Splitting up these applications is most likely what holds this back.
Yeah, some of it is probably the programming task, but I would guess that part of it is also marketing. Let's say, for example, that they developed a media player that was agnostic about the source of the media, and then a separate application to access the iTunes store. Now Amazon can theoretically hook their store into your media player, and you're not driving customers to your storefront anymore. In addition, you can't do things like Genius recommendations or iTunes Match as easily, since those rely on the store having access to your library.
You have similar problems if you try to separate the iTunes Library/Media application from the iOS management, or the iTunes store from the iOS management. Or if you try to separate the iTunes App Store from the iTunes Music store from the iTunes Movie Store, then you miss out from the ability to advertise products together. Right now, if you search for "Game of Thrones", you'll probably find the TV series, the books, an iOS application or two, and maybe a soundtrack. It's certainly convenient.
That's not to say that they can't do it or they shouldn't do it. Personally, I think they should drop Ping (I can't imagine that people use it), and they should have a separate iOS device management application. The iOS management application should allow you to backup/wipe/upgrade your phone, decide which sources of media you'd like to sync to (and give you the option of syncing to media libraries other than iTunes), etc. The iOS App Store should be separated from the media store, and on OSX the iOS App Store should integrate with the Mac App Store.
Can you imagine the support hurricane it would cause if Windows users suddenly needed to download, install, and use 3-4 different apps to sync and manage their media on their iPhone?
Would it help if Apple just offered an iTunes suite, where you download 1 installer and it installs 3-4 applications? They already kind of do that. when you install iTunes, you get Quicktime and Apple's updater software too. I could easily see them at least breaking out iOS device management into a different application, and then having a dedicated media player and media library organizer.
I'm still hoping the "Professional "version will do away with Metro. Metro seems fine for tablets, but for office workers sitting at a desk, I think it's going to be a headache.
If you never use the metro apps, the goofy start screen just acts like a giant start menu, even with incremental search
Yes, but with the huge disadvantage that it's annoying to access. Instead of being a button on the screen, it's a full screen waste of space. Accessing it with a mouse is generally unreliable in my experience-- you have to hover your cursor near the edge of the screen, and it often doesn't actually pop up when you do that.
I think it kind of depends on whether you've reached a point with the electronics where you can kind of buy whatever and trust that it's "good enough". Like I don't go around spending lots of time shopping out light bulbs. I'm not an audiophile, so as long as speakers don't totally stink, I'd probably be fine with them being built into the walls or into furniture. The main reason I wouldn't want a TV built into my furniture is really because TV designs are still in such flux, and there will probably be something 10 times better in the next 5 years, and there's such a wide disparity right now between different sets.
And a bluray player? Are people really using blurays? I'd just skipped from DVD to streaming, and the idea of buying discs seems almost quaint.
What's the problem? If you told me there was an amazing TV show from your country, there's a good chance I'd check it out.
Anyway, my point wasn't so much to tell you that you should watch it, though I would recommend it. My point is that (in my opinion) it's a better show than Seinfeld, so if you know who Jerry Seinfeld is, there's no real reason to think you couldn't know who Louis CK is.
My guess is that he's pretty famous.... in the US, but completely obscure anywhere else.
Yeah, but think about it this way: You're implying that people in the US should explain all of our cultural references that would be obscure outside of the US, since it's self-centered of Americans to expect others to know what's going on in our country. On the other hand, knowing which of our references would be obscure in your country would require us to pay just as much attention to your cultural references. If it's self-centered for me to assume that you know who Louis CK is, then it's just as self-centered for you to assume that I know that you don't know who Louis CK is.
When I saw references to Peep Show on the Internet, I didn't get upset at British people for expecting that I know what they were talking about.
Nice that you know about this. So are you familiar with the arguments in the case? On what grounds did they argue that First Sale doesn't apply to things manufactured outside of the US?
I'm having a hard time understanding why a manufacturer would have any right to control what happens to an item after they've sold it. I could understand if it were an issue of items being obtained illegally, or of copyrighted materials being copied. But generally speaking, if I own something, shouldn't I be allowed to sell it without consulting the manufacturer?
