Actually, classical music, in its native time period, was business as well. Most composers (Mozart, Haydn, etc.) were writing their works on commission as spec'ed by a wealthy patron. The composers and musicians whose works have survived to the present had the business power of Madonna, Elvis and the Beatles to dictate more of their endeavors. The composers we rarely heard of were often the Britney Spears of their day, writing music that was fashionable for one season and making as much money as they could during their 15 minutes of fame.
The main thing that's changed from those days is the democratization of the consumer base (you don't have to hire your own chamber orchestra to get good music), and the increased power of the middle-men.
The real problem is the power of corporate america, how they can bully through legal system, how they can bully politicians and buy laws in their favor, how it takes a superhuman effort from the populace to defeat such lawsuits or stop such laws from being passed.
Bingo. When I was in Econ 101, I was taught that the concept of "limited liability" for corporations was so powerful compared with other business models, that the government attempted to counterbalance it by "double taxation". And guess what's happened to the dividend and capital gains taxes over the past few years?
The beauty of the boycott is that it will play into the RIAA and MPAAs paranoia about piracy to the point that they will do something foolish, like actually frying people's computers. Mistakes will be made and the boycott will grow as more F*ups occur.
"The goal of the RIAA is to scare people..." This is true in more ways than even you mention. The lawsuits not only intimidate anybody who remotely resembles a file sharer, they also serve as sort of a negative marketing that "you have to buy our product". It's the same way that insurers try to scare you into buying insurance by saying "will your family be safe after you die" and coerce you into buying insurance by having states require you to have liability insurance to run a business or drive a car.
The fact is, you don't HAVE to buy their product, and you don't HAVE to pirate music. Hearing someone say "oh I'm going to put up a music site and stand up to the bastards" is just music (so to speak) to their ears. 9 times out of 10, they'll find a way to intimidate you by threatening your income and your social relationships, in addition to the usual "lawyers, guns and money" that make up our legal system.
The only way to scare them back is to 1) don't give them a handle to harass you by pirating music, and 2) don't buy a damn thing of theirs. This basically means no Hollywood media whatsoever: no movies, no CDs, no DVDs, no satellite radio or television, no cable, no books, no software or ANYthing that they produce.
Now, obviously only the Amish are going to be able to adhere to this policy, so the next best thing is to target the particular segment that offends you. This means eliminate all commercial music from your entertainment budget: no CDs, and no satellite radio or commercial music stations (they pay royalties on their music), especially if you are logged by a ratings agency. That still leaves NPR or other talk/community radio stations, any LEGAL music you can download, any CDs you already own, plus any local bar concerts you want to hear. You can survive a boycott without playing their game. We DO have the power to scare them as badly as they scare the students. In fact they are already scared by their declining sales, which is why they're getting so coercive. They have a history of this:
I doubt it. The RIAA doesn't own the copyright, the individual recording company/media comglomerate that contributes a few million a year to the RIAA owns the copyright. and the RIAA probably has something like a shrink wrap license saying you can't redistribute.
The RIAA is basically just like the EFF, but in reverse: they take money from contributors and then they use the court system to pursue their contributors interest.
If you write code in your copious free time as a student, you can make $12k in a year, easy. He wrote a friggin search engine, so he was probably making more than that. $25 a pop installing hard drives for English majors is easy money (although this was RPI, so he'd probably have to work the other colleges in the area). Now, how he SAVED that much money is another question.
Any way, I still say he settled because they threatened his completion of his degree (they probably threatened RPI for hosting the engine and RPI told the kid settle or you're out), and they probably threatened to send a note to his employers (whoever paid him the $12K he saved up) saying he was a pirate and a hacker.
Say goodbye to Hollywood! Just boycott CDs for the holidays.
Obviously, he was coding for fun and profit, while you were sifting french fries. OTOH I doubt that he could have written a search engine on a C64, either.
That may be why he settled: he was afraid of losing his job, expulsion, etc. A lot of times the coercion goes beyond "we'll bankrupt you with legal fees" to "you'll never work in this town again, kid" (and remember where that expression originated?).
Hollowood talking about "intellectual" property rights is an oxymoron.
