When labels go out of their way to pursue file sharers, I feel obligated to go out of my way to find their tracks through non-conventional methods.
I personally don't do file sharing, am a musician trying to scrape by a living, but this is the very point I've been trying to make other musicians understand for years, especially the ones who gleefully attack children for seeking out new music.
The artists and labels who have become vindictive assholes about file sharing are the ones destroying the music industry because their passion for money exceeds their passion for the art. They are the ones who will continue pay the highest price for the War on Music.
There was McCain who told people the truth - which wasn't what they wanted to hear.
You're right. "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" was not what I wanted to hear.
------
After reading through more than 2/3 of this thread, the real question I have is:
What the hell does any of the conversation above have to do with the White House pressuring registrars to block sites?
We should be figuring out how to prevent the government from censoring the Internet.
In addition to the original topic not being discussed, there is also S. 3804, the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act," which is going to give the recording industry a new way to interfere with independent musicians sharing their own music by making it easier to accuse us of breaking the law and silence us.
But everyone would rather argue about tangents, past history, conservatives vs. liberals, third party viability or the rest of the partisan political bullshit than tackle the issues at hand. This is why our country has gone to hell.
Sounds like you haven't seen sales figures in the last 7 years. The record industry has set itself back more than 30 years by attacking its customers and anyone who tries to put their music into the public's ears.
Not trying to be argumentative, but all of the things mentioned and some of which drifted off into long tangents in this thread -- wi-fi, water, air, minerals, Asperger's and ADHD, and now sugar and caffeine -- overlook the basic truths of life.
When I went to school back in the '60s, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, the air circulation was awful, no one had thought about the water yet, we had chocolate milk, candy machines and soda machines in the cafeteria, there was no such thing as wi-fi, ADHD, Asperger's or much of anything else that people are going to blame this on. And we were actually healthier. We can adapt to almost anything.
School was still an uncomfortable place to be and if you thought about it enough, it would make you physically ill. The only thing that has changed is that we now have about 1,000 more bullshit things to worry about.
The very act of learning changes your brain. It's uncomfortable, but it's all in your thought, how you process information and whether or not you are hating it or eating it up. Put one bad teacher into the mix and it's going to turn your stomach every time you think about their class. Tell your classmate how you feel, and they'll catch it, too.
When our society was primarily agricultural, no one had ADHD. You went out and did the same thing all day long. There weren't any real distractions. Asperger's people are usually highly logical, but 90% of the people around us and the way the world works are anything but logical and if you bring emotional garbage into the mix, it wigs them out.
Our reality is based on our perception and our thoughts are powerful things that can change our physical chemistry. The religious respect the power of prayer, which is just thoughts. Try telling a minister that prayer doesn't work and they'll go off on you. Because it does work. Been to New York since 9/11? It's a different place now. The entire country concentrated our thoughts and good will on that city and it changed instrinsically. Why aren't there devastating outbreaks of typhoid, malaria, and other rampant diseases after tsunamis, earthquakes, floods and other disasters? The situations invite it, the conditions are primed to allow it. But it rarely happens.
Maybe because we all concentrate on these places and wish that it doesn't happen.
Sounds crazy until you really think about it. New Orleans should not be capable of supporting life. After Katrina, there was 20 feet of water covering a huge swath of the city, filled with dead humans, dead animals, raw sewage and toxic chemicals, all of which receded into everyone's lawns, houses, businesses. The place still smells like death five years later. It should be entirely inhabitable. But the entire country focused on that city for weeks. Miraculously, life goes on.
Every mental configuration we put ourselves through changes who and what we are. Merely deciding to be happy or sad or annoyed or belligerent when we wake up in the morning shapes our entire day, tweaks our reality and change alters how we physically feel.
It's all in our heads. Literally. We could fix it if we weren't so focused on blaming it all on some outside source that we were always able to deal with in the past or is new and myserious (like wi-fi -- it used to be power lines). Because now we have a jillion things to worry about that we never gave a thought to before. We're teaching ourselves and our children to fear everything.
Yes. Not because it's inherently better (it's not), but because it's what students can expect to be exposed to for the rest of their lives/careers.
I would think that a flat yes or no answer is a little short-sighted.
It would seem as if there are some things which could still be taught without much need for tech -- math, art, music, literature, history, philosophy, for instance. Using technology can make these subjects more effective perhaps, but there is much to be learned in each of these disciplines before you rise to that level.
