You could always suggest a government provided ISP made available for the country just to see the fiscal Conservatives jump out of their shorts ready to stab you.
Just because US/Canadian interests have coincided for many, many years doesn't mean the will always coincide, and I wouldn't want Canadians blindly trusting in the goodwill of the United States any more than I'd want the US to trust the national defense interests of Canada. Nations do not have friends and nations do not "like." If nothing else, it introduces a whole other country outside of your control that's privy to things you don't advertise. That's something that should always be approached warily.
In this case, after some consideration (and IANAL, so with a grain of salt) and research, the ad agency didn't have any responsibility to check on the model release because the photograph was already published. Usually it is the responsibility of the publisher to obtain model releases, but thanks to this photographer's great and mighty lack of foresight he managed to publish the pictures on Flickr. And, as a publisher, he said "Go on. Take one, they're free."
It makes you wonder how long it will be before airport security goes nuts and shoots someone accidentally, doesn't it? They're armed, they've got a shitty job and no one likes them, and they're paid to be paranoid. I'm thinking that eventually the postal service will be completely off the hook for hiring psychopaths.
Exactly, I wonder what the Slashdot crowd thinks should happen? I mean, if your small business gets slapped with a big lawsuit and has to pay fines you have a couple of choices too. One involves charging more, and another involves firing everyone. We're already complaining about a non-competitive IT economy with thousands of jobs going overseas, do we really need Microsoft going belly up to satisfy the bloodlust of the Open Source fanatics? People scream "BUT IT'S FREE!", but I can almost guarantee that thousands of businesses wouldn't see it that way if they were suddenly faced with the prospect of training new workers, finding new software solutions that used a different platform, and such...
If you're gloating over your clear digital cable signal after a pre-emptive nuclear strike,I think you deserve all the leather clad mutant bikers from the Wastelands that spite can suffer.
So the guy selling pirated cds, which are after all his illegal but personally owned property, should be allowed to blast away at the RIAA guys for trying to steal them from him. Right. Gotcha.
If the customer demands that the gas, if it is to be sold at all, MUST be sold at 1.15 and no one provides it then they usually end up finding alternative products to gasoline or using legislation to alter the basic rules of the game. Gasoline in the US is a prime example, we buy it at a tremendously lower price than a lot of the world simply because we demand that it be so and our government is willing to fill our bread & circus quota with wars in Iraq and F15s for Saudi Arabia to get it. I'm not suggesting that the government should be pondering legislation on this, just that even diamonds that are hideously overpriced and rigidly controlled have spawned alternatives. We've got something like that going on with the "limited high speed internet" commercials I've been seeing I suppose, but how long will it take before business and individuals start looking for the government to step in to weigh in on the issue?
Or you could have people constantly sending you tons of files of crap songs and wondering why they bother. I don't even bother to turn my radio onto anything but ESPN and NPR anymore because virtually everything coming out is a heaping bucket of shit...or worse, a remake of a heaping bucket of shit. So far in the past few years the only music I've bothered with have been movie scores and "world" music which at least has the luxury of being completely different from anything that the lawyers at SonyMusic are convinced I want to hear.
What I'm saying is that it would become harder to justify going to the maximum extent of damages if you could point out that at.25 at download a person would have to have managed to convince 120,000 hits on dowloading a song to make up that $30,000. That seems to me to be something on the order of a long term sales curve or at least a limited "hit song".
As for subconscious copying...well it's just dumb and ill-conceived. Thanks to computers people are more and more linking, searching, and processing information in ways that encourage people making subconscious connections. That's much of the medium's appeal, and it gets more saturated and commonplace in society everyday. Otherwise there wouldn't be the problem with music downloading in the first place, because people wouldn't be reaching out to satisfy their entertainment urges and would sit complacently to let others satisfy them much as before.
By and by though, searching out lyrics sometimes on Google is a hellish mess. Just try searching out the lyrics to a song without the title or author whose choruses weren't particularly orginal or have made it into common usage. Just try searching for something like "she loves me lyrics" in Google. Perhaps they're all just derived, but Nelson and The Descendents seem like pretty different groups (just on the first page)singing probably different songs entirely.
I suppose by waiting for the lawsuit, though I'm not sure that the damage awards at.25 a song would be crippling. I suppose the songwriters themselves could set up a database and make it attractive to join, therefore setting up a searchable place where you could "verify" your lyrics by phrase and chorus to make sure you weren't completely trampling someone else's idea.
