Big corporations can't afford controversy, so those went away when Hasbro (via WotC) took over.
Actually, they went away long, LONG before Hasbro took over.
It was kind of a combination of figuring that if the religious whackos were getting all bent out of shape because the name "demon" appeared in the rules, without actually reading the books at all, then changing the name would deflect the whackos, and the realization that "Type III Demon" was just not very inspiring as a terrible foe... sounds like you should attack it with your Model 2A Sword. Change the names and the annoying people would quiet down while the monsters would be more interesting -- and more trademarkable, which was TSR's big thing at the time.
When WotC bought them out, the demons returned, but by then the game had gotten so out of hand (i.e., the need for a forklift to get all the rulebooks to the game table) that a lot of people had drifted off to other things anyway, and few cared what demons were or weren't called.
Funny thing... in today's world, the person I was in high school would have been tagged "most likely to shoot up the school." I played D&D, wrote depressing poetry, listened to The Wall incessantly, and wore black a lot. I seem to have survived to middle age without killing anything more deserving of life than a biting insect or a food animal. And I still wear black a lot. (though my poetry has improved) So much for the stereotypes.
I guess you're a bigot if you want people to be able to live their lives the way they want.
You mean like being able to marry whoever they want to? To do whatever they want in their bedrooms with other consenting adults?
I guess you're a bigot unless you acknowledge there's only one set of acceptable thoughts and no others will be tolerated.
You mean like male-dominant, married, heterosexual relationships are the only permissable form, and all others are sinful and should be illegal as well?
I guess you're a bigot if you want to make your own decisions rather than have them made by the government or some activist group.
You mean like those groups that want to amend the Constitution of the United States to take those decisions away from individuals, from states, from the federal government, not only for our generation but for every one to follow?
I guess "live and let live" is bigoted now, and "you will think what we tell you and do what we tell you" is the only way to avoid this evil bigotry.
"You have to live in accordance with my religion" is bigoted no matter how you look at it. Nobody is trying to force you, by either laws or violence, to be gay. Plenty of people are trying to force gay people, by both laws and violence, to be straight, or at least to pretend so.
I'm put in mind of a passage from a book... to save my life I couldn't think of what it was, some random SF book I read long ago... where some guy was complaining to the protagonist that he (the complainer) suffered from terrible religous persecution in that world. It turned out that the "persecution" was that they were prevented from suppressing all other religions. The big problem with a truly free society comes in when you have people who would take away freedom from others. That is the one freedom -- the freedom to restrict freedom -- that a free society cannot permit, because that is the worm that can eat it from within. Nice little paradox there.
there is NO research stating there are ANY animals that practice ONLY homosexuality. what the research is REALLY saying is that BI-sexuality is 'normal', or rather, natural. Shit! i've seen male dogs jump on other male dogs (which, BTW, is actually a display of dominance, NOT sexuality), but that same dog would also be ALL OVER a female dog.
It's not research, but it's not bad as anecdotal evidence goes: Back when I used to raise fancy mice, I had one completely homosexual male mouse. Ticked me off, too, because he had really nice markings (tan and white spotted) and I wanted to breed from him. But he would only mount other males. If I presented him with females in estrus, he would either ignore them or attack them. Males, any males, he'd be all over. I never did get a litter out of him.:(
and innate?? give me a BREAK!!! I have NO desire to tup another guys arse, or him mine, or suck a schlong, or him mine.... but getting pegged by my girlfriend, that's different!
So why do you think it's a choice when someone else has no desire to get pegged by a your girlfriend, but tupping another guy's arse, or sucking his scholong, that's different? Could you choose to be homosexual? Could you get up some morning, and say "today, I think I'm going to give up all attraction to women, and go find myself a boyfriend"? If you looked at gay porn for the next six months, would you get the hots for other guys? If not, then why do you think it's somehow not equally innate for someone who feels as attracted to women as you feel attracted to men?
Also, animals are just that animals. Are you stating we should act like animals and be gay?
I have heard many people say that "animals aren't gay, so therefore it's unnatural and humans shouldn't do it." So... are they stating that we should act like animals and be straight?
Follow the logic:
If animals don't do it, it's unnatural and we shouldn't do it. (like writing Slashdot posts)
If animals do it, it's acting like an animal and we shouldn't do it. (like eating)
yeah, back then when on average humans only lived to 40ish, they were getting married and starting families at twelve.
Actually, you're mistaking average life expectancy for the age people actually lived to. Average life expectancy includes infant mortality -- so if you have a society where 50% of the people die before they're a year old, and the other 50% live to the biblical threescore and ten, your average life expectancy is 35. But nobody is actually dying at 35 -- it's either 0 or 70. Of course, reality isn't quite that binary, but it's the same basic math. Since modern western societies have such a low infant/child mortality rate, we're used to seeing the average life expectancy number having something to do with how long you can expect to live, but when you're dealing with societies that have very high infant mortality rates, it's not even close to the same thing.
Wander around a cemetery in New Engalnd some time and read the dates on old tombstones. If a man lived to grow up, he was fairly well assured of living to 60+. If a woman survived childbearing, she would probably live longer than that. But that is counterbalanced in the overall average by those rows of little tiny stones that say "Baby Smith, 8 days old."
The average of first menstruation in girls has actually gone down in the past hundred or so years. This may be because of better nutrition and overall health, nobody is quite sure. Though, interestingly enough, it seems to have been at roughly modern ages in ancient Rome and possibly during the medieval era. It's rather difficult to determine, because in societies where marriage is arranged or contracted for social reasons rather than individual choice, girls often are married before they are capable of bearing children, and the actual consummation of the marriage is postponed. Without medical records, it's hard to tell when young women were sexually mature; mostly it's a matter of guessing based on birth records.
Your whole point is a non sequitur anyway. When people were getting married and starting families at young ages (12 or otherwise), it was not because they had seen the pigs making piglets. It was because they were ready to take on the duties of adulthood, which were much simpler at the time. They had learned the basic skills of household management, food production, etc., as children -- kids worked from the day they could toddle. Many young couples lived with one or another set of parents (usually the husband's) for a number of years and got further on-the-job training before they established a separate household.
They didn't have educations to complete -- if they were lucky, they went to the one room schoolhouse for a few years. They didn't have careers to decide on -- they did what their parents did, which was usually farming. They didn't travel and see the world -- most people never went more than 100 miles from where they were born. The reasons that modern people put off marriage and family didn't exist for any but the wealthy classes. Since they had learned the skills they needed for adult life since early childhood, the only thing they had to wait for was their bodies to be ready to do the job.
Obviously, that is not the case today. People have educations to complete, careers to plan, a world to explore. Having children in today's complex world is a much more complicated isse than adding a few more kids to a big farm family, more than doing things the way your parents and grandparents and ten generations back had done them. It is that, rather than knowing where babies come from, that determines things like age of marriage. That is true whether wishful-thinking adults try to keep those children in ignorance in the hope of achieving some mythical "innocence" or whether they give them accurate and reliable information. They are going to get information from someone, somewhere, no matter what. They are going to ask questions and get answers. Far better that those be accurate answers.
My parents tried hard to keep me not only sheltered, but their "little baby girl" forever. Yet by the time I was 10, I knew all the facts (or at least myths) of life, courtesy of classmates. I knew things that would have curled my parents' hair. Children were far from "innocent" when I was 10 years old -- and I'll be 42 in September.
Unless you isolate your children from every child who knows a child who knows a child who has seen mommy and her boyfriend going at it on the couch, unless your isolate your children from every child who knows a child who knows a child who has been molested by her uncle, unless you isolate your children from every child who knows a child who knows a child who knows about something you want to pretend doesn't exist, there is no "innocence." There never was. There is only adult blindness, pretending that if we don't talk to children about things we don't like then those things will go away, or at least never affeact our children.
