Recently Microsoft caved in on pricing issues to the Thai government after they started to complain. The GDP of Thailand is around $500B, while Israel's is 1/5 the size at around $125B (thank you CIA Factbook). Of course, there are many differences in details between the two countries, with Israel having a higher GDP per capita and a more developed computer industry, while Thailand has a larger population base.
Still, it will be interesting to see Microsoft's reaction. Will this being a smaller market make them more or less likely to cave in. Would they abandon the smaller market altogether? This could be good or bad for smaller countries worldwide, which could then, in turn, be good or bad for open software.
The Israeli government's anti-trust division is also one of the strongest in the world. Many of the Justice Department and other anti-trust government lawyers from around the world are very admiring of all the power of the Anti-Trust laws there.
Also, US Courts and Israeli Courts have been known to take each other's opinions into account (although never as binding precedent), in the same way US, British and Canadian courts do. So Microsoft being a convicted monopolist in the U.S. is even more likely to make an Israeli politician or bureacrat pause and consider their options....
Such a misconception that the whole Middle East is at war with Israel. Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and a majority of the Palestinian people are in a state of war with Israel.
On the other hand, though, many non-native-Hebrew speakers and non-Jews live as full citizens in Israel, and non-Palestinian non-Jews (such as the Bedouins) also serve in the Israeli army. Does Israel have discrimination problems? Yes, but so do most countries. Have you checked out how enlightened France deals with its Muslim minority recently?
Also, Turkey and Israel are allies. They even trade military information, I believe. Jordan and Israel are in a state of peace. The King of Jordan's uncle recently said in the New York Times that when the Palestinians get their own state (although we all know that may be years and the specifics all have to be worked out) he'd like to see a BeNeLux model for the three countries so they could cooperate economically.
Additionally, Egypt and, I believe, Morocco also have relatively good relations with Israel.
Israeli technological improvements, therefore, help many friends in the Middle East as well as enemies.
What America did to the Indians and China did to Tibet is to kill them or ruthlessly suppress them (force them to convert to their religion). Russia didn't "annex" Eastern Europe - it set up puppet governments. Actually, almost no country in history has "annexed" another country. If anything they take over and kill, supress, or forcibly convert the natives as ruthlessly as possible. That's history for ya'.
Even America didn't "annex" Japan after WWII. No, it tried to turn it into a modern democracy of its own - but Israel doesn't have the resources to do that for that Palestinians. Its a small country and it barely has the power to impose enough martial law in the Palestinian territories to stop terrorist attacks against it.
"I bet that a vast majority of palestenians would love to be first class citizens of a modern democracy." - According to most internal polls, Palestinians do not want to be part of Israel. They want to be part of a MUSLIM modern democratic country. When they speak of the "right of return", they mean return to an Israel with no Jews (Jews driven into the sea and all that...). When you clarify they would be moving to Israel, the majority don't want it. On the other side, very few Jewish Israelis are intersted in living in a country with a Muslim majority. So why force the two to unite?
it's been decades since Israel took over the "disputed terrotories" and yet it has made no move to make any of those peole citizens.
Perhaps you didn't notice that the Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese also have hundreds of thousands or millions of Palestinian on their territory that they also have not offered to make citizens of their ocuntries. No other country the middle east (with the exception of Jordan, which is mainly Palestinian anyway) has annexed citizens, so why should Israel? Face it, nobody wants to annex Palestinians. That is why they need their own country. Luckily, that is what they will get as soon as they promise to cut out the terrorism and dismantle Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Unfortunately, its going to be awhile before they do that...
On the other hand, science and technology, I believe, does bring people together. Many scientific experiments are still going on at Israeli and Palestinian universities and were even at the height of the current intifada, which is now hopefully winding down.
They will make the switch, likely mainly on time. I think they are considering pushing it back to 2008, though.
Either way, nobody will buy a new TV. They have converter boxes that will take your existing TV and convert it. Likely those boxes will be very cheap by the time the switch rolls around. Probably most people with cable will get it thrown in for free, and some charities will give some away to the really poor.
