The Slashdot community's constant hating on Firefox 5 has profoundly disappointed me.
The vast majority of the comments I've read in the last series of articles have boiled down to "change is bad! I liked things the way they were!"
Really? As a community we've been reduced to that?
I thought we technologist folk were supposed to excited by technological progress. Where's the excitement over the addition of CSS3 animations? Where's the excitement over a fast release cycle leading to a more advanced rendering engine being delivered to users at a faster pace? Where's the excitement that the browser wars are back in full swing and that this competition can only lead to good things for developers and users alike?
I've never seen such a sad bunch of folks afraid of technological progress before in a community that is ostensibly supposed to be obsessed with technological progress.
Oh no! The existence of some internet website undermines my business model! We need to eradicate this technology quickly! Technological progress is bad for business!
Caprica - get real, name one episode that was worth watching
The whole series was worth watching. It was a terrific dark drama which was intelligently written and subtle. Caprica was to sci fi what HBO's Rome was to historical dramas. They even had Polly Walker playing the lead antagonist.
I have always found it depressing that of all the possible issues the Democrats and Republicans could unify over, that this issue was one of the few. Both major parties are for strong copyright and strong punishments for noncommercial infringement.
Speaking as someone who strongly supports the Democrats on all other issues, my party is dead wrong on the copyright issue. It seems as though the only political party that understands the internet is the Libertarian party.
As such, I believe copyright law needs a strong injection of Libertarian ideology, or we're gonna get stuck with our own version of the Great Firewall of China some day. 1984 was not supposed to be a guidebook for how to run a society...
My suggestion to Netflix when I visited was that they use their strong position in the market as leverage to convince the content industry to abandon these consumer restrictions that prevent Netflix from delivering the kind of user experience that they would be capable of delivering otherwise.
If anyone can strongarm big content out of their fixation with DRM, it's a company like Netflix. And if discussions in private, behind closed doors don't work, then my suggestion to Netflix was that they take it into the public sphere and write an open letter to their customers explaining why it is their content partners, not Netflix, who are preventing them from delivering an ideal user experience.
I think if Netflix publicly campaigned for an end to DRM and enlisted the public for populist support, then big media might cave. That is what I suggest that Netflix do, and it is what I suggested on the day I met with them.
Their response was that they do occasionally use their strong position in the market to effect compromise with the studios, but that they work on a more gradual scale. They said my vision was too grandiose and bold and that it would jeopardize their relationships with their content partners.
My response to that was that fortune favors the bold. Netflix didn't destroy Blockbuster by playing it safe. They destroyed Blockbuster by innovating and doing something different. Something different for the sake of a better user experience.
I fear that Netflix has lost its way and that one day they will suffer the same fate as Blockbuster at the hands of a newer media company that understands how media over the internet should be consumed.
I genuinely wonder what the execs have against that solution
I've spoken with some of the higher-ups at Netflix and asked them this. They're well aware that things like DRM fuck up the quality of the user experience. Their hands are tied. They value their relationships with movie studios more than they value the optimal user experience. So they deliver the best user experience hollywood will let them deliver. It is for this reason that I declined a job opportunity there. I can't work for a company that values their relationship with the corrupt and backward content industry more than the user experience.
Setting aside the fact that a $50 million dollar budget to create a video game might imply inefficiencies in the production costs, there are plenty of alternative models at the disposal of the developers.
They could serve the download for the game for free, but require the downloader to watch a few video ads. Such an ad setup would fetch a lot more of a pretty penny than some stupid adsense site (which they could deploy as well) and you can be sure they'd be bringing in more volume in new customers that they surely currently lose charging absurd prices such as $50+ a pop for a new game (depending on publisher).
They could also offer, in addition to that, a subscription service that allows ad-free downloading and discounted game-related merchandise. Maybe being a subscriber entitles the subscriber to other benefits, such as a physical media rental, or a special privileges on the official game server. Think software a service.
