"It's silly to me that record companies aren't seeing the opportunity to release deleted albums, which were not profitable to produce as downloads."
If you mean out-of-print CDs, it's often because they can't get the rightsholder's permission. To place a song online, the stores must get the permission of the record company (which owns the copyright on the recording), the composer (who owns the publishing rights to the music) and the lyricist (who owns the rights to the words). If a CD has tracks written by a number of people, permission must be secured by everybody involved if the entire album is to be released online.
Back when the original Napster was in business, there was talk of implementing a compulsory licensing system that would weaking songwriters' rights here -- it would work like recording covers does: you need not get permission from the creator, as long as you pay them a royalty fixed by law. When this notion was argued before congress, it was the record companies and the original Napster on one side of the table, and the songwriters on the other side. In the years that have followed, more and more composers and lyricists have seen the light, but to this day you'll still occasionally see "partial albums" available on iTMS, where they can't secure all the permissions necessary to release certain songs.
"Wow RIAA finally made a very stupid decision(big surpise) not supporting Napster, because of this I really think they put themselves in a really bad posistion."
Napster basically said to the record companies: "we've invented this service that allows millions of teenagers to pirate your content. Won't you please work with us?". This was simply extortion. Extortion, legal or otherwise, certainly happens quite often (in fact, many people see the record company lawsuits as extortion), but if somebody tried to pull this with you, you'd most likely tell them to FOAD, so why would you expect the record companies to act differently?
Fast forward to 2005. The record companies are still alive and kicking. The record companies ended up working with Apple, who've just sold their 50 millionth paid download, the online music biz continues to grow, and Apple and the record companies are laughing all the way to the bank. Napster, which took the approach of launching an unauthorized P2P platform with little concerns for the rights of the record companies (yeah, they have them too) and the artists, found out the hard way that you don't engage in business with somebody by first doing your absolute best to profoundly piss them off. As a result, they have long since gone out of business. While the "piss off the record industry and then try to partner with them" approach might make perfect sense to you (assuming you haven't been to B-school), history shows us that they chose wrongly.
Who made the stupid decision? Who's in the bad position? "Out of business" is about as bad of a position as you can be in.
"rip off children by selling them pieces of plastic at an obscene markup."
Oh, please. The mouse you're holding, the monitor you're looking at, and the PC that's powering both were likely sold at a higher markup than CDs. That applies at the retailer, too -- Best Buy takes about 15 points on CDs and 40 points on mice. If the profit margin of the record industry is bothersome to you, you would be deeply and profoundly disturbed to learn what the margins are on packaged foods, clothing, and most everything else you buy. It would make you want to move to Norway and become a yak herder.
Plenty of things to find fault with in the record industry, but profit margins sure ain't one of them.
"ipod video is great. my friend just got one. of course everyone is saying what the hell, who would want to watch video on a 2.5" screen, but the question i have, is how the fuck do you plan on taking a normal sized, 30" tv on a plane, train, or in a car?"
Did you really think that's the only option? Either a 2.5" screen, or a 30" TV? Next time you're on a plane or train, note all the other folks with notebooks sporting 15" screens. This is what I use to watch movies on flights, since I have to take it with me anyway. Thus, I have no need for a video iPod.
"stop complaining about the screen size and realize the potential. if you travel a lot, if youre a high school student (like myself), its great."
And understand that there are many people who are not high school students (like yourself) or otherwise have different needs or expectations, and thus aren't interested in this product. You should not let this upset you. Others are entitled to their opinions, and theirs may just be just as valid as yours.
You're obviously being sarcastic, but I'm not sure where you fall on this particular issue, as we're talking about a fan-produced season of Firefly, which would probably not be made available in libraries. I apparently didn't make my outlook clear on this, either.
Assuming for a second that you watched and loved Firefly (for the sake of discussion let's assume that)and if Joss Whedon took the bold step of doing a new, fan-supported season (the pay-per-download model that the GGP suggested), where would you fall on the situational ethics of downloading it for free rather than paying the price that Joss charged to make his money back? Would you step back for a second and say "whoa, normally I've no problem with helping myself to stuff for free, but Joss is doing this really cool thing here and I feel okay about ponying up since he's asking for fans to support this show that I love," or would your opinion fall more in the realm of the examples I gave in the GP post?
There are no right and wrong answers, of course; I just want your opinion. You often see folks claiming that the "selling CDs and DVDs for a profit" model is dead, and it's been suggested before that fan-supported, direct-to-fan stuff is the model of the future. But if the same "information wants to be free" idiots kill that in vitro, then perhaps it's back to the drawing board.