Writing their own songs, virtually no distribution costs and virtually no promotion. How much distribution and promotion costs are there in bandwidth and webmaster? How much is the artists making right now on filesharing, and how much more would they stand to make if they could encourage the sort of browsing that goes on Kazaa? Essentially the interesting garbage, being mostly commentary, would be the make-up pricing. If the entire album still costs 20 bucks after you figure in the lead singer talking about life and the drummer talking about legalizing weed, then so be it. I can even see a "brand new" price increase for the first 2 months being a nice standard, at 50 cents a song (with the interesting garbage still at.25) you'd probably be able to pay for some promotion too.
But let's be serious, I'm not in the least bit concerned for the artist really. I think that encouraging people to download music, to listen to music, to enjoy music, is more important than whether or not an artist can afford to give up his day job or can afford some bling bling. If my proposal means that artists would have to work twice as hard to make the same amount of money, then I'm not going to shed many tears about it. Fame is it's own sort of reward, along with recognition from your peers and the public. At 25 cents a song I think people would be grabbing an awful lot of music though, since it would essentially solve the static budget/increasing services thing a bit and wouldn't seem so bad to pay for even kids with limited budgets who're really the target audience for a lot of music anyways. At 25 cents a song you could finally start to point at illegal filesharers and call them asses I think, instead of raising objections of expense. You'd still have to compete with availability though, there are an awful lot of songs online that music publishers seem to have forgotten about.
So the artist wants to only sell a complete album...so what? Make the whole thing a single file or get off the pot and stop shitting me.
Personally I think the starting point should be a quarter a song to encourage "browsing" and artists to make more music. Seriously, that's the "public good" portion of copyright - content for the public. Increasing the volume of production demand will drop other prices too, and maybe we'll get the sort of thing that DVD buyers get all the time like files of commentaries on the songs, songs that didn't get finished, the bassist playing his favorite Burt Bacharat tune, or whatever. If you drop the price on all of it and basically sell interesting garbage you're finally getting into the spirit of the internet I think. If the band wants to still sell overpriced cds though, I think touring would be a great place for it- along with the overpriced tickets, tshirts, beer, and food.
If only the public were nicer, the corporations would behave. Everyone knows by now, that corporations are only there to promote the public good without greed or malice. Why, just the other day I was saying to myself that it was a shame that people were such buttheads that we didn't simply be nicer to the various large impersonal organizations that answer only to audits, stockholders, and Congress and realize that with a little love and understanding poor maligned companies like Enron would have gotten their acts together and fixed things for us. The RIAA is like a kindly old grandmother in fact, if we weren't so bad she'd fix cookies for everyone instead of harrassing us and suing us for billions of dollars. How could we ever be confused into thinking that corporations were less concerned with laws than the bottom line anyways? Everyone knows that corporations are so concerned with the law that they go out of their way to change the laws in ways that individuals can't afford! Bad individuals, good RIAA. Shame on filetraders.
So your argument is basically that because you believe the world is an ass, you assert that it's ok to be an ass? The original poster wasn't making any broad claims about the world being a nice place, it was saying that the United States should set a positive example instead of running around kicking people in the nuts for following the example that we are setting.
Slashdot Mirror
You could always suggest a government provided ISP made available for the country just to see the fiscal Conservatives jump out of their shorts ready to stab you.
Why would anyone waste good tequila on rocks? Call me back when someone can turn cheap beer into tequila.
Just because US/Canadian interests have coincided for many, many years doesn't mean the will always coincide, and I wouldn't want Canadians blindly trusting in the goodwill of the United States any more than I'd want the US to trust the national defense interests of Canada. Nations do not have friends and nations do not "like." If nothing else, it introduces a whole other country outside of your control that's privy to things you don't advertise. That's something that should always be approached warily.
The database is a symptom of that society though.
In this case, after some consideration (and IANAL, so with a grain of salt) and research, the ad agency didn't have any responsibility to check on the model release because the photograph was already published. Usually it is the responsibility of the publisher to obtain model releases, but thanks to this photographer's great and mighty lack of foresight he managed to publish the pictures on Flickr. And, as a publisher, he said "Go on. Take one, they're free."
It makes you wonder how long it will be before airport security goes nuts and shoots someone accidentally, doesn't it? They're armed, they've got a shitty job and no one likes them, and they're paid to be paranoid. I'm thinking that eventually the postal service will be completely off the hook for hiring psychopaths.
And how do you pay for the withholding except by raising revenues?
Exactly, I wonder what the Slashdot crowd thinks should happen? I mean, if your small business gets slapped with a big lawsuit and has to pay fines you have a couple of choices too. One involves charging more, and another involves firing everyone. We're already complaining about a non-competitive IT economy with thousands of jobs going overseas, do we really need Microsoft going belly up to satisfy the bloodlust of the Open Source fanatics? People scream "BUT IT'S FREE!", but I can almost guarantee that thousands of businesses wouldn't see it that way if they were suddenly faced with the prospect of training new workers, finding new software solutions that used a different platform, and such...