And that's just what I can come up with in five minutes. Who knows how many other models there are that are competitive with piracy? The point is there are lots of options. To say that legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement would destroy the value of human labor is fallaciously sensationalist.
The fairest penalty is no penalty. We need to end the war on sharing by legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement. I know this is not a popular view. But this stalemate can't last forever. One side has to win. Either piracy or anti-piracy will win.
Given a choice between the two, I choose piracy. Because if anti-piracy wins, the resultant changes to internet policy and enforcement would be something straight out of dystopian science fiction. All data transmitted across the internet would have to be monitored and checked for copyright violations. It would require aggressive internet filtering and surveillance on a scale that makes the Great Firewall of China look like child's play. 1984 was not supposed to be a guidebook...
Moreover, there's plenty of evidence that it's possible to run a content business on the internet without charging per digital download. Plenty of people do it. In short: yes, you can compete with free.
Legalize file sharing by legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement. It's the only way.
iOS is a UNIX too. That hasn't stopped Apple from locking it down so that you can't get software from anywhere other than the app store without jailbreak.
You don't have to have professional experience or go to school to build a portfolio of work. Many applicants have portfolios of projects they cooked up themselves, contributions to open source projects, and other sorts of volunteer work.
When I get into discussions about this topic with (young) people and they think they can play the "Bill Gates" trump card (For some odd reason, they think I should admire the man since I'm "into computers"), this is exactly what I tell them. It's just plain common sense.
You don't have to be a beat-the-odds tech celebrity to do well without a college education. When I interview people, their academic degrees play little to no role in my hiring decision. My primary considerations are their portfolio of work (professional or otherwise), how well they can demonstrate their skills during the interview, and how well I believe they would integrate with the team.
As a Droid Incredible owner, I'm pretty pissed off that Android 2.2 is so many months old and there's STILL no official build available for my device. Why can't I just go to a magic URL like google.com/android/2.2, then download a supported ROM for my device, and then install the new OS just like downloading a new version of Ubuntu for a PC?
Stupid people said that. Intelligent people knew it wasn't so, and did it.
Reaching other star systems in a reasonable amount of time is actually impossible, given current and foreseeable tech.
So people in the 1800s were stupid for thinking that reaching escape velocity was impossible given their current and foreseeable technology at the time? How is that any different than you saying reaching other star systems in a timely fashion is impossible given current and foreseeable technology?
Is there going to be someone like you making an argument like that in every propulsion era? I can see the next Slashdot argument now, set in a hypothetical future where inter-stellar travel becomes normative:
Stupid people said that reaching other stars in a reasonable amount of time was impossible. Intelligent people knew it wasn't so, and did it.
Reaching other galaxies in a reasonable amount of time is actually impossible, given current and foreseeable tech.
The problem is if the rules of the universe dont enable us to get there in any practical way.
People used to say that about the moon. "Escape velocity is impossible to reach!" they'd say. Escape velocity wasn't impossible. It was a puzzle to be solved. I prefer to look at Relativity and faster than light travel the same way. Maybe one day we'll solve those puzzles. I still have hope. I guess I'm an optimist.
The exoplanets search is the most exciting thing in space exploration since the moon landings IMHO for one important reason: one day, a project like Kepler will find an Earth sized planet orbiting within a foreign star's habitable zone. It's the stated goal of the project, yes, but when it actually happens, things will be different.
Imagine what the day will be like when we find something like that. We'll know it's there, we'll know it's the right size and at the right distance from its star, but we'll know little else. We'll know that life very probably *could* exist there, but without getting much, much closer to it, we'd never know for sure.
And we're not talking about the extremely remote possibilities of microbial life on Mars, or some kind of funky aquatic life on Europa's hypothetical subsurface ocean, we're talking about plants and animals. Maybe even intelligent animals like us.
What could possibly be a better motivator for our society to start pushing the limits of propulsion technology again? If we had something *tangibly* interesting to explore in a relatively nearby star system, like the ones Kepler is exploring, we might just get that extra kick in our pants we need to start innovating again.