Hey, this is America... people gotta' have their TV.
Of course there are people running dataless. A fifth of the planet gets by on less than $2 per day... Those people are not storing much data...
To make up for it, the rest are actually storing several gigs, at least... Likely much more if you're reading/.
Actually, that rearranges feature is off by default. You have to go into "consolidate library" under "Advanced" for that to happen, and its off by default. Even then it warns you before it rearranges anything.
I have to admit, though, it is a convenient feature for arranging all of your MP3s by artist.
I agree with you about Win98, but I guess they can't support everything...
North Norka, Cuba, and other dictatorial countries have power grids that fail because their overall economy is weak, and they lack the investment for infrastructure.
Some other countries that do not have a free market power grid - most of the United States, Canada, Britain, Europe, Japan... do you think those countries are the envy of the world when it comes to power supply?
Your comment "excessive monopolies are illegal" shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the ecnomics of the situation. You are just repeating a standard capitalist line that has nothing to do with this particular industry. Software, aside from the artificial monopoly of intellectual property, follows standard supply/demand curves. That is not true of electricity.
Electricity (and telecommunications) would be disastrous in a free market, as California quickly learned. That's because in natural monopolies like electricity the supply demand curves are reversed, and the cost of entry of another marginal unit of product is minimal. The normal rules of the marketplace are turned on their head, and don't apply. Its not a matter of stopping fraud, its basic economics. Free markets really do not work in this industry...
Any analogy falls apart if you look at every irrelevant characteristic.
Drinking water accounting for less than 5% of all tap water usage doesn't change the fact that people are managing to sell water even though it is essentially being offered for free. The relevent point here isn't the commercial viability of the tap water, which is analagous to the P2P networks, but of the bottled water companies, which is analogous to the music companies. My response to the initial statement that you CAN compete with free, I believe, still holds true.
Re: the record companies having much larger margins. Water companies only have small margins because they are a regulated industry - the government has stepped in and told them how much they are able to charge. This is similar to what the government has done with song writers. Perhaps the solution is for the government to fully regulate IP, and artificially force the cost of music to drop to the point where the whole free/paid debate doesn't matter - as with water. I personally think this is a bad idea. A well run competitive business that is focused on consumers will generally do better than the government. On the other hand, it worked with water.
You should see my other note, but I'll rewrite your paragraph for you....
If music is in your computer, it isn't free. It's part of your ISP. That means while you have a flat rate for music, it isn't free. (Yes, the ISPs don't pay the music industry, but the manufacturers do for blank tapes under the Audio Home Recording Act, and the only reason this hasn't been extended is because the music industry would rather sue people. Also, consumers don't know the difference one way or another. To them, flat rate tacked onto something else is free. I will continue...)
Furthermore, the only reason music has caught on in this country is public paranoia over bad quality of music and, in some cases, poor music delivery systems. Poor music systems lead to poor sounding water, which drives some people to buy music from the music industry. In my hometown, the music is mostly traded amongst friends, and is excellent. Few people use use music bought from the music industry.
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I believe my point is that while there will always be people in small towns who use tap water and trade mixes with their friends, the vast majority of people are buying for quality and convenience. P2P works because the music industry price fixes, vastly overcharges, sells their product with numerous restrictions when you can find it at all under their inconvenient distribution system. Consumers, especially American consumers, are used to paying a bit more but also used to getting what they want, when they want it, if they are willing to pay. Also, they don't understand licensing, which is a business concept that no cnosumer has ever been subjected to. Generally, when you turn on your hose to spray the neighbors kids, you don't expect to get sued. The music industry should start thinking a little more like the water industry, or at least start thinking about consumers.
Um,... your analysis of my example is kinda' flawed. If anything, you proved my point.
Contrary to your statement, most of the bottled water that people buy is from the same source as tap water (not Evian, but the supermarket brand, for instance). Its just been micro-filtered and ozonated. Its the same water, but its at a different level of quality, and a different level of convenience. Like the water industry, music over the radio, on CD, or on P2P is all from the same source, but comes out at different quality levels and at different levels of convenience.
