I mean, PepsiCo just paid for the ad, and if you don't buy their products, then you're a leach too.
Funny, I run my own business.
The above two statements made by you don't make sense. Even a non-business person knows how ads work. Surely a businessman would know exactly how they work unless your business is just a hobby, not making much income.
Do that every day for a month and the revenue gained from advertisers for your visits is $0.66. This does not equal your stated $5 per month per site.
That's assuming you visit exactly ONE PAGE / day, which never happens. Suppose you visited 200 web pages / day with 2 ads / webpage: monthly ad cost = 200 x 2 x 30 x 2.2 / 1000 = $26.40
Those aren't sites that I, at least, am interested in seeing.
So don't see them. You can't infringe on other people's freedom and right to make money off their work. The problem is your kind is hypocritical: you complain you don't like ads and you complain you don't like sites with ads. And then you right ahead and visit those sites when want or need their information, except you don't to pay for the content by viewing ads -- it's practically shoplifting.
Maybe google should place a little icon (for eg: "AS" meaning ad-supported) next to links stating the site is ad-supported, so users who don't like ads need not click the link to view the site.
Right, but what about the profit that you used to get from ads? Or do you think websites are created and operated for charity? Many sites would not exist if its creators couldn't monetize it from google ads or some other ad network.
The problem is 90% or more internet users are unwilling to pay for content. So... ads. However, there should be limits on how obnoxious ads can be. For eg, no animations or slowind down the page with flash ads. Ads should be text, png or jpg (non-animated).
When costs fall, if there are enough sellers, one of them will reduce his profit margin to try to gain market share.
I don't agree with this at all. Businesses want maximum profit and there are plenty of examples: Amazon has been around for a couple of decades and during that period, prices of books have been the same as that before internet bookstores. Amazon does not have to rent/buy expensive retail stores to sell their books, instead it buys cheap land in the middle of nowhere. It does not have to pay salesman's salary because its website plays the part of the (automated) salesman. It does incur cost to ship the book from a remote warehouse to the customer, but usually the customer pays for the shipping.
So when exactly are consumers going to see a drop in book prices after the money Amazon saved in selling books cheaply?
Another example is cars. They are supposed to be cheaper now because of the use of computers/CAD to design cars and robots to assemble them. But car prices are still rising with inflation. TLDR; selling prices usually have little relationship to production cost.
Prices for a unit of computing capability have been falling steadily for 60 years.
Only because computing power grows every year due to Moore's law. Once that stops, don't expect cheap computers.
But every time RAM capacity increases and CPU speed increases, the OS gets more bloated and your apps' performance has only marginally increased in 5 years. Hardware improvements should go to the apps, and not get eaten by the OS.
Maybe it takes 10 times longer for the 2-3x performance gain. But with decent apps, it could beat Windows, Linux, OS X, BSD etc in the performance game. In case you haven't noticed, operating systems have stagnated... there haven't been major advances in OS X or Windows for over a decade.
The model was always that making recorded music was a form of advertising to get people to come to your shows....
Are you living in one of those states where marijuana is legal? Because the crappy playback quality of most concerts is not worth much money music-wise. Concerts are about promoting a band/album -- that's why artists don't hold concerts 365 days/year for every year -- it's not their primary job. Only idiot musicians would ruin their fingers playing instruments every day or damage their vocal cords singing everyday at a concert. This isn't the 1800s -- machines can do the job replaying a song without needing the musician for every single recital.
Recorded music sounds an order of magnitude better than the loud, out-of-tune concert music. Plus, you can listen to recorded music, when you want and where you want. Therefore unlike what pirates are fond of repeating, concerts are ads for selling recorded music and not the other way around.
but that could as easily be accomplished by demanding much higher wages up front.
That's doubtful. Payment for creative work like music, books and software should always be based on percentage of sales/profit. Distributors and retailers usually charge a percentage to move a product because it's impossible to guess ahead of time how many (if any) units will sell. Fixed wages should be paid for non-creative tasks, both for simple menial tasks or highly technical jobs like that of a doctor or lawyer -- where the output is more or less exactly the same each time the task is performed.
say I designed a software-free hammer building machine (after all automation pre-dates software substantially). Should I be entitled to a share of profits from hammer sales in perpetuity?