I'm an ASCAP member, so I got a copy of William's dodge-and-weave ahead of most of the rest of the world.
The greatest flaw in Williams' logic is that a Creative Commons license is adopted by the copyright owners. In the case of music, this would be the artists and songwriters. So basically, ASCAP has declared war on its own membership.
A debate is not really necessary to pick the winner of this argument.
A whole 1,000 files? From the "most active(ly) seeded files)? Does this include the ones the studios leaked intentionally? I'm surprised they even found one "legal" file.
I think the zero legal music / tv / movie files can be attributed to those types of files that are legal to distribute are usually just done so by http or ftp servers. They don't get put into a torrent type download system.
I totally agree. It's got the same problem as peer-to-peer. You have to know what you're looking for to find it. If you're not already famous (in which case you're probably singing "The Pirates are stealing my stuff"), no one is looking for your music or film.
This makes the chances of it appearing in the list of most actively seeded files somewhat infinitesimal.
Record companies front an artist the money to pay for a tour for instance.
Only if the artist signed up for a "360" contract and the record company is getting a percentage of the tour income, merchandise sales and anything else that brings income in.
That money comes from album sales. You're suggesting that an artist is going to be paid once for recording an album. Who is going to pay them and why?
No one is going to pay an artist to record an album. Ever. That's not how things work.
They get an advance on record sale revenue at the beginning of their contract. They get charged all the expenses of recording an album. The combination of the advance, any expenses incurred to record the album -- and let's not forget marketing and promotion -- are "recoupable" expenses, meaning the artist won't see another dime until all those expenses have been recovered.
And maybe not even then.
And yet in your world, they don't have the rights to sell individual CDs because copies of content shouldn't count.
The artists have no right to sell individual CDs unless they buy them from the record label. If an album is deemed no longer commercially viable and is out of print, the artist can't just have more copies run off. They don't own it -- the record label does.
What business model exists here?
It's the music industry business model, which is designed so that the artists never get paid for record sales. Current rule of thumb is that if you do get paid for record sales, you should fire your agent (or manager) for not asking for a large enough advance.
How is the artist getting paid at all?
Live performances. And now with the "360" contracts, the record label takes the lion's share of that, too.
The traditional newspaper/magazine paradigm is that the advertisers pay to have the news printed and made available. Customer subscriptions are a nominal fee just to make sure they're on the list of people who get the publication delivered to their door every day/week/month (depending on the frequency of publication).
This should still work on the Internet. To a point, it does, although there are many more voices available on the Internet, fragmenting the advertisers' budget as they try to reach their target audience.
If the article serves as any indication, standing the traditional practice on its head and expecting the audience to pay the cost of delivering the news is a losing bet.
Jenner was also involved with Choruss a couple of years ago, a project that Jim Griffin was doing (running? Promoting?) for Warner Music which was aimed at providing a sanctioned RIAA service for U.S. universities. This comes from an e-mail that Griffin sent me.
This was the outgrowth of Griffin's original assignment at Warner, which was to come up with something that would create a "pool of money" from which artists would be paid -- after the labels took their share.
Regardless of your opinion of Peter Jenner himself, the fact that he is now saying "Don't stop file sharing" is significant. Then read the other article (in today's batch of stories) from NewYorkCountryLawyer that talks about how the RIAA spent $64 million between 2006-2008 to collect about $1.4 million from the evil college students that are "stealing their stuff."
The RIAA has lost this war, exactly like ASCAP lost their battle with radio from 1923 to 1940.
A lot of schools also cut out art, music and sports. Earlier, things like home ec and shop class disappeared. Part of it is financial issues, part of it is due to liability concerns. But it seems like the core problem is that teachers and schools are now required to justify their existence and improve test scores to maintain federal funding.
So what do they test? Reading, writing and math. Math is a set of rules that remain pretty constant. Unless you're an accountant trying to cook the books for someone, math is not very creative, although it can be a tool for a creatuve person. With reading, kids are measured for comprehension and the ability to classify and analyze. Writing is the only potentially creative area that kids are tested in, but it's more about knowing and following certain rules, outlining, organizational skills, grammar and spelling. If you're creative enough to ignore the rules, you're not going to do well.
