Personally, I feel that yes, copyright terms have been extended much, much too far. I view this as a lobbying failure on OUR part. (Note, the congressmen's pockets... er, ears... are still available.)
Theoretically.
In truth, you have to buy a seat at the table when the copyright office goes through the arbitration process and the cost of the proceedings are divided evenly between the attendees, usually a few million $$. In the case of music, the RIAA pre-negotiates with all the major parties.
So if the cost of arbitration is going to be $2 million (a number picked out of the air), the RIAA is willing to pay it all to have things their way. No matter how good your argument, it's going to cost you $1 million to express it. And the RIAA will still probably get their way anyhow -- you just reduced the cost for them.
As for the main topic, this doesn't even resemble a surprise.
This isn't about hardware or software. It's about Apple's music store, which has sold more singles in the last 7 years than the music industry ever did in the entire course of its prior existence. Apple's refusal to let the music cartel set retail prices made it an adversary to the RIAA.
So Amazon is getting exclusive pre-releases. Only for one day, mind you, but Apple's response is, "Then don't look to us to promote these titles." If Apple was getting the exclusive, that might be unfair market dominance. If they got exclusives AND Amazon got exclusives, it would be a fair deal.
Apple sees Amazon as a competitor. I would think that complaining seems like a perfectly normal business response to a supplier giving preference to a competitor.
The RIAA is using their combined market dominance to favor Amazon in a pointed attempt to diminish Apple's market share. It's not like one label started doing it and the others simply followed suit because it seemed like a good idea. The RIAA members have colluded and conspired together to come up with the plan and all four are going with it. The RIAA has been playing as a team for so long they don't know what actual competition even looks like any more because they gave it up a long time ago. They think that their largest retailer is their competition.
Less than two years ago, the DOJ was asking why the only music services allowed to survive were joint ventures between the four major labels. Now, the DOJ is top-heavy with ex-RIAA attorneys. They don't even need to lobby anymore.
These guys won't notice the obvious collusion and attempts at price-fixing. They stopped wondering about the joint ventures.
Looking at Apple for antitrust in this situation completely ignores the party who actually IS using their market dominance in what seems to be a highly illegal manner by giving preference to one retailer with the specific intent of damaging another retailer. Apple is getting heat merely for bitching about being on the receiving end of it.
Apparently, "Doesn't kiss the RIAA's ass" is the new definition of anti-trust.
At this point it's pretty obvious that BP is out of ideas...
This is what the ACs who are tired of hearing about this seem to miss.
Seems like BP has spent more time and effort trying to prevent people from seeing what they've done than actually doing something about it. They'd prefer no one talks about it either.
China is selling DVDs for $1.25, but Hollywood had a record box office last year. For about the third or fourth year in a row. It's obviously killing them (sarcasm).
The truth is that if there were no pirated product available in China, they STILL wouldn't be able to sell overpriced DVDs to them.
I think most of the thinking world knows that almost ALL of the "piracy" claims are groundless.
If someone shares their IP address with you, you can connect directly to their computer. While it may be possible to shut down things like Limewire, you can't really ban P2P without turning off the internet completely.
For a decade now the biggest sites were targeted and shutdown...
Kazaa is still live.
--------
Obviously, the RIAA finds suing people to be more profitable than trying to sell CDs. And they don't have to share any of the money with the artists, which makes them feel all warm and fuzzy.
I don't do P2P, but I use the open Internet (aka a web page) to share my music, so I'm not opposed to it.
Ten years ago, most people didn't know who the RIAA was. Then they sued Napster. The RIAA's greatest obstacle is that they think P2P is ruining sales. I think that reality is that the RIAA ruined sales by being the giant dickwads that they are. I'm sure not going to buy anything from these moronic, gravy-sucking pigs that really believe separating college students from their tuition money is a good thing to do, for any reason.
If they shut down every P2P network that is out there, that won't turn the RIAA into the kind of people I want to do business with. I don't think they can ever get that back. Certainly not from me.
