Sources say the scheme, which pretty much sounds like a protection racket - we won't sue if you pay
Uhh... spare me the hyperbole, but this is hardly a protection racket. In fact, this is just standard legal procedure: Settle out of court and get a better deal; wait for the verdict and you take your chances.
To a large extent, our monthly disposable income is in fact fixed, so gaining a larger piece of the pie is a definite goal for the industry. The question of whether CDs are overpriced is moot. The price reflects what people are willing to pay and not what they would prefer to pay. The labels have no doubt determined this price point through extensive research, and there is presumably some logic to why some new releases cost $12 and others cost $20.
They are definitely open to offering a bulk service, though it won't be the bargain you might hope for. People talk about 50 cents a track, but that's unrealistic. For $10-$20 a month you could get a subscription service, but not unlimited downloads. As for the wider variety of music, everyone here talks about that, but don't underestimate the public's need for pop. Not only do a lot of people like pop music (and not just because it's shoved down their throats), but a lot of people just need to fit in.
Listening to the same music as their friends is a big part of that. Speaking as someone with fairly unusual taste, I find it difficult. I'm unlikely to find a friend who wants to drive with me to an out-of-town concert, and it's difficult to find the CDs I want at an affordable price. So would I like CD prices to be cheaper? Sure, but I don't think I have the right to demand it. If I see a CD I want for more than $20, I just don't buy it. On the other hand, the Internet has been a boon for me. I don't see the need for file sharing. The Internet offers lots of communities where you can hear about obscure music. If I hear about band I might like, I can almost always go to their website and download a few samples.
And as far as I can tell, Ars really is doing it out of benevolence. Their subscription FAQ on their website suggests that they were sick of losing money and merely want to recoup their costs. Of course they are a private company (I think) so they could be lying through their teeth.
I think I had your whole post's line of reasoning when I said in my post that "anybody with the money to launch an anti-RIAA label has no real incentive to do so."
The key question is why. Why do you hold a grudge against people who want to make money? Why do you think it would be noble for someone to start a company to sell CDs for almost no profit?
What it'd take is some CD pubisher willing to publish good music for $5 per CD, and making up the difference with volume because they end up selling many more copies at that price. The CD as a format is cheap enough to make that each disc could be profitably sold for $5 each.
What I don't understand is why you think it's your perogative to tell the labels how to run their business. I see by your reply that you didn't get my point about how much you profit being just as important as whether you profit. I know this fact is routinely ignored by/. readers, but to be successful you have to do more than break even. You have to make a substantial profit that both compensates for the risk of the venture and for the rate of inflation. $5 a CD is not going to cut it.
That being said, it actually is possible to buy quality music for $5. You can buy the greatest hits albums of a whole bunch of popular bands for dirt cheap. Look for them in your local supermarket. Sure the selection is a bit limited and you can't get the latest hits, but hey.. you get what you pay for.
The problem is, once this anti-RIAA label makes its splash with quality albums for $5 each, all of the RIAA labels will flood the market with their products for $5 each. The upstart will have a hard time competing with its only distingishing feature being duplicated by everybody else, and not having the same publicity machine advantage as the RIAA labels. When the anti-RIAA label is wiped out, the price will then methodically go back on a path back to $17. Therefore, anybody with the money to launch an anti-RIAA label has no real incentive to do so.
Your little fantasy here is dead wrong. Where is you fantasy label going to get its seed capital -- from the coaltion of investors looking for a tax loss? No smart businessman would accept your proposal, and unfortunately for you, smart businessmen are the ones who tend to have the money. One thing that every smart businessman understands is that price wars are no good for anyone involved.
Assuming for the moment that your theory is true (that this new label would sell say 5x as many CDs in order to compensate for the meagre profit margins), you think it's morally wrong for the other labels to try to compete? The fact that some labels will go bankrupt if the price sinks to $5 proves that $5 is the wrong price. Sure the intimidation factor buoys prices, but this tacit form of collusion is necessary to support a healthy economy.
It is obvious that no one on/. understands anything about economics. It is time to learn that just because an idea is counter-intuitive doesn't mean it's right.
they could be the big winners. as the conglomerate that owns the content that are converted to mp3s, if they just offered a comparably convenient, legitimate solution to p2p filesharing, they would make money and save money (instead of paying all those lawyers).
And if that doesn't work, they can just give away the music for free and make their money selling services and support.:-)
Yeah, that's really insightful, Einstein. Have you considered the fact that the Boolean goal of being profitable is not the only goal of your average company. Contrary to popular/. thinking, it also matters how much money you make.
There are already plenty of convenient, legitimate alternatives to file sharing. I want to sample an album before I buy, I could just preview it at the CD store or go to the band's website and download a couple of sample tracks.