What is the use case for these 1.5TB MiniDiscs, though? In terms of pure storage capacity, tape drives are still far superior (you can store up to 5TB on a tape!) In terms of speed and flexibility, hard drives are better. If you're looking for ruggedness, flash-based storage is smaller, lighter, and can easily survive a dip in the ocean.
Maybe it's a good balance of features. Tapes can hold more, but they're generally slow for accessing files because it's all sequential. This would be slower than hard drives, but perhaps more durable(...?). I'd bet that these are cheaper per TB than Flash. Many times, when picking a solution, there isn't one option that's clearly superior in every way. Instead, you have to pick a solution where the advantages/disadvantages are balanced to meet your needs.
I would guess this will be sold as an archival format, similar to how you might use tape, but more convenient to access a specific file without spooling through a whole tape.
they should at least be forced to advertise the fact and be forced to advertise their internet connections as comcast-network connections.
I've been advocating a much larger change for some time: forbid any company from being both an infrastructure provider and a service provider.
It seems vitally important to me that Comcast, for example, should not be permitted to string the coaxial cable to your house *as well as* providing internet services, VoIP, and Television over that cable. It inherently creates perverse incentives for them to provide both the infrastructure and the services carried over that infrastructure. Even if they weren't providing their own streaming service, their business interests as a TV provider are undermined by companies like Netflix, so they have an incentive to provide poor Internet service that makes Netflix untenable. Further, the fact that Comcast is also a content owner (via NBC/Universal), they have a perverse incentive to undermine any dealings with Netflix that would put their content on Netflix's streaming service.
There's no real way to prevent these kinds of perverse incentives unless you break Comcast up, the cable infrastructure company on one side, and the media services company on the other. Once they're broken up, regulate the infrastructure company as public infrastructure, and require that they aren't allowed to make special deals with individual companies. That should go a long way towards ensuring net neutrality.
Well keep in mind, when people talk about "the free market", they're not always talking about the same thing. It all depends on whose perspective your looking from, and who you think should be "free" in the market. Is a "free market" the market where *customers* are free, in that they are permitted to choose freely between different vendors of different products, based on the quality of those products? Or is a "free market" a market where the *vendors* are free, in that they are permitted to manipulate the market in any way that they're able, including fraud and monopolization?
When Comcast says they want a "free market", they're talking about the second one, where vendors are free.
I only know Jerry Seinfeld because the sitcom he had in the 90s was named after him
Similarly, you might know who Louis CK is because he has a current sitcom named after him. Actually a brilliant television show that probably shouldn't be called a "sitcom" because it's too brilliant.
Right, essentially he's saying Louis CK was merely selling his work as a product instead of arranging all kinds of side-deals and whatnot. You might think that your record label is just interested in selling you music, or movie studios are just interested in selling movies. They're not. they're all wrapped up in all kinds of licensing deals, advertising, cross promotions, and product tie-ins.
Copyright does not give creators the "right to monetize their creations," it gives them a limited duration (hah) in which they can control duplication and redistribution of their work.
Which in turn gives them the ability to monetize it.
Part of the reason the Hobbit isn't already out is that it took Jackson and the studio a couple of years to come to an agreement. A big part of the reason it took so long was that Jackson was unhappy that we wasn't getting paid because the LotR trilogy somehow didn't make any profit (according to the studio).
Personally, I don't care what the company does with my corporate email. Scan away.
I agree to an extent. When I'm writing an email at work, I consider it an official communication, and I try to write it as though it might become public information. If I'm writing an email to a coworker, I might review it and ask myself, "Would it be bad if my boss and my client read this?" If then answer is yes, then I usually won't send it. Of course, I can't stick to this 100% all the time. Sometimes I end up writing some things that I wouldn't really want my clients to see, for example, but I still would hope that if they saw it, they would understand and it wouldn't be the end of the world.