That's a great idea and I hope that somebody tries it, but if I were a potential investor, I'd consider the potentially huge factor of the "Information wants to be free! Bork bork bork bork!" idiots who'd help themselves to it on BitTorrent.
While intuitively it makes sense that people would be a little cooler in a situation like this, it's easy to overlook the power of our ability to rationalize just about anything. We'd see rationalizations like:
"Joss Whedon already has enough money."
"The actors already have enough money."
"I don't need to worry about putting any actors or crewpeople out of work, because they've already been paid."
"Somebody else will pay for it."
"I wouldn't have paid for it anyway."
"The cost of $X is more than I can afford / care to pay. Thus, the price is not fair. Joss Whedon is a greedy idiot."
"I am downloading it as an act of social protest / civil disobedience. Yes indeed, my actions are right up there with the lunch counter sit-ins in the 1960s."
"Some big organization is likely getting this money. I would only support this if Joss Whedon were getting 100% of the price I pay to download it. Thus, I'm going to make sure he gets nothing."
"Joss Whedon should know that the real money is in live performances by the Firefly cast. Oh, and t-shirts. So I'll see them if they come to town. In the meantime, BitTorrent here I come!"
"They should know better. If they're putting it on the 'net, somebody's going to make it available for free. I'm just taking part of the natural social evolution of the Internet."
"DRM sucks. I'm downloading the cracked version to teach them a lesson."
"If they wanted to make money, they should have released this in a theatre."
You're not the first person to make this mistake. Our legal system does not work this way because there must be a deterrent. If the penalty is fixed at the value of what's taken (or "infringed upon," for the pedants), then copyright violation, theft, embezzlement, and so on are zero sum games.
If you're not sure what I mean, imagine what would happen if the law were changed so that if you robbed $100K from a bank or stole $100K from your employer, your only risk is that you'd have to pay the $100K back if you were caught.
The wikipedia article on damages probably explains it better than I can. Scroll down to the "Punitive or exemplary damages" section if you don't have time to read the whole thing. I hope this helps.
"How can an organization like the RIAA justify wanting more than 99 cents per song when you can purchase 44 minutes of audio and video for two dollars?"
Because people are buying millions and millions of them at $0.99. They have likely done the research to show that they'll sell millions at $1.49 as well.
The fundamental thing here is value to the customer. It makes absolutely no difference what else is available for a similar price. If you want that CD for $13, you'll likely buy it despite the fact that a DVD costs $20 or a movie ticket costs $9 or a Urban Outfitters t-shirt costs $16 or a Jhane Barnes t-shirt costs $100 or a cheeseburger costs $4 or a concert ticket costs $40 -- because you want a CD, not a DVD, a cheeseburger or a t-shirt.
Likewise, if you want a particular song, but you don't happen to want a particular episode of Lost, then the price of the two items relative to each other -- or the price of the item you want relative to anything else on the planet -- makes little difference.
If anybody reading this is not a fan of the luxury of charging what the market will bear, then great -- figure out how much it would cost you to barely scrape by for a year without vacations or other discretionary spending, and then talk to your boss on Thursday about reducing your salary.
" If such fanciful upsampling algorithms were able to be done, they would have existed already."
Yup, it's been done before. Audio signal processing and psychoacoustics are nothing new... I think the significant thing here is that they're done in real time and on a reasonably affordable product.
" Those fuckers killed Aureal. Creative has been on my shit list ever since..."
And Aureal's strategy was to put Creative out of business. They were not a non-profit, nor would they have been satisfied with 50% of the market. This is competition.
Okay, now do the one about "theft of service," "stolen kisses," and "stealing your thunder." And can you do the one about Apple's "don't steal music" sticker? I just love that one!
"
It's amusing that everyone was all a flutter about this movie and how it was going to be so successful and awesome because so many people wanted it to come back... and... then.... BOOM!... One giant bomb."
Interesting -- where are you located? In the USA it entered at #2 with a $10MM opening, knocking "Corpse Bride" out of the #2 spot.
"I have to wonder, if this works to boost revenue for Serenity, what will the MPAA's response be? It only took them, what, ten years to realize the internet can help them?"
What an interesting thing to say. I remember that Strange Days had a rather kick-ass web site for its time... and that was in 1995. Since then, I've lost count of the number of well-executed Internet ad campaigns I've seen for films. I know that many Slashdotters may have only been on the Internet for a few years so this sort of thing may be new to them, but it's an old, old medium to lots of us.