So a company who puts its own capital on the line to build a product that has the user base to recover their initial investment.. can do nothing to stop pirates? What if pirates prevent them from recovering their investment?
Whether or not they can do anything to stop pirates is another discussion entirely. It is no part of my post, or even really part of this whole thread. We're talking about one implementation of one (lame) idea, not prevention of piracy in general.
What I said, and what you conveniently ignored, is that this particular system does nothing to stop piracy whatsoever, and the only thing it does do is inconvenience the legitimate users.
One would think, if a company was trying to stop people from pirating their software, they'd do something that would inconvenience the pirates but not affect the legitimate users.
In this case, they've got it totally, 100% the other way around. That's a way to encourage piracy, not stop it.
It's like trying to stop shoplifting by leaving merchandise outside the store with nobody watching it, but making customers fill out a written application and bring two personal references in order to buy it.
This is a great idea. Now that its tagged and *if* you share it, they'll know exactly whose sharing it and can prosecute.
This particular bit of genius doesn't stop anyone from sharing the files, or make it easier to prosecute any of them. All a prospective pirate has to do is zero out the tag bytes. The one thing it does do is make it impossible for the legitimate users -- not the pirates, but the people who have actually supported the company and paid for the thing -- to verify that they have a clean download. It's not hurting the pirates in the least tiny bit. It is hurting their customers. That's why people are so torqued.
The clerks should take it up with management, because the customers will protect THEIR interests.
No. The CUSTOMERS should take it up with management. Corporate management, not store management.
In a customer-management interaction, the customer isn't always right, but at least the company knows that the customer will spend more money if they treat him as though he's right. In an employee-management interaction, the employee is always wrong.
If the clerks take it up with management, they'll get one of two responses:
1) It's not your problem. Keeping the store name & address percentage up is your problem. Get back to work.
-or-
2) Stop by on Friday to pick up your final paycheck.
Sales clerks are not in a position to set corporate policy. If they complain, nobody listens to them. You think if our complaints did any good, Radio Shack would have compensated us for the mad rush of the Christmas season by cutting our commission percentage?
Store managers are not in a position to set corporate policy either. They got dicked the same as we did, commission wise. And in just about every other way, which probably explains why there were jokes in our district about Radio Shack management being the training program for Circuit City salesclerks.
District managers are not much better off. Regional managers might actually be heard if they pass a comment up the line, but they have "more important" things to do, mostly involving dealing with harried district managers overwhelmed by legions of disgruntled store managers.
If you have a problem with a company, taking it out on the poor slob at the register won't do either of you any good. He is not only not the guy who can do anything, he's multiple levels removed from the guy who can do anything, and most of the people in those intervening levels, like him, would feel that their job is threatened if they pass on your complaints. If you have a problem with a company, take it to the top. That's where the people who can do something about it are. Write to the president of the company, buy one share of stock and show up at their shareholders meetings, do something that will actually get results. Don't beat up on the poor schmuck who's just trying to pay his rent and buy his groceries.
But if you wanted to get a subscription to the print version of the newspaper, you'd be required to give them your name and address and possibly credit card number.
I would only have to provide enough information to allow them to deliver the newspaper to me. If I paid my paperboy in cash, as I used to when I got the paper, all they would know for sure is the address the paper goes to, and maybe my name if I didn't feel like being a pain about it. They wouldn't know my income level, what industry I work in, my age, or even (since my first name is somewhat ambiguous) my sex. They would just need to know that a newspaper needs to go to 123 Main St.
Newspapers have done just fine for generations selling advertising without knowing private details of each individual customer. But as someone said earlier, they've decided that their product is no longer news -- their product is their readers, to be packaged up and delivered to their real customers, their advertisers. Some of that product is rebelling.
I would have much less of a problem with a form that asked me for my advertising preferences: would I prefer to see ads for movies, books, sporting events, cars, clothing, food, travel, or whatever, and would I prefer my ads to be targetted to the lower, middle, or higher end of the price range. Preferably individually selectable by category -- I buy cheap cars and expensive books. I would fill that out honestly, and maybe even buy from their advertisers.
But someone, presumably the advertisers, can't get over stereotyped demographics. They think that because I'm female, I'm a likely buyer of child care products (no children), "women's workshops" on the latest styles of victimhood (not a victim), and travel/spa packages (let's not even go there). In reality, the things I buy most often online are technical computer books, games, and computer parts. All of which, of course, I'll never see the ads for if I fill out the usual registration forms honestly, because they're served only to men.
Since a system like that would obviously serve their needs, and the needs of their advertisers, much better, and they haven't implemented anything of the kind, clearly they're gathering these vast amounts of personal information for other purposes. What? I have no clue. But when you look at the powers granted to the US government by the Patriot Act, you have to wonder... hmm, Joe Schmoe reads every article about Osama bin Laden on the NYT site... something suspicious about that boy.
I used to work for Radio Shack. I should point out that giving the poor schmuck at the counter a hard time doesn't do any good. People I knew were fired for not having a high enough name & address percentage -- or for not asking at all when a mystery shopper checked. Since the job market was in the toilet at the time, it wasn't worth the risk. The customer might give you a rough time, but the company was gonna fire your ass.
My pet peeve: every time that I buy something from Barnes & Noble, the sales clerk harasses me to buy their $25 discount card. It has cost them thousands of dollars worth of my business, since I now shop at Border's if I need a brick-and-mortar superstore, or amazon.com if I can wait a couple of days.
...annoyances you have to deal with in a free society
They seem to be very selective about that freedom.
I assume they're more than willing to call on the agents of the government (the police, for instance) to protect them from people exercising their freedom to visit the company offices and beat the living crap out of them. And I'm sure that they would not be so dedicated to people's freedom to slam every system they own with a DOS attack. The only "freedom" they're concerned about is their freedom to commit extortion without that mean ol' FTC interfering.
They're all fired up about their rights (is there a right to commit extortion?) but they're conveniently ignoring one thing: rights come with attached responsibilities. You can't separate the two, and when you try, you get problems. For instance, if you have the right to swing your fist around, it comes with the responsibility to stop short of my nose. If you have the right to drive a car, it comes with the responsibility not to squash pedestrians. A society which granted those rights but does not acknowledge the associated responsibilities would be murderous chaos.
In a truly civilized society, people are as aware of their responsibilities as they are of their rights, and act accordingly. Only in such a society can there truly be freedom.
In modern US society, right and wrong have been equated with legal and illegal -- or, even worse, with getting away with it and getting caught. Rights are everything. Responsibilities are not in the picture at all. Civilized behavior is mocked. This has cost us many things, including the expense of feeding an ever-more-bloated government. But most of all, it has cost us freedom.
Being Slashdot nerds, we tend to look first at the technical aspects of a problem. But in this case, the greatest difficulty is not technical. The biggest part of the problem is trust -- namely, users' trust for you.
This might surprise a lot of people, but the majority of credit card fraud is not carried out by shoulder surfers, packet sniffers, l33t hackers, or any other third parties. It's done by the merchants themselves, or by their employees. Yep: the people most likely to misuse your CC info are the people you voluntarily give it to.
You're planning to ask people to give you information that can positively identify them in a non-face-to-face environment. Which means that you, your eventual employees, the investigators you hire to verify that the documents people send you are real, etc., will all potentially have access to that information. You first have to work out a bulletproof means to protect that information, even from yourself, and then you have to convince prospective users (remember, these are the people who are afraid to send their CC info over the Net) that you've protected it adequately. You can convince yourself . . . you might possibly be able to convince me . . . but it'll be a cold day in hell before you convince my mother-in-law.
There are a lot more mothers-in-law who have heard scary news stories about identity theft than there are Slashdotters.
So, I should be forced to provide my personal contact information to the general public so that its open, but the threats [chillingeffects.org] that you send me, whether by lawyer or by crow bar, ought to be kept private?!
You, sir, are delusional. Nowhere in anything I wrote, anywhere, did I say anything of the kind.