Let's face it: What you want is a cheaper alternative to CDs. Why would record labels want to give up their highly profitable and legally established right to sell CDs at $17 a pop in order to collect pennies in royalties off some Internet service.
What you are talking about is just a form of extortion. (Give us a discount and we promise not to rip off your stuff.)
Okay, my turn to post a ridiculously long message.
Turns out, the article last week I was referring to was about Micropayments. However, if you follow a couple of links from there, you will eventually reach an interesting article on the failure of web advertising. The article caught my eye because I really believe that micropayments are the way to go.
I don't actually mind the friend/foe system, although I don't use it. At least in that case the user is consciously deciding who he likes and dislikes. What I find dangerous is the new "friend of a friend" and "foe of a friend" system, which will tend to create cliques of like-minded thinkers who have blocked out any dissenting opinions. I do always read/. logged in, but when I set up this new account, I decided to give anonymous cowards a +1 bonus. I've actually been very impressed with the results; for some reason, anonymous posters tend to post more intelligently than your average score 1 poster (and most of the crap gets modded down to -1 anyway). BTW, speaking of moderation, I have noticed that marking a post "(OT)" is *more* likely, not less likely to get you moderated as offtopic.
As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm a puzzle geek. I look at every fact as a statistic and every situation as a game. Of course, this drives my non-geek friends crazy when they try and hold a normal conversation. But it has always surprised me that most/. readers are not more savvy about statistics and probability analysis. In particular, you see a lot of qualitative arguments where quantitative evidence is called for. One rule of quantitative analysis is that anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything. We could spend all day arguing about whether or not Ars Technica (for example) is successful, but it's still only one company. Yes, there will inevitably be a few success stories, but it seems clear that the overall market is shrinking.
BTW, if you go to the Ars Technica website, you can see that they are not profitable and they don't aspire to be. "The cold, hard truth: Ars is not a profitable enterprise. That's OK, because we never set out to be." In the geek world, making a profit is not really a noble goal. But consider this: every unprofitable website out there is leeching ad revenue that could be going to a profitable site. The altruistic side of the web will tend to stall the economy.
TV subsided on ad revenue for many years, but only for the lack of anything better. It seems there is only enough ad revenue out there to support 3 networks.When cable came along, the profitability of network TV was slowly eroded. Of course, now there are too many cable channels. Every time the cable company adds a new channel, your rates will inevitably go up, even if you don't subscribe to the new station. More channels means more people need to get paid, which means more revenue per consumer (also, cheaper, poor quality programming). A lot of people didn't see that coming. Also, think about PBS. Public Broadcasting barely scrapes by, thanks to government subsidies and individual donations. Can you imagine if there were multiple PBS stations per town? No way would they all survive. Donations to PBS are charity and most people will only give a very small portion of their income to charity.
I brought up Red Hat because they are widely regarded on/. as being a financial success, even though when you look at their balance sheet, you realize that they aren't. So while you may say that "we" have learned a few things in the last 4 years, judging only from the/. readership, I would say that "we" have merely been jumping from one bandwagon to another. The one common thread among/. business cases is that they all involve giving away your biggest asset for free (or at least very cheaply). Now while it may be possible in a few cases to make money by doing this, the *amount* of money to be made will be drastically decreased. And thus we are drawn back to the quantitative analysis issue.
We see this all the time with CDs. How many times have you heard a/. reader say something like: "CDs are so overpriced. That's why I pirate them. $20 for a CD is ridiculous compared to $10 for a DVD, which at least has bonus tracks; with CDs, all you get is the music. If only CDs cost $3, then I would buy them. Think of the money to be made!!! But no, the labels have to be greedy and screw the musicians." This little gem of an argument has many, many flaws, but note in particular the phony math. The deliberately distorted prices work against the reader's argument. You may sell more CDs at $3 than at $20, but are you really going to sell 10x as many? (and this ignores the fact that it probably costs $2 to manufacture and ship the CD).
I have no doubt that people will still support musicians or websites if the data was available for free. But now, as I said before, you are relying on altruism. A lot of people do donate to charity, but they tend to donate a very small portion of their income (something like 1% or less in the US). Furthermore, most people need to be shamed into donating. As I mentioned before, charity is a tragedy of the commons. It is irrational from a game theory perspective, and thus you have to exploit the irrational side of human nature. This means leveraging personal relationships to get someone to support your walk-a-thon, or having to walk past the veteran in the supermarket entrance without making eye contact. In the impersonal world of the Internet, it's going to be much more difficult to get someone to contribute.
I think I've gone on about long enough. About the OP's book. Sure, you may buy a paper copy of it that you wouldn't have bought otherwise, but consider the big picture. There's only a limited amount of time that you can spend reading. Will you buy every single book you read on the Internet, or only half or a third of them. What about consumers such as students who have limited sources of income. That never stopped them from buying books (or CDs for that matter) in the past, but they certainly don't do so voluntarily.
