One of my clients is a television network... public television, but a television network nonetheless. He said they've been working within their own group and with a couple of other, larger, non-public networks to deliver television content via web. They see it as competition for the market.
During the day, you've got soaps, kids programming, and infomercials. What if you could simultaneously offer content for everyone else (not that I couldn't spend my days watching Days of Our Lives and Dora the Explorer, but I choose not to)? Or always having educational programs for schools available?
I'd love the ability to pull up my favorite show (which I missed because I was [on the road|working|watching something else|whatever]) at anytime. Without needing a PVR and without worrying about some broadcast flag...
Ok, let's avoid your off-topic claims that my argument hinges on you and me personally involved in the scenario.
Person A invents something using his or her own money, time, and talent. Person A then offers that for sale. Person B finds a way to obtain that without paying for it, but also without depriving anyone of any physical asset. Person A was not compensated for the access, use, or enjoyment of the invention.
This is wrong because Person A relies on income from that invention. Person B has lessened the value of Person A's invention.
Do you not understand this, or are you simply being a devil's advocate? I have a hard time believing that someone who functions in society can really think there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of the creators out there.
As for the claims regarding free advertising, I already said (but you ignored) the fact that increases in sales are not necessarily related to increased downloading. Correlation is not causation and all that.
Finally, what you're still not understanding is that piracy is wrong even if it hurts nobody.
Referring to a "you" is the same as referring to "a given person" or whatever. You're way off-base by claiming my argument is name-calling.
If I spend time, money, and talent to create a song, you have absolutely no right to take that from me without my permission. That's the point.
Free advertisement doesn't mean anything if it doesn't improve sales. Do you download the entire CD before you buy it? Do you buy every CD you download?
Radio is free advertising (free to consumers). Videos are free advertising (again, to consumers). They produce quantifiable sales. Downloading doesn't.
So what if ales are growing? That doesn't have anything to do with piracy being right or wrong.
The courts have no problem identifying potential revenue lost from slander or libel; the courts also have no problem recognizing potential revenue lost from corporate espionage.
In this case, you are breaking a law (it is a crime in some places) or you are ignoring the Constitutional protections afforded to the folks that produced it. I don't believe for a minute that everyone (or even a large percentage) of the folks that pirate music wouldn't have actually bought it if it weren't available for free online. How many albums did singer xxxxxxxx sell? If online piracy weren't available, I believe that number would certainly have been up.
Copyright infringement is more serious than you realize. Your ignorance doesn't excuse you, but it means that you're short on "real world understanding." There are folks trying to earn a living by creating something useful or enjoyable to the rest of the world. In the rare event that they succeed in creating a marketable product (a song, an art piece, software, etc.) it is a terrible pity that you believe the rest of the world should just take it for free because it won't cost anyone anything.
I know very few people who still buy music. Everyone I know downloads it for free. The occasional CD purchases I make (or that my friends make) are from artists that we really support. Even then, those are few and far between.
Did you pay for it? No. Do you now have it? Yes. Did you take it without permission? Yes.
Sounds like a textbook case to me.
You can justify your crime all you want, but it still boils down to your decision to deprive someone of potential earnings. They can only afford to create that product (that you pirated) because of the potential to recover their investment.
It's one thing to not understand this. It's another thing to take issue with the word "theft" simply because you're not physically depriving anyone of anything. It's yet another to understand all of this and still believe that you're not doing anything wrong.
Yeah, and we could use a meta-dupe-checking group to ensure that the dupe-checkers were honestly and accurately checking for duplicates. And it would be a real success, just like the other checks and balances here on Slashdot!
I've thought long and hard about that. When the time comes for me to hire and manage my own employees, I'd like to be a "good" boss. I've worked for employers that made me want to keep working there (even though the pay was crappy) and employers that made me want to purchase explosives (even though the pay wasn't that bad).
It's hard, but a decent manager should be able to identify when an employee is no longer motivated and find ways to improve the situation - without having anyone take advantage of him.
