"Who is more greedy? 1.) People who work to produce music, movies, etc., then want to get paid for the time, effort, and money they invested. Or, 2.) People who want to take the fruits of that labor without paying for it. I would argue that group 2 are the greedy ones. And by the way, the work I produce is not begging you to free it. It's asking you to buy it."
It's asking us to buy it with all sorts of restrictions, inconveniences, and hindrances which interfere with the enjoyment of the media and which pirates don't have to suffer. It is greedy to expect people to pay more and get less.
Yes it would cost more to provide losslessly compressed files, but they could charge more for those who choose them. The people who find it important to have lossless files are likely to be willing to pay the extra cost.
(Before you nitpickers nitpick this, by "lossless" above I mean lossless compared to the CD. I already know that CD itself is lossy compared to the original analog source.)
If this school doesn't offer many scholarships, look for another one that either offers good scholarships or is less expensive. Surely this isn't the only college you could get accepted into? If it is, you won't be worthy of any real scholarships anyway.
It is not because of the lack of good developers in India or Russia or other places outside the US. The reduced innovation is due to the nature of the business relationship between the US companies, the outsourcing vendors, and the people the outsourcers hire.
1. The innovative individuals and companies overseas generally set themselves up doing thier own thing, creating and selling products driven by their own ideas and intiatives; not to provide bodies to do the work dictated by first-world firms. Either that, or they'll find a high-paying job in a first-world country.
2. The outsourcing vendors are merely looking to hire enough bodies who will do the work at bargain basement rates. Hiring for innovation is not high on their priorities. Remember their main selling point is being cheap.
3. Innovation generally involves risk, and the outsourcing firms have little incentive to take those risks. They get paid as long as they do X when asked to do X, not for being creative and doing X^2. If they do something innovative it's the client firm that will see the vast majority of the upside benefits. So their risk/reward ratios don't encourage innovation.
4. The first-world corporations aren't choosing outsourcing firms based on innovative ability; the motivation is to cut costs.
5. Offshoring is happening so fast and furiously, that most of it is indeed just fad-chasing. Other industries like manufacturing took a much longer time to be offshored in significant numbers. The speed at which this is happening is creating a demand for offshore programmers which is causing high turnover among them, along with a lowering of hiring standards.
However, much of the above doesn't really apply with offshore in-sourcing. But most companies aren't doing that because they don't have the know-how to set up a software subsidiary in a country thousands of miles away, given that they struggle so much to run an IT department in the same building. And the time and money involved to set up their own offshore subsidiary means the benefits won't show up in next quarter's profits.
"I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I have made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with--the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product."
Ayn Rand made money as a result of the set of involuntary restrictions called copyright...
"Places like India are getting more expensive because they are getting way better at doing the jobs well.
Actually the quality is getting worse. Because of the explosive demand for programmers in India, hiring standards are dropping in order to find enough bodies to fill the seats. It is *much* easier to get a programming job in India now than it was 5 years ago.
"Currently, while companies can easily move money around the world for hiring in cheaper countries (aka globalization), the free movement of labor is very restricted. Perhaps freeing this up would attract labor to the US, which, while cheaper, would create a less extreme situation, since these immigrant employees would still have to be paid with a US cost-of-living in mind."
That's exactly the problem with the current form of globalization -- it is too one-sided in favor of the corporations. Companies can drive down labor costs by being able to send work to cheaper locations, but workers can't so easily push up their wages by moving to countries where the work is more lucrative.
If Indians were as free to move to the US, Canada, Europe, or Australia as the products of their work can, the employers in India would have to pay more to keep them from fleeing, which would decrease the wage difference between India and the other countries.
I went to an art museum this summer, and they banned camcorders and digital cameras, but allowed regular film cameras. Why? All the paintings there were over 80 years old and the artists are dead, so none of it was copyrighted anymore. And you can use a scanner to digitize an analog picture.
Taiwan became big in semiconductor manufacturing because over the course of three decades of private and government research and experience they were able to become very good at it, producing high yields that made them competitive with US producers. It wasn't because of cheap labor. Taiwan's workers aren't that much cheaper than in the US, and Taiwan's per capita income is over 10X that of India.
