Just guessing, but I'd wager you received a monthly salary for your job right?
There are two ways to make money in this world.
#1 You take a salaried job, where you know you get a regular income each month and no worries about how much you will earn.
Or
#2 you work for no salary, for yourself, gambling your savings on the hope that what you *do* create in that time will be popular enough to generate sales equivalent to the alternative of a full time job. Most of the time, you will earn less, some people earn about the same. Some (very very few) people earn hugely from this, at least for a short period. (not many media careers last a lifetime).
of course, then there is the modern interweb alternative #3:
Choose to work with a regular job for a regular salary, but steal everything person #2 does, and then bitch about having made the wrong choice.
Nobody is stopping you going out and starting your own business. if its such a gravy train, and they all earn so much more than you, why aren't you doing it?
I haven't been to the USA since 9/11. I had a one hour stopover on the way to central America, and that was bad enough. maybe 70% of the people USA customs people talk to each day are on holiday. These guys are basically the marketing dept of the USA, the first people and last people we see on our holidays in your country, and they make everyone feel like a criminal. I've only ever been fingerprinted once, and its when my holiday flight involved a stopover in the USA. I wasn't even leaving the airport. Most people will remember this as a negative point in their holiday memories, and every stupid rule means US businesses have to work that much harder to compensate for it and make people want to visit the USA again.
I'm not sure how badly tourism to the US has been hit by all this, but I'm pretty sure that the majority of the effect is hidden right now because of the weak dollar. There are still people like me, who would love to go back to yosemite and vegas, especially now its dirt cheap with UK currency, but are severely put off by all this crap. Bah.
This is a stupid move. If I had some big flipping stone pyramids that were a huge tourist draw and earned my country millions. I'd be 100% in favour of people spending BILLIONS of dollars to build huge amazing hotels with awesome restaurants and the best breakfest buffet in vegas (trust me!). Surely the Luxor is just a huge amazing advert that says "LOOK AT HOW AMAZING THE EGYPTIAN PYRAMIDS MUST BE!" Which surely makes more people aware of the relevant culture, and keen to go visit the real thing. They are even subsconciously thinking the real ones must also have great casinos and nightclubs right? whats not to like! I've always wanted to see the pyramids, and staying 2 nights in the luxor does not 'compete' with them.
Depressingly, as someone who is very strongly pro-copyright, I find myself rolling my eyes at another retarded dipstick trying to push the idea past its usefulness and harming the concept by association.:(
even the youth connection is bullshit. My games are mostly played by adults. Are they going to tax mine too? If they do, I'll have to add a special "dumbass video game tax" policy to Democracy 2.
"As I understand it, LED bulbs are likely to be the best choice. I haven't seen them yet myself, but I hear they're OK and improving"
there is always a better technology just around the corner and those who oppose energy efficiency often suggest we wait for it. They never come, and when they look close, they always bump us to yet another further-off tech. CFLs work now, you can buy them now, everywhere.
good post. If torrentspy had a trivial way for anyone to flag an item as being 'copyrighted content' which meant that content would be reviewed and removed within 24 hours and put on a ban list, they might have a leg to stand on. We all know this isn't the case. They specifically make you send a snail mail copy (http://www.torrentspy.com/dmca.asp) despite knowing full well this is just a tactic to slow down the process. Why must it be the copyright owner who reports it? Is it not flipping obvious that spiderman 3 is copyrighted, regardless who spots it? They were openly and knowingly a place to go to to get copyrighted content. If I was a judge hearing them plead innocence, I'd be unable to keep a straight face.
holy fuck. don't you people have a government who can prosecute this kind of thing? Seriously. If its as bad as posters here depict, some senior executives should spend the next 30 years breaking rocks. That would be my verdict anyway.
Well said. I use my PC just as a PC (not a media center), to develop games and play games and surf the web, and I love vista in comparison to XP. When XP boots, I have to wait 10 minutes for the GUI to become responsive. Vista is responsive instantly. I'm sure if 90% of my time was spent watching videos and copying video and ripping music, there might be some problem, but frankly, I don't do that, and don't care. And I've yet to find a single program or game that has any problem with vista. The only gripe I have is the flakiness in standby mode, but apparently that's being fixed in service pack 1 anyway. Vista is the best version of windows so far. It suffers from huge bloat, but so did XP. It's tough to avoid that if you always support backwards compatibility. I'd love a complete ground-up modular re-written O/S. But I'd hate to run an O/S where none of my existing apps run anymore.