For one thing, requiring my lawyer to contact your lawyer to resolve a dispute is no more open or public than me emailing you and saying "hey, that's my stuff, wouldya please take it off your web page." If anything, it's likely to be less public. Plus, if I had to hire a lawyer to deal with the situation, since my IP lawyer charges me $200 an hour, I wouldn't be able to settle for just having the infringing material removed; I'd have to go after you for damages, not because the infringement did me any actual monetary harm, but because I've got to pay my lawyer, who does me entirely too much monetary harm.
Again, you are putting totally bizarre words into my mouth. I never said that "everyone speaking on the Internet is required to make their personal contact information public." I never even implied it. Owning a domain name and "speaking on the Internet" are two totally different things. Nor would keeping the ownership of domain names secret from all but lawyers and their ilk prevent the types of issues that chillingeffects.org is reporting. Note that the C&D letters in question are all sent by, guess who, lawyers.
And no, I'm not frustrated by having to delete annoying emails. I'm frustrated by having to deal with a mailserver groaning under the strain, with customers begging me to make it stop, with things like a business associate not getting a critical email from me because it got lost in literally hundreds of spams he received the same day. We're barely keeping our heads above water as it is. Taking away something that has been one of the few tools available to the victims -- the ability to find out who is bombarding them with the stuff -- and giving the bad guys an impenetrable shield of secrecy will make things much, much worse.
Having to hire a lawyer to tell someone to quit copying my stuff, or to find out who is hammering my mailserver into the ground with a flood of spam for fake Viagra, will only drive up my costs more. It won't help innocent people in any way -- large corporations who want to intimidate the little guy have plenty of staff lawyers, and even tame judges, to do the job for them. But it will sure as hell gut any chance the little guy has of being able to respond or defend himself against that kind of attack or intimidation.
Openness has served the Net well for many years. Throwing that away in favor of secrecy, and a heirarchy of haves and have-nots where only lawyers and big companies have access to that information, will not improve it.
. . . once you have pirated and installed it, there is no incentive to ever pay for it.
So why did I recently send thirty bucks to some guy in Korea for EditPlus? EditPlus is fully functional shareware. I could have kept on using it forever without paying a penny.
To answer my own question, because the author did right by me, so it's only fair that I do right by him and pay up. It's called honor.
The statistics aren't "screwed up beyond all hell." Just because you weren't going to buy something still doesn't give you the right to suddenly have it without paying for it.
Non sequitur.
Whether or not it gives anyone the right to have it without paying for it is not the issue. The issue is whether BSA members would have had $39,000,000,000 more if all software piracy was prevented. Since a very large percentage of that software is used by people who either will not or can not pay for it, that figure is seriously flawed.
Let's say you paint a mural on the side of your garage and require everyone who looks at it to pay you a dollar because of all your hard work. You put out a can to collect the money. You check it a week later, and there are only five dollars in it. You saw three people look at your garage without paying. So you hire a guard to stand by the mural and make sure that nobody can look at it without paying. He chases away the three people: an art lover (thinks he has a right to it), a 6-year-old girl with only ten cents (can't afford it), and a blind man (can't use it anyway). Your can still has only five dollars in it.
None of those three people would have paid to look at the mural in the first place, so you have gained nothing by hiring that guard to prevent them from doing so. You can't claim that you lost $3 from "illegal staring" before you hired the guard, because it was $3 you never had and weren't ever going to get.
That's the problem with the BSA's figures: They're making up numbers for how much pirated software is out there, and then counting their "losses" as the full retail price of that software, disregarding the fact that a very large percentage of it is in the hands of people who will not or can not pay for it, and thus was never "lost sales" to begin with. If illegally copying software is wrong, then what is lying about statistics and deliberately misleading the public and the government?
After all, how does one "steal" a service, you're not taking any physical object from me, are you?
Bad analogy: He'd be taking your time. If you spent your time landscaping his yard, you would be unable to spend that same time landscaping the yard of a customer who wasn't planning to stiff you, and therefore miss out on payment from that other client. Landscaping his yard is an exclusive activity, and precludes any other landscaping during that same period of time.
As it happens, in the past I have been a software developer and had my products pirated. Unpleasant as it might be, the fact that a couple of little AOLamers were passing around unauthorized copies of my software did not prevent me from selling software to those people who would pay. I did not lose time, I did not lose money (though I might have not gained money I otherwise could have), and in fact I did not actually lose anything at all. In order to lose something you must first have it.
If you landscape my yard for free, just to be neighborly, you could not work for pay at the same time you're working for free. On the other hand, if I give you a copy of my software for free, and it's something you wouldn't have bought anyway (it was pretty niche stuff), that wouldn't change my income for the week in the slightest. I could give a copy to you and sell one to someone else at the same time. So the two examples are not even remotely equivalent.
Yeah but everyone wants photoshop, not some $100 balls cut off image app.
Actually, Photoshop Elements (the app in question) does pretty much everything the average user needs, and in fact fills about 95% of my requirements for graphics for my website business. I use it a lot myself because it gives me what I need to get the job done without my having to dig through piles of features only relevant to people doing graphics for print publication during a full moon in Outer Mongolia. Although there are numerous reasons I dislike Adobe, Photoshop Elements isn't one of them.
Sadly, Photoshop itself is yet another victim of the software industry's desperate effort to overcome the flattening out of market growth and saturation of the existing market by trying to sell people the same software they bought last year, which requires adding a few more bells and whistles to persuade them that they need it.
Now that this tactic has started to fail, we're starting to see companies trying to force users to pay annually whether they upgrade anything or not. Years of seemingly endless market growth have spoiled them, and they've come to believe that they deserve ongoing revenue from a product they've already sold.
One example is the gaming industry's mass exodus to console gaming where piracy is much more difficult.
Piracy is not the only (perhaps not even the major) issue there. The games are still being released for the PC platform -- but people aren't buying them. The consumer market as a whole is spending a lot more on games for consoles than for PCs. We, the gamers, aren't doing that to protect the game companies from piracy.
We're doing it because . . .
. . . we don't need to buy expensive upgrades for our consoles every 6 months to be able to play current games
. . . we can drop the disc in the machine and play, instead of dealing with an installer that somehow manages to break unrelated software in the process of installing a game
. . . games are becoming more and more unstable, rather than less, and we're tired of having some bug-riddled mess crash our comp every time we want to take a ten minute game break
. . . it's easier to take a console (or a disc and a memory card) to a friend's place instead of uprooting a whole PC
. . . you can rent console games, leading people to buy games they enjoyed when they rented them for a week
. . . and so on. That isn't even touching household issues, like the fact that multiplayer is easy on consoles, or the fact that they're not in use by family members doing their homework, bringing work home from the office, surfing pr0n, or whatever.
That shift isn't being pushed by the game companies -- it's being pulled by the consumers who prefer the convenience of a console system to the hassles experienced on a PC. It's easy, quick, and fun, and you can just go play a game instead of trying to figure out why the game you just installed hosed your email software -- and more important, how to un-hose it.
Potential sales are not considered when discussing lost revenue. This is actually by law, I believe.
Which law? In which country? And if potential sales are not considered, what revenue is being lost, and how? Armed robbery? They're saying "If people weren't pirating our software, we'd have sold X more units for Y billion dollars"... that's potential sales right there.
For years the BSA has been claiming multi-billion-dollar "losses" based, not just on their guesstimates of the amount of pirated software on the "average" computer, but on the premise that every 15-year-old warez d00d with a trophy copy of Photoshop would have bought it at full retail price if he couldn't pirate it. So $649 per warez d00d x however many of them the BSA guesstimates there are, repeat as needed for MS Office ($499), Dreamweaver ($399), etc. -- blissfully ignoring the fact that said d00ds have little or no need for the products, wouldn't have bought them at any price, and without them (and probably even with them) they'd use Paint, WordPad, etc. So that $1547 loss is the loss of a sale -- or hundreds of thousands of sales -- that never existed in the first place.