Japan's car industry became big because of quality, not lower cost. The first incarnations of their vehicles decades ago were cheap crap, but they didn't get anywhere in the market. Their eventual success came from producing high-quality vehicles that were able to sell for MORE than US-made vehicles of equal size and engine power.
Steel workers in the US lost jobs not because of labor costs, which make up a very small portion of steel manufacturing, but because other countries were able to produce higher yields per ton of raw material.
However the current trend of outsourcing software development to India is a management fad in pursuit of cheap labor, for a type of work that does not lend itself to cheap labor en masse. The real savings really aren't that great -- you're lucky to save as much as 25%. The quality isn't very good, and there are many risks including budget overruns due to miscommunication, intellectual property and privacy infringement which are practically impossible to enforce in India (you're lucky if the courts will see your case in 10 years), and the costs of paying people to cleanup the junk that comes back.
If outsourcing brings real net savings, we'll see the benefits in other aspects of the economy, like cheaper goods and services and increased profits that boost the stock markets. However, there is a very real danger that it is likely to materialize as another "gold rush" like the dotcom boom, only that this time the corporations and investors are chasing after imaginary savings instead of imaginary profits. And when the reality hits and they can't deny it, there will be another economic meltdown.
"Maybe our programmers should start making themselves more compeditative [sic] than our overseas counterparts. Offer something they can't or work for a compeditative [sic] pay."
Maybe they could start by learning to spell or use spell-check.
Would you actually read my statements please? Can't you see I was talking about the set of people who do want to die (yes, there are many like that, that's why Dr. Kevorkian was in business), or are already dead?!!! And I was talking about the ethics of the parent's decisions, not the value or right to life of the persons affected!
When I say "severely deformed", I meant deformed to the extent that they prefer death, or the majority of their lifetime is spent suffering in a hospital while their mental capacity is not even developed enough to know about the concept of life and death, and/or they die very young because of their deformities. To knowingly impose that fate on anyone with a 99% probability is unethical, regardless of whether the suffering person happens to want to live and be able to do so.
There are many people who exist because their mothers were raped. That those people have a right to live does not make rape right!
People who exist have a right to live if they want to, regardless of the actions and ethical circumstances by which they came to be alive. And their right to live does not make the actions of their parents any more or less right.
Cloning of full humans should be illegal. Unlike other black market activities, it is so expensive and difficult that it is unlikely to happen in any significant numbers (if at all) if it is illegal. Like much other difficult scientific research, it probably will need government *funding*, not just permission, for it to happen. And its enforcement would only require restrictions on the actions of doctors and scientists, nothing like the bodily intrusions that would be required to prevent prospective parents from passing on serious genetic diseases.
If cloning were so easy that it could be done by a rogue scientist in a backyard basement, it would have been done already. Instead it was over 50 years since the detonation of nuclear bombs, over 25 years after putting man on the moon, and over 30 years since the first cloning of a frog that they were even able to clone a sheep, and it still took 297 tries for the sheep.
Yes, it is unethical for a couple to reproduce if they know they have a 99% chance of having severely deformed children whose deformities would result in a short and painful life. Just as it is unethical for a healthy couple or person to reproduce if they don't have the will or ability to take care of their children - the child suffers and/or society foots the bill. But that does not mean it should be made illegal for people to do either of the above. For some behaviors the cure is worse than the disease.
Other forms of medically assisted conception that people use do not have the same risks as cloning has been found to have. Nothing close to the 200:1 and 800:1 seen in cloning. And the failure cases generally result in no pregnancy, not pregnancy with seriously deformed children. However I don't agree with the fertility-boosting techniques that result in upwards of four children per pregnancy and put the life and health of the mother and children at significant risk.
BTW, folks don't tend to clone stem cells. They tend to want to clone from stem cells.;-)
When I mentioned stem cells I meant cloned embryos from which stem cells are extracted.
No matter how big or small they are, artists make the majority of their money from performances, not from album sales where they only get $1/per album that often gets split among band members, songwriters, managers, etc.