Actually, radio stations pay royalties to the record companies for the music they play. Remember the big brouhaha about the fees internet radio stations were required to pay? So if you listen to the radio, you actually are (indirectly) feeding the coffers of the RIAA, especially if you ever get picked as a listening survey client.
It probably depends on the court. I recall about 10 years ago, some retiree tried to pay off a settlement/judgement of a couple K$ in pennies and the judge said he couldn't. (That last bit makes me think it was a judgement, but my memory for the details is really bad.)
Don't I have the right to profit for the rest of my life from my work?
Yes. You just don't have the right to EXCLUSIVELY profit from it after the copyright expires. After the work is released into the public domain, the original copyright holder can still sell copies of their work. (Well, not anymore, because now the copyright is so long that the original holder will be dead by the time it goes into the public domain.)
Look at all the people who make money publishing Shakespeare. If he were still alive, he could get a slice of the pie, and he could call it "Authors Annotated Edition" or anything else he wanted to market his version over the others. In fact, he could probably get a new copyright on the entire work just for adding some liner notes.
Anyway, the point of copyright law is that the government will back up your rights to your work with specific legal standards at the federal level, rather than having to settle ownership disputes with contract law or other standards at the state or local level, which would be much harder to prosecute. In return for recognizing and simplifying your defense of your ownership, the government requires you to (eventually) release the rights to a work. This is a fairly even deal.
Well, eVENtually it will be clarified by about 20 years of case law, DMCA2 and so forth. The lawyers have to get their cut too.
One way to beat RIAA/MPAA lobby is for online music/film providers to bypass artists already signed by RIAA and purchase rights directly from the artists. Eliminate the middle-man (or in this case, find a middle-man who charges a reasonable price).
One thing music downloaders have to recognize is that eventually, they will have to pay for their music. It isn't fair to the artists to share their work promiscuously with others. Online music sites can't afford to buy up artists' contracts without a source of revenue, which means either subscriber/download fees or advertising.
Top 10 authors I continue to read/seek out. Since you claim 4000 books, you probably have all of these already. I'm trying to spring some new names at you by avoidng anybody who published prior to 1980 (by my best guess), even if they have recent work. Also, this list just means the books were enjoyable to me, and have varying intellectual impact. To paraphrase one Amazon commenter "...like Twinkies they may be fluff, but they are definitive fluff."
1. Sean Russell - Fantasy. tends to write duologies: 3 complete series available with one (Swan's War) in progress. These are thick, slow reads, heavy with atmosphere. 2. Terry Pratchett - Fantasy Comedy. Prolific series reminiscent of Monty Python, but with a more lasting impact on the brain. Read each one multiple times. 3. Neal Stephenson - SF - He's already been well covered by others. 4. Lois M. Bujold - SF and some fantasy - Main focus is Barrayar/Vorkosigan series, but has a couple of stand-alones. Kind of the Dick Francis of SF. 5. Elizabeth Moon - Space Opera/Fantasy. Space Opera involves "Familias Regnant" universe with Heris Serrano and later generations. Fantasy is high/religious/D&D level with "Deed of Paksennarion" and "Gird" books in same setting.
6. Harry Turtledove - Fantasy/Alternate History/SF. Haven't read many of his more recent alternate-history series, but "Guns of the South" is classic, and multiple series set in Videssos are readable. Also Gerin "The Fox" series is fun.
7. Connie Willis - SF: I mainly stick to her time travel stories based out of Oxford: "Doomsday Book", "To Say Nothing of the Dog". Also, "Lincoln's Dreams". Currently reigning most-awarded SF author. 8. Orson Scott Card - Like Mark Twain, R. Heinlein and others, has started his descent into sermonizing. Two absolutely classic series: Chronicles of Alvin Maker and Ender Wiggin series (First 4 books of it, before spinoffs). Numerous other works, including some good singleton fantasies. 9. Charles De Lint: Urban Fantasy. Many stand-alones set in Canadian cities Ottawa and "Newford"(?)(I think). Magic is unhuman, innate quality, rather than result of ritual or learning. 10. Stephen Brusttie: Fantasy, some SF. The Vlad Taltos (about 7 books so far) and Phoenix Guards (3 books so far) series set in Dragaera have completely different tones, but are all interesting. ("Brokedown Palace" is also set in same universe, but is a singleton). A couple of singleton fantasies (Agyar? To Reign in Hell?) and SF.