The market is saturated for many types of software. If people are happy with their office apps, for instance, they don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on upgrades that will give them nothing they need and excessive bloat they don't want. Another part of the BSA's definition of "loss" comes out as "we can't sell version 5.0 of our program this year to everyone who bought 4.0 last year"... which, of course, couldn't possibly be that they're satisfied with 4.0, it must be the fault of pirates!!!
Software piracy is wrong. Don't get me wrong on that. And I put my money where my mouth is: every program on this computer is legitimately owned, even the shareware is registered. BUT the BSA is crying wolf with their outrageously inflated numbers, and trying to take away our freedom to do totally legal things to protect themselves from that wolf they've conjured.
But you can't protect the individual artist without protecting the person whom buys copy rights from that artist - through contract or otherwise.
The individual musician needs to be protected from the RIAA, not P2P. It's not the people sharing their music who are cutting into their profits -- it's the people who are making millions off that music and not giving those musicians a slice. If you believe record industry accountants, even top-selling CDs don't actually make a profit. The record labels are actually a charity operation, running barely at break-even, just helping the poor musicians get some CDs out there. Or so they tell the musicians when royalty payment time comes around. Of course, all of the industry executives just happen to be independantly wealthy, which explains the million-dollar houses and the lifestyles to match.
This has nothing to do with P2P.
It has everything to do with P2P. The musicans don't make money from CD sales. The record labels make a killing, but few of the people who actually make the music -- only a handful at the very top -- ever make any money off of CDs. For them, it's a way to get people to hear their music so that those people will go to their concerts.
The record companies know that if there was a way for the musicians to get that music directly to the people who are listening to it, in order to entice them to buy the concert tickets and the T-shirts, then they, the record companies, will be irrelevant. Dinosaurs. Buggy whip makers. A business with neither suppliers nor customers.
A handful of top name musicans agree with them, because they know they're "top" because of their celebrity status, not because their music is any better than a hundred or a thousand up-and-coming competitors, and they want to keep that lock they have on the CD sales and the radio airplay. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose by people discovering that Seether sounds just as good as Metallica. But for most -- all of the ones creating great music and trying to make a living at it -- the recording industry cartel is their enemy. Their fans aren't the enemy, the people who would hear their music and go to a concert or, yes, order a CD, aren't the enemy. The enemy is the people who want to make huge profits off their music and keep all the money for themselves. The cartel known as the RIAA.
That same artist who has little popularity and is not centrist enough to get a record contract... is the one hurt the most by P2P.
Um, how about "no"?
The only CDs he's likely to be selling are the ones from the card table by the door when he plays some local club. His music is not in the stores, not on the racks at Wal-Mart or WorstBuy or Strawberries. He's making a living off opening for better-known acts, playing at clubs, getting gigs where he can, and probably delivering pizzas to make ends meet. Nobody knows about his website, nobody knows about his music, and except for the people who hear him locally, nobody ever will.
If he puts his music out there on the P2P networks and encourages people to share it, then people who don't happen to live in his home town will hear him. People who don't randomly wander across his website will hear him. People who will love his music, who will go to his concerts, who will buy his Cafe Press T-shirts, and who will even order a physical CD off his website because they think he's awesome and want to support and encourage him, will hear him.
For him, P2P is a lifesaver and the RIAA, the recording industry who wants to make sure that nobody sells music without giving them the lion's share of the profits, the industry that wants to make sure that it's as hard as possible for him to get the fame (and sales) his music deserves, is the real enemy.
There's a book publisher who has put their money (and their copyrights) where their mouth is. Check out the Baen Free Library. For the pas
For years, the music industry has claimed, in Congressional hearing after Congressional hearing, that the creators and distributors of music that encourages its listeners to behave in an anti-social fashion bear no responsibility when those listeners follow along. (I agree with them, by the way, but that's not the point at the moment) They have gone to court over and over again to prove that they have no liability when they tell children to kill, to rape, to use drugs, etc., and those children do so.
Now they want to criminalize the act of writing computer programs which could be used for copyright infringement because that is "inducing" children to break the law.
Now, wait just one cotton-pickin' minute here. If selling music that glorifies committing crimes, and in some cases has a clear and direct call to commit such crimes, is not "inducement" to commit such crimes, then how is writing computer programs which may be used to violate copyrights, among many other legal uses, "inducement" to violate those copyrights? They want to have it both ways.
Ooooh that smell... Can't you smell that smell... Ooooh that smell... The smell of hypocrisy
surrounds you...
And let's not even get into the gun industry. By Orrin Hatch's logic, since guns are used in crimes, the gun industry is "inducing" children to hold up liquor stores. Handguns in particular should be banned, since their overwhelming use is to either kill human beings or practice killing human beings. It follows the same logic. So how come Hatch is so worked up about copyright infringement but he doesn't care about murder?
Ranting on Slashdot is fun, but it doesn't change anything. We need to be active. We need to vote. We need to get our friends and relatives to vote. And we need to do it now, before "inducing" people to vote against the party in power becomes a crime, too.
The failed business model in question is the record companies' stranglehold on the music industry.
Few people seem to realize the hypocrisy of their sudden rush to "protect the rights of artists." (When did an "artist" become someone who makes music, not someone who paints? When did "musician" become a dirty word?) The biggest threat to those rights is, and always has been, the record companies themselves.
"The artist formerly known as Prince" didn't change his name to a weird symbol on a whim; he did it because before he was famous, a record company had gotten him to sign a contract so one-sided that they even owned his real-life name. (yes, it's Prince... talk about child abuse) Going back a few years, the singers and songwriters of some of the real classics of modern music, especially (though far from exclusively) those who were not white males, were paid a pittance for their work that record companies made a fortune from. In court, the record companies have insisted time and again that $100 was more than fair compensation for all rights to a song that they made tens of millions of dollars off of.
Even today, most musicians see only a tiny fraction, if any, of the money from the sales of their CDs. They earn their money primarily from concerts. The money from that overpriced CD -- the one that sells for twice what a DVD of a movie that cost a hundred million dollars to film -- goes straight to the record company, and stays there.
The record companies have a lock on the distribution of music. Anyone can rent a studio and make a CD... even me (William Hung move over!)... but if they want to get it in the record stores and on the radio, they have to sell their soul to a record company.
That's why P2P scares the living shit out of the record companies. They know what the real numbers are, not the doctored ones they show Congress. They know that their serfs are deserting them for independant labels and self-distribution. They know that the massive consolidation of radio station ownership since Orrin Hatch and his buddies threw out rules that had preserved competition for decades and handed the market over to their supporter and propaganda wing Clear Channel is costing them a fortune in payola. And I'm sure they know that they're turning out endless streams of overpriced music that, fundamentally, sucks.
But they can't do anything about that. (except maybe the sucky music) They know they're dinosaurs. The know the industry has changed, and their chosen business model -- total control of production, distribution, and sales of music -- is going the way of a business model based on total control of buggy whips. So they're getting people like Orrin Hatch to pass laws to force the market to continue to support that model.
It isn't fans sharing music by the record companies' serfs that the companies fear... they know, their public statements to the contrary, it isn't hurting their sales, and quite possibly either increasing them or offsetting what would be a greater decline. What leaves them terrified is the existance of a distribution channel that they don't and can't control which will free musicians from being serfs of the record companies in the first place. They fear a system that will allow musicans to keep on doing what they already do -- making their money off of concerts and other sources of revenue -- and not have to sign their lives and their rights over to any record company. They know a system which connects the producer and the consumer directly will have no place for parasites that have gotten fat from feeding off both ends of the line.
Slashdot Mirror
Big corporations can't afford controversy, so those went away when Hasbro (via WotC) took over.