Sorry about taking so long to reply. I was intimidated by the length of your comment and the fact that it wasn't exactly on topic.
The problem with advocacy on/. is that it goes largely like this: "I'm going to do X. X is the way of the future. Anyone who disagrees with me is wrong." rather than this: "X has been proven true in theory. X has been proven true in practice. X is the way of the future."
I assumed from your user # that you were around on/. 4 years ago. Regarding the ad situation, you say "we have learned a little since then," but have "we" really? Firstly, by "we", I assume you mean the/. moral majority. Four years ago, there were plenty of naysayers who warned that Internet advertising was going to fail. It's just common sense. In a way,/. is a refuge where geeks can share in a mass delusion for awhile, until it inevitably proves false. The moderation helps ensure this, especially that new foe of a friend BS.
Even now, you carry some delusions: "Banners can be sold on a per click basis, not impression." That's cute (and over-simplified), but it also misses the fundamental problem, which is that there is only a limited pool of ad money to go around. A large chunk of this money is local advertising, which really doesn't work that well on the web. At the peak of the bubble, about half the ads I would read on the Internet were ads for other businesses that make money selling ads. This is not a way to make money.
I trust logic and common sense, game theory and human nature. If a revenue model doesn't work within those contexts, it's not going to survive. One common fallacy on/. is to ignore the tragedy of the commons. It's a sad fact, but a fair amount of collusion is necessary in order for a capitalist economy to succeed. Without collusion, you get unhealthy price wars. Another key law of capitalism is not to offer people a product at a price below what they are willing to pay for it.
The/. community makes two unjustified assumptions in propping up their business models: a) I am altruistic, therefore most people are altruistic, and b) I am not an idiot, but most people are. Substitute "businesses" for people in the above at it makes even less sense. Yes, you could ask people to please view the ads... you could even *pay* people to read the ads (oh wait, someone already tried that). This is yet another tragedy of the commons. No one wants to read the ads, but everyone wants the site to stay afloat. You can't solve a tragedy of the commons by proposing that the general public become altruistic. That's just naive. People will write scripts to artificially inflate hit counts, but at the end of the day, browsers will still ban popups, and users will still blacklist Doubleclick and disable Javascript.
Your "success stories" of Ars Technica, Lwn, and pr0n are interesting choices. Different from the usual selections of Red Hat and Google. I have no idea whether Ars Technica is profitable, since I don't think they are a public company. Did you read the story on advertising last week? There is a link to an article from 1997 which explains quite clearly that only a very select few sites will be able to survive on advertising revenue alone. As for pr0n, I suspect that the only reason people pay for it is that they don't know about autopr0n or ninenine. Either that or they want movies, which you can't get for free.
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first.
I knew this story was going to be kitchy, moralistic piece of crap after I read the first couple of paragraphs.
Firstly, this scenario doesn't make any sense! When we first read the above paragraph, we think "How does the computer know who is reading the books?" Stallman later explains that the computer has a centrally-administered username/password login. So if that's the case then WHY WOULD THE LLENZ USERID HAVE PERMISSION TO READ THE BOOK???
And this "story" is supposedly written by a UNIX expert. Sheesh! This is almost as bad as those red "Warning: Unauthorized Access" messages that appear on the protagonist's computer screen as he hacks into a computer system in a Hollywood movie. You know the ones where the message flashes on your screen but it doesn't actually prevent you from accessing the site...
I am an author. My latest book is coming out later this year in paper form, and will cost money. The same book is currently available on the web for free. It will continue to be on the web for free after the paper form is published. In fact, the web version is a significant part of the marketing of the paper version.
I am not sure this is the entire story. Music is better on CD. In some cases, quite a bit better. So the experience is similar, but not quite the same. This difference can be enough to warrant a purchase. There is more to the experience though. The packaging of the CD, cover art, liner notes and little freebies seem to make quite a difference to a lot of people many of whom also would not care about the sonic quality differences between CD and mp3 / ogg.
You and the OP have something in common. You both rationalize the illegal copying of a product by stating that sales won't go down (because the copy is inferior) and they will actually go up (because of the free publicity). Your justification for pirating them does not make sense.
If you are right, then publishers who provide free versions of their products will soon be rewarded when market forces cause those products to dominate in the marketplace. But please remember that/. doesn't have a great track record in predicting business trends. If you go back about 4 years ago on/., the general consensus was that all websites (and even software) could be paid for by selling advertising, and releasing your software under the GPL would not affect your ability to sell it.
You have the right to your opinion, but you cross the line when you break the law because you arrogantly assume that your theory is correct.
Oh PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!! Codewarrior is an overpriced copy of the GNU toolchain with an ide...