My uncle, also a business owner, says that it's important to "pay yourself first." While I understand the meaning, I also think it's important to make sure your employees are happy to work for you. Happy employees work harder. Happy employees are less likely to stab you in the back. In the end, you make more money - not because you withheld it from the employees, but because your employees made it for you. There are plenty of companies out there that succeed in these respects - Google and Pixar are two that come to mind. On the other hand, there are plenty of similar companies that fail.
I spent a long time making suggestions, trying to improve it, and finally just bitching about the situation to my bosses and co-workers. At some point, I realized that it was up to me to improve it. I'm sure part of that was contentedness; my bosses were the only two partners in the company and one was close to retirement. He didn't care if things improved. I don't ever want to create the environment where my employees need to complain or feel that things cannot improve. I've not had the opportunity to be a real-world manager before; I'm naive and idealistic, but having been on the bad end of things I hope I can extend this not-so-enjoyable lesson to my own employees one day.
I just started my own company, directly competing with my previous employer. I spent nearly eight months on their payroll while I began up my own business and sought projects of my own. Here's what I learned:
1. Don't stab anyone in the back (burned bridges, insert your favorite cliche). It can come back to hurt you.
2. Don't give your bosses a reason to be unhappy with you. Work just as hard - or harder. If you're valuable to the company, leaving them will be more painful (and can produce a more profitable situation for you).
3. Encrypt every email, instant message, and web transaction that deals with your activities. Don't assume anything is safe unless you're actively doing something to ensure its security or you can verify it easily (SSL, for instance).
4. Regularly scan your machine for viruses and spyware. Use a packet sniffer to see if you're sending anything unexpected. Look through your machine to see if there are programs installed that shouldn't be there... is your company spying on you?
5. Don't use their phones. Upgrade your damn cell plan and use that.
6. Take advantage of non-company resources for communication and whatnot. Find a decent webmail provider with SSL enabled.
7. Make sure any contract or agreement you signed isn't going to come back to bite you. If you signed a non-compete agreement or whatever, don't assume it's invalid or that they won't pursue it. See a lawyer BEFORE you have legal troubles in this area.
As others have complained, there are loyalty problems in this country. I used to love my job, love my work, and love the company. Some things changed, and while I still love the work I no longer enjoyed anything about the company. Many attempts to change it from within failed. When your boss is taking advantage of you, you need to re-evaluate. When you're stuck in a dead-end, you need to re-evaluate. When you get the line, "if you don't like it, then find somewhere else to work," the time for re-evaluation has passed and it's time to end that part of your life.
Employers aren't loyal to employees any more than we are to them. I heard stories of pre-1980s-boom-and-crash Japan, where a failing company's president would give everything he had back into the company to keep it going as long as possible...and if it wouldn't work, he'd split the cash from his shares, pay, etc. among the employees. This was in return for the lifetime loyalty you gave to the company.
According to a lot of sources, The Bible is the most frequently stolen book (followed by "The Joy of Sex").
I understand what you're saying, though. It's not entirely unlike telling your name to your kidnapper or a mugger. If they see you as a human being or have even the remotest sympathy for your situation, it reduces your chances of being physically harmed.
Of course, churches get robbed anyway. So while it might work on some would-be criminals, it certainly wouldn't deter everyone.
If it comes into my system without my permission, it's a bad thing. I don't care if it's coming with good intentions or not, any kind of unauthorized access is unacceptable.
As others have pointed out, patching isn't always something you should do right away. In any enterprise system, you should be testing the patches and updates before you deploy them to your users. For instance, many of us wait to see if Service Pack 2 is stable before installing it. I haven't put it on my own machine yet (partly for fear of instability and partly out of laziness). If a worm came around that forced users to upgrade to SP2 right after it was released, that could be a very bad thing.