... sounds like you should attack it with your Model 2A Sword. Change the names and the annoying people would quiet down while the monsters would be more interesting -- and more trademarkable, which was TSR's big thing at the time.
... in today's world, the person I was in high school would have been tagged "most likely to shoot up the school." I played D&D, wrote depressing poetry, listened to The Wall incessantly, and wore black a lot. I seem to have survived to middle age without killing anything more deserving of life than a biting insect or a food animal. And I still wear black a lot. (though my poetry has improved) So much for the stereotypes.
Actually, they went away long, LONG before Hasbro took over.
It was kind of a combination of figuring that if the religious whackos were getting all bent out of shape because the name "demon" appeared in the rules, without actually reading the books at all, then changing the name would deflect the whackos, and the realization that "Type III Demon" was just not very inspiring as a terrible foe
When WotC bought them out, the demons returned, but by then the game had gotten so out of hand (i.e., the need for a forklift to get all the rulebooks to the game table) that a lot of people had drifted off to other things anyway, and few cared what demons were or weren't called.
Funny thing
I guess you're a bigot if you want people to be able to live their lives the way they want.
... to save my life I couldn't think of what it was, some random SF book I read long ago ... where some guy was complaining to the protagonist that he (the complainer) suffered from terrible religous persecution in that world. It turned out that the "persecution" was that they were prevented from suppressing all other religions. The big problem with a truly free society comes in when you have people who would take away freedom from others. That is the one freedom -- the freedom to restrict freedom -- that a free society cannot permit, because that is the worm that can eat it from within. Nice little paradox there.
You mean like being able to marry whoever they want to? To do whatever they want in their bedrooms with other consenting adults?
I guess you're a bigot unless you acknowledge there's only one set of acceptable thoughts and no others will be tolerated.
You mean like male-dominant, married, heterosexual relationships are the only permissable form, and all others are sinful and should be illegal as well?
I guess you're a bigot if you want to make your own decisions rather than have them made by the government or some activist group.
You mean like those groups that want to amend the Constitution of the United States to take those decisions away from individuals, from states, from the federal government, not only for our generation but for every one to follow?
I guess "live and let live" is bigoted now, and "you will think what we tell you and do what we tell you" is the only way to avoid this evil bigotry.
"You have to live in accordance with my religion" is bigoted no matter how you look at it. Nobody is trying to force you, by either laws or violence, to be gay. Plenty of people are trying to force gay people, by both laws and violence, to be straight, or at least to pretend so.
I'm put in mind of a passage from a book
there is NO research stating there are ANY animals that practice ONLY homosexuality. what the research is REALLY saying is that BI-sexuality is 'normal', or rather, natural. Shit! i've seen male dogs jump on other male dogs (which, BTW, is actually a display of dominance, NOT sexuality), but that same dog would also be ALL OVER a female dog.
:(
.... but getting pegged by my girlfriend, that's different!
It's not research, but it's not bad as anecdotal evidence goes: Back when I used to raise fancy mice, I had one completely homosexual male mouse. Ticked me off, too, because he had really nice markings (tan and white spotted) and I wanted to breed from him. But he would only mount other males. If I presented him with females in estrus, he would either ignore them or attack them. Males, any males, he'd be all over. I never did get a litter out of him.
and innate?? give me a BREAK!!! I have NO desire to tup another guys arse, or him mine, or suck a schlong, or him mine
So why do you think it's a choice when someone else has no desire to get pegged by a your girlfriend, but tupping another guy's arse, or sucking his scholong, that's different? Could you choose to be homosexual? Could you get up some morning, and say "today, I think I'm going to give up all attraction to women, and go find myself a boyfriend"? If you looked at gay porn for the next six months, would you get the hots for other guys? If not, then why do you think it's somehow not equally innate for someone who feels as attracted to women as you feel attracted to men?
Also, animals are just that animals. Are you stating we should act like animals and be gay?
... are they stating that we should act like animals and be straight?
I have heard many people say that "animals aren't gay, so therefore it's unnatural and humans shouldn't do it." So
Follow the logic:
If animals don't do it, it's unnatural and we shouldn't do it. (like writing Slashdot posts)
If animals do it, it's acting like an animal and we shouldn't do it. (like eating)
Nice logic.
You are assuming that being gay is inherent, like being black.
Let me ask you this: Why would someone choose to be vilified, outlawed, and unable to find a date?
yeah, back then when on average humans only lived to 40ish, they were getting married and starting families at twelve.
Actually, you're mistaking average life expectancy for the age people actually lived to. Average life expectancy includes infant mortality -- so if you have a society where 50% of the people die before they're a year old, and the other 50% live to the biblical threescore and ten, your average life expectancy is 35. But nobody is actually dying at 35 -- it's either 0 or 70. Of course, reality isn't quite that binary, but it's the same basic math. Since modern western societies have such a low infant/child mortality rate, we're used to seeing the average life expectancy number having something to do with how long you can expect to live, but when you're dealing with societies that have very high infant mortality rates, it's not even close to the same thing.
Wander around a cemetery in New Engalnd some time and read the dates on old tombstones. If a man lived to grow up, he was fairly well assured of living to 60+. If a woman survived childbearing, she would probably live longer than that. But that is counterbalanced in the overall average by those rows of little tiny stones that say "Baby Smith, 8 days old."
The average of first menstruation in girls has actually gone down in the past hundred or so years. This may be because of better nutrition and overall health, nobody is quite sure. Though, interestingly enough, it seems to have been at roughly modern ages in ancient Rome and possibly during the medieval era. It's rather difficult to determine, because in societies where marriage is arranged or contracted for social reasons rather than individual choice, girls often are married before they are capable of bearing children, and the actual consummation of the marriage is postponed. Without medical records, it's hard to tell when young women were sexually mature; mostly it's a matter of guessing based on birth records.
Your whole point is a non sequitur anyway. When people were getting married and starting families at young ages (12 or otherwise), it was not because they had seen the pigs making piglets. It was because they were ready to take on the duties of adulthood, which were much simpler at the time. They had learned the basic skills of household management, food production, etc., as children -- kids worked from the day they could toddle. Many young couples lived with one or another set of parents (usually the husband's) for a number of years and got further on-the-job training before they established a separate household.
They didn't have educations to complete -- if they were lucky, they went to the one room schoolhouse for a few years. They didn't have careers to decide on -- they did what their parents did, which was usually farming. They didn't travel and see the world -- most people never went more than 100 miles from where they were born. The reasons that modern people put off marriage and family didn't exist for any but the wealthy classes. Since they had learned the skills they needed for adult life since early childhood, the only thing they had to wait for was their bodies to be ready to do the job.
Obviously, that is not the case today. People have educations to complete, careers to plan, a world to explore. Having children in today's complex world is a much more complicated isse than adding a few more kids to a big farm family, more than doing things the way your parents and grandparents and ten generations back had done them. It is that, rather than knowing where babies come from, that determines things like age of marriage. That is true whether wishful-thinking adults try to keep those children in ignorance in the hope of achieving some mythical "innocence" or whether they give them accurate and reliable information. They are going to get information from someone, somewhere, no matter what. They are going to ask questions and get answers. Far better that those be accurate answers.
and what of childrens' innocence?
Children's innocence is an adult fantasy.
My parents tried hard to keep me not only sheltered, but their "little baby girl" forever. Yet by the time I was 10, I knew all the facts (or at least myths) of life, courtesy of classmates. I knew things that would have curled my parents' hair. Children were far from "innocent" when I was 10 years old -- and I'll be 42 in September.
Unless you isolate your children from every child who knows a child who knows a child who has seen mommy and her boyfriend going at it on the couch, unless your isolate your children from every child who knows a child who knows a child who has been molested by her uncle, unless you isolate your children from every child who knows a child who knows a child who knows about something you want to pretend doesn't exist, there is no "innocence." There never was. There is only adult blindness, pretending that if we don't talk to children about things we don't like then those things will go away, or at least never affeact our children.
