I'm not saying the issue isn't important. It is, but this is no longer the best forum to raise your concerns. Just about everyone here is already on your side; the goal now should be to move forward and convince people that actually matter -- members of congress, judges, and our presidents & governors. Arguably, the private sector is at least as important, but you're never going to get them on your side on this one so it's a dead end to go after them.
There are more important issues. Copyright is a strange & muddied thing, and very interesting in these GNU / Linux / mp3 / Napster / etc days. But it's not the end of the world. Sorry, but that's all there is to it. It ties in to some very dangerous issues (the AOL-TimeWarner merger terrifies me, for example) but there are more important things to worry about. Health care. Education. Defense. Ecology. Et cetera -- pick any one you choose. Just because copyright plays a role in our livlihoods does not, by that very connection, make it the most important issue on the docket -- and implying such implies quite a bit about the self-importance of the readers here. Is software a big deal? Sure, I guess. But give me a break, get a grip on reality. The jonny one note thing gets really, really old after a while...
We do not just fight this in the courts, we fight it in the streets.
Bingo -- stop right there. That is exactly what I'm getting at. Is this a problem? Yes. Should we be concerned? Absolutely. Should we do something about it? Of course we should.
Should we keep preaching to the already converted?
NO.
The big fallacy here is in thinking that Slashdot is anything but our little geek soapbox to rant upon, but that's all it is. I'd like to see some changes too, but this isn't the place to bring them about. A start, sure, but you're sufficently riled up & organized that it's now time to move on to bigger strategies -- write (with atoms & paper, not bits & keys!) to your congressmen and let them know how important this is. Don't bitch about it to me -- I'm already on your side. Bitch about it to people that can do something about the problem. If you invest all your energy here then the world is going to pass you by, and the issue you're so worked up about will never be helped by your contribution.
That would almost be worse than anything else, wouldn't it?
...does the sky ever stop falling around here? This guy -- in a very reactionary way -- does raise some good points. Things like DCMA are Orwellian, I grant that. But the way things get portrayed on Slashdot has long since become a parody of itself: everything is a crisis, everything is an emergency, everything is a threat to our beloved GPL -- and not just to a simple license, but to our very way of life, to the American way, to life and liberty and freedom and happiness and ice cream cones too. Help help! We must Act, and Quickly!
Yawn
Guys: It's just software. It is not the end of the world. there are more important things in life than this. Really.
It gets pretty tiresome after a year or two guys. Can't this band play any other numbers?
Does anyone besides me find this ridiculous? Some questions / comments / observations:
Why?
How heavy is this monster? Lightweight bikes are far more practical, as a rule; is this too bulky to be worth using?
Would you want to be on the same {street|sidewalk} as the maniac barreling along on one of these? Cell phones for drivers are bad enough, palm-web-java-whatever on a bike sounds like a series of (admittedly relatively minor, compared to cars) injuries just screaming to happen.
I, for one, like riding my bike as a form of release from technology. It's just me and the pedals, and one of the few times I don't really connect to the digital world. I don't want that space to be invaded this way. Maybe others would like it, but I think it would be a particularly hard sell if others feel the same way I do.
Gizmos in the car is one thing -- you're more likely to have passengers to play with the stuff, or to be stuck in traffic and what have you. But this feels like the wrong platform to me. Why why why?
(Well okay maybe not but I can't think of one for here...:)
Several teams from my school have been working on this for a couple of years now. They've got a page up at this link.
Interestingly -- to me at least -- they aren't actually working with robots, but rather software automata that can somewhere down the line be used as the brains for autonomous soccer playing robots. To that end, they set it up so they can play a server and students can all write their own soccer playing clients that work together on teams. They're amusingly bad, but encouraging as well -- you can see where things might lead.
The home page for the research groups has some neat stuff as well. Whoa -- they even link to my old project! Ain't that nice of them...:)
Anyway, point being is that RoboCup is a big, worldwide research effort and it's not all just hardware. Interesting stuff...
Semi-related: I was downloading Netscape 6 last friday and the install software had a banner ad on it about itself. In a flash of blinding stupidity, I followed the link -- only to be led to Netscape's NetCenter page. Stupid me, actually wanting to learn about the software now, had rto dig around Netscape's site for ten minutes before I could find a page about the software.
You'd think that if a company were going to advertise something from their site, they'd at least give you a link that takes you to the product in question. This is why I could never be a marketer -- apparently you have to be a complete moron, and I'm only a partial moron...:)
How many of you have learned to filter out any image in the 400x60 profile. Some? Many? Just about everyone? The latter, I think.
