Are the prices high? Perhaps. But so are the special effects and the union crews and the cinematographers etc. Some companies are trying to make lower priced movies and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail.
You're spot on. I've gotten tired of sitting down for a $5 coffee with friends who parrot what Geist and his astroturfing friends keep saying. My friends have learned not to invite me to meet them at Starbucks and then repeat random blather about how the content industry "just doesn't get it" and "screws us."
Part of the reason that kids today don't have any money is the tenured radicals like Geist work at schools charge $50k+ for a degree that isn't worth much anymore. If he really wanted to do something for the poor, he would find a way to give degrees away for free. Oh wait. Then he wouldn't have a job that gives him all of this spare time to blog about copyright.
While this may be true in the poorest countries, it's not true in Sweden, Canada or the United States. The folks who are paying RapidShare, Pirate Bay or the USENET losers seem to be able to afford $20+ a month. They could spend that at legit stores like Amazon or iTunes, but they choose not to.
But what can you expect from a tenured professor in a profession that's spawning such wonderful scamblogs like http://firsttiertoilet.blogspot.com/.
First amendment? Hardly. The First Amendment protects you when you work hard to make a movie or a song. It doesn't protect you when you "express yourself" by making a copy of someone else's song. And there's no creativity or expression involved in publishing a link to a torrent site.
If only this were true. Libraries don't infringe. They buy legit copies and loan them out. The newspapers preserve the advertisements and the authors get paid. If only the same thing could be said about the P2P sites.
How many taxes to the P2P "sharing" folks pay? How many taxes do the movie theaters, the DVD stores, and Netflix pay? Heck, Netflix pays sales taxes in my state even though they have no physical presence that I can see. Amazon may not want to pay sales taxes, but they still pay federal taxes and the employees pay income taxes. Who's making a contribution to bringing down the deficit? Who is paying the taxes that pay for teachers, police officers, ambulance corps etc.
As much as I love free software and utopian ideals, I have to admit that it doesn't make itself easy to tax. That's all wonderful until you ask who is going to pay for the teachers, the police, etc...
Why are the biggest leaders in the computer industry all college drop outs? They took much less computer science than the degree holders and look who's ended up dominating the industry. Heck, in the one area I really know, databases, the drop outs are busy throwing away all of the theory about relational databases and building super fast, very useful tools like Cassandra. I know that many academics might not think of SQL as particular academic, but it was one area where research made its way into products. Now the practical folks are learning it wasn't a worthwhile path to follow, most of the time. Even the people who still use Oracle spend all of their time denormalizing the tables, essentially unlearning all of the theory that the algebraic theoreticians created.
I'm going to run right over to the ISPs that throttle. Why? Because I don't use bittorrent and I hate to pay an equal share of those overconsumers and abusers of "fair use". This is a great indicator of which ISPs care about decent folk who pay their fair share and those that cater to the couchpotatoes who are too cheap to pay 99 cents for a song.
Foreign? It's not just foreign. I see it happen at American sites all of the time. Heck, BoingBoing
is both one of the biggest fans of Creative Commons licenses and one of the biggest abusers. They
always post the CC license link prominently when it allows copying, but when it doesn't they
just post the image anyways. And they're about as commercial as a website gets charging
some of the heaviest ad rates around. ($20 CPM.) They reportedly raked in more than $1 million
in 2006. (http://blogbuildingu.com/articles/making-money-blogging-profiles-of-6-very-successful-blogs)
There's a reason why their masthead lists two
lawyers but no staff photographers. They would rather pay the lawyers to spew squid ink about
fair use than to pay anything to the people who contribute the art. This attitude, of course,
is not unique to this site. A number of sites do it.
The music companies may keep most of the money, but the pirates keep all of it and they don't spend anything to develop the work. If the pirates were really contributing something like the open source movement I might be torn, but I think they're all just a bunch of leeches.
I know that many of the corporations are pretty sleezy and they make money off the backs of the artists, but the pirate sites do exactly the same thing. At least the corporate suits give a few percent to the artists. The pirate sites keep it all for themselves.