Well sure it is... but isn't that the business model that/. has been asking us to follow for the last couple of years? After all, isn't RedHat just an overpriced copy of GNU/Linux/Gnome with package management?
Hey, if you get the chance to combine your corporate slogan and your company name, I say go for it!
Motorola bailing them out is just throwing good money after bad. I've seen it a million times before; if these products don't turn a profit next year they'll be history.
As usual, the best name for the merged company would be "MOney down the TOilet-o-ROLA".
Big sexist corporate culture too. Both of my friends are women, and BOTH have had ideas stolen from them by their male manager. Fuckers.
I don't know if they're sexist or not, but your logic doesn't follow. Managers often get to where they are by taking credit for other people's ideas. Do you have evidence that managers don't steal the ideas of male employees? Two data points does not a trend make.
I disagree. I think spam is a free speech issue. Even if spam didn't cost you anything (via higher bandwidth costs), you'd still be upset about it because it wastes your time.
But isn't that part of what free speech is about? When protesters chain themselves to trees and abortion clinics or hold demonstrations outside city hall or in other public places, they are inconveniencing people in the name of free speech.
It doesn't strike me as relevant whether they are doing it to sell a product or an idea.
So you go off ranting about how it's silly to spend your money supporting a business case and how businesses should profit from selling things and not from soliciting donations from geeks.
Then your sig says "I'm a Slashdot subscriber. Are you?"
Your otherwise intelligent comment comes to an end when you defend Ken Lay. Is breaking the law now considered "hacking" (finding an innovative solution to a problem)? Is tax evasion just "increasing efficiency"? That's BS.
Mind you, there may be anti-trust concerns w. M$ buying out Borland, since Borland is their biggest competitor in the computer languages market (Borland at one time had 2/3 of ALL the language market for the PC, with everyone else splitting the difference).
Dude, I'm not sure ancient history counts in an anti-trust case. That would be sort of like my country declaring war on your country just because my ancestors didn't like your ancestors. Oh wait...
Bowie never really said he supported piracy, only that it could not be stopped. Anyway, it was quite clever of Bowie to state that he didn't care about music piracy *AFTER* selling off the rights to most of his songs for some up-front cash.
O'Reilly is a suck up who makes money by telling/. readers exactly what they want to hear. It's a win-win situation, 'cause the readers can support him by buying his books on their employers' dime (I have witnessed plenty of this). If he wasn't a hyprocrite, he'd put his money where his mouth is and release his books under the GPL.
Out of curiosity, does anyone have a copy of one of the "polite" cease and desist letters that he sends to websites that pirate his material? I bet it goes something like this:
Dear so-and-so:
I notice you have an illegal copy of my book up on your website. I just wanted to let you know that selling books is my livelihood and I'd really appreciate it if you'd take it down. I'm not going to sue you or anything if you don't, but it would make me happy. If you don't feel like supporting me, perhaps you could encourage everyone who downloads the book to donate $5 to an obscure author of their choice.
Over the last 5 years, I've been forced to pay out thousands of dollars of car insurance and I never collected a cent. And now, thanks to a couple of undeserved speeding tickets, my rates are going to go up. I think I deserve the right to stage a couple of accidents and reclaim some of MY MONEY.
Huh? I'm not supporting O'Reilly, but I've never heard anyone argue in favour of regressive taxation before. I guess if we tax poor people heavily it will give them an incentive not to be poor, right?
If that's true, then it really doesn't make sense to attribute Nietzche's conclusions to Nietzche, since they were also deterministic. The Universe figured it out, and Nietzche just manifested a phenomenon.
Well that's true, but once you learn that free will isn't truly free (since it's preordained), you learn to accept that you have to judge people for what they are, not necessarily why they are that way.
Grey areas abound. For example, when a genetic disorder makes someone into a pedophile, we call them a pervert and we put them in jail. But when a schizophrenic kills someone, we tend to blame the disease, since we know it can be controlled with medication.
So you just have to accept the fact that if a person is a jerk, it doesn't really matter whether it's by nature or by nurture. You probably don't want to hang out with them either way.
It's also interesting to wonder if Nietzche knew about (or even could have known about) the discovery that nothing is deterministic at the subatomic level.
No, of course he didn't. Anyway, Nietzche wasn't the only one to come up with this theory. It was also proposed by Laplace. Also, the probabilistic effects that we observe at a subatomic level do not prove that the mind (or the universe) is probabilistic at its core. The effects are equally well explained by hidden variables that we cannot measure.
Contrarywise, it can be defensibly argued that variables that can't be measured don't really exist. This is sort of a colollary to the "I think therefore I am" philosophy. That which exists within the ken of my perception exists, and that which doesn't doesn't.