WWII motivated us to enter a brand new energy age with the development of atomic power and the perfection (I'll use that term loosely;)) of rocketry. Would discovering a planet in another star system with a high degree of habitability give us the motivation we need to efficiently produce and harness antimatter or some other next-generation power source?
Yeah, I'm being all misty eyed here. Relativity is a pesky little fucker, among other issues. But I can't shake the feeling that we're an amazing species of innovators when properly motivated. And I just don't think exploring other star systems has captured our collective attention the way landing on the moon did.
I desperately want to see us that motivated again some day. And I think finding a reasonably high enough probability of habitability on a planet orbiting a foreign star would give us back what we let slip away from us in the 1970s.
So does this precedent put other popular private servers for other popular MMORPGs in danger too, like the UOGamers private server of Ultima Online? (http://uogamers.com)
The point of the Ars link is to help frame the debate properly so we don't get distracted by red herrings. The issue isn't whether or not the iPhone 4 gets better reception overall. I'm not saying that it doesn't. What I'm saying is that it has a clearly reproducible defect, one which has been widely reproduced with sound methodology and which adversely affects a number of ordinary consumers under certain circumstances. The net effect produces a worse overall experience for such customers than prior iPhone models which do not exhibit the same issue.
If you never meant to assert the issue doesn't exist, then by all means feel free to disregard my criticisms of your argument as being anecdotal evidence. I'm certainly not trying to attack a straw man here. However, if you read the rest of the replies to your post, you'll notice that everyone else seems to have interpreted your argument the same way that I did. SvnLyrBrto (the first reply) even goes so far as to accept your (non?)anecdote as evidence supporting the idea that this defect doesn't exist by posting another anecdote of his own and concluding that the entire controversy is hyperbole.
Anecdotal evidence is when you tell us a story that regardless of whether or not it is verifiably true, insufficiently supports the conclusion you're drawing. In your OP you appeared to be generalizing and casting doubt on the legitimacy of the reception issue based solely on the experiences of your acquaintances. Maybe you didn't mean to doubt the legitimacy of the issue, but that's how it read. And it doesn't matter how qualified your acquaintances are at testing smartphones. Until they produce a scientific study with the rigor of the consumer organizations who do this professionally, their experiences are just anecdotes.
I know about 20 people with new iPhones and all of them are thrilled. When I ask them about their reception they all tell me that they have never experienced a problem
Stop the presses! Slashdot user joeyblades (785896) has an anecdote. Seriously, when did anecdotal evidence warrant a +5 on slashdot? This place is going downhill.
There are studies by Consumer Reports, Ars Technica, and who knows how many other reputable organizations using sound methodology to prove the existence of this reception issue. Why so many people feel compelled to vocally pretend the issue doesn't exist is astounding.
You want to circumvent the market and just rip stuff off if you don't like the price. How is that any different than hopping the fence at a concert if you don't like what the artist is charging at the door?
There are two critical differences: - Floor space at a concert is scarce, information is not. These two actions are thus not morally equivalent. - Stopping people from sneaking into a concert is possible and routinely done. Stopping file sharing is not possible.
Really? You're going to tell people how they should earn their living?
You're doing something worse. You're telling people how they should use technology and consume content. You're telling people to stop using the internet for exactly what it was designed for--copying information at no cost--because you're upset that technological advancement has invalidated the old business model of distributing media.
Take a look at the bigger picture for a minute. The invention of the internet has delivered an end to the scarcity of information. This is one of the most amazing inventions in history. And you're telling us we shouldn't use this remarkable invention because it gets in the way of a dinosaur business model. Telling people that is what's really immoral here.
So I say, yes, keep pirating. If that drives content creators out of business, so be it. Eventually content creators will adapt and work under business models that don't depend on rejecting technological advancement in order to be sustainable. We need to look forward to new ways of distributing media, not backward trying to subsidize the old ways.
