Am I missing something? Record labels profit from selling music, regardless of the medium they sell it on. So if downloads become more popular than CDs, shouldn't they just make less CDs?
If IP isn't respected, it won't be profittable for corporations to spend multi-millions discovering new drugs
I'd like to quote a bit of page 99 of Naomi Klein's No Logo if I may (hopefully I may, otherwise I guess I'll be sued next):
Dr. Dong's study compared the effectiveness of Boots' thyroid drug, Synthroid, with a generic competitor... The two drugs were bio-equivalent, a fact that represented a potential saving of $365 million a year for the eight million Americans who were taking the brand-name drug... Boots successfully halted publication of the article.
And on the next page:
[In a similar case] researchers found that [a different] drug being tested might actually be harmful to patients... When Olivieri found evidence that, in some cases, the drug might have life-threatening side effects, she wanted to warn the patients participating in the trial and to alert other doctors in her field. Apotex pulled the plug on the study and threatened to sue Olivieri if she went public.
Maybe corporations don't have public interests at heart?
One of the most interesting points might be how DRM is fundamentally incompatible with free software - if you, the user, are free to view your software's source code and modify it, you are inherently able to disable or otherwise modify the DRM. Then again, this may be a bit much for anyone who isn't already familiar with the concept of software that gives the user the freedoms that geeks always wanted to encourage.
I mean, on the one hand I can see how some people - and especially corporations - want to stop others copying their hard work freely, but on the other hand, is it worth giving up free software to protect the rights of authors, musicians and directors?
If everyone was allowed to run their own sim, sl would have now many times more land:). But there would have to be some organisation responsible for sim placement.
Yes, that sounds like one of the major hurdles. How about something like everyone being able to put their virtual land in a big grid that covers the whole landscape, as long as the four landowners adjacent to them agree to this? Then everyone notes their adjacent four computers' IP addresses, and it should be almost seamless for an avatar to move from one person's land/server to another person's, all without anyone having to pay for the right to use a server because they run their own.
Of course, you'd still need someone to write a free (libre) server in the first place, and the open protocol spec complete with RFC. But I'm sure all of this is possible, just very hard and time consuming to set up in the first place.
Yes, and probably it will be named something like Second Life. Oh wait...
Second Life is good, but it's not quite decentralised - one company has the monopoly on renting land to users. That's the equivalent of the W3C renting web sites to anyone who wants to write pages on one.
The Metaverse, if anyone manages to create one that is truly decentralised, will co-exist with the web. If it's going to replace anything, it's going to replace IRC - a fun place to wander around aimlessly and meet new people, or to form a small group of friends you have things in common with regardless of your physical location. The web is a resource for finding or publishing information. The Metaverse is a communications tool for hanging out with friends and meeting new people.
To be fair the comparison between a 50 year old book and a 50 year old text document is hardly accurate.
It's impossible to say whether a popular modern format such as PDFs will seem as obsolete in another 50 years or not. Only time will tell. Still, technology's moving at a faster rate now than it was then...
[Sony] messed up Audio CD-ROMs for cripes sake, now we want them to control a book format too?
In all fairness, they also helped Philips invent the audio CD format in the first place, which includes the bit about it not having any DRM. It's probably safe to say that they're such a large corporation (making blank CDs, CD-ROM burning drives, CD players, pre-recorded albums, and so on) that they sometimes conflict with themselves.
That's the only advantage you can think of for traditional books? They also have no DRM; they have to be treated pretty badly before they stop working; they contain both the data and everything necessary to read it.
I have a fifty odd year old book I bought second hand recently. It has one or two holes in it where it got torn up pretty badly. However, I can still read it. I probably couldn't say the same thing about a fifty year old computer text file, as it would pre-date ASCII and likely be written on some old format like a punch card, so I'd probably need to buy some specialist hardware like a punch card reader, then write a program to translate the data into a modern format.
Of course, digitised books have advantages too, such as not taking up space, and being easily searchable. It seems like an ideal format for non-fiction reference books such as encyclopedias and guides, but not very good for fiction.
Here's the question though. Is fiction really ment to be interactive? Or is fiction the journey the author leads you on?