The conservative party in the Uk did just this. they introduced the 'fuel duty escalator' where fuel prices rose every year above inflation. The labour party scrapped it:(
Higher gas prices don't have to harm the poor. It means the poor drive to work in cars with smaller engines. Big deal. They aren't exactly suffering major quality of life reductions because they cant do 0-60 in the same time as the next guy, and for the vast majority of commuters, the vast majority of the time they are trundling along so slow that the cars performance is irrelevant.
Regulating emissions from cars might help climate change, but it doesn't help people get to work quicker or find a parking space when they go shopping. The only solutions to that I can see are: Public transport Car pooling Staggered work hours. I don't understand why there are not big economic advantages through tax incentives to allow wide ranging flexitime. Most roads near me are jam packed at 9am and 5pm and totally deserted at 11am. That's just insane inefficiency. There is veyr little reason for the majority of office workers to all start and finish at the same time.
great post. I'm in a similar position. I am not scared of the whole concept of nuclear power, butt he practicalities of it. here in the UK, it seems the poster child for cover-ups is our nuclear industry. They repeatedly lie about when leaks and problems occur, lie about the effect, lie about what's done to fix it, etc etc. They are the absolute opposite of an open and transparent industry. Both the GM food and Nuclear industry really do not need any opposition from green groups, they do a great job of shooting themselves in the foot on a regular basis. Blatantly lying about your business just scares the hell out of people, especially those living near a reactor, (or with farms near a GM field). Maybe the nuclear industries in other nations are better, but its going to be a LONG time here in the Uk before the general public start to trust private companies (or our govt for that matter) to build new nuclear powerstations. Trust is something you need to earn, it can't be bought, nor assumed on the basis of academic qualifications.
I'm not defending the RIAA by any stretch, but the cost you sell something for is NOT the marginal cost. Its the marginal cost PLUS an estimate of the slice of the fixed costs you need to charge per copy based on projected sales. If it turns out that this means music must cost $1.01 per track, and you 'refuse' to pay that, then that's fine, you obviously don't value music at the going rate. In which case, you happily go without it.
The fact that the marginal cost of a song is zero doesn't change the basic maths. They assume that fixed investment of 1 million, over 1 million tracks sold is a dollar. If they sell 900,000 they are fucked, if they sell 2 million, they are laughing. They take that risk, and they are entitled to the reward (if any).
"i want to pay a fair price for a good that has a marginal cost that is basically zero, so i would say, something not too far from zero is a fair price"
Then clearly you do not understand how the fixed costs are paid back then. magic?
"The marginal cost of the government providing street lighting to me is zero. therefore I shall refuse to pay my taxes for those lights."
You business model only works as long as there are people paying full price to leech off.
I'm very pro-copyright, but generally very anti-RIAA, and pro fair-use. Here is how I would have handled it...
"As the RIAA, we have no problem whatsoever with the plaintiff making backup copies of his CD-bought music to mp3 format, in order to preserve his disks, and to enable him to format shift to another medium. We sell music, and if the customer wants to enjoy that music on multiple formats we don't have a problem with that. We want them to enjoy the product. However, taking those mp3 copies and placing them in a shared folder, so they can be distributed to other people without paying for them is obviously not acceptable to us. The plaintiff must be aware that this music is not offered for free by the copyright holder as they themselves purchased it, so they must be aware that they are infringing our copyright by offering it to other people. They have purchased copies of the music, and we thank them for their custom, but they did not purchase distribution rights, which (if available) would cost them many millions of dollars more..."