I know that's hard. People don't know what else to do. They ask, "how do I run my music business without charging for song downloads?" They begin to think the only way to make money is to sell downloads and fight piracy, but it's a false dichotomy created by fear of change and failure to innovate.
You need to sell services which are scarce. Bands can play concerts, sell merchandise, sell physical media, and set up prominent "pay what you want" download pages, which include an option for free. Show an advertisement to people that don't pay. All of these models have been proven successes and who knows what other things people will innovate in the future?
So let's embrace the future together instead of trying to relive the past.
As a silly comparison: Trying to stop murder is impossible too, but that doesn't mean it should be legalized.
Unlike piracy, it's not impossible to enforce laws against murder. Laws punishing the crime (thus serving as deterrent) are highly effective with statistical significance. The same is not true for piracy. Literally millions of people pirate stuff and that number grows every year. The numbers of people caught and sued are minuscule. What's more, a large chunk of those people don't believe it's even immoral. Thus, the murder comparison is silly on many levels. It's just not a valid analogy.
When content creators have no revenue model anymore, there will be very little content worth copying.
Legalizing file sharing won't destroy revenue models, it will modernize them. Consider a pay what you want model. Plenty of folks will still pay, even when they don't have to. Some will pay because they're generous and appreciative of quality work. Others will pay not to see ads. If they pay enough of a premium, maybe they get some physical merchandise on top of the downloadable content. Maybe buying an album entitles you to a concert ticket. The point is legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement is not the content production apocalypse. Plenty of folks operate on this model already and prosper just fine.
The problem with copyright is the LENGTH of copyright, not that it exists.
Nope. This is the biggest red herring in the great copyright debate ever. So many people point to copyright length as the problem. Entire books have been published on this fallacy, such as James Boyle's "The Public Domain." He's a great writer and he makes a ton of excellent arguments, but his conclusion just won't solve the problem. If we shorten copyright even to a single year, piracy will still be as rampant as it is today. If we want to solve the piracy problem, we have to treat piracy as a competitor. If we do that, it won't matter how many years copyright lasts for.
Also, I didn't say I oppose copyright. I said I oppose copyright applying to noncommercial copying. I firmly believe in today's laws against commercial copyright infringement, which are perfectly enforceable and what copyright law was originally created for.
If you want to go after something completely corrupt and useless to society, then start attacking software patents.
Slashdot Mirror
The Slashdot community's constant hating on Firefox 5 has profoundly disappointed me.
The vast majority of the comments I've read in the last series of articles have boiled down to "change is bad! I liked things the way they were!"
Really? As a community we've been reduced to that?
I thought we technologist folk were supposed to excited by technological progress. Where's the excitement over the addition of CSS3 animations? Where's the excitement over a fast release cycle leading to a more advanced rendering engine being delivered to users at a faster pace? Where's the excitement that the browser wars are back in full swing and that this competition can only lead to good things for developers and users alike?
I've never seen such a sad bunch of folks afraid of technological progress before in a community that is ostensibly supposed to be obsessed with technological progress.
Maybe people keep modding it up because it keeps being relevant.
Just a thought.
Harry Mudd's endorsement of the argument doesn't necessarily lend it much credibility. A shame.
Oh no! The existence of some internet website undermines my business model! We need to eradicate this technology quickly! Technological progress is bad for business!
The whole series was worth watching. It was a terrific dark drama which was intelligently written and subtle. Caprica was to sci fi what HBO's Rome was to historical dramas. They even had Polly Walker playing the lead antagonist.
But if you just want one episode, try out Retribution: http://kethinov.com/bsgepisodes.php?series=4&season=1&epnumber=12 - If you don't think Caprica's awesome after that episode then I pity your tastes.
I have always found it depressing that of all the possible issues the Democrats and Republicans could unify over, that this issue was one of the few. Both major parties are for strong copyright and strong punishments for noncommercial infringement.