The difference is that, unlike the water industry, the music industry is not interested in charging for these value added features. They would rather provide a less convenient product (radio or CD) and then use the law to bludgeon people to do it their way.
Anyone who uses P2P knows that it is not very convenient in terms of finding what you want when you want it at a speed you want, and it is also not anywhere near the quality of CD - more like a clear radio signal. These are clear distinguishing factors, just as in water, that the music industry could differentiate itself with.
On a side note, this is why every independent study has shown that there is no validity to the industry claim that P2P "piracy" is causing them to lose money. Most of the people who are using P2P were the people taping songs off the radio years ago. They don't care enough about quality to pay an extra $6 or %10 for it. The switch to P2P, though, shows they do care about convenience. Too bad the music industry doesn't offer them this feature.
Back to my analogy, like water, people would pay for an on-line service that provided higher quality music with greater convience at a reasonable price. The closest example to this, of course, would be iTunes, but even that is restrictive. The current time limits and restrictions on music services would be like the bottled water industry insisting that you collect your fluid excrement (ya, know, #1) back into the bottle and return it to them. How popular do you think that would be?
The bottom line is that, with the correct business model and if you are not overly greedy, you can compete with free. If you would prefer an analogy other than water, somehow Microsoft has become one of the richest corporations on earth, exercising great monopoly power, and yet their product is distributed by individuals for free with the same regularity as music. Yet Microsoft has not only never felt the need to sue a 12 year old in public housing, but I don't believe they've ever sued any consumer at all. Granted, Microsoft has not always been exactly a role model of corporate morality, but I have to give them that.
As you yourself admit, "you can compete with free", so why don't you also admit that the music industry COULD compete with free if it wanted to? It just doesn't have the business sense... Its been basically 10 years since the invention of the WWW, and 5 years since P2P hit it big, and we're still waiting for the first business that lets you cheaply, easily, and securely buy and download an unlimited copy of a song from any computer. Its a good thing the music industry isn't the water industry, or we all would have died of thirst by now.
I don't see how you can truly believe any business can compete with a service that offers the exact same product for free with home delivery.
I am so sick of all these whining people who claim you can't compete with free. Where did they get such a crazy idea? Plenty of people do...
Mmmmmhhh.... lemme' see. Water, for most of us, comes included with our rent, which means its free. Comes out of a tap in the house - home delivery. Yep, its all there.
And yet... ever heard of a little thing called Evian? I wonder why the good ol' Coke Corp. has declared that sales of bottled water is its fastest growing product line? Could it be that it IS possible to compete with free? Maybe there's a business concept called a value-add?
But wait - if you can can compete with free but the music industry isn't, maybe that's because both they and hmccabe are extremely poor businessman who would rather whine, lose money, and sue 12 year olds than create a product that consumers are actually willing to pay for. Nah, that couldn't be it.
In a perfect world, you wouldn't need a programmer or a doctor or an accountant or anything. You could do it all yourself! Since you are not a genius, though, and this is not a perfect world, you have two alternatives - specialization or living in a primitive society in which everyone has a few general skills.
Saying we don't need lawyers if we just make law simple is like saying we don't need project managers or accountants or wall street financiers. But what if you want to move capital around in a complex fashion or build something complex, or regulate something complex that you are building so it works out in society's best interest? Modern society IS complex, so the laws have to be complex. But it is better to live in a complex society that can build things like Space Shuttles and the Internet and the freeway system and our electrical and telecommunications grids and our jail system... saying we don't need complex laws is like saying we don't need complexity. Personally, I would prefer to live in a well regulated modern society than in a pre-industrial (likely, stone age) society of hunter-gatherer. I'm betting more people agree with me than with you. There are a lot more people trying to get into the "1st world" than out. I'll save my camping for the weekends.
