Murrow and many others, myself included, respectfully disagree. We're human beings. We have points of view. If the news were restricted purely to reporting and not editorial, then we'd be in a very sad state of affairs never being presented with anything to think critically about. It would be like the world in "The Invention of Lying" where every film is just some guy reading passages in history books.
I'm not encouraging sensationalist journalism either. The Murrow school of thought tends to be this: Have a point of view, of course... but be prepared to analyze and defend it.
This doesn't mean two pundits talking at each other for thirty minutes without any facts to back up their assertions. This means doing one's homework, creating a thesis and supporting arguments for it. That's much of what journalism is... or was, anyway, before blogs came along and replaced journalism with regurgitation of the slightest blurb every hour of the day to increase pageviews.
Another reason I discourage just leaving "the fresh thoughts to the readers" is the lack of editorial guidance on the web. Blogs are often staffed by people who work for next to nothing, or nothing, because ad revenue doesn't pay nearly as much as people like to believe it does. So you might have a handful of paid staff, then fifty other "contributors" whose work gets published round the clock, with zero time allotted for editorial guidance to determine newsworthiness, accuracy and, in opinion pieces, solidity of the writer's argument.
Readers still have a responsibility of determining for themselves whether or not they think the writer justified his or her opinions, but writers have a responsibility that shouldn't be abdicated just because of a 24/7 news cycle (thanks a lot, CNN) or the supposedly interactive nature of the web where you can find websites with meaninglessly high global rankings, yet whose readers never actually dig beyond a headline—evidenced by time-on-site/time-on-page analytics.
But seriously, folks. I know we're all a bunch of geeks here, myself included. But the truth is that it's not the CPU market that's changing. It's the nature of computing itself that is changing. Devices that can be called computing platforms are varied in size, function, and resources. An iPhone is essentially a mobile computing platform, but people wouldn't call it a "computer" in the conventional sense of the word because "computing" is an activity that has moved so far into the background, behind what the end user wants to actually accomplish with said device.
Likewise, CPU speed and number of cores don't give anyone, let alone the average consumer, a universal standard of performance... by this I mean even the geek cannot assume on CPU speed or cores in and of themselves how a device will fare to other devices with different architectures, operating systems, background applications and so on.
Why does the OP say "our rights" when Google was ostensibly not defending "our rights"... but rather their rights. And even then, what rights of ours would those be? Does he believe we have a right to redistribute the works of others?
Anyone remember the Nokia 8860? When Nokia was moving toward internal antenna design, this flagship model that originally cost $1000 was a sleek-looking slider. Actually it was a piece of crap. The rolling ball contacts on the slider routinely wore out their springs. This would disengage the mouthpiece/microphone. The slider piece was terrible. The "chrome" was a coat of paint over plastic. The antenna, they warned, shouldn't be covered with your hand. Why? Because it would drain the battery (due to no advanced kind of power management) and drop calls.
Within six months this phone, which did nothing special other than break, was reduced to $250 (still more than the iPhone). Within one year, it was discontinued. It was Nokia's "flagship" phone... and hey, at $1000 they were generous enough to throw in a "rapid charger"... how nice of them.
this statement "they don't really need an excuse" is a straw man argument.
Do they need an excuse to waste their own money? No. To be successful in convincing all of Congress? Yes. Evidence helps build their case for just how far they can twist the law.
Anything can motivate you to come after me for wearing hotpants, but can you convince an entire legislative body on your personal beliefs alone that it's worth banning hotpants over?
Do you remember the 1980's? I do. RIAA wasn't on a warpath until internet distribution came along. They'd been fighting commercial piracy up to that point, but never really heavily pursuing noncommercial piracy until internet distribution became a reality.
It's not like the figures were that much worse. The whole motivation has been to try to slow down the adoption of ALL internet distribution, including legitimate supply-and-demand.
Record labels didn't understand DRM, much less digital distribution at all, in the mid-90's. But if doing nothing, in your opinion, is enough ammunition for them, then what do you think engaging in piracy will do? Yes, that's right... by your own argument, any marginal excuse would only INCREASE their ammunition against internet distribution as a whole medium from whatever is already driving it (again, obsolescence not piracy).
The rate of decline of CD sales owes more to a shift in purchasing habits than it does nonpurchasing habits. The growth rate of piracy cannot alone account for the LARGE double-digit declines in CD sales.
What scares them to death is the idea that the record company doesn't even need to exist... and decimating their entire repertoire (catalogue) is a vastly bigger threat to their bottom line, quite obviously, than a couple billion dollars in lost sales to piracy.
Think about it! A shrewd businessman would embrace the net and figure out a way to be the dominant force... UNLESS there were no way for him to compete effectively in that space against what catalogues others had to offer.
How can Warner Bros. possibly maintain its margins and continue to satisfy shareholders if it's losing major breadwinners to LiveNation, which is totally transforming the way the business is run... 360 contracts and the like.
To think that this has something to do with a perverse need to shut down Grandma Millie's downloading operation of a few hundred songs is to ridiculously overestimate an individual's importance relative to the PAYING market, the active revenue streams that are migrating to independent distro and multimedia 360 deals.
As an aggregate, though, consumers aren't heard through their shouts or misguided but well-intentioned grassroots operations like EFF and the Copyleft movement. If you're not a paying customer anyway, your opinions are worth spit to the record industry.
What IS making the difference is the total shift in distribution to where iTunes has become the dominant force, replacing all music retailers and discount chains (Best Buy, WalMart, etc.). The industry suddenly is paying attention because for years they didn't think this would amount to anything.
Also, let me let you in on a rather less-than-secret secret... I worked in internet security and we received hundreds of DMCA takedown requests and subpoenas each week. But you know what the common thread was? Not one of them was in pursuit of a downloader. That's right... the industry has very little legitimate means of pursuing downloaders. They're only effective at building cases against filesharers who host and distribute copies by the thousands.