Speaking as someone who strongly supports the Democrats on all other issues, my party is dead wrong on the copyright issue. It seems as though the only political party that understands the internet is the Libertarian party.
As such, I believe copyright law needs a strong injection of Libertarian ideology, or we're gonna get stuck with our own version of the Great Firewall of China some day. 1984 was not supposed to be a guidebook for how to run a society...
My suggestion to Netflix when I visited was that they use their strong position in the market as leverage to convince the content industry to abandon these consumer restrictions that prevent Netflix from delivering the kind of user experience that they would be capable of delivering otherwise.
If anyone can strongarm big content out of their fixation with DRM, it's a company like Netflix. And if discussions in private, behind closed doors don't work, then my suggestion to Netflix was that they take it into the public sphere and write an open letter to their customers explaining why it is their content partners, not Netflix, who are preventing them from delivering an ideal user experience.
I think if Netflix publicly campaigned for an end to DRM and enlisted the public for populist support, then big media might cave. That is what I suggest that Netflix do, and it is what I suggested on the day I met with them.
Their response was that they do occasionally use their strong position in the market to effect compromise with the studios, but that they work on a more gradual scale. They said my vision was too grandiose and bold and that it would jeopardize their relationships with their content partners.
My response to that was that fortune favors the bold. Netflix didn't destroy Blockbuster by playing it safe. They destroyed Blockbuster by innovating and doing something different. Something different for the sake of a better user experience.
I fear that Netflix has lost its way and that one day they will suffer the same fate as Blockbuster at the hands of a newer media company that understands how media over the internet should be consumed.
I've spoken with some of the higher-ups at Netflix and asked them this. They're well aware that things like DRM fuck up the quality of the user experience. Their hands are tied. They value their relationships with movie studios more than they value the optimal user experience. So they deliver the best user experience hollywood will let them deliver. It is for this reason that I declined a job opportunity there. I can't work for a company that values their relationship with the corrupt and backward content industry more than the user experience.
Setting aside the fact that a $50 million dollar budget to create a video game might imply inefficiencies in the production costs, there are plenty of alternative models at the disposal of the developers.
They could serve the download for the game for free, but require the downloader to watch a few video ads. Such an ad setup would fetch a lot more of a pretty penny than some stupid adsense site (which they could deploy as well) and you can be sure they'd be bringing in more volume in new customers that they surely currently lose charging absurd prices such as $50+ a pop for a new game (depending on publisher).
They could also offer, in addition to that, a subscription service that allows ad-free downloading and discounted game-related merchandise. Maybe being a subscriber entitles the subscriber to other benefits, such as a physical media rental, or a special privileges on the official game server. Think software a service.
And that's just what I can come up with in five minutes. Who knows how many other models there are that are competitive with piracy? The point is there are lots of options. To say that legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement would destroy the value of human labor is fallaciously sensationalist.
The fairest penalty is no penalty. We need to end the war on sharing by legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement. I know this is not a popular view. But this stalemate can't last forever. One side has to win. Either piracy or anti-piracy will win.
Given a choice between the two, I choose piracy. Because if anti-piracy wins, the resultant changes to internet policy and enforcement would be something straight out of dystopian science fiction. All data transmitted across the internet would have to be monitored and checked for copyright violations. It would require aggressive internet filtering and surveillance on a scale that makes the Great Firewall of China look like child's play. 1984 was not supposed to be a guidebook...
Moreover, there's plenty of evidence that it's possible to run a content business on the internet without charging per digital download. Plenty of people do it. In short: yes, you can compete with free.
Legalize file sharing by legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement. It's the only way.
iOS is a UNIX too. That hasn't stopped Apple from locking it down so that you can't get software from anywhere other than the app store without jailbreak.
You don't have to have professional experience or go to school to build a portfolio of work. Many applicants have portfolios of projects they cooked up themselves, contributions to open source projects, and other sorts of volunteer work.
