Well tell me... how should the money be spent? Should a government panel appropriate all the money spent on album sales and distribute it among the musicians based on artistic merit?
Face it: pop music may be widely abhored, but it is also widely liked. Folk music has a smaller following, but the rest of the population largely ignores it. If 10 million people want to buy a Britney album and 40 thousand buy some critically acclaimed folk album, why should Britney be punished?
It seems to me that China is a traditionally communist country that is experimenting with capitalism, whereas America is a traditionally capitalist country that is experimenting with communism. The grass is always greener on the other side.
This opinion is one I really haven't formed yet, so as I speak about Napster now, please understand that I'm not totally informed. I will be the first in line to file a class action suit to protect my copyrights if Napster or even the far more advanced Gnutella doesn't work with us to protect us.
She then goes on to praise file sharing after basically admitting that she doesn't know what she is talking about. As we can see from the article on China, it's not exactly a musician's paradise.
Yes, the music industry is full of inequities. The inequity is that the artists are getting screwed and the RIAA isn't. Piracy merely ensures that everyone gets equally screwed.:-)
dude, all the really great music comes from indie artists anyway. i can't remember the last time i bought a CD from major record label. get your ass out to your local bars and clubs, and support local music!!!
That's your opinion and you are entitled to it, but mine is different. I like highly-produced, virtuoso music, and I'm not much for concerts because it aggravates my tinitus. Very few of the bands I like ever tour where I live.
So these bands have very little chance of getting money from me via concerts. However, I don't support piracy so I will buy their CDs if they are reasonably priced (by my standards $20). If they want to make more money, they can skip the middleman and sell me the CD directly from their website (or let me download it).
Do you realize that some analogies are false and some are valid? Do you lack the ability to distinguish between them so you just avoid all of them? If you have a good analogy use it. If not, don't. If you see someone using a false analogy, point it out. How hard is that?!
Arguments by analogy are not logically compelling. Period. When arguing a fact, some analogies are apt and others are false. When arguing an opinion, everything is subjective.
When someone responds to one of my posts with an analogy, 99% of the time they are disagreeing with me. Therefore, there is probably a 99% chance that I disagree with the validity of their analogy. However, arguing about an analogy never gets anywhere, since it is subjective.
Sorry, but it really gets to me when a "band" only does their stuff for the money.
You know what bugs me? When hookers only do it for the money. I remember when they used to do it for the crack.;-)
But seriously, what does the/. crowd have against people who try to make a buck doing something they enjoy? The whole reason I went to university and studied engineering is so I could have a career I enjoyed. I could have studied something less applicable (such as literature) and then done my pennance in an unrewarding job. I used to have a job writing proprietary software (which I enjoyed), but now that's been vilified. Is this like a new form of puritanism or something?
The record companies could make much more money from this method than their current model, which is probably why they aren't doing it yet. Easier to complain than change.
Ahh yes... the miraculous money making machine. It's amazing:/. readers have all the answers, but everyone in the industry is too dumb to see them. I wonder why some enterprising young readers don't put their money where their mouth is. Somebody outta overthrow the system and make millions in the process by being first to market (like they did with open source).
Warner Music soon plans to begin a talent search for members of a five-girl band to be called Mei Mei, with the winners signed up for a two-year contract to promote M&M candy.
The corporate sponsorship trend has already started here. M&M has already found their North American spokesman. It's all subliminal, baby.
If you think about it, this is no surprise. If the only real way you can make money is by gaining corporate sponsorship then you pretty much have to aim at the lowest common denominator. Reducing the profits of the RIAA will only hurt musical diversity if you don't find a way to divert the money to the artists. Under the current system, the artists may get very little money from album sales, but at least the fame may allow them to sell concert tickets; the artists in China don't even have that. As usual,/. readers have proposed the overthrow of one system without providing a cogent reason why the new system will be better.
"Finding good Open Source developers is possible. Finding good artists is harder." Uh uh, un-qualified statement. I'd say not only are they of the same dificulty, they're one in the same challenge.
Oddly enough, also an unqualified statement. Personally, I agree with the OP that finding open source developers is easier. Artists didn't have it easy for the last 10 years and they are less inclined to work for free.
I'm not prepared to argue the legality of taxes with you. Given that taxes are legal, the variety of different taxes is the government's way of not putting all their eggs in one basket. Income taxes are progressive, but hard to enforce. Sales taxes are regressive, but easier to enforce (Internet sales and driving to other states excepted).
P2P is a tool. Misuse of it is something I don't support. I also can't support the way the music industry is attempting to restrict my life and use of content based on the fact that I might misuse that technology to break a law.