Either way, ad campaigns are put together by studios, not the MPAA. The MPAA is a trade group that represents studios.
"HBO doesn't yet understand that the real money is to be made in licensing - DVDs, soundtracks, decorative "Rome" wall hangings, what have you."
I'm guessing HBO's Australian arm is behind the times. Here in the US, HBO does monster business for DVD sales and soundtracks. In fact, the SFU soundtrack was the #1 download on iTunes the day after the final episode aired.
I believe this is one reason why HBO attempts to make downloading difficult. They believe that a certain percentage of folks who've helped themselves to a complete set via BitTorrent will no longer have the desire to get a second copy on DVD. To put it in your words, pirated copies are interfering with their real revenue stream.
"The problem with your logic is that it assumies that the content isnt being pirated to hell and back allready. Which it is."
Thank you for your reply. This goes back to the point I made in the GP -- we as Slashdotters should take the 1,000 foot view and consider how the other 90% of us use technology, not just the bleeding-edge Slashdotters. The media companies are afraid that releasing soft copies of their content would take the volume of piracy to an even higher level. I think Slashdotters tend to think "well, everybody pirates movies and TV shows" when the reality is that this is limited to those with a high bandwidth connection and who know and love BitTorrent. And, the supply is gated by the finite number of people who have the time and interest in ripping their DVDs or pulling stuff off of their Tivos or MPCs. Now imagine what would happen if HBO were to pour thousands of thousands of copies of their programs into the hands of less tech-savvy consumers. All of a sudden, Joe and Jane NASCAR would be trading copies.
We already saw this happen with music. Sure, folks have been trading tapes and CDs for years, but piracy exploded with the enabling technology that was P2P. Suddenly, piracy was no longer the domain of the geeks, and Mr. and Mrs. NASCAR could get their Kenny Chesney for free instead of driving the F150 to Wally World.
This has happened to me, as well. I recently cancelled my HBO subscription because I have friends who've recently bought Tivos with integral DVD burners. Now that Carnivale and Sex and the City are gone (the two were very similar; only the former featured more midgets) I'm only really interested in the final season of The Sopranos. In the past, that would have kept me subscribing, but Tivos with DVD burners are the enabling technology that is costing HBO subscription revenue.
Probably because they'd just be pirated to hell and back. For every guy who paid the $20, there'd be ten folks who'd just help themselves to the copies that were conveniently digitized by HBO. Of course, HBO could try the DRM route, but as we all know, around here that's tatamount to killing kittens.
Sorry the world isn't moving fast enough for you -- but keep in mind that Slashdotters are usually on the leading edge of technology. It usually takes a new idea ten years from conception to widespread acceptance. Look at how many years it took digital music delivery to limp along before Apple took it to the mainstream. And remember how long IMing was an uber-nerdy thing before Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft brought it to the masses?
In the meantime, have you looked at Netflix? For $20 a month you can rent lots of the old HBO shows, as well as just about any other movie you'd like.
"So what if I download and episode, realize that I really like it, and want to sign up?"
Sheyeah, right.
This would put you in that same class of people who download albums off of P2P so that they can listen to the whole thing before buying a copy. While there might be a small percentage of people who do that (certainly not anybody I know -- all of my friends who use P2P do so to save money), it's abundantly clear that most people do things like downloading "Rome" so they don't have to pay HBO to watch it.
"So yeah, I just can't imagine how this helps them at all."
As an aside, the ironic thing is that your post is presently 4, insightful, despite the fact that you used "I can't imagine" twice in your post and even titled it "Don't get it." That's a lack of insight.
"These coke sniffing, hooker humping, lawyer loving, backhander taking, oozing cankers on the arse of humanity are threatening to take away a woman's child because she downloaded some MP3s."
Plenty of rational arguments to make against the RIAA here. Absolutely no need to pull something out of your ass.
"The $.99 fee per track that iTunes (and others) charge is an arbitrary amount that has not been set by the market."
Yes, it has. Apple negotiated with the suppliers (the record labels, the hosting providers) and set a retail price that got them an acceptable margin. The market responded by buying them like crazy -- 50 million and counting! Perhaps if they'd tried setting the price at $2.00 and it'd bombed, then the price might have been lowered by now.