You don't have to be a beat-the-odds tech celebrity to do well without a college education. When I interview people, their academic degrees play little to no role in my hiring decision. My primary considerations are their portfolio of work (professional or otherwise), how well they can demonstrate their skills during the interview, and how well I believe they would integrate with the team.
As a Droid Incredible owner, I'm pretty pissed off that Android 2.2 is so many months old and there's STILL no official build available for my device. Why can't I just go to a magic URL like google.com/android/2.2, then download a supported ROM for my device, and then install the new OS just like downloading a new version of Ubuntu for a PC?
So people in the 1800s were stupid for thinking that reaching escape velocity was impossible given their current and foreseeable technology at the time? How is that any different than you saying reaching other star systems in a timely fashion is impossible given current and foreseeable technology?
Is there going to be someone like you making an argument like that in every propulsion era? I can see the next Slashdot argument now, set in a hypothetical future where inter-stellar travel becomes normative:
People used to say that about the moon. "Escape velocity is impossible to reach!" they'd say. Escape velocity wasn't impossible. It was a puzzle to be solved. I prefer to look at Relativity and faster than light travel the same way. Maybe one day we'll solve those puzzles. I still have hope. I guess I'm an optimist.
The exoplanets search is the most exciting thing in space exploration since the moon landings IMHO for one important reason: one day, a project like Kepler will find an Earth sized planet orbiting within a foreign star's habitable zone. It's the stated goal of the project, yes, but when it actually happens, things will be different.
Imagine what the day will be like when we find something like that. We'll know it's there, we'll know it's the right size and at the right distance from its star, but we'll know little else. We'll know that life very probably *could* exist there, but without getting much, much closer to it, we'd never know for sure.
And we're not talking about the extremely remote possibilities of microbial life on Mars, or some kind of funky aquatic life on Europa's hypothetical subsurface ocean, we're talking about plants and animals. Maybe even intelligent animals like us.
What could possibly be a better motivator for our society to start pushing the limits of propulsion technology again? If we had something *tangibly* interesting to explore in a relatively nearby star system, like the ones Kepler is exploring, we might just get that extra kick in our pants we need to start innovating again.
WWII motivated us to enter a brand new energy age with the development of atomic power and the perfection (I'll use that term loosely ;)) of rocketry. Would discovering a planet in another star system with a high degree of habitability give us the motivation we need to efficiently produce and harness antimatter or some other next-generation power source?
Yeah, I'm being all misty eyed here. Relativity is a pesky little fucker, among other issues. But I can't shake the feeling that we're an amazing species of innovators when properly motivated. And I just don't think exploring other star systems has captured our collective attention the way landing on the moon did.
I desperately want to see us that motivated again some day. And I think finding a reasonably high enough probability of habitability on a planet orbiting a foreign star would give us back what we let slip away from us in the 1970s.
So does this precedent put other popular private servers for other popular MMORPGs in danger too, like the UOGamers private server of Ultima Online? (http://uogamers.com)
The point of the Ars link is to help frame the debate properly so we don't get distracted by red herrings. The issue isn't whether or not the iPhone 4 gets better reception overall. I'm not saying that it doesn't. What I'm saying is that it has a clearly reproducible defect, one which has been widely reproduced with sound methodology and which adversely affects a number of ordinary consumers under certain circumstances. The net effect produces a worse overall experience for such customers than prior iPhone models which do not exhibit the same issue.
If you never meant to assert the issue doesn't exist, then by all means feel free to disregard my criticisms of your argument as being anecdotal evidence. I'm certainly not trying to attack a straw man here. However, if you read the rest of the replies to your post, you'll notice that everyone else seems to have interpreted your argument the same way that I did. SvnLyrBrto (the first reply) even goes so far as to accept your (non?)anecdote as evidence supporting the idea that this defect doesn't exist by posting another anecdote of his own and concluding that the entire controversy is hyperbole.
Go read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
And this: http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2010/07/unanswered-questions-unearned-trust.ars
Thanks.
