Trying to blame this economic/financial meltdown on the housing market is like trying to blame the cards when you lose at 3-card monte. Sure, they're involved in the problem, but the root of the problem is the game itself, and the guy behind the game.
If it weren't housing, there would have been some other bull crap that everyone poured their money into because some financial model said it couldn't fail. There still would have been a bubble, and worse yet people would have still been involved in back room deals that amount to high-stakes gambling involving more money than anyone in the world actually has.
I didn't claim that you're licensing anything when you buy a CD/DVD. I agreed that you're licensing content when you download it from a service like iTunes/Amazon.
These days, online distribution costs are so cheap, you can offer a movie that you can keep for life for <$5 a pop, and still be making a profit.
Online distribution is cheap, but that doesn't mean movie production is cheap.
You might think the idea of digital rentals is absurd, but the alternative is that you'll only have purchases, and even though you think purchases should be <$5, they won't be. You'll still be paying $15 per movie, or maybe even more because they'll claim they have to make up lost revenue from the loss of digital "rentals".
Me? I usually only really want to see a movie once, unless it's a really good movie. I'd rather be able to pay $3-$4 and be able to download a movie, watch it once, and be done. Same with TV shows. In fact, even if the price to buy a movie were $3, everyone would be asking if I could then get a "rental" for $0.50, and they'd be willing to give up being able to keep the movie to get that price.
The whole reason the rental market for movies exists is exactly because most people don't want to "own" most movies. The movie industry is right to be looking for tiered pricing-- one price to watch it, and another to get to buy it. It's what their customers actually want.
I wasn't criticizing the court so much as questioning the judgement of the donut shop. I guess if they really have valid reasons to believe that it's a competitor who is engaging in an organized campaign to harm the public image, it seems reasonable to try to fight back. Otherwise, it seems like an overreaction.
Well I suppose some of that depends on what you think the point of DRM really is. Is the point to force consumers to constantly re-buy content that they've already bought in some form in an attempt to secure a steady revenue stream regardless of whether you're producing new content? Is it to make copyright infringement impossible? Or is it just to make attempts at casual piracy inconvenient enough that you're average person is less likely to do it?
I think DRM *might* be valid so long as it's only applied to "rentals" and only for the last purpose-- to make piracy inconvenient. You're not going to be able to make piracy impossible, and as long as you're trying to do that, you'll inconvenience your legitimate customers to the point where it's counter-productive. But if you can make piracy even somewhat inconvenient, and meanwhile make legitimate purchases extremely convenient and reasonably priced, then I think you'll probably be able to capture enough customers to stay profitable.
Of course, I'll acknowledge that all this is just my opinion/prediction. I might turn out to be wrong. I also think pursuing piracy should only be done for the purpose of shutting down any convenient methods of distributing content in violation of copyright law. You're never going to stop it, but you can probably make it inconvenient enough that people will pay some amount of money for the highly convenient legal distribution.
And I'm also left wondering, what is the lawsuit going to accomplish? I say your donut shop is dirty, and either people believe it or not. Now are the people who believed it going to reconsider because they've heard on the news that a court determined they weren't dirty? Or now what if they lose the case-- should we assume that they really are dirty?
Or is this just to try to wring some money out of some random person who posted on a forum that they thought the place was dirty? They're probably spend tens of thousands of dollars to discover it was a 12 year old who has no money.
No, you're right, and that's exactly why I put "own" in quotes in the first place. However, even though I'm technically "licensing" the right to copy that movie according to law, if I go into iTunes, they have a button next to it that says "Buy".
All the language of the marketing and advertising talks about "buying" the movie. On a non technical level, that's how we all talk about it and think about it, and that's even what the business model is built to support. If movie studios and stores start talking about "licensing" movies instead, they know no one will give them money anymore.
On a certain level, what you're talking about is worth talking about. It's the legal technicality that allows the content industry to function. On the other hand, it is only the technicality that allows the content industry to function. It's not the reality of how these things work, how people think of these things working, or what consumers will accept.