I agree that one of the big problems will be false-positives. I don't doubt that someone might take the computer's opinion as gospel. People can exercise very bad judgement sometimes, especially when there's a system in place telling them what to do, and especially when you have a PHB who doesn't really know what he's doing. However, I think the bigger problem happens even before you get to your first false-positive: the psychological effects on the people who know this system is in place. I could easily see managers becoming paranoid and using this system to go over every email that with any deviation from the normal tone, and having that lead them down the rabbit hole of suspecting conspiracies everywhere. I could imagine other bosses having this system provide them with a false sense of security, where they start letting obvious security risks go intended because "hey, I have this super high-tech email scanner that will tell me if anyone is dishonest."
But even worse than that, you have to worry about the general culture of the company. If employees know they're being spied on and that they're not trusted, you could see an impact on how your employees interact with you, their coworkers, and even their clients. Company culture is a complex and subtle thing, and yet it can make an enormous difference on how a company runs. Even if your employees don't know they're being spied on, if you know you're spying on them and it changes the way you think about your employees, that could have a terrible impact on the culture.
I'm sure this kind of monitoring has its place, but I think for an awful lot of companies, it'd be more trouble than it's worth. I'd sooner advise that employers focus on their hiring habits and their company culture to make sure you're hiring good people and encouraging them to do good work.
You're hitting on the larger problem of "who watches the watchmen?" It's a bit of an inherent problem, and not one that's easy to solve.
I've tried to explain this to people before, that one of the most important things in an IT professional is that you can trust him. He has access to a bunch of stuff, and he might have access into more than you know. You can say, "Well lock them out! Set up security so they can't access it!" But who do you get to set that up? How do you know that they did a good job, and didn't leave themselves a back-door?
And you know, often you *want* to have your IT department leave a back-door into your security systems. For example, when I encrypt people's laptop hard drives, I set a master password that I know or snag the encryption keys so that if the user locks themselves out, I can still get access. I let them know that I'm doing this, and they have no objection because sometimes you want your IT people to be able to rescue you from your own mistakes.
That's not to say you can't have some security surrounding your IT department. It's just that security is never 100%, and even less so when you're securing computers from people who have full access and know more about the computers than you do.
I don't disagree. I was just lumping "identifying which problem to solve in the first place" with the other two steps. Part of it is having the right idea. The rest is in the implementation-- making sure that you're solving the right problem, and that you're solving it in the right way.
My general point was that we tend to think that the idea is everything. "I've had a million dollar idea!" or "I had the idea for the iPhone years before the iPhone was released!" Ideas are important and all, but to some degree, they're a dime a dozen. The ideas might be very clever or very obvious, but the devil is in the details, and success if often about the execution.
I've had many friends come to me and say, "Hey, I have an idea for an iPhone app," or "I have an idea for an idea to compete with Facebook." I'm keep trying to explain to people, "Yeah, it's great that you have an idea. Everyone has ideas. Do you know how to make it happen? Do you know how to make it work?"
It doesn't seem that interesting to me that someone had the idea. Once you have computers and computerized contacts, calendars, media, etc., it's not *that* clever to say, "Oh, it would be cool if we could put all this into a handheld device.". Further, there were lots of working versions of this before the iPhone. You can see precursors in Windows phones, Blackberries, Palm devices, and even Apple' own Newton device.
The real issue is the implementation. You need the technology to be able to make the thing. You need fast enough processors, long-lasting batteries, nice LCD screens, and small storage devices that can hold a lot of data. In 1991, the technology to make an iPhone didn't exist yet. And then beyond that, once you have all the technology, you need someone to put it all together into a design that people find useful, and that was the only innovation of the iPhone. Apple didn't originate the idea and they weren't the first people to have access to the technology, they were just the most successful in creating a design that people liked.
I'm totally baffled by this and would like an explanation of how a language could possibly be copyrighted. Is Tolkein's Elvish language copyrighted, and if so, what does that mean? I can understand specific phrases from his books being copyrighted, but if I translated this post into Elvish, does Tolkein's estate suddenly own the copyright to this post? Or what?
Sorry, but the idea of owning the copyright to a language seems silly. I might understand patenting a use of a language or patenting a method of translation, but the language itself? Doesn't copyright need to apply to a specific expression? Like... I can copyright the image of a painting, but I can't copyright paint.