Why not? Software is just a cheaper but slower method to control various pieces of lower level hardware. The control method can be software or hardware depending on the performance/cost requirements.
Software = cheap, easy to implement, slow, less parallel. Hardware = expensive, difficult to implement, fast, more parallel.
I would be surprised if the center of gravity is much more than 6 feet off the ground.
It's probably higher than that since the coach rides high over the chassis. Most cars are way below 6 feet in height and SUVs, which are around 6 feet in height, usually have a high rollover risk, again mainly due to their high CoG compared to regular cars even though they are bottom-heavy, just like train coaches.
The model is different. Suppose software is part of a machine that manufactures hammers (assuming hammer manufacturing is 100% automated which it is not currently). Due to software automation, the hammer manufacturer can cut staff resulting in millions saved in salary payments. The hammer manufacturer sells 1 million hammers/year at $10 profit per hammer. Do you think he owes the programmer who wrote the software for the machine only $100k one time payment, instead of 10% of his profit which is $1 million/year? With this machine, the manufacturer can easily make $10million profit per year. Do you think it's fair, he makes $100 million in 10 years, but pays only about $1 million ($900k hardware, $100k software) to obtain it?
You can't charge royalty per hammer because its design the same for every hammer. You can't charge royalty for cookie cutter designed parts. Software is meta level, that is, it is used to make multiple hammers. Also the software is unique compared to hammers whose designs are more or less, the same.
As a consumer, it's hard for me to understand why a CD that costs $1 to stamp and package, sells for $15, and gets the artist $0.10.
These number seem exaggerated. Here's the BBC's take on how 800 million pounds from CD sales are divided amongst the various players: About 13% goes to the artists, while 30% goes to the label, with a 17% cut going to the government in the form of VAT (applied at 20% and therefore 1/6 of purchase price). About 17% goes to the retailer, while the rest goes to manufacturers (9%), distributors (8%) and the spend on administering copyright (6%).
If you look at this amtrak passenger coach, its height seems to be above 20 feet. When something this tall, riding on narrow rails, takes a high speed turn, it's bound to overturn and derail due to high center of gravity. Why don't they make much shorter coaches to reduce the CoG? That might eliminate most of these crashes.
He's got a point: only very famous musicians can make money from "concerts/merchandise." The remaining artists depend upon song sales for bare minimum survival. You don't get to decide which music is appropriate for making money -- that's the artists choice.
if I put in a year worth of labor on a software product, am I really entitled to a lifetime of income there either?
Umm, why not? Your employer will use that software to generate revenue (or reduce expenses) for a long time (many years). Why shouldn't the person who created the software get a cut while the software is making money? If the naive programmer takes a small fixed salary, the boss ends up with all the profit for someone else's work. All he paid for was $100,000 for increasing revenue by $2M.
For what? Aren't Spotify and similar websites just like labels, except they are e-labels? Why do you need two middlemen? You should not have deal with (or pay) a conventional label if distributing your music through an e-label like Spotify.
Paying both middlemen would be quite expensive, resulting in a very tiny fraction of profit per song played for the artist as has been demonstrated on numerous slashdot stories.
Works entering the public domain provide an economic benefit to future generations.
Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Dickens works have been public domain for quite some time. What economic benefits have been gained so far? Nothing, other than getting those works for free.
weakening culture and destroying wealth.
I fail to see how paying for art weakens culture. It should strengthen it instead. As far as destroying wealth, no one became poor spending a few hundred dollars a year.
Farms and other businesses have great upkeep costs which must be exceeded by their useful output in order to turn a profit.
But there are plenty of efficient farmers and businessmen who are more capable of maintaining these real properties than the (often inexperienced) descendents of the previous owner. So, why pass these properties down to the descendents?
hard assets do not draw upon the economy to divert wealth, but rather maintain or decay in wealth.