If they let kids spend time doing creative things, then that time can't be used to push them to learn the specific things which will be on The Test. If the students don't do well on The Test, then the school risks being branded as underperforming, losing funding or being taken over by the state (at least that's how it works in Arizona -- currently ranked 50th in education).
I went to school in the 60s. It seems as if the goal back then was to make sure you had a well-rounded education to prepare you for the future, whether you were going to work in a factory, be a mechanic or go on to college. Like geography, for instance. I've got a daughter that starts high school at the end of the summer. She has yet to study how the United States is laid out, what the state capitals are and what each state contributes to the national economy. This is stuff we had to know in 4th grade.
But geography isn't on The Test. Neither is music, art, or sports. So they don't teach these things to our kids. Recess is a waste of valuable time.
We've taken all of their fun away. None of it is on The Test.
So, contrary to the headline, Google isn't struggling to give away the $10 million. They're just struggling with the decision of who the recipients will be.
After reading many of the comments here, this entire line of argument seems to overlook one basic fact.
Newspapers do not sell news. Newspapers sell ads.
They don't make money when people look at ads, just when they print them. Readership is a number (the revenue is a very small portion of the income) which is used to justify the rates for advertising. The advertisers don't care if you sell it or give it away, as long as you get it into as many hands as possible.
If a story appears in a publication, the newspaper has already been paid (or is owed) as much as they will be receiving for that issue. The amount of editorial content is determined on a basis of a percentage of the overall space vs. how much advertising has been purchased (usually 60% ads and 40% editorial, although a 70/30 split is not uncommon. You maximize advertising by ignoring real news and concentrating on puff pieces that promote the advertisers. Fill the rest with wire service stories.
Even better, get advertisers to give you fully printed inserts (grocery stores are best for this). That way, you don't even need news to balance it.
If you intercept their readers, it's called "competition." Real competition comes when you go to the source and steal their advertisers. That's where the money is.
If you have a newspaper in Alabama and your biggest advertisers are car dealers, having an unauthorized reprint in a Colorado rag (or website) will have exactly zero effect on how many people patronize your advertisers. If your local competition is doing it, that's another story.
...the people who have to write their mortgage checks feel the same thing.
I worked as a newspaper editor before the Internet. None of us made enough money to qualify for a mortgage. Even the publisher rented.
Plagiarism is not acceptable, of course. But it is not "theft," according to the Supreme Court (Dowling v. United States - 1985). Copyright infringement does not "appropriate a physical object," nor does it cost the creator ownership of the copyright. Also, "works that are not sufficiently original, or which constitute facts, a method or process cannot enjoy copy protection."
In addition to exempting much of what could truly be called news, that section alone ought to put every 12-bar blues tune straight into public domain, unless you invented the key of H today.
The writer doesn't own a copyright. The newspaper does. The writer has a 9-5 job that pays by the hour, whether he/she is lifting a story from another publication and rewriting it to fill space, or putting together a Pulitzer Prize winning article, which will pay off regardless of the number of times it has been reprinted without permission. Might even be what puts it on the radar in the first place.
The newspaper biz says it's all about the writers; the music biz says it's all about the artists. In both cases, this is 97% false. With the exception of a few "stars," the idea has always been to pay the writers and artists as little as possible for as much creativity as can be squeezed out of them. Same thing in the movie business, otherwise various groups (writers, directors, actors, stagehands) wouldn't go on strike every time the union contracts came to an end.
All of the indignant self-righteousness is appalling. Those on the moral bandwagon, standing up so tall for copyright, have little to no true concern for the authors and creators; you are fighting to support the corporations which abuse them.
But that's okay. We saw what suing your customers did for the record biz. Now indie film producers are adding themselves to the list of things that the rest of us will never buy or patronize. A subset of us won't bother to take it for free, either.
If you don't want people to read your articles, hear your songs or see your movie, abiding by that give me great pleasure. Saves me a lot of damn money, too.
Tons of free, legal music and movies at the Internet Archive (http://arch
But on CL? that's going to be interesting to see happen.
That's going to be more than interesting, and much closer to damn near impossible. Placing an ad does not mean a transaction actually took place, it just means you wanted one to happen.
"All else" has officially failed. Ironically, it seems like this is going to end up putting the anti-nuke crowd in direct opposition to the "save the planet" crowd. The division is already forming; the sea life is already dying.