Yeah, I don't know about this case, since it does seem to be a case of rebroadcasting. However, I think you're right to draw a comparison between the music industry of 10 years ago and the TV industry today.
We all know the story: in the late 90s, once people had been exposed to Napster, most people knew where music distribution was going. People had been exposed to a system where they could search online for essentially any song ever, and then download it. Contrary to the way we sometimes talk about it, the revolutionary thing about Napster was not that it allowed piracy, but that it enabled people to easily fetch whatever song they wanted without leaving the house. It was perhaps the first exposure the masses had to the idea of a highly available massive online media library, and people loved the idea.
If the record companies had been smart, they would have taken one look at this setup and said, "We need to make this happen. This needs to happen, and it will happen whether we like it or not, so let's get ahead of this thing. Let's figure out how to make money off of this thing immediately so we can be the first business into this market."
Instead they stonewalled. They dragged their feet. The people running the record companies not only expressed that they weren't happy with online distribution, but they were even unhappy selling CDs and wanted to go back to vinyl. They tried to kill online services. When they made online services, they focused on preventing piracy, and they focused on creating synergistic marketing campaigns that would maximize shareholder value with a high ROI. What they didn't focus on, however, was making these services good.
And then Apple came along, leveraged some industry connections and a popular music player, and Apple drank their milkshake. Too bad, so sad.
Now the TV industry is doing the same thing. A growing number of people are asking, "Why can't I just have Netflix, but with all the TV shows and movies that I want to watch?" The people in the industry are dragging their feet, stonewalling, trying to prevent piracy, and engaging in bullshit marketing deals. They are not focused on making a good service that will make their customers happy. The only question is, will it be Apple drinking their milkshake again, or will it be someone else this time?
This would be like a company renting a single movie, making copies, then charging for access to the copies, without compensating the original distributor.
Or perhaps a better comparison would be cable networks carrying broadcast network channels without permission from the broadcast networks.
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Splitting up these applications is most likely what holds this back.
Yeah, some of it is probably the programming task, but I would guess that part of it is also marketing. Let's say, for example, that they developed a media player that was agnostic about the source of the media, and then a separate application to access the iTunes store. Now Amazon can theoretically hook their store into your media player, and you're not driving customers to your storefront anymore. In addition, you can't do things like Genius recommendations or iTunes Match as easily, since those rely on the store having access to your library.
You have similar problems if you try to separate the iTunes Library/Media application from the iOS management, or the iTunes store from the iOS management. Or if you try to separate the iTunes App Store from the iTunes Music store from the iTunes Movie Store, then you miss out from the ability to advertise products together. Right now, if you search for "Game of Thrones", you'll probably find the TV series, the books, an iOS application or two, and maybe a soundtrack. It's certainly convenient.
That's not to say that they can't do it or they shouldn't do it. Personally, I think they should drop Ping (I can't imagine that people use it), and they should have a separate iOS device management application. The iOS management application should allow you to backup/wipe/upgrade your phone, decide which sources of media you'd like to sync to (and give you the option of syncing to media libraries other than iTunes), etc. The iOS App Store should be separated from the media store, and on OSX the iOS App Store should integrate with the Mac App Store.
Can you imagine the support hurricane it would cause if Windows users suddenly needed to download, install, and use 3-4 different apps to sync and manage their media on their iPhone?
Would it help if Apple just offered an iTunes suite, where you download 1 installer and it installs 3-4 applications? They already kind of do that. when you install iTunes, you get Quicktime and Apple's updater software too. I could easily see them at least breaking out iOS device management into a different application, and then having a dedicated media player and media library organizer.
I'm still hoping the "Professional "version will do away with Metro. Metro seems fine for tablets, but for office workers sitting at a desk, I think it's going to be a headache.
If you never use the metro apps, the goofy start screen just acts like a giant start menu, even with incremental search
Yes, but with the huge disadvantage that it's annoying to access. Instead of being a button on the screen, it's a full screen waste of space. Accessing it with a mouse is generally unreliable in my experience-- you have to hover your cursor near the edge of the screen, and it often doesn't actually pop up when you do that.