This is a fundamental concept, so I'm trying to figure out where you got off the beam. It might be that you think that a price set by the market has to mean that the margins are below some arbitrary level, or that it's a price that everybody will want to pay. Not so -- use the classic example of a Ferrari. Their gross margins are astronomical. Most people can't afford one. I can afford one, but I don't want one. The people who buy them think they're worth the money, and Ferrari sells all that it wants -- if they wanted to make $10K economy cars, they would... but they don't want to. Does that make it more clear?
"Rather, we as the consumer are forced to pay that amount by the RIAA because of exhorbant licensing fees. Just like in the old days of CD price fixing."
That's not what the price fixing settlement was about at all. It was Best Buy and Wal-Mart spanking the record companies because they were paying co-op money to some indie retailers to advertise CDs at a certain price. It came about because Best Buy and Wal-Mart were driving down the prices of CDs to at or below their costs. However, yours is a popular misunderstanding, so you're probably just repeating what you've heard -- perfectly understandable.
"The costs involved in that are completly negligible, yet we are still paying the type of prices associated with actual manufacturing."
Most of the price you pay for a CD at retail doesn't go toward manufacturing costs, either. While you're 100% correct that there's lower per-piece costs associated with e-delivery, record companies still have to recoup the costs of doing business. The difference between the net margin and the gross margin is a real devil bitch. It's also a fundamental concept, but one that many people don't understand until they have some serious real-world experience under their belt.
If you're not sure what I mean, it's sort of like the fact that you won't work for food, even though all you need to get through the day is a sandwich and some beverages. You might have student loans, a car loan, rent, and the like; plus, perhaps you'd like to have a little extra to put into savings or to just have fun with. Luckily for you, your salary (like the price of digital downloads and most other things you buy, with the exception of perhaps milk) is largely set by market forces.
"Heck, there is no requirement that artists get compensated in the US!"
Unless an artist goes out of their way to make it happen otherwise (such as by releasing their own stuff for free), royalties are fixed by law at about $0.07 per track in the US for songwriters and composers (there are royalties beyond that for performing artists which generally start at a % of the selling price).
Here's a PDF chart of what the payment is in various countries. Note that in the US, UK and Japan it's set by law. In other countries it's set by MOUs (memoranda of understanding) or by the local equivalent of the RIAA. In Russia -- luckily for all the clever Slashdotters who love allofmp3.com -- it's an N/A.
I've noticed that Slashdotters tend to fall in two camps on this issue -- the "artists are needy" camp (artists good, record companies bad) and the "artists are greedy" camp (artists and record companies bad). allofmp3.com should appeal to those who identify with the former. If there are any moral ambiguities, 30 minutes of watching music videos should clear that right up. Whenever you see that 300M with the dubs and the custom grill in the hip-hop video, just tell yourself that the person who wrote the song, the person who sat behind the mixing board, and the person who did the CD cover art also have an equally nice car -- maybe even two of them. They are much better off than, say, your average Russian mobster.
Yes. I guarantee it's not his only legal option. I think that this is one of those "reading for comprehension" issues. You probably read my post a little too fast, which is understandable. It happens to all of us.
Assuming that it's legal (as I said in another post, just pick the legal opinion that you agree with the most, and go with that), he has plenty of other options. Perhaps he prefers allofmp3 over the squillion other ways of listening to music cheaply and legally, but he's certainly not being forced to use it at gunpoint. He likes allofmp3 -- that's fine. He need not try to convince people that it's his "only legal option."
The actual, real lawyers who've chimed in on similar allofmp3 discussions in the past around here have typically pointed to S 602, importing. Importation is a huge part of copyright law. The museekster FAQ references S 602 and states that this does not qualify -- but consider the source. However, I've read the opinions of lawyers I trust, who say that it does. Of course, opinions are just opinions until there is a court ruling.
In general, if you're comfortable with paying a bunch of Russians knowing that your money is not going to anybody who took part in the production of the music -- that is, "is it legal or not?" is your only real issue, and not "is it moral or not?", then pick the opinion you trust the most, and go with that. I'd say the odds of an individual person being busted for using allofmp3 are practically nil.
"I'm constantly surprised how many people DON'T know about allofmp3.com."
I don't expect you to believe this or even understand this, but there are lots and lots of people who know about allofmp3.com, but have absolutely no interest in using it. Not all geeks share the same moral compass.
Classify people into "cool" or "uncool" based on their use of allofmp3.com if you like. There are simply people out there who see the world differently.
" According to this article http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3faq.htm [museekster.com] AllOfMP3 is operating legallly in Russia. Near the bottom of the page, it says Moscow police investigated them, and prosecutirs found nothing wrong."
