Of course, the other reason that the monk analogy does not fit that seems to be oft overlooked is that the monks did not make record profits as printing became increasingly common.
Why are you against record profits?
Incidentally, your first point (widespread copyright infringement makes people buy more) and your second point (widespread copyright infringement frees up my money to spend elsewhere) seem odd when taken together.
I do know musicians. Just because small time bands aren't driving around in gold plated bentleys, doesn't mean they are entitled to. You know nothing about me, asshole.
Well we do know that you you use horrendous double-negative clauses and that you resort to insults at the drop of a hat. Oh, and that you resort to exaggerated strawmen to try and make a point. The GP said nothing about "gold-plated Bentleys' or being entitled to own them. The GP said that the majority of musicians struggle to get by on music alone and are ripped off frequently. That's pretty much true. Your nonsense sentence about gold-plated cars doesn't contradict the GP in the slightest.
The rest of us have to struggle for a living. The idea that musicians should be able to live 'comforably' working only a few hours a night is absurd. They essentially work the same hours as barstaff. This means, of course, that if they do require more money they can have a regular job as well as performing.
So by your logic, if you had some advanced skills that you had perfected or trained for over time, e.g. you were an expert UNIX sysadmin, you should be paid the same as bar staff for your hourly rate. So by your logic, Paul McCartney who wrote the most popular song yet written ("Yesterday" is the most played song on radio worldwide) which he says came to him in a morning and was pretty much finished by the end of the day, should have been paid a flat daily rate for the time, perhaps about US$20. Something that has been covered 3,000 times and sold tens of millions of copies, right?
And you think that you yourself should be the arbiter of whether or not something is worth money or not? Because that's vital to your argument. If you don't think that you should be the judge of the value of everything, then you need to let people negotiate for themselves what prices to pay. That's called "buying and selling".
If making ends meet is a struggle for physicists and sysadmins, why should it be a breeze for guitarists? We don't owe them shit.
Not if you don't listen to their music or obtain their recordings, no, you don't. But if you don't then why do you care about others being against piracy - it's irrelevant to you. Unless of course you do listen to their music or want their recordings, in which case, yes, they have provided you with something you want and you have given nothing in return.
You finish off your drooling retard rant with the old chestnut that 'piracy is stealing' - which is true, so long as you are talking about those fellows in Somalia. It isn't true for copying data, and pretend it is makes you look stupid.
Oh, and you file share anyway. So STFU
Yeah - "STFU". A real argument closer. You do realise that your instructions to what people can and can't say are irrelevant to them, yes? Someone takes something without the payment asked? Yeah - sounds like theft to me.
It's going to be interesting to see how things develop. I personally definitely don't want to see a return to the days of patronage. Mozart was widely popular with the people, but he was constrained in what he did by having to obey the tastes of the gentry. I don't want to see more Renaissance masters forced to daub pictures of rich Venetians or Michaelangelo having to do more dreary God-scenes for the Vatican.;)
Okay - they're all historical examples and will be different the next time things go round, but if artists have to chase the money, the tastes of the rich will dictate the tastes of us all. Perhaps. I freely confess to not knowing where on earth the boat is going, but I dislike the piss-poor logic and stinking hypocrisy some of the piracy-zealots come out with in the Slashdot echo-chamber. Most of the people I know download copyright-restricted media and freely confess they do so as an alternative to purchasing in a number of cases. It's only in a few online places like Slashdot that people howl at you about evil corporations and how people should tell the artist how much they want to pay for their work (usually nothing). I note that after fighting hard with the odd insightful mod, my original post has finally died under an avalanche of aggressive Troll and Flamebait modifications. It's dangerous disagreeing with the herd here on Slashdot, so thank you for a reasoned response.;)
Shit artists and holywood can suck my free living balls.
If you think something is shit, then you wouldn't download it. Right? So you don't pirate and this discussion isn't of concern to you. Or if you do download something, then we can assume that you don't think it's shit.
Sorry if I'm dense, but, why the need for a centralized repository of the torrent data? These data could be floating on the net themselves, replicating in a huge number of copies, with a versionig system for updating. Or not?
It is possible to create "tracker-less" torrents without a central tracker server. These are newer and TPB wasn't using such a system. It's not as effective but it does work. But you're also asking why there needs to be a central repository of torrent data. There are ways around this. There are things like Freenet which let files (such as the torrent files you need) to be decentralised, and you could have a system whereby updated collections of torrent files are passed around from peer to peer. I don't know if anything exactly like the latter exists. It wouldn't work as well - you'd still need some way of finding and joining the network in the first place. I expect to see something like this start to appear if it doesn't already, but there are problems with it compared to having a tracker. And there are plenty of private trackers out there for the time being, so there doesn't seem to be a driving need at the mo. Be interested to hear from anyone with newer insights, though.