If you asked "Did you sleep well last night?" and the computer said "Me not sleep, me computer." (or some question on some other biological function) then you could probably determine the difference between a human and a computer. This need not, however, preclude machine intelligence.
Well that's a given! Those of us who accept the validity of the Turing test understand that it is a sufficient, but not necessary indication of some level of intelligence. I say "some level" because I do not believe that you can make a black and white decision about whether a machine (or a human) is intelligent. And of course the validity of the test depends on how many (and what) questions you ask.
Slashdot Mirror
Sources say the scheme, which pretty much sounds like a protection racket - we won't sue if you pay
Uhh... spare me the hyperbole, but this is hardly a protection racket. In fact, this is just standard legal procedure: Settle out of court and get a better deal; wait for the verdict and you take your chances.
-a
Yes this has been a good thread.
To a large extent, our monthly disposable income is in fact fixed, so gaining a larger piece of the pie is a definite goal for the industry. The question of whether CDs are overpriced is moot. The price reflects what people are willing to pay and not what they would prefer to pay. The labels have no doubt determined this price point through extensive research, and there is presumably some logic to why some new releases cost $12 and others cost $20.
They are definitely open to offering a bulk service, though it won't be the bargain you might hope for. People talk about 50 cents a track, but that's unrealistic. For $10-$20 a month you could get a subscription service, but not unlimited downloads. As for the wider variety of music, everyone here talks about that, but don't underestimate the public's need for pop. Not only do a lot of people like pop music (and not just because it's shoved down their throats), but a lot of people just need to fit in.
Listening to the same music as their friends is a big part of that. Speaking as someone with fairly unusual taste, I find it difficult. I'm unlikely to find a friend who wants to drive with me to an out-of-town concert, and it's difficult to find the CDs I want at an affordable price. So would I like CD prices to be cheaper? Sure, but I don't think I have the right to demand it. If I see a CD I want for more than $20, I just don't buy it. On the other hand, the Internet has been a boon for me. I don't see the need for file sharing. The Internet offers lots of communities where you can hear about obscure music. If I hear about band I might like, I can almost always go to their website and download a few samples.
And as far as I can tell, Ars really is doing it out of benevolence. Their subscription FAQ on their website suggests that they were sick of losing money and merely want to recoup their costs. Of course they are a private company (I think) so they could be lying through their teeth.
-a
I think I had your whole post's line of reasoning when I said in my post that "anybody with the money to launch an anti-RIAA label has no real incentive to do so."
The key question is why. Why do you hold a grudge against people who want to make money? Why do you think it would be noble for someone to start a company to sell CDs for almost no profit?
-a
What it'd take is some CD pubisher willing to publish good music for $5 per CD, and making up the difference with volume because they end up selling many more copies at that price. The CD as a format is cheap enough to make that each disc could be profitably sold for $5 each.
What I don't understand is why you think it's your perogative to tell the labels how to run their business. I see by your reply that you didn't get my point about how much you profit being just as important as whether you profit. I know this fact is routinely ignored by
That being said, it actually is possible to buy quality music for $5. You can buy the greatest hits albums of a whole bunch of popular bands for dirt cheap. Look for them in your local supermarket. Sure the selection is a bit limited and you can't get the latest hits, but hey.. you get what you pay for.
The problem is, once this anti-RIAA label makes its splash with quality albums for $5 each, all of the RIAA labels will flood the market with their products for $5 each. The upstart will have a hard time competing with its only distingishing feature being duplicated by everybody else, and not having the same publicity machine advantage as the RIAA labels. When the anti-RIAA label is wiped out, the price will then methodically go back on a path back to $17. Therefore, anybody with the money to launch an anti-RIAA label has no real incentive to do so.
Your little fantasy here is dead wrong. Where is you fantasy label going to get its seed capital -- from the coaltion of investors looking for a tax loss? No smart businessman would accept your proposal, and unfortunately for you, smart businessmen are the ones who tend to have the money. One thing that every smart businessman understands is that price wars are no good for anyone involved.
Assuming for the moment that your theory is true (that this new label would sell say 5x as many CDs in order to compensate for the meagre profit margins), you think it's morally wrong for the other labels to try to compete? The fact that some labels will go bankrupt if the price sinks to $5 proves that $5 is the wrong price. Sure the intimidation factor buoys prices, but this tacit form of collusion is necessary to support a healthy economy.
It is obvious that no one on
-a
they could be the big winners. as the conglomerate that owns the content that are converted to mp3s, if they just offered a comparably convenient, legitimate solution to p2p filesharing, they would make money and save money (instead of paying all those lawyers).
And if that doesn't work, they can just give away the music for free and make their money selling services and support.