I don't know if the reality will ever come around and shift the law to reflect it, but when I buy an album from iTunes or Amazon, I don't think anyone involved in the transaction (setting aside lawyers employed by these companies) is really interested in the licensing issues. I am paying them to "buy" the album, intellectually as close to buying a record or CD as digital transfers will allow. In return, I get to own that copy and any other copies I make, and I'm allowed to do whatever I want with them, just so long as I don't distribute them. That's the reality of the transaction that we make, and in our current climate, there isn't a lawyer involved who would dare to bring me to court to challenge that, in spite of all legal technicalities.
there is little evidence that early detection makes a difference in whether treatment could save your life.
I have to say that I don't like this way of talking about these things. There is little evidence that early detection makes a difference? Does that mean that there is a little evidence that it does? How much evidence is there that it doesn't?
I'll tell you, if there's a test that there is some evidence that it might save my life, then I don't particularly like the idea of my doctor disregarding that test because it might not save my life.
I'm not saying that the doctor or the residency program did the wrong thing here, and of course there are limits. We can't go overboard and do all the most expensive tests on everyone all the time with absolutely no evidence that it will help anyone. But at the same time, I resent the way some people use statistics. You might say, "There's no point in running this test because it will only save the person's life 0.1% of the time." And that makes a lot of sense up until the day where you're in that 0.1%.
I mean, what's Netflix afraid of? They think the movies they offer are so good that their customers will pay all over again to download the same bytes a second time?
It's probably more the movie studios than Netflix, and what they're worried about is that the movies are good enough quality to watch. They're worried that if people have free copies of movies that are good enough to watch, that they won't bother buying movies.
If you take away the DRM, then movie studios have no reason to allow Netflix to do this business at all.
However, even movie execs aren't stupid enough to drop a profit generating customer.
First of all, yes they are. Second, once Netflix streams can be ripped, from the movie studio's perspective, it's just as harmful to their business as piracy.
Yes, I agree, that is the problem with DRM: it turns everything into rented content. But that's not such a big problem when you're explicitly renting it.
For example, iTunes has the option to rent movies for $4 (giving you 24 hours to watch it) or to buy movies that you keep for $15. The rentals are effectively the same as my cable company's pay-per-view service, and it doesn't bother me on any practical or ideological level. Without that DRM, they probably wouldn't offer that option of "renting" digital downloads, whereas I find those rentals useful.
However, I won't "buy" iTunes DRMed video. If I'm supposed to be "buying" it for keeps, and I'm paying a price that's commensurate with a purchase, then DRM is unacceptable. I'll buy movies and TV series, but not unless it's in a high-quality format that I can rip/transcode if I really want to.
Possibly. Just as an alternate theory, I'm going to throw this out there as an alternative-- instead of this:
1) Management got a phone call from Microsoft, or an MSCE Certified Bonehead, who said "Switch to Silverlight, they will wuv you 4ever!"
It may have been something like this:
1) Management got a phone call from a movie studio exec saying, "Do you know that people can get around the copy protection on your download service? Fix it now, or I'm going to sue your ass, you'll lose all of our content, and god help you in trying to get rights to stream my movies ever again."
1.3) Management called Microsoft and said, "Do you know that your copy protection is useless? How do we stop people from capturing the movies that we're streaming?"
1.6) Microsoft tells management, "Just use Silverlight! It will solve everything, and we promise that we're not pushing a sub-par solution in order to displace Flash."
The thing is, this is one use of DRM that I think I might be able to live with: when you're renting content. Most of the things that I believe make DRM inherently unacceptable come from someone else trying to exercise control over something that I purchased and "own".
Sure, and "Don't you know that no productive trade ever happened before property rights?"
I don't see a valid argument that the reason we have property rights is to produce productive trade. We have property rights because they're generally considered to be a natural right (i.e. inalienable human right).
But at least in the US, patents and copyrights are only constitutional in that they are specifically supposed to promote the "progress of science and useful arts". They are specifically not an inalienable human rights.