Too bad. I used to love the music business. But it went from being the music business to the music business. Turns out, I just loved the music. They just love the money. It seems as if it would make no difference to the CEOs if they were selling sweat socks. It's all about the quarterly revenue, year-to-year growth, yada, yada.
The industry used to be run by musicians. Now, it's run by people who can't find a musician.
Unfortunately, fear doesn't keep them honest. Not even a little bit.
Jack Valenti told us VCRs were going to be like the Boston Strangler for Hollywood. And then the Internet was going to be the evil killer. Last year was a record-setter at the box office.
Hilary Rosen told us the RIAA would never sue individuals. They fired her and sued 40,000.
Fear (and ignorance) is what drives their witch hunt.
Your parents had the most sensitive parts of your penis removed as a baby... Even if it is considered normal by society, that's got to fuck you up.
Without taking a position on the wisdom (or lack thereof) in circumcizing males, this happened to me but I don't seem to remember anything that happened to me before age 3 or 4. Didn't even consider that my stuff might not be the same as everyone else.
But when we had to start taking showers in PE class, it was the uncircumsized that were different than the rest of us. The rest of us didn't know we had lost our most sensitive bits.
With no memory of the event, no lingering pain, and not even the psychological issue of feeling different than what was "normal," there's not really much about it to fuck you up. You're just like everyone else.
should these questions be left to be answered and executed in private by the parents of kids?
Yes.
If the question is "Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?" I kind of agree.
But that title is misleading. The real question being asked was "Do Kids Do Better in School if You Pay Them for Effort and Performance?" The answer to the question is not the opinion of the parent; nothing (no one?) has to be executed. Instead, the answer is a reasonable conclusion drawn from the actual experience of seeing what happens when you do it.
The parental guidance needed to happen before they hit the college classrooms where this experiment took place. And it did. It's a safe bet that almost none of those kids' parents go work somewhere for 7 or 8 hours a day performing a mentally challenging task, expecting nothing in exchange except a piece of paper, a handshake, and a hearty "Good luck!" after 4 years.
If working to the required level offers the same reward as excelling, there's not much reason to skip tonight's party and hit the books. You have to be self-driven, either by some sort of competitive desire to be the best, a quest for knowledge, or an inherent, pre-existing understanding of what you are supposed to be "learning." It's just a wild-ass guess, but I'd bet that this only describes about 7 percent of the students in any course in any field of study at any college or university in the country.
The other 93% need a little nudge once in a while to keep them on target and focused.
I confess I didn't RTFA, but knowing that most college kids don't have any money, it would seem as if you could get a little extra effort from the slackers for the price of a pizza, a 12-pack, and a movie rental once a month. It's a small price to pay for the knowledge that your doctor didn't just squeak through medical school on the minimum effort required, leaving time to concentrate on more important things, like retaining their title as the campus Beer Pong King.
...the same way electricity and natural gas companies are regulated.
Not a chance in hell.
The best one could hope for from the FCC is for them to provide the same expert guidance they used to prevent payola, make sure that ClearChannel didn't homogenize and monopolize radio, and champion the causes of localism and diversity.
Fortunately, unlike electricity and natural gas, radio isn't that important to our survival. It's been replaced by the Internet, over which the FCC has no authority yet. Even if they ever do get authority, it'll take them 15 or 20 years to really fuck it up beyond repair.
Maybe I didn't scroll down far enough, but this would almost seem to draw acronymns into play. Many proper nouns are multiple words, which should disqualify them, but IBM, NBC, CBS, EMI, etc, function as names, especially when people do not know what those letters stand for.
Personally, I think this change is not in the best interests of the game, which I always looked at as a tool to develop your vocabulary. This makes it easier to avoid learning new words.
There were only 1800 bugs. Not like it was anything serious.