I have also noticed that countries with less complex laws and a less powerful legal system tend to have a lot more violence. In Russia during the early '90s, when the rule of law was much weaker, if you had a problem with a rival corporation instead of suing them you could hire a bunch of thugs to go shoot up that company and everyone in it. Given the choice between living in a country with lawsuits in a complex carefully orchestrated process that takes a long time to learn or everyone grabbing a gun and last one standing wins - I'll take the one with the lawyers.
75 is probably just a number they picked. In my experience, most of the time this stuff is done randomly by some mid-level person who wants a round number.
But courts are NOT designed to handle this sort of thing. Remember that traffic courts and small claims courts are kept separate precisely because they deal in volume of cases rather than large amounts, and even then its very small. Most cases settle out of court and the courts encourage arbitration and mediation rather than going to court. Courts are a conflict resolution method of last resort.
This is the RIAA's biggest problem. Since we are not a police state, courts in this country are designed to deal with the abberrations. As a democracy, when the majority of people do not agree with a law to the point of being willing to ignore it, the system breaks down. The RIAA will never win as long as most people do not see any ethical problem with copying. Most people aren't going to, because consumers have never been subjected to copyright law before and don't feel that it applies to them. Hey, even businesses weren't subject to copyright law until a few hundred years ago. Compare that to, say, "though shalt not steal" which has been part of our culture for thousands of years and which everyone pretty much agrees to.
You said artists have the right to get paid for their work? Is that a biblical right? A natural right? Plenty of work gets done without people getting paid. Do I have a right to get paid for cleaning my house? Hey, that's work, too, but nobody is lining up to pay me for it.
Artists do have a right to freely express themselves... thats in the bill of RIGHTS! Nothing in there about getting paid.
Or were you making an argument that artists should be economically incentivized to create by being rewarded for their creation? That is in the constitution, but it is society that decides how much artists get paid, and in what form. If the majority of society is ignoring minor or non-commercial copyright law violations (and don't kid yourself - even if they are not downloading music they are making copies at Kinkos or in other ways violating copyright laws) then that is a choice society has made. If the laws don't reflect the wishes of society, that is a flaw in the system that will hopefully be corrected.
Arists have the right to look at what society is offering them, in terms of incentives for creation, and decide whether to create art or not to create art. They don't have the right to get paid for their art. If they did, I've got a bunch of fingerpaintings from 1st grade I've been saving for just this occasion. Either way, as Courtney Love said, good artists (who aren't greedy) have nothing to worry about. Feeble artists who are being artificially propped up by an artificial monopoly (you know who you are) have the right to get treated like everyone else...
folks have considered casual copying to be reasonable ever since audio and later video recording was invented.
Um, before they had audio and video recording? Folks have ALWAYS considered casual copying to be reasonable. I mean since the dawn of time. People used to sit around the campfires in the wilderness and teach each other songs they knew... and artists used to get paid by wealthy patrons, ya' know?
Doesn't anyone remember prohibition anymore? You can't legislate morality... There is about as much chance of stopping casual copying of music as there is of stopping casual consumption of alcohol.
There is no "e" at the end of Asimov. Also, since he has written around 450 books you'd have to read 15 books a day, or around one book per waking hour, to read them all in a month. Or was that a joke?
Competition is always good, but the big question is which competing service will succeed. But M$ seems to be going in the wrong direction, at least I think so. Usually they are more about ripping off good ideas poorly than ripping off bad ideas well. I bet after this Apple thing they will ditch their current plan in favor of letting users keep what they own.
The bottom line is that people who bother to go online and download a song like it enough to want to own it forever. Everyone else just listens to the radio....
Even if the contributory infringement of the search engine technology was not a factor, there was also direct infringement in which they themselves were trading music. They were obviously guilty of this, and that is likely what they are paying for.
Even so, thats a huge sum of money for trading illegal songs. At the going Apple rate of a buck a song, they would have had to have given away 5000 songs and got triple damages. These sums are basically what the lawyers worked out to make the problem go away, and is probably based more on what the legal fees would have cost them to fight it out in court. Google, which can afford endless litigation, will never get sued... this was about intimidation, not legality...