Maybe it can be either. Some fiction leads you on a set path. Some interactive fiction leads you on that same set path, but makes it appear that you can change it when in reality you can't (so you can discover things in any order you like, and stray beyond the path a bit before being gently nudged back on it later on without realising). Some interactive fiction has multiple endings. Some regular fiction has multiple endings too. (Remember the films Clue or Wayne's World?)
Maybe there's no "right way" of telling a story. Maybe they're all interesting possibilities that should be explored more.
Maybe for movies the studios are demanding only the paying user can view on their iPod - so movie downloads will be tied to a user account on each device.
That seeems unlikely. They're already tied to an iTunes account (the kind that can be used on up to five computers and an unlimited number of iPods), so why also tie them to an OS X user account? I'm guessing that since Apple manage the former on their servers, it's a lot easier for them to keep track of what you're up to.
If the obvious fix is to exclude special characters from password fields, then why allow them by default to begin with?
Because that won't stop a wily hacker from using a tool such as curl to use those special characters as if they'd entered them in the password field. This has to be fixed at the server end, not the client end.
The first three Star Wars were great, not because of the special effects (which were good at the time) but because of the people.
Really? The people weren't acting that well in those films, and I can't blame them seeing as the only direction they ever heard from Geroge Lucas was "faster, more intense!" I suspect the reason those films were so popular was that they combined his ability to show people a foreign world (like he did in THX-1138) with a retelling of the monomyth (as explained in Joseph Campbell's book The Hero With a Thousand Faces).
Me thinks you were part of the problem, Georgie...how much did the last three of your films cost? Yeah.
It's hard to tell this early, after all he's only released them once so far. Maybe after the 3D versions you'll be able to get a good estimate of how much they cost to make overall.
Once it becomes easy to distribute movies, why do you need the studios again?
Um, to make the movies, perhaps? With some imagination, some guide books and a lot of hard work and practice, anyone can write a novel or produce an album, but making a film requires a whole group of people who all know what they're doing, plus expensive equipment to do it with. Maybe eventually films will mostly be made by amateur groups of people, but it'll be a while after books and albums end up that way.
No matter what studios think, a digital download does not have as much intrinsic value as a packaged Disc.
I'm sure the studios realise this, the same way they realise DVDs look more "filmey" if you put them in a box the same height as a VHS tape, and the same way they realise someone won't pay twice as much for two films on a single disc. It's not about the bitrate, or how much will fit into a given physical space, it's about psychology.
Many of the studios don't want to offer most of their movies for download at all.
I know you're right, but could someone please explain to me why? On the one hand, you've got DVDs, which you need to physically make hundreds of thousands of copies of, then ship them to stores, hope none of them break in the post, hope none of them get sent back because they weren't bought, and hope no one circumvents the easy-to-bypass encryption of them.
On the other hand, there's iTunes downloads, with slightly harder to break encryption (meaning most people are too lazy to bother), zero cost to produce any copies, zero cost to ship any copies, absolutely no copies breaking in the post, and if only five people end up buying the film, then only five copies are made, with nothing left over that has to be sold at embarrassingly cheap prices because no one wants to buy it.
Plus when the standard definition downloads become obsolete, and people buy them all over again at a slightly better resolution, they won't be able to sell the old copies they bought second hand!
So why are movie studios against iTunes downloads, besides WalMart's threats? I'm sure there's a reason, but I can't work it out.
Are [Apple's] machines not "sexy alternatives to the big, grey box?"
I'm guessing this whole campaign is an attempt to stop Apple getting more of the PC market share. From what I heard, Jonathan Ive designed the iMac a long time ago, but market research showed that no one would actually buy it. Steve Jobs came back and was the only person who didn't believe the market research, so gave the iMac the go-ahead. Lots of people bought it, and companies started to realise that some people do actually care about the design of products they buy, even computers.
The fact that they'll police all sites on there to ensure compliance is a fantastic idea, I reckon.
Yeah, and I'd also be all in favour of a database linking to sites (DMOZ style) that comply with HTML standards enough to work with pretty much any browser. Far too many sites don't work properly in text mode, or using speech synthesis, which is a real shame for anyone visually impaired. Hell, far too many sites don't work properly on an Apple Mac or anything else that's not Windows running Internet Explorer. A way to easily find sites that are standards compliant and therefore work reasonably well on all browsers would be great.