Whether or not the Russian success was overrated, we have nukes. Since all else has indeed failed, they are probably being considered. If successful, the government will have one more argument as to why we need to keep a ready supply. We (America) have no qualms about underground testing. A mile underwater seems rather safe by comparison, although mutation could potentially change the definition of jumbo shrimp.
Okay, the jumbo shrimp was a joke, but the situation is not. If someone seriously thinks they have a better idea, instead of quibbling about it here:
a) they need to get it to someone who can implement it, b) they need to convince Obama, like, yesterday, and c) they damn well better be right, or we're back to the nuclear option.
I hope you made the same point in yesterday's article about Warner pirating anti-pirating software.
If you like it, cool. Buy it, rent it, watch it with a friend...
I haven't seen this film so I don't know if I like it. While I have no intention whatsoever to download this movie, due to the asshole conduct of the film's producers, I now have no interest in buying it, renting it, watching it with a friend or any other activity which will put their product in front of my eyes. I think I'll even skip this one when it makes it to cable, along with anything else they create.
The public response to lawsuits killed the music industry. Now film producers want to start playing the game. I guess some people never learn. So I guess now is a good time to start boycotting the entire movie industry as well. Just one less waste of money in hard times.
I think that's ethically much simpler than trying to figure out what the creators wanted. You don't even have to think about them at all or any of the phony moral posturing that now seems necessary to watch a damn movie.
Slashdot Mirror
When labels go out of their way to pursue file sharers, I feel obligated to go out of my way to find their tracks through non-conventional methods.
I personally don't do file sharing, am a musician trying to scrape by a living, but this is the very point I've been trying to make other musicians understand for years, especially the ones who gleefully attack children for seeking out new music.
The artists and labels who have become vindictive assholes about file sharing are the ones destroying the music industry because their passion for money exceeds their passion for the art. They are the ones who will continue pay the highest price for the War on Music.
Maybe you're thinking of the Internet Archive.
http://www.archive.org/
There was McCain who told people the truth - which wasn't what they wanted to hear.
You're right. "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" was not what I wanted to hear.
------
After reading through more than 2/3 of this thread, the real question I have is:
What the hell does any of the conversation above have to do with the White House pressuring registrars to block sites?
We should be figuring out how to prevent the government from censoring the Internet.
In addition to the original topic not being discussed, there is also S. 3804, the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act," which is going to give the recording industry a new way to interfere with independent musicians sharing their own music by making it easier to accuse us of breaking the law and silence us.
But everyone would rather argue about tangents, past history, conservatives vs. liberals, third party viability or the rest of the partisan political bullshit than tackle the issues at hand. This is why our country has gone to hell.
Sounds like you haven't seen sales figures in the last 7 years. The record industry has set itself back more than 30 years by attacking its customers and anyone who tries to put their music into the public's ears.
http://www.azoz.com/topics/riaastats/index.html
Yeah, Sony was so sure we were all saving our money up to buy the new $40 version of Pong.
This severely prevents you from ever owning your game. Once the company decides to no longer host the servers... that game is dead.
But it worked so well for software and music...
I've been using Mac OS9 until I was finally forced to upgrade to OSX last month.
As the title says, I've been throwing out old software that works. The old stuff was better, more stable. That's why I stuck with it for 10 years.
I was happier.
Not trying to be argumentative, but all of the things mentioned and some of which drifted off into long tangents in this thread -- wi-fi, water, air, minerals, Asperger's and ADHD, and now sugar and caffeine -- overlook the basic truths of life.
When I went to school back in the '60s, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, the air circulation was awful, no one had thought about the water yet, we had chocolate milk, candy machines and soda machines in the cafeteria, there was no such thing as wi-fi, ADHD, Asperger's or much of anything else that people are going to blame this on. And we were actually healthier. We can adapt to almost anything.
School was still an uncomfortable place to be and if you thought about it enough, it would make you physically ill. The only thing that has changed is that we now have about 1,000 more bullshit things to worry about.
The very act of learning changes your brain. It's uncomfortable, but it's all in your thought, how you process information and whether or not you are hating it or eating it up. Put one bad teacher into the mix and it's going to turn your stomach every time you think about their class. Tell your classmate how you feel, and they'll catch it, too.
When our society was primarily agricultural, no one had ADHD. You went out and did the same thing all day long. There weren't any real distractions. Asperger's people are usually highly logical, but 90% of the people around us and the way the world works are anything but logical and if you bring emotional garbage into the mix, it wigs them out.