Gunmakers are being sued, to my understanding, for intentionally flooding certain high-crime areas with guns they should have known would be used illegally. They were negligent with their product distribustion. They are not responsible for others actions with their guns, only for their own actions in putting those guns in the hands of criminals. Guns, of course, are a more regulated industry, too.
In this case, P2P software makers would have to intentionally advertise "come steal with our software" for it to be analogous. Or more likely they would have to be monitoring high crime areas of the internet and intentionally distributing their software there (ie - a warez sites advertising campaign).
One of the main points in this case was that the software makers were just putting the software out there on the internet and it was the users who were deciding to use P2P software for infringing purposes.
Well said! Knowledge is valuable for its own sake, and it is a weak mind that feels any knowledge is not worth some preservation.
We are at a unique moment in history in that globalization is destroying cultural diversity. This is a good thing in some ways, but we will never get another chance to document the incredible diversity caused by people being forced to live in small isolated groups for the past thousand (hundreds of thousands) of years. This is not an experiment that can be recreated in a lab, after all.
There is an opportunity here, and we'd better not waste it!
Maybe, but a test case would surely get free legal counsel provided by EFF or ACLU or whoever. The low likelihood of conviction and the chance to avoid a felony on their record makes accepting a plea less likely, unless they reduced it to a misdemeanor, which means it would lose all its deterrent effect.
All in all its just an unlikely scenario - criminal proscution of file traders, I mean.
I doubt he trades files illegally, but it would be fair if any test case involved his kids. If he doesn't have kids, I'm sure he has nieces and nephews or neighbors and I'm sure most of them trade files illegally.
Of course, I'm sure this is not who the police would choose to go after, but if some concerned citizen monitoring a network were to collect evidence and mysteriously hand it over to police, wouldn't they have almost a duty to prosecute?
Seriously, though, I highly doubt this case would win in a real court. He's just a bit short on cash and needs some of that music label love...
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Still, it will be interesting to see Microsoft's reaction. Will this being a smaller market make them more or less likely to cave in. Would they abandon the smaller market altogether? This could be good or bad for smaller countries worldwide, which could then, in turn, be good or bad for open software.
Also, US Courts and Israeli Courts have been known to take each other's opinions into account (although never as binding precedent), in the same way US, British and Canadian courts do. So Microsoft being a convicted monopolist in the U.S. is even more likely to make an Israeli politician or bureacrat pause and consider their options....
On the other hand, though, many non-native-Hebrew speakers and non-Jews live as full citizens in Israel, and non-Palestinian non-Jews (such as the Bedouins) also serve in the Israeli army. Does Israel have discrimination problems? Yes, but so do most countries. Have you checked out how enlightened France deals with its Muslim minority recently?
Also, Turkey and Israel are allies. They even trade military information, I believe. Jordan and Israel are in a state of peace. The King of Jordan's uncle recently said in the New York Times that when the Palestinians get their own state (although we all know that may be years and the specifics all have to be worked out) he'd like to see a BeNeLux model for the three countries so they could cooperate economically.
Additionally, Egypt and, I believe, Morocco also have relatively good relations with Israel.
Israeli technological improvements, therefore, help many friends in the Middle East as well as enemies.
Even America didn't "annex" Japan after WWII. No, it tried to turn it into a modern democracy of its own - but Israel doesn't have the resources to do that for that Palestinians. Its a small country and it barely has the power to impose enough martial law in the Palestinian territories to stop terrorist attacks against it.
"I bet that a vast majority of palestenians would love to be first class citizens of a modern democracy." - According to most internal polls, Palestinians do not want to be part of Israel. They want to be part of a MUSLIM modern democratic country. When they speak of the "right of return", they mean return to an Israel with no Jews (Jews driven into the sea and all that...). When you clarify they would be moving to Israel, the majority don't want it. On the other side, very few Jewish Israelis are intersted in living in a country with a Muslim majority. So why force the two to unite?
it's been decades since Israel took over the "disputed terrotories" and yet it has made no move to make any of those peole citizens.