As far as being mobile specific, however... I can see the point if the pages will contain less information, and be short and to the point, so that readers won't have to scroll down dozens of pages to just read the news or whatever information it is they're after. Otherwise, I don't like the idea of a site tailor made to be viewed on one particular device.
This goes against the whole point of separating style and content - the exact same web page, using a handful of CSS files that are each tailored to suit a particular medium, should look equally good on a computer monitor, a TV set, a projector or a mobile phone. Hopefully as people use percentages and ems more and pixels less, we should see a trend towards this ideal.
Saying "this site is for mobile phones, that one is for desktop computers," completely ignores all of this, telling people to go to a site designed for just their medium.
I'm only 25, and I remember when all t'web were light grey... technology's evolving exponentially faster, so the next generation will sound like wild eyed old coots when they're even younger. Maybe 15 year olds will end up waxing nostalgic to 12 year olds about the good old days.
Vinyl covers are big and the art is prominently displayed.
We're probably getting close to the point where the metadata in music downloads will feature higher resolution artwork than printed CDs. Somehow, I can't imagine people will complain any less, though.
The 7-inch vinyls are singles. And it just goes to show that nothing has changed. People want to buy songs individually for $1 or $2 rather than paying $15 or $20 for a whole album with only one or two songs they like.
I'm assuming Radiohead will boycott this new fangled 7" vinyl format, due to their sworn oath to the sacred album.
It seems to me that the return to records really reflects the lack of excitement of redbook audio CDs as well as the onslaught of silly new disc-based media.
It is possible people are harking back to the olden days when music they bought would actually play on their hi-fi. Redbook CDs are also flawless in this respect, but I suspect the average person on the street doesn't realise that DRM encumbered CDs aren't actually real CDs at all, and therefore the redbook CD format isn't actually to blame at all. (This is the reason I like the idea that Philips won't let any DRM encumbered CD have the official Compact Disc logo. Sadly, I doubt anyone actually looks for it.)
Maybe everyone has their own cutoff point of which was the last "good" format that they want to stick to.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I missing something? Record labels profit from selling music, regardless of the medium they sell it on. So if downloads become more popular than CDs, shouldn't they just make less CDs?
If IP isn't respected, it won't be profittable for corporations to spend multi-millions discovering new drugs
I'd like to quote a bit of page 99 of Naomi Klein's No Logo if I may (hopefully I may, otherwise I guess I'll be sued next):
And on the next page:
Maybe corporations don't have public interests at heart?
One of the most interesting points might be how DRM is fundamentally incompatible with free software - if you, the user, are free to view your software's source code and modify it, you are inherently able to disable or otherwise modify the DRM. Then again, this may be a bit much for anyone who isn't already familiar with the concept of software that gives the user the freedoms that geeks always wanted to encourage.
I mean, on the one hand I can see how some people - and especially corporations - want to stop others copying their hard work freely, but on the other hand, is it worth giving up free software to protect the rights of authors, musicians and directors?
If everyone was allowed to run their own sim, sl would have now many times more land :). But there would have to be some organisation responsible for sim placement.
Yes, that sounds like one of the major hurdles. How about something like everyone being able to put their virtual land in a big grid that covers the whole landscape, as long as the four landowners adjacent to them agree to this? Then everyone notes their adjacent four computers' IP addresses, and it should be almost seamless for an avatar to move from one person's land/server to another person's, all without anyone having to pay for the right to use a server because they run their own.
Of course, you'd still need someone to write a free (libre) server in the first place, and the open protocol spec complete with RFC. But I'm sure all of this is possible, just very hard and time consuming to set up in the first place.
Yes, and probably it will be named something like Second Life. Oh wait...
Second Life is good, but it's not quite decentralised - one company has the monopoly on renting land to users. That's the equivalent of the W3C renting web sites to anyone who wants to write pages on one.