I agree that software copyrights and patents are excessively long... the lifespan of usefulness of a book or a painting is much longer than that of code. For almost as long as I've understood the problem, I've believed that the solution is not to abandon protections but to shorten them for certain works.
I think that information is valuable because it's not readily available. Think of how long you spend learning and perfecting a craft. Should you be forced to share that for free? Your education, your personal talents, and developed abilities are valuable because they are indeed rare. Information is not limited in the same way as resources, but the expense - in money, time, and personal dedication - of gaining that information is just as scarce as any given resource.
Stop thinking along the lines of small programs and start thinking about software packages that require many people and many months of work to create. What should those programmers, artists, and musicians do to earn money? How do they pay their bills for the next two years while they create the next blockbuster game title?
Copyrights protect the creator, whether you like it or not. The music industry, evil though it may have become, is designed as a way to ensure that poor artists can get their work heard and make some money from it. Simplified: To do that, they get a loan from the music company. In exchange, the music company does everything it can to recoup expenses and turn a profit. If they didn't have copyright laws to protect their investments, we wouldn't get such great music; even though there would be dedicated folks still creating music, you wouldn't hear it because it would be too expensive to record, produce, and distribute the music. And not a single one would do it anyway, because nobody would buy it (it's free, remember?).
Haven't you seen the thousands of open source projects that live on donations alone? How many of those programmers pay their bills on the money they get in their PayPal donations?
People make money by advertising, by selling products, and by selling their services. Information is guarded because it's valuable.
In the meantime, consider the "artificial monopoly" that keeps millions of folks in business. We're not talking about millionaires, we're talking about everyday programmers that need to feed their families and pay their bills.
The business plan - relying on licensing and copyright protection - is the most viable one for major software projects. You simply can't produce works like...say, Doom 3, without having the ability to pay all those folks for their work. They won't do it for free because they can't afford to live for three or four years on their savings alone. And after that, they're not going to give it away for free (because they just spent all that time and money of their own, and now they have to pay their bills).
Just because you don't want to pay for the software doesn't mean you have a right to steal it.
To get some real-world experience, try getting a job in a department with those kinds of needs - but not explicit in your job description. That is, try being a sysadmin or network support guy somewhere. A larger company, a University, etc. The company I'm leaving is a small business with three dedicated web and database servers. This has allowed me to play the role of web and network security administrator, even though my job was originally completely unrelated to that. With a small business, you get to wear a lot of hats - giving you a chance to learn alot and get some real world experience.
After you get some of that experience, you'll have a better feel of where you want to go with it (and an easier time getting there).
The last time my XP machine needed a reboot was when I had to apply a Window update that required a restart. Now that I think about it, that's really the only time I ever need a reboot - an update or an install.
I dual boot at home, so I rarely leave it on long enough to see any comparisons between Linux, Win2k and XP.
You're being too sensitive. The word's context is that of a quote (read the article). There is no racist usage of the word except from the quote in the story - a phenomenal writing about a game, by the way.
...just put them all in an Excel spreadsheet, keep a copy printed out and stored in your filing cabinet under a folder labeled "Passwords" and don't lock the cabinet.
I gave my two weeks' notice and this was the first thing my bosses wanted me to do: write down all the passwords for them so they could keep everything on file.
You see, Mr Incredible is running through the forest because he doesn't want to get caught. Watch him hit this spin move right there (scribbles line on screen) - and when the henchmen try to close the gap (marks an X on henchman's forehead) he cuts back and completely dodges their tackle. (unrelated doodle) I wish I had him on my team when I was coaching. (play-by-play announcer slaps forehead and shakes his head)
They don't spend anything on CDs. They just wait until they've gotten enough of 'em in the mail and then send them out again. Or they stop by Wal-mart and pick up a handful.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my clients is a television network... public television, but a television network nonetheless. He said they've been working within their own group and with a couple of other, larger, non-public networks to deliver television content via web. They see it as competition for the market.
