"Goodwill" has a long history in business (and divorce where there is family business involved) litigation. We're not talking about the thriftstore here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting)
You said it: he still didn't invent and build the damned calculator either.
There are three parties: 1: original user 2. copier 3: manufacturer
It is the manufacturer who loses, not 1 or 2. You are completely ignoring that.
As for "theft" -- we're talking here, not writing a legal brief. Theft has lots of meanings in various contexts. It's perfectly OK to use the phrase colloquially.
Tortious interference with a business interest? Is that not a suit in which damages can include lost income? Liquidated damages provisions in construction contracts, i.e., build my store on time or pay $X to compensate me for the (hard to calculate) lost income. Or nuisance suits where the nuisance interferes with a business. There are probably a thousand ways in which potential lost income can be estimated and awarded.
Yes, you can do whatever you want with your physical copy except make an identical copy, give it away and keep your copy to boot. You are perfectly free to give a copy to your friend and delete your own. If you would like the right to make and distribute multiple copies, you are free to negotiate with the person who holds the copyright. Just be prepared to pay more than $0.99 per track.
Theft may not be the perfect word perhaps, and if you read carefully, I didn't exactly say it was -- that was in a parent post. I did refer to the "sharing/theft" arguments however, so it is fair to think I'm calling illicit copying "theft". Technically, illicit sharing amounts to something much closer to "depriving a property owner of his property without his permission" -- which is kind of a mouthful. Most people tend to live their lives using human-speak rather than legal jargon however, and so while it may not meet a statutory definition of theft, a creator might feel after risking much and working hard, that illegal copies are stealing his ability to earn a living from his talents.
The semantic argument about "sharing/theft" that the P2P crowd gloms on, tells us nothing about whether it is right or wrong to take someone's work without their permission. And while "theft" may not fit a perfectly legalistic definition of the manner in which a creator's property is taken without permission, is English a language flexible enough to encompass multiple meanings in multiple contexts? And even if English has become so rigid that people cannot use words colorfully, is it somehow right to deprive a person of their income source simply because digital copying is trivial?
I can respect the creators' desires to profit from their work. I can understand users' desires to get stuff free. What irks me are those who engage in illicit copying and try to justify their actions by silly arguments. You're taking the fruit of someone's labor and not paying for it. Be honest with people about what you are, maybe even proud -- get CD tatoos on your knuckles or something, but skip the moralizing and the rationalization.
You Holmes, are not the creator, so whether it was or was not taken from you is irrelevant to the creator. You are thinking about this narrowly, as in "(A) I have widget X, (B) someone copies it, (C) I still have it, (D) thus there is no loss to the creator of widget X." D does not logically follow from A+B+C. There is no loss for the user, but that says nothing about the creator.
Try this: (A) You invest one year and $1m making widget X, (B) Widget X becomes popular and a 1.1m people want it for $1 or less, (C) someone copies it and gives it away free, (D) 10% of the 1.1m people who want it will choose to get it free, (E) thus you have not lost anything.
Plainly E does not follow A+B+C+D. In fact, you now lose $110k on your $1m investment. It should be clear, even though I used made up numbers, that USERS and CREATORS look at this from a different perspective, and that the fact that users don't lose anything immediately on illicit copies, does not mean that creators lose nothing on illicit copies.
It doesn't matter what you spent on the calculator -- you are merely a calculator user, so its copying does not affect you. For the calculator manufacturer however, selling calculators is the whole point and as a result, it is harmed by unauthorized duplication because it can't recoup its expenses let alone make a profit.
As a user, you simply are not in the same shoes as the creator with respect to duplication. Look at it this way: duplication has no adverse effect on the user because the user still has the original. For the manufacturer who sells originals, duplication reduces the potential market and increases the likelihood of financial failure. Your original analogy fails because you put yourself in the position of a creator, when you are only a user. You and the creator have different interests in the creation.
Your analogy fails. What if you had invested a huge amount of money and time hiring people to program and build the machine?