The Metaverse, if anyone manages to create one that is truly decentralised, will co-exist with the web. If it's going to replace anything, it's going to replace IRC - a fun place to wander around aimlessly and meet new people, or to form a small group of friends you have things in common with regardless of your physical location. The web is a resource for finding or publishing information. The Metaverse is a communications tool for hanging out with friends and meeting new people.
It seems to me that by putting the files up, they are giving permission to distribute them. Hence, no copyright infringement occurs.
They'd be really missing the point if they put adverts under a copyright protecting license. Then again, I wouldn't put it past them.
To be fair the comparison between a 50 year old book and a 50 year old text document is hardly accurate.
It's impossible to say whether a popular modern format such as PDFs will seem as obsolete in another 50 years or not. Only time will tell. Still, technology's moving at a faster rate now than it was then...
[Sony] messed up Audio CD-ROMs for cripes sake, now we want them to control a book format too?
In all fairness, they also helped Philips invent the audio CD format in the first place, which includes the bit about it not having any DRM. It's probably safe to say that they're such a large corporation (making blank CDs, CD-ROM burning drives, CD players, pre-recorded albums, and so on) that they sometimes conflict with themselves.
pulp books do not need electricity
That's the only advantage you can think of for traditional books? They also have no DRM; they have to be treated pretty badly before they stop working; they contain both the data and everything necessary to read it.
I have a fifty odd year old book I bought second hand recently. It has one or two holes in it where it got torn up pretty badly. However, I can still read it. I probably couldn't say the same thing about a fifty year old computer text file, as it would pre-date ASCII and likely be written on some old format like a punch card, so I'd probably need to buy some specialist hardware like a punch card reader, then write a program to translate the data into a modern format.
Of course, digitised books have advantages too, such as not taking up space, and being easily searchable. It seems like an ideal format for non-fiction reference books such as encyclopedias and guides, but not very good for fiction.
Here's the question though. Is fiction really ment to be interactive? Or is fiction the journey the author leads you on?
Maybe it can be either. Some fiction leads you on a set path. Some interactive fiction leads you on that same set path, but makes it appear that you can change it when in reality you can't (so you can discover things in any order you like, and stray beyond the path a bit before being gently nudged back on it later on without realising). Some interactive fiction has multiple endings. Some regular fiction has multiple endings too. (Remember the films Clue or Wayne's World?)
Maybe there's no "right way" of telling a story. Maybe they're all interesting possibilities that should be explored more.
Maybe for movies the studios are demanding only the paying user can view on their iPod - so movie downloads will be tied to a user account on each device.
That seeems unlikely. They're already tied to an iTunes account (the kind that can be used on up to five computers and an unlimited number of iPods), so why also tie them to an OS X user account? I'm guessing that since Apple manage the former on their servers, it's a lot easier for them to keep track of what you're up to.
If the obvious fix is to exclude special characters from password fields, then why allow them by default to begin with?
Because that won't stop a wily hacker from using a tool such as curl to use those special characters as if they'd entered them in the password field. This has to be fixed at the server end, not the client end.
The first three Star Wars were great, not because of the special effects (which were good at the time) but because of the people.
Really? The people weren't acting that well in those films, and I can't blame them seeing as the only direction they ever heard from Geroge Lucas was "faster, more intense!" I suspect the reason those films were so popular was that they combined his ability to show people a foreign world (like he did in THX-1138) with a retelling of the monomyth (as explained in Joseph Campbell's book The Hero With a Thousand Faces).
Me thinks you were part of the problem, Georgie...how much did the last three of your films cost? Yeah.
It's hard to tell this early, after all he's only released them once so far. Maybe after the 3D versions you'll be able to get a good estimate of how much they cost to make overall.
Once it becomes easy to distribute movies, why do you need the studios again?
Um, to make the movies, perhaps? With some imagination, some guide books and a lot of hard work and practice, anyone can write a novel or produce an album, but making a film requires a whole group of people who all know what they're doing, plus expensive equipment to do it with. Maybe eventually films will mostly be made by amateur groups of people, but it'll be a while after books and albums end up that way.
No matter what studios think, a digital download does not have as much intrinsic value as a packaged Disc.