Yeah, that's really insightful, Einstein. Have you considered the fact that the Boolean goal of being profitable is not the only goal of your average company. Contrary to popular
There are already plenty of convenient, legitimate alternatives to file sharing. I want to sample an album before I buy, I could just preview it at the CD store or go to the band's website and download a couple of sample tracks.
Let's face it: What you want is a cheaper alternative to CDs. Why would record labels want to give up their highly profitable and legally established right to sell CDs at $17 a pop in order to collect pennies in royalties off some Internet service.
What you are talking about is just a form of extortion. (Give us a discount and we promise not to rip off your stuff.)
-a
Okay, my turn to post a ridiculously long message.
/. logged in, but when I set up this new account, I decided to give anonymous cowards a +1 bonus. I've actually been very impressed with the results; for some reason, anonymous posters tend to post more intelligently than your average score 1 poster (and most of the crap gets modded down to -1 anyway). BTW, speaking of moderation, I have noticed that marking a post "(OT)" is *more* likely, not less likely to get you moderated as offtopic.
/. readers are not more savvy about statistics and probability analysis. In particular, you see a lot of qualitative arguments where quantitative evidence is called for. One rule of quantitative analysis is that anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything. We could spend all day arguing about whether or not Ars Technica (for example) is successful, but it's still only one company. Yes, there will inevitably be a few success stories, but it seems clear that the overall market is shrinking.
/. as being a financial success, even though when you look at their balance sheet, you realize that they aren't. So while you may say that "we" have learned a few things in the last 4 years, judging only from the /. readership, I would say that "we" have merely been jumping from one bandwagon to another. The one common thread among /. business cases is that they all involve giving away your biggest asset for free (or at least very cheaply). Now while it may be possible in a few cases to make money by doing this, the *amount* of money to be made will be drastically decreased. And thus we are drawn back to the quantitative analysis issue.
/. reader say something like: "CDs are so overpriced. That's why I pirate them. $20 for a CD is ridiculous compared to $10 for a DVD, which at least has bonus tracks; with CDs, all you get is the music. If only CDs cost $3, then I would buy them. Think of the money to be made!!! But no, the labels have to be greedy and screw the musicians." This little gem of an argument has many, many flaws, but note in particular the phony math. The deliberately distorted prices work against the reader's argument. You may sell more CDs at $3 than at $20, but are you really going to sell 10x as many? (and this ignores the fact that it probably costs $2 to manufacture and ship the CD).
Turns out, the article last week I was referring to was about Micropayments. However, if you follow a couple of links from there, you will eventually reach an interesting article on the failure of web advertising. The article caught my eye because I really believe that micropayments are the way to go.
I don't actually mind the friend/foe system, although I don't use it. At least in that case the user is consciously deciding who he likes and dislikes. What I find dangerous is the new "friend of a friend" and "foe of a friend" system, which will tend to create cliques of like-minded thinkers who have blocked out any dissenting opinions. I do always read
As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm a puzzle geek. I look at every fact as a statistic and every situation as a game. Of course, this drives my non-geek friends crazy when they try and hold a normal conversation. But it has always surprised me that most
BTW, if you go to the Ars Technica website, you can see that they are not profitable and they don't aspire to be. "The cold, hard truth: Ars is not a profitable enterprise. That's OK, because we never set out to be." In the geek world, making a profit is not really a noble goal. But consider this: every unprofitable website out there is leeching ad revenue that could be going to a profitable site. The altruistic side of the web will tend to stall the economy.
TV subsided on ad revenue for many years, but only for the lack of anything better. It seems there is only enough ad revenue out there to support 3 networks.When cable came along, the profitability of network TV was slowly eroded. Of course, now there are too many cable channels. Every time the cable company adds a new channel, your rates will inevitably go up, even if you don't subscribe to the new station. More channels means more people need to get paid, which means more revenue per consumer (also, cheaper, poor quality programming). A lot of people didn't see that coming. Also, think about PBS. Public Broadcasting barely scrapes by, thanks to government subsidies and individual donations. Can you imagine if there were multiple PBS stations per town? No way would they all survive. Donations to PBS are charity and most people will only give a very small portion of their income to charity.
I brought up Red Hat because they are widely regarded on
We see this all the time with CDs. How many times have you heard a
I have no doubt that people will still support musicians or websites if the data was available for free. But now, as I said before, you are relying on altruism. A lot of people do donate to charity, but they tend to donate a very small portion of their income (something like 1% or less in the US). Furthermore, most people need to be shamed into donating. As I mentioned before, charity is a tragedy of the commons. It is irrational from a game theory perspective, and thus you have to exploit the irrational side of human nature. This means leveraging personal relationships to get someone to support your walk-a-thon, or having to walk past the veteran in the supermarket entrance without making eye contact. In the impersonal world of the Internet, it's going to be much more difficult to get someone to contribute.