The problem with banners -- not just for Google, but for all sites -- is that no one pays attention to them, and marketeers are realizing that. They're invariably [a] ugly and [b] a waste of time, so no one cares and everyone filters them out, either mentally or, if they're savvy enough, in software.
This can't last. Sooner or later, marketeers are going to have to change their tactics and find a way to get people to pay attention to them. Rather than polluting an aesthetically pleasing site like Google with dancing gif banners, advertisers should try other methods of promotion there -- text based ads, for example, or low-key images that fit in other profiles besides 400x60.
The emphasis should be less on clickthrough rates (which will always be trivial at best) and more on brand reconition. In other words, the ad itself is the point, just as it always was in print & broadcast media. If a small handful of people actually click on the thing then that's great too, but the point isn't to draw people in as much as it is to promote the quality of a brand by planting the idea in people's heads.
This isn't anything new really -- like I say, this is how things have always been done in traditional media -- but I think marketeers got distracted by the interactive nature of the web and tried to get people to do something that no one is really interested in doing.
I don't care what you're selling, I want to do a search. If you want to subsidize that with your ad revenues, then thanks for that -- I'll admit, I don't feel like paying for it myself, but I realize that someone has to -- but please don't expect me to leave this useful site to go look at yours instead. I'll appreciate your contribution more if you don't tell me what to do.
Google has an opportunity to, once again, point to the way forward here. If they can work with the mentality described above, they might set a trend that (I can hope) the rest of the web may come to follow.
A course requirement was to find the resource online. I only knew I was looking at the right algorithm because it looked similar to one from the books available to me at the time. Cut me some slack, amigo...:)
When I was taking my freshman programming [C++] courses, one of our assignments was to research different sorting algorithms and then turn in an implementation of our own. After a few minutes of Yahooing, the best one I could find was from an Argentinian web page, so the code was of course all in Spanish.
Utterly incomprehensible.
I can sorta understand Spanish, and I was just learning C++ (I'm still not fluent in either), so trying to read some weird amalgamation of the two was mind blowing. You don't really think about how all the variables influence what you're writing, and the comments were of course not much more help.
At least that was still ascii though. Is it even possible to write code in a language that requires some kind of Unicode extensions? Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, etc. Or for that matter, even a relatively close language like French or Swedish, when you accound for all the accent marks and such. I'm guessing that the compiler would have to be aware of the character set it was working with and adjust accordingly. Must be an absolute joy to debug though...:)
One simple (/simplistic?) approach would be to have a keyword based filter on all public terminals, and let anyone at all use them. In parallel, you can set up unrestricted or partially restricted terminals that can be accessed by minors under supervision, or anyone over the age of 18, etc. The main drawback is that it requires a bit more manpower to keep going -- you can't just fire it up and watch it go with everyone happy. But then, that's the price here -- if you want to be able to control access then you have to be willing to supervise that process.
" Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Vice President, Technology & Strategy IBM Enterprise Systems Group, discusses IBM's overview of Linux. The presentation will begin on August 8th, 2000, at 11:30 am EST, and will remain viewable afterwards." It's in Real or Windows Media Player - bleah.
Heh. A conference on Linux that isn't Linux accessible. Cute...
Sometimes it seems like they get it, and other times they just leave you wondering...
Interesting script there. I've run it a few times over the last hour and the load keeps shifting, but consistently it's about 4:1 IIS to Apache. They may be migrating faster than the original article implied -- or, like you suggest, the test is imperfect...
I think just about all of you are looking at this the wrong way. You're so wrapped up in thinking that Linux is the One True Way, and that all Other systems, especially that One From Redmond, suck and should be destroyed.
But you overlook one little thing:
That Other System is run by about 95% of the rest of the world.
I don't much like Windows either, guys -- I agree that there are much better desktop operating systems. But the sheer size of Windows is a card it can play against all others. If someone managed to come up with a decent clone of it, and one that was reasonably stable and fast, then as an aside -- with no work on their part -- they'd also get a universe of applications to run on it, and hundreds of millions of users that already know how to use it.
Would it be sub-optimal? Sure. Would hardcore geeks like us prefer it to Linux? Doubtful -- maybe as a games platform or as something to make the Gnu/Linux weenies happy;) -- but it's something those hundreds of millions of others might appreciate way more than Linux.