I think we could probably do without DRM if P2P networks were properly regulated. To be considered a legitimate technology, P2P networks ought to have had anti-piracy measures in place from the start. But they didn't, of course, because most of them are explicitly intended for the purpose of trading copyrighted works. I recognize you don't want to argue by analogy, but there is no difference between this and telling me I cannot drive because I could misuse my Mercedes to run over my husband.
In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they aren't. The difference is that millions of people are using P2P for illegal purposes, but only one (that I know of) used a car to intentionally run over her husband.
Contrary to popular/. belief, the law is not solely based on principles, it is also reactive. If large numbers of people start abusing a system, the system needs to be regulated. If millions of people are exploiting a loophole in a law, the law needs to be changed. Ideally, the law ought to be proactive as well, but it rarely is. With respect to our rights to own firearms, I feel strongly we should still have those rights. Is the justification for them to prevent the government from instituting unlawful martial law? I don't know.
As far as I know, that was the justification. Having just overthrown one government, they foresaw a need to potentially overthrow others. But it is highly unlikely that such an amendment would be added today (you don't see other countries doing this), particularly in light of the strong correlation between handgun ownership and handgun violence. Why should the first amendment apply to an artist who wants to make art generally considered obscene but not to someone's source code? Both are an expression of creativity.
Source code is only marginally an expression of creativity. Coding may be "an art", but it is not "art". Baboon feces slung at a canvas may be disgusting, but it still qualifies as art, perhaps only by the process of elimination (if it's not art, then what is it?).
Whenever you have a law, people are going to look for loopholes in that law. It's up to the courts to sniff out people who are merely trying to exploit a loophole in the law to facilitate another criminal act. Remember the Seinfeld episode, where a guy claimed he was a pickpocket "artist"?
People like me? What generalization have you made about me because I think taxing me for something within another state's jurisdiction is wrong?
Well, I noticed that you posted a bunch of anti-DMCA, pro-fair use comments. I suppose you could be anti-DMCA and anti-P2P, but not many people are. If that is the case then I apolopize for assuming wrong. Regardless, why do you think I want a free lunch? I want to be able to choose how and where I buy my products. If I lived in PA (Philadelphia, maybe), I'd drive to DE to purchase goods, because you know what? No sales tax.
If you don't want to pay tax then *move* to Delaware. As long as you live in PA and take advantage of the services the state has to offer, it's your responsibility to pay your fair share of taxes.
I suppose there's a reasonable argument that if you literally lived in a town that's on the border of two states then you should split the taxes between them, but that would be unduly burdensome at the moment. So anyway, what's malleable about "rights?" With the way congress is behaving, rights of the masses are clearly malleable. Do you think they should be?
Actually yes. I see no reason to automatically preserve rights that were awarded based on out-of-date circumstances. The constitution has been amended a bunch of times to add new rights, but not to take old ones away. On the heels of the revolutionary war, congress added some reactionary measures. The justification behind the second amendment seems pretty old-fashioned today.
The first amendment -- a reaction to the British banning "certain kinds of assemblies" -- is being extended in far-reaching ways. Regardless of your stance on the DMCA, application of the first amendment to source code strikes me as a dogmatic interpretation of "rights", and an indication that the constitution needs to be updated.
When people like you post in the anti-RIAA discussion, you don't have a leg to stand on. Clearly it's not about rights -- rights are malleable; you're just looking for a free lunch.
If the vendor can know the value of your token, then he can refuse to take ones with no value. What do you do when the vendor says "I'm sorry sir, but there seems to be a problem with your token, are you sure it's not a forged one?". Do you give him a different one?
That's probably where the math comes in. Rivest knows a thing or two about zero knowledge proofs. I suspect that the token-generation stage would be interactive so the merchant can verify that it was chosen randomly.
See that's the problem. You have no justification for making that distinction. That, in my mind, is the forgotten economics. That $15 will get a college student into 3 frat parties and get you drunk for a whole weekend.
Not last time I checked. I spent far more than $1,500 on beer when I was in university. Are you saying that instead of paying for an education, you should buy CDs?
Of course not. I was pointing out that someone who has the means to afford an education could probably afford to buy a CD. Now if you were talking about poor kids living in a trailer park, using P2P on an old 486 that was donated to them by goodwill, that might be different. There's 2 types of music IMO. Real music, and music that is manufactured in a studio. Real music in most cases is 5 times better live.
Exactly: in your opinion. I don't agree. I've been to a bunch of concerts, many of them featuring some of my favorite bands, and most of the time I feel a bit ripped off. In a bar, often the acoustics aren't great; in a stadium they're usually terrible. Most of the time, the guitar solos aren't as good as they are on the album.