Copyrighted works too maintain and decay in wealth generation after their prime years. So, not very different. Yet it is redistributed.
It is as if the farmer, content with who he is and lazy in his way, farmed no tomatoes, but instead charged every other farmer on the planet for growing and selling tomatoes.
Why not? If you used his land to grow the tomatoes, you owe him a cut of your sales/profit. Similarly, if you repackage someone's copyrighted song and sell it on CD or as a network service, you owe the owners of the copyrighted material, a cut.
What does a farmer do anyway? Mostly work on the land driving around in a tractor while planting seeds. Then using another tractor like vehicle to reap the finished crop -- mostly automated. It's very similar to a copyright material owner opening a business, advertising his product, then packaging and shipping it to a customer -- both products involve simple, menial tasks. The farmer is lazy because earth and nature do most of the work in growing the crop. This is similar to the laziness of the descendent who continues selling his ancestor's copyrighted content or the laziness of a pirate who thinks he has the right to copyrighted content without payment just because he can run a copy command on his file manager.
No, greedy moron, I'm not talking about patentable IP (creating fire, wheels etc.) but copyrightable IP (paintings, music, books, movies etc.). Copyrighted IP can passed down to generations like the so-called real assets without causing hardship to people trying to use technology like wheel or fire. I call them "so-called real," because they are a mixture of cheap minerals from earth combined with expensive, patentable and copyrighted IP to form your so-called real assets.
when you create a song, or a process, or an invention, and you share it, you still have the "idea" and now I have the idea too!
Exactly why IP laws exist... to prevent you from profiting from that invention, that song, without paying the creator. Because I did the work to create something useful and you... simply copied/took it without giving anything in return.
The fact that those descendants had absolutely nothing to do with creating the book?
Neither did the descendents who inherited their parents' farms, mansions, condos, hotels, businesses, savings accounts, investments, expensive cars etc. So just like out-of-copyright books, I want all those assets freely distributed to everyone in the country, equally, upon death of the owner.
Copyright is not some natural right.
That's backwards. Copyright is just a legal embodiment of what is natural right -- creator of intellectual property is (the first) owner of that property. It would exist in some other form even without the government.
because innovation is good for society.
Sure... but where does it say free innovation? If you want to enjoy that innovation, you gotta pay.
Today, people can play the works of J.S. Bach without having to pay royalties to the family. That's good for everyone.
That's great for musicians who have no composing skills. They can simply play Bach's music without paying royalty to the Bach family and then sell copyrighted CDs for $12.99 to $19.99 to the public.
Slashdot Mirror
The above two statements made by you don't make sense. Even a non-business person knows how ads work. Surely a businessman would know exactly how they work unless your business is just a hobby, not making much income.
Except advertising dollars, so content creators can create and offer you FREE CONTENT, since you are too cheap to pay for it otherwise.
That's assuming you visit exactly ONE PAGE / day, which never happens. Suppose you visited 200 web pages / day with 2 ads / webpage:
monthly ad cost = 200 x 2 x 30 x 2.2 / 1000 = $26.40
So don't see them. You can't infringe on other people's freedom and right to make money off their work. The problem is your kind is hypocritical: you complain you don't like ads and you complain you don't like sites with ads. And then you right ahead and visit those sites when want or need their information, except you don't to pay for the content by viewing ads -- it's practically shoplifting.
Maybe google should place a little icon (for eg: "AS" meaning ad-supported) next to links stating the site is ad-supported, so users who don't like ads need not click the link to view the site.
Even wikipedia rakes in millions more than it needs from donations to operate. No one works for free, except the good and the suckers.
Right, but what about the profit that you used to get from ads? Or do you think websites are created and operated for charity? Many sites would not exist if its creators couldn't monetize it from google ads or some other ad network.
The problem is 90% or more internet users are unwilling to pay for content. So... ads. However, there should be limits on how obnoxious ads can be. For eg, no animations or slowind down the page with flash ads. Ads should be text, png or jpg (non-animated).