And a lot of people will deliberately choose a filtered web. Maybe not the majority of slashdot readers, but thats a small group in percentage terms. Imagine a non-net-savvy family who can choose the current web through "noneofmybusiness.net" or a filtered web with "safeandsecure.net". One of them offers unrestricted access and no guarantees. The other offers to screen out all known malware, spoof, scam and other undesirable sites. Who do you think they will pick? Lets be honest, the web *is* full of sites, content etc that cause mayhem and chaos for everyone. If it were that much harder for a typical innocent surfer to get a drive-by install of some trojan because the majority of such sites were blocked, would that be such a disaster? Obviously the problem arises when you have no choice of ISP, or when sites get added to a ban list for dubious reasons, but in principle I can see a LOT of people thinking that ISP filtering (in theory) could be a *good* thing for the net.
what? Firstly , on what planet is it the case that its only the 'big guys' who get pirated? I can assure you EVERYTHING gets pirated. pirates don't give a damn what company made the stuff. Secondly, do you object to the police investigating shoplifting and credit card fraud? It's exactly the same thing. no business model is workable unless the law is enforced and generally obeyed. at the end of the day, the state enforces the law, and that's the same when it comes to copyright as it is when it comes to shoplifting and credit card fraud.
I agree. small companies don't do any of the bad stuff, but those same small companies content is then happily pirated in the name of 'sticking it to the man' by people who stupidly think that their beef with a few select members of the RIAA and MPAA give them a justification for stealing from everyone, everywhere, who makes digitally encodable content. Thats just total hypocrisy.
just not true. the web means anyone can sell anything to anyone. I know, I do it.
big media tend to have bricks and mortar businesses, and will make money regardless. If digital media is ruined because of rampant piracy the first casualties are NOT EMI and Sony, but the small indie content developers whose business is so small that they ONLY sell digitally. This is the big irony. By encouraging people to ignore copyright on digital media, you actually punish the small guy and keep the status quo where big businesses are the only ones who make any cash.
Why is it specifically in favour of 'Big' media companies? What is it that prevents this also helping out small media companies, and even individuals who create copyrighted works? It seems that anti-copyright campaigners would much rather portray every copyright owner as being like Madonna, prince or Metallica, rich and arrogant, rather than the reality, which is that the vast majority of copyright holders by number are very small or one-man companies. if you are an average-wage magazine column writer, copyright law helps protect you from being ripped off. If you are an author, musician or other content creator, the copyright law also helps protect you. the fact that the law also protects some big clueless, evil bastards that none of us like does not mean we should throw out the law. Laws against violence also protect politicians and business people that we hate, that doesn't mean the whole idea of those laws is bad too.
Copyright law needs to be clarified and reformed. But it also needs to be enforced. Writing to your elected representative is the correct way to achieve sensible laws. Breaking the law so you can watch spiderman 3 for free proves their point, not yours.
I agree with you 100%. that sort of thing is crap. But that doesn't vaguely stretch to cover the issue that media companies have with filesharing, which is the mass copying and distribution of perfect digital copies of other peoples work. Surely you agree that this is wrong?
I'll keep offering media that was made by other people on file-sharing networks regardless of watermarking
Fixed that for you. Nobody cares about you offering *your* media on file sharing networks, But if you do not own the distribution rights, its not for you to offer it. Unless you want to pay a few million to the movie production company that put up the money to make it.
You seem to think its great that people get to enjoy the music and movies for free, but the people who pay their rent and feed their family by their job working on big budget movies are hardly likely to share your enthusiasm.
You are missing the point. The point is not to remove internet service from pirates. It's to ensure people know that if they pirate stuff, they will lose service. Thats another reason for the mostly-honest consumer who is a borderline pirate not to download copyrighted stuff. That same consumer is unlikely to pick an isp thats more expensive and inconvenient to escape the mainstream ISPs content policy. Plus if mom and dad pick the ISP, they will probably pick the one that will prevent their kid from causing them to get threatening letters for breaking the law. I can genuinely see many customers seeing content filtering as a value-added service.
The point of laws is not to punish people who do a bad thing, but to discourage people from doing the bad thing. I know many people who won't break the speed limit because they don't want to get caught and fined. the fact that some people go to great lengths to avoid speed cameras doesn't mean that the cameras don't have the desired effect on the other 90%
The reviews of games with free small easy to get demos are irrelevant to me. I'm capable of making up my own mind. If your game is good, a demo is the best possible marketing or PR you can get.
It was dirt cheap to make! which is why, unfortunately its not got much in the looks department. That's not true of the sequel, which looks 100 times better. It's easier to risk your savings on a game when it's a sequel to one that sold ok:D
Slashdot Mirror
Just guessing, but I'd wager you received a monthly salary for your job right?