So-called "Lolita" sites, which feature nude photos of minors and would be waaaaay over the line in the US and most countries, operate happily in Russia as well. They sell subscriptions to anybody with a credit card, but it's strictly caveat emptor -- if it's a no-no in your country, and you're caught with the material, it's your ass.
I wonder if the pedophiles in the US who subscribe to such services use the "but it's legal in Russia!" excuse.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's silly to me that record companies aren't seeing the opportunity to release deleted albums, which were not profitable to produce as downloads."
If you mean out-of-print CDs, it's often because they can't get the rightsholder's permission. To place a song online, the stores must get the permission of the record company (which owns the copyright on the recording), the composer (who owns the publishing rights to the music) and the lyricist (who owns the rights to the words). If a CD has tracks written by a number of people, permission must be secured by everybody involved if the entire album is to be released online.
Back when the original Napster was in business, there was talk of implementing a compulsory licensing system that would weaking songwriters' rights here -- it would work like recording covers does: you need not get permission from the creator, as long as you pay them a royalty fixed by law. When this notion was argued before congress, it was the record companies and the original Napster on one side of the table, and the songwriters on the other side. In the years that have followed, more and more composers and lyricists have seen the light, but to this day you'll still occasionally see "partial albums" available on iTMS, where they can't secure all the permissions necessary to release certain songs.
"Wow RIAA finally made a very stupid decision(big surpise) not supporting Napster, because of this I really think they put themselves in a really bad posistion."
Napster basically said to the record companies: "we've invented this service that allows millions of teenagers to pirate your content. Won't you please work with us?". This was simply extortion. Extortion, legal or otherwise, certainly happens quite often (in fact, many people see the record company lawsuits as extortion), but if somebody tried to pull this with you, you'd most likely tell them to FOAD, so why would you expect the record companies to act differently?
Fast forward to 2005. The record companies are still alive and kicking. The record companies ended up working with Apple, who've just sold their 50 millionth paid download, the online music biz continues to grow, and Apple and the record companies are laughing all the way to the bank. Napster, which took the approach of launching an unauthorized P2P platform with little concerns for the rights of the record companies (yeah, they have them too) and the artists, found out the hard way that you don't engage in business with somebody by first doing your absolute best to profoundly piss them off. As a result, they have long since gone out of business. While the "piss off the record industry and then try to partner with them" approach might make perfect sense to you (assuming you haven't been to B-school), history shows us that they chose wrongly.
Who made the stupid decision? Who's in the bad position? "Out of business" is about as bad of a position as you can be in.
"rip off children by selling them pieces of plastic at an obscene markup."
Oh, please. The mouse you're holding, the monitor you're looking at, and the PC that's powering both were likely sold at a higher markup than CDs. That applies at the retailer, too -- Best Buy takes about 15 points on CDs and 40 points on mice. If the profit margin of the record industry is bothersome to you, you would be deeply and profoundly disturbed to learn what the margins are on packaged foods, clothing, and most everything else you buy. It would make you want to move to Norway and become a yak herder.
Plenty of things to find fault with in the record industry, but profit margins sure ain't one of them.
"ipod video is great. my friend just got one. of course everyone is saying what the hell, who would want to watch video on a 2.5" screen, but the question i have, is how the fuck do you plan on taking a normal sized, 30" tv on a plane, train, or in a car?"
Did you really think that's the only option? Either a 2.5" screen, or a 30" TV? Next time you're on a plane or train, note all the other folks with notebooks sporting 15" screens. This is what I use to watch movies on flights, since I have to take it with me anyway. Thus, I have no need for a video iPod.
"stop complaining about the screen size and realize the potential. if you travel a lot, if youre a high school student (like myself), its great."
And understand that there are many people who are not high school students (like yourself) or otherwise have different needs or expectations, and thus aren't interested in this product. You should not let this upset you. Others are entitled to their opinions, and theirs may just be just as valid as yours.
You're obviously being sarcastic, but I'm not sure where you fall on this particular issue, as we're talking about a fan-produced season of Firefly, which would probably not be made available in libraries. I apparently didn't make my outlook clear on this, either.
Assuming for a second that you watched and loved Firefly (for the sake of discussion let's assume that)and if Joss Whedon took the bold step of doing a new, fan-supported season (the pay-per-download model that the GGP suggested), where would you fall on the situational ethics of downloading it for free rather than paying the price that Joss charged to make his money back? Would you step back for a second and say "whoa, normally I've no problem with helping myself to stuff for free, but Joss is doing this really cool thing here and I feel okay about ponying up since he's asking for fans to support this show that I love," or would your opinion fall more in the realm of the examples I gave in the GP post?