It probably feels more profitable than principles, thats damned sure.
At least if MS acquires AOL it will pretty much be vulnerable to monopoly claims on a whole new basis.
If you're gloating over your clear digital cable signal after a pre-emptive nuclear strike,I think you deserve all the leather clad mutant bikers from the Wastelands that spite can suffer.
My magic eight ball I had when I was younger may have been a little more hit or miss, but at least I could find out if I was going to pass a test too.
No, it's a sign that the people who used to play Cyberpunk with you occassionally check to see what you're posting on Slashdot.
As far as I know R Talsorian is just one guy with a day job now.
So the guy selling pirated cds, which are after all his illegal but personally owned property, should be allowed to blast away at the RIAA guys for trying to steal them from him. Right. Gotcha.
When all else fails, introduce lovable childlike characters to gain a younger audience.
If the customer demands that the gas, if it is to be sold at all, MUST be sold at 1.15 and no one provides it then they usually end up finding alternative products to gasoline or using legislation to alter the basic rules of the game. Gasoline in the US is a prime example, we buy it at a tremendously lower price than a lot of the world simply because we demand that it be so and our government is willing to fill our bread & circus quota with wars in Iraq and F15s for Saudi Arabia to get it. I'm not suggesting that the government should be pondering legislation on this, just that even diamonds that are hideously overpriced and rigidly controlled have spawned alternatives. We've got something like that going on with the "limited high speed internet" commercials I've been seeing I suppose, but how long will it take before business and individuals start looking for the government to step in to weigh in on the issue?
Porn. Lots and lots of porn.
Or you could have people constantly sending you tons of files of crap songs and wondering why they bother. I don't even bother to turn my radio onto anything but ESPN and NPR anymore because virtually everything coming out is a heaping bucket of shit...or worse, a remake of a heaping bucket of shit. So far in the past few years the only music I've bothered with have been movie scores and "world" music which at least has the luxury of being completely different from anything that the lawyers at SonyMusic are convinced I want to hear.
As for subconscious copying...well it's just dumb and ill-conceived. Thanks to computers people are more and more linking, searching, and processing information in ways that encourage people making subconscious connections. That's much of the medium's appeal, and it gets more saturated and commonplace in society everyday. Otherwise there wouldn't be the problem with music downloading in the first place, because people wouldn't be reaching out to satisfy their entertainment urges and would sit complacently to let others satisfy them much as before.
By and by though, searching out lyrics sometimes on Google is a hellish mess. Just try searching out the lyrics to a song without the title or author whose choruses weren't particularly orginal or have made it into common usage. Just try searching for something like "she loves me lyrics" in Google. Perhaps they're all just derived, but Nelson and The Descendents seem like pretty different groups (just on the first page)singing probably different songs entirely.
I suppose by waiting for the lawsuit, though I'm not sure that the damage awards at .25 a song would be crippling. I suppose the songwriters themselves could set up a database and make it attractive to join, therefore setting up a searchable place where you could "verify" your lyrics by phrase and chorus to make sure you weren't completely trampling someone else's idea.
But let's be serious, I'm not in the least bit concerned for the artist really. I think that encouraging people to download music, to listen to music, to enjoy music, is more important than whether or not an artist can afford to give up his day job or can afford some bling bling. If my proposal means that artists would have to work twice as hard to make the same amount of money, then I'm not going to shed many tears about it. Fame is it's own sort of reward, along with recognition from your peers and the public. At 25 cents a song I think people would be grabbing an awful lot of music though, since it would essentially solve the static budget/increasing services thing a bit and wouldn't seem so bad to pay for even kids with limited budgets who're really the target audience for a lot of music anyways. At 25 cents a song you could finally start to point at illegal filesharers and call them asses I think, instead of raising objections of expense. You'd still have to compete with availability though, there are an awful lot of songs online that music publishers seem to have forgotten about.
Personally I think the starting point should be a quarter a song to encourage "browsing" and artists to make more music. Seriously, that's the "public good" portion of copyright - content for the public. Increasing the volume of production demand will drop other prices too, and maybe we'll get the sort of thing that DVD buyers get all the time like files of commentaries on the songs, songs that didn't get finished, the bassist playing his favorite Burt Bacharat tune, or whatever. If you drop the price on all of it and basically sell interesting garbage you're finally getting into the spirit of the internet I think. If the band wants to still sell overpriced cds though, I think touring would be a great place for it- along with the overpriced tickets, tshirts, beer, and food.
So your argument is basically that because you believe the world is an ass, you assert that it's ok to be an ass? The original poster wasn't making any broad claims about the world being a nice place, it was saying that the United States should set a positive example instead of running around kicking people in the nuts for following the example that we are setting.