So a company who puts its own capital on the line to build a product that has the user base to recover their initial investment.. can do nothing to stop pirates? What if pirates prevent them from recovering their investment?
Whether or not they can do anything to stop pirates is another discussion entirely. It is no part of my post, or even really part of this whole thread. We're talking about one implementation of one (lame) idea, not prevention of piracy in general.
What I said, and what you conveniently ignored, is that this particular system does nothing to stop piracy whatsoever, and the only thing it does do is inconvenience the legitimate users.
One would think, if a company was trying to stop people from pirating their software, they'd do something that would inconvenience the pirates but not affect the legitimate users. In this case, they've got it totally, 100% the other way around. That's a way to encourage piracy, not stop it.
It's like trying to stop shoplifting by leaving merchandise outside the store with nobody watching it, but making customers fill out a written application and bring two personal references in order to buy it.
This is a great idea. Now that its tagged and *if* you share it, they'll know exactly whose sharing it and can prosecute.
This particular bit of genius doesn't stop anyone from sharing the files, or make it easier to prosecute any of them. All a prospective pirate has to do is zero out the tag bytes. The one thing it does do is make it impossible for the legitimate users -- not the pirates, but the people who have actually supported the company and paid for the thing -- to verify that they have a clean download. It's not hurting the pirates in the least tiny bit. It is hurting their customers. That's why people are so torqued.
The clerks should take it up with management, because the customers will protect THEIR interests.
No. The CUSTOMERS should take it up with management. Corporate management, not store management.
In a customer-management interaction, the customer isn't always right, but at least the company knows that the customer will spend more money if they treat him as though he's right. In an employee-management interaction, the employee is always wrong.
If the clerks take it up with management, they'll get one of two responses:
1) It's not your problem. Keeping the store name & address percentage up is your problem. Get back to work.
-or-
2) Stop by on Friday to pick up your final paycheck.
Sales clerks are not in a position to set corporate policy. If they complain, nobody listens to them. You think if our complaints did any good, Radio Shack would have compensated us for the mad rush of the Christmas season by cutting our commission percentage?
Store managers are not in a position to set corporate policy either. They got dicked the same as we did, commission wise. And in just about every other way, which probably explains why there were jokes in our district about Radio Shack management being the training program for Circuit City salesclerks.
District managers are not much better off. Regional managers might actually be heard if they pass a comment up the line, but they have "more important" things to do, mostly involving dealing with harried district managers overwhelmed by legions of disgruntled store managers.
If you have a problem with a company, taking it out on the poor slob at the register won't do either of you any good. He is not only not the guy who can do anything, he's multiple levels removed from the guy who can do anything, and most of the people in those intervening levels, like him, would feel that their job is threatened if they pass on your complaints. If you have a problem with a company, take it to the top. That's where the people who can do something about it are. Write to the president of the company, buy one share of stock and show up at their shareholders meetings, do something that will actually get results. Don't beat up on the poor schmuck who's just trying to pay his rent and buy his groceries.
But if you wanted to get a subscription to the print version of the newspaper, you'd be required to give them your name and address and possibly credit card number.
... hmm, Joe Schmoe reads every article about Osama bin Laden on the NYT site ... something suspicious about that boy.
I would only have to provide enough information to allow them to deliver the newspaper to me. If I paid my paperboy in cash, as I used to when I got the paper, all they would know for sure is the address the paper goes to, and maybe my name if I didn't feel like being a pain about it. They wouldn't know my income level, what industry I work in, my age, or even (since my first name is somewhat ambiguous) my sex. They would just need to know that a newspaper needs to go to 123 Main St.
Newspapers have done just fine for generations selling advertising without knowing private details of each individual customer. But as someone said earlier, they've decided that their product is no longer news -- their product is their readers, to be packaged up and delivered to their real customers, their advertisers. Some of that product is rebelling.
I would have much less of a problem with a form that asked me for my advertising preferences: would I prefer to see ads for movies, books, sporting events, cars, clothing, food, travel, or whatever, and would I prefer my ads to be targetted to the lower, middle, or higher end of the price range. Preferably individually selectable by category -- I buy cheap cars and expensive books. I would fill that out honestly, and maybe even buy from their advertisers.
But someone, presumably the advertisers, can't get over stereotyped demographics. They think that because I'm female, I'm a likely buyer of child care products (no children), "women's workshops" on the latest styles of victimhood (not a victim), and travel/spa packages (let's not even go there). In reality, the things I buy most often online are technical computer books, games, and computer parts. All of which, of course, I'll never see the ads for if I fill out the usual registration forms honestly, because they're served only to men.
Since a system like that would obviously serve their needs, and the needs of their advertisers, much better, and they haven't implemented anything of the kind, clearly they're gathering these vast amounts of personal information for other purposes. What? I have no clue. But when you look at the powers granted to the US government by the Patriot Act, you have to wonder
I used to work for Radio Shack. I should point out that giving the poor schmuck at the counter a hard time doesn't do any good. People I knew were fired for not having a high enough name & address percentage -- or for not asking at all when a mystery shopper checked. Since the job market was in the toilet at the time, it wasn't worth the risk. The customer might give you a rough time, but the company was gonna fire your ass. My pet peeve: every time that I buy something from Barnes & Noble, the sales clerk harasses me to buy their $25 discount card. It has cost them thousands of dollars worth of my business, since I now shop at Border's if I need a brick-and-mortar superstore, or amazon.com if I can wait a couple of days.
Ah. So you're saying he was getting the spam via esp then?
He said "internet community" not "internet".
...annoyances you have to deal with in a free society
They seem to be very selective about that freedom.
I assume they're more than willing to call on the agents of the government (the police, for instance) to protect them from people exercising their freedom to visit the company offices and beat the living crap out of them. And I'm sure that they would not be so dedicated to people's freedom to slam every system they own with a DOS attack. The only "freedom" they're concerned about is their freedom to commit extortion without that mean ol' FTC interfering.
They're all fired up about their rights (is there a right to commit extortion?) but they're conveniently ignoring one thing: rights come with attached responsibilities. You can't separate the two, and when you try, you get problems. For instance, if you have the right to swing your fist around, it comes with the responsibility to stop short of my nose. If you have the right to drive a car, it comes with the responsibility not to squash pedestrians. A society which granted those rights but does not acknowledge the associated responsibilities would be murderous chaos.
In a truly civilized society, people are as aware of their responsibilities as they are of their rights, and act accordingly. Only in such a society can there truly be freedom.
In modern US society, right and wrong have been equated with legal and illegal -- or, even worse, with getting away with it and getting caught. Rights are everything. Responsibilities are not in the picture at all. Civilized behavior is mocked. This has cost us many things, including the expense of feeding an ever-more-bloated government. But most of all, it has cost us freedom.
Being Slashdot nerds, we tend to look first at the technical aspects of a problem. But in this case, the greatest difficulty is not technical. The biggest part of the problem is trust -- namely, users' trust for you.
This might surprise a lot of people, but the majority of credit card fraud is not carried out by shoulder surfers, packet sniffers, l33t hackers, or any other third parties. It's done by the merchants themselves, or by their employees. Yep: the people most likely to misuse your CC info are the people you voluntarily give it to.
You're planning to ask people to give you information that can positively identify them in a non-face-to-face environment. Which means that you, your eventual employees, the investigators you hire to verify that the documents people send you are real, etc., will all potentially have access to that information. You first have to work out a bulletproof means to protect that information, even from yourself, and then you have to convince prospective users (remember, these are the people who are afraid to send their CC info over the Net) that you've protected it adequately. You can convince yourself . . . you might possibly be able to convince me . . . but it'll be a cold day in hell before you convince my mother-in-law.
There are a lot more mothers-in-law who have heard scary news stories about identity theft than there are Slashdotters.