But why would they spend $12 million to get a less than $400k return in damages? It's not because the filesharers are the ones actually depleting their revenue. It's because the entire model opens up artists to legitimate, independent distribution using the same kinds of technologies that the Napsters and BitTorrents and so on made available.
It's the fact that Madonna and several other multimillion dollar selling artists are leaving major labels for multimedia deals with LiveNation that give the artist a bigger stake while providing tour support and better multimedia promotion than the traditional labels have been providing. It's the fact that these giant artists migrating to internet distro will take hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars of revenue with them when they leave.
That far outweighs the figures for piracy, and the pithy revenue earned by the other 85%
It never was. Sidney Shemel and M. William Krasilovsky, two music industry attorneys, wrote the bible on the industry called This Business of Music. They observed the maturation of the CD format as an inevitability in the mid-1990's. I also wrote a paper about the coming internet distribution possibilities in 1996.
Piracy is a growing threat a continuing decline in their bottom line, but that isn't the overall concern. The overall concern is the inevitable obsolescence of record companies themselves. Digital distribution cuts out so many middlemen in the distro monopoly that's been in place since the 1940's. It's got the potential to eliminate entire A&R departments, distributors, subdistributors, rack jobbers, one stops... the "record club" is already practically obsolete (remember Columbia House?).
So, the industry is changing and these guys realize that the older conglomerates aren't small enough, agile enough, to possibly ever compete in the more diverse space of internet distro. They don't understand it. They can't dominate it. So, they're throwing lawyers at every granny and twelve year old not to stop the inevitable shift, but to slow it down.
The problem is that piracy only gives them more ammunition to send lobbyists after Congress to get more dumb legislation passed like the DMCA. The real response to this? People need to speak with their pocketbooks and show the economic viability of the legit distro models that work, that they like, whatever, by purchasing through those models.
That will send a message to the record labels and to the marketplace in general in the only language that they understand... "Cha-ching!"
Telco's aren't owned by the government, and they aren't the only method of communication available to you. If you want to "Charge" them, though, the easiest way to do so is to not use their networks. Using their networks means the creation of data that isn't otherwise created without signal traversing their equipment... You consent to that being their data by using their services.
There are departures from fiction, and there are departures from fact. The geocentric model of the universe was not arrived at through modern skeptical scientific inquiry.
But this issue goes much deeper. It's not just that they are removing references to the progress America has made intellectually, socially and culturally, but they are replacing these references with inferences of their own, alleging that America is a Christian nation, recognizing the accomplishments of pro-slavery confederates and rationalizing McCarthyism as justified by some of the results.
However, it's not liberal bias to say that America is not a Christian nation. It simply isn't. There is not a single reference to the words "god", "Bible", "Jesus", "Christian", "religion" or "Church" anywhere in the Articles of the Constitution, and the single reference to religion in the Bill of Rights is the Establishment Clause which prohibits Congress from enacting any law concerning religious institutions, Christianity being one of them. This isn't a liberally-biased viewpoint. It is a fact. Just like evolution is a fact. We can debate how precisely either occurred, but that they are is a fact.
The problem with certain appeals to emotion, such as the "equal time" argument is that all opinions and arguments aren't equal. Some views, such as Intelligent Design, have zero scientific merit whatsoever, at least in the manner in which their proponents have presented them.
I know that we live in the Age of Entitlement, but no... not all opinions are equal. Some are substantiated in fact far better than others.
Wait, so... usability, user experience, intuitiveness... basically all the reasons we use tools (to make the output of a task greater than the input required; i.e. to make our lives easier)...
These are all "non-issues"? I'm really interested to know what you define as an "issue," then.
Bias is ok, as long as one's opinions are well supported by fact.
While Apple is gaining ground this is just a poorly constructed summary, right down to using market capitalization as a metric for the strength of the company (see my post some lines below).
Market capitalization is essentially meaningless as a measure of a company's strength, i.e. it's ability to continue operations while also facilitating growth in a competitive environment.
All that market capitalization ever tells you is what some fool would pay to acquire the company whole at the current market price quotation.
It doesn't reflect what one should pay.
It doesn't reflect what the book value of the company is (Assets minus liabilities minus intangibles).
It doesn't reflect what the intrinsic value of the company is (book value plus discounted operating cash flows forward - i.e. a measure of its effectiveness as a cash generating engine).
It doesn't tell you anything about product presence, sales, operating income, debt load, or any other metric that has anything to do with the actual "strength" of a company.
Journalists need to stop referencing "market cap" as if it bears greater meaning than "The (typically) overinflated price only a sucker would pay."
Bad movies aren't so entertaining when they are engineered to be bad. They're hilarious when they're unintentionally funny. But some of them weren't funny at all. Ed Wood was damned serious about what he was doing, and his films are just grating to watch.
Also, this argument only works for the first of Lucas' original trilogy because the second and third were neither written nor directed by him. Both Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand had different ideas about elevating Star Wars from merely a bad imitation of terrible 1950s serial sci-fi to something else... and few fanboys will argue that Empire Strikes Back isn't the best of the entire sagaâ"for that very reason. It wasn't serious drama all the time, but it took itself seriously in the right places, and loosened up in the right places. The result is something engaging.
Speaking as one who was there... I fell asleep the first time I saw "Star Wars" in the theater 30 years ago, and fell asleep again when I saw it in 1997. I had watched it many times on video as a kid, but to go through in one sitting for two hours nonstop without a break is just agony.
One of the things that made Raiders of the Lost Ark, another Lucas concept, great was that it had the spirit of its predecessors but also established itself as something else, apart and above all the rest. Note that Larry Kasdan wrote both Raiders and Empire. These films exist in our culture not as propped up cardboard cutouts of a bygone era but as something entirely of their own.