There are no right and wrong answers, of course; I just want your opinion. You often see folks claiming that the "selling CDs and DVDs for a profit" model is dead, and it's been suggested before that fan-supported, direct-to-fan stuff is the model of the future. But if the same "information wants to be free" idiots kill that in vitro, then perhaps it's back to the drawing board.
That's a great idea and I hope that somebody tries it, but if I were a potential investor, I'd consider the potentially huge factor of the "Information wants to be free! Bork bork bork bork!" idiots who'd help themselves to it on BitTorrent.
While intuitively it makes sense that people would be a little cooler in a situation like this, it's easy to overlook the power of our ability to rationalize just about anything. We'd see rationalizations like:
You're not the first person to make this mistake. Our legal system does not work this way because there must be a deterrent. If the penalty is fixed at the value of what's taken (or "infringed upon," for the pedants), then copyright violation, theft, embezzlement, and so on are zero sum games.
If you're not sure what I mean, imagine what would happen if the law were changed so that if you robbed $100K from a bank or stole $100K from your employer, your only risk is that you'd have to pay the $100K back if you were caught.
The wikipedia article on damages probably explains it better than I can. Scroll down to the "Punitive or exemplary damages" section if you don't have time to read the whole thing. I hope this helps.
"How can an organization like the RIAA justify wanting more than 99 cents per song when you can purchase 44 minutes of audio and video for two dollars?"
Because people are buying millions and millions of them at $0.99. They have likely done the research to show that they'll sell millions at $1.49 as well.
The fundamental thing here is value to the customer. It makes absolutely no difference what else is available for a similar price. If you want that CD for $13, you'll likely buy it despite the fact that a DVD costs $20 or a movie ticket costs $9 or a Urban Outfitters t-shirt costs $16 or a Jhane Barnes t-shirt costs $100 or a cheeseburger costs $4 or a concert ticket costs $40 -- because you want a CD, not a DVD, a cheeseburger or a t-shirt.
Likewise, if you want a particular song, but you don't happen to want a particular episode of Lost, then the price of the two items relative to each other -- or the price of the item you want relative to anything else on the planet -- makes little difference.
If anybody reading this is not a fan of the luxury of charging what the market will bear, then great -- figure out how much it would cost you to barely scrape by for a year without vacations or other discretionary spending, and then talk to your boss on Thursday about reducing your salary.
" If such fanciful upsampling algorithms were able to be done, they would have existed already."
Yup, it's been done before. Audio signal processing and psychoacoustics are nothing new... I think the significant thing here is that they're done in real time and on a reasonably affordable product.
"How can make an mp3 sound BETTER than the CD?"
With signal processing. Dolby and innumerable others have been doing it for decades.
" Those fuckers killed Aureal. Creative has been on my shit list ever since..."
And Aureal's strategy was to put Creative out of business. They were not a non-profit, nor would they have been satisfied with 50% of the market. This is competition.
"Copyright infringement is not theft!"
Okay, now do the one about "theft of service," "stolen kisses," and "stealing your thunder." And can you do the one about Apple's "don't steal music" sticker? I just love that one!
" It's amusing that everyone was all a flutter about this movie and how it was going to be so successful and awesome because so many people wanted it to come back ... and... then.... BOOM!... One giant bomb."
Interesting -- where are you located? In the USA it entered at #2 with a $10MM opening, knocking "Corpse Bride" out of the #2 spot.
"I have to wonder, if this works to boost revenue for Serenity, what will the MPAA's response be? It only took them, what, ten years to realize the internet can help them?"
What an interesting thing to say. I remember that Strange Days had a rather kick-ass web site for its time... and that was in 1995. Since then, I've lost count of the number of well-executed Internet ad campaigns I've seen for films. I know that many Slashdotters may have only been on the Internet for a few years so this sort of thing may be new to them, but it's an old, old medium to lots of us.
Either way, ad campaigns are put together by studios, not the MPAA. The MPAA is a trade group that represents studios.
"HBO doesn't yet understand that the real money is to be made in licensing - DVDs, soundtracks, decorative "Rome" wall hangings, what have you."
I'm guessing HBO's Australian arm is behind the times. Here in the US, HBO does monster business for DVD sales and soundtracks. In fact, the SFU soundtrack was the #1 download on iTunes the day after the final episode aired.