If you're going to do this thing, study the masters like Richard Stallman and write something intellectually coherent about intellectual property. Make a solid argument and it's more likely to be respected.
I certainly agree with the quote in theory, but I also feel that it has to be broken because of the nature of society. In my town, there were some pretty nasty red-light runners. I was almost hit several times. So when they came to take away part of my liberty by installing red light cameras, I wasn't so upset. It was a trade off that would make the world better. There will probably be some people who think that letting the Feds shut down websites is a bad tradeoff to make but I'm not one of them. The constitution gives each of us the freedom to speak, not the freedom to steal someone else's word. Most of the torrent-loving people are just kind of lazy couch potatoes who seem obsessed with filling up a 2tb disk with more than they can ever watch. Yet they're too cheap to spend 99 cents on a song. Starbucks charges more for a cup of coffee than Amazon does for many of the hottest albums. Come on.
This is a bogus argument. Rightshaven pays the creator and thus funds more reporting. If Rightshaven successfully sues the infringers, even more content is created.
Wrong. When Rightshaven gives money to a newspaper, the newspaper has money to pay reporters. That creates new content. While I agree that some newspapers or lawyers will just take the money to a vacation in Vegas-- oh wait these guys live there-- most newspapers will put the money into writing more content.
The people who remove value are the ones who are causing litigation in the first place.
If the EFF were truly fair, they would push for both sides to get the court to review evidence. How about asking the ISPs to require their users to get a court order before following a torrent link? This would protect the users for inadvertently downloading something protected by copyright. It would be a feature for customers if the court could decide a priori whether there's enough legal basis to proceed.
Notice how you're using the words "privacy" and "due process". You only see those words applying to the rights of the file sharing community. But what if we spoke about a content creator's right to have a private communication with a customer? The EFF calls that DRM and actively campaigns against it.
Or due process? The EFF is only interested in making sure the rules are followed when they help file sharers. They want red tape to impede the content creators from defending their rights.
It's easy to come up with scenarios where the EFF could insist upon court orders that would help the content creators. Imagine if the EFF in their role as staunch defenders of rights insisted that every downloader must get a court order certifying that the material is either in the public domain or available with a valid license? Hah. Following a torrent link would require hiring a lawyer to prepare a solid argument.
I realize that such an idea seems inconceivable and very inefficient to you, but if the EFF really cared about due process for everyone they would push for more court involvement to check that both sides are being legally correct.
You may think they're not a trade organization, but I that's only because you're drinking the Kool Aid. I'm just pointing out that they're heavily funded by people who want them to support a set of principles that heavily favor a few industries and hurt their rivals. It's no big surprise that they've found each other. That's how business is done.
Now it's true that there are some fairly independent people online who may also support them, but that doesn't change the fundamental economics. There are gun lovers who are also fairly independent, but I think it's fair to see the NRA as a mouthpiece for the gun industry.
Courts make odd decisions about when they accept amicus brief. As I've said again and again, I'm sure the EFF will contribute solid and well thought out ideas, but I can also see why the court may reject them. Why bother getting someone who is so biased toward one side of the case? Let the counsel for that side articulate the issues.
Actually, they've only chosen a narrow definition of freedom and privacy: freedom and privacy for the file sharing community. They never lift a finger to protect the freedom of the content creators to create an efficient and fair marketplace where all users pay equally. There's no evidence that they care at all about the freedom of content creators to try to earn a living. Oh, they babble on and on about supporting copyright laws, but they never intercede to defend the freedom of anyone except the couch potatoes who use words like "privacy" as a shield to defend their inherent cheapness.
And privacy? What about the privacy of content creators who want to encrypt their communications with their customers? Hah. The EFF calls that DRM and actively campaigns against it.
And what's wrong with saying that the ACLU is astroturfing for the newspaper biz? My only point is that the EFF isn't some neutral party here. They're a lobbying organization supported by the folks in Silicon Valley who make more money when the content producers get nothing.