The standard line about "sharing/theft" from the p2p crowd fails to consider that the person doing the sharing is not the creator, merely a user. For a user, there is no loss with a digital copy. For a creator, who depends on the creation for income, there is a loss of potential income. At which point we get to the "I would never have paid for that junk anyway" argument, to which the obvious response is "if it has no value to you, you won't mind not having it."
Absolutely! I mean it's either that or, horror of horrors, finding salaried employment.
I'm a mathematician. Many Slashdotters are programmers, engineers, etc. Isn't our work creative? How come we don;t get a lifetime +90 years gravy train?
You can try to get on that "gravy train". Of course, you will have to go into business for yourself, put everything you own at risk, forgo or defer the many conveniences and benefits of having a steady reliable income, and create something that many people want. There is potential to do very well, and a million times more potential to simply fail and burn through your savings.
I think many (not all) who enjoy benefits of "salaried employment", such as easy access to home loans, a predicable income, stability, and comparatively low stress levels, fail to understand the risks and the downsides inherent in trying to live and prosper independently of the mothership, and overestimate how easy it is to ride the "gravy train".
I don't understand why you think you have a free right to the music somebody made which you did not commission. I never asked Colgate for toothpaste. Does mean I can go get a free tube whenever I want? Not unless Colgate decides to let me have it, which they could do. I never asked anyone to make Linux distros -- luckily all the people involved said "have at it", with certain restrictions, so I can whenever I want to.
The problem in the digital world for people who would try to make a living doing some art, is that duplication has become meaningless whereas once it was a difficult thing, and people have confused the present costs of duplication with the cost of creation. Then someone like you comes along and says, "hey, if I didn't specifically ask you to do it, I can have it free." What is that? Just because a person hasn't "asked" someone to do something, doesn't give that person the right to use another's product or labor of another without permission. I haven't asked you to mow my lawn. That means you must? Or do you mean, you won't mow my lawn unless I ask and you agree? I suspect you would go with option two, in which case I have to wonder, have you asked permission to use the "shared" music and has the artist agreed?
True, but I invited him over to do some labor for me free. Come to think of it... do you have a sponge and some Mr. Clean? I could think of few other labor intensive tasks I wouldn't mind having freely performed.
Yes yes yes, to any pedants who wish to point out that it is trivial to duplicate a song but not trivial to clean out my storage closet... seriously, I get that. By the same token, it seems that people who are so hip on "file sharing" seem to forget that creative products are incredibly time consuming to make. Yes, distribution is cheap, but by focusing only on distribution, the entire creative process is ignored. It may take years for a singer to acquire the skill and find the inspiration to write an excellent song. Yet the people who love the song can't dig up a buck for iTunes or a quarter for Emusic? Even at a buck, that song is barely an eighth of minimum wage.
The whole "file sharing" thing seems to me like a bunch of whiners with an entitlement complex justifying their actions by saying "corporations are evil." Yeah, maybe they are. But so? That's a justification, not a reason.
As I said, I don't really care if people chose to overbreed, I just don't want to pay for it. I'm sure some of my tax dollars go to the problems caused by overbreeding in the third world, but compared to the portion extorted from me for our homegrown breeders, it is hardly worth thinking about. As I said way earlier, I'm not suggesting licenses for a "birth-right" -- people can have all the kids they want, as long as I don't have to pay for it.
No it doesn't save money. It costs money. It saves money to have a reasonable number of ankle-biters where "reasonable number" means "number you can afford on your income without a handout".
What you meant to say is that under our current system of giving away stuff to the irresponsible, it costs somewhat less to provide healthcare services along the way, than it does later on. This in no way addresses the fact that we have a system that encourages irresponsible behavior at my expense.
My position is that people can have as many kids as they want as long as I don't have to pay for it. It is wrong and immoral to make me cover the costs incurred by breeders. Nobody is stepping up to buy me a new motherboard to tinker with every month, why the heck should I pay for people who want kids?
I think the end of the cold war and the instigation/dreaming up of a new enemy, as warned by past generals and presidents, is ample evidence that it is ludicrous to believe that "the military will gladly put down its weapons and walk away."
Now that we have a huge standing army and military/industrial complex for the last 60 years, it will never be dislodged. It will only grow in importance.
The founding fathers would cry to see what we've made of America.