I believe this is one reason why HBO attempts to make downloading difficult. They believe that a certain percentage of folks who've helped themselves to a complete set via BitTorrent will no longer have the desire to get a second copy on DVD. To put it in your words, pirated copies are interfering with their real revenue stream.
"The problem with your logic is that it assumies that the content isnt being pirated to hell and back allready. Which it is."
Thank you for your reply. This goes back to the point I made in the GP -- we as Slashdotters should take the 1,000 foot view and consider how the other 90% of us use technology, not just the bleeding-edge Slashdotters. The media companies are afraid that releasing soft copies of their content would take the volume of piracy to an even higher level. I think Slashdotters tend to think "well, everybody pirates movies and TV shows" when the reality is that this is limited to those with a high bandwidth connection and who know and love BitTorrent. And, the supply is gated by the finite number of people who have the time and interest in ripping their DVDs or pulling stuff off of their Tivos or MPCs. Now imagine what would happen if HBO were to pour thousands of thousands of copies of their programs into the hands of less tech-savvy consumers. All of a sudden, Joe and Jane NASCAR would be trading copies.
We already saw this happen with music. Sure, folks have been trading tapes and CDs for years, but piracy exploded with the enabling technology that was P2P. Suddenly, piracy was no longer the domain of the geeks, and Mr. and Mrs. NASCAR could get their Kenny Chesney for free instead of driving the F150 to Wally World.
This has happened to me, as well. I recently cancelled my HBO subscription because I have friends who've recently bought Tivos with integral DVD burners. Now that Carnivale and Sex and the City are gone (the two were very similar; only the former featured more midgets) I'm only really interested in the final season of The Sopranos. In the past, that would have kept me subscribing, but Tivos with DVD burners are the enabling technology that is costing HBO subscription revenue.
Probably because they'd just be pirated to hell and back. For every guy who paid the $20, there'd be ten folks who'd just help themselves to the copies that were conveniently digitized by HBO. Of course, HBO could try the DRM route, but as we all know, around here that's tatamount to killing kittens.
Sorry the world isn't moving fast enough for you -- but keep in mind that Slashdotters are usually on the leading edge of technology. It usually takes a new idea ten years from conception to widespread acceptance. Look at how many years it took digital music delivery to limp along before Apple took it to the mainstream. And remember how long IMing was an uber-nerdy thing before Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft brought it to the masses?
In the meantime, have you looked at Netflix? For $20 a month you can rent lots of the old HBO shows, as well as just about any other movie you'd like.
"So what if I download and episode, realize that I really like it, and want to sign up?"
Sheyeah, right.
This would put you in that same class of people who download albums off of P2P so that they can listen to the whole thing before buying a copy. While there might be a small percentage of people who do that (certainly not anybody I know -- all of my friends who use P2P do so to save money), it's abundantly clear that most people do things like downloading "Rome" so they don't have to pay HBO to watch it.
"So yeah, I just can't imagine how this helps them at all."
As an aside, the ironic thing is that your post is presently 4, insightful, despite the fact that you used "I can't imagine" twice in your post and even titled it "Don't get it." That's a lack of insight.
"These coke sniffing, hooker humping, lawyer loving, backhander taking, oozing cankers on the arse of humanity are threatening to take away a woman's child because she downloaded some MP3s."
Plenty of rational arguments to make against the RIAA here. Absolutely no need to pull something out of your ass.
"The $.99 fee per track that iTunes (and others) charge is an arbitrary amount that has not been set by the market."
Yes, it has. Apple negotiated with the suppliers (the record labels, the hosting providers) and set a retail price that got them an acceptable margin. The market responded by buying them like crazy -- 50 million and counting! Perhaps if they'd tried setting the price at $2.00 and it'd bombed, then the price might have been lowered by now.
This is a fundamental concept, so I'm trying to figure out where you got off the beam. It might be that you think that a price set by the market has to mean that the margins are below some arbitrary level, or that it's a price that everybody will want to pay. Not so -- use the classic example of a Ferrari. Their gross margins are astronomical. Most people can't afford one. I can afford one, but I don't want one. The people who buy them think they're worth the money, and Ferrari sells all that it wants -- if they wanted to make $10K economy cars, they would... but they don't want to. Does that make it more clear?
"Rather, we as the consumer are forced to pay that amount by the RIAA because of exhorbant licensing fees. Just like in the old days of CD price fixing."