10. Sheri S. Teppertie: SF and Fantasy. Not the most consistently great author, but there are a lot of good books out there with her name on them. "The Family Tree", "Six Moon Dance" and "The Singer from the Sea" are recent titles.
Older Authors that continue to publish: Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, C.J Cherryh, Sharon Green, David Brin, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson, George R.R. Martin.
Some forgotten classics: "When Gravity Fails" (Marid Audran sequence) by George Alec Effinger; "Growing Up Weightless" by some forgotten author. "Unquenchable Fire" by Rachel Pollack (back in print).
Non-genre authors to investigate: Ruth Rendell (mysteries), Reginald Hill (mysteries), Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Laura Esquivel.
And for those of you knocking Tolkien, remember that when he did it, it was original. Just because every two-bit fantasy hack out to make a buck has copied T's setting, races and plotlines to the point where most of us throw up at the sound of the word "halfling", doesn't mean he was a hack, too.
The companies that are pushing digital rights management are the media companies. The TV makers and Cable operators generally don't own a lot of copyrights. Now the cable BROADCASTERS are another story.
Speaking of the Illuminati, I'm not sure if it's still in print, but Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy is looking awfully prescient right now. It's a lovely conspiracy theory (probably fictional) showing how the Illuminati control both sides of the two-party system, business and labor, Judeo/Christian/Islam and Satanism, and basically co-opt or kill anybody who gains power outside their control.
I think a lot of the trouble with recent patents is that now people/corporations are allowed to patent "Business Processes". This eliminates a lot of the innovation that used to be required in patents, because now you can get a patent for putting the same old puzzle pieces together in a slightly different way.
Pretty soon I think we'll all have to have patent attorneys on retainer to find out if it's legal to wipe ourselves with the paper folded instead of crumpled. (or vice versa).
A larger force than OpenSource in cheapening the value of developers (and most other service workers in the US and Europe) is the internet. Without the internet, US companies wouldn't be sourcing software development from India, and other places where the labor is both skilled and cheap. My company is moving to source something like 20% of its development costs (meaning more than 20% of its technical personnel) from non-US development sources.
Take this a step further: since there are so many other services that can be sourced over the internet, and the U.S. is now such a heavily service-based economy, what happens when we are competing for service jobs with millions of University-educated workers who consider themselves well-paid at $25K a year or less? Now, do we trigger massive inflation in the developing countries to bring their benefits up to western standards, or deflation (or massive unemployment) in the west, as we either take paycuts to compete or lose our jobs? Split the difference?
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The main thing that's changed from those days is the democratization of the consumer base (you don't have to hire your own chamber orchestra to get good music), and the increased power of the middle-men.
Bingo. When I was in Econ 101, I was taught that the concept of "limited liability" for corporations was so powerful compared with other business models, that the government attempted to counterbalance it by "double taxation". And guess what's happened to the dividend and capital gains taxes over the past few years?
The beauty of the boycott is that it will play into the RIAA and MPAAs paranoia about piracy to the point that they will do something foolish, like actually frying people's computers. Mistakes will be made and the boycott will grow as more F*ups occur.
The fact is, you don't HAVE to buy their product, and you don't HAVE to pirate music. Hearing someone say "oh I'm going to put up a music site and stand up to the bastards" is just music (so to speak) to their ears. 9 times out of 10, they'll find a way to intimidate you by threatening your income and your social relationships, in addition to the usual "lawyers, guns and money" that make up our legal system.
The only way to scare them back is to 1) don't give them a handle to harass you by pirating music, and 2) don't buy a damn thing of theirs. This basically means no Hollywood media whatsoever: no movies, no CDs, no DVDs, no satellite radio or television, no cable, no books, no software or ANYthing that they produce.