Is there a two child welfare limit? Is there a 2 child SCHIP limit? Is there a 2 child limit for whatever method people can dream up to spend my money?
What about my rights to my earnings? Considering the recent news about that single-bitch in CA who had a litter of 8, it's hard not to toy with the idea of restricting parental rights. Ultimately that would be a bad idea. Much better would be to simply limit the amount of government support a person can get for kids. In this way you don't limit a parent's right to play dog, but you don't stick all the rational people in the world with a massive bill. "Ya wanna have a litter? Fine, but you get to pay for it." I'd set the maximum level of gov't support at three kids. I'd prefer it to be one, but I suspect I'm on the extreme side in that regard. It really pisses me off that in all liklihood, that selfish litter bearer will be sucking up money from everyone else for absolutely no good reason.
Is the content itself without value? If so, you are correct in saying there is "NO product". I think about some of my favorite TV shows -- like Firefly -- I think I read it cost $1,000,000 per episode to make. Yeah it got canceled, but with a way to make money, the show would not have been made. Compare the satisfaction of watching a great sci-fi with a slideshow of cat pictures on youtube. The first takes real money to make, and won't be made without a way to recoup those expenses. The second costs virtually nothing, but gets boring after mere minutes.
It's a real issue for media producers -- how to make something better than cat slideshows when people won't pay for the media.
You're ranting. I've had no problem playing non-DRMed aac files in linux. With open source drivers, support for "the proprietary format" is here to stay.
MP3 is another proprietary format likely to stick around. Non-DRM MP3s are what emusic sells. Mostly from smaller artists. But everyone talks about supporting small artists, rather than doing it, while engaged in copyright infringement of giant bands. People should either stop posturing and just admit to wanting something for nothing, or put their money where their mouth is.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad idea. Humans tend to find human-adverse aversive.
Federal judge = lifetime appointment. Someone else posted the judge's contact info and it looks like he's a Fed.
"Goodwill" has a long history in business (and divorce where there is family business involved) litigation. We're not talking about the thriftstore here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting)
In my school days, there were no cell phones and I once got detention for wearing shoes but not socks. Seriously.
You said it: he still didn't invent and build the damned calculator either.
There are three parties:
1: original user
2. copier
3: manufacturer
It is the manufacturer who loses, not 1 or 2. You are completely ignoring that.
As for "theft" -- we're talking here, not writing a legal brief. Theft has lots of meanings in various contexts. It's perfectly OK to use the phrase colloquially.
Oh -- you plowed into my car, I can't work for the next 6 months -- I get to sue you for my lost potential income.
Tortious interference with a business interest? Is that not a suit in which damages can include lost income? Liquidated damages provisions in construction contracts, i.e., build my store on time or pay $X to compensate me for the (hard to calculate) lost income. Or nuisance suits where the nuisance interferes with a business. There are probably a thousand ways in which potential lost income can be estimated and awarded.
Yes, you can do whatever you want with your physical copy except make an identical copy, give it away and keep your copy to boot. You are perfectly free to give a copy to your friend and delete your own. If you would like the right to make and distribute multiple copies, you are free to negotiate with the person who holds the copyright. Just be prepared to pay more than $0.99 per track.
Theft may not be the perfect word perhaps, and if you read carefully, I didn't exactly say it was -- that was in a parent post. I did refer to the "sharing/theft" arguments however, so it is fair to think I'm calling illicit copying "theft". Technically, illicit sharing amounts to something much closer to "depriving a property owner of his property without his permission" -- which is kind of a mouthful. Most people tend to live their lives using human-speak rather than legal jargon however, and so while it may not meet a statutory definition of theft, a creator might feel after risking much and working hard, that illegal copies are stealing his ability to earn a living from his talents.
The semantic argument about "sharing/theft" that the P2P crowd gloms on, tells us nothing about whether it is right or wrong to take someone's work without their permission. And while "theft" may not fit a perfectly legalistic definition of the manner in which a creator's property is taken without permission, is English a language flexible enough to encompass multiple meanings in multiple contexts? And even if English has become so rigid that people cannot use words colorfully, is it somehow right to deprive a person of their income source simply because digital copying is trivial?