It betrays a certain ignorance of cinematic history to think that Lucas' terrible dialogue was entirely an intentional nod to only the worst that the 1940's and 1950's had to offer, while failing to realize how much of Fred C. Dobbs is in both Han Solo and Indiana Jones,
I had the opportunity to interview writer/director Neill Blomkamp and Sharlto Copley, who plays Wikus van der Merwe. Here's the link to the interview and to the review I published this past week.
I think that Blomkamp will continue to impress us if he keeps focused on further developing the story and the characters in his future films. Is it a perfect film? No. Most sci-fi is far from the depths of where cinematic drama can reach, but this is a respectable start for a first time film director who was spared, I will say, of the critical failure that Halo is destined to become. As someone else mentioned, I've also followed Blomkamp's work from Tetra Vaal to his CitrÃen and VW ads, and the film short "Alive in Joburg" which I've linked in the interview page URL I've posted here.
Much has been made about the lens flares but it is possible for indoor scenes that the lens flares were natural. If there were numerous lighting sources (and consider the bridge is, in fact, very brightly lit) just above the rim of the lens, the Panavision 2.39:1 anamorphic optics naturally produce substantial flares that stretch horizontally.
It's a stylistic choice, and not necessarily a good one... but in the case of space there would actually be a hell of a lot of glare. If we are meant to be observers with a camera, the resulting glare from numerous bodies either directly emitting light or albedo would result in substantial haze and flares. The intensity of celestial light not occluded by an atmosphere is so great that astronauts in spacewalk wear helmets thinly anodized with 24k gold to avoid sunburn and blindness.
>> If you stop caring about the proper use of language, you will begin making the same mistakes yourself.
> Certainly. But who would notice?
I did. There shouldn't be a comma between "use of language" and "you will."
This is why I generally do not read critical reviews or news from blogs. Blogs generally lack a competent editorial staff to properly manage both the newsworthiness of content as well as the writing standards.
Yes, I know people have real money in Second Life. People have real money in online poker, too, but that doesn't make it a valid economy.
This is an important point. Gambling agreements are not enforceable according to The U.S. Code... and for good reason. In the case of virtual property, I would argue that verbal agreements are not enforceable. If a written agreement stood behind it, then I believe it would be enforceable to the extent that consideration, mutual assent, etc. were all present and to the extent that specific performance would be a tangible remedy to breach of contract.
[quote]Copyrights certainly do confer a monopoly on what's copyrighted.[/quote]
A key characteristic of a monopoly is the lack of, or willful institution by a company of barriers to entry to, viable substitutes.
In this way, your argument fails the litmus test of a "monopoly" definition twice.
1) There are sufficient independent, major, and minor record label alternatives to a given artist's work. The songs may not be identical but if you really want to argue that one grunge song doesn't provide the entertainment value equivalent to any other grunge song, then we're going to sit here all year arguing about the monopoly over 12 inch long, neon pink toilet scrubbers with black handles made in China on Thursdays.
2) Viable substitutes do exist. First, through the proliferation of performing rights societies which are independent of the record labels (e.g. ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, etc.) and protect the publishers' or artists' interests, mechanical license is fairly easy to obtain. The cost for mechanical license varies and, if the person who wishes to acquire said rights can't scrounge up the financing for mechanical license there is always compulsory license which is generally much cheaper to secure (I say generally because mechanical rights could be pretty cheap for an artist nobody has heard of... or wants to).
In both cases, copyright protections do not fit the definition of a monopoly.
[quote]Where does this idea of yours come from?[/quote]
Regarding intellectual property versus distribution? Chiefly from the fact that you seem to be unaware of the history of record distribution in the United States. Record distribution is in fact a monopoly. I've never disputed this and in fact I've argued for artists and consumers to take action against it. What you're claiming is that the federal recognition of the rights of a creator of a work, or rights of an owner of a work made for hire, have somehow led to the way things are at present. This is not true.
The present system involving labels, distributors, sub-distributors, rack jobbers, one stops, and to a lesser extent today the record clubs (e.g. Columbia House), arose largely because record distribution was an economy of scale from 1940-1996. Around 1996, things began to change significantly. The monopoly began to erode as viable alternative channels of global distribution emerged, namely through the internet. But copyright still exists. So how is copyright the problem? It isn't. Copyright still exists and yet we are seeing the beginning of a new era in which artists and consumers are conscientiously eliminating the middleman without intervention from government.
And again, compulsory and mechanical license still exist. As a photographer, I'm not certain that you have compulsory license. Then again, the nature of photography is vastly different... as the bulk of it consists of capturing imagery that exists in the world that may vary in specificity greatly, rather than creating an image from scratch of an unquestionably specific nature. In your case, the reason compulsory license is not required is because you cannot protect scene compositions that are extremely generic... say, a photograph of an apple in a bowl. Anyone can photograph an apple in a bowl and wouldn't in principle be violating an original idea. I know that this is not the only scenario when it comes to photographic duplication... but I'll get back to that in a minute...
Not anyone can record "Gimme Shelter" and claim that it is generic enough that anyone could have written its lyrics.
[quote]Nobody no where is guaranteed a return. All they are supposed to have is an opportunity.[/quote]
I'm glad you speak of "opportunity". To continue my train of thought from above... Likewise, no one has the right to take an exact copy of the specific images you have made and deprive you of the opportunity to profit from it OR elect of your own volition to allow it up as public domain. Remind me again, what is it you do for a paycheck?
Copyrights are not what grants record companies a monopoly. Free market economies of scale have done so, and now that centralized economies of scale are no longer required for global distribution (by no action whatsoever on the part of the government) that monopoly is eroding faster than if the government had broken it up.
There are no government-sanctioned barriers to entry. There are no government mechanisms in place that give recording companies the distribution monopoly they have.