I'm sure the studios realise this, the same way they realise DVDs look more "filmey" if you put them in a box the same height as a VHS tape, and the same way they realise someone won't pay twice as much for two films on a single disc. It's not about the bitrate, or how much will fit into a given physical space, it's about psychology.
Many of the studios don't want to offer most of their movies for download at all.
I know you're right, but could someone please explain to me why? On the one hand, you've got DVDs, which you need to physically make hundreds of thousands of copies of, then ship them to stores, hope none of them break in the post, hope none of them get sent back because they weren't bought, and hope no one circumvents the easy-to-bypass encryption of them.
On the other hand, there's iTunes downloads, with slightly harder to break encryption (meaning most people are too lazy to bother), zero cost to produce any copies, zero cost to ship any copies, absolutely no copies breaking in the post, and if only five people end up buying the film, then only five copies are made, with nothing left over that has to be sold at embarrassingly cheap prices because no one wants to buy it.
Plus when the standard definition downloads become obsolete, and people buy them all over again at a slightly better resolution, they won't be able to sell the old copies they bought second hand!
So why are movie studios against iTunes downloads, besides WalMart's threats? I'm sure there's a reason, but I can't work it out.
Are [Apple's] machines not "sexy alternatives to the big, grey box?"
I'm guessing this whole campaign is an attempt to stop Apple getting more of the PC market share. From what I heard, Jonathan Ive designed the iMac a long time ago, but market research showed that no one would actually buy it. Steve Jobs came back and was the only person who didn't believe the market research, so gave the iMac the go-ahead. Lots of people bought it, and companies started to realise that some people do actually care about the design of products they buy, even computers.
The fact that they'll police all sites on there to ensure compliance is a fantastic idea, I reckon.
Yeah, and I'd also be all in favour of a database linking to sites (DMOZ style) that comply with HTML standards enough to work with pretty much any browser. Far too many sites don't work properly in text mode, or using speech synthesis, which is a real shame for anyone visually impaired. Hell, far too many sites don't work properly on an Apple Mac or anything else that's not Windows running Internet Explorer. A way to easily find sites that are standards compliant and therefore work reasonably well on all browsers would be great.
As far as being mobile specific, however... I can see the point if the pages will contain less information, and be short and to the point, so that readers won't have to scroll down dozens of pages to just read the news or whatever information it is they're after. Otherwise, I don't like the idea of a site tailor made to be viewed on one particular device.
This goes against the whole point of separating style and content - the exact same web page, using a handful of CSS files that are each tailored to suit a particular medium, should look equally good on a computer monitor, a TV set, a projector or a mobile phone. Hopefully as people use percentages and ems more and pixels less, we should see a trend towards this ideal.
Saying "this site is for mobile phones, that one is for desktop computers," completely ignores all of this, telling people to go to a site designed for just their medium.
I am not a wild eyed old coot. I'm 28 damnit!
I'm only 25, and I remember when all t'web were light grey... technology's evolving exponentially faster, so the next generation will sound like wild eyed old coots when they're even younger. Maybe 15 year olds will end up waxing nostalgic to 12 year olds about the good old days.
Vinyl covers are big and the art is prominently displayed.
We're probably getting close to the point where the metadata in music downloads will feature higher resolution artwork than printed CDs. Somehow, I can't imagine people will complain any less, though.
The 7-inch vinyls are singles. And it just goes to show that nothing has changed. People want to buy songs individually for $1 or $2 rather than paying $15 or $20 for a whole album with only one or two songs they like.
I'm assuming Radiohead will boycott this new fangled 7" vinyl format, due to their sworn oath to the sacred album.
It seems to me that the return to records really reflects the lack of excitement of redbook audio CDs as well as the onslaught of silly new disc-based media.
It is possible people are harking back to the olden days when music they bought would actually play on their hi-fi. Redbook CDs are also flawless in this respect, but I suspect the average person on the street doesn't realise that DRM encumbered CDs aren't actually real CDs at all, and therefore the redbook CD format isn't actually to blame at all. (This is the reason I like the idea that Philips won't let any DRM encumbered CD have the official Compact Disc logo. Sadly, I doubt anyone actually looks for it.)
Maybe everyone has their own cutoff point of which was the last "good" format that they want to stick to.