I agree, and that was more or less what I was expressing, I think. By saying that I believe the business model will shift from being copy-based to distribution-based, I'm saying that businesses that were build around "copying" (e.g. book publishers and record labels) will decrease in relevance because copying is becoming irrelevant. The business models that seem to be increasing in relevance are services like iTunes, Amazon (ebooks and MP3s), Netflix, and Steam. In other words: the distributors.
As wide distribution becomes the primary legal issue and the primary mechanism by which creators are compensated, excess middlemen can be cut out, but these distributors can still provide some important services for the creator. They can provide search features and recommendation engines, take care of all the technical issues of distribution, set up the groundwork for receiving payments, and probably some other things that I'm not thinking of at the moment. Oh, right, and they can also device a business model and marketing plan for how this content can be viewed/used-- in the sense that Netflix can market a set-top box, Amazon can market the Kindle, and Apple can market the iPod/iPhone/AppleTV.
The way ahead isn't simple, but I think we're agreeing that distributors are in line to take over the role of compensating content creators in the way that labels/publishers have traditionally done.
Well yes, I had in mind that the actual goal in us, as a society, supporting a business model that supplies us with intellectual content is, in the end, to financially support those who create the content.
To backtrack and restate my post a little more thoroughly, our past and current attempt to do this has been focused on the creation of copies. The people printing the books and cutting the records, and that in itself was a valid business. In addition, those businesses had an exclusive right to create those copies, and in having such exclusivity, they were able to mark up the cost of those copies well above the production costs, thereby having enough enough money to subsidize the creative process. That was the mechanism by which artists and musicians got paid.
Now that we have computers and cheap storage and networks and the internet, we can make an unlimited number of copies without losing any quality and at virtually no cost. The result has been that the business of "copying" often provides no value anymore, and in itself is no longer a valid business.
So I'm saying that there are a lot of people trying to work out all the details of the new business model that will replace the businesses whose main value was in "copying". An obvious business model to explore is in distribution, and to some degree, that's the avenue that businesses are already headed down. Copyright has essentially been repurposed, through technicalities, from regulating the actual act of "copying" to the regulation of content distribution. Legal/technical technicalities aside, copyright holders effectively have no control over copies being made of their work anymore, but instead are giving control of any wide distribution channels of their work. Customers then pay the distributor for the ability to download the work, and copyright holders get a share of that fee.
This is already pretty much what's happening, and as far as I've seen, that's the direction things will continue to go. So the rest is just an issue of how you make it profitable and keep it profitable.
Does anyone else think this idea of trying to re-create the subscription based model of AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc that the Internet successfully killed off 10 years ago is a bit strange?
I'm not sure how old you are, but if you have enough experience watching the world, then it shouldn't be too strange to see old ideas come back after seeming to be "killed off". If anything, that's the default state of things. Ideas don't disappear; they just recycled.
I think we're in a very strange place right now, because it's clear that there has to be some kind of business model that makes money from intellectual property, but selling "copies" doesn't make sense now that an unlimited number of digital copies can be made for free (or at least virtually "free"). So what's the business model going to be?
I think the best possible thing to happen right now is for businesses to be experimenting to find something that works. I would find it strange if they weren't trying to make money from facilitating distribution, storage, and use of intellectual property rather than "copies". Copies are easy and free. Distribution, storage, backups-- and generally ensuring that you have what you want, when you want it, where you want it, and how you want it-- that stuff is still challenging. There's money to be made there, still.
What's worse is how many phone applications come as subscriptions. I know people who get charged $20 a month for an email application. And then sometimes they make it somewhat difficult to cancel.
On the other hand, businesses exist to make money. Too far in the restrictive direction, and the employees will become unproductive and leave...It's all about balance - security is a process, not a rule set.
Well security also isn't something that you either "do" or "don't do". It comes in degrees, and has to be targeted toward diminishing and mitigating-- not really eliminating-- specific risks. You can always be "more secure", but it's not always feasible or even desirable, given that you have to operate with limited resources and allow some level of accessibility.