I think I've gone on about long enough. About the OP's book. Sure, you may buy a paper copy of it that you wouldn't have bought otherwise, but consider the big picture. There's only a limited amount of time that you can spend reading. Will you buy every single book you read on the Internet, or only half or a third of them. What about consumers such as students who have limited sources of income. That never stopped them from buying books (or CDs for that matter) in the past, but they certainly don't do so voluntarily.
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Sorry about taking so long to reply. I was intimidated by the length of your comment and the fact that it wasn't exactly on topic.
/. is that it goes largely like this: "I'm going to do X. X is the way of the future. Anyone who disagrees with me is wrong." rather than this: "X has been proven true in theory. X has been proven true in practice. X is the way of the future."
/. 4 years ago. Regarding the ad situation, you say "we have learned a little since then," but have "we" really? Firstly, by "we", I assume you mean the /. moral majority. Four years ago, there were plenty of naysayers who warned that Internet advertising was going to fail. It's just common sense. In a way, /. is a refuge where geeks can share in a mass delusion for awhile, until it inevitably proves false. The moderation helps ensure this, especially that new foe of a friend BS.
/. is to ignore the tragedy of the commons. It's a sad fact, but a fair amount of collusion is necessary in order for a capitalist economy to succeed. Without collusion, you get unhealthy price wars. Another key law of capitalism is not to offer people a product at a price below what they are willing to pay for it.
/. community makes two unjustified assumptions in propping up their business models: a) I am altruistic, therefore most people are altruistic, and b) I am not an idiot, but most people are. Substitute "businesses" for people in the above at it makes even less sense. Yes, you could ask people to please view the ads... you could even *pay* people to read the ads (oh wait, someone already tried that). This is yet another tragedy of the commons. No one wants to read the ads, but everyone wants the site to stay afloat. You can't solve a tragedy of the commons by proposing that the general public become altruistic. That's just naive. People will write scripts to artificially inflate hit counts, but at the end of the day, browsers will still ban popups, and users will still blacklist Doubleclick and disable Javascript.
The problem with advocacy on
I assumed from your user # that you were around on
Even now, you carry some delusions: "Banners can be sold on a per click basis, not impression." That's cute (and over-simplified), but it also misses the fundamental problem, which is that there is only a limited pool of ad money to go around. A large chunk of this money is local advertising, which really doesn't work that well on the web. At the peak of the bubble, about half the ads I would read on the Internet were ads for other businesses that make money selling ads. This is not a way to make money.
I trust logic and common sense, game theory and human nature. If a revenue model doesn't work within those contexts, it's not going to survive. One common fallacy on
The
Your "success stories" of Ars Technica, Lwn, and pr0n are interesting choices. Different from the usual selections of Red Hat and Google. I have no idea whether Ars Technica is profitable, since I don't think they are a public company. Did you read the story on advertising last week? There is a link to an article from 1997 which explains quite clearly that only a very select few sites will be able to survive on advertising revenue alone. As for pr0n, I suspect that the only reason people pay for it is that they don't know about autopr0n or ninenine. Either that or they want movies, which you can't get for free.
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This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first.
I knew this story was going to be kitchy, moralistic piece of crap after I read the first couple of paragraphs.
Firstly, this scenario doesn't make any sense! When we first read the above paragraph, we think "How does the computer know who is reading the books?" Stallman later explains that the computer has a centrally-administered username/password login. So if that's the case then WHY WOULD THE LLENZ USERID HAVE PERMISSION TO READ THE BOOK???
And this "story" is supposedly written by a UNIX expert. Sheesh! This is almost as bad as those red "Warning: Unauthorized Access" messages that appear on the protagonist's computer screen as he hacks into a computer system in a Hollywood movie. You know the ones where the message flashes on your screen but it doesn't actually prevent you from accessing the site...
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I am not sure this is the entire story. Music is better on CD. In some cases, quite a bit better. So the experience is similar, but not quite the same. This difference can be enough to warrant a purchase.
There is more to the experience though. The packaging of the CD, cover art, liner notes and little freebies seem to make quite a difference to a lot of people many of whom also would not care about the sonic quality differences between CD and mp3 / ogg.
You and the OP have something in common. You both rationalize the illegal copying of a product by stating that sales won't go down (because the copy is inferior) and they will actually go up (because of the free publicity). Your justification for pirating them does not make sense.
If you are right, then publishers who provide free versions of their products will soon be rewarded when market forces cause those products to dominate in the marketplace. But please remember that
You have the right to your opinion, but you cross the line when you break the law because you arrogantly assume that your theory is correct.
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Oh PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!
Codewarrior is an overpriced copy of the GNU toolchain with an ide...
Well sure it is... but isn't that the business model that
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Hey, if you get the chance to combine your corporate slogan and your company name, I say go for it!