Perhaps you didn't notice that the Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese also have hundreds of thousands or millions of Palestinian on their territory that they also have not offered to make citizens of their ocuntries. No other country the middle east (with the exception of Jordan, which is mainly Palestinian anyway) has annexed citizens, so why should Israel? Face it, nobody wants to annex Palestinians. That is why they need their own country. Luckily, that is what they will get as soon as they promise to cut out the terrorism and dismantle Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Unfortunately, its going to be awhile before they do that...
On the other hand, science and technology, I believe, does bring people together. Many scientific experiments are still going on at Israeli and Palestinian universities and were even at the height of the current intifada, which is now hopefully winding down.
Either way, nobody will buy a new TV. They have converter boxes that will take your existing TV and convert it. Likely those boxes will be very cheap by the time the switch rolls around. Probably most people with cable will get it thrown in for free, and some charities will give some away to the really poor.
Hey, this is America... people gotta' have their TV.
Of course there are people running dataless. A fifth of the planet gets by on less than $2 per day... Those people are not storing much data... To make up for it, the rest are actually storing several gigs, at least... Likely much more if you're reading /.
I have to admit, though, it is a convenient feature for arranging all of your MP3s by artist.
I agree with you about Win98, but I guess they can't support everything...
Some other countries that do not have a free market power grid - most of the United States, Canada, Britain, Europe, Japan... do you think those countries are the envy of the world when it comes to power supply?
Your comment "excessive monopolies are illegal" shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the ecnomics of the situation. You are just repeating a standard capitalist line that has nothing to do with this particular industry. Software, aside from the artificial monopoly of intellectual property, follows standard supply/demand curves. That is not true of electricity.
Electricity (and telecommunications) would be disastrous in a free market, as California quickly learned. That's because in natural monopolies like electricity the supply demand curves are reversed, and the cost of entry of another marginal unit of product is minimal. The normal rules of the marketplace are turned on their head, and don't apply. Its not a matter of stopping fraud, its basic economics. Free markets really do not work in this industry...
Drinking water accounting for less than 5% of all tap water usage doesn't change the fact that people are managing to sell water even though it is essentially being offered for free. The relevent point here isn't the commercial viability of the tap water, which is analagous to the P2P networks, but of the bottled water companies, which is analogous to the music companies. My response to the initial statement that you CAN compete with free, I believe, still holds true.
Re: the record companies having much larger margins. Water companies only have small margins because they are a regulated industry - the government has stepped in and told them how much they are able to charge. This is similar to what the government has done with song writers. Perhaps the solution is for the government to fully regulate IP, and artificially force the cost of music to drop to the point where the whole free/paid debate doesn't matter - as with water. I personally think this is a bad idea. A well run competitive business that is focused on consumers will generally do better than the government. On the other hand, it worked with water.
If music is in your computer, it isn't free. It's part of your ISP. That means while you have a flat rate for music, it isn't free. (Yes, the ISPs don't pay the music industry, but the manufacturers do for blank tapes under the Audio Home Recording Act, and the only reason this hasn't been extended is because the music industry would rather sue people. Also, consumers don't know the difference one way or another. To them, flat rate tacked onto something else is free. I will continue...)
Furthermore, the only reason music has caught on in this country is public paranoia over bad quality of music and, in some cases, poor music delivery systems. Poor music systems lead to poor sounding water, which drives some people to buy music from the music industry. In my hometown, the music is mostly traded amongst friends, and is excellent. Few people use use music bought from the music industry.
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I believe my point is that while there will always be people in small towns who use tap water and trade mixes with their friends, the vast majority of people are buying for quality and convenience. P2P works because the music industry price fixes, vastly overcharges, sells their product with numerous restrictions when you can find it at all under their inconvenient distribution system. Consumers, especially American consumers, are used to paying a bit more but also used to getting what they want, when they want it, if they are willing to pay. Also, they don't understand licensing, which is a business concept that no cnosumer has ever been subjected to. Generally, when you turn on your hose to spray the neighbors kids, you don't expect to get sued. The music industry should start thinking a little more like the water industry, or at least start thinking about consumers.
