1. My daughter recently had to fork over $110 for a basic community-college ALGEBRA textbook. This knowledge has been around for centuries. Other very basic textbooks are similarly astronomically priced considering they rehash the same basic ideas as the 10,000 that have come before them.
2. We have no idea if the huge margins being made on textbooks are being passed along to authors.
Textbook companies like Thompson have slowly muscled out competition by such tactics as out-and-out bribing instructors:
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i42/42a00801.htm
It's corrupt. That doesn't mean piracy is always justified. But it's not as simple as you are arguing..."pay up or return to the dark ages".
"this is why public libraries are important repositories of culture."
Bwa-ha-ha-ha!
As a former public librarian, I can tell you that most public libraries do NOT view their role as repositories of culture. They don't, in 99% of cases, have the shelf space or the money to store books which circulate only rarely or never. They aim to provide their taxpaying customers with the latest books, and also focus heavily on services for children. That's their bread and butter.
They may have a special branch that houses materials with local interest for the long haul, but they do not for the most part try to conserve culture in general.
Larger university libraries, and of course the Library of Congress, are repositories of culture. While university libraries aren't strictly speaking public, they do often participate in inter-library loan programs with public libraries.
Some commented below TFA who claims to know the situation, and said the programmer was a contractor. Hence, no real firing possible. Jail unlikely. And are states immune from lawsuits or something (though wikipedia says political subdivisions of a state do not have sovereign immunity). Anyway, I doubt much will happen.
"Something EVERY flash based product does several times per year as prices and capacity get better."
I wish...the majority of MP3 players on the market are 8 GB or less, and this has been the case for the better part of 2 years if not more. They don't even boost flash capacity on a Christmas to Christmas cycle these days. I guess because Apple has sucked the air out of the market.
But really, when Sony recently got it together and released two great-sounding flash players without their horrible Sonic Stage crap and stupid coded limitations, they still couldn't manage to get something on the market larger than 8 GB. At a time when Creative had something on the European market with 32 GB (which was crazy expensive, sure, but it existed).
I'm still hanging on to a P.O.S. 500 MB player waiting for something good at 32 GB, which will let me finally get a decent chunk of my collection on a player for the gym.
Hey--the manufactured Monkees were better than the later, liberated Monkees!
Their songwriters were the cream of the Brill Building crop...Carol King/Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann/Cynthia Weil, Jeff Barry, plus Neil Diamond, Boyce and Hart, and the list goes on. Those songwriters were available because the Beatles changed the rules of the game (somewhat...Burt Bacharach continued to do well in the late sixties as a behind-the-scenes guy), and the pop groups were beginning to write their own material.
It's all very ironic...the Monkees ape the British Invasion, but do so using the talents of the songwriters supplanted by the British Invasion. Then, they get all ambitious (like a group from, uh...Britain!) and start writing their own material, which is mostly much less memorable than the stuff that was shoved down their throats. Ah, the music biz.
Fakebooks come in two flavors, illegal and legally licensed. Licensed fakebooks (which are probably more common today than in the 1970s and 80s, when the bootlegs were the only good alternatives) are in no danger from the precedent set by this tab site going down.
For non-musicians reading this, fakebooks contain simplified or modified arrangements of songs that are intended to be played by pickup groups who have usually not rehearsed together (wedding combos, restaurant jazz combos, etc). They contain the melody line and the chords of songs (as opposed to a standard piano arrangement, which includes specific harmonies intended to be played by one person on a piano).
Illegal fakebooks (original 'Real Book', etc) probably are transcribed by ear for the most part, but this is not really part of the music publishing industry. In any case, their illegality is well established, because they reproduce a song's melody in standard notation, which is a clear violation of copyright.
What I find interesting about this debate is that tablature (as I recall) doesn't have all the information (rhythmic values, key signature information) that standard notation has. It's somewhere in between scribbling out chord changes and standard notation--kind of a gray area (though not to the lawyers, obviously). The melody line, which is what forces fakebook publishers to pay royalties on a given tune, isn't present as standard notation. A sax player can't look at guitar tab and play a melody from it, at least not without doing a whole lot of mental calculations on the fly. Even then, the rhythmic values of the notes, which are critical from a copyright perspective, might not be knowable (depending on how the tab is created).
"[Edwards] voted the way his constituents wanted, every single time....I don't think most people realize how far to the left Edward's stated positions actually are. He's not moderate."
I'm also a North Carolinian and also underwhelmed by Edwards.
But, to play devil's advocate to your post, you criticize him for constantly kowtowing to his conservative constituents (we did elect Jesse Helms five times, and haven't voted Democratic in a presidential election since Carter), and then you warn us that Edwards' stated positions are too far left. Unless you are defining his constituents as only the residents of Orange county, this doesn't exactly add up.
Whatever his stated positions are (and they are stated for the benefit of Democratic primary voters, of course), were he to get into office, he's probably be not much to the left of Clinton, if any, which is to say he would cut deals left and right. I don't think he's really an ideologue at all.
I think a lot of voters, me included, and probably you too, feel like politicians today don't have to do much to get taken seriously as presidential candidates. Obviously Bush didn't have many accomplishments under his belt when he was elected, and Obama started people chattering about his presidential worthiness based on his one speech in 2004 (though his academic track record is pretty stunning, and his community organizing is probably more relevant to politics than running a couple of oil companies into the ground). Edwards--same deal. One term in the Senate and all of a sudden he's a statesman.