I've been arguing throughout this thread (mainly because I dislike bad logic and hypocrisy) against support for TPB, but I find it hard to dispute someone who quotes Lazy Town.;):D
It's good that there are people still out there running encrypted torrents with private trackers, because we (all of us) need the Internet to preserve some of its freedom and for governments not to be able to establish total control over communications. One day (today?) we'll need this technology for more important things than downloading movies. But if big name and more public setups like TPB get lopped down periodically causing mainstream public to not pirate *everything* but buy enough that such works actually still get created, then I'm happy about that too. I don't like seeing people go to jail - it's a barbaric treatment, but the verdict was probably correct.
There is more money to be made from lawsuits than honest sales.
That's a failure of logic. You can only recover money from the people you were suing if they have made more money from 'selling' the product (e.g. actual sales, advertising, whatever). Which means that there was more money made sales than from lawsuits. If there is more money recovered from lawsuits than is made, then you have created money from thin air.
it's the fact your are making it available with no other reason than to break the law.
I'm going to add to that. From the court verdict I read, one of the major factors in deciding sentence wasn't just their intent to break the law, but their making substantial profits from doing so. Apparently TPB got quite a lot of ad revenue from their site (to the tune of around SU$60,0000 per month).
Maybe 'unemployed' is the wrong word here. It is more that the monks lost control of what the general public was able to read. Suddenly is was no longer possible for the monks to censor religious or political incorrect ideas.
This is a very wrong analogy. No media industry is censoring you from producing and selling your own music or movies. You are perfectly able to do that either in a traditional business model (selling individual copies using copyright law to protect yourself) or using one of the "new" business models that are much-touted on Slashdot (such as giving away for free and making money from touring or waiting for donations).
The Internet has opened up media distribution to a whole new set of people. This has some parallels to the printing press and is great. But piracy is not a required part of that and the monk analogy does not fit piracy.
Lol, they used the same line of reasoning when TV came out. There were scare campaigns that there would never be any more media because TV would allow people to watch things for free.
Citation please. I know that in the UK it was predicted that TV would harm the cinema industry. And as it turns out, it did. Vast numbers used to go to the cinemas for newsreels, weekly serials and others. I'm not aware that there was a general feeling from the industry that there would be "no more media." So as your comment appears intended to undermine mine, please could you support it with some industry quotes from the time period. Though its also worth noting if you do find such quotes, that just because some people sixty-odd years ago may have been wrong about something, an entirely different set of people talking about a different thing today would be also be wrong because of it.
Whether it's accurate is another matter altogether though... you have to consider that a small broadcasting/production house which caters to a niche market, but only has limited broadcast footprint could actually benefit from the torrents - it would be able to reach far further afield right from the outset, which could, in turn lead to more interest on an international scale.
It's possible. And general trends will only be general in either case, meaning there will be a lot of winners and losers on either side of the small-company big-corp divide, regardless. But I think it's more likely to be the other way around than what you propose. Non-profit media producers - whether written stories, amateur movies, etc. will likely benefit from file-sharing models. There are no or very limited costs to cover so any gains are pure profit and often profit isn't the motive anyway. But these groups are perfectly capable of using such models legally already - they just say "you're free to copy and redistribute." Move much above this level and I think piracy starts to hit very hard. The big corps can actually weather this damage better than the small ones I think. I know some people that eke out a very small business selling books in both hardcopy and PDF. It's certain that piracy costs them quite a lot of money. A big corp with a big name product can still make a lot of money even if a big chunk is taken away by piracy. Small players, or individual artists selling directly, are already on more of a knife-edge and losses can easily make it non-viable to them.
Don't forget that it's not a case of big vs. small players only. Often times, particularly in the music industry, big labels will front the expertise and money to artists that are less likely to be big names as well as the Britneys. *If* these become less profitable to the big labels, then there will be an increasing focus on just the more certain big earners. I don't know if this last part will turn out accurate or not, but my experience in small publishing bears out the first part of my post.
You don't know much about running a torrent tracker that handles millions of users at a time do you? There bandwidth costs are much more than just serving tiny torrent files and running text searches.