Further, I thought one of the better possible outcomes of the anti-trust trial would be an open API and possible clones. Hey presto, looks like people have gotten started already. Why do you have a problem with that? Even if it can't make a perfect & enhanced & stabilized version of Windows -- which, I admit, is a long shot -- it would have a possibly much greater side effect: it would be competition for Microsoft. Isn't that supposed to be a good thing? What are you all complaining about, anyway?
Eh? The whole point of the GPL is that you can do anything you want with a program -- rip it apart, use it elsewhere, give it to everyone you know, or sell it. People buy copies of GPL'ed software every day -- every Linux distribution comes with Perl, Apache, gcc, and dozens of other examples.
Your point about the economics of it all is valid (support does seem to be a primary way of making money of GPLware), but your main example doesn't play into this point.
You: I don't know whether that means prior to Episode I or Episode IV
Them: For the game, LucasArts and BioWare are creating an entirely original storyline set some four thousand years before Star Wars: Episode I. The ancient era is dominated by an epic struggle between the Jedi and the evil Sith.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say they're talking way before the current batch of movies, unless ol Darth of the original trilogy is really old...
Check out the boilerplate I send when I get junk email. It cites the following material from US Code:
US Code Title 47, Sec.227(b)(1)(C):
"It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States to use any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine"
A "telephone facsimile machine" is defined in Sec.227(a)(2)(B) as:
"equipment which has the capacity to transcribe text or images (or both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line onto paper."
Sounds close enough to me. Can we have this shot down before it gets out of control? IANAL of course, but I think we can defend against this...
GodDAMN their page sucks, here's how it looks the way I browse, in Lynx:
razorfish manages digital change
In order to visit this site, you need to enable javascript.
| || ||| || r a z o r f i s h, inc.
Fat load of good that does me if I don't have access to or want to use Javascript...
Oh wait, you mean like a page they made for somebody else? My god, people actually pay for this kind of crap?
:)
(Heh. Actually I interviewed with them and would have been perfectly happy to ignore the atrocity of their home site if it meant I could have lived in London for a few months, but it didn't work out and now I have no reason to stick up for their site. And that's too bad too, because they actually have some smart people working there. Not doing their own site apparently, but they are on the payroll...:)
Linux, and indeed software in general, isn't the only journalistic area that is subject to this. The music industry had a problem with DJs getting showered with gifts in order to get their bands on the airwaves, and in various ways it is still a problem today. I'm sure most types of critics have to deal with the same issue, whether the reviews are of movies & books or cars & computers. Car & Driver magazine, for example, is a steaming pile of horse poo; my dad gets it and laps up the masturbatory reviews of the latest gas guzzling behoemoths each month without pausing for even a second to question it all.
Like the other forms of criticism, the software & particularly in this case open source critics have to have the discretion and impartiality to say what they really think about a product, and not just "gee whiz they gave me this and ain't it fun" [1] but a balanced analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each item up for review. In other words, something akin to Consumer Reports, which goes out of its way to avoid entanglements with the manufacturers fo the products it reviews, accepting no handouts or advertisements. I think Slashdot could actually be a decent parallel to CU, in that few of us are actually on the payrolls (directly or otherwise) of, say, Red Hat. But our biases are a little too strong around here (like the godawful book reviews:) and I think somethign more objective is called for.
That or we could just learn to read these things with a huge lump of salt. That's probably easier anyhow.
[1] There was a great article in The Baffler a while back in which a reporter accepted a weekend trip to the American Southwest to go bombing around in a brand new Audi TT, courtesy of course of Audi. The Audi people didn't come out and say "we want you to write a good review for us", but they were pretty thorough about making sure the reporters had a good time, flying them in first class, putting them up in a four star hotel, giving them the car, a full tank of gas, and a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses, and basically just letting them go race around the deserts & mountains for a few days. Most of the journalists were regulars, working for Motor Trend type trade magazines, but there were others (travel magazines, etc) and then the Baffler guy, who wasn't writing about the car at all, but rather the whole process of it. Surreal stuff, and makes you wonder just how honest the regular critics can be even if they tried, which they might not do anyway...
"what about promotions, tours, music videos, movie soundtracks, and everything else that makes the music industry hum while sating consumer appetites?"
I think there's a whole lot of bloat in the current music promotion business, and we certainly don't need the RIAA's help to push things along. Take a look at this article by Steve Albini, in which he describes the crap that the labels make a typical band go through to get to "the top." Note especially the itemized accounting at the bottom, showing how all the label fees end up ultimately *costing the band money*, rather than making them rich as they origianlly hoped.