There are two ways to make money in this world.
#1
You take a salaried job, where you know you get a regular income each month and no worries about how much you will earn.
Or
#2
you work for no salary, for yourself, gambling your savings on the hope that what you *do* create in that time will be popular enough to generate sales equivalent to the alternative of a full time job. Most of the time, you will earn less, some people earn about the same. Some (very very few) people earn hugely from this, at least for a short period. (not many media careers last a lifetime).
of course, then there is the modern interweb alternative #3:
Choose to work with a regular job for a regular salary, but steal everything person #2 does, and then bitch about having made the wrong choice.
Nobody is stopping you going out and starting your own business. if its such a gravy train, and they all earn so much more than you, why aren't you doing it?
I haven't been to the USA since 9/11. I had a one hour stopover on the way to central America, and that was bad enough. maybe 70% of the people USA customs people talk to each day are on holiday. These guys are basically the marketing dept of the USA, the first people and last people we see on our holidays in your country, and they make everyone feel like a criminal. I've only ever been fingerprinted once, and its when my holiday flight involved a stopover in the USA. I wasn't even leaving the airport. Most people will remember this as a negative point in their holiday memories, and every stupid rule means US businesses have to work that much harder to compensate for it and make people want to visit the USA again.
I'm not sure how badly tourism to the US has been hit by all this, but I'm pretty sure that the majority of the effect is hidden right now because of the weak dollar. There are still people like me, who would love to go back to yosemite and vegas, especially now its dirt cheap with UK currency, but are severely put off by all this crap.
Bah.
This is a stupid move. If I had some big flipping stone pyramids that were a huge tourist draw and earned my country millions. I'd be 100% in favour of people spending BILLIONS of dollars to build huge amazing hotels with awesome restaurants and the best breakfest buffet in vegas (trust me!).
:(
Surely the Luxor is just a huge amazing advert that says "LOOK AT HOW AMAZING THE EGYPTIAN PYRAMIDS MUST BE!" Which surely makes more people aware of the relevant culture, and keen to go visit the real thing. They are even subsconciously thinking the real ones must also have great casinos and nightclubs right? whats not to like!
I've always wanted to see the pyramids, and staying 2 nights in the luxor does not 'compete' with them.
Depressingly, as someone who is very strongly pro-copyright, I find myself rolling my eyes at another retarded dipstick trying to push the idea past its usefulness and harming the concept by association.
even the youth connection is bullshit. My games are mostly played by adults. Are they going to tax mine too? If they do, I'll have to add a special "dumbass video game tax" policy to Democracy 2.
"As I understand it, LED bulbs are likely to be the best choice. I haven't seen them yet myself, but I hear they're OK and improving"
there is always a better technology just around the corner and those who oppose energy efficiency often suggest we wait for it. They never come, and when they look close, they always bump us to yet another further-off tech. CFLs work now, you can buy them now, everywhere.
good post.
If torrentspy had a trivial way for anyone to flag an item as being 'copyrighted content' which meant that content would be reviewed and removed within 24 hours and put on a ban list, they might have a leg to stand on. We all know this isn't the case. They specifically make you send a snail mail copy (http://www.torrentspy.com/dmca.asp) despite knowing full well this is just a tactic to slow down the process. Why must it be the copyright owner who reports it? Is it not flipping obvious that spiderman 3 is copyrighted, regardless who spots it? They were openly and knowingly a place to go to to get copyrighted content. If I was a judge hearing them plead innocence, I'd be unable to keep a straight face.
holy fuck. don't you people have a government who can prosecute this kind of thing? Seriously. If its as bad as posters here depict, some senior executives should spend the next 30 years breaking rocks. That would be my verdict anyway.
Well said. I use my PC just as a PC (not a media center), to develop games and play games and surf the web, and I love vista in comparison to XP. When XP boots, I have to wait 10 minutes for the GUI to become responsive. Vista is responsive instantly.
I'm sure if 90% of my time was spent watching videos and copying video and ripping music, there might be some problem, but frankly, I don't do that, and don't care.
And I've yet to find a single program or game that has any problem with vista. The only gripe I have is the flakiness in standby mode, but apparently that's being fixed in service pack 1 anyway.