Actually, I have a fairly good idea. I manage some University servers and had to forecast requirements quite accurately for some very intensive, high-use services. And I can tell you that the server requirements for their setup are small money and that, at least at UK prices (I am presuming Sweden is comparable), you don't need US$65,000 per month to cover what they were doing either. Not by a long shot. A torrent file may be 14K. The amount of data for the transmitted peer lists will vary with number of peers, how long you share, and other factors, but it's going to be in the same sort of region or less normally. Let's just call it 30K in total for an average. At the cheaper end of bandwidth (before you get into discounts for big buying), you'd be looking at ballpark £0.80 per GB or US$1.20. So US$100 buys you enough to run over 2.5 million torrent files / peers. (I've allowed a generous 10% overhead on data transmitted to account for routing layers, dropped packets, etc.). The pirate bay were pulling in US$65,000 per month. Run 5x 500W servers in full usage without monitors on 24/7 for a month and at UK industrial cost electricity and you're looking at about £150 per month or about US$220. Now you have to add on other costs like cooling, etc. But we can do 250million peers for under US$14,000 per month. See? This is ballpark of course, how can we do anything else without actual figures and costs, but it gives you some idea what we're talking about. So don't just randomly say to people online that they don't have any idea when you don't bring anything even slightly resembling a fact to the discussion.
* As far as anyone has been able to determine, which is not for lack of trying. Plenty of people have searched for an alternative that works acceptably for all forms of art, but no-one has been successful. For example, live performances have been suggested, but that makes no mention of what electronic music is supposed to do, for example.
It's worth noting (not in contradiction to your post, but complimenting it), that the existence of copyright law doesn't prevent anyone from releasing their work under a different model. I often see people here insisting how a new business model is better and more profitable, whilst ignoring that if this is the case, people are free to use that model right now without any change to the law.
Running as a not-for-profit? They could easily show (its its actually the case) that the ad revenue supports the site running costs only.
Well they could easily show it if it were true. Apparently they pulled down nearly US$65,000 per month. If all you're doing is handing out teeny-little torrent files and running basic text searches, your bandwidth and server costs aren't going to be very much in relation. They actually did try and demonstrate in court that they weren't making money. But they failed. Given the ineptness of the prosecution against them, the usually thorough nature of the Swedish courts and my own knowledge of running costs for servers and bandwidth, I'm thinking that failure was the correct outcome.
Most of the people I know, excepting only old people and a few others, pirate some form of media. Almost without exception they consider what they are doing to be "wrong" and admit that they will use piracy as an alternative to purchasing. It's only on a few odd places online, such as Slashdot, that I find all these people who are morally indignant that what they do should be considered wrong, or put themselves through such hideous logical contortions to justify their behaviour. The nearest thing to it I know, is watching fundamentalists trying to rationalise dinosaurs.
Of course not - that's no longer a buzzword. Honestly - most of the academics in this field couldn't predict the next big thing until eight months *after* it hit. They run around latching onto any buzzword and then dressing it up in fancy language to research bodies and (if they're lucky) a national newspaper and trying to make themselves sound up to date. There are few things sadder to see than people whose job depends on trying to sound cutting edge.
Some academics are quite good at seeing which way things are going early on, of course. But they're not the same academics who make a living out of talking about it, they're the academics who are just aware of how things are because they're actually involved in producing new technologies. The rest are just parasites - narrating without contributing.
Ah, good insight. It's not like me to not look for the cynical angle first. Well at least Amazon are something I know what they are doing and I can (just about) opt in or out of it. Back on the subject of Phorm, I just created a graph of their share price over the last twelve months which makes for some amusing viewing. I wonder how that's affected their balance sheet?
Well this is a good PR move on the part of Amazon as far as I'm concerned. Cancels out their "censorship" glitch from the other day and puts them back in a healthy credit again. Obviously keeping an eye out as always for loopholes such as allowing a different company to do the same as Phorm on their site, but currently Amazon is getting points from me for this. I despise Phorm. But apparently Phrom haven't been doing that well anyway. There was a bit of an exodus from their board a while back and I heard their shareprice took a bit of a whack after the original scandal. The EU investigating what the UK government refused to has just added to their woes, I'm guessing.
A number of your counter-points stem from failing to understand what I wrote. For example:
Of course you then proceed with some childish nonsense about more Muslims in Britain than white people. It's funny that you belabored that point so much when the whole thing points at your own lack of ability in reading!
You posted a link to a poll in the Telegraph (the UK government's most obedient paper, by the way) which said 1% of muslims in the UK "had a sympathy for the feelings and motives of the July 7 bombers". You then said this accounted for your "millions and millions" of muslims that supported terrorism. Dealing with the numbers first, if your 1% accounts for millions and millions (which has to be at least four million), then 100% of muslims in Britain must equal 4m multiplied by 100 which gives 400million muslims in Britain. Do you see how your hyperbole results in absurdities? There are only about 70 million in the UK in total. I'm sorry that you feel mathematics is "childish nonsense" but most here on Slashdot don't. So either use numbers that make sense or admit that your opinion isn't backed up by actual statistics.
That's why I posted a poll with hard numbers rather than hand-waving like you. Do you concede that the poll I posted contained hard numbers?