Motorola bailing them out is just throwing good money after bad. I've seen it a million times before; if these products don't turn a profit next year they'll be history.
As usual, the best name for the merged company would be "MOney down the TOilet-o-ROLA".
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Big sexist corporate culture too. Both of my friends are women, and BOTH have had ideas stolen from them by their male manager. Fuckers.
I don't know if they're sexist or not, but your logic doesn't follow. Managers often get to where they are by taking credit for other people's ideas. Do you have evidence that managers don't steal the ideas of male employees? Two data points does not a trend make.
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I disagree. I think spam is a free speech issue. Even if spam didn't cost you anything (via higher bandwidth costs), you'd still be upset about it because it wastes your time.
But isn't that part of what free speech is about? When protesters chain themselves to trees and abortion clinics or hold demonstrations outside city hall or in other public places, they are inconveniencing people in the name of free speech.
It doesn't strike me as relevant whether they are doing it to sell a product or an idea.
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So you go off ranting about how it's silly to spend your money supporting a business case and how businesses should profit from selling things and not from soliciting donations from geeks.
Then your sig says "I'm a Slashdot subscriber. Are you?"
Hypocrite!!
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Your otherwise intelligent comment comes to an end when you defend Ken Lay. Is breaking the law now considered "hacking" (finding an innovative solution to a problem)? Is tax evasion just "increasing efficiency"? That's BS.
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Mind you, there may be anti-trust concerns w. M$ buying out Borland, since Borland is their biggest competitor in the computer languages market (Borland at one time had 2/3 of ALL the language market for the PC, with everyone else splitting the difference).
Dude, I'm not sure ancient history counts in an anti-trust case. That would be sort of like my country declaring war on your country just because my ancestors didn't like your ancestors. Oh wait...
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Bowie never really said he supported piracy, only that it could not be stopped. Anyway, it was quite clever of Bowie to state that he didn't care about music piracy *AFTER* selling off the rights to most of his songs for some up-front cash.
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Out of curiosity, does anyone have a copy of one of the "polite" cease and desist letters that he sends to websites that pirate his material? I bet it goes something like this:
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Over the last 5 years, I've been forced to pay out thousands of dollars of car insurance and I never collected a cent. And now, thanks to a couple of undeserved speeding tickets, my rates are going to go up. I think I deserve the right to stage a couple of accidents and reclaim some of MY MONEY.
(note sarcasm)
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If computers only cost $500, I wouldn't steal them either. (Yeah, I know you can get a computer for less than that, but I wanted a laptop.)
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Huh? I'm not supporting O'Reilly, but I've never heard anyone argue in favour of regressive taxation before. I guess if we tax poor people heavily it will give them an incentive not to be poor, right?
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"The Chinese Room argument is a load of pants???" Are you making some kind of wierd argument based on the stereotype of Chinese laundromats?
Just kidding. I agree that the Chinese Room argument is as vapid as a fortune cookie.
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If that's true, then it really doesn't make sense to attribute Nietzche's conclusions to Nietzche, since they were also deterministic. The Universe figured it out, and Nietzche just manifested a phenomenon.
Well that's true, but once you learn that free will isn't truly free (since it's preordained), you learn to accept that you have to judge people for what they are, not necessarily why they are that way.
Grey areas abound. For example, when a genetic disorder makes someone into a pedophile, we call them a pervert and we put them in jail. But when a schizophrenic kills someone, we tend to blame the disease, since we know it can be controlled with medication.
So you just have to accept the fact that if a person is a jerk, it doesn't really matter whether it's by nature or by nurture. You probably don't want to hang out with them either way.
It's also interesting to wonder if Nietzche knew about (or even could have known about) the discovery that nothing is deterministic at the subatomic level.
No, of course he didn't. Anyway, Nietzche wasn't the only one to come up with this theory. It was also proposed by Laplace. Also, the probabilistic effects that we observe at a subatomic level do not prove that the mind (or the universe) is probabilistic at its core. The effects are equally well explained by hidden variables that we cannot measure.
Contrarywise, it can be defensibly argued that variables that can't be measured don't really exist. This is sort of a colollary to the "I think therefore I am" philosophy. That which exists within the ken of my perception exists, and that which doesn't doesn't.
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Well duh... it's a distorted word.
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If you asked "Did you sleep well last night?" and the computer said "Me not sleep, me computer." (or some question on some other biological function) then you could probably determine the difference between a human and a computer. This need not, however, preclude machine intelligence.
Well that's a given! Those of us who accept the validity of the Turing test understand that it is a sufficient, but not necessary indication of some level of intelligence. I say "some level" because I do not believe that you can make a black and white decision about whether a machine (or a human) is intelligent. And of course the validity of the test depends on how many (and what) questions you ask.
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