Elsewhere in this "issue" of slashdot, we have the story of Microsoft's OOXML failing the standards test because they've only bothered to address about 5% of the issues there.
You just had another "emergency" security update for IE a few days ago.
Microsoft wants the world to run on its software and most of the business world does, not to mention the government. But they are willing to sell it to you BEFORE they bother to take a look and see how well it was coded. They were bad in the late-1980s, started actively bastardizing things to create their own version (Java is a prime example) in the 1990s and have now graduated to deplorable.
As long as they retain their market share, there is no real incentive to improve. Everyone keeps buying MS software anyway.
The RIAA was supposed to have to prove distribution (although I don't think they ever did). Downloading is not a crime or even a civil offense or iTunes would not be allowed to operate.
You're making a leap there, pal. I didn't know about the patch management tool -- but I wasn't talking about it.
As for the rest, I read the news. It's amazing what one can learn. There's a story about Microsoft security patches pretty regularly. The "Security Fix" column at the Washington Post is an excellent source of information, although just about every tech publication will front-page an article about a new MS patch because it's always an "emergency." Anyone with reasonable intelligence can see that stopping to patch every computer in every corporate environment is going to eat up some time. Multiply that by the sheer number of updates and it's a huge dent in our country's productivity.
Which is why people are asking if "MS releases emergency patch" qualifies as news.
You don't have to use Windows to be aware of this basic info, just like you won't have to watch American Idol to find out who the winner is. You'll know, whether you want to or not, whether you're interested or not.
Occasionally, but not every other Tuesday for the last 10 years or so, sapping the productivity of the entire corporate spectrum on a regular basis. And how many "emergency" patches has IE had already this year?
This isn't about their business model. This is about Warner Music crossing over into insanity.
The intern will literally be on the front-lines of the epic battle against pirated content...
The "front lines of the epic battle"? Where is this exactly? Somewhere near Baghdad or Tora Bora? Jersey? Or in Edgar Bronfman's tiny little brain?...ensnaring users in incriminating transactions...
Because a flock of interns will be a good scapegoat when they ensnare dead people, 10-year-olds and the innocent.
issuing takedown requests, and causing general frustration amongst the file-sharing population on the Internet.
I would change "frustration" to "amusement."
They're going to have college kids (who act like the Internet is self-contained on their school's network) spy on other college kids. The "file-sharing population on the Internet" will keep shifting, go deeper if necessary, and a bunch of interns won't stop them or even slow them down.
I am surprised their is not more pressure by their stockholders to end this kind of bad business.
If you're still holding Warner stock after the last 10 years, wisdom is not your strong point in the first place. Maybe they think throwing piles of money out the window to chase invisible pirates is a better choice than trying to find a new act that sells. There will no return on this investment.
What they don't seem to understand is that there are no "lost sales" to be reclaimed. They sales that the record labels have lost over the past decade are a response to their actions and attitude toward the public that used to buy their product.
I don't download RIAA music. As a result, I don't hear anything new from them, which eliminates even a fleeting desire to buy a copy of anything they make. But more, the record label music is sold under is at the top of my considerations when making a "music buying decision." If it's from the RIAA, the decision is "No."
THAT is a true lost sale. And they're never going to get it back.
This shouldn't be a moral question at all. Not churchy enough to have a Book/chaper/verse thing, but I recall, "If thy right eye offends thee, then pluck it out."
So the moralist view is that God lets you reject body parts entirely. Just tweaking them a little shouldn't be a problem.
The people at the college are re-formatting their e-mail to save ink. Assuming this actually works well enough to make it worth the effort, I bet that's very helpful -- for the people they send it to. Someone is going to spend a lot of time reformatting the incoming e-mail. That labor will cost more than the potential savings in ink.
And ink doesn't cost anywhere near $1,000 a gallon if you buy it by the quart. Of course, those cartridges won't refill themselves, but you could do a dozen of them in 10 minutes.