Then consider a band like Fugazi, which has managed to do extremely well without this label crap for going on 15 years. They print their own albums, organize their own tours, etc -- and I suspect they're doing a hell of a lot better than some of their major label collegues. And I sure as hell have a lot more respect for them than most major label bands.
The comparison to the movies isn't exactly accurate. Any bum with three chords and an attitude can put out a decent rock album (hey, just look at anyone from the Ramones to Green Day). More money mainly translates into fancier equipment, more beer, and 18" models of Stonehenge on stage -- none of which necessarily does anything to increase the quality of the show. Especially the Stonehenge thing. Look at the Fugazis, the Ani DiFrancos, etc that are recording their own music and doing their own tours on less than a shoestring budget, yet are making a decent living in the process. Then consider how rare this is in movies, even in the indie/arthouse friendly climate today. "Blair Witch Project" was a huge anomaly: most movies are extremely expensive to produce, market, and distribute. It's out of reach for most people, but any high school kid can start up a band.
And to come back to the matter of copyright, I don't think it's the major issue with the Fugazi's and Ani DiFranco's of the world. They make their living by touring, mainly, and while their albums sell at very respectable rates, it is the live performances that are bringing them recognition and financial reward. I'm certainly not the first to point out that in a "post copyright" world, it will be the act of creation, and not the product of it, that will bring one rewards. It's an old tradition, going back through the Grateful Dead and their bootleggers and even, say, Shakespeare and his plays -- he didn't make his fortune off the scripts, but the performances. Everything old is new again...
Slashdot Mirror
Says it all, really. Since when is Katz this cogent?
I'm not saying the issue isn't important. It is, but this is no longer the best forum to raise your concerns. Just about everyone here is already on your side; the goal now should be to move forward and convince people that actually matter -- members of congress, judges, and our presidents & governors. Arguably, the private sector is at least as important, but you're never going to get them on your side on this one so it's a dead end to go after them.
There are more important issues. Copyright is a strange & muddied thing, and very interesting in these GNU / Linux / mp3 / Napster / etc days. But it's not the end of the world. Sorry, but that's all there is to it. It ties in to some very dangerous issues (the AOL-TimeWarner merger terrifies me, for example) but there are more important things to worry about. Health care. Education. Defense. Ecology. Et cetera -- pick any one you choose. Just because copyright plays a role in our livlihoods does not, by that very connection, make it the most important issue on the docket -- and implying such implies quite a bit about the self-importance of the readers here. Is software a big deal? Sure, I guess. But give me a break, get a grip on reality. The jonny one note thing gets really, really old after a while...
Bingo -- stop right there. That is exactly what I'm getting at. Is this a problem? Yes. Should we be concerned? Absolutely. Should we do something about it? Of course we should.
Should we keep preaching to the already converted?
NO.
The big fallacy here is in thinking that Slashdot is anything but our little geek soapbox to rant upon, but that's all it is. I'd like to see some changes too, but this isn't the place to bring them about. A start, sure, but you're sufficently riled up & organized that it's now time to move on to bigger strategies -- write (with atoms & paper, not bits & keys!) to your congressmen and let them know how important this is. Don't bitch about it to me -- I'm already on your side. Bitch about it to people that can do something about the problem. If you invest all your energy here then the world is going to pass you by, and the issue you're so worked up about will never be helped by your contribution.
That would almost be worse than anything else, wouldn't it?
Yawn
Guys: It's just software. It is not the end of the world. there are more important things in life than this. Really.
It gets pretty tiresome after a year or two guys. Can't this band play any other numbers?
Gizmos in the car is one thing -- you're more likely to have passengers to play with the stuff, or to be stuck in traffic and what have you. But this feels like the wrong platform to me. Why why why?
Several teams from my school have been working on this for a couple of years now. They've got a page up at this link.
Interestingly -- to me at least -- they aren't actually working with robots, but rather software automata that can somewhere down the line be used as the brains for autonomous soccer playing robots. To that end, they set it up so they can play a server and students can all write their own soccer playing clients that work together on teams. They're amusingly bad, but encouraging as well -- you can see where things might lead.
The home page for the research groups has some neat stuff as well. Whoa -- they even link to my old project! Ain't that nice of them... :)
Anyway, point being is that RoboCup is a big, worldwide research effort and it's not all just hardware. Interesting stuff...