So, I should be forced to provide my personal contact information to the general public so that its open, but the threats [chillingeffects.org] that you send me, whether by lawyer or by crow bar, ought to be kept private?!
You, sir, are delusional. Nowhere in anything I wrote, anywhere, did I say anything of the kind.
For one thing, requiring my lawyer to contact your lawyer to resolve a dispute is no more open or public than me emailing you and saying "hey, that's my stuff, wouldya please take it off your web page." If anything, it's likely to be less public. Plus, if I had to hire a lawyer to deal with the situation, since my IP lawyer charges me $200 an hour, I wouldn't be able to settle for just having the infringing material removed; I'd have to go after you for damages, not because the infringement did me any actual monetary harm, but because I've got to pay my lawyer, who does me entirely too much monetary harm.
Again, you are putting totally bizarre words into my mouth. I never said that "everyone speaking on the Internet is required to make their personal contact information public." I never even implied it. Owning a domain name and "speaking on the Internet" are two totally different things. Nor would keeping the ownership of domain names secret from all but lawyers and their ilk prevent the types of issues that chillingeffects.org is reporting. Note that the C&D letters in question are all sent by, guess who, lawyers.
And no, I'm not frustrated by having to delete annoying emails. I'm frustrated by having to deal with a mailserver groaning under the strain, with customers begging me to make it stop, with things like a business associate not getting a critical email from me because it got lost in literally hundreds of spams he received the same day. We're barely keeping our heads above water as it is. Taking away something that has been one of the few tools available to the victims -- the ability to find out who is bombarding them with the stuff -- and giving the bad guys an impenetrable shield of secrecy will make things much, much worse.
Having to hire a lawyer to tell someone to quit copying my stuff, or to find out who is hammering my mailserver into the ground with a flood of spam for fake Viagra, will only drive up my costs more. It won't help innocent people in any way -- large corporations who want to intimidate the little guy have plenty of staff lawyers, and even tame judges, to do the job for them. But it will sure as hell gut any chance the little guy has of being able to respond or defend himself against that kind of attack or intimidation.
Openness has served the Net well for many years. Throwing that away in favor of secrecy, and a heirarchy of haves and have-nots where only lawyers and big companies have access to that information, will not improve it.
. . . once you have pirated and installed it, there is no incentive to ever pay for it.
So why did I recently send thirty bucks to some guy in Korea for EditPlus? EditPlus is fully functional shareware. I could have kept on using it forever without paying a penny.
To answer my own question, because the author did right by me, so it's only fair that I do right by him and pay up. It's called honor.
The statistics aren't "screwed up beyond all hell." Just because you weren't going to buy something still doesn't give you the right to suddenly have it without paying for it.
Non sequitur.
Whether or not it gives anyone the right to have it without paying for it is not the issue. The issue is whether BSA members would have had $39,000,000,000 more if all software piracy was prevented. Since a very large percentage of that software is used by people who either will not or can not pay for it, that figure is seriously flawed.
Let's say you paint a mural on the side of your garage and require everyone who looks at it to pay you a dollar because of all your hard work. You put out a can to collect the money. You check it a week later, and there are only five dollars in it. You saw three people look at your garage without paying. So you hire a guard to stand by the mural and make sure that nobody can look at it without paying. He chases away the three people: an art lover (thinks he has a right to it), a 6-year-old girl with only ten cents (can't afford it), and a blind man (can't use it anyway). Your can still has only five dollars in it.
None of those three people would have paid to look at the mural in the first place, so you have gained nothing by hiring that guard to prevent them from doing so. You can't claim that you lost $3 from "illegal staring" before you hired the guard, because it was $3 you never had and weren't ever going to get.
That's the problem with the BSA's figures: They're making up numbers for how much pirated software is out there, and then counting their "losses" as the full retail price of that software, disregarding the fact that a very large percentage of it is in the hands of people who will not or can not pay for it, and thus was never "lost sales" to begin with. If illegally copying software is wrong, then what is lying about statistics and deliberately misleading the public and the government?
After all, how does one "steal" a service, you're not taking any physical object from me, are you?
Bad analogy: He'd be taking your time. If you spent your time landscaping his yard, you would be unable to spend that same time landscaping the yard of a customer who wasn't planning to stiff you, and therefore miss out on payment from that other client. Landscaping his yard is an exclusive activity, and precludes any other landscaping during that same period of time.
As it happens, in the past I have been a software developer and had my products pirated. Unpleasant as it might be, the fact that a couple of little AOLamers were passing around unauthorized copies of my software did not prevent me from selling software to those people who would pay. I did not lose time, I did not lose money (though I might have not gained money I otherwise could have), and in fact I did not actually lose anything at all. In order to lose something you must first have it.
If you landscape my yard for free, just to be neighborly, you could not work for pay at the same time you're working for free. On the other hand, if I give you a copy of my software for free, and it's something you wouldn't have bought anyway (it was pretty niche stuff), that wouldn't change my income for the week in the slightest. I could give a copy to you and sell one to someone else at the same time. So the two examples are not even remotely equivalent.
Bad analogy, no donut.
Yeah but everyone wants photoshop, not some $100 balls cut off image app.
Actually, Photoshop Elements (the app in question) does pretty much everything the average user needs, and in fact fills about 95% of my requirements for graphics for my website business. I use it a lot myself because it gives me what I need to get the job done without my having to dig through piles of features only relevant to people doing graphics for print publication during a full moon in Outer Mongolia. Although there are numerous reasons I dislike Adobe, Photoshop Elements isn't one of them.
Sadly, Photoshop itself is yet another victim of the software industry's desperate effort to overcome the flattening out of market growth and saturation of the existing market by trying to sell people the same software they bought last year, which requires adding a few more bells and whistles to persuade them that they need it.
Now that this tactic has started to fail, we're starting to see companies trying to force users to pay annually whether they upgrade anything or not. Years of seemingly endless market growth have spoiled them, and they've come to believe that they deserve ongoing revenue from a product they've already sold.
Piracy is not the only (perhaps not even the major) issue there. The games are still being released for the PC platform -- but people aren't buying them. The consumer market as a whole is spending a lot more on games for consoles than for PCs. We, the gamers, aren't doing that to protect the game companies from piracy.
We're doing it because . . .
- . . . we don't need to buy expensive upgrades for our consoles every 6 months to be able to play current games
- . . . we can drop the disc in the machine and play, instead of dealing with an installer that somehow manages to break unrelated software in the process of installing a game
- . . . games are becoming more and more unstable, rather than less, and we're tired of having some bug-riddled mess crash our comp every time we want to take a ten minute game break
- . . . it's easier to take a console (or a disc and a memory card) to a friend's place instead of uprooting a whole PC
- . . . you can rent console games, leading people to buy games they enjoyed when they rented them for a week
. . . and so on. That isn't even touching household issues, like the fact that multiplayer is easy on consoles, or the fact that they're not in use by family members doing their homework, bringing work home from the office, surfing pr0n, or whatever.That shift isn't being pushed by the game companies -- it's being pulled by the consumers who prefer the convenience of a console system to the hassles experienced on a PC. It's easy, quick, and fun, and you can just go play a game instead of trying to figure out why the game you just installed hosed your email software -- and more important, how to un-hose it.
Potential sales are not considered when discussing lost revenue. This is actually by law, I believe.
... that's potential sales right there.
... which, of course, couldn't possibly be that they're satisfied with 4.0, it must be the fault of pirates!!!
Which law? In which country? And if potential sales are not considered, what revenue is being lost, and how? Armed robbery? They're saying "If people weren't pirating our software, we'd have sold X more units for Y billion dollars"
For years the BSA has been claiming multi-billion-dollar "losses" based, not just on their guesstimates of the amount of pirated software on the "average" computer, but on the premise that every 15-year-old warez d00d with a trophy copy of Photoshop would have bought it at full retail price if he couldn't pirate it. So $649 per warez d00d x however many of them the BSA guesstimates there are, repeat as needed for MS Office ($499), Dreamweaver ($399), etc. -- blissfully ignoring the fact that said d00ds have little or no need for the products, wouldn't have bought them at any price, and without them (and probably even with them) they'd use Paint, WordPad, etc. So that $1547 loss is the loss of a sale -- or hundreds of thousands of sales -- that never existed in the first place.