Now, obviously only the Amish are going to be able to adhere to this policy, so the next best thing is to target the particular segment that offends you. This means eliminate all commercial music from your entertainment budget: no CDs, and no satellite radio or commercial music stations (they pay royalties on their music), especially if you are logged by a ratings agency. That still leaves NPR or other talk/community radio stations, any LEGAL music you can download, any CDs you already own, plus any local bar concerts you want to hear. You can survive a boycott without playing their game. We DO have the power to scare them as badly as they scare the students. In fact they are already scared by their declining sales, which is why they're getting so coercive. They have a history of this:
You'll never work in this town again, kid!
I doubt it. The RIAA doesn't own the copyright, the individual recording company/media comglomerate that contributes a few million a year to the RIAA owns the copyright. and the RIAA probably has something like a shrink wrap license saying you can't redistribute.
The RIAA is basically just like the EFF, but in reverse: they take money from contributors and then they use the court system to pursue their contributors interest.
If you write code in your copious free time as a student, you can make $12k in a year, easy. He wrote a friggin search engine, so he was probably making more than that. $25 a pop installing hard drives for English majors is easy money (although this was RPI, so he'd probably have to work the other colleges in the area). Now, how he SAVED that much money is another question. Any way, I still say he settled because they threatened his completion of his degree (they probably threatened RPI for hosting the engine and RPI told the kid settle or you're out), and they probably threatened to send a note to his employers (whoever paid him the $12K he saved up) saying he was a pirate and a hacker. Say goodbye to Hollywood! Just boycott CDs for the holidays.
Obviously, he was coding for fun and profit, while you were sifting french fries. OTOH I doubt that he could have written a search engine on a C64, either.
That may be why he settled: he was afraid of losing his job, expulsion, etc. A lot of times the coercion goes beyond "we'll bankrupt you with legal fees" to "you'll never work in this town again, kid" (and remember where that expression originated?).
Hollowood talking about "intellectual" property rights is an oxymoron.
Actually, radio stations pay royalties to the record companies for the music they play. Remember the big brouhaha about the fees internet radio stations were required to pay? So if you listen to the radio, you actually are (indirectly) feeding the coffers of the RIAA, especially if you ever get picked as a listening survey client.
It probably depends on the court. I recall about 10 years ago, some retiree tried to pay off a settlement/judgement of a couple K$ in pennies and the judge said he couldn't. (That last bit makes me think it was a judgement, but my memory for the details is really bad.)
Yes. You just don't have the right to EXCLUSIVELY profit from it after the copyright expires. After the work is released into the public domain, the original copyright holder can still sell copies of their work. (Well, not anymore, because now the copyright is so long that the original holder will be dead by the time it goes into the public domain.) Look at all the people who make money publishing Shakespeare. If he were still alive, he could get a slice of the pie, and he could call it "Authors Annotated Edition" or anything else he wanted to market his version over the others. In fact, he could probably get a new copyright on the entire work just for adding some liner notes.
Anyway, the point of copyright law is that the government will back up your rights to your work with specific legal standards at the federal level, rather than having to settle ownership disputes with contract law or other standards at the state or local level, which would be much harder to prosecute. In return for recognizing and simplifying your defense of your ownership, the government requires you to (eventually) release the rights to a work. This is a fairly even deal.
Well, eVENtually it will be clarified by about 20 years of case law, DMCA2 and so forth. The lawyers have to get their cut too.
One way to beat RIAA/MPAA lobby is for online music/film providers to bypass artists already signed by RIAA and purchase rights directly from the artists. Eliminate the middle-man (or in this case, find a middle-man who charges a reasonable price).
One thing music downloaders have to recognize is that eventually, they will have to pay for their music. It isn't fair to the artists to share their work promiscuously with others. Online music sites can't afford to buy up artists' contracts without a source of revenue, which means either subscriber/download fees or advertising.
Actually, even within SF/Fantasy, the quality of writing is much higher when there isn't a pixie or a dragon or a robot on the book's cover.
1. Sean Russell - Fantasy. tends to write duologies: 3 complete series available with one (Swan's War) in progress. These are thick, slow reads, heavy with atmosphere.
2. Terry Pratchett - Fantasy Comedy. Prolific series reminiscent of Monty Python, but with a more lasting impact on the brain. Read each one multiple times.
