Oh, it's not just the disk drive manufacturers. Look at their annual report. While they get money from individuals, they also take cash from groups like the Consumer Electronics Association. Notice that it's not the Consumer Content Association. People who MP3 players (i.e. members of the CEA) like it when there's plenty of free content available and so they tend to support the EFF and other organizations that play up the greatness of the "free and open Internet".
The EFF trots it out every time they need some political cover. They can say, "See, we're not anti-artist, we're not anti-copyright." But then they spend their time defending all of the file sharers they can find. They're paid shills for the hardware companies and the bandwidth companies. They want you to buy bigger, faster machines with faster net connections and the easiest way to do that is to wink at file sharing. They don't care about the artists and they hold up this ideal of "free and open" to make it seem like it's somehow anti-freedom to pay an artist for their life's work.
Dude. The EFF may take plenty of donations from average joes, but they take big ones from the big hardware companies. There's a reason why the Consumer Electronics Association donates so much money to them. The more pirated content on the web, the more money that the users have to pay for more hardware. Pirated songs encourage users to buy new iPods with more capacity. Hardware companies wink, wink, and wink again when it comes to piracy and the EFF winks along with them.
Check out their proposal:
http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing
They want everyone to put money in a pool and then the artists split it based on how often their music is actually paid. But it requires bugging everyone's computer/ipod and building a huge db of what everyone listens to. This didn't make the privacy people at EFF very happy.
Oh, btw, I don't disagree about the homes of the people who run the RIAA, MPAA and ASCAP. They're large. They may be greedy scum, but they do share something with the artists, unlike the so-called ZeroPaid.com and Giganews. I personally know one guy whose grandfather the song writer had a big house. ASCAP paid for it.
Drew just waves his hands and talks about magical ways that filesharing may help artists. ASCAP may take 95% of the money, but they do share something and that's more than ZeroPaid, Giganews and the Torrent software companies can ever say.
Look who advertises on ZeroPaid and supports them? Companies that charge money for torrent software or Usenet feeds. They're not volunteers. They're not copyfighters. They're businessmen plain and simple. They know people sign up for the pirated copies. They do the minimal amount they can to comply with the DMCA and then wink, wink, wink as they take the money.
So sure, they give some to Drew to be a shill and attract the kind of kids who pay for Giganews memberships.
But in the end, they keep it all.
The irony is that the EFF's voluntary collective licensing is pretty much the same as ASCAP. It's not much different from Rhapsody and it never caught on. People like the idea of "ownership" for whatever reason. Maybe it's Steve Jobs' reality distortion field.
Dude. You really should check out Giganews. They're making a boatload of cash. Check out the houses of the owners on Google Maps. They've got tennis courts and pools. The only people not getting paid are the artists.
This dude Drew is just their paid shill. He's a tool of the folks who make their money encouraging downloading.
This is a story on a website called "ZeroPaid". It is funded by ads from paid Usenet repositories and BitTorrent software companies. Yet, they claim they're not "anti-copyright". Hah. The only people who are zero paid are the artists.
The EFF is incredibly clever. They propose an unwieldy collective sharing system that's incredibly bureaucratic and then spend the rest of the time undermining every other system out there. The existence of this proposal lets them claim that they're not anti-artist, but the net effect is that they just make Google and the hardware companies richer. And who's their biggest donors?
The information-must-be-free folks have already put a number of newspapers out of business and reduced the headcount at many others. So who's really reducing the available information.
Paywalls don't restrict access to paying customers, just those who don't want to pull their weight.
A shorter copyright term is only important when we're talking about battles over things like Mickey Mouse. The news is rarely valuable after one month .
You're right that the business game isn't easy for small entities, but it's not fair for them to take all of the advantages of small size without living with the disadvantages. These small bloggers constantly crow about being faster or better focused, but what the reason they're faster is that they don't do any of the work. The bloggers just summarize someone else's work. The bloggers seem to want to be considered to be just as powerful, just as insightful, just as innovative as the big corporations-- but they don't want to live with all of the legal rules that the big guys do.
If you're going to claim that you're just as cool as an official, old-school journalist, then you've got to live with the same rules as the old-school journalists.
I can see people saying "never ever stop sharing" after a fun looting episode during the 70s or after Katrina. But people stop when the stores go out of business. And they'll stop "sharing" when the newspapers go out of business too. Then whatever news there is will be kept behind closed walls.
I routinely skip articles after reading summaries on BoingBoing. I don't read them on the original site even if I go to the site regularly.
What kind of proof do you imagine?
But it can have the same effect on a newspaper or a blog. They make money when people look at ads or buy subscriptions. If you reproduce a large part of the article or somehow intercept the readers, it has the same effect as stealing some money directly from their bank account. So you can quibble over the word "theft", but the comptroller who needs to issue the paychecks and the people who have to write their mortgage checks feel the same thing.
I know it's a complement and it's not as horrible as giving someone a complement by making out with their girlfriend, but it's still something that hurts the paper. If they don't get ad revenue, they die. If someone really wants to give someone a complement, they'll give a short teaser link with a suggestion to the reader to follow the link and read the piece. A long quote may not seem mean, but it still hurts.
Is anyone buying any longer? The last time I checked, his book _Makers_ wasn't selling very many copies at Amazon despite the endless ads on BoingBoing. I think everyone is used to getting him for free.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll make the arteriosclerosis from cholesterol look like a sneeze.
Oh, it's not just the disk drive manufacturers. Look at their annual report. While they get money from individuals, they also take cash from groups like the Consumer Electronics Association. Notice that it's not the Consumer Content Association. People who MP3 players (i.e. members of the CEA) like it when there's plenty of free content available and so they tend to support the EFF and other organizations that play up the greatness of the "free and open Internet".