I think what you're conflating is the difference between intellectual property rights and distribution rights. If we argue that anyone is free to rob anyone else's idea then that has to be true on all levels...:Large companies would be free to rob you and I of our ideas and use their economies of scale to shut us out. The end result would actually be no better and possibly worse than it is now.
Copyrights, however, act as an equalizer... Frankly, and think about this carefully, a recording artist is the source of the ideas. Nobody has a gun to their head demanding they hand over their material to a record company or that they sign an absurd distribution contract that indebts them without guarantee of return.
Additionally, copyrights in sound recordings also require granting of compulsory license. This is actually a mechanism AGAINST intellectual monopoly. The only thing copyright in sound recordings therefore protects is the right of compensation for licensing and the right to exclusive distribution of the tangible recording which cost money to produce... money that isn't being recouped if just anyone can distribute copies of it... regardless of whether a recording company loans an artist the money or they finance it independently.
Artists can choose to distribute their work freely and allow others to copy it, but they should and do retain the right to make that choice... rather than to have that choice made for them.
Republican? That's odd. I seem to distinctly remember being involved this weekend in a drive for Barack Obama.
Politics has nothing to do with this. The fact that government isn't setting price controls is PRECISELY a free market by all economic definitions.
Private companies setting their own prices in a free market is still a free market. Customers organizing boycotts is still a free market, even though that activity generally has the effect of manipulating price.
I'm a bit confused... you champion "free markets" in your first post and then you try to label me as a Republican... the very party that champions so-called "free market economics" (when in fact what they really champion is corporate welfare). But I digress... My point is that "free market economics" is a different matter from an industrial monopoly. There was a distribution monopoly for 40 years, but it is crumbling.
Here's where I stand: Buyers are a market force. Sellers are a market force. They are demand and supply respectively. If buyers want sellers to drop the price on goods or services, buyers have to refuse the asking price categorically... they have to refuse to purchase that product. Instead, putting the money toward another product is where they have to go. Digital downloads is a great example. People have, in fact, been telling record companies in droves that they prefer the discounted retail price of tracks and albums on iTunes and services like it, and the a-la carte model versus paying $15.98 for an entire album when what they really want is the one desirable track on it.
The recording industry has attempted to insist on their prices and their distribution model and, with iTunes surpassing all conventional retail channels of distribution, it is blindingly obvious that buyers have responded with a resounding "NO!" Now, the record companies are ailing, they're obsolete and not long from now they'll be history. The first phase of the decentralization of the recording distro monopoly of the past 40 years is complete. The second phase of this revolution is beginning... That is, artists are now realizing thanks to the financial viability of services like iTunes and Amazon, that record companies are superfluous entities in the new paradigm of distribution, promotion and marketing. Madonna, the single highest paid solo recording artist (excluding Michael Jackson who it can be argued is insolvent due to his debts which remain to be recouped by the record label), is leaving the majors for good.
That's free market economics for you.
Oh, and by the way, this "Republican MBA type" championed the free market economics of independent internet distribution of music in a research paper I wrote in 1996... twelve years ago.
The market does decide. No government entity steps in and determines retail pricing or gross margin. Sellers and buyers are market forces... If the market of buyers doesn't want to pay $15.98 for a CD, then they ought to boycott it.
If they're serious enough, buyers will, either as a group of individuals or an organized collective, force retail margins down.
Piracy is thought to be an answer but it does nothing to set a better market price, or to attract artists away from bad record deals (which they are responsible themselves for opting to sign into) by giving them evidence of a profitable alternative.
Market price isn't a gun put to the heads of consumers by some "MBA types". Let's not reduce this debate to paraphrasing the stereotypes perpetuated by pop films of the equally insipid motion picture industry. In doing so, you're ironically reinforcing the very intellectual bankruptcy you claim to be fighting.
Let me add... yes, I made one error in that I did not clarify in my original post that when I ask whether developers are bereft of creativity I mean these developers who write something that a distributor ostensibly already has and, here's the specific qualifier, ask them to distribute it.
I have no problem with developers coming up with a better implementation and distributing it on their own, but to do so effectively makes that developer a competitor and they should then not expect that their competitors will enthusiastically agree to sell the product.
It's also not the case that Apple first distributed the product and then turned around and decided they didn't want to. There is a review process, and they reviewed it, and somewhere in the fine print it probably gives them final say to reject anything they don't want to distribute (after all, they're not the government or Mother Theresa... nothing obligates them to distribute everything sent to them)... and upon that review they exercised some right they reserved in their policies and there you are.
The developers know that investing all this time is not a guarantee... but I admit I don't know the mechanics of the SDK and it is possible that one flaw would be if it were in fact the case that Apple would not give a "yea" or "nay" to a concept if floated by them BEFORE development began. If Apple's SDK process doesn't allow this, do their developer program managers take such questions out-of-process and what has been their response in such cases?
If they offer you NO alternative but to fully develop the product before they reject it, then there's your issue, in my opinion and I would fully agree that it's a problem.
But even if I took your silly "developers should know better than to make a competing application" idea as valid, try to think ahead a little.
Did you read the entire sentence? Let me reprint it with emphasis:
If they were truly talented would they have attempted less than surreptitiously to ask a distributor to promote a competing product rather than writing any number of applications that haven't been thought of yet?
Where in my remarks is it evident that I'm asking developers to never refine existing ideas? What I find kind of humorous is the effort to make a competing piece of software and then ask YOUR COMPETITOR to distribute it for you. Without getting into the mechanics, ethics, legality, or "moral" implications of Apple's chosen distribution model, that fact alone tells me it is such a developer, not Apple, who is shooting themselves in the foot.
If they're really serious about developing software, maybe, to paraphrase Alan Kay, they should try making their own hardware to run it. Nobody's barring them from doing that.