I think the only real question is why they print so much damn e-mail in the first place. Seems primitive, especially for a college. And pointless. An entire room full of data can fit on an appropriately sized hard drive. And you know there's another room at the other end of this data retention process where somone is shredding the oldest stuff to make room for the new stuff. Or they pay someone to haul it away and destroy it.
If the records do sell really well you do get royalties beyond the advance, although the terms are pretty one-sided.
Theoretically true, but this assumes that the label actually keeps their side of the agreement. Since they never do, "royalties beyond the advance" almost qualifies as a musician's urban myth.
Remember the Bay City Rollers? They sold millions of records. Never got a dime past the original $250,000 advance. Sony is currently holding about $60 million that's due to the band because they (Sony) lost the original contract and doesn't know how to pay it out. So they haven't. For 40 years.
The Beatles (what's left) sued EMI last year for skimming royalties.
The record labels are under constant audit by the artists. There's like a 5-year waiting period when you get in line to see their accounting. In 50 or 60 years of this, the record label accounting has proven to be accurate or a mistake was made in the artists' favor exactly twice, unless they accidentally passed an audit in the last couple of years.
If they get caught, they usually settle for like 10 percent, so they get to keep 90 percent of what they steal anyway.
You say that 90,000 albums were sold online via one particular outlet.
That's not what I said. I said 90,000 new albums were distributed via Tunecore. They went to iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster and a dozen other outlets. The distribution is global.
The problem with selling CDs is that ANYBODY can do it...
Except the record labels, apparently.
If you really meant that anyone can MAKE a CD, that's not a problem, unless you're a record label and used to have complete control over who can and can't be heard. But the idea is to NOT make CDs beyond 100 or so at a time to sell at live shows.
...and most bands are one-hit wonders.
This has been true since I started listening to music in about 1960 or so.
it takes some work to create a brand and I'm not sure the average singer or guitar player has the right skills.
The very idea of creating a "brand" is half the problem with the music industry today. No talent? Can't sing? No problem! We've got autotune. Can't play a lick? No problem! Let's release a line of pants and perfume.
A record company can milk that for all its worth and get teenagers to buy five follow-up albums for some reason I can't fathom...
Oh, you must be talking about Disney (Hollywood Records) which is the only label currently doing that. That's easy. They play it every day for a month for free on Disney TV. Repetition is the key here, just like Top 40 used to be. After two or three weeks, parents that have been listening to High School Musical or Hannah Montana are happy to buy a copy to go on the kid's iPod just so they don't have to hear it anymore.
I think we have a warped idea of what "popular" music is. In a country of 300 million people, selling a million records means you reached 1/3 of one percent of us. Barely even a niche market.
...but most independent artists actually have to make VERY high quality music to accomplish this.
Ever heard any independent music on the radio? I live in Phoenix, which is currently the 5th largest city in the U.S. In the past 15 years, I have heard exactly one song by a local unsigned act played on the airwaves.
----------
But this is all okay, even the part where we're not under any illusions that we'll be quitting our day jobs (our guitarist is a stockbroker and your theoretical advance doesn't even cover his salary alone). The industry is suffering, the audience is being sued, ASCAP is shutting down venues left and right, and the RIAA is trying to squeeze royalties out of radio, which they have steadfastly controlled through cash, cocaine, and hookers since way back.
Just like jazz, blues, country and western in the 1930s, we (the independents) have been judged not worthy. But one day, maybe as the royalty heari
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I feel that yes, copyright terms have been extended much, much too far. I view this as a lobbying failure on OUR part. (Note, the congressmen's pockets... er, ears... are still available.)
Theoretically.
In truth, you have to buy a seat at the table when the copyright office goes through the arbitration process and the cost of the proceedings are divided evenly between the attendees, usually a few million $$. In the case of music, the RIAA pre-negotiates with all the major parties.
So if the cost of arbitration is going to be $2 million (a number picked out of the air), the RIAA is willing to pay it all to have things their way. No matter how good your argument, it's going to cost you $1 million to express it. And the RIAA will still probably get their way anyhow -- you just reduced the cost for them.