Slashdot Mirror
Two things:
1. My daughter recently had to fork over $110 for a basic community-college ALGEBRA textbook. This knowledge has been around for centuries. Other very basic textbooks are similarly astronomically priced considering they rehash the same basic ideas as the 10,000 that have come before them.
2. We have no idea if the huge margins being made on textbooks are being passed along to authors.
Textbook companies like Thompson have slowly muscled out competition by such tactics as out-and-out bribing instructors: http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i42/42a00801.htm It's corrupt. That doesn't mean piracy is always justified. But it's not as simple as you are arguing..."pay up or return to the dark ages".
"this is why public libraries are important repositories of culture."
Bwa-ha-ha-ha!
As a former public librarian, I can tell you that most public libraries do NOT view their role as repositories of culture. They don't, in 99% of cases, have the shelf space or the money to store books which circulate only rarely or never. They aim to provide their taxpaying customers with the latest books, and also focus heavily on services for children. That's their bread and butter.
They may have a special branch that houses materials with local interest for the long haul, but they do not for the most part try to conserve culture in general.
Larger university libraries, and of course the Library of Congress, are repositories of culture. While university libraries aren't strictly speaking public, they do often participate in inter-library loan programs with public libraries.
Some commented below TFA who claims to know the situation, and said the programmer was a contractor. Hence, no real firing possible. Jail unlikely. And are states immune from lawsuits or something (though wikipedia says political subdivisions of a state do not have sovereign immunity). Anyway, I doubt much will happen.
"Something EVERY flash based product does several times per year as prices and capacity get better."
I wish...the majority of MP3 players on the market are 8 GB or less, and this has been the case for the better part of 2 years if not more. They don't even boost flash capacity on a Christmas to Christmas cycle these days. I guess because Apple has sucked the air out of the market.
But really, when Sony recently got it together and released two great-sounding flash players without their horrible Sonic Stage crap and stupid coded limitations, they still couldn't manage to get something on the market larger than 8 GB. At a time when Creative had something on the European market with 32 GB (which was crazy expensive, sure, but it existed).
I'm still hanging on to a P.O.S. 500 MB player waiting for something good at 32 GB, which will let me finally get a decent chunk of my collection on a player for the gym.
Hey--the manufactured Monkees were better than the later, liberated Monkees!
Their songwriters were the cream of the Brill Building crop...Carol King/Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann/Cynthia Weil, Jeff Barry, plus Neil Diamond, Boyce and Hart, and the list goes on. Those songwriters were available because the Beatles changed the rules of the game (somewhat...Burt Bacharach continued to do well in the late sixties as a behind-the-scenes guy), and the pop groups were beginning to write their own material.
It's all very ironic...the Monkees ape the British Invasion, but do so using the talents of the songwriters supplanted by the British Invasion. Then, they get all ambitious (like a group from, uh...Britain!) and start writing their own material, which is mostly much less memorable than the stuff that was shoved down their throats. Ah, the music biz.
Wow. That beats my record.
Fakebooks come in two flavors, illegal and legally licensed. Licensed fakebooks (which are probably more common today than in the 1970s and 80s, when the bootlegs were the only good alternatives) are in no danger from the precedent set by this tab site going down.
For non-musicians reading this, fakebooks contain simplified or modified arrangements of songs that are intended to be played by pickup groups who have usually not rehearsed together (wedding combos, restaurant jazz combos, etc). They contain the melody line and the chords of songs (as opposed to a standard piano arrangement, which includes specific harmonies intended to be played by one person on a piano).
Illegal fakebooks (original 'Real Book', etc) probably are transcribed by ear for the most part, but this is not really part of the music publishing industry. In any case, their illegality is well established, because they reproduce a song's melody in standard notation, which is a clear violation of copyright.
What I find interesting about this debate is that tablature (as I recall) doesn't have all the information (rhythmic values, key signature information) that standard notation has. It's somewhere in between scribbling out chord changes and standard notation--kind of a gray area (though not to the lawyers, obviously). The melody line, which is what forces fakebook publishers to pay royalties on a given tune, isn't present as standard notation. A sax player can't look at guitar tab and play a melody from it, at least not without doing a whole lot of mental calculations on the fly. Even then, the rhythmic values of the notes, which are critical from a copyright perspective, might not be knowable (depending on how the tab is created).
by alhensel Friday May 25
"[Edwards] voted the way his constituents wanted, every single time....I don't think most people realize how far to the left Edward's stated positions actually are. He's not moderate."
I'm also a North Carolinian and also underwhelmed by Edwards.
But, to play devil's advocate to your post, you criticize him for constantly kowtowing to his conservative constituents (we did elect Jesse Helms five times, and haven't voted Democratic in a presidential election since Carter), and then you warn us that Edwards' stated positions are too far left. Unless you are defining his constituents as only the residents of Orange county, this doesn't exactly add up.
Whatever his stated positions are (and they are stated for the benefit of Democratic primary voters, of course), were he to get into office, he's probably be not much to the left of Clinton, if any, which is to say he would cut deals left and right. I don't think he's really an ideologue at all.
I think a lot of voters, me included, and probably you too, feel like politicians today don't have to do much to get taken seriously as presidential candidates. Obviously Bush didn't have many accomplishments under his belt when he was elected, and Obama started people chattering about his presidential worthiness based on his one speech in 2004 (though his academic track record is pretty stunning, and his community organizing is probably more relevant to politics than running a couple of oil companies into the ground). Edwards--same deal. One term in the Senate and all of a sudden he's a statesman.