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Murrow and many others, myself included, respectfully disagree. We're human beings. We have points of view. If the news were restricted purely to reporting and not editorial, then we'd be in a very sad state of affairs never being presented with anything to think critically about. It would be like the world in "The Invention of Lying" where every film is just some guy reading passages in history books.
I'm not encouraging sensationalist journalism either. The Murrow school of thought tends to be this: Have a point of view, of course... but be prepared to analyze and defend it.
This doesn't mean two pundits talking at each other for thirty minutes without any facts to back up their assertions. This means doing one's homework, creating a thesis and supporting arguments for it. That's much of what journalism is... or was, anyway, before blogs came along and replaced journalism with regurgitation of the slightest blurb every hour of the day to increase pageviews.
Another reason I discourage just leaving "the fresh thoughts to the readers" is the lack of editorial guidance on the web. Blogs are often staffed by people who work for next to nothing, or nothing, because ad revenue doesn't pay nearly as much as people like to believe it does. So you might have a handful of paid staff, then fifty other "contributors" whose work gets published round the clock, with zero time allotted for editorial guidance to determine newsworthiness, accuracy and, in opinion pieces, solidity of the writer's argument.
Readers still have a responsibility of determining for themselves whether or not they think the writer justified his or her opinions, but writers have a responsibility that shouldn't be abdicated just because of a 24/7 news cycle (thanks a lot, CNN) or the supposedly interactive nature of the web where you can find websites with meaninglessly high global rankings, yet whose readers never actually dig beyond a headline—evidenced by time-on-site/time-on-page analytics.
Blingcores?
But seriously, folks. I know we're all a bunch of geeks here, myself included. But the truth is that it's not the CPU market that's changing. It's the nature of computing itself that is changing. Devices that can be called computing platforms are varied in size, function, and resources. An iPhone is essentially a mobile computing platform, but people wouldn't call it a "computer" in the conventional sense of the word because "computing" is an activity that has moved so far into the background, behind what the end user wants to actually accomplish with said device.
Likewise, CPU speed and number of cores don't give anyone, let alone the average consumer, a universal standard of performance... by this I mean even the geek cannot assume on CPU speed or cores in and of themselves how a device will fare to other devices with different architectures, operating systems, background applications and so on.
Why does the OP say "our rights" when Google was ostensibly not defending "our rights"... but rather their rights. And even then, what rights of ours would those be? Does he believe we have a right to redistribute the works of others?
Anyone remember the Nokia 8860? When Nokia was moving toward internal antenna design, this flagship model that originally cost $1000 was a sleek-looking slider. Actually it was a piece of crap. The rolling ball contacts on the slider routinely wore out their springs. This would disengage the mouthpiece/microphone. The slider piece was terrible. The "chrome" was a coat of paint over plastic. The antenna, they warned, shouldn't be covered with your hand. Why? Because it would drain the battery (due to no advanced kind of power management) and drop calls.
Within six months this phone, which did nothing special other than break, was reduced to $250 (still more than the iPhone). Within one year, it was discontinued. It was Nokia's "flagship" phone... and hey, at $1000 they were generous enough to throw in a "rapid charger"... how nice of them.
this statement "they don't really need an excuse" is a straw man argument.
Do they need an excuse to waste their own money? No. To be successful in convincing all of Congress? Yes. Evidence helps build their case for just how far they can twist the law.
Anything can motivate you to come after me for wearing hotpants, but can you convince an entire legislative body on your personal beliefs alone that it's worth banning hotpants over?
Do you remember the 1980's? I do. RIAA wasn't on a warpath until internet distribution came along. They'd been fighting commercial piracy up to that point, but never really heavily pursuing noncommercial piracy until internet distribution became a reality.
It's not like the figures were that much worse. The whole motivation has been to try to slow down the adoption of ALL internet distribution, including legitimate supply-and-demand.
Record labels didn't understand DRM, much less digital distribution at all, in the mid-90's. But if doing nothing, in your opinion, is enough ammunition for them, then what do you think engaging in piracy will do? Yes, that's right... by your own argument, any marginal excuse would only INCREASE their ammunition against internet distribution as a whole medium from whatever is already driving it (again, obsolescence not piracy).
The rate of decline of CD sales owes more to a shift in purchasing habits than it does nonpurchasing habits. The growth rate of piracy cannot alone account for the LARGE double-digit declines in CD sales.
What scares them to death is the idea that the record company doesn't even need to exist... and decimating their entire repertoire (catalogue) is a vastly bigger threat to their bottom line, quite obviously, than a couple billion dollars in lost sales to piracy.
Think about it! A shrewd businessman would embrace the net and figure out a way to be the dominant force... UNLESS there were no way for him to compete effectively in that space against what catalogues others had to offer.
How can Warner Bros. possibly maintain its margins and continue to satisfy shareholders if it's losing major breadwinners to LiveNation, which is totally transforming the way the business is run... 360 contracts and the like.
To think that this has something to do with a perverse need to shut down Grandma Millie's downloading operation of a few hundred songs is to ridiculously overestimate an individual's importance relative to the PAYING market, the active revenue streams that are migrating to independent distro and multimedia 360 deals.
As an aggregate, though, consumers aren't heard through their shouts or misguided but well-intentioned grassroots operations like EFF and the Copyleft movement. If you're not a paying customer anyway, your opinions are worth spit to the record industry.
What IS making the difference is the total shift in distribution to where iTunes has become the dominant force, replacing all music retailers and discount chains (Best Buy, WalMart, etc.). The industry suddenly is paying attention because for years they didn't think this would amount to anything.
Also, let me let you in on a rather less-than-secret secret... I worked in internet security and we received hundreds of DMCA takedown requests and subpoenas each week. But you know what the common thread was? Not one of them was in pursuit of a downloader. That's right... the industry has very little legitimate means of pursuing downloaders. They're only effective at building cases against filesharers who host and distribute copies by the thousands.