I think it kind of depends on whether you've reached a point with the electronics where you can kind of buy whatever and trust that it's "good enough". Like I don't go around spending lots of time shopping out light bulbs. I'm not an audiophile, so as long as speakers don't totally stink, I'd probably be fine with them being built into the walls or into furniture. The main reason I wouldn't want a TV built into my furniture is really because TV designs are still in such flux, and there will probably be something 10 times better in the next 5 years, and there's such a wide disparity right now between different sets.
And a bluray player? Are people really using blurays? I'd just skipped from DVD to streaming, and the idea of buying discs seems almost quaint.
What's the problem? If you told me there was an amazing TV show from your country, there's a good chance I'd check it out.
Anyway, my point wasn't so much to tell you that you should watch it, though I would recommend it. My point is that (in my opinion) it's a better show than Seinfeld, so if you know who Jerry Seinfeld is, there's no real reason to think you couldn't know who Louis CK is.
My guess is that he's pretty famous.... in the US, but completely obscure anywhere else.
Yeah, but think about it this way: You're implying that people in the US should explain all of our cultural references that would be obscure outside of the US, since it's self-centered of Americans to expect others to know what's going on in our country. On the other hand, knowing which of our references would be obscure in your country would require us to pay just as much attention to your cultural references. If it's self-centered for me to assume that you know who Louis CK is, then it's just as self-centered for you to assume that I know that you don't know who Louis CK is.
When I saw references to Peep Show on the Internet, I didn't get upset at British people for expecting that I know what they were talking about.
Nice that you know about this. So are you familiar with the arguments in the case? On what grounds did they argue that First Sale doesn't apply to things manufactured outside of the US?
I'm having a hard time understanding why a manufacturer would have any right to control what happens to an item after they've sold it. I could understand if it were an issue of items being obtained illegally, or of copyrighted materials being copied. But generally speaking, if I own something, shouldn't I be allowed to sell it without consulting the manufacturer?
Yes, it does depend on the quality of the discs. There are CDs that last much longer than a few years. Sony claims Bluray discs will last 30-50 years.
What is the use case for these 1.5TB MiniDiscs, though? In terms of pure storage capacity, tape drives are still far superior (you can store up to 5TB on a tape!) In terms of speed and flexibility, hard drives are better. If you're looking for ruggedness, flash-based storage is smaller, lighter, and can easily survive a dip in the ocean.
Maybe it's a good balance of features. Tapes can hold more, but they're generally slow for accessing files because it's all sequential. This would be slower than hard drives, but perhaps more durable(...?). I'd bet that these are cheaper per TB than Flash. Many times, when picking a solution, there isn't one option that's clearly superior in every way. Instead, you have to pick a solution where the advantages/disadvantages are balanced to meet your needs.
I would guess this will be sold as an archival format, similar to how you might use tape, but more convenient to access a specific file without spooling through a whole tape.
they should at least be forced to advertise the fact and be forced to advertise their internet connections as comcast-network connections.
I've been advocating a much larger change for some time: forbid any company from being both an infrastructure provider and a service provider.
It seems vitally important to me that Comcast, for example, should not be permitted to string the coaxial cable to your house *as well as* providing internet services, VoIP, and Television over that cable. It inherently creates perverse incentives for them to provide both the infrastructure and the services carried over that infrastructure. Even if they weren't providing their own streaming service, their business interests as a TV provider are undermined by companies like Netflix, so they have an incentive to provide poor Internet service that makes Netflix untenable. Further, the fact that Comcast is also a content owner (via NBC/Universal), they have a perverse incentive to undermine any dealings with Netflix that would put their content on Netflix's streaming service.
There's no real way to prevent these kinds of perverse incentives unless you break Comcast up, the cable infrastructure company on one side, and the media services company on the other. Once they're broken up, regulate the infrastructure company as public infrastructure, and require that they aren't allowed to make special deals with individual companies. That should go a long way towards ensuring net neutrality.
Well keep in mind, when people talk about "the free market", they're not always talking about the same thing. It all depends on whose perspective your looking from, and who you think should be "free" in the market. Is a "free market" the market where *customers* are free, in that they are permitted to choose freely between different vendors of different products, based on the quality of those products? Or is a "free market" a market where the *vendors* are free, in that they are permitted to manipulate the market in any way that they're able, including fraud and monopolization?