Anyway, the point is, that's just *MY* opinion. Not every college student is going to go to a lot of concerts. If they refuse to buy CDs, that's a huge income loss for the music industry. And that's what refutes your original statement.
College students by nature dont have much money. A poor college student wasnt going to buy the cd anyways, so their are no lost royalties.
This oft-repeated argument has got to be the biggest pile of steaming dung that I have heard. Poor, starving students sitting in their $5,000 dorm rooms, sharing music on their $2,000 computers, all the while ignoring their $10,000 education, are always complaining about the price of $15 CDs.
I, for one, am not afraid to admit it. I have pretty much stopped buying CDs, not because of file sharing but because I already have 300 or so. I reckon I bought half of those -- 150 frigging CDs -- while I was in university. A lot of those I bought used. A lot of them were Christmas gifts. Some of them were purchased with money I earned by working. Yes, WORKING!!!
And you know what? The money I paid for those 150 CDs still doesn't compare to the cost of one semester of tution.
If I hadn't been an honest person, the music industry would have lost out on over $1,500 during my college days. Please don't ignore the fact that a lot of people don't particularly like concerts. They tend to be expensive, the sound quality is usually poor, and the musicianship is often inferior to the album. I have spent much more on CDs than I ever would on concerts.
There are thousands of bands hawking their music for free on MP3.com. None of them seem to be particularly successful. So either they all suck, or the effort that the labels put into producing and promoting the signed artists really does make a difference.
The three stages of a chess game are "opening", "middle game", and "end game". In summary, computers will always be far superior in the opening and end-game, because they can play those parts of the game perfectly. The middle game is where humans will always have the advantage.
Funny... a friend and I were just talking about this. "Always" is a popular word in some/. readers' vocabulary, and usually the hallmark of a dumb post.
In fact, very few humans are able to match the current crop chess machines in the middle game. In 5 years, I would be very surprised if Kasparov was able to win even a single game off the next generation Deep Junior.
The chess computers rely on this empirical data, not on thinking. They *compute.* Big deal.
The real breakthrough in pop-AI will not be when we magically create a machine that achieves 'sentience'. Rather, the creation of a human-like machine will finally force us to acknowledge that what we like to call 'sentience' and 'free will' are merely highly evolved algorithms.
*ALL* intelligence is in some sense artificial (some more than the rest).
Slashdot Mirror
Well tell me... how should the money be spent? Should a government panel appropriate all the money spent on album sales and distribute it among the musicians based on artistic merit?
Face it: pop music may be widely abhored, but it is also widely liked. Folk music has a smaller following, but the rest of the population largely ignores it. If 10 million people want to buy a Britney album and 40 thousand buy some critically acclaimed folk album, why should Britney be punished?
-a
It seems to me that China is a traditionally communist country that is experimenting with capitalism, whereas America is a traditionally capitalist country that is experimenting with communism. The grass is always greener on the other side.
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This opinion is one I really haven't formed yet, so as I speak about Napster now, please understand that I'm not totally informed. I will be the first in line to file a class action suit to protect my copyrights if Napster or even the far more advanced Gnutella doesn't work with us to protect us.
She then goes on to praise file sharing after basically admitting that she doesn't know what she is talking about. As we can see from the article on China, it's not exactly a musician's paradise.
Yes, the music industry is full of inequities. The inequity is that the artists are getting screwed and the RIAA isn't. Piracy merely ensures that everyone gets equally screwed.
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dude, all the really great music comes from indie artists anyway. i can't remember the last time i bought a CD from major record label.
get your ass out to your local bars and clubs, and support local music!!!
That's your opinion and you are entitled to it, but mine is different. I like highly-produced, virtuoso music, and I'm not much for concerts because it aggravates my tinitus. Very few of the bands I like ever tour where I live.
So these bands have very little chance of getting money from me via concerts. However, I don't support piracy so I will buy their CDs if they are reasonably priced (by my standards $20). If they want to make more money, they can skip the middleman and sell me the CD directly from their website (or let me download it).
-a
Do you realize that some analogies are false and some are valid? Do you lack the ability to distinguish between them so you just avoid all of them?
If you have a good analogy use it. If not, don't. If you see someone using a false analogy, point it out. How hard is that?!
Arguments by analogy are not logically compelling. Period. When arguing a fact, some analogies are apt and others are false. When arguing an opinion, everything is subjective.
When someone responds to one of my posts with an analogy, 99% of the time they are disagreeing with me. Therefore, there is probably a 99% chance that I disagree with the validity of their analogy. However, arguing about an analogy never gets anywhere, since it is subjective.