Again with a strawman - proposing that I need hard numbers to make a case and then shouting that I don't have them. I'm not making any case that requires backing up with statistics. I'm proving that you don't have a statistical basis for your opinion. Do I concede that your Googled up poll contains hard numbers? Well the Telegraph is a dreadfully biased paper which is far from above distorting statistics, but in any case, these "hard numbers" don't actually solve the problems in your argument whether they are trustworthy or not. Aside from all the problems of you taking reported opinions from a small number of people in one country about one incident where you decide "sympathy for the feelings" of the perpetrators and then extrapolating it to what over 1.5 billion people from different countries feel about many, many incidents in different countries, circumstances against different targets (military, civilian) and deciding that "sympathy" translates to "supporting terrorism"... Aside from all the problems with that use of "hard numbers", problems that are obvious to everyone but you who need them not to be for your argument to work, aside from all that... the maths, as I demonstrated at the beginning, would mean that there were 400million muslims in Britain. Nearly a third of the World's muslim population live in the UK? Now there's a shock!
If you want more flaws in your mathematics, let me take you back to your very first post which provoked me to call you on your "statistics". You said that "Millions out of 1.5 billion or whatever is a small percentage, sure..." So millions. What, the four million you seem to think counts? Four million out of 1.5 billion is 0.26%. Have you got that? Less than a third of a percent! That's about a fifth of the prevalence of Schizophrenia in humans. It makes more sense to stereotype White people as schizophrenic than muslims supporting terrorism by your numbers. Are you really sure this is what you want to be proving with your "hard numbers".:D
Nope, I said I can't give a tight definition. Do you concede that?
With pleasure - I asked if you could give a tight definition of terrorism and you agreed you could not. Furthermore, you completely failed to give any useful definition at all. So again I'll ask you, now that you admit you can't tightly define terrorism, how you can state what people do and don't support. If you can't or wont distinguish between Hindu extremists blowing up a mosque in India to Palestinians shooting Israeli soldiers in Gaza to the attacks of 9/11, then why do you expect anyone to be convinced of your arguments? Go to Iraq,
I disagree. An argument based on hard numbers and evidence of present actions is much more sound than a nebulous hand-waving about potential threats that don't yet exist (as you admit here) and one which you haven't even accounted for external factors (as you admit in the next point).
And yet you don't provide an argument based on hard numbers and respond to my point that you haven't by saying I haven't provided hard numbers. The counter to someone pointing out you haven't supported your case with any actual numbers is not to point out that someone else hasn't either (especially when they weren't trying to make a case at all), but to provide those hard numbers. Something which you have singularly failed to do. You gave your opinion and ignored factors which would undermine that opinion. You compensate by pretending that I am claiming some statistical validity and saying that it's flawed. I'm not claiming proof. I'm demonstrating that (a) your opinion isn't supported by any numbers you have provided us and (b) you ignored important factors that would likely undermine your opinion. Without addressing these, there is no reason people should accept your statements about militant islam's prevalence.
Okay go for it. I don't think you'll be able to. How do you put a hard number on violence or standard of living? Even among relatively similar societies it's very difficult to scientifically state that country A is "nicer" than country B.
Again - the strawman that I was arguing which countries were what. Your complete ignoring of these very major factors renders your conclusions useless. You need to address them to be convincing.
I can't give you a tight definition of terrorism. It's very subjective.
Which is what I just said you couldn't. I'm glad you concede this. Now given that you can't define terrorism, tell me how you are able to talk authoritatively about how many people support terrorism when none of us know whether you are talking about attacks on US soil by foreign agents, attacks in foreign countries by militant forces against military targets (which the US government calls terrorism), whether we're including Palestine, Iraq, Israeli operations in Lebanon when they targeted power stations and scattered unexploded cluster bombs across large agricultural areas of the country, anti-government actions in Pakistan, Hindu-extremist strikes on Mosques in India, club-bombings in Bali. Massively different situations in far apart countries that many who support or disapprove of one set might feel very differently about another set. For example, the previously mentioned many Iraqi's that might support driving US troops out of their homeland but not condone actions such as 9/11. If you admit you can't define your terms, then admit that you can't support your argument. Else go back and define your terms. I don't think you'll be able to and still support your opinion.
Your 1% of British muslims (quoted from a very biased British paper, but anyway) being "larger than millions and millions" is even worse statistics than your previous post. If 1% of British muslims is more than 4 million (the smallest possible interpretation of your excited "millions and millions"), then that makes 400 million British muslims in total. You do realise that the population of the UK is only about 70 million (less than a quarter the number of muslims you think live here) and that the population is about 91% White (Whites are very predominantly not muslim). Do you see now why we shouldn't trust your opinions without your backing them up with actual statistics (which don't exist because it's so difficult to account for other factors).