Vista is the best version of windows so far. It suffers from huge bloat, but so did XP. It's tough to avoid that if you always support backwards compatibility. I'd love a complete ground-up modular re-written O/S. But I'd hate to run an O/S where none of my existing apps run anymore.
The conservative party in the Uk did just this. they introduced the 'fuel duty escalator' where fuel prices rose every year above inflation. The labour party scrapped it :(
Higher gas prices don't have to harm the poor. It means the poor drive to work in cars with smaller engines. Big deal. They aren't exactly suffering major quality of life reductions because they cant do 0-60 in the same time as the next guy, and for the vast majority of commuters, the vast majority of the time they are trundling along so slow that the cars performance is irrelevant.
Regulating emissions from cars might help climate change, but it doesn't help people get to work quicker or find a parking space when they go shopping. The only solutions to that I can see are:
Public transport
Car pooling
Staggered work hours.
I don't understand why there are not big economic advantages through tax incentives to allow wide ranging flexitime. Most roads near me are jam packed at 9am and 5pm and totally deserted at 11am. That's just insane inefficiency. There is veyr little reason for the majority of office workers to all start and finish at the same time.
great post. I'm in a similar position. I am not scared of the whole concept of nuclear power, butt he practicalities of it. here in the UK, it seems the poster child for cover-ups is our nuclear industry. They repeatedly lie about when leaks and problems occur, lie about the effect, lie about what's done to fix it, etc etc. They are the absolute opposite of an open and transparent industry.
Both the GM food and Nuclear industry really do not need any opposition from green groups, they do a great job of shooting themselves in the foot on a regular basis. Blatantly lying about your business just scares the hell out of people, especially those living near a reactor, (or with farms near a GM field).
Maybe the nuclear industries in other nations are better, but its going to be a LONG time here in the Uk before the general public start to trust private companies (or our govt for that matter) to build new nuclear powerstations. Trust is something you need to earn, it can't be bought, nor assumed on the basis of academic qualifications.
I'm not defending the RIAA by any stretch, but the cost you sell something for is NOT the marginal cost. Its the marginal cost PLUS an estimate of the slice of the fixed costs you need to charge per copy based on projected sales.
If it turns out that this means music must cost $1.01 per track, and you 'refuse' to pay that, then that's fine, you obviously don't value music at the going rate. In which case, you happily go without it.
The fact that the marginal cost of a song is zero doesn't change the basic maths. They assume that fixed investment of 1 million, over 1 million tracks sold is a dollar. If they sell 900,000 they are fucked, if they sell 2 million, they are laughing. They take that risk, and they are entitled to the reward (if any).
"i want to pay a fair price for a good that has a marginal cost that is basically zero, so i would say, something not too far from zero is a fair price"
Then clearly you do not understand how the fixed costs are paid back then. magic?
"The marginal cost of the government providing street lighting to me is zero. therefore I shall refuse to pay my taxes for those lights."
You business model only works as long as there are people paying full price to leech off.
I'm very pro-copyright, but generally very anti-RIAA, and pro fair-use. Here is how I would have handled it...
"As the RIAA, we have no problem whatsoever with the plaintiff making backup copies of his CD-bought music to mp3 format, in order to preserve his disks, and to enable him to format shift to another medium. We sell music, and if the customer wants to enjoy that music on multiple formats we don't have a problem with that. We want them to enjoy the product.
However, taking those mp3 copies and placing them in a shared folder, so they can be distributed to other people without paying for them is obviously not acceptable to us. The plaintiff must be aware that this music is not offered for free by the copyright holder as they themselves purchased it, so they must be aware that they are infringing our copyright by offering it to other people. They have purchased copies of the music, and we thank them for their custom, but they did not purchase distribution rights, which (if available) would cost them many millions of dollars more..."
And a lot of people will deliberately choose a filtered web. Maybe not the majority of slashdot readers, but thats a small group in percentage terms.
Imagine a non-net-savvy family who can choose the current web through "noneofmybusiness.net" or a filtered web with "safeandsecure.net". One of them offers unrestricted access and no guarantees. The other offers to screen out all known malware, spoof, scam and other undesirable sites. Who do you think they will pick?
Lets be honest, the web *is* full of sites, content etc that cause mayhem and chaos for everyone. If it were that much harder for a typical innocent surfer to get a drive-by install of some trojan because the majority of such sites were blocked, would that be such a disaster?