As for the main topic, this doesn't even resemble a surprise.
This isn't about hardware or software. It's about Apple's music store, which has sold more singles in the last 7 years than the music industry ever did in the entire course of its prior existence. Apple's refusal to let the music cartel set retail prices made it an adversary to the RIAA.
So Amazon is getting exclusive pre-releases. Only for one day, mind you, but Apple's response is, "Then don't look to us to promote these titles." If Apple was getting the exclusive, that might be unfair market dominance. If they got exclusives AND Amazon got exclusives, it would be a fair deal.
Apple sees Amazon as a competitor. I would think that complaining seems like a perfectly normal business response to a supplier giving preference to a competitor.
The RIAA is using their combined market dominance to favor Amazon in a pointed attempt to diminish Apple's market share. It's not like one label started doing it and the others simply followed suit because it seemed like a good idea. The RIAA members have colluded and conspired together to come up with the plan and all four are going with it. The RIAA has been playing as a team for so long they don't know what actual competition even looks like any more because they gave it up a long time ago. They think that their largest retailer is their competition.
Less than two years ago, the DOJ was asking why the only music services allowed to survive were joint ventures between the four major labels. Now, the DOJ is top-heavy with ex-RIAA attorneys. They don't even need to lobby anymore.
These guys won't notice the obvious collusion and attempts at price-fixing. They stopped wondering about the joint ventures.
Looking at Apple for antitrust in this situation completely ignores the party who actually IS using their market dominance in what seems to be a highly illegal manner by giving preference to one retailer with the specific intent of damaging another retailer. Apple is getting heat merely for bitching about being on the receiving end of it.
Apparently, "Doesn't kiss the RIAA's ass" is the new definition of anti-trust.
At this point it's pretty obvious that BP is out of ideas...
This is what the ACs who are tired of hearing about this seem to miss.
Seems like BP has spent more time and effort trying to prevent people from seeing what they've done than actually doing something about it. They'd prefer no one talks about it either.
China is selling DVDs for $1.25, but Hollywood had a record box office last year. For about the third or fourth year in a row. It's obviously killing them (sarcasm).
The truth is that if there were no pirated product available in China, they STILL wouldn't be able to sell overpriced DVDs to them.
I think most of the thinking world knows that almost ALL of the "piracy" claims are groundless.
I think from now on we should all vote based on the candidate's comedic value. The country will still be screwed, but at least we'll get some laughs.
That's how Bush got elected. But we misunderestimated his stategery.
You'd think that after 10 years of using Netflix heavily...
Try buying a DVD. They save the most annoying features for the customers who pay full price.
If someone shares their IP address with you, you can connect directly to their computer. While it may be possible to shut down things like Limewire, you can't really ban P2P without turning off the internet completely.
For a decade now the biggest sites were targeted and shutdown...
Kazaa is still live.
--------
Obviously, the RIAA finds suing people to be more profitable than trying to sell CDs. And they don't have to share any of the money with the artists, which makes them feel all warm and fuzzy.
I don't do P2P, but I use the open Internet (aka a web page) to share my music, so I'm not opposed to it.
Ten years ago, most people didn't know who the RIAA was. Then they sued Napster. The RIAA's greatest obstacle is that they think P2P is ruining sales. I think that reality is that the RIAA ruined sales by being the giant dickwads that they are. I'm sure not going to buy anything from these moronic, gravy-sucking pigs that really believe separating college students from their tuition money is a good thing to do, for any reason.
If they shut down every P2P network that is out there, that won't turn the RIAA into the kind of people I want to do business with. I don't think they can ever get that back. Certainly not from me.
Too bad. I used to love the music business. But it went from being the music business to the music business. Turns out, I just loved the music. They just love the money. It seems as if it would make no difference to the CEOs if they were selling sweat socks. It's all about the quarterly revenue, year-to-year growth, yada, yada.