The difference is that, unlike the water industry, the music industry is not interested in charging for these value added features. They would rather provide a less convenient product (radio or CD) and then use the law to bludgeon people to do it their way.
Anyone who uses P2P knows that it is not very convenient in terms of finding what you want when you want it at a speed you want, and it is also not anywhere near the quality of CD - more like a clear radio signal. These are clear distinguishing factors, just as in water, that the music industry could differentiate itself with.
On a side note, this is why every independent study has shown that there is no validity to the industry claim that P2P "piracy" is causing them to lose money. Most of the people who are using P2P were the people taping songs off the radio years ago. They don't care enough about quality to pay an extra $6 or %10 for it. The switch to P2P, though, shows they do care about convenience. Too bad the music industry doesn't offer them this feature.
Back to my analogy, like water, people would pay for an on-line service that provided higher quality music with greater convience at a reasonable price. The closest example to this, of course, would be iTunes, but even that is restrictive. The current time limits and restrictions on music services would be like the bottled water industry insisting that you collect your fluid excrement (ya, know, #1) back into the bottle and return it to them. How popular do you think that would be?
The bottom line is that, with the correct business model and if you are not overly greedy, you can compete with free. If you would prefer an analogy other than water, somehow Microsoft has become one of the richest corporations on earth, exercising great monopoly power, and yet their product is distributed by individuals for free with the same regularity as music. Yet Microsoft has not only never felt the need to sue a 12 year old in public housing, but I don't believe they've ever sued any consumer at all. Granted, Microsoft has not always been exactly a role model of corporate morality, but I have to give them that.
As you yourself admit, "you can compete with free", so why don't you also admit that the music industry COULD compete with free if it wanted to? It just doesn't have the business sense... Its been basically 10 years since the invention of the WWW, and 5 years since P2P hit it big, and we're still waiting for the first business that lets you cheaply, easily, and securely buy and download an unlimited copy of a song from any computer. Its a good thing the music industry isn't the water industry, or we all would have died of thirst by now.
I am so sick of all these whining people who claim you can't compete with free. Where did they get such a crazy idea? Plenty of people do...
Mmmmmhhh.... lemme' see. Water, for most of us, comes included with our rent, which means its free. Comes out of a tap in the house - home delivery. Yep, its all there.
And yet... ever heard of a little thing called Evian? I wonder why the good ol' Coke Corp. has declared that sales of bottled water is its fastest growing product line? Could it be that it IS possible to compete with free? Maybe there's a business concept called a value-add?
But wait - if you can can compete with free but the music industry isn't, maybe that's because both they and hmccabe are extremely poor businessman who would rather whine, lose money, and sue 12 year olds than create a product that consumers are actually willing to pay for. Nah, that couldn't be it.
Saying we don't need lawyers if we just make law simple is like saying we don't need project managers or accountants or wall street financiers. But what if you want to move capital around in a complex fashion or build something complex, or regulate something complex that you are building so it works out in society's best interest? Modern society IS complex, so the laws have to be complex. But it is better to live in a complex society that can build things like Space Shuttles and the Internet and the freeway system and our electrical and telecommunications grids and our jail system... saying we don't need complex laws is like saying we don't need complexity. Personally, I would prefer to live in a well regulated modern society than in a pre-industrial (likely, stone age) society of hunter-gatherer. I'm betting more people agree with me than with you. There are a lot more people trying to get into the "1st world" than out. I'll save my camping for the weekends.
I have also noticed that countries with less complex laws and a less powerful legal system tend to have a lot more violence. In Russia during the early '90s, when the rule of law was much weaker, if you had a problem with a rival corporation instead of suing them you could hire a bunch of thugs to go shoot up that company and everyone in it. Given the choice between living in a country with lawsuits in a complex carefully orchestrated process that takes a long time to learn or everyone grabbing a gun and last one standing wins - I'll take the one with the lawyers.