Obviously the problem arises when you have no choice of ISP, or when sites get added to a ban list for dubious reasons, but in principle I can see a LOT of people thinking that ISP filtering (in theory) could be a *good* thing for the net.
what?
Firstly , on what planet is it the case that its only the 'big guys' who get pirated? I can assure you EVERYTHING gets pirated. pirates don't give a damn what company made the stuff.
Secondly, do you object to the police investigating shoplifting and credit card fraud? It's exactly the same thing. no business model is workable unless the law is enforced and generally obeyed. at the end of the day, the state enforces the law, and that's the same when it comes to copyright as it is when it comes to shoplifting and credit card fraud.
I agree. small companies don't do any of the bad stuff, but those same small companies content is then happily pirated in the name of 'sticking it to the man' by people who stupidly think that their beef with a few select members of the RIAA and MPAA give them a justification for stealing from everyone, everywhere, who makes digitally encodable content. Thats just total hypocrisy.
just not true. the web means anyone can sell anything to anyone. I know, I do it.
big media tend to have bricks and mortar businesses, and will make money regardless. If digital media is ruined because of rampant piracy the first casualties are NOT EMI and Sony, but the small indie content developers whose business is so small that they ONLY sell digitally.
This is the big irony. By encouraging people to ignore copyright on digital media, you actually punish the small guy and keep the status quo where big businesses are the only ones who make any cash.
Why is it specifically in favour of 'Big' media companies? What is it that prevents this also helping out small media companies, and even individuals who create copyrighted works?
It seems that anti-copyright campaigners would much rather portray every copyright owner as being like Madonna, prince or Metallica, rich and arrogant, rather than the reality, which is that the vast majority of copyright holders by number are very small or one-man companies.
if you are an average-wage magazine column writer, copyright law helps protect you from being ripped off. If you are an author, musician or other content creator, the copyright law also helps protect you. the fact that the law also protects some big clueless, evil bastards that none of us like does not mean we should throw out the law. Laws against violence also protect politicians and business people that we hate, that doesn't mean the whole idea of those laws is bad too.
Copyright law needs to be clarified and reformed. But it also needs to be enforced. Writing to your elected representative is the correct way to achieve sensible laws. Breaking the law so you can watch spiderman 3 for free proves their point, not yours.
I agree with you 100%. that sort of thing is crap. But that doesn't vaguely stretch to cover the issue that media companies have with filesharing, which is the mass copying and distribution of perfect digital copies of other peoples work. Surely you agree that this is wrong?
I'll keep offering media that was made by other people on file-sharing networks regardless of watermarking
Fixed that for you. Nobody cares about you offering *your* media on file sharing networks, But if you do not own the distribution rights, its not for you to offer it. Unless you want to pay a few million to the movie production company that put up the money to make it. You seem to think its great that people get to enjoy the music and movies for free, but the people who pay their rent and feed their family by their job working on big budget movies are hardly likely to share your enthusiasm.
You are missing the point. The point is not to remove internet service from pirates. It's to ensure people know that if they pirate stuff, they will lose service. Thats another reason for the mostly-honest consumer who is a borderline pirate not to download copyrighted stuff. That same consumer is unlikely to pick an isp thats more expensive and inconvenient to escape the mainstream ISPs content policy. Plus if mom and dad pick the ISP, they will probably pick the one that will prevent their kid from causing them to get threatening letters for breaking the law. I can genuinely see many customers seeing content filtering as a value-added service.
The point of laws is not to punish people who do a bad thing, but to discourage people from doing the bad thing. I know many people who won't break the speed limit because they don't want to get caught and fined. the fact that some people go to great lengths to avoid speed cameras doesn't mean that the cameras don't have the desired effect on the other 90%
The reviews of games with free small easy to get demos are irrelevant to me. I'm capable of making up my own mind. If your game is good, a demo is the best possible marketing or PR you can get.
actually that doesn't sound half as bad to me as it would most. I mean, even aragorn had to sharpen his sword...
It was dirt cheap to make! which is why, unfortunately its not got much in the looks department. That's not true of the sequel, which looks 100 times better. It's easier to risk your savings on a game when it's a sequel to one that sold ok :D