But the important part is that 20% feel sympathetic to their motives. That's what I meant by rationalizing. Muslims have this peculiar way of being "against" specific terrorist acts, but sympathizing with the terrorists' motives.
Dubious, dubious statistics. Firstly, atheists are a minority at the current time, world wide so even if the percentage of atheists that were "militant" were the same as amongst muslims, you'd still be able to point out that there were more of the religious type. It's a non-scientific argument. Secondly you have to control for other factors. How well does atheism correlate with rich populations enjoying periods of peace compared to poor populations under non-democratic rule and / or recent or ongoing periods of conflict? How are these correlations for Islam?
Regarding the percentage of muslims that "support, rationalize, and defend their [terrorists] behavior", I'm going to have to ask for both citations and tight definitions of terrorism. The US government calls every act of violence against US troops in Iraq an act by "terrorist" forces. Do many Iraqi's support driving the invading US troops out of Iraq? Yes. Did those same people support the attack on the World Trade Centre by a group that had nothing to do with them? Predominantly not, I would make an educated guess at. So you really need to define what you're talking about when you say terrorism, because the USA and UK governments have used the word in all sorts of inventive ways over the last eight years.
In practice, the pressure in a community can force people to go along with sharia law even though it is far from in their best interests. This is principally for women in divorce cases, adultery cases, domestic abuse cases and basically anything where a woman is facing a man in the court. The UK government has washed its hands of this and made it much harder for women in Islamic communities in the UK.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you against record profits?
Incidentally, your first point (widespread copyright infringement makes people buy more) and your second point (widespread copyright infringement frees up my money to spend elsewhere) seem odd when taken together.
Well we do know that you you use horrendous double-negative clauses and that you resort to insults at the drop of a hat. Oh, and that you resort to exaggerated strawmen to try and make a point. The GP said nothing about "gold-plated Bentleys' or being entitled to own them. The GP said that the majority of musicians struggle to get by on music alone and are ripped off frequently. That's pretty much true. Your nonsense sentence about gold-plated cars doesn't contradict the GP in the slightest.
So by your logic, if you had some advanced skills that you had perfected or trained for over time, e.g. you were an expert UNIX sysadmin, you should be paid the same as bar staff for your hourly rate. So by your logic, Paul McCartney who wrote the most popular song yet written ("Yesterday" is the most played song on radio worldwide) which he says came to him in a morning and was pretty much finished by the end of the day, should have been paid a flat daily rate for the time, perhaps about US$20. Something that has been covered 3,000 times and sold tens of millions of copies, right?
And you think that you yourself should be the arbiter of whether or not something is worth money or not? Because that's vital to your argument. If you don't think that you should be the judge of the value of everything, then you need to let people negotiate for themselves what prices to pay. That's called "buying and selling".
Not if you don't listen to their music or obtain their recordings, no, you don't. But if you don't then why do you care about others being against piracy - it's irrelevant to you. Unless of course you do listen to their music or want their recordings, in which case, yes, they have provided you with something you want and you have given nothing in return.
Yeah - "STFU". A real argument closer. You do realise that your instructions to what people can and can't say are irrelevant to them, yes? Someone takes something without the payment asked? Yeah - sounds like theft to me.
It's going to be interesting to see how things develop. I personally definitely don't want to see a return to the days of patronage. Mozart was widely popular with the people, but he was constrained in what he did by having to obey the tastes of the gentry. I don't want to see more Renaissance masters forced to daub pictures of rich Venetians or Michaelangelo having to do more dreary God-scenes for the Vatican.
Okay - they're all historical examples and will be different the next time things go round, but if artists have to chase the money, the tastes of the rich will dictate the tastes of us all. Perhaps. I freely confess to not knowing where on earth the boat is going, but I dislike the piss-poor logic and stinking hypocrisy some of the piracy-zealots come out with in the Slashdot echo-chamber. Most of the people I know download copyright-restricted media and freely confess they do so as an alternative to purchasing in a number of cases. It's only in a few online places like Slashdot that people howl at you about evil corporations and how people should tell the artist how much they want to pay for their work (usually nothing). I note that after fighting hard with the odd insightful mod, my original post has finally died under an avalanche of aggressive Troll and Flamebait modifications. It's dangerous disagreeing with the herd here on Slashdot, so thank you for a reasoned response.
Regards,
H.
If you think something is shit, then you wouldn't download it. Right? So you don't pirate and this discussion isn't of concern to you. Or if you do download something, then we can assume that you don't think it's shit.