You'd think that if a company were going to advertise something from their site, they'd at least give you a link that takes you to the product in question. This is why I could never be a marketer -- apparently you have to be a complete moron, and I'm only a partial moron... :)
The problem with banners -- not just for Google, but for all sites -- is that no one pays attention to them, and marketeers are realizing that. They're invariably [a] ugly and [b] a waste of time, so no one cares and everyone filters them out, either mentally or, if they're savvy enough, in software.
This can't last. Sooner or later, marketeers are going to have to change their tactics and find a way to get people to pay attention to them. Rather than polluting an aesthetically pleasing site like Google with dancing gif banners, advertisers should try other methods of promotion there -- text based ads, for example, or low-key images that fit in other profiles besides 400x60.
The emphasis should be less on clickthrough rates (which will always be trivial at best) and more on brand reconition. In other words, the ad itself is the point, just as it always was in print & broadcast media. If a small handful of people actually click on the thing then that's great too, but the point isn't to draw people in as much as it is to promote the quality of a brand by planting the idea in people's heads.
This isn't anything new really -- like I say, this is how things have always been done in traditional media -- but I think marketeers got distracted by the interactive nature of the web and tried to get people to do something that no one is really interested in doing.
I don't care what you're selling, I want to do a search. If you want to subsidize that with your ad revenues, then thanks for that -- I'll admit, I don't feel like paying for it myself, but I realize that someone has to -- but please don't expect me to leave this useful site to go look at yours instead. I'll appreciate your contribution more if you don't tell me what to do.
Google has an opportunity to, once again, point to the way forward here. If they can work with the mentality described above, they might set a trend that (I can hope) the rest of the web may come to follow.
Or, as I've done once or twice, recover a page that was accidentally deleted. It's nice to have a passive mirror like that...
http://www.geocities.com/connorbd/varaq/
A course requirement was to find the resource online. I only knew I was looking at the right algorithm because it looked similar to one from the books available to me at the time. Cut me some slack, amigo... :)
Utterly incomprehensible.
I can sorta understand Spanish, and I was just learning C++ (I'm still not fluent in either), so trying to read some weird amalgamation of the two was mind blowing. You don't really think about how all the variables influence what you're writing, and the comments were of course not much more help.
At least that was still ascii though. Is it even possible to write code in a language that requires some kind of Unicode extensions? Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, etc. Or for that matter, even a relatively close language like French or Swedish, when you accound for all the accent marks and such. I'm guessing that the compiler would have to be aware of the character set it was working with and adjust accordingly. Must be an absolute joy to debug though... :)
One simple (/simplistic?) approach would be to have a keyword based filter on all public terminals, and let anyone at all use them. In parallel, you can set up unrestricted or partially restricted terminals that can be accessed by minors under supervision, or anyone over the age of 18, etc. The main drawback is that it requires a bit more manpower to keep going -- you can't just fire it up and watch it go with everyone happy. But then, that's the price here -- if you want to be able to control access then you have to be willing to supervise that process.
Heh. A conference on Linux that isn't Linux accessible. Cute...
Sometimes it seems like they get it, and other times they just leave you wondering...
Interesting script there. I've run it a few times over the last hour and the load keeps shifting, but consistently it's about 4:1 IIS to Apache. They may be migrating faster than the original article implied -- or, like you suggest, the test is imperfect...
But you overlook one little thing:
That Other System is run by about 95% of the rest of the world.
I don't much like Windows either, guys -- I agree that there are much better desktop operating systems. But the sheer size of Windows is a card it can play against all others. If someone managed to come up with a decent clone of it, and one that was reasonably stable and fast, then as an aside -- with no work on their part -- they'd also get a universe of applications to run on it, and hundreds of millions of users that already know how to use it.
Would it be sub-optimal? Sure. Would hardcore geeks like us prefer it to Linux? Doubtful -- maybe as a games platform or as something to make the Gnu/Linux weenies happy ;) -- but it's something those hundreds of millions of others might appreciate way more than Linux.
Further, I thought one of the better possible outcomes of the anti-trust trial would be an open API and possible clones. Hey presto, looks like people have gotten started already. Why do you have a problem with that? Even if it can't make a perfect & enhanced & stabilized version of Windows -- which, I admit, is a long shot -- it would have a possibly much greater side effect: it would be competition for Microsoft . Isn't that supposed to be a good thing? What are you all complaining about, anyway?