During the day, you've got soaps, kids programming, and infomercials. What if you could simultaneously offer content for everyone else (not that I couldn't spend my days watching Days of Our Lives and Dora the Explorer, but I choose not to)? Or always having educational programs for schools available?
I'd love the ability to pull up my favorite show (which I missed because I was [on the road|working|watching something else|whatever]) at anytime. Without needing a PVR and without worrying about some broadcast flag...
Ok, let's avoid your off-topic claims that my argument hinges on you and me personally involved in the scenario.
Person A invents something using his or her own money, time, and talent. Person A then offers that for sale.
Person B finds a way to obtain that without paying for it, but also without depriving anyone of any physical asset. Person A was not compensated for the access, use, or enjoyment of the invention.
This is wrong because Person A relies on income from that invention. Person B has lessened the value of Person A's invention.
Do you not understand this, or are you simply being a devil's advocate? I have a hard time believing that someone who functions in society can really think there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of the creators out there.
As for the claims regarding free advertising, I already said (but you ignored) the fact that increases in sales are not necessarily related to increased downloading. Correlation is not causation and all that.
Finally, what you're still not understanding is that piracy is wrong even if it hurts nobody.
Referring to a "you" is the same as referring to "a given person" or whatever. You're way off-base by claiming my argument is name-calling.
If I spend time, money, and talent to create a song, you have absolutely no right to take that from me without my permission. That's the point.
Free advertisement doesn't mean anything if it doesn't improve sales. Do you download the entire CD before you buy it? Do you buy every CD you download?
Radio is free advertising (free to consumers). Videos are free advertising (again, to consumers). They produce quantifiable sales. Downloading doesn't.
So what if ales are growing? That doesn't have anything to do with piracy being right or wrong.
...you shouldn't do drugs.
Since when did Slashdot start mimicking Hunter S. Thompson?
The courts have no problem identifying potential revenue lost from slander or libel; the courts also have no problem recognizing potential revenue lost from corporate espionage.
In this case, you are breaking a law (it is a crime in some places) or you are ignoring the Constitutional protections afforded to the folks that produced it. I don't believe for a minute that everyone (or even a large percentage) of the folks that pirate music wouldn't have actually bought it if it weren't available for free online. How many albums did singer xxxxxxxx sell? If online piracy weren't available, I believe that number would certainly have been up.
Copyright infringement is more serious than you realize. Your ignorance doesn't excuse you, but it means that you're short on "real world understanding." There are folks trying to earn a living by creating something useful or enjoyable to the rest of the world. In the rare event that they succeed in creating a marketable product (a song, an art piece, software, etc.) it is a terrible pity that you believe the rest of the world should just take it for free because it won't cost anyone anything.
I know very few people who still buy music. Everyone I know downloads it for free. The occasional CD purchases I make (or that my friends make) are from artists that we really support. Even then, those are few and far between.
Did you pay for it? No.
Do you now have it? Yes.
Did you take it without permission? Yes.
Sounds like a textbook case to me.
You can justify your crime all you want, but it still boils down to your decision to deprive someone of potential earnings. They can only afford to create that product (that you pirated) because of the potential to recover their investment.
It's one thing to not understand this. It's another thing to take issue with the word "theft" simply because you're not physically depriving anyone of anything. It's yet another to understand all of this and still believe that you're not doing anything wrong.
Yeah, and we could use a meta-dupe-checking group to ensure that the dupe-checkers were honestly and accurately checking for duplicates. And it would be a real success, just like the other checks and balances here on Slashdot!
I've thought long and hard about that. When the time comes for me to hire and manage my own employees, I'd like to be a "good" boss. I've worked for employers that made me want to keep working there (even though the pay was crappy) and employers that made me want to purchase explosives (even though the pay wasn't that bad).
It's hard, but a decent manager should be able to identify when an employee is no longer motivated and find ways to improve the situation - without having anyone take advantage of him.