Our reality is based on our perception and our thoughts are powerful things that can change our physical chemistry. The religious respect the power of prayer, which is just thoughts. Try telling a minister that prayer doesn't work and they'll go off on you. Because it does work. Been to New York since 9/11? It's a different place now. The entire country concentrated our thoughts and good will on that city and it changed instrinsically. Why aren't there devastating outbreaks of typhoid, malaria, and other rampant diseases after tsunamis, earthquakes, floods and other disasters? The situations invite it, the conditions are primed to allow it. But it rarely happens.
Maybe because we all concentrate on these places and wish that it doesn't happen.
Sounds crazy until you really think about it. New Orleans should not be capable of supporting life. After Katrina, there was 20 feet of water covering a huge swath of the city, filled with dead humans, dead animals, raw sewage and toxic chemicals, all of which receded into everyone's lawns, houses, businesses. The place still smells like death five years later. It should be entirely inhabitable. But the entire country focused on that city for weeks. Miraculously, life goes on.
Every mental configuration we put ourselves through changes who and what we are. Merely deciding to be happy or sad or annoyed or belligerent when we wake up in the morning shapes our entire day, tweaks our reality and change alters how we physically feel.
It's all in our heads. Literally. We could fix it if we weren't so focused on blaming it all on some outside source that we were always able to deal with in the past or is new and myserious (like wi-fi -- it used to be power lines). Because now we have a jillion things to worry about that we never gave a thought to before. We're teaching ourselves and our children to fear everything.
THAT is what's making our kids sick.
Yes. Not because it's inherently better (it's not), but because it's what students can expect to be exposed to for the rest of their lives/careers.
I would think that a flat yes or no answer is a little short-sighted.
It would seem as if there are some things which could still be taught without much need for tech -- math, art, music, literature, history, philosophy, for instance. Using technology can make these subjects more effective perhaps, but there is much to be learned in each of these disciplines before you rise to that level.
Why not disabled by default and not activable?
What's the tremendous benefit we'd be losing?
National security, at least in the minds of some.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/07/29/1311223/FBI-May-Get-Easier-Access-To-Internet-Activity
I'm an ASCAP member, so I got a copy of William's dodge-and-weave ahead of most of the rest of the world.
The greatest flaw in Williams' logic is that a Creative Commons license is adopted by the copyright owners. In the case of music, this would be the artists and songwriters. So basically, ASCAP has declared war on its own membership.
A debate is not really necessary to pick the winner of this argument.
Or to identify the fool.
First of all, the study was intentionally biased.
A whole 1,000 files? From the "most active(ly) seeded files)? Does this include the ones the studios leaked intentionally? I'm surprised they even found one "legal" file.
I think the zero legal music / tv / movie files can be attributed to those types of files that are legal to distribute are usually just done so by http or ftp servers. They don't get put into a torrent type download system.
I totally agree. It's got the same problem as peer-to-peer. You have to know what you're looking for to find it. If you're not already famous (in which case you're probably singing "The Pirates are stealing my stuff"), no one is looking for your music or film.
This makes the chances of it appearing in the list of most actively seeded files somewhat infinitesimal.
The RIAA sued 40,000 people. Only took two cases to court. If that wasn't frivolous, then the newspapers aren't even close to approaching that label.
Do the courts and judges really want people to start suing first?
No, but the lawyers do. The RIAA spent $64 in legal fees for every $1 they collected.
Record companies front an artist the money to pay for a tour for instance.
Only if the artist signed up for a "360" contract and the record company is getting a percentage of the tour income, merchandise sales and anything else that brings income in.
That money comes from album sales. You're suggesting that an artist is going to be paid once for recording an album. Who is going to pay them and why?
No one is going to pay an artist to record an album. Ever. That's not how things work.
They get an advance on record sale revenue at the beginning of their contract. They get charged all the expenses of recording an album. The combination of the advance, any expenses incurred to record the album -- and let's not forget marketing and promotion -- are "recoupable" expenses, meaning the artist won't see another dime until all those expenses have been recovered.
And maybe not even then.
And yet in your world, they don't have the rights to sell individual CDs because copies of content shouldn't count.
The artists have no right to sell individual CDs unless they buy them from the record label. If an album is deemed no longer commercially viable and is out of print, the artist can't just have more copies run off. They don't own it -- the record label does.
What business model exists here?