But why would they spend $12 million to get a less than $400k return in damages? It's not because the filesharers are the ones actually depleting their revenue. It's because the entire model opens up artists to legitimate, independent distribution using the same kinds of technologies that the Napsters and BitTorrents and so on made available.
It's the fact that Madonna and several other multimillion dollar selling artists are leaving major labels for multimedia deals with LiveNation that give the artist a bigger stake while providing tour support and better multimedia promotion than the traditional labels have been providing. It's the fact that these giant artists migrating to internet distro will take hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars of revenue with them when they leave.
That far outweighs the figures for piracy, and the pithy revenue earned by the other 85%
It never was. Sidney Shemel and M. William Krasilovsky, two music industry attorneys, wrote the bible on the industry called This Business of Music. They observed the maturation of the CD format as an inevitability in the mid-1990's. I also wrote a paper about the coming internet distribution possibilities in 1996.
Piracy is a growing threat a continuing decline in their bottom line, but that isn't the overall concern. The overall concern is the inevitable obsolescence of record companies themselves. Digital distribution cuts out so many middlemen in the distro monopoly that's been in place since the 1940's. It's got the potential to eliminate entire A&R departments, distributors, subdistributors, rack jobbers, one stops... the "record club" is already practically obsolete (remember Columbia House?).
So, the industry is changing and these guys realize that the older conglomerates aren't small enough, agile enough, to possibly ever compete in the more diverse space of internet distro. They don't understand it. They can't dominate it. So, they're throwing lawyers at every granny and twelve year old not to stop the inevitable shift, but to slow it down.
The problem is that piracy only gives them more ammunition to send lobbyists after Congress to get more dumb legislation passed like the DMCA. The real response to this? People need to speak with their pocketbooks and show the economic viability of the legit distro models that work, that they like, whatever, by purchasing through those models.
That will send a message to the record labels and to the marketplace in general in the only language that they understand... "Cha-ching!"
Telco's aren't owned by the government, and they aren't the only method of communication available to you. If you want to "Charge" them, though, the easiest way to do so is to not use their networks. Using their networks means the creation of data that isn't otherwise created without signal traversing their equipment... You consent to that being their data by using their services.
Boycott them.
There are departures from fiction, and there are departures from fact. The geocentric model of the universe was not arrived at through modern skeptical scientific inquiry.
But this issue goes much deeper. It's not just that they are removing references to the progress America has made intellectually, socially and culturally, but they are replacing these references with inferences of their own, alleging that America is a Christian nation, recognizing the accomplishments of pro-slavery confederates and rationalizing McCarthyism as justified by some of the results.
However, it's not liberal bias to say that America is not a Christian nation. It simply isn't. There is not a single reference to the words "god", "Bible", "Jesus", "Christian", "religion" or "Church" anywhere in the Articles of the Constitution, and the single reference to religion in the Bill of Rights is the Establishment Clause which prohibits Congress from enacting any law concerning religious institutions, Christianity being one of them. This isn't a liberally-biased viewpoint. It is a fact. Just like evolution is a fact. We can debate how precisely either occurred, but that they are is a fact.
The problem with certain appeals to emotion, such as the "equal time" argument is that all opinions and arguments aren't equal. Some views, such as Intelligent Design, have zero scientific merit whatsoever, at least in the manner in which their proponents have presented them.
I know that we live in the Age of Entitlement, but no... not all opinions are equal. Some are substantiated in fact far better than others.
Welcome to the wonderful world of zero editorial guidance or accountability, i.e. the blogosphere.
Wait, so... usability, user experience, intuitiveness... basically all the reasons we use tools (to make the output of a task greater than the input required; i.e. to make our lives easier)...
These are all "non-issues"? I'm really interested to know what you define as an "issue," then.
Bias is ok, as long as one's opinions are well supported by fact.
While Apple is gaining ground this is just a poorly constructed summary, right down to using market capitalization as a metric for the strength of the company (see my post some lines below).
Market capitalization is essentially meaningless as a measure of a company's strength, i.e. it's ability to continue operations while also facilitating growth in a competitive environment.
All that market capitalization ever tells you is what some fool would pay to acquire the company whole at the current market price quotation.
It doesn't reflect what one should pay.
It doesn't reflect what the book value of the company is (Assets minus liabilities minus intangibles).
It doesn't reflect what the intrinsic value of the company is (book value plus discounted operating cash flows forward - i.e. a measure of its effectiveness as a cash generating engine).
It doesn't tell you anything about product presence, sales, operating income, debt load, or any other metric that has anything to do with the actual "strength" of a company.
Journalists need to stop referencing "market cap" as if it bears greater meaning than "The (typically) overinflated price only a sucker would pay."
Bad movies aren't so entertaining when they are engineered to be bad. They're hilarious when they're unintentionally funny. But some of them weren't funny at all. Ed Wood was damned serious about what he was doing, and his films are just grating to watch.
Also, this argument only works for the first of Lucas' original trilogy because the second and third were neither written nor directed by him. Both Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand had different ideas about elevating Star Wars from merely a bad imitation of terrible 1950s serial sci-fi to something else... and few fanboys will argue that Empire Strikes Back isn't the best of the entire sagaâ"for that very reason. It wasn't serious drama all the time, but it took itself seriously in the right places, and loosened up in the right places. The result is something engaging.
Speaking as one who was there... I fell asleep the first time I saw "Star Wars" in the theater 30 years ago, and fell asleep again when I saw it in 1997. I had watched it many times on video as a kid, but to go through in one sitting for two hours nonstop without a break is just agony.
One of the things that made Raiders of the Lost Ark, another Lucas concept, great was that it had the spirit of its predecessors but also established itself as something else, apart and above all the rest. Note that Larry Kasdan wrote both Raiders and Empire. These films exist in our culture not as propped up cardboard cutouts of a bygone era but as something entirely of their own.