The $100/night band at the local bar doesn't sell enough albums (if any) to make more than what they earn for playing live, and big artists who go on tour rake in over a million bucks per show.
Sure, there are some exceptions where the artist continues to draw big bucks from royalties long after they have retired from performing (or even after they are dead, like Bob Marley, Elvis, and Tupac Shakur). But the prospect of that ongoing income would not have been necessary to provide incentive for them to perform. 99.99% of professional artists expect that they will not receive a dime after they retire and they are correct, yet they perform anyway.
Cloning of complete human beings is experimentation on humans who didn't consent. Cloning has a very high failure rate, with the failed cases resulting in miscarriages or life-ending deformities. I can't see how anyone can claim that human cloning is ethical if it results in 200 or more severely deformed babies for every healthy birth.
Maybe the failure rate could eventually drop to being close to the rate experienced by normal conceptions. But how would we get there? It is almost certain they would have to refine the cloning techniques by repeatedly failing on humans, because the differences between species indicates that you can't automatically make a jump from one species to an equal or better success rate with another. For example, years after the cloning of Dolly the sheep which took 297 attempts, it took 800 attempts to clone a horse despite the advantage of all the knowledge gained since Dolly.
Cloning of isolated organs or stem cells is a different matter which I don't have a problem with.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a new bill written, and perhaps passed into law, that forces TiVo and all DVR producers to remove the fast-forward capability from all boxes manufactured after 200x. Or at least to disable fast-forward during commercials (using a "commercial broadcast flag" that reliably indicates what part of a showing is a commercial and what isn't).
"He says that music pricing needs to vary in order to convey information to customers about what they're getting. But the value of music isn't intrinsic to the music. What I may be willing to pay $1.25 for, you may only be willing to pay $.02 for. The fact that the RIAA has valued this particular song at a given price tells me nothing about its value to me."
But that's how it is with any other goods. Different people are willing to pay differing amounts. You can only sell to the people who are willing to pay as much or more than your price, so in a market with varying prices, the sellers do better market research and analyze buying trends in their attempt to determine the price that would bring optimal profits.
Prices carry information about the supply, demand, and cost of making a good. With music, the supply is practically unlimited, since they can easily manufacture as much as they want at little cost, and the marginal costs are near zero. So if music had varying prices, the price would almost entirely reflect the demand. A high price would indicate high popularity, which in turn indicates high quality for people who tend to like music that lots of other people like. So the price would be indicative of its value to you iff you tended to like music which is popular. If your taste in music is very different from the public at large, prices wouldn't tell you much, but you would benefit from having access to lots of low-cost music.
"When I'm shopping for music, though, I'm not going to say, "Oh, that Dylan track is too expensive--I'll buy this Radiohead song instead." One song is not a replacement for another, or I wouldn't have 12,000 of them."
For someone who can afford a collection of 12000 they may not be interchangeable, but for most people they are interchangeable to the extent that they will have an interest in multiple songs but are willing and able to buy only a subset of them. Many a time people will go to the record store and see two or three CDs that they want to buy, but will choose just one for budgetary reasons. If someone liked both Dylan and Radiohead almost equally and had to choose just one, a significant price difference would indeed tilt them towards buying the cheaper one. The more expensive one would have to be perceived as being that much better than the rest in order to be chosen.
The increasing consolidation of control of radio stations is another factor that has contributed to the economic "moral hazard". With behemoths like ClearChannel controlling a large chunk of the radio market, the local DJs who know about what their listeners want have less freedom to decide what to play. As a result, what they play more reflects who the RIAA execs have decided will be their next thing (or yet another album from the last big thing), instead of reflecting what listeners want. So we have the same songs by the same artists being played over and over and over again.
The current arrangement with the media conglomerates and the airwaves hurts both the public's ability to find out what is good music and the propensity of the producers to find out what the people want. They are more concerned with pushing a predetermined set of artists who they deem shall be successful, than they are with finding out what people like. So people will turn to file-sharing where they can find lots of good music that they would never hear on the radio.