My uncle, also a business owner, says that it's important to "pay yourself first." While I understand the meaning, I also think it's important to make sure your employees are happy to work for you. Happy employees work harder. Happy employees are less likely to stab you in the back. In the end, you make more money - not because you withheld it from the employees, but because your employees made it for you. There are plenty of companies out there that succeed in these respects - Google and Pixar are two that come to mind. On the other hand, there are plenty of similar companies that fail.
I spent a long time making suggestions, trying to improve it, and finally just bitching about the situation to my bosses and co-workers. At some point, I realized that it was up to me to improve it. I'm sure part of that was contentedness; my bosses were the only two partners in the company and one was close to retirement. He didn't care if things improved. I don't ever want to create the environment where my employees need to complain or feel that things cannot improve. I've not had the opportunity to be a real-world manager before; I'm naive and idealistic, but having been on the bad end of things I hope I can extend this not-so-enjoyable lesson to my own employees one day.
I just started my own company, directly competing with my previous employer. I spent nearly eight months on their payroll while I began up my own business and sought projects of my own. Here's what I learned:
1. Don't stab anyone in the back (burned bridges, insert your favorite cliche). It can come back to hurt you.
2. Don't give your bosses a reason to be unhappy with you. Work just as hard - or harder. If you're valuable to the company, leaving them will be more painful (and can produce a more profitable situation for you).
3. Encrypt every email, instant message, and web transaction that deals with your activities. Don't assume anything is safe unless you're actively doing something to ensure its security or you can verify it easily (SSL, for instance).
4. Regularly scan your machine for viruses and spyware. Use a packet sniffer to see if you're sending anything unexpected. Look through your machine to see if there are programs installed that shouldn't be there... is your company spying on you?
5. Don't use their phones. Upgrade your damn cell plan and use that.
6. Take advantage of non-company resources for communication and whatnot. Find a decent webmail provider with SSL enabled.
7. Make sure any contract or agreement you signed isn't going to come back to bite you. If you signed a non-compete agreement or whatever, don't assume it's invalid or that they won't pursue it. See a lawyer BEFORE you have legal troubles in this area.
As others have complained, there are loyalty problems in this country. I used to love my job, love my work, and love the company. Some things changed, and while I still love the work I no longer enjoyed anything about the company. Many attempts to change it from within failed. When your boss is taking advantage of you, you need to re-evaluate. When you're stuck in a dead-end, you need to re-evaluate. When you get the line, "if you don't like it, then find somewhere else to work," the time for re-evaluation has passed and it's time to end that part of your life.
Employers aren't loyal to employees any more than we are to them. I heard stories of pre-1980s-boom-and-crash Japan, where a failing company's president would give everything he had back into the company to keep it going as long as possible...and if it wouldn't work, he'd split the cash from his shares, pay, etc. among the employees. This was in return for the lifetime loyalty you gave to the company.
According to a lot of sources, The Bible is the most frequently stolen book (followed by "The Joy of Sex").
I understand what you're saying, though. It's not entirely unlike telling your name to your kidnapper or a mugger. If they see you as a human being or have even the remotest sympathy for your situation, it reduces your chances of being physically harmed.
Of course, churches get robbed anyway. So while it might work on some would-be criminals, it certainly wouldn't deter everyone.
If it comes into my system without my permission, it's a bad thing. I don't care if it's coming with good intentions or not, any kind of unauthorized access is unacceptable.
As others have pointed out, patching isn't always something you should do right away. In any enterprise system, you should be testing the patches and updates before you deploy them to your users. For instance, many of us wait to see if Service Pack 2 is stable before installing it. I haven't put it on my own machine yet (partly for fear of instability and partly out of laziness). If a worm came around that forced users to upgrade to SP2 right after it was released, that could be a very bad thing.
I agree that software copyrights and patents are excessively long... the lifespan of usefulness of a book or a painting is much longer than that of code. For almost as long as I've understood the problem, I've believed that the solution is not to abandon protections but to shorten them for certain works.