That's not what the price fixing settlement was about at all. It was Best Buy and Wal-Mart spanking the record companies because they were paying co-op money to some indie retailers to advertise CDs at a certain price. It came about because Best Buy and Wal-Mart were driving down the prices of CDs to at or below their costs. However, yours is a popular misunderstanding, so you're probably just repeating what you've heard -- perfectly understandable.
"The costs involved in that are completly negligible, yet we are still paying the type of prices associated with actual manufacturing."
Most of the price you pay for a CD at retail doesn't go toward manufacturing costs, either. While you're 100% correct that there's lower per-piece costs associated with e-delivery, record companies still have to recoup the costs of doing business. The difference between the net margin and the gross margin is a real devil bitch. It's also a fundamental concept, but one that many people don't understand until they have some serious real-world experience under their belt.
If you're not sure what I mean, it's sort of like the fact that you won't work for food, even though all you need to get through the day is a sandwich and some beverages. You might have student loans, a car loan, rent, and the like; plus, perhaps you'd like to have a little extra to put into savings or to just have fun with. Luckily for you, your salary (like the price of digital downloads and most other things you buy, with the exception of perhaps milk) is largely set by market forces.
"Heck, there is no requirement that artists get compensated in the US!"
Unless an artist goes out of their way to make it happen otherwise (such as by releasing their own stuff for free), royalties are fixed by law at about $0.07 per track in the US for songwriters and composers (there are royalties beyond that for performing artists which generally start at a % of the selling price).
Here's a PDF chart of what the payment is in various countries. Note that in the US, UK and Japan it's set by law. In other countries it's set by MOUs (memoranda of understanding) or by the local equivalent of the RIAA. In Russia -- luckily for all the clever Slashdotters who love allofmp3.com -- it's an N/A.
I've noticed that Slashdotters tend to fall in two camps on this issue -- the "artists are needy" camp (artists good, record companies bad) and the "artists are greedy" camp (artists and record companies bad). allofmp3.com should appeal to those who identify with the former. If there are any moral ambiguities, 30 minutes of watching music videos should clear that right up. Whenever you see that 300M with the dubs and the custom grill in the hip-hop video, just tell yourself that the person who wrote the song, the person who sat behind the mixing board, and the person who did the CD cover art also have an equally nice car -- maybe even two of them. They are much better off than, say, your average Russian mobster.
"Wow, you guarantee it's not?"
Yes. I guarantee it's not his only legal option. I think that this is one of those "reading for comprehension" issues. You probably read my post a little too fast, which is understandable. It happens to all of us.
Assuming that it's legal (as I said in another post, just pick the legal opinion that you agree with the most, and go with that), he has plenty of other options. Perhaps he prefers allofmp3 over the squillion other ways of listening to music cheaply and legally, but he's certainly not being forced to use it at gunpoint. He likes allofmp3 -- that's fine. He need not try to convince people that it's his "only legal option."
The actual, real lawyers who've chimed in on similar allofmp3 discussions in the past around here have typically pointed to S 602, importing. Importation is a huge part of copyright law. The museekster FAQ references S 602 and states that this does not qualify -- but consider the source. However, I've read the opinions of lawyers I trust, who say that it does. Of course, opinions are just opinions until there is a court ruling.
In general, if you're comfortable with paying a bunch of Russians knowing that your money is not going to anybody who took part in the production of the music -- that is, "is it legal or not?" is your only real issue, and not "is it moral or not?", then pick the opinion you trust the most, and go with that. I'd say the odds of an individual person being busted for using allofmp3 are practically nil.
"I'm constantly surprised how many people DON'T know about allofmp3.com."
I don't expect you to believe this or even understand this, but there are lots and lots of people who know about allofmp3.com, but have absolutely no interest in using it. Not all geeks share the same moral compass.
Classify people into "cool" or "uncool" based on their use of allofmp3.com if you like. There are simply people out there who see the world differently.
"For me, it is simply the only legal option."
I guarantee you it's not.
" According to this article http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3faq.htm [museekster.com] AllOfMP3 is operating legallly in Russia. Near the bottom of the page, it says Moscow police investigated them, and prosecutirs found nothing wrong."
So-called "Lolita" sites, which feature nude photos of minors and would be waaaaay over the line in the US and most countries, operate happily in Russia as well. They sell subscriptions to anybody with a credit card, but it's strictly caveat emptor -- if it's a no-no in your country, and you're caught with the material, it's your ass.
I wonder if the pedophiles in the US who subscribe to such services use the "but it's legal in Russia!" excuse.