It is possible to create "tracker-less" torrents without a central tracker server. These are newer and TPB wasn't using such a system. It's not as effective but it does work. But you're also asking why there needs to be a central repository of torrent data. There are ways around this. There are things like Freenet which let files (such as the torrent files you need) to be decentralised, and you could have a system whereby updated collections of torrent files are passed around from peer to peer. I don't know if anything exactly like the latter exists. It wouldn't work as well - you'd still need some way of finding and joining the network in the first place. I expect to see something like this start to appear if it doesn't already, but there are problems with it compared to having a tracker. And there are plenty of private trackers out there for the time being, so there doesn't seem to be a driving need at the mo. Be interested to hear from anyone with newer insights, though.
I've been arguing throughout this thread (mainly because I dislike bad logic and hypocrisy) against support for TPB, but I find it hard to dispute someone who quotes Lazy Town.
It's good that there are people still out there running encrypted torrents with private trackers, because we (all of us) need the Internet to preserve some of its freedom and for governments not to be able to establish total control over communications. One day (today?) we'll need this technology for more important things than downloading movies. But if big name and more public setups like TPB get lopped down periodically causing mainstream public to not pirate *everything* but buy enough that such works actually still get created, then I'm happy about that too. I don't like seeing people go to jail - it's a barbaric treatment, but the verdict was probably correct.
That's a failure of logic. You can only recover money from the people you were suing if they have made more money from 'selling' the product (e.g. actual sales, advertising, whatever). Which means that there was more money made sales than from lawsuits. If there is more money recovered from lawsuits than is made, then you have created money from thin air.
I'm going to add to that. From the court verdict I read, one of the major factors in deciding sentence wasn't just their intent to break the law, but their making substantial profits from doing so. Apparently TPB got quite a lot of ad revenue from their site (to the tune of around SU$60,0000 per month).
This is a very wrong analogy. No media industry is censoring you from producing and selling your own music or movies. You are perfectly able to do that either in a traditional business model (selling individual copies using copyright law to protect yourself) or using one of the "new" business models that are much-touted on Slashdot (such as giving away for free and making money from touring or waiting for donations).
The Internet has opened up media distribution to a whole new set of people. This has some parallels to the printing press and is great. But piracy is not a required part of that and the monk analogy does not fit piracy.
Citation please. I know that in the UK it was predicted that TV would harm the cinema industry. And as it turns out, it did. Vast numbers used to go to the cinemas for newsreels, weekly serials and others. I'm not aware that there was a general feeling from the industry that there would be "no more media." So as your comment appears intended to undermine mine, please could you support it with some industry quotes from the time period. Though its also worth noting if you do find such quotes, that just because some people sixty-odd years ago may have been wrong about something, an entirely different set of people talking about a different thing today would be also be wrong because of it.
It's possible. And general trends will only be general in either case, meaning there will be a lot of winners and losers on either side of the small-company big-corp divide, regardless. But I think it's more likely to be the other way around than what you propose. Non-profit media producers - whether written stories, amateur movies, etc. will likely benefit from file-sharing models. There are no or very limited costs to cover so any gains are pure profit and often profit isn't the motive anyway. But these groups are perfectly capable of using such models legally already - they just say "you're free to copy and redistribute." Move much above this level and I think piracy starts to hit very hard. The big corps can actually weather this damage better than the small ones I think. I know some people that eke out a very small business selling books in both hardcopy and PDF. It's certain that piracy costs them quite a lot of money. A big corp with a big name product can still make a lot of money even if a big chunk is taken away by piracy. Small players, or individual artists selling directly, are already on more of a knife-edge and losses can easily make it non-viable to them.
Don't forget that it's not a case of big vs. small players only. Often times, particularly in the music industry, big labels will front the expertise and money to artists that are less likely to be big names as well as the Britneys. *If* these become less profitable to the big labels, then there will be an increasing focus on just the more certain big earners. I don't know if this last part will turn out accurate or not, but my experience in small publishing bears out the first part of my post.
I can look forward to a future with no more big-budget movies or mainstream e-books. What a relief!
Nothing stops any artist today who feels the same from releasing their music free for all. Copyright provides a choice to the artist.
Actually, I have a fairly good idea. I manage some University servers and had to forecast requirements quite accurately for some very intensive, high-use services. And I can tell you that the server requirements for their setup are small money and that, at least at UK prices (I am presuming Sweden is comparable), you don't need US$65,000 per month to cover what they were doing either. Not by a long shot. A torrent file may be 14K. The amount of data for the transmitted peer lists will vary with number of peers, how long you share, and other factors, but it's going to be in the same sort of region or less normally. Let's just call it 30K in total for an average. At the cheaper end of bandwidth (before you get into discounts for big buying), you'd be looking at ballpark £0.80 per GB or US$1.20. So US$100 buys you enough to run over 2.5 million torrent files / peers. (I've allowed a generous 10% overhead on data transmitted to account for routing layers, dropped packets, etc.). The pirate bay were pulling in US$65,000 per month. Run 5x 500W servers in full usage without monitors on 24/7 for a month and at UK industrial cost electricity and you're looking at about £150 per month or about US$220. Now you have to add on other costs like cooling, etc. But we can do 250million peers for under US$14,000 per month. See? This is ballpark of course, how can we do anything else without actual figures and costs, but it gives you some idea what we're talking about. So don't just randomly say to people online that they don't have any idea when you don't bring anything even slightly resembling a fact to the discussion.