When Comcast says they want a "free market", they're talking about the second one, where vendors are free.
I only know Jerry Seinfeld because the sitcom he had in the 90s was named after him
Similarly, you might know who Louis CK is because he has a current sitcom named after him. Actually a brilliant television show that probably shouldn't be called a "sitcom" because it's too brilliant.
Right, essentially he's saying Louis CK was merely selling his work as a product instead of arranging all kinds of side-deals and whatnot. You might think that your record label is just interested in selling you music, or movie studios are just interested in selling movies. They're not. they're all wrapped up in all kinds of licensing deals, advertising, cross promotions, and product tie-ins.
I mean... he is pretty famous. If the story were about Jerry Seinfeld, would you still expect an explanation of who he was?
Copyright does not give creators the "right to monetize their creations," it gives them a limited duration (hah) in which they can control duplication and redistribution of their work.
Which in turn gives them the ability to monetize it.
IIRC, Star Wars has supposedly still not made a profit.
Part of the reason the Hobbit isn't already out is that it took Jackson and the studio a couple of years to come to an agreement. A big part of the reason it took so long was that Jackson was unhappy that we wasn't getting paid because the LotR trilogy somehow didn't make any profit (according to the studio).
They settled it somehow, but I don't know how.
Personally, I don't care what the company does with my corporate email. Scan away.
I agree to an extent. When I'm writing an email at work, I consider it an official communication, and I try to write it as though it might become public information. If I'm writing an email to a coworker, I might review it and ask myself, "Would it be bad if my boss and my client read this?" If then answer is yes, then I usually won't send it. Of course, I can't stick to this 100% all the time. Sometimes I end up writing some things that I wouldn't really want my clients to see, for example, but I still would hope that if they saw it, they would understand and it wouldn't be the end of the world.
I agree that one of the big problems will be false-positives. I don't doubt that someone might take the computer's opinion as gospel. People can exercise very bad judgement sometimes, especially when there's a system in place telling them what to do, and especially when you have a PHB who doesn't really know what he's doing. However, I think the bigger problem happens even before you get to your first false-positive: the psychological effects on the people who know this system is in place. I could easily see managers becoming paranoid and using this system to go over every email that with any deviation from the normal tone, and having that lead them down the rabbit hole of suspecting conspiracies everywhere. I could imagine other bosses having this system provide them with a false sense of security, where they start letting obvious security risks go intended because "hey, I have this super high-tech email scanner that will tell me if anyone is dishonest."
But even worse than that, you have to worry about the general culture of the company. If employees know they're being spied on and that they're not trusted, you could see an impact on how your employees interact with you, their coworkers, and even their clients. Company culture is a complex and subtle thing, and yet it can make an enormous difference on how a company runs. Even if your employees don't know they're being spied on, if you know you're spying on them and it changes the way you think about your employees, that could have a terrible impact on the culture.
I'm sure this kind of monitoring has its place, but I think for an awful lot of companies, it'd be more trouble than it's worth. I'd sooner advise that employers focus on their hiring habits and their company culture to make sure you're hiring good people and encouraging them to do good work.
You're hitting on the larger problem of "who watches the watchmen?" It's a bit of an inherent problem, and not one that's easy to solve.
I've tried to explain this to people before, that one of the most important things in an IT professional is that you can trust him. He has access to a bunch of stuff, and he might have access into more than you know. You can say, "Well lock them out! Set up security so they can't access it!" But who do you get to set that up? How do you know that they did a good job, and didn't leave themselves a back-door?
And you know, often you *want* to have your IT department leave a back-door into your security systems. For example, when I encrypt people's laptop hard drives, I set a master password that I know or snag the encryption keys so that if the user locks themselves out, I can still get access. I let them know that I'm doing this, and they have no objection because sometimes you want your IT people to be able to rescue you from your own mistakes.
That's not to say you can't have some security surrounding your IT department. It's just that security is never 100%, and even less so when you're securing computers from people who have full access and know more about the computers than you do.