It's the music industry business model, which is designed so that the artists never get paid for record sales. Current rule of thumb is that if you do get paid for record sales, you should fire your agent (or manager) for not asking for a large enough advance.
How is the artist getting paid at all?
Live performances. And now with the "360" contracts, the record label takes the lion's share of that, too.
The traditional newspaper/magazine paradigm is that the advertisers pay to have the news printed and made available. Customer subscriptions are a nominal fee just to make sure they're on the list of people who get the publication delivered to their door every day/week/month (depending on the frequency of publication).
This should still work on the Internet. To a point, it does, although there are many more voices available on the Internet, fragmenting the advertisers' budget as they try to reach their target audience.
If the article serves as any indication, standing the traditional practice on its head and expecting the audience to pay the cost of delivering the news is a losing bet.
Fortunately, it's Murdoch's money that was lost.
Jenner was also involved with Choruss a couple of years ago, a project that Jim Griffin was doing (running? Promoting?) for Warner Music which was aimed at providing a sanctioned RIAA service for U.S. universities. This comes from an e-mail that Griffin sent me.
This was the outgrowth of Griffin's original assignment at Warner, which was to come up with something that would create a "pool of money" from which artists would be paid -- after the labels took their share.
Regardless of your opinion of Peter Jenner himself, the fact that he is now saying "Don't stop file sharing" is significant. Then read the other article (in today's batch of stories) from NewYorkCountryLawyer that talks about how the RIAA spent $64 million between 2006-2008 to collect about $1.4 million from the evil college students that are "stealing their stuff."
The RIAA has lost this war, exactly like ASCAP lost their battle with radio from 1923 to 1940.
They just haven't surrendered yet.
A lot of schools also cut out art, music and sports. Earlier, things like home ec and shop class disappeared. Part of it is financial issues, part of it is due to liability concerns. But it seems like the core problem is that teachers and schools are now required to justify their existence and improve test scores to maintain federal funding.
So what do they test? Reading, writing and math. Math is a set of rules that remain pretty constant. Unless you're an accountant trying to cook the books for someone, math is not very creative, although it can be a tool for a creatuve person. With reading, kids are measured for comprehension and the ability to classify and analyze. Writing is the only potentially creative area that kids are tested in, but it's more about knowing and following certain rules, outlining, organizational skills, grammar and spelling. If you're creative enough to ignore the rules, you're not going to do well.
If they let kids spend time doing creative things, then that time can't be used to push them to learn the specific things which will be on The Test. If the students don't do well on The Test, then the school risks being branded as underperforming, losing funding or being taken over by the state (at least that's how it works in Arizona -- currently ranked 50th in education).
I went to school in the 60s. It seems as if the goal back then was to make sure you had a well-rounded education to prepare you for the future, whether you were going to work in a factory, be a mechanic or go on to college. Like geography, for instance. I've got a daughter that starts high school at the end of the summer. She has yet to study how the United States is laid out, what the state capitals are and what each state contributes to the national economy. This is stuff we had to know in 4th grade.
But geography isn't on The Test. Neither is music, art, or sports. So they don't teach these things to our kids. Recess is a waste of valuable time.
We've taken all of their fun away. None of it is on The Test.
So, contrary to the headline, Google isn't struggling to give away the $10 million. They're just struggling with the decision of who the recipients will be.
In a casino, poker is the only game where you do not play against the house.
Without touching, smelling and hearing (signal is not timed correctly) the brain development is stunted.
Textbooks fail all of these criteria as well. So do newspapers, magazines and every conventional news outlet.
There are a lot of things that can be learned without touching, smelling or hearing them.
After reading many of the comments here, this entire line of argument seems to overlook one basic fact.
Newspapers do not sell news. Newspapers sell ads.
They don't make money when people look at ads, just when they print them. Readership is a number (the revenue is a very small portion of the income) which is used to justify the rates for advertising. The advertisers don't care if you sell it or give it away, as long as you get it into as many hands as possible.
If a story appears in a publication, the newspaper has already been paid (or is owed) as much as they will be receiving for that issue. The amount of editorial content is determined on a basis of a percentage of the overall space vs. how much advertising has been purchased (usually 60% ads and 40% editorial, although a 70/30 split is not uncommon. You maximize advertising by ignoring real news and concentrating on puff pieces that promote the advertisers. Fill the rest with wire service stories.