The industry used to be run by musicians. Now, it's run by people who can't find a musician.
Even the ones who "suspected" something wasn't right (but fell for it anyway) fall into the "not so bright" category.
You know... if stupidity was illegal just about everyone would be prosecuted.
Apparently, that's the plan.
You mean it's all going to be in "the cloud"? A giant leap backwards.
I simply do not believe the $75 of pirated software for every $100 sold. That would require mass piracy at the corporate level... Oh. Never mind.
Lobby? They probably helped write it.
Unfortunately, fear doesn't keep them honest. Not even a little bit.
Jack Valenti told us VCRs were going to be like the Boston Strangler for Hollywood. And then the Internet was going to be the evil killer. Last year was a record-setter at the box office.
Hilary Rosen told us the RIAA would never sue individuals. They fired her and sued 40,000.
Fear (and ignorance) is what drives their witch hunt.
Your parents had the most sensitive parts of your penis removed as a baby... Even if it is considered normal by society, that's got to fuck you up.
Without taking a position on the wisdom (or lack thereof) in circumcizing males, this happened to me but I don't seem to remember anything that happened to me before age 3 or 4. Didn't even consider that my stuff might not be the same as everyone else.
But when we had to start taking showers in PE class, it was the uncircumsized that were different than the rest of us. The rest of us didn't know we had lost our most sensitive bits.
With no memory of the event, no lingering pain, and not even the psychological issue of feeling different than what was "normal," there's not really much about it to fuck you up. You're just like everyone else.
should these questions be left to be answered and executed in private by the parents of kids?
Yes.
If the question is "Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?" I kind of agree.
But that title is misleading. The real question being asked was "Do Kids Do Better in School if You Pay Them for Effort and Performance?" The answer to the question is not the opinion of the parent; nothing (no one?) has to be executed. Instead, the answer is a reasonable conclusion drawn from the actual experience of seeing what happens when you do it.
The parental guidance needed to happen before they hit the college classrooms where this experiment took place. And it did. It's a safe bet that almost none of those kids' parents go work somewhere for 7 or 8 hours a day performing a mentally challenging task, expecting nothing in exchange except a piece of paper, a handshake, and a hearty "Good luck!" after 4 years.
If working to the required level offers the same reward as excelling, there's not much reason to skip tonight's party and hit the books. You have to be self-driven, either by some sort of competitive desire to be the best, a quest for knowledge, or an inherent, pre-existing understanding of what you are supposed to be "learning." It's just a wild-ass guess, but I'd bet that this only describes about 7 percent of the students in any course in any field of study at any college or university in the country.
The other 93% need a little nudge once in a while to keep them on target and focused.
I confess I didn't RTFA, but knowing that most college kids don't have any money, it would seem as if you could get a little extra effort from the slackers for the price of a pizza, a 12-pack, and a movie rental once a month. It's a small price to pay for the knowledge that your doctor didn't just squeak through medical school on the minimum effort required, leaving time to concentrate on more important things, like retaining their title as the campus Beer Pong King.
...the same way electricity and natural gas companies are regulated.
Not a chance in hell.
The best one could hope for from the FCC is for them to provide the same expert guidance they used to prevent payola, make sure that ClearChannel didn't homogenize and monopolize radio, and champion the causes of localism and diversity.
Fortunately, unlike electricity and natural gas, radio isn't that important to our survival. It's been replaced by the Internet, over which the FCC has no authority yet. Even if they ever do get authority, it'll take them 15 or 20 years to really fuck it up beyond repair.
Maybe I didn't scroll down far enough, but this would almost seem to draw acronymns into play. Many proper nouns are multiple words, which should disqualify them, but IBM, NBC, CBS, EMI, etc, function as names, especially when people do not know what those letters stand for.
Personally, I think this change is not in the best interests of the game, which I always looked at as a tool to develop your vocabulary. This makes it easier to avoid learning new words.