I don't agree with this at all. Businesses want maximum profit and there are plenty of examples: Amazon has been around for a couple of decades and during that period, prices of books have been the same as that before internet bookstores. Amazon does not have to rent/buy expensive retail stores to sell their books, instead it buys cheap land in the middle of nowhere. It does not have to pay salesman's salary because its website plays the part of the (automated) salesman. It does incur cost to ship the book from a remote warehouse to the customer, but usually the customer pays for the shipping.
So when exactly are consumers going to see a drop in book prices after the money Amazon saved in selling books cheaply?
Another example is cars. They are supposed to be cheaper now because of the use of computers/CAD to design cars and robots to assemble them. But car prices are still rising with inflation. TLDR; selling prices usually have little relationship to production cost.
Only because computing power grows every year due to Moore's law. Once that stops, don't expect cheap computers.
But every time RAM capacity increases and CPU speed increases, the OS gets more bloated and your apps' performance has only marginally increased in 5 years. Hardware improvements should go to the apps, and not get eaten by the OS.
Maybe it takes 10 times longer for the 2-3x performance gain. But with decent apps, it could beat Windows, Linux, OS X, BSD etc in the performance game. In case you haven't noticed, operating systems have stagnated... there haven't been major advances in OS X or Windows for over a decade.
Are you living in one of those states where marijuana is legal? Because the crappy playback quality of most concerts is not worth much money music-wise. Concerts are about promoting a band/album -- that's why artists don't hold concerts 365 days/year for every year -- it's not their primary job. Only idiot musicians would ruin their fingers playing instruments every day or damage their vocal cords singing everyday at a concert. This isn't the 1800s -- machines can do the job replaying a song without needing the musician for every single recital.
Recorded music sounds an order of magnitude better than the loud, out-of-tune concert music. Plus, you can listen to recorded music, when you want and where you want. Therefore unlike what pirates are fond of repeating, concerts are ads for selling recorded music and not the other way around.
That's doubtful. Payment for creative work like music, books and software should always be based on percentage of sales/profit. Distributors and retailers usually charge a percentage to move a product because it's impossible to guess ahead of time how many (if any) units will sell. Fixed wages should be paid for non-creative tasks, both for simple menial tasks or highly technical jobs like that of a doctor or lawyer -- where the output is more or less exactly the same each time the task is performed.
Why not? Software is just a cheaper but slower method to control various pieces of lower level hardware. The control method can be software or hardware depending on the performance/cost requirements.
Software = cheap, easy to implement, slow, less parallel.
Hardware = expensive, difficult to implement, fast, more parallel.
It's probably higher than that since the coach rides high over the chassis. Most cars are way below 6 feet in height and SUVs, which are around 6 feet in height, usually have a high rollover risk, again mainly due to their high CoG compared to regular cars even though they are bottom-heavy, just like train coaches.
The model is different. Suppose software is part of a machine that manufactures hammers (assuming hammer manufacturing is 100% automated which it is not currently). Due to software automation, the hammer manufacturer can cut staff resulting in millions saved in salary payments. The hammer manufacturer sells 1 million hammers/year at $10 profit per hammer. Do you think he owes the programmer who wrote the software for the machine only $100k one time payment, instead of 10% of his profit which is $1 million/year? With this machine, the manufacturer can easily make $10million profit per year. Do you think it's fair, he makes $100 million in 10 years, but pays only about $1 million ($900k hardware, $100k software) to obtain it?
You can't charge royalty per hammer because its design the same for every hammer. You can't charge royalty for cookie cutter designed parts. Software is meta level, that is, it is used to make multiple hammers. Also the software is unique compared to hammers whose designs are more or less, the same.
These number seem exaggerated. Here's the BBC's take on how 800 million pounds from CD sales are divided amongst the various players:
About 13% goes to the artists, while 30% goes to the label, with a 17% cut going to the government in the form of VAT (applied at 20% and therefore 1/6 of purchase price). About 17% goes to the retailer, while the rest goes to manufacturers (9%), distributors (8%) and the spend on administering copyright (6%).