It betrays a certain ignorance of cinematic history to think that Lucas' terrible dialogue was entirely an intentional nod to only the worst that the 1940's and 1950's had to offer, while failing to realize how much of Fred C. Dobbs is in both Han Solo and Indiana Jones,
I had the opportunity to interview writer/director Neill Blomkamp and Sharlto Copley, who plays Wikus van der Merwe. Here's the link to the interview and to the review I published this past week. I think that Blomkamp will continue to impress us if he keeps focused on further developing the story and the characters in his future films. Is it a perfect film? No. Most sci-fi is far from the depths of where cinematic drama can reach, but this is a respectable start for a first time film director who was spared, I will say, of the critical failure that Halo is destined to become. As someone else mentioned, I've also followed Blomkamp's work from Tetra Vaal to his CitrÃen and VW ads, and the film short "Alive in Joburg" which I've linked in the interview page URL I've posted here.
Much has been made about the lens flares but it is possible for indoor scenes that the lens flares were natural. If there were numerous lighting sources (and consider the bridge is, in fact, very brightly lit) just above the rim of the lens, the Panavision 2.39:1 anamorphic optics naturally produce substantial flares that stretch horizontally.
It's a stylistic choice, and not necessarily a good one... but in the case of space there would actually be a hell of a lot of glare. If we are meant to be observers with a camera, the resulting glare from numerous bodies either directly emitting light or albedo would result in substantial haze and flares. The intensity of celestial light not occluded by an atmosphere is so great that astronauts in spacewalk wear helmets thinly anodized with 24k gold to avoid sunburn and blindness.
>> If you stop caring about the proper use of language, you will begin making the same mistakes yourself.
> Certainly. But who would notice?
I did. There shouldn't be a comma between "use of language" and "you will."
This is why I generally do not read critical reviews or news from blogs. Blogs generally lack a competent editorial staff to properly manage both the newsworthiness of content as well as the writing standards.
Sure Eric Bana is the worst thing since, well, Eric Bana... but I buy it.
This is an important point. Gambling agreements are not enforceable according to The U.S. Code... and for good reason. In the case of virtual property, I would argue that verbal agreements are not enforceable. If a written agreement stood behind it, then I believe it would be enforceable to the extent that consideration, mutual assent, etc. were all present and to the extent that specific performance would be a tangible remedy to breach of contract.
[quote]Copyrights certainly do confer a monopoly on what's copyrighted.[/quote]
A key characteristic of a monopoly is the lack of, or willful institution by a company of barriers to entry to, viable substitutes.
In this way, your argument fails the litmus test of a "monopoly" definition twice.
1) There are sufficient independent, major, and minor record label alternatives to a given artist's work. The songs may not be identical but if you really want to argue that one grunge song doesn't provide the entertainment value equivalent to any other grunge song, then we're going to sit here all year arguing about the monopoly over 12 inch long, neon pink toilet scrubbers with black handles made in China on Thursdays.
2) Viable substitutes do exist. First, through the proliferation of performing rights societies which are independent of the record labels (e.g. ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, etc.) and protect the publishers' or artists' interests, mechanical license is fairly easy to obtain. The cost for mechanical license varies and, if the person who wishes to acquire said rights can't scrounge up the financing for mechanical license there is always compulsory license which is generally much cheaper to secure (I say generally because mechanical rights could be pretty cheap for an artist nobody has heard of... or wants to).
In both cases, copyright protections do not fit the definition of a monopoly.
[quote]Where does this idea of yours come from?[/quote]
Regarding intellectual property versus distribution? Chiefly from the fact that you seem to be unaware of the history of record distribution in the United States. Record distribution is in fact a monopoly. I've never disputed this and in fact I've argued for artists and consumers to take action against it. What you're claiming is that the federal recognition of the rights of a creator of a work, or rights of an owner of a work made for hire, have somehow led to the way things are at present. This is not true.
The present system involving labels, distributors, sub-distributors, rack jobbers, one stops, and to a lesser extent today the record clubs (e.g. Columbia House), arose largely because record distribution was an economy of scale from 1940-1996. Around 1996, things began to change significantly. The monopoly began to erode as viable alternative channels of global distribution emerged, namely through the internet. But copyright still exists. So how is copyright the problem? It isn't. Copyright still exists and yet we are seeing the beginning of a new era in which artists and consumers are conscientiously eliminating the middleman without intervention from government.
And again, compulsory and mechanical license still exist. As a photographer, I'm not certain that you have compulsory license. Then again, the nature of photography is vastly different... as the bulk of it consists of capturing imagery that exists in the world that may vary in specificity greatly, rather than creating an image from scratch of an unquestionably specific nature. In your case, the reason compulsory license is not required is because you cannot protect scene compositions that are extremely generic... say, a photograph of an apple in a bowl. Anyone can photograph an apple in a bowl and wouldn't in principle be violating an original idea. I know that this is not the only scenario when it comes to photographic duplication... but I'll get back to that in a minute...
Not anyone can record "Gimme Shelter" and claim that it is generic enough that anyone could have written its lyrics.
[quote]Nobody no where is guaranteed a return. All they are supposed to have is an opportunity.[/quote]
I'm glad you speak of "opportunity". To continue my train of thought from above... Likewise, no one has the right to take an exact copy of the specific images you have made and deprive you of the opportunity to profit from it OR elect of your own volition to allow it up as public domain. Remind me again, what is it you do for a paycheck?
Copyrights are not what grants record companies a monopoly. Free market economies of scale have done so, and now that centralized economies of scale are no longer required for global distribution (by no action whatsoever on the part of the government) that monopoly is eroding faster than if the government had broken it up.
There are no government-sanctioned barriers to entry. There are no government mechanisms in place that give recording companies the distribution monopoly they have.