Look at the list of big donors to the EFF. It's heavy on Google and hardware company execs. It's just another trade organization. This is why the judge may not want to accept their "friend of the court" brief. I'm sure it makes good points. I'm sure it would help offer some depth. But at the end of the day, the lawyers who wrote it are bought and paid for by people who make more money when they cut the content creators out of the loop. So again, the EFF is not a "friend of the court", they're a "friend of the cloud manufacturers" and a "friend of the MP3 makers".
No. You miss my point. My point is that the EFF never insists on full legal process when it benefits the content creators, they only push for long legal battles when it will benefit their funders, the hardware companies. The ACLU lost some members when they supported the Nazi marches in Skokie,IL but they fought it was important to support free speech for all. I don't hear the EFF insisting that websites make it easy to file a DMCA form. I don't hear the EFF applying the law equally to both sides. They're just interested in arguing points of law when it benefits the people who pay for their astroturfing, Google and the Consumer Electronics Ass.
I understand your point. I do. They never run up the pirate flag like the Pirate Party in Sweden, but they always seem to be on the side of the copyists. Why just this week they called on the Euro Commission to "protect internet users' rights by requiring a court order." And so you can claim that they're not condone infringement, just defending the users' rights to endless time in court.
But what are the users afraid of? Being busted for copyright infringement. This has nothing to do with civil rights or protection from profiling or any of a number of interesting issues. The only reason they want to throw the sand in the gears is to protect the infringers because they're the only ones to worry about ISP takedowns from the current law.
I love the EFF. I do. But they're rabidly pro-copying. Or pro-sharing. A friend of mine likes to point out that they get some of their money by the hardware companies which sort of makes sense. The hardware companies don't care about sharing. They don't care about whether the content creators get paid because, well, they still get their money. If anything, they're happy to wink at the copying because every dollar spent on content is a dollar that can't be spent on a new version of a gadget.
So while I think it's okay that they're writing friends of a court briefs, I'm sure they're really more like "friends of the cloud manufacturers" or "friends of the Consumer Electronics Ass."
Slashdot Mirror
Are the prices high? Perhaps. But so are the special effects and the union crews and the cinematographers etc. Some companies are trying to make lower priced movies and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail.
You're spot on. I've gotten tired of sitting down for a $5 coffee with friends who parrot what Geist and his astroturfing friends keep saying. My friends have learned not to invite me to meet them at Starbucks and then repeat random blather about how the content industry "just doesn't get it" and "screws us." Part of the reason that kids today don't have any money is the tenured radicals like Geist work at schools charge $50k+ for a degree that isn't worth much anymore. If he really wanted to do something for the poor, he would find a way to give degrees away for free. Oh wait. Then he wouldn't have a job that gives him all of this spare time to blog about copyright.
While this may be true in the poorest countries, it's not true in Sweden, Canada or the United States. The folks who are paying RapidShare, Pirate Bay or the USENET losers seem to be able to afford $20+ a month. They could spend that at legit stores like Amazon or iTunes, but they choose not to. But what can you expect from a tenured professor in a profession that's spawning such wonderful scamblogs like http://firsttiertoilet.blogspot.com/.
First amendment? Hardly. The First Amendment protects you when you work hard to make a movie or a song. It doesn't protect you when you "express yourself" by making a copy of someone else's song. And there's no creativity or expression involved in publishing a link to a torrent site.
Google pays taxes. By some accounts, 10% of the California tax revenue came from the exercise of Google options. Pirate Bay doesn't.
Uhhh.... no. If you think it's dreck, ignore it. But don't steal it, watch it and use your disdain to justify not paying.
If only this were true. Libraries don't infringe. They buy legit copies and loan them out. The newspapers preserve the advertisements and the authors get paid. If only the same thing could be said about the P2P sites.
How many taxes to the P2P "sharing" folks pay? How many taxes do the movie theaters, the DVD stores, and Netflix pay? Heck, Netflix pays sales taxes in my state even though they have no physical presence that I can see. Amazon may not want to pay sales taxes, but they still pay federal taxes and the employees pay income taxes. Who's making a contribution to bringing down the deficit? Who is paying the taxes that pay for teachers, police officers, ambulance corps etc. As much as I love free software and utopian ideals, I have to admit that it doesn't make itself easy to tax. That's all wonderful until you ask who is going to pay for the teachers, the police, etc...