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Sorry, but it really gets to me when a "band" only does their stuff for the money.
You know what bugs me? When hookers only do it for the money. I remember when they used to do it for the crack.
But seriously, what does the
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The record companies could make much more money from this method than their current model, which is probably why they aren't doing it yet. Easier to complain than change.
Ahh yes... the miraculous money making machine. It's amazing:
-a
Warner Music soon plans to begin a talent search for members of a five-girl band to be called Mei Mei, with the winners signed up for a two-year contract to promote M&M candy.
The corporate sponsorship trend has already started here. M&M has already found their North American spokesman. It's all subliminal, baby.
-a
If you think about it, this is no surprise. If the only real way you can make money is by gaining corporate sponsorship then you pretty much have to aim at the lowest common denominator. Reducing the profits of the RIAA will only hurt musical diversity if you don't find a way to divert the money to the artists. Under the current system, the artists may get very little money from album sales, but at least the fame may allow them to sell concert tickets; the artists in China don't even have that. As usual, /. readers have proposed the overthrow of one system without providing a cogent reason why the new system will be better.
-a
"Finding good Open Source developers is possible. Finding good artists is harder."
Uh uh, un-qualified statement. I'd say not only are they of the same dificulty, they're one in the same challenge.
Oddly enough, also an unqualified statement. Personally, I agree with the OP that finding open source developers is easier. Artists didn't have it easy for the last 10 years and they are less inclined to work for free.
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Care to comment on what the specific violation was?
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I'm not prepared to argue the legality of taxes with you. Given that taxes are legal, the variety of different taxes is the government's way of not putting all their eggs in one basket. Income taxes are progressive, but hard to enforce. Sales taxes are regressive, but easier to enforce (Internet sales and driving to other states excepted).
-a
P2P is a tool. Misuse of it is something I don't support. I also can't support the way the music industry is attempting to restrict my life and use of content based on the fact that I might misuse that technology to break a law.
I think we could probably do without DRM if P2P networks were properly regulated. To be considered a legitimate technology, P2P networks ought to have had anti-piracy measures in place from the start. But they didn't, of course, because most of them are explicitly intended for the purpose of trading copyrighted works.
I recognize you don't want to argue by analogy, but there is no difference between this and telling me I cannot drive because I could misuse my Mercedes to run over my husband.
In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they aren't. The difference is that millions of people are using P2P for illegal purposes, but only one (that I know of) used a car to intentionally run over her husband.
Contrary to popular
With respect to our rights to own firearms, I feel strongly we should still have those rights. Is the justification for them to prevent the government from instituting unlawful martial law? I don't know.
As far as I know, that was the justification. Having just overthrown one government, they foresaw a need to potentially overthrow others. But it is highly unlikely that such an amendment would be added today (you don't see other countries doing this), particularly in light of the strong correlation between handgun ownership and handgun violence.
Why should the first amendment apply to an artist who wants to make art generally considered obscene but not to someone's source code? Both are an expression of creativity.
Source code is only marginally an expression of creativity. Coding may be "an art", but it is not "art". Baboon feces slung at a canvas may be disgusting, but it still qualifies as art, perhaps only by the process of elimination (if it's not art, then what is it?).
Whenever you have a law, people are going to look for loopholes in that law. It's up to the courts to sniff out people who are merely trying to exploit a loophole in the law to facilitate another criminal act. Remember the Seinfeld episode, where a guy claimed he was a pickpocket "artist"?
-a
People like me? What generalization have you made about me because I think taxing me for something within another state's jurisdiction is wrong?
Well, I noticed that you posted a bunch of anti-DMCA, pro-fair use comments. I suppose you could be anti-DMCA and anti-P2P, but not many people are. If that is the case then I apolopize for assuming wrong.
Regardless, why do you think I want a free lunch? I want to be able to choose how and where I buy my products. If I lived in PA (Philadelphia, maybe), I'd drive to DE to purchase goods, because you know what? No sales tax.
If you don't want to pay tax then *move* to Delaware. As long as you live in PA and take advantage of the services the state has to offer, it's your responsibility to pay your fair share of taxes.
I suppose there's a reasonable argument that if you literally lived in a town that's on the border of two states then you should split the taxes between them, but that would be unduly burdensome at the moment.
So anyway, what's malleable about "rights?" With the way congress is behaving, rights of the masses are clearly malleable. Do you think they should be?
Actually yes. I see no reason to automatically preserve rights that were awarded based on out-of-date circumstances. The constitution has been amended a bunch of times to add new rights, but not to take old ones away. On the heels of the revolutionary war, congress added some reactionary measures. The justification behind the second amendment seems pretty old-fashioned today.