I don't disagree. I was just lumping "identifying which problem to solve in the first place" with the other two steps. Part of it is having the right idea. The rest is in the implementation-- making sure that you're solving the right problem, and that you're solving it in the right way.
My general point was that we tend to think that the idea is everything. "I've had a million dollar idea!" or "I had the idea for the iPhone years before the iPhone was released!" Ideas are important and all, but to some degree, they're a dime a dozen. The ideas might be very clever or very obvious, but the devil is in the details, and success if often about the execution.
I've had many friends come to me and say, "Hey, I have an idea for an iPhone app," or "I have an idea for an idea to compete with Facebook." I'm keep trying to explain to people, "Yeah, it's great that you have an idea. Everyone has ideas. Do you know how to make it happen? Do you know how to make it work?"
It doesn't seem that interesting to me that someone had the idea. Once you have computers and computerized contacts, calendars, media, etc., it's not *that* clever to say, "Oh, it would be cool if we could put all this into a handheld device.". Further, there were lots of working versions of this before the iPhone. You can see precursors in Windows phones, Blackberries, Palm devices, and even Apple' own Newton device.
The real issue is the implementation. You need the technology to be able to make the thing. You need fast enough processors, long-lasting batteries, nice LCD screens, and small storage devices that can hold a lot of data. In 1991, the technology to make an iPhone didn't exist yet. And then beyond that, once you have all the technology, you need someone to put it all together into a design that people find useful, and that was the only innovation of the iPhone. Apple didn't originate the idea and they weren't the first people to have access to the technology, they were just the most successful in creating a design that people liked.
I'm totally baffled by this and would like an explanation of how a language could possibly be copyrighted. Is Tolkein's Elvish language copyrighted, and if so, what does that mean? I can understand specific phrases from his books being copyrighted, but if I translated this post into Elvish, does Tolkein's estate suddenly own the copyright to this post? Or what?
Sorry, but the idea of owning the copyright to a language seems silly. I might understand patenting a use of a language or patenting a method of translation, but the language itself? Doesn't copyright need to apply to a specific expression? Like... I can copyright the image of a painting, but I can't copyright paint.
Yeah, I don't know about this case, since it does seem to be a case of rebroadcasting. However, I think you're right to draw a comparison between the music industry of 10 years ago and the TV industry today.
We all know the story: in the late 90s, once people had been exposed to Napster, most people knew where music distribution was going. People had been exposed to a system where they could search online for essentially any song ever, and then download it. Contrary to the way we sometimes talk about it, the revolutionary thing about Napster was not that it allowed piracy, but that it enabled people to easily fetch whatever song they wanted without leaving the house. It was perhaps the first exposure the masses had to the idea of a highly available massive online media library, and people loved the idea.
If the record companies had been smart, they would have taken one look at this setup and said, "We need to make this happen. This needs to happen, and it will happen whether we like it or not, so let's get ahead of this thing. Let's figure out how to make money off of this thing immediately so we can be the first business into this market."
Instead they stonewalled. They dragged their feet. The people running the record companies not only expressed that they weren't happy with online distribution, but they were even unhappy selling CDs and wanted to go back to vinyl. They tried to kill online services. When they made online services, they focused on preventing piracy, and they focused on creating synergistic marketing campaigns that would maximize shareholder value with a high ROI. What they didn't focus on, however, was making these services good.
And then Apple came along, leveraged some industry connections and a popular music player, and Apple drank their milkshake. Too bad, so sad.
Now the TV industry is doing the same thing. A growing number of people are asking, "Why can't I just have Netflix, but with all the TV shows and movies that I want to watch?" The people in the industry are dragging their feet, stonewalling, trying to prevent piracy, and engaging in bullshit marketing deals. They are not focused on making a good service that will make their customers happy. The only question is, will it be Apple drinking their milkshake again, or will it be someone else this time?
This would be like a company renting a single movie, making copies, then charging for access to the copies, without compensating the original distributor.
Or perhaps a better comparison would be cable networks carrying broadcast network channels without permission from the broadcast networks.