However, it's pretty common for people to get annoyed at levels of security that are actually pretty appropriate. Everyone always wants what they want, immediately and with no hoops to jump through. It's understandable, but not always reasonable.
In every company I've worked for, users have complained when their account is anything less than a full admin, when not all ports on the firewall are allowed to pass freely to their desktop, and when they are not permitted to install every piece of software that they believe would be useful. I've read complaints from people here on Slashdot that come down to, "I know what I'm doing! Why don't those bastards in IT just let me do whatever I want?"
I guess I'm just trying to say, (a) that a reasonable balance might still leave employees feeling like the IT staff isn't responsive; and (b) the level of security that constitutes a "reasonable balance" depends entirely on the importance of security (top secret documents warrant more stringent security than your MP3 collection).
Are all the people that use P2P software to distribute FOSS putting themselves at risk? Yes. But it's ok, it's a known and controlled risk.
I'm not saying that P2P is bad on principle. Still, if you let everyone in your company install P2P programs on their own computers, then it's not a highly-controlled risk. The risk isn't because of something inherent in the fact that it's P2P, and wouldn't necessarily be different from allowing everyone to run their own web server on their own computers.
I'm saying allowing everyone in your company to run their own servers is a stupid security risk. The software might have bugs, people might fail to keep it up to date, and people might misconfigure the server software, exercising poor judgment in their own security policies. And those are the reasons why companies generally do not and should not allow people to install their own software or allow external traffic to be routed to unauthorized machines (anything not set up specifically to act as a server for external traffic).
This is especially important if you have access on your network to information that needs access to be very restricted. I worked for a defense contractor, and all of the information that needed to be secured was kept on a separate network that was not connected to the Internet at all. For someone with that sort of data to install server software on their computer while connected to the Internet is reckless. I'm assuming that it wasn't intentional, but rather that whoever set up the software did not accurately assess the risk.
And so in that case, I think that the story is correct to say, "OMG file sharers are breaching national security!" Apparently someone was ignorant to the risk.
I don't think there's anything unfair about the summary. P2P applications are a security risk, and I know I don't allow my users to install them on their work computers.
Let me put it this way: Any time you're setting a computer up to be a server on the Internet, it's always a security risk. There are risks associated with bugs and things like that, but also (and perhaps more importantly) there are risks associated with misconfiguration. This is very relevant for P2P applications, which might come configured by default to share files that you don't want to share.
So yes, if people with high security clearances are installing Kazaa on their work computers and sharing out all their documents, then "OMG file sharers are breaching national security!"
Well the things you describe are really just startling. Something pops out, catches you by surprise, and you jump. Overuse of that technique is pretty much the definition or poorly made horror.
Good horror, I think, is more about what you expect to see, what you think you might have seen but can't be sure, and what you don't see at all. It builds an idea in your mind, suggests the most awful things, and then leaves you to fill in the gaps with the worst thing you can imagine. Because really, once you've seen the monster, know what it is, and know what the rules are, it's not that scary anymore.
I think that in the best horror, the monster is just a stand-in for all the horrible things that might happen to you, that you might not have even imagined yet, and that you'd be powerless to stop once they started coming after you.
I happen to know that in some cases, it's the very same people. I've seen people here on Slashdot flip-flop on exactly this topic-- same username arguing both sides of the point. I've seen people that I know in real life argue both sides, and I've seen political pundits on TV arguing both sides. And in many of those cases, I've observed that these people have a political viewpoint that inclines them to pick whichever of these statements will most improve the arguing position of large businesses.
Now sure, there are probably a fair number of people who only argue one of these things, and I can't say to them "You can't have it both ways." In the case of someone making the first statement ("It's all supply and demand.") they're in better shape because they're understanding more about how these things actually work. In the case of someone making the second statement, they're failing to understand that prices aren't necessarily determined by cost.
This can be achieved through campaigns, e.g. publishing an article about increased cost to widely read websites.