Anecdotal evidence is when you tell us a story that regardless of whether or not it is verifiably true, insufficiently supports the conclusion you're drawing. In your OP you appeared to be generalizing and casting doubt on the legitimacy of the reception issue based solely on the experiences of your acquaintances. Maybe you didn't mean to doubt the legitimacy of the issue, but that's how it read. And it doesn't matter how qualified your acquaintances are at testing smartphones. Until they produce a scientific study with the rigor of the consumer organizations who do this professionally, their experiences are just anecdotes.
Stop the presses! Slashdot user joeyblades (785896) has an anecdote. Seriously, when did anecdotal evidence warrant a +5 on slashdot? This place is going downhill.
There are studies by Consumer Reports, Ars Technica, and who knows how many other reputable organizations using sound methodology to prove the existence of this reception issue. Why so many people feel compelled to vocally pretend the issue doesn't exist is astounding.
Some will give up, yes. Others will adapt and take their place.
There are two critical differences:
- Floor space at a concert is scarce, information is not. These two actions are thus not morally equivalent.
- Stopping people from sneaking into a concert is possible and routinely done. Stopping file sharing is not possible.
You're doing something worse. You're telling people how they should use technology and consume content. You're telling people to stop using the internet for exactly what it was designed for--copying information at no cost--because you're upset that technological advancement has invalidated the old business model of distributing media.
Take a look at the bigger picture for a minute. The invention of the internet has delivered an end to the scarcity of information. This is one of the most amazing inventions in history. And you're telling us we shouldn't use this remarkable invention because it gets in the way of a dinosaur business model. Telling people that is what's really immoral here.
So I say, yes, keep pirating. If that drives content creators out of business, so be it. Eventually content creators will adapt and work under business models that don't depend on rejecting technological advancement in order to be sustainable. We need to look forward to new ways of distributing media, not backward trying to subsidize the old ways.
I know that's hard. People don't know what else to do. They ask, "how do I run my music business without charging for song downloads?" They begin to think the only way to make money is to sell downloads and fight piracy, but it's a false dichotomy created by fear of change and failure to innovate.
You need to sell services which are scarce. Bands can play concerts, sell merchandise, sell physical media, and set up prominent "pay what you want" download pages, which include an option for free. Show an advertisement to people that don't pay. All of these models have been proven successes and who knows what other things people will innovate in the future?
So let's embrace the future together instead of trying to relive the past.
Unlike piracy, it's not impossible to enforce laws against murder. Laws punishing the crime (thus serving as deterrent) are highly effective with statistical significance. The same is not true for piracy. Literally millions of people pirate stuff and that number grows every year. The numbers of people caught and sued are minuscule. What's more, a large chunk of those people don't believe it's even immoral. Thus, the murder comparison is silly on many levels. It's just not a valid analogy.
Legalizing file sharing won't destroy revenue models, it will modernize them. Consider a pay what you want model. Plenty of folks will still pay, even when they don't have to. Some will pay because they're generous and appreciative of quality work. Others will pay not to see ads. If they pay enough of a premium, maybe they get some physical merchandise on top of the downloadable content. Maybe buying an album entitles you to a concert ticket. The point is legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement is not the content production apocalypse. Plenty of folks operate on this model already and prosper just fine.
Nope. This is the biggest red herring in the great copyright debate ever. So many people point to copyright length as the problem. Entire books have been published on this fallacy, such as James Boyle's "The Public Domain." He's a great writer and he makes a ton of excellent arguments, but his conclusion just won't solve the problem. If we shorten copyright even to a single year, piracy will still be as rampant as it is today. If we want to solve the piracy problem, we have to treat piracy as a competitor. If we do that, it won't matter how many years copyright lasts for.
Also, I didn't say I oppose copyright. I said I oppose copyright applying to noncommercial copying. I firmly believe in today's laws against commercial copyright infringement, which are perfectly enforceable and what copyright law was originally created for.
No argument there. :)