to be complacent, but instead of beating ourselves up, let's just get to work on the next neat thing.
>> It makes me sick that they sued MP3.com who has done everything in their power to be legal all this time.
No sense getting sick over such a basic misunderstanding. The RIAA did not sue MP3.com over the MP3's they distribute legally, but over the separate "My MP3" service where they were streaming commercial CD's to people who could supposedly "prove" they owned them.
MP3.com did not do "everything in their power to be legal" when they thought that one up. Encoding Mariah Carey onto your servers and streaming it (without permission) to thousands of Internet users on demand is FLAGRANTLY outside the bounds of copyright protection.
Even if the validation system could have been made ironclad, it would have been argued by the RIAA that copyright law does not give you the right to stream a work to a third party -- even if that third party owns a copy of the same work.
However, since the validation system was porous as a popcorn ball, it was never really necessary to test that interesting point of law.
"My MP3" was [a] a very slippery concept even if you support the grassroots MP3 music revolution, and [b] grotesquely open to abuse, as its creators must have known and as immediate experience proved.
Remember how it worked: you put your CD into the slot, it read the TOC, computed a unique ID (a la CDDB), then connected to the central server which decided "This bloke appears to have a copy of SUPERNATURAL"... and from that point on, if you could validate yourself to My MP3 as the same user from anywhere in the world, it would STREAM that album to you, from a previously purchased and encoded copy on its central servers.
The album you originally inserted was not encoded, or ever referenced again. If it was a CD-R copy, My MP3 neither knew nor cared. If it had been handed to you by the chap at the next desk, and if after "registering" it you handed it onward down the line for the same purpose, so that everybody on an office floor registered SUPERNATURAL from one legit disc, My MP3 neither knew nor cared. Any album that anybody you knew had an original or copy of, and that you could borrow for 60 seconds, you now "owned" as far as My MP3 was concerned.
Buying one copy of every album in Christendom, encoding them all onto mass servers, then streaming them on demand for free to everyone in the world who satisfied some pathetically loosey-goosey "validation" scheme dreamed up by the streamer, is precisely the sort of violation that copyrights are asserted to prevent. My MP3 was a dead duck as soon as it reached a judge, and a lot of us knew it.
Anyway, it was all a sideshow to the real MP3 revolution, and if it damages MP3.com as a player in that revolution (no pun intended), it's their own darn fault, and someone else will take up the slack.
Yikes, I knew I should have previewed, I meant Mars Polar Lander of course.
Trust me, they will keep making amazing little announcements three times a week until interest in the Mars Polar Explorer fiasco report dies down. NASA may not be able to control half of its space probes, but it does a masterful job of controlling the science news headlines.