But courts are NOT designed to handle this sort of thing. Remember that traffic courts and small claims courts are kept separate precisely because they deal in volume of cases rather than large amounts, and even then its very small. Most cases settle out of court and the courts encourage arbitration and mediation rather than going to court. Courts are a conflict resolution method of last resort.
This is the RIAA's biggest problem. Since we are not a police state, courts in this country are designed to deal with the abberrations. As a democracy, when the majority of people do not agree with a law to the point of being willing to ignore it, the system breaks down. The RIAA will never win as long as most people do not see any ethical problem with copying. Most people aren't going to, because consumers have never been subjected to copyright law before and don't feel that it applies to them. Hey, even businesses weren't subject to copyright law until a few hundred years ago. Compare that to, say, "though shalt not steal" which has been part of our culture for thousands of years and which everyone pretty much agrees to.
Artists do have a right to freely express themselves... thats in the bill of RIGHTS! Nothing in there about getting paid.
Or were you making an argument that artists should be economically incentivized to create by being rewarded for their creation? That is in the constitution, but it is society that decides how much artists get paid, and in what form. If the majority of society is ignoring minor or non-commercial copyright law violations (and don't kid yourself - even if they are not downloading music they are making copies at Kinkos or in other ways violating copyright laws) then that is a choice society has made. If the laws don't reflect the wishes of society, that is a flaw in the system that will hopefully be corrected.
Arists have the right to look at what society is offering them, in terms of incentives for creation, and decide whether to create art or not to create art. They don't have the right to get paid for their art. If they did, I've got a bunch of fingerpaintings from 1st grade I've been saving for just this occasion. Either way, as Courtney Love said, good artists (who aren't greedy) have nothing to worry about. Feeble artists who are being artificially propped up by an artificial monopoly (you know who you are) have the right to get treated like everyone else...
Send them a check? Very primitive...
Just go to Musiclink (formerly Fairtunes) and they will take care of it for you...
Um, before they had audio and video recording? Folks have ALWAYS considered casual copying to be reasonable. I mean since the dawn of time. People used to sit around the campfires in the wilderness and teach each other songs they knew... and artists used to get paid by wealthy patrons, ya' know?
Doesn't anyone remember prohibition anymore? You can't legislate morality... There is about as much chance of stopping casual copying of music as there is of stopping casual consumption of alcohol.
I have already set aside a chunk of my time later this summer for it, as we all should.
There is no "e" at the end of Asimov. Also, since he has written around 450 books you'd have to read 15 books a day, or around one book per waking hour, to read them all in a month. Or was that a joke?
The bottom line is that people who bother to go online and download a song like it enough to want to own it forever. Everyone else just listens to the radio....
Even so, thats a huge sum of money for trading illegal songs. At the going Apple rate of a buck a song, they would have had to have given away 5000 songs and got triple damages. These sums are basically what the lawyers worked out to make the problem go away, and is probably based more on what the legal fees would have cost them to fight it out in court. Google, which can afford endless litigation, will never get sued... this was about intimidation, not legality...
In this case, P2P software makers would have to intentionally advertise "come steal with our software" for it to be analogous. Or more likely they would have to be monitoring high crime areas of the internet and intentionally distributing their software there (ie - a warez sites advertising campaign).
One of the main points in this case was that the software makers were just putting the software out there on the internet and it was the users who were deciding to use P2P software for infringing purposes.
We are at a unique moment in history in that globalization is destroying cultural diversity. This is a good thing in some ways, but we will never get another chance to document the incredible diversity caused by people being forced to live in small isolated groups for the past thousand (hundreds of thousands) of years. This is not an experiment that can be recreated in a lab, after all.
There is an opportunity here, and we'd better not waste it!
All in all its just an unlikely scenario - criminal proscution of file traders, I mean.
Of course, I'm sure this is not who the police would choose to go after, but if some concerned citizen monitoring a network were to collect evidence and mysteriously hand it over to police, wouldn't they have almost a duty to prosecute?
Seriously, though, I highly doubt this case would win in a real court. He's just a bit short on cash and needs some of that music label love...