It's worth noting (not in contradiction to your post, but complimenting it), that the existence of copyright law doesn't prevent anyone from releasing their work under a different model. I often see people here insisting how a new business model is better and more profitable, whilst ignoring that if this is the case, people are free to use that model right now without any change to the law.
Well they could easily show it if it were true. Apparently they pulled down nearly US$65,000 per month. If all you're doing is handing out teeny-little torrent files and running basic text searches, your bandwidth and server costs aren't going to be very much in relation. They actually did try and demonstrate in court that they weren't making money. But they failed. Given the ineptness of the prosecution against them, the usually thorough nature of the Swedish courts and my own knowledge of running costs for servers and bandwidth, I'm thinking that failure was the correct outcome.
Most of the people I know, excepting only old people and a few others, pirate some form of media. Almost without exception they consider what they are doing to be "wrong" and admit that they will use piracy as an alternative to purchasing. It's only on a few odd places online, such as Slashdot, that I find all these people who are morally indignant that what they do should be considered wrong, or put themselves through such hideous logical contortions to justify their behaviour. The nearest thing to it I know, is watching fundamentalists trying to rationalise dinosaurs.
Of course not - that's no longer a buzzword. Honestly - most of the academics in this field couldn't predict the next big thing until eight months *after* it hit. They run around latching onto any buzzword and then dressing it up in fancy language to research bodies and (if they're lucky) a national newspaper and trying to make themselves sound up to date. There are few things sadder to see than people whose job depends on trying to sound cutting edge.
Some academics are quite good at seeing which way things are going early on, of course. But they're not the same academics who make a living out of talking about it, they're the academics who are just aware of how things are because they're actually involved in producing new technologies. The rest are just parasites - narrating without contributing.
Ah, good insight. It's not like me to not look for the cynical angle first. Well at least Amazon are something I know what they are doing and I can (just about) opt in or out of it. Back on the subject of Phorm, I just created a graph of their share price over the last twelve months which makes for some amusing viewing. I wonder how that's affected their balance sheet?
Well this is a good PR move on the part of Amazon as far as I'm concerned. Cancels out their "censorship" glitch from the other day and puts them back in a healthy credit again. Obviously keeping an eye out as always for loopholes such as allowing a different company to do the same as Phorm on their site, but currently Amazon is getting points from me for this. I despise Phorm. But apparently Phrom haven't been doing that well anyway. There was a bit of an exodus from their board a while back and I heard their shareprice took a bit of a whack after the original scandal. The EU investigating what the UK government refused to has just added to their woes, I'm guessing.
Nice. :D
A number of your counter-points stem from failing to understand what I wrote. For example:
You posted a link to a poll in the Telegraph (the UK government's most obedient paper, by the way) which said 1% of muslims in the UK "had a sympathy for the feelings and motives of the July 7 bombers". You then said this accounted for your "millions and millions" of muslims that supported terrorism. Dealing with the numbers first, if your 1% accounts for millions and millions (which has to be at least four million), then 100% of muslims in Britain must equal 4m multiplied by 100 which gives 400million muslims in Britain. Do you see how your hyperbole results in absurdities? There are only about 70 million in the UK in total. I'm sorry that you feel mathematics is "childish nonsense" but most here on Slashdot don't. So either use numbers that make sense or admit that your opinion isn't backed up by actual statistics.
Again with a strawman - proposing that I need hard numbers to make a case and then shouting that I don't have them. I'm not making any case that requires backing up with statistics. I'm proving that you don't have a statistical basis for your opinion. Do I concede that your Googled up poll contains hard numbers? Well the Telegraph is a dreadfully biased paper which is far from above distorting statistics, but in any case, these "hard numbers" don't actually solve the problems in your argument whether they are trustworthy or not. Aside from all the problems of you taking reported opinions from a small number of people in one country about one incident where you decide "sympathy for the feelings" of the perpetrators and then extrapolating it to what over 1.5 billion people from different countries feel about many, many incidents in different countries, circumstances against different targets (military, civilian) and deciding that "sympathy" translates to "supporting terrorism"... Aside from all the problems with that use of "hard numbers", problems that are obvious to everyone but you who need them not to be for your argument to work, aside from all that... the maths, as I demonstrated at the beginning, would mean that there were 400million muslims in Britain. Nearly a third of the World's muslim population live in the UK? Now there's a shock!