That is a major symptom of the problem. Obtaining a patent should be just a notch below the level of rare and high achievement required to be an Olympic medalist, discover a new galaxy, or win a Nobel Prize. For crying out loud, you are saying that none of the other six billion people on earth did what you claim to do, and that no one else will naturally create that when faced with a similar problem in the course of their work. That is an extremely strong statement against the rest of the human race, and IMHO there aren't enough inventions that rise to the standard of novelty to truly deserve 190,000 patents in a decade.
If the USPTO were more strict with upholding a high standards for patents, the vast majority of applications that are submitted today would get thrown out even before commencing a prior art search. Eventually, the flood of applications would be reduced to a small number of worthy contenders, which would be a much more manageable load.
Unfortunately, the policies of the USPTO put the burden of proof on the patent examiner. They have to grant the patent unless they can find prior art or make a strong case why the creation is obvious. But the burden should be on the applicant to impress the examiners with the device's originality and utility, because a patent granted in error places a very high burden on the rest of society. The benefit of the doubt should be given to the public at large, not the patent applicant. Until that policy is changed they will be flooded with frivolous applications, and be pressured to grant patents for most of them, because it is so much more difficult to deny them.
"It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rater to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith." -- US Supreme Court (Atlantic Works v. Brady, 1017 U.S. 192, 200 (1882)).
The main benefit of going public is the ability to cash in on getting overvalued by a hype-driven market. A private company that would normally sell for $1 billion can sell $2 billion or more of stock in an IPO.
But the real reason is that decisions made by executives are not designed primarily to benefit the company; they are designed to benefit those who make the decisions. IPOs are usually very profitable for the pockets of executives, even if they are detrimental or neutral to the long-term health of the company. Similarly, if going public would be good for the company but not the executives, they will choose not to go public.
Slashdot Mirror
"Who is more greedy? 1.) People who work to produce music, movies, etc., then want to get paid for the time, effort, and money they invested. Or, 2.) People who want to take the fruits of that labor without paying for it. I would argue that group 2 are the greedy ones. And by the way, the work I produce is not begging you to free it. It's asking you to buy it."
It's asking us to buy it with all sorts of restrictions, inconveniences, and hindrances which interfere with the enjoyment of the media and which pirates don't have to suffer. It is greedy to expect people to pay more and get less.
And the CEO and directors should be jailed. They really are trying to make a fool of the judge.
Yes it would cost more to provide losslessly compressed files, but they could charge more for those who choose them. The people who find it important to have lossless files are likely to be willing to pay the extra cost.
(Before you nitpickers nitpick this, by "lossless" above I mean lossless compared to the CD. I already know that CD itself is lossy compared to the original analog source.)
If this school doesn't offer many scholarships, look for another one that either offers good scholarships or is less expensive. Surely this isn't the only college you could get accepted into? If it is, you won't be worthy of any real scholarships anyway.
It is not because of the lack of good developers in India or Russia or other places outside the US. The reduced innovation is due to the nature of the business relationship between the US companies, the outsourcing vendors, and the people the outsourcers hire.
1. The innovative individuals and companies overseas generally set themselves up doing thier own thing, creating and selling products driven by their own ideas and intiatives; not to provide bodies to do the work dictated by first-world firms. Either that, or they'll find a high-paying job in a first-world country.
2. The outsourcing vendors are merely looking to hire enough bodies who will do the work at bargain basement rates. Hiring for innovation is not high on their priorities. Remember their main selling point is being cheap.
3. Innovation generally involves risk, and the outsourcing firms have little incentive to take those risks. They get paid as long as they do X when asked to do X, not for being creative and doing X^2. If they do something innovative it's the client firm that will see the vast majority of the upside benefits. So their risk/reward ratios don't encourage innovation.
4. The first-world corporations aren't choosing outsourcing firms based on innovative ability; the motivation is to cut costs.
5. Offshoring is happening so fast and furiously, that most of it is indeed just fad-chasing. Other industries like manufacturing took a much longer time to be offshored in significant numbers. The speed at which this is happening is creating a demand for offshore programmers which is causing high turnover among them, along with a lowering of hiring standards.