I can respect the creators' desires to profit from their work. I can understand users' desires to get stuff free. What irks me are those who engage in illicit copying and try to justify their actions by silly arguments. You're taking the fruit of someone's labor and not paying for it. Be honest with people about what you are, maybe even proud -- get CD tatoos on your knuckles or something, but skip the moralizing and the rationalization.
You Holmes, are not the creator, so whether it was or was not taken from you is irrelevant to the creator. You are thinking about this narrowly, as in "(A) I have widget X, (B) someone copies it, (C) I still have it, (D) thus there is no loss to the creator of widget X." D does not logically follow from A+B+C. There is no loss for the user, but that says nothing about the creator.
Try this: (A) You invest one year and $1m making widget X, (B) Widget X becomes popular and a 1.1m people want it for $1 or less, (C) someone copies it and gives it away free, (D) 10% of the 1.1m people who want it will choose to get it free, (E) thus you have not lost anything.
Plainly E does not follow A+B+C+D. In fact, you now lose $110k on your $1m investment. It should be clear, even though I used made up numbers, that USERS and CREATORS look at this from a different perspective, and that the fact that users don't lose anything immediately on illicit copies, does not mean that creators lose nothing on illicit copies.
It doesn't matter what you spent on the calculator -- you are merely a calculator user, so its copying does not affect you. For the calculator manufacturer however, selling calculators is the whole point and as a result, it is harmed by unauthorized duplication because it can't recoup its expenses let alone make a profit.
As a user, you simply are not in the same shoes as the creator with respect to duplication. Look at it this way: duplication has no adverse effect on the user because the user still has the original. For the manufacturer who sells originals, duplication reduces the potential market and increases the likelihood of financial failure. Your original analogy fails because you put yourself in the position of a creator, when you are only a user. You and the creator have different interests in the creation.
Your analogy fails. What if you had invested a huge amount of money and time hiring people to program and build the machine?
The standard line about "sharing/theft" from the p2p crowd fails to consider that the person doing the sharing is not the creator, merely a user. For a user, there is no loss with a digital copy. For a creator, who depends on the creation for income, there is a loss of potential income. At which point we get to the "I would never have paid for that junk anyway" argument, to which the obvious response is "if it has no value to you, you won't mind not having it."
You can try to get on that "gravy train". Of course, you will have to go into business for yourself, put everything you own at risk, forgo or defer the many conveniences and benefits of having a steady reliable income, and create something that many people want. There is potential to do very well, and a million times more potential to simply fail and burn through your savings.
I think many (not all) who enjoy benefits of "salaried employment", such as easy access to home loans, a predicable income, stability, and comparatively low stress levels, fail to understand the risks and the downsides inherent in trying to live and prosper independently of the mothership, and overestimate how easy it is to ride the "gravy train".
I don't understand why you think you have a free right to the music somebody made which you did not commission. I never asked Colgate for toothpaste. Does mean I can go get a free tube whenever I want? Not unless Colgate decides to let me have it, which they could do. I never asked anyone to make Linux distros -- luckily all the people involved said "have at it", with certain restrictions, so I can whenever I want to. The problem in the digital world for people who would try to make a living doing some art, is that duplication has become meaningless whereas once it was a difficult thing, and people have confused the present costs of duplication with the cost of creation. Then someone like you comes along and says, "hey, if I didn't specifically ask you to do it, I can have it free." What is that? Just because a person hasn't "asked" someone to do something, doesn't give that person the right to use another's product or labor of another without permission. I haven't asked you to mow my lawn. That means you must? Or do you mean, you won't mow my lawn unless I ask and you agree? I suspect you would go with option two, in which case I have to wonder, have you asked permission to use the "shared" music and has the artist agreed?
True, but I invited him over to do some labor for me free. Come to think of it ... do you have a sponge and some Mr. Clean? I could think of few other labor intensive tasks I wouldn't mind having freely performed.