There were only 1800 bugs. Not like it was anything serious.
Elsewhere in this "issue" of slashdot, we have the story of Microsoft's OOXML failing the standards test because they've only bothered to address about 5% of the issues there.
You just had another "emergency" security update for IE a few days ago.
Microsoft wants the world to run on its software and most of the business world does, not to mention the government. But they are willing to sell it to you BEFORE they bother to take a look and see how well it was coded. They were bad in the late-1980s, started actively bastardizing things to create their own version (Java is a prime example) in the 1990s and have now graduated to deplorable.
As long as they retain their market share, there is no real incentive to improve. Everyone keeps buying MS software anyway.
The RIAA was supposed to have to prove distribution (although I don't think they ever did). Downloading is not a crime or even a civil offense or iTunes would not be allowed to operate.
You're making a leap there, pal. I didn't know about the patch management tool -- but I wasn't talking about it.
As for the rest, I read the news. It's amazing what one can learn. There's a story about Microsoft security patches pretty regularly. The "Security Fix" column at the Washington Post is an excellent source of information, although just about every tech publication will front-page an article about a new MS patch because it's always an "emergency." Anyone with reasonable intelligence can see that stopping to patch every computer in every corporate environment is going to eat up some time. Multiply that by the sheer number of updates and it's a huge dent in our country's productivity.
Which is why people are asking if "MS releases emergency patch" qualifies as news.
You don't have to use Windows to be aware of this basic info, just like you won't have to watch American Idol to find out who the winner is. You'll know, whether you want to or not, whether you're interested or not.
Oh! they do make such a thing
I wouldn't know about such things. I use a Mac.
Like other operating systems don't have patches?
Occasionally, but not every other Tuesday for the last 10 years or so, sapping the productivity of the entire corporate spectrum on a regular basis. And how many "emergency" patches has IE had already this year?
This isn't about their business model. This is about Warner Music crossing over into insanity.
The intern will literally be on the front-lines of the epic battle against pirated content...
The "front lines of the epic battle"? Where is this exactly? Somewhere near Baghdad or Tora Bora? Jersey? Or in Edgar Bronfman's tiny little brain? ...ensnaring users in incriminating transactions...
Because a flock of interns will be a good scapegoat when they ensnare dead people, 10-year-olds and the innocent.
issuing takedown requests, and causing general frustration amongst the file-sharing population on the Internet.
I would change "frustration" to "amusement."
They're going to have college kids (who act like the Internet is self-contained on their school's network) spy on other college kids. The "file-sharing population on the Internet" will keep shifting, go deeper if necessary, and a bunch of interns won't stop them or even slow them down.
I am surprised their is not more pressure by their stockholders to end this kind of bad business.
If you're still holding Warner stock after the last 10 years, wisdom is not your strong point in the first place. Maybe they think throwing piles of money out the window to chase invisible pirates is a better choice than trying to find a new act that sells. There will no return on this investment.
What they don't seem to understand is that there are no "lost sales" to be reclaimed. They sales that the record labels have lost over the past decade are a response to their actions and attitude toward the public that used to buy their product.
I don't download RIAA music. As a result, I don't hear anything new from them, which eliminates even a fleeting desire to buy a copy of anything they make. But more, the record label music is sold under is at the top of my considerations when making a "music buying decision." If it's from the RIAA, the decision is "No."
THAT is a true lost sale. And they're never going to get it back.
This shouldn't be a moral question at all. Not churchy enough to have a Book/chaper/verse thing, but I recall, "If thy right eye offends thee, then pluck it out."
So the moralist view is that God lets you reject body parts entirely. Just tweaking them a little shouldn't be a problem.
Only if people are printing emails...
Wait a minute...
The people at the college are re-formatting their e-mail to save ink. Assuming this actually works well enough to make it worth the effort, I bet that's very helpful -- for the people they send it to. Someone is going to spend a lot of time reformatting the incoming e-mail. That labor will cost more than the potential savings in ink.