However, much of the above doesn't really apply with offshore in-sourcing. But most companies aren't doing that because they don't have the know-how to set up a software subsidiary in a country thousands of miles away, given that they struggle so much to run an IT department in the same building. And the time and money involved to set up their own offshore subsidiary means the benefits won't show up in next quarter's profits.
... and Madster, and Friendster. And 50 Cent for his song "Wankster". Hey if Microsoft can sue Lindows, why cant Napster sue the "sters"?
"I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I have made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with--the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product."
Ayn Rand made money as a result of the set of involuntary restrictions called copyright...
"Places like India are getting more expensive because they are getting way better at doing the jobs well.
Actually the quality is getting worse. Because of the explosive demand for programmers in India, hiring standards are dropping in order to find enough bodies to fill the seats. It is *much* easier to get a programming job in India now than it was 5 years ago.
"Currently, while companies can easily move money around the world for hiring in cheaper countries (aka globalization), the free movement of labor is very restricted. Perhaps freeing this up would attract labor to the US, which, while cheaper, would create a less extreme situation, since these immigrant employees would still have to be paid with a US cost-of-living in mind."
That's exactly the problem with the current form of globalization -- it is too one-sided in favor of the corporations. Companies can drive down labor costs by being able to send work to cheaper locations, but workers can't so easily push up their wages by moving to countries where the work is more lucrative.
If Indians were as free to move to the US, Canada, Europe, or Australia as the products of their work can, the employers in India would have to pay more to keep them from fleeing, which would decrease the wage difference between India and the other countries.
I went to an art museum this summer, and they banned camcorders and digital cameras, but allowed regular film cameras. Why? All the paintings there were over 80 years old and the artists are dead, so none of it was copyrighted anymore. And you can use a scanner to digitize an analog picture.
What do they expect to gain by doing that?
Taiwan became big in semiconductor manufacturing because over the course of three decades of private and government research and experience they were able to become very good at it, producing high yields that made them competitive with US producers. It wasn't because of cheap labor. Taiwan's workers aren't that much cheaper than in the US, and Taiwan's per capita income is over 10X that of India.
Japan's car industry became big because of quality, not lower cost. The first incarnations of their vehicles decades ago were cheap crap, but they didn't get anywhere in the market. Their eventual success came from producing high-quality vehicles that were able to sell for MORE than US-made vehicles of equal size and engine power.
Steel workers in the US lost jobs not because of labor costs, which make up a very small portion of steel manufacturing, but because other countries were able to produce higher yields per ton of raw material.
However the current trend of outsourcing software development to India is a management fad in pursuit of cheap labor, for a type of work that does not lend itself to cheap labor en masse. The real savings really aren't that great -- you're lucky to save as much as 25%. The quality isn't very good, and there are many risks including budget overruns due to miscommunication, intellectual property and privacy infringement which are practically impossible to enforce in India (you're lucky if the courts will see your case in 10 years), and the costs of paying people to cleanup the junk that comes back.
If outsourcing brings real net savings, we'll see the benefits in other aspects of the economy, like cheaper goods and services and increased profits that boost the stock markets. However, there is a very real danger that it is likely to materialize as another "gold rush" like the dotcom boom, only that this time the corporations and investors are chasing after imaginary savings instead of imaginary profits. And when the reality hits and they can't deny it, there will be another economic meltdown.
"Maybe our programmers should start making themselves more compeditative [sic] than our overseas counterparts. Offer something they can't or work for a compeditative [sic] pay."
Maybe they could start by learning to spell or use spell-check.
Would you actually read my statements please? Can't you see I was talking about the set of people who do want to die (yes, there are many like that, that's why Dr. Kevorkian was in business), or are already dead?!!! And I was talking about the ethics of the parent's decisions, not the value or right to life of the persons affected!
When I say "severely deformed", I meant deformed to the extent that they prefer death, or the majority of their lifetime is spent suffering in a hospital while their mental capacity is not even developed enough to know about the concept of life and death, and/or they die very young because of their deformities. To knowingly impose that fate on anyone with a 99% probability is unethical, regardless of whether the suffering person happens to want to live and be able to do so.