Yes yes yes, to any pedants who wish to point out that it is trivial to duplicate a song but not trivial to clean out my storage closet ... seriously, I get that. By the same token, it seems that people who are so hip on "file sharing" seem to forget that creative products are incredibly time consuming to make. Yes, distribution is cheap, but by focusing only on distribution, the entire creative process is ignored. It may take years for a singer to acquire the skill and find the inspiration to write an excellent song. Yet the people who love the song can't dig up a buck for iTunes or a quarter for Emusic? Even at a buck, that song is barely an eighth of minimum wage.
The whole "file sharing" thing seems to me like a bunch of whiners with an entitlement complex justifying their actions by saying "corporations are evil." Yeah, maybe they are. But so? That's a justification, not a reason.
Agreed. Human labor shouldn't ever be compensated. When are you coming over to change my oil?
As I said, I don't really care if people chose to overbreed, I just don't want to pay for it. I'm sure some of my tax dollars go to the problems caused by overbreeding in the third world, but compared to the portion extorted from me for our homegrown breeders, it is hardly worth thinking about. As I said way earlier, I'm not suggesting licenses for a "birth-right" -- people can have all the kids they want, as long as I don't have to pay for it.
No it doesn't save money. It costs money. It saves money to have a reasonable number of ankle-biters where "reasonable number" means "number you can afford on your income without a handout".
What you meant to say is that under our current system of giving away stuff to the irresponsible, it costs somewhat less to provide healthcare services along the way, than it does later on. This in no way addresses the fact that we have a system that encourages irresponsible behavior at my expense.
My position is that people can have as many kids as they want as long as I don't have to pay for it. It is wrong and immoral to make me cover the costs incurred by breeders. Nobody is stepping up to buy me a new motherboard to tinker with every month, why the heck should I pay for people who want kids?
I think the end of the cold war and the instigation/dreaming up of a new enemy, as warned by past generals and presidents, is ample evidence that it is ludicrous to believe that "the military will gladly put down its weapons and walk away."
Now that we have a huge standing army and military/industrial complex for the last 60 years, it will never be dislodged. It will only grow in importance.
The founding fathers would cry to see what we've made of America.
Is there a two child welfare limit? Is there a 2 child SCHIP limit? Is there a 2 child limit for whatever method people can dream up to spend my money?
Wish I hadn't posted already cause I'd mod you up. Well put.
What about my rights to my earnings? Considering the recent news about that single-bitch in CA who had a litter of 8, it's hard not to toy with the idea of restricting parental rights. Ultimately that would be a bad idea. Much better would be to simply limit the amount of government support a person can get for kids. In this way you don't limit a parent's right to play dog, but you don't stick all the rational people in the world with a massive bill. "Ya wanna have a litter? Fine, but you get to pay for it." I'd set the maximum level of gov't support at three kids. I'd prefer it to be one, but I suspect I'm on the extreme side in that regard. It really pisses me off that in all liklihood, that selfish litter bearer will be sucking up money from everyone else for absolutely no good reason.
They already sell the software to make the tracks: http://www.apple.com/logicexpress/#recording
And it looks there is some sort of approval process at Apple to get your songs online, and lots of various companies that will help with this step, for a fee of course. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/564768.html
The only missing part is the free-for-all publishing system of YouTube, which is probably a good thing.
Is the content itself without value? If so, you are correct in saying there is "NO product". I think about some of my favorite TV shows -- like Firefly -- I think I read it cost $1,000,000 per episode to make. Yeah it got canceled, but with a way to make money, the show would not have been made. Compare the satisfaction of watching a great sci-fi with a slideshow of cat pictures on youtube. The first takes real money to make, and won't be made without a way to recoup those expenses. The second costs virtually nothing, but gets boring after mere minutes.
It's a real issue for media producers -- how to make something better than cat slideshows when people won't pay for the media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding#FAAC_and_FAAD2
You're ranting. I've had no problem playing non-DRMed aac files in linux. With open source drivers, support for "the proprietary format" is here to stay.
MP3 is another proprietary format likely to stick around. Non-DRM MP3s are what emusic sells. Mostly from smaller artists. But everyone talks about supporting small artists, rather than doing it, while engaged in copyright infringement of giant bands. People should either stop posturing and just admit to wanting something for nothing, or put their money where their mouth is.