And ink doesn't cost anywhere near $1,000 a gallon if you buy it by the quart. Of course, those cartridges won't refill themselves, but you could do a dozen of them in 10 minutes.
I think the only real question is why they print so much damn e-mail in the first place. Seems primitive, especially for a college. And pointless. An entire room full of data can fit on an appropriately sized hard drive. And you know there's another room at the other end of this data retention process where somone is shredding the oldest stuff to make room for the new stuff. Or they pay someone to haul it away and destroy it.
...some of the clips Viacom was suing over were ones Viacom uploaded themselves...
This merely confirms my suspicions.
Viacom's copyrights should pass into the realm of public domain for their behavior in this case.
Sadly, that's not how they do things. They'll pay out a few million to settle out of court, and do it without admitting guilt. Like it never happened.
If the records do sell really well you do get royalties beyond the advance, although the terms are pretty one-sided.
Theoretically true, but this assumes that the label actually keeps their side of the agreement. Since they never do, "royalties beyond the advance" almost qualifies as a musician's urban myth.
Remember the Bay City Rollers? They sold millions of records. Never got a dime past the original $250,000 advance. Sony is currently holding about $60 million that's due to the band because they (Sony) lost the original contract and doesn't know how to pay it out. So they haven't. For 40 years.
The Beatles (what's left) sued EMI last year for skimming royalties.
The record labels are under constant audit by the artists. There's like a 5-year waiting period when you get in line to see their accounting. In 50 or 60 years of this, the record label accounting has proven to be accurate or a mistake was made in the artists' favor exactly twice, unless they accidentally passed an audit in the last couple of years.
If they get caught, they usually settle for like 10 percent, so they get to keep 90 percent of what they steal anyway.
You say that 90,000 albums were sold online via one particular outlet.
That's not what I said. I said 90,000 new albums were distributed via Tunecore. They went to iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster and a dozen other outlets. The distribution is global.
The problem with selling CDs is that ANYBODY can do it...
Except the record labels, apparently.
If you really meant that anyone can MAKE a CD, that's not a problem, unless you're a record label and used to have complete control over who can and can't be heard. But the idea is to NOT make CDs beyond 100 or so at a time to sell at live shows.
This has been true since I started listening to music in about 1960 or so.
it takes some work to create a brand and I'm not sure the average singer or guitar player has the right skills.
The very idea of creating a "brand" is half the problem with the music industry today. No talent? Can't sing? No problem! We've got autotune. Can't play a lick? No problem! Let's release a line of pants and perfume.
A record company can milk that for all its worth and get teenagers to buy five follow-up albums for some reason I can't fathom...
Oh, you must be talking about Disney (Hollywood Records) which is the only label currently doing that. That's easy. They play it every day for a month for free on Disney TV. Repetition is the key here, just like Top 40 used to be. After two or three weeks, parents that have been listening to High School Musical or Hannah Montana are happy to buy a copy to go on the kid's iPod just so they don't have to hear it anymore.
I think we have a warped idea of what "popular" music is. In a country of 300 million people, selling a million records means you reached 1/3 of one percent of us. Barely even a niche market.
Ever heard any independent music on the radio? I live in Phoenix, which is currently the 5th largest city in the U.S. In the past 15 years, I have heard exactly one song by a local unsigned act played on the airwaves.
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But this is all okay, even the part where we're not under any illusions that we'll be quitting our day jobs (our guitarist is a stockbroker and your theoretical advance doesn't even cover his salary alone). The industry is suffering, the audience is being sued, ASCAP is shutting down venues left and right, and the RIAA is trying to squeeze royalties out of radio, which they have steadfastly controlled through cash, cocaine, and hookers since way back.
Just like jazz, blues, country and western in the 1930s, we (the independents) have been judged not worthy. But one day, maybe as the royalty heari