Why are the biggest leaders in the computer industry all college drop outs? They took much less computer science than the degree holders and look who's ended up dominating the industry. Heck, in the one area I really know, databases, the drop outs are busy throwing away all of the theory about relational databases and building super fast, very useful tools like Cassandra. I know that many academics might not think of SQL as particular academic, but it was one area where research made its way into products. Now the practical folks are learning it wasn't a worthwhile path to follow, most of the time. Even the people who still use Oracle spend all of their time denormalizing the tables, essentially unlearning all of the theory that the algebraic theoreticians created.
I'm going to run right over to the ISPs that throttle. Why? Because I don't use bittorrent and I hate to pay an equal share of those overconsumers and abusers of "fair use". This is a great indicator of which ISPs care about decent folk who pay their fair share and those that cater to the couchpotatoes who are too cheap to pay 99 cents for a song.
They charge for the ads. Seems pretty profitable to me.
Foreign? It's not just foreign. I see it happen at American sites all of the time. Heck, BoingBoing is both one of the biggest fans of Creative Commons licenses and one of the biggest abusers. They always post the CC license link prominently when it allows copying, but when it doesn't they just post the image anyways. And they're about as commercial as a website gets charging some of the heaviest ad rates around. ($20 CPM.) They reportedly raked in more than $1 million in 2006. (http://blogbuildingu.com/articles/making-money-blogging-profiles-of-6-very-successful-blogs)
There's a reason why their masthead lists two lawyers but no staff photographers. They would rather pay the lawyers to spew squid ink about fair use than to pay anything to the people who contribute the art. This attitude, of course, is not unique to this site. A number of sites do it.
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/04/george-bernard-shaws.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/06/startups-of-londons.html
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/ol-space-food/
The music companies may keep most of the money, but the pirates keep all of it and they don't spend anything to develop the work. If the pirates were really contributing something like the open source movement I might be torn, but I think they're all just a bunch of leeches.
I know that many of the corporations are pretty sleezy and they make money off the backs of the artists, but the pirate sites do exactly the same thing. At least the corporate suits give a few percent to the artists. The pirate sites keep it all for themselves. If you're going to do this thing, study the masters like Richard Stallman and write something intellectually coherent about intellectual property. Make a solid argument and it's more likely to be respected.
I certainly agree with the quote in theory, but I also feel that it has to be broken because of the nature of society. In my town, there were some pretty nasty red-light runners. I was almost hit several times. So when they came to take away part of my liberty by installing red light cameras, I wasn't so upset. It was a trade off that would make the world better. There will probably be some people who think that letting the Feds shut down websites is a bad tradeoff to make but I'm not one of them. The constitution gives each of us the freedom to speak, not the freedom to steal someone else's word. Most of the torrent-loving people are just kind of lazy couch potatoes who seem obsessed with filling up a 2tb disk with more than they can ever watch. Yet they're too cheap to spend 99 cents on a song. Starbucks charges more for a cup of coffee than Amazon does for many of the hottest albums. Come on.
This is a bogus argument. Rightshaven pays the creator and thus funds more reporting. If Rightshaven successfully sues the infringers, even more content is created.
Wrong. When Rightshaven gives money to a newspaper, the newspaper has money to pay reporters. That creates new content. While I agree that some newspapers or lawyers will just take the money to a vacation in Vegas-- oh wait these guys live there-- most newspapers will put the money into writing more content. The people who remove value are the ones who are causing litigation in the first place.
If the EFF were truly fair, they would push for both sides to get the court to review evidence. How about asking the ISPs to require their users to get a court order before following a torrent link? This would protect the users for inadvertently downloading something protected by copyright. It would be a feature for customers if the court could decide a priori whether there's enough legal basis to proceed.