Oops, that last sentence should read "over 20 years since the first cloning of a frog..."
There are many people who exist because their mothers were raped. That those people have a right to live does not make rape right!
People who exist have a right to live if they want to, regardless of the actions and ethical circumstances by which they came to be alive. And their right to live does not make the actions of their parents any more or less right.
Cloning of full humans should be illegal. Unlike other black market activities, it is so expensive and difficult that it is unlikely to happen in any significant numbers (if at all) if it is illegal. Like much other difficult scientific research, it probably will need government *funding*, not just permission, for it to happen. And its enforcement would only require restrictions on the actions of doctors and scientists, nothing like the bodily intrusions that would be required to prevent prospective parents from passing on serious genetic diseases.
If cloning were so easy that it could be done by a rogue scientist in a backyard basement, it would have been done already. Instead it was over 50 years since the detonation of nuclear bombs, over 25 years after putting man on the moon, and over 30 years since the first cloning of a frog that they were even able to clone a sheep, and it still took 297 tries for the sheep.
Yes, it is unethical for a couple to reproduce if they know they have a 99% chance of having severely deformed children whose deformities would result in a short and painful life. Just as it is unethical for a healthy couple or person to reproduce if they don't have the will or ability to take care of their children - the child suffers and/or society foots the bill. But that does not mean it should be made illegal for people to do either of the above. For some behaviors the cure is worse than the disease.
;-)
Other forms of medically assisted conception that people use do not have the same risks as cloning has been found to have. Nothing close to the 200:1 and 800:1 seen in cloning. And the failure cases generally result in no pregnancy, not pregnancy with seriously deformed children. However I don't agree with the fertility-boosting techniques that result in upwards of four children per pregnancy and put the life and health of the mother and children at significant risk.
BTW, folks don't tend to clone stem cells. They tend to want to clone from stem cells.
When I mentioned stem cells I meant cloned embryos from which stem cells are extracted.
No matter how big or small they are, artists make the majority of their money from performances, not from album sales where they only get $1/per album that often gets split among band members, songwriters, managers, etc.
The $100/night band at the local bar doesn't sell enough albums (if any) to make more than what they earn for playing live, and big artists who go on tour rake in over a million bucks per show.
Sure, there are some exceptions where the artist continues to draw big bucks from royalties long after they have retired from performing (or even after they are dead, like Bob Marley, Elvis, and Tupac Shakur). But the prospect of that ongoing income would not have been necessary to provide incentive for them to perform. 99.99% of professional artists expect that they will not receive a dime after they retire and they are correct, yet they perform anyway.
Cloning of complete human beings is experimentation on humans who didn't consent. Cloning has a very high failure rate, with the failed cases resulting in miscarriages or life-ending deformities. I can't see how anyone can claim that human cloning is ethical if it results in 200 or more severely deformed babies for every healthy birth.
Maybe the failure rate could eventually drop to being close to the rate experienced by normal conceptions. But how would we get there? It is almost certain they would have to refine the cloning techniques by repeatedly failing on humans, because the differences between species indicates that you can't automatically make a jump from one species to an equal or better success rate with another. For example, years after the cloning of Dolly the sheep which took 297 attempts, it took 800 attempts to clone a horse despite the advantage of all the knowledge gained since Dolly.
Cloning of isolated organs or stem cells is a different matter which I don't have a problem with.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a new bill written, and perhaps passed into law, that forces TiVo and all DVR producers to remove the fast-forward capability from all boxes manufactured after 200x. Or at least to disable fast-forward during commercials (using a "commercial broadcast flag" that reliably indicates what part of a showing is a commercial and what isn't).
"He says that music pricing needs to vary in order to convey information to customers about what they're getting. But the value of music isn't intrinsic to the music. What I may be willing to pay $1.25 for, you may only be willing to pay $.02 for. The fact that the RIAA has valued this particular song at a given price tells me nothing about its value to me."