Even better, get advertisers to give you fully printed inserts (grocery stores are best for this). That way, you don't even need news to balance it.
If you intercept their readers, it's called "competition." Real competition comes when you go to the source and steal their advertisers. That's where the money is.
If you have a newspaper in Alabama and your biggest advertisers are car dealers, having an unauthorized reprint in a Colorado rag (or website) will have exactly zero effect on how many people patronize your advertisers. If your local competition is doing it, that's another story.
I worked as a newspaper editor before the Internet. None of us made enough money to qualify for a mortgage. Even the publisher rented.
Plagiarism is not acceptable, of course. But it is not "theft," according to the Supreme Court (Dowling v. United States - 1985). Copyright infringement does not "appropriate a physical object," nor does it cost the creator ownership of the copyright. Also, "works that are not sufficiently original, or which constitute facts, a method or process cannot enjoy copy protection."
In addition to exempting much of what could truly be called news, that section alone ought to put every 12-bar blues tune straight into public domain, unless you invented the key of H today.
The writer doesn't own a copyright. The newspaper does. The writer has a 9-5 job that pays by the hour, whether he/she is lifting a story from another publication and rewriting it to fill space, or putting together a Pulitzer Prize winning article, which will pay off regardless of the number of times it has been reprinted without permission. Might even be what puts it on the radar in the first place.
The newspaper biz says it's all about the writers; the music biz says it's all about the artists. In both cases, this is 97% false. With the exception of a few "stars," the idea has always been to pay the writers and artists as little as possible for as much creativity as can be squeezed out of them. Same thing in the movie business, otherwise various groups (writers, directors, actors, stagehands) wouldn't go on strike every time the union contracts came to an end.
All of the indignant self-righteousness is appalling. Those on the moral bandwagon, standing up so tall for copyright, have little to no true concern for the authors and creators; you are fighting to support the corporations which abuse them.
But that's okay. We saw what suing your customers did for the record biz. Now indie film producers are adding themselves to the list of things that the rest of us will never buy or patronize. A subset of us won't bother to take it for free, either.
If you don't want people to read your articles, hear your songs or see your movie, abiding by that give me great pleasure. Saves me a lot of damn money, too.
Tons of free, legal music and movies at the Internet Archive (http://arch
In fact, that seems like a much lighter sentence then the legal avenue.
While I agree with your perspective, an appeals court is "weighing punishment." Someone took the legal avenue.
But on CL? that's going to be interesting to see happen.
That's going to be more than interesting, and much closer to damn near impossible. Placing an ad does not mean a transaction actually took place, it just means you wanted one to happen.
Taxing wishes seems kind of 12th century.
So if all else fails...
Didn't BP say that this was their final idea?
"All else" has officially failed. Ironically, it seems like this is going to end up putting the anti-nuke crowd in direct opposition to the "save the planet" crowd. The division is already forming; the sea life is already dying.
Whether or not the Russian success was overrated, we have nukes. Since all else has indeed failed, they are probably being considered. If successful, the government will have one more argument as to why we need to keep a ready supply. We (America) have no qualms about underground testing. A mile underwater seems rather safe by comparison, although mutation could potentially change the definition of jumbo shrimp.
Okay, the jumbo shrimp was a joke, but the situation is not. If someone seriously thinks they have a better idea, instead of quibbling about it here:
a) they need to get it to someone who can implement it,
b) they need to convince Obama, like, yesterday, and
c) they damn well better be right, or we're back to the nuclear option.
The point in all this should be ethically simple.
I hope you made the same point in yesterday's article about Warner pirating anti-pirating software.
If you like it, cool. Buy it, rent it, watch it with a friend...
I haven't seen this film so I don't know if I like it. While I have no intention whatsoever to download this movie, due to the asshole conduct of the film's producers, I now have no interest in buying it, renting it, watching it with a friend or any other activity which will put their product in front of my eyes. I think I'll even skip this one when it makes it to cable, along with anything else they create.
The public response to lawsuits killed the music industry. Now film producers want to start playing the game. I guess some people never learn. So I guess now is a good time to start boycotting the entire movie industry as well. Just one less waste of money in hard times.
I think that's ethically much simpler than trying to figure out what the creators wanted. You don't even have to think about them at all or any of the phony moral posturing that now seems necessary to watch a damn movie.
That's NOT entertainment. It's a pain in the ass.