The first amendment -- a reaction to the British banning "certain kinds of assemblies" -- is being extended in far-reaching ways. Regardless of your stance on the DMCA, application of the first amendment to source code strikes me as a dogmatic interpretation of "rights", and an indication that the constitution needs to be updated.
-a
When people like you post in the anti-RIAA discussion, you don't have a leg to stand on. Clearly it's not about rights -- rights are malleable; you're just looking for a free lunch.
-a
If the vendor can know the value of your token, then he can refuse to take ones with no value.
What do you do when the vendor says "I'm sorry sir, but there seems to be a problem with your token, are you sure it's not a forged one?". Do you give him a different one?
That's probably where the math comes in. Rivest knows a thing or two about zero knowledge proofs. I suspect that the token-generation stage would be interactive so the merchant can verify that it was chosen randomly.
-a
I was refering to spending money, not in general.
See that's the problem. You have no justification for making that distinction. That, in my mind, is the forgotten economics.
That $15 will get a college student into 3 frat parties and get you drunk for a whole weekend.
Not last time I checked. I spent far more than $1,500 on beer when I was in university.
Are you saying that instead of paying for an education, you should buy CDs?
Of course not. I was pointing out that someone who has the means to afford an education could probably afford to buy a CD. Now if you were talking about poor kids living in a trailer park, using P2P on an old 486 that was donated to them by goodwill, that might be different.
There's 2 types of music IMO. Real music, and music that is manufactured in a studio. Real music in most cases is 5 times better live.
Exactly: in your opinion. I don't agree. I've been to a bunch of concerts, many of them featuring some of my favorite bands, and most of the time I feel a bit ripped off. In a bar, often the acoustics aren't great; in a stadium they're usually terrible. Most of the time, the guitar solos aren't as good as they are on the album.
Anyway, the point is, that's just *MY* opinion. Not every college student is going to go to a lot of concerts. If they refuse to buy CDs, that's a huge income loss for the music industry. And that's what refutes your original statement.
-a
College students by nature dont have much money. A poor college student wasnt going to buy the cd anyways, so their are no lost royalties.
This oft-repeated argument has got to be the biggest pile of steaming dung that I have heard. Poor, starving students sitting in their $5,000 dorm rooms, sharing music on their $2,000 computers, all the while ignoring their $10,000 education, are always complaining about the price of $15 CDs.
I, for one, am not afraid to admit it. I have pretty much stopped buying CDs, not because of file sharing but because I already have 300 or so. I reckon I bought half of those -- 150 frigging CDs -- while I was in university. A lot of those I bought used. A lot of them were Christmas gifts. Some of them were purchased with money I earned by working. Yes, WORKING!!!
And you know what? The money I paid for those 150 CDs still doesn't compare to the cost of one semester of tution.
If I hadn't been an honest person, the music industry would have lost out on over $1,500 during my college days. Please don't ignore the fact that a lot of people don't particularly like concerts. They tend to be expensive, the sound quality is usually poor, and the musicianship is often inferior to the album. I have spent much more on CDs than I ever would on concerts.
-a
There are thousands of bands hawking their music for free on MP3.com. None of them seem to be particularly successful. So either they all suck, or the effort that the labels put into producing and promoting the signed artists really does make a difference.
-a
The three stages of a chess game are "opening", "middle game", and "end game". In summary, computers will always be far superior in the opening and end-game, because they can play those parts of the game perfectly. The middle game is where humans will always have the advantage.
Funny... a friend and I were just talking about this. "Always" is a popular word in some
In fact, very few humans are able to match the current crop chess machines in the middle game. In 5 years, I would be very surprised if Kasparov was able to win even a single game off the next generation Deep Junior.
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The chess computers rely on this empirical data, not on thinking. They *compute.* Big deal.
The real breakthrough in pop-AI will not be when we magically create a machine that achieves 'sentience'. Rather, the creation of a human-like machine will finally force us to acknowledge that what we like to call 'sentience' and 'free will' are merely highly evolved algorithms.
*ALL* intelligence is in some sense artificial (some more than the rest).
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Roger Penrose is a widely respected mathematician whose inane babblings on AI threaten to forever taint his good name.
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Unfortunately, a couple of the more immature low user IDs are editors with unlimited karma. Again, no names named, but most people know who they are.
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How am I supposed to evaluate these results when I am duct taped to a BED???
News flash: 802.11 found to be poor choice for victims of home invasions
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What an idiotic comment. Talk about arguing with the example without disputing the point.
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