But that's how it is with any other goods. Different people are willing to pay differing amounts. You can only sell to the people who are willing to pay as much or more than your price, so in a market with varying prices, the sellers do better market research and analyze buying trends in their attempt to determine the price that would bring optimal profits.
Prices carry information about the supply, demand, and cost of making a good. With music, the supply is practically unlimited, since they can easily manufacture as much as they want at little cost, and the marginal costs are near zero. So if music had varying prices, the price would almost entirely reflect the demand. A high price would indicate high popularity, which in turn indicates high quality for people who tend to like music that lots of other people like. So the price would be indicative of its value to you iff you tended to like music which is popular. If your taste in music is very different from the public at large, prices wouldn't tell you much, but you would benefit from having access to lots of low-cost music.
"When I'm shopping for music, though, I'm not going to say, "Oh, that Dylan track is too expensive--I'll buy this Radiohead song instead." One song is not a replacement for another, or I wouldn't have 12,000 of them."
For someone who can afford a collection of 12000 they may not be interchangeable, but for most people they are interchangeable to the extent that they will have an interest in multiple songs but are willing and able to buy only a subset of them. Many a time people will go to the record store and see two or three CDs that they want to buy, but will choose just one for budgetary reasons. If someone liked both Dylan and Radiohead almost equally and had to choose just one, a significant price difference would indeed tilt them towards buying the cheaper one. The more expensive one would have to be perceived as being that much better than the rest in order to be chosen.
The increasing consolidation of control of radio stations is another factor that has contributed to the economic "moral hazard". With behemoths like ClearChannel controlling a large chunk of the radio market, the local DJs who know about what their listeners want have less freedom to decide what to play. As a result, what they play more reflects who the RIAA execs have decided will be their next thing (or yet another album from the last big thing), instead of reflecting what listeners want. So we have the same songs by the same artists being played over and over and over again.
The current arrangement with the media conglomerates and the airwaves hurts both the public's ability to find out what is good music and the propensity of the producers to find out what the people want. They are more concerned with pushing a predetermined set of artists who they deem shall be successful, than they are with finding out what people like. So people will turn to file-sharing where they can find lots of good music that they would never hear on the radio.
That is a major symptom of the problem. Obtaining a patent should be just a notch below the level of rare and high achievement required to be an Olympic medalist, discover a new galaxy, or win a Nobel Prize. For crying out loud, you are saying that none of the other six billion people on earth did what you claim to do, and that no one else will naturally create that when faced with a similar problem in the course of their work. That is an extremely strong statement against the rest of the human race, and IMHO there aren't enough inventions that rise to the standard of novelty to truly deserve 190,000 patents in a decade.
If the USPTO were more strict with upholding a high standards for patents, the vast majority of applications that are submitted today would get thrown out even before commencing a prior art search. Eventually, the flood of applications would be reduced to a small number of worthy contenders, which would be a much more manageable load.
Unfortunately, the policies of the USPTO put the burden of proof on the patent examiner. They have to grant the patent unless they can find prior art or make a strong case why the creation is obvious. But the burden should be on the applicant to impress the examiners with the device's originality and utility, because a patent granted in error places a very high burden on the rest of society. The benefit of the doubt should be given to the public at large, not the patent applicant. Until that policy is changed they will be flooded with frivolous applications, and be pressured to grant patents for most of them, because it is so much more difficult to deny them.
"It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rater to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith."
-- US Supreme Court (Atlantic Works v. Brady, 1017 U.S. 192, 200 (1882)).
The main benefit of going public is the ability to cash in on getting overvalued by a hype-driven market. A private company that would normally sell for $1 billion can sell $2 billion or more of stock in an IPO.
But the real reason is that decisions made by executives are not designed primarily to benefit the company; they are designed to benefit those who make the decisions. IPOs are usually very profitable for the pockets of executives, even if they are detrimental or neutral to the long-term health of the company. Similarly, if going public would be good for the company but not the executives, they will choose not to go public.
I agree. Sometimes it takes more time to study the ins and outs of an existing framework than to write a skinnied-down one for yourself.