Notice how you're using the words "privacy" and "due process". You only see those words applying to the rights of the file sharing community. But what if we spoke about a content creator's right to have a private communication with a customer? The EFF calls that DRM and actively campaigns against it. Or due process? The EFF is only interested in making sure the rules are followed when they help file sharers. They want red tape to impede the content creators from defending their rights. It's easy to come up with scenarios where the EFF could insist upon court orders that would help the content creators. Imagine if the EFF in their role as staunch defenders of rights insisted that every downloader must get a court order certifying that the material is either in the public domain or available with a valid license? Hah. Following a torrent link would require hiring a lawyer to prepare a solid argument. I realize that such an idea seems inconceivable and very inefficient to you, but if the EFF really cared about due process for everyone they would push for more court involvement to check that both sides are being legally correct.
You may think they're not a trade organization, but I that's only because you're drinking the Kool Aid. I'm just pointing out that they're heavily funded by people who want them to support a set of principles that heavily favor a few industries and hurt their rivals. It's no big surprise that they've found each other. That's how business is done. Now it's true that there are some fairly independent people online who may also support them, but that doesn't change the fundamental economics. There are gun lovers who are also fairly independent, but I think it's fair to see the NRA as a mouthpiece for the gun industry. Courts make odd decisions about when they accept amicus brief. As I've said again and again, I'm sure the EFF will contribute solid and well thought out ideas, but I can also see why the court may reject them. Why bother getting someone who is so biased toward one side of the case? Let the counsel for that side articulate the issues.
Actually, they've only chosen a narrow definition of freedom and privacy: freedom and privacy for the file sharing community. They never lift a finger to protect the freedom of the content creators to create an efficient and fair marketplace where all users pay equally. There's no evidence that they care at all about the freedom of content creators to try to earn a living. Oh, they babble on and on about supporting copyright laws, but they never intercede to defend the freedom of anyone except the couch potatoes who use words like "privacy" as a shield to defend their inherent cheapness. And privacy? What about the privacy of content creators who want to encrypt their communications with their customers? Hah. The EFF calls that DRM and actively campaigns against it.
And what's wrong with saying that the ACLU is astroturfing for the newspaper biz? My only point is that the EFF isn't some neutral party here. They're a lobbying organization supported by the folks in Silicon Valley who make more money when the content producers get nothing. Look at the list of big donors to the EFF. It's heavy on Google and hardware company execs. It's just another trade organization. This is why the judge may not want to accept their "friend of the court" brief. I'm sure it makes good points. I'm sure it would help offer some depth. But at the end of the day, the lawyers who wrote it are bought and paid for by people who make more money when they cut the content creators out of the loop. So again, the EFF is not a "friend of the court", they're a "friend of the cloud manufacturers" and a "friend of the MP3 makers".
No. You miss my point. My point is that the EFF never insists on full legal process when it benefits the content creators, they only push for long legal battles when it will benefit their funders, the hardware companies. The ACLU lost some members when they supported the Nazi marches in Skokie,IL but they fought it was important to support free speech for all. I don't hear the EFF insisting that websites make it easy to file a DMCA form. I don't hear the EFF applying the law equally to both sides. They're just interested in arguing points of law when it benefits the people who pay for their astroturfing, Google and the Consumer Electronics Ass.
I understand your point. I do. They never run up the pirate flag like the Pirate Party in Sweden, but they always seem to be on the side of the copyists. Why just this week they called on the Euro Commission to "protect internet users' rights by requiring a court order." And so you can claim that they're not condone infringement, just defending the users' rights to endless time in court. But what are the users afraid of? Being busted for copyright infringement. This has nothing to do with civil rights or protection from profiling or any of a number of interesting issues. The only reason they want to throw the sand in the gears is to protect the infringers because they're the only ones to worry about ISP takedowns from the current law.
I love the EFF. I do. But they're rabidly pro-copying. Or pro-sharing. A friend of mine likes to point out that they get some of their money by the hardware companies which sort of makes sense. The hardware companies don't care about sharing. They don't care about whether the content creators get paid because, well, they still get their money. If anything, they're happy to wink at the copying because every dollar spent on content is a dollar that can't be spent on a new version of a gadget. So while I think it's okay that they're writing friends of a court briefs, I'm sure they're really more like "friends of the cloud manufacturers" or "friends of the Consumer Electronics Ass."