The EFF trots it out every time they need some political cover. They can say, "See, we're not anti-artist, we're not anti-copyright." But then they spend their time defending all of the file sharers they can find. They're paid shills for the hardware companies and the bandwidth companies. They want you to buy bigger, faster machines with faster net connections and the easiest way to do that is to wink at file sharing. They don't care about the artists and they hold up this ideal of "free and open" to make it seem like it's somehow anti-freedom to pay an artist for their life's work.
Dude. The EFF may take plenty of donations from average joes, but they take big ones from the big hardware companies. There's a reason why the Consumer Electronics Association donates so much money to them. The more pirated content on the web, the more money that the users have to pay for more hardware. Pirated songs encourage users to buy new iPods with more capacity. Hardware companies wink, wink, and wink again when it comes to piracy and the EFF winks along with them.
Check out their proposal: http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing They want everyone to put money in a pool and then the artists split it based on how often their music is actually paid. But it requires bugging everyone's computer/ipod and building a huge db of what everyone listens to. This didn't make the privacy people at EFF very happy.
Here's the link. http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing It's like Rhapsody, but with greenwashing.
Oh, btw, I don't disagree about the homes of the people who run the RIAA, MPAA and ASCAP. They're large. They may be greedy scum, but they do share something with the artists, unlike the so-called ZeroPaid.com and Giganews. I personally know one guy whose grandfather the song writer had a big house. ASCAP paid for it.
Drew just waves his hands and talks about magical ways that filesharing may help artists. ASCAP may take 95% of the money, but they do share something and that's more than ZeroPaid, Giganews and the Torrent software companies can ever say.
Look who advertises on ZeroPaid and supports them? Companies that charge money for torrent software or Usenet feeds. They're not volunteers. They're not copyfighters. They're businessmen plain and simple. They know people sign up for the pirated copies. They do the minimal amount they can to comply with the DMCA and then wink, wink, wink as they take the money. So sure, they give some to Drew to be a shill and attract the kind of kids who pay for Giganews memberships. But in the end, they keep it all.
Yup. I love when websites use CC photos. Given a choice between sharing their ad revenue with photographers and embracing CC, they embrace the CC.
The irony is that the EFF's voluntary collective licensing is pretty much the same as ASCAP. It's not much different from Rhapsody and it never caught on. People like the idea of "ownership" for whatever reason. Maybe it's Steve Jobs' reality distortion field.
Dude. You really should check out Giganews. They're making a boatload of cash. Check out the houses of the owners on Google Maps. They've got tennis courts and pools. The only people not getting paid are the artists. This dude Drew is just their paid shill. He's a tool of the folks who make their money encouraging downloading.
This is a story on a website called "ZeroPaid". It is funded by ads from paid Usenet repositories and BitTorrent software companies. Yet, they claim they're not "anti-copyright". Hah. The only people who are zero paid are the artists.
The EFF is incredibly clever. They propose an unwieldy collective sharing system that's incredibly bureaucratic and then spend the rest of the time undermining every other system out there. The existence of this proposal lets them claim that they're not anti-artist, but the net effect is that they just make Google and the hardware companies richer. And who's their biggest donors?
Most blogs I know just grab the work of others and pretend that they did some real work. Look at this brilliant blog post:
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/03/commercially-availab.html
The blogger wrote one sentence. Wow. I can't wait for bloggers to continue when they finally overthrow the evil mainstream media.
The information-must-be-free folks have already put a number of newspapers out of business and reduced the headcount at many others. So who's really reducing the available information.
Paywalls don't restrict access to paying customers, just those who don't want to pull their weight.
A shorter copyright term is only important when we're talking about battles over things like Mickey Mouse. The news is rarely valuable after one month .
You're right that the business game isn't easy for small entities, but it's not fair for them to take all of the advantages of small size without living with the disadvantages. These small bloggers constantly crow about being faster or better focused, but what the reason they're faster is that they don't do any of the work. The bloggers just summarize someone else's work. The bloggers seem to want to be considered to be just as powerful, just as insightful, just as innovative as the big corporations-- but they don't want to live with all of the legal rules that the big guys do.
If you're going to claim that you're just as cool as an official, old-school journalist, then you've got to live with the same rules as the old-school journalists.
I can see people saying "never ever stop sharing" after a fun looting episode during the 70s or after Katrina. But people stop when the stores go out of business. And they'll stop "sharing" when the newspapers go out of business too. Then whatever news there is will be kept behind closed walls.
I routinely skip articles after reading summaries on BoingBoing. I don't read them on the original site even if I go to the site regularly. What kind of proof do you imagine?
But it can have the same effect on a newspaper or a blog. They make money when people look at ads or buy subscriptions. If you reproduce a large part of the article or somehow intercept the readers, it has the same effect as stealing some money directly from their bank account. So you can quibble over the word "theft", but the comptroller who needs to issue the paychecks and the people who have to write their mortgage checks feel the same thing.
I know it's a complement and it's not as horrible as giving someone a complement by making out with their girlfriend, but it's still something that hurts the paper. If they don't get ad revenue, they die. If someone really wants to give someone a complement, they'll give a short teaser link with a suggestion to the reader to follow the link and read the piece. A long quote may not seem mean, but it still hurts.
The guy who wrote Beating the College Bubble says that the cost of college debt is so high, everyone should feel empathy for the students, not demand empathy from them. I agree. (For a Slashdot review, read this .)
I'm going to celebrate tonight.
I'm glad they gave me some new ideas for tracking.
Is anyone buying any longer? The last time I checked, his book _Makers_ wasn't selling very many copies at Amazon despite the endless ads on BoingBoing. I think everyone is used to getting him for free.