Your point about the economics of it all is valid (support does seem to be a primary way of making money of GPLware), but your main example doesn't play into this point.
What's in my pocket?
Them: For the game, LucasArts and BioWare are creating an entirely original storyline set some four thousand years before Star Wars: Episode I. The ancient era is dominated by an epic struggle between the Jedi and the evil Sith.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say they're talking way before the current batch of movies, unless ol Darth of the original trilogy is really old...
Sounds close enough to me. Can we have this shot down before it gets out of control? IANAL of course, but I think we can defend against this...
Heh -- actually I think that was going to end up being the plot of his next book...
Fat load of good that does me if I don't have access to or want to use Javascript...
Oh wait, you mean like a page they made for somebody else? My god, people actually pay for this kind of crap?
:)
(Heh. Actually I interviewed with them and would have been perfectly happy to ignore the atrocity of their home site if it meant I could have lived in London for a few months, but it didn't work out and now I have no reason to stick up for their site. And that's too bad too, because they actually have some smart people working there. Not doing their own site apparently, but they are on the payroll... :)
Like the other forms of criticism, the software & particularly in this case open source critics have to have the discretion and impartiality to say what they really think about a product, and not just "gee whiz they gave me this and ain't it fun" [1] but a balanced analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each item up for review. In other words, something akin to Consumer Reports, which goes out of its way to avoid entanglements with the manufacturers fo the products it reviews, accepting no handouts or advertisements. I think Slashdot could actually be a decent parallel to CU, in that few of us are actually on the payrolls (directly or otherwise) of, say, Red Hat. But our biases are a little too strong around here (like the godawful book reviews :) and I think somethign more objective is called for.
That or we could just learn to read these things with a huge lump of salt. That's probably easier anyhow.
[1] There was a great article in The Baffler a while back in which a reporter accepted a weekend trip to the American Southwest to go bombing around in a brand new Audi TT, courtesy of course of Audi. The Audi people didn't come out and say "we want you to write a good review for us", but they were pretty thorough about making sure the reporters had a good time, flying them in first class, putting them up in a four star hotel, giving them the car, a full tank of gas, and a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses, and basically just letting them go race around the deserts & mountains for a few days. Most of the journalists were regulars, working for Motor Trend type trade magazines, but there were others (travel magazines, etc) and then the Baffler guy, who wasn't writing about the car at all, but rather the whole process of it. Surreal stuff, and makes you wonder just how honest the regular critics can be even if they tried, which they might not do anyway...
heh yeah, I mean as opposed to just broadcast live -- not like going back in time or something. Wiseass haahaha :)
I think there's a whole lot of bloat in the current music promotion business, and we certainly don't need the RIAA's help to push things along. Take a look at this article by Steve Albini, in which he describes the crap that the labels make a typical band go through to get to "the top." Note especially the itemized accounting at the bottom, showing how all the label fees end up ultimately *costing the band money*, rather than making them rich as they origianlly hoped.
Then consider a band like Fugazi, which has managed to do extremely well without this label crap for going on 15 years. They print their own albums, organize their own tours, etc -- and I suspect they're doing a hell of a lot better than some of their major label collegues. And I sure as hell have a lot more respect for them than most major label bands.
The comparison to the movies isn't exactly accurate. Any bum with three chords and an attitude can put out a decent rock album (hey, just look at anyone from the Ramones to Green Day). More money mainly translates into fancier equipment, more beer, and 18" models of Stonehenge on stage -- none of which necessarily does anything to increase the quality of the show. Especially the Stonehenge thing. Look at the Fugazis, the Ani DiFrancos, etc that are recording their own music and doing their own tours on less than a shoestring budget, yet are making a decent living in the process. Then consider how rare this is in movies, even in the indie/arthouse friendly climate today. "Blair Witch Project" was a huge anomaly: most movies are extremely expensive to produce, market, and distribute. It's out of reach for most people, but any high school kid can start up a band.
And to come back to the matter of copyright, I don't think it's the major issue with the Fugazi's and Ani DiFranco's of the world. They make their living by touring, mainly, and while their albums sell at very respectable rates, it is the live performances that are bringing them recognition and financial reward. I'm certainly not the first to point out that in a "post copyright" world, it will be the act of creation, and not the product of it, that will bring one rewards. It's an old tradition, going back through the Grateful Dead and their bootleggers and even, say, Shakespeare and his plays -- he didn't make his fortune off the scripts, but the performances. Everything old is new again...