The market is saturated for many types of software. If people are happy with their office apps, for instance, they don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on upgrades that will give them nothing they need and excessive bloat they don't want. Another part of the BSA's definition of "loss" comes out as "we can't sell version 5.0 of our program this year to everyone who bought 4.0 last year"
Software piracy is wrong. Don't get me wrong on that. And I put my money where my mouth is: every program on this computer is legitimately owned, even the shareware is registered. BUT the BSA is crying wolf with their outrageously inflated numbers, and trying to take away our freedom to do totally legal things to protect themselves from that wolf they've conjured.
But you can't protect the individual artist without protecting the person whom buys copy rights from that artist - through contract or otherwise.
The individual musician needs to be protected from the RIAA, not P2P. It's not the people sharing their music who are cutting into their profits -- it's the people who are making millions off that music and not giving those musicians a slice. If you believe record industry accountants, even top-selling CDs don't actually make a profit. The record labels are actually a charity operation, running barely at break-even, just helping the poor musicians get some CDs out there. Or so they tell the musicians when royalty payment time comes around. Of course, all of the industry executives just happen to be independantly wealthy, which explains the million-dollar houses and the lifestyles to match.
This has nothing to do with P2P.
It has everything to do with P2P. The musicans don't make money from CD sales. The record labels make a killing, but few of the people who actually make the music -- only a handful at the very top -- ever make any money off of CDs. For them, it's a way to get people to hear their music so that those people will go to their concerts.
The record companies know that if there was a way for the musicians to get that music directly to the people who are listening to it, in order to entice them to buy the concert tickets and the T-shirts, then they, the record companies, will be irrelevant. Dinosaurs. Buggy whip makers. A business with neither suppliers nor customers.
A handful of top name musicans agree with them, because they know they're "top" because of their celebrity status, not because their music is any better than a hundred or a thousand up-and-coming competitors, and they want to keep that lock they have on the CD sales and the radio airplay. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose by people discovering that Seether sounds just as good as Metallica. But for most -- all of the ones creating great music and trying to make a living at it -- the recording industry cartel is their enemy. Their fans aren't the enemy, the people who would hear their music and go to a concert or, yes, order a CD, aren't the enemy. The enemy is the people who want to make huge profits off their music and keep all the money for themselves. The cartel known as the RIAA.
That same artist who has little popularity and is not centrist enough to get a record contract... is the one hurt the most by P2P.
Um, how about "no"?
The only CDs he's likely to be selling are the ones from the card table by the door when he plays some local club. His music is not in the stores, not on the racks at Wal-Mart or WorstBuy or Strawberries. He's making a living off opening for better-known acts, playing at clubs, getting gigs where he can, and probably delivering pizzas to make ends meet. Nobody knows about his website, nobody knows about his music, and except for the people who hear him locally, nobody ever will.
If he puts his music out there on the P2P networks and encourages people to share it, then people who don't happen to live in his home town will hear him. People who don't randomly wander across his website will hear him. People who will love his music, who will go to his concerts, who will buy his Cafe Press T-shirts, and who will even order a physical CD off his website because they think he's awesome and want to support and encourage him, will hear him.
For him, P2P is a lifesaver and the RIAA, the recording industry who wants to make sure that nobody sells music without giving them the lion's share of the profits, the industry that wants to make sure that it's as hard as possible for him to get the fame (and sales) his music deserves, is the real enemy.
There's a book publisher who has put their money (and their copyrights) where their mouth is. Check out the Baen Free Library. For the pas
Let me get this straight:
... Can't you smell that smell ... Ooooh that smell ... The smell of hypocrisy
surrounds you ...
For years, the music industry has claimed, in Congressional hearing after Congressional hearing, that the creators and distributors of music that encourages its listeners to behave in an anti-social fashion bear no responsibility when those listeners follow along. (I agree with them, by the way, but that's not the point at the moment) They have gone to court over and over again to prove that they have no liability when they tell children to kill, to rape, to use drugs, etc., and those children do so.
Now they want to criminalize the act of writing computer programs which could be used for copyright infringement because that is "inducing" children to break the law.
Now, wait just one cotton-pickin' minute here. If selling music that glorifies committing crimes, and in some cases has a clear and direct call to commit such crimes, is not "inducement" to commit such crimes, then how is writing computer programs which may be used to violate copyrights, among many other legal uses, "inducement" to violate those copyrights? They want to have it both ways.
Ooooh that smell
And let's not even get into the gun industry. By Orrin Hatch's logic, since guns are used in crimes, the gun industry is "inducing" children to hold up liquor stores. Handguns in particular should be banned, since their overwhelming use is to either kill human beings or practice killing human beings. It follows the same logic. So how come Hatch is so worked up about copyright infringement but he doesn't care about murder?
Ranting on Slashdot is fun, but it doesn't change anything. We need to be active. We need to vote. We need to get our friends and relatives to vote. And we need to do it now, before "inducing" people to vote against the party in power becomes a crime, too.
The failed business model in question is the record companies' stranglehold on the music industry.
Few people seem to realize the hypocrisy of their sudden rush to "protect the rights of artists." (When did an "artist" become someone who makes music, not someone who paints? When did "musician" become a dirty word?) The biggest threat to those rights is, and always has been, the record companies themselves.
"The artist formerly known as Prince" didn't change his name to a weird symbol on a whim; he did it because before he was famous, a record company had gotten him to sign a contract so one-sided that they even owned his real-life name. (yes, it's Prince ... talk about child abuse) Going back a few years, the singers and songwriters of some of the real classics of modern music, especially (though far from exclusively) those who were not white males, were paid a pittance for their work that record companies made a fortune from. In court, the record companies have insisted time and again that $100 was more than fair compensation for all rights to a song that they made tens of millions of dollars off of.
Even today, most musicians see only a tiny fraction, if any, of the money from the sales of their CDs. They earn their money primarily from concerts. The money from that overpriced CD -- the one that sells for twice what a DVD of a movie that cost a hundred million dollars to film -- goes straight to the record company, and stays there.
The record companies have a lock on the distribution of music. Anyone can rent a studio and make a CD ... even me (William Hung move over!) ... but if they want to get it in the record stores and on the radio, they have to sell their soul to a record company.
That's why P2P scares the living shit out of the record companies. They know what the real numbers are, not the doctored ones they show Congress. They know that their serfs are deserting them for independant labels and self-distribution. They know that the massive consolidation of radio station ownership since Orrin Hatch and his buddies threw out rules that had preserved competition for decades and handed the market over to their supporter and propaganda wing Clear Channel is costing them a fortune in payola. And I'm sure they know that they're turning out endless streams of overpriced music that, fundamentally, sucks.
But they can't do anything about that. (except maybe the sucky music) They know they're dinosaurs. The know the industry has changed, and their chosen business model -- total control of production, distribution, and sales of music -- is going the way of a business model based on total control of buggy whips. So they're getting people like Orrin Hatch to pass laws to force the market to continue to support that model.
It isn't fans sharing music by the record companies' serfs that the companies fear ... they know, their public statements to the contrary, it isn't hurting their sales, and quite possibly either increasing them or offsetting what would be a greater decline. What leaves them terrified is the existance of a distribution channel that they don't and can't control which will free musicians from being serfs of the record companies in the first place. They fear a system that will allow musicans to keep on doing what they already do -- making their money off of concerts and other sources of revenue -- and not have to sign their lives and their rights over to any record company. They know a system which connects the producer and the consumer directly will have no place for parasites that have gotten fat from feeding off both ends of the line.
This is the sa