:D
If you want more flaws in your mathematics, let me take you back to your very first post which provoked me to call you on your "statistics". You said that "Millions out of 1.5 billion or whatever is a small percentage, sure..." So millions. What, the four million you seem to think counts? Four million out of 1.5 billion is 0.26%. Have you got that? Less than a third of a percent! That's about a fifth of the prevalence of Schizophrenia in humans. It makes more sense to stereotype White people as schizophrenic than muslims supporting terrorism by your numbers. Are you really sure this is what you want to be proving with your "hard numbers".
With pleasure - I asked if you could give a tight definition of terrorism and you agreed you could not. Furthermore, you completely failed to give any useful definition at all. So again I'll ask you, now that you admit you can't tightly define terrorism, how you can state what people do and don't support. If you can't or wont distinguish between Hindu extremists blowing up a mosque in India to Palestinians shooting Israeli soldiers in Gaza to the attacks of 9/11, then why do you expect anyone to be convinced of your arguments? Go to Iraq,
And yet you don't provide an argument based on hard numbers and respond to my point that you haven't by saying I haven't provided hard numbers. The counter to someone pointing out you haven't supported your case with any actual numbers is not to point out that someone else hasn't either (especially when they weren't trying to make a case at all), but to provide those hard numbers. Something which you have singularly failed to do. You gave your opinion and ignored factors which would undermine that opinion. You compensate by pretending that I am claiming some statistical validity and saying that it's flawed. I'm not claiming proof. I'm demonstrating that (a) your opinion isn't supported by any numbers you have provided us and (b) you ignored important factors that would likely undermine your opinion. Without addressing these, there is no reason people should accept your statements about militant islam's prevalence.
Again - the strawman that I was arguing which countries were what. Your complete ignoring of these very major factors renders your conclusions useless. You need to address them to be convincing.
Which is what I just said you couldn't. I'm glad you concede this. Now given that you can't define terrorism, tell me how you are able to talk authoritatively about how many people support terrorism when none of us know whether you are talking about attacks on US soil by foreign agents, attacks in foreign countries by militant forces against military targets (which the US government calls terrorism), whether we're including Palestine, Iraq, Israeli operations in Lebanon when they targeted power stations and scattered unexploded cluster bombs across large agricultural areas of the country, anti-government actions in Pakistan, Hindu-extremist strikes on Mosques in India, club-bombings in Bali. Massively different situations in far apart countries that many who support or disapprove of one set might feel very differently about another set. For example, the previously mentioned many Iraqi's that might support driving US troops out of their homeland but not condone actions such as 9/11. If you admit you can't define your terms, then admit that you can't support your argument. Else go back and define your terms. I don't think you'll be able to and still support your opinion.
Your 1% of British muslims (quoted from a very biased British paper, but anyway) being "larger than millions and millions" is even worse statistics than your previous post. If 1% of British muslims is more than 4 million (the smallest possible interpretation of your excited "millions and millions"), then that makes 400 million British muslims in total. You do realise that the population of the UK is only about 70 million (less than a quarter the number of muslims you think live here) and that the population is about 91% White (Whites are very predominantly not muslim). Do you see now why we shouldn't trust your opinions without your backing them up with actual statistics (which don't exist because it's so difficult to account for other factors).
Dubious, dubious statistics. Firstly, atheists are a minority at the current time, world wide so even if the percentage of atheists that were "militant" were the same as amongst muslims, you'd still be able to point out that there were more of the religious type. It's a non-scientific argument. Secondly you have to control for other factors. How well does atheism correlate with rich populations enjoying periods of peace compared to poor populations under non-democratic rule and / or recent or ongoing periods of conflict? How are these correlations for Islam?
Regarding the percentage of muslims that "support, rationalize, and defend their [terrorists] behavior", I'm going to have to ask for both citations and tight definitions of terrorism. The US government calls every act of violence against US troops in Iraq an act by "terrorist" forces. Do many Iraqi's support driving the invading US troops out of Iraq? Yes. Did those same people support the attack on the World Trade Centre by a group that had nothing to do with them? Predominantly not, I would make an educated guess at. So you really need to define what you're talking about when you say terrorism, because the USA and UK governments have used the word in all sorts of inventive ways over the last eight years.
In practice, the pressure in a community can force people to go along with sharia law even though it is far from in their best interests. This is principally for women in divorce cases, adultery cases, domestic abuse cases and basically anything where a woman is facing a man in the court. The UK government has washed its hands of this and made it much harder for women in Islamic communities in the UK.