I think that information is valuable because it's not readily available. Think of how long you spend learning and perfecting a craft. Should you be forced to share that for free? Your education, your personal talents, and developed abilities are valuable because they are indeed rare. Information is not limited in the same way as resources, but the expense - in money, time, and personal dedication - of gaining that information is just as scarce as any given resource.
So that's the missing step..
1. Put ads on your site.
2. Trick millions of folks into visiting.
3. Profit.
Stop thinking along the lines of small programs and start thinking about software packages that require many people and many months of work to create. What should those programmers, artists, and musicians do to earn money? How do they pay their bills for the next two years while they create the next blockbuster game title?
Copyrights protect the creator, whether you like it or not. The music industry, evil though it may have become, is designed as a way to ensure that poor artists can get their work heard and make some money from it. Simplified: To do that, they get a loan from the music company. In exchange, the music company does everything it can to recoup expenses and turn a profit. If they didn't have copyright laws to protect their investments, we wouldn't get such great music; even though there would be dedicated folks still creating music, you wouldn't hear it because it would be too expensive to record, produce, and distribute the music. And not a single one would do it anyway, because nobody would buy it (it's free, remember?).
Haven't you seen the thousands of open source projects that live on donations alone? How many of those programmers pay their bills on the money they get in their PayPal donations?
People make money by advertising, by selling products, and by selling their services. Information is guarded because it's valuable.
Your troll has been duly noted.
In the meantime, consider the "artificial monopoly" that keeps millions of folks in business. We're not talking about millionaires, we're talking about everyday programmers that need to feed their families and pay their bills.
The business plan - relying on licensing and copyright protection - is the most viable one for major software projects. You simply can't produce works like...say, Doom 3, without having the ability to pay all those folks for their work. They won't do it for free because they can't afford to live for three or four years on their savings alone. And after that, they're not going to give it away for free (because they just spent all that time and money of their own, and now they have to pay their bills).
Just because you don't want to pay for the software doesn't mean you have a right to steal it.
FoxTrot had a comic today along those lines...
I appreciate that.
Never had a virus, trojan, or successful compromise of any of our servers, data, or sites.
To get some real-world experience, try getting a job in a department with those kinds of needs - but not explicit in your job description. That is, try being a sysadmin or network support guy somewhere. A larger company, a University, etc. The company I'm leaving is a small business with three dedicated web and database servers. This has allowed me to play the role of web and network security administrator, even though my job was originally completely unrelated to that. With a small business, you get to wear a lot of hats - giving you a chance to learn alot and get some real world experience.
After you get some of that experience, you'll have a better feel of where you want to go with it (and an easier time getting there).
The last time my XP machine needed a reboot was when I had to apply a Window update that required a restart. Now that I think about it, that's really the only time I ever need a reboot - an update or an install.
I dual boot at home, so I rarely leave it on long enough to see any comparisons between Linux, Win2k and XP.
There's wasabi involved.
Steves quote...
Or lack thereof...
You're being too sensitive. The word's context is that of a quote (read the article). There is no racist usage of the word except from the quote in the story - a phenomenal writing about a game, by the way.
...just put them all in an Excel spreadsheet, keep a copy printed out and stored in your filing cabinet under a folder labeled "Passwords" and don't lock the cabinet.
I gave my two weeks' notice and this was the first thing my bosses wanted me to do: write down all the passwords for them so they could keep everything on file.
Fantastic.
Imagine it in a John Madden voice:
You see, Mr Incredible is running through the forest because he doesn't want to get caught. Watch him hit this spin move right there (scribbles line on screen) - and when the henchmen try to close the gap (marks an X on henchman's forehead) he cuts back and completely dodges their tackle. (unrelated doodle) I wish I had him on my team when I was coaching. (play-by-play announcer slaps forehead and shakes his head)
They don't spend anything on CDs. They just wait until they've gotten enough of 'em in the mail and then send them out again. Or they stop by Wal-mart and pick up a handful.