The artist makes 1.04 pounds from an 8 pound CD.
If you look at this amtrak passenger coach, its height seems to be above 20 feet. When something this tall, riding on narrow rails, takes a high speed turn, it's bound to overturn and derail due to high center of gravity. Why don't they make much shorter coaches to reduce the CoG? That might eliminate most of these crashes.
He's got a point: only very famous musicians can make money from "concerts/merchandise." The remaining artists depend upon song sales for bare minimum survival. You don't get to decide which music is appropriate for making money -- that's the artists choice.
Umm, why not? Your employer will use that software to generate revenue (or reduce expenses) for a long time (many years). Why shouldn't the person who created the software get a cut while the software is making money? If the naive programmer takes a small fixed salary, the boss ends up with all the profit for someone else's work. All he paid for was $100,000 for increasing revenue by $2M.
For what? Aren't Spotify and similar websites just like labels, except they are e-labels? Why do you need two middlemen? You should not have deal with (or pay) a conventional label if distributing your music through an e-label like Spotify.
Paying both middlemen would be quite expensive, resulting in a very tiny fraction of profit per song played for the artist as has been demonstrated on numerous slashdot stories.
The majority of such works are inconsequential since such things are done mostly by less creative artists.
Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Dickens works have been public domain for quite some time. What economic benefits have been gained so far? Nothing, other than getting those works for free.
I fail to see how paying for art weakens culture. It should strengthen it instead. As far as destroying wealth, no one became poor spending a few hundred dollars a year.
But there are plenty of efficient farmers and businessmen who are more capable of maintaining these real properties than the (often inexperienced) descendents of the previous owner. So, why pass these properties down to the descendents?
Copyrighted works too maintain and decay in wealth generation after their prime years. So, not very different. Yet it is redistributed.
Why not? If you used his land to grow the tomatoes, you owe him a cut of your sales/profit. Similarly, if you repackage someone's copyrighted song and sell it on CD or as a network service, you owe the owners of the copyrighted material, a cut.
What does a farmer do anyway? Mostly work on the land driving around in a tractor while planting seeds. Then using another tractor like vehicle to reap the finished crop -- mostly automated. It's very similar to a copyright material owner opening a business, advertising his product, then packaging and shipping it to a customer -- both products involve simple, menial tasks. The farmer is lazy because earth and nature do most of the work in growing the crop. This is similar to the laziness of the descendent who continues selling his ancestor's copyrighted content or the laziness of a pirate who thinks he has the right to copyrighted content without payment just because he can run a copy command on his file manager.
BTW, you still haven't answered what the descendents of the "real property" did to take ownership of it after the death of the property's owner.
No, greedy moron, I'm not talking about patentable IP (creating fire, wheels etc.) but copyrightable IP (paintings, music, books, movies etc.). Copyrighted IP can passed down to generations like the so-called real assets without causing hardship to people trying to use technology like wheel or fire. I call them "so-called real," because they are a mixture of cheap minerals from earth combined with expensive, patentable and copyrighted IP to form your so-called real assets.
Exactly why IP laws exist... to prevent you from profiting from that invention, that song, without paying the creator. Because I did the work to create something useful and you... simply copied/took it without giving anything in return.
Neither did the descendents who inherited their parents' farms, mansions, condos, hotels, businesses, savings accounts, investments, expensive cars etc. So just like out-of-copyright books, I want all those assets freely distributed to everyone in the country, equally, upon death of the owner.
That's backwards. Copyright is just a legal embodiment of what is natural right -- creator of intellectual property is (the first) owner of that property. It would exist in some other form even without the government.
Sure... but where does it say free innovation? If you want to enjoy that innovation, you gotta pay.
That's great for musicians who have no composing skills. They can simply play Bach's music without paying royalty to the Bach family and then sell copyrighted CDs for $12.99 to $19.99 to the public.