3. Neal Stephenson - SF - He's already been well covered by others.
4. Lois M. Bujold - SF and some fantasy - Main focus is Barrayar/Vorkosigan series, but has a couple of stand-alones. Kind of the Dick Francis of SF.
5. Elizabeth Moon - Space Opera/Fantasy. Space Opera involves "Familias Regnant" universe with Heris Serrano and later generations. Fantasy is high/religious/D&D level with "Deed of Paksennarion" and "Gird" books in same setting.
6. Harry Turtledove - Fantasy/Alternate History/SF. Haven't read many of his more recent alternate-history series, but "Guns of the South" is classic, and multiple series set in Videssos are readable. Also Gerin "The Fox" series is fun.
7. Connie Willis - SF: I mainly stick to her time travel stories based out of Oxford: "Doomsday Book", "To Say Nothing of the Dog". Also, "Lincoln's Dreams". Currently reigning most-awarded SF author.
8. Orson Scott Card - Like Mark Twain, R. Heinlein and others, has started his descent into sermonizing. Two absolutely classic series: Chronicles of Alvin Maker and Ender Wiggin series (First 4 books of it, before spinoffs). Numerous other works, including some good singleton fantasies.
9. Charles De Lint: Urban Fantasy. Many stand-alones set in Canadian cities Ottawa and "Newford"(?)(I think). Magic is unhuman, innate quality, rather than result of ritual or learning.
10. Stephen Brust tie: Fantasy, some SF. The Vlad Taltos (about 7 books so far) and Phoenix Guards (3 books so far) series set in Dragaera have completely different tones, but are all interesting. ("Brokedown Palace" is also set in same universe, but is a singleton). A couple of singleton fantasies (Agyar? To Reign in Hell?) and SF. 10. Sheri S. Tepper tie: SF and Fantasy. Not the most consistently great author, but there are a lot of good books out there with her name on them. "The Family Tree", "Six Moon Dance" and "The Singer from the Sea" are recent titles.
Older Authors that continue to publish: Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, C.J Cherryh, Sharon Green, David Brin, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson, George R.R. Martin.
Some forgotten classics: "When Gravity Fails" (Marid Audran sequence) by George Alec Effinger; "Growing Up Weightless" by some forgotten author. "Unquenchable Fire" by Rachel Pollack (back in print).
Non-genre authors to investigate: Ruth Rendell (mysteries), Reginald Hill (mysteries), Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Laura Esquivel. And for those of you knocking Tolkien, remember that when he did it, it was original. Just because every two-bit fantasy hack out to make a buck has copied T's setting, races and plotlines to the point where most of us throw up at the sound of the word "halfling", doesn't mean he was a hack, too.
The companies that are pushing digital rights management are the media companies. The TV makers and Cable operators generally don't own a lot of copyrights. Now the cable BROADCASTERS are another story.
Speaking of the Illuminati, I'm not sure if it's still in print, but Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy is looking awfully prescient right now. It's a lovely conspiracy theory (probably fictional) showing how the Illuminati control both sides of the two-party system, business and labor, Judeo/Christian/Islam and Satanism, and basically co-opt or kill anybody who gains power outside their control.
I think a lot of the trouble with recent patents is that now people/corporations are allowed to patent "Business Processes". This eliminates a lot of the innovation that used to be required in patents, because now you can get a patent for putting the same old puzzle pieces together in a slightly different way.
Pretty soon I think we'll all have to have patent attorneys on retainer to find out if it's legal to wipe ourselves with the paper folded instead of crumpled. (or vice versa).
A larger force than OpenSource in cheapening the value of developers (and most other service workers in the US and Europe) is the internet. Without the internet, US companies wouldn't be sourcing software development from India, and other places where the labor is both skilled and cheap. My company is moving to source something like 20% of its development costs (meaning more than 20% of its technical personnel) from non-US development sources. Take this a step further: since there are so many other services that can be sourced over the internet, and the U.S. is now such a heavily service-based economy, what happens when we are competing for service jobs with millions of University-educated workers who consider themselves well-paid at $25K a year or less? Now, do we trigger massive inflation in the developing countries to bring their benefits up to western standards, or deflation (or massive unemployment) in the west, as we either take paycuts to compete or lose our jobs? Split the difference?