I think what you're conflating is the difference between intellectual property rights and distribution rights. If we argue that anyone is free to rob anyone else's idea then that has to be true on all levels... :Large companies would be free to rob you and I of our ideas and use their economies of scale to shut us out. The end result would actually be no better and possibly worse than it is now.
Copyrights, however, act as an equalizer... Frankly, and think about this carefully, a recording artist is the source of the ideas. Nobody has a gun to their head demanding they hand over their material to a record company or that they sign an absurd distribution contract that indebts them without guarantee of return.
Additionally, copyrights in sound recordings also require granting of compulsory license. This is actually a mechanism AGAINST intellectual monopoly. The only thing copyright in sound recordings therefore protects is the right of compensation for licensing and the right to exclusive distribution of the tangible recording which cost money to produce... money that isn't being recouped if just anyone can distribute copies of it... regardless of whether a recording company loans an artist the money or they finance it independently.
Artists can choose to distribute their work freely and allow others to copy it, but they should and do retain the right to make that choice... rather than to have that choice made for them.
Republican? That's odd. I seem to distinctly remember being involved this weekend in a drive for Barack Obama.
Politics has nothing to do with this. The fact that government isn't setting price controls is PRECISELY a free market by all economic definitions.
Private companies setting their own prices in a free market is still a free market. Customers organizing boycotts is still a free market, even though that activity generally has the effect of manipulating price.
I'm a bit confused... you champion "free markets" in your first post and then you try to label me as a Republican... the very party that champions so-called "free market economics" (when in fact what they really champion is corporate welfare). But I digress... My point is that "free market economics" is a different matter from an industrial monopoly. There was a distribution monopoly for 40 years, but it is crumbling.
Here's where I stand: Buyers are a market force. Sellers are a market force. They are demand and supply respectively. If buyers want sellers to drop the price on goods or services, buyers have to refuse the asking price categorically... they have to refuse to purchase that product. Instead, putting the money toward another product is where they have to go. Digital downloads is a great example. People have, in fact, been telling record companies in droves that they prefer the discounted retail price of tracks and albums on iTunes and services like it, and the a-la carte model versus paying $15.98 for an entire album when what they really want is the one desirable track on it.
The recording industry has attempted to insist on their prices and their distribution model and, with iTunes surpassing all conventional retail channels of distribution, it is blindingly obvious that buyers have responded with a resounding "NO!" Now, the record companies are ailing, they're obsolete and not long from now they'll be history. The first phase of the decentralization of the recording distro monopoly of the past 40 years is complete. The second phase of this revolution is beginning... That is, artists are now realizing thanks to the financial viability of services like iTunes and Amazon, that record companies are superfluous entities in the new paradigm of distribution, promotion and marketing. Madonna, the single highest paid solo recording artist (excluding Michael Jackson who it can be argued is insolvent due to his debts which remain to be recouped by the record label), is leaving the majors for good.
That's free market economics for you.
Oh, and by the way, this "Republican MBA type" championed the free market economics of independent internet distribution of music in a research paper I wrote in 1996... twelve years ago.
The market does decide. No government entity steps in and determines retail pricing or gross margin. Sellers and buyers are market forces... If the market of buyers doesn't want to pay $15.98 for a CD, then they ought to boycott it.
If they're serious enough, buyers will, either as a group of individuals or an organized collective, force retail margins down.
Piracy is thought to be an answer but it does nothing to set a better market price, or to attract artists away from bad record deals (which they are responsible themselves for opting to sign into) by giving them evidence of a profitable alternative.
Market price isn't a gun put to the heads of consumers by some "MBA types". Let's not reduce this debate to paraphrasing the stereotypes perpetuated by pop films of the equally insipid motion picture industry. In doing so, you're ironically reinforcing the very intellectual bankruptcy you claim to be fighting.
Let me add... yes, I made one error in that I did not clarify in my original post that when I ask whether developers are bereft of creativity I mean these developers who write something that a distributor ostensibly already has and, here's the specific qualifier, ask them to distribute it.
I have no problem with developers coming up with a better implementation and distributing it on their own, but to do so effectively makes that developer a competitor and they should then not expect that their competitors will enthusiastically agree to sell the product.
It's also not the case that Apple first distributed the product and then turned around and decided they didn't want to. There is a review process, and they reviewed it, and somewhere in the fine print it probably gives them final say to reject anything they don't want to distribute (after all, they're not the government or Mother Theresa... nothing obligates them to distribute everything sent to them)... and upon that review they exercised some right they reserved in their policies and there you are.
The developers know that investing all this time is not a guarantee... but I admit I don't know the mechanics of the SDK and it is possible that one flaw would be if it were in fact the case that Apple would not give a "yea" or "nay" to a concept if floated by them BEFORE development began. If Apple's SDK process doesn't allow this, do their developer program managers take such questions out-of-process and what has been their response in such cases?
If they offer you NO alternative but to fully develop the product before they reject it, then there's your issue, in my opinion and I would fully agree that it's a problem.
But even if I took your silly "developers should know better than to make a competing application" idea as valid, try to think ahead a little.
Did you read the entire sentence? Let me reprint it with emphasis:
If they were truly talented would they have attempted less than surreptitiously to ask a distributor to promote a competing product rather than writing any number of applications that haven't been thought of yet?
Where in my remarks is it evident that I'm asking developers to never refine existing ideas? What I find kind of humorous is the effort to make a competing piece of software and then ask YOUR COMPETITOR to distribute it for you. Without getting into the mechanics, ethics, legality, or "moral" implications of Apple's chosen distribution model, that fact alone tells me it is such a developer, not Apple, who is shooting themselves in the foot.
If they're really serious about developing software, maybe, to paraphrase Alan Kay, they should try making their own hardware to run it. Nobody's barring them from doing that.