Good point. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if these telcos had PR people out pushing this story. It's kind of win/win. Either you drum up enough support that people the administration won't have the political will to do it, or else you convince customers to accept a price hike.
Not only critics say that, anyone who has ever run a business will tell you that ALL costs are passed on to the customers in one way or another.
Well that's definitely true in that eventually all costs must be paid, and businesses get their money from customers, and therefore all costs are in some way paid by customers. However, it's not true that all cost increases to a business result in cost increases to the customer, nor do cost decreases for the company necessarily lead to cost decreases for the consumer.
I find it almost funny how when you talk about customers getting overcharged-- "overcharged" in the sense that they're paying far most than something costs to produce-- everyone comes out of the woodwork to say, "Of course! This is capitalism! It's about supply and demand, and charging what the market will bear. Even if it costs $0.02 to product, they'll charge $100 for as long as people are willing to pay that price." Then these same people, when you mention that some regulation will increase the cost of production, they complain, "Well that cost is just going to get passed along to consumers!" Well you can't have it both ways.
There's some truth to it, but it's also true that companies do a lot of research to determine an optimal price for their product. If they charge too little, they sell lots of units but don't make as much per unit and they don't make as much money. If they charge too much, then they make more per unit but there volume is so low that they don't make as much money. There is often some kind of optimal point where they make the most money, and that's the price they charge.
Same thing with cell phone companies. The prices we're being charged per month is based on what will make the carriers the most money. Not cost. If you raise the costs sufficiently to "diminish supply", then you'll see an increase in price. But costs at this scale don't simply get "passed along to consumers" in the way people talk about it.
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Trying to blame this economic/financial meltdown on the housing market is like trying to blame the cards when you lose at 3-card monte. Sure, they're involved in the problem, but the root of the problem is the game itself, and the guy behind the game.
If it weren't housing, there would have been some other bull crap that everyone poured their money into because some financial model said it couldn't fail. There still would have been a bubble, and worse yet people would have still been involved in back room deals that amount to high-stakes gambling involving more money than anyone in the world actually has.
I didn't claim that you're licensing anything when you buy a CD/DVD. I agreed that you're licensing content when you download it from a service like iTunes/Amazon.
These days, online distribution costs are so cheap, you can offer a movie that you can keep for life for <$5 a pop, and still be making a profit.
Online distribution is cheap, but that doesn't mean movie production is cheap.
You might think the idea of digital rentals is absurd, but the alternative is that you'll only have purchases, and even though you think purchases should be <$5, they won't be. You'll still be paying $15 per movie, or maybe even more because they'll claim they have to make up lost revenue from the loss of digital "rentals".
Me? I usually only really want to see a movie once, unless it's a really good movie. I'd rather be able to pay $3-$4 and be able to download a movie, watch it once, and be done. Same with TV shows. In fact, even if the price to buy a movie were $3, everyone would be asking if I could then get a "rental" for $0.50, and they'd be willing to give up being able to keep the movie to get that price.
The whole reason the rental market for movies exists is exactly because most people don't want to "own" most movies. The movie industry is right to be looking for tiered pricing-- one price to watch it, and another to get to buy it. It's what their customers actually want.
I wasn't criticizing the court so much as questioning the judgement of the donut shop. I guess if they really have valid reasons to believe that it's a competitor who is engaging in an organized campaign to harm the public image, it seems reasonable to try to fight back. Otherwise, it seems like an overreaction.
Well I suppose some of that depends on what you think the point of DRM really is. Is the point to force consumers to constantly re-buy content that they've already bought in some form in an attempt to secure a steady revenue stream regardless of whether you're producing new content? Is it to make copyright infringement impossible? Or is it just to make attempts at casual piracy inconvenient enough that you're average person is less likely to do it?
I think DRM *might* be valid so long as it's only applied to "rentals" and only for the last purpose-- to make piracy inconvenient. You're not going to be able to make piracy impossible, and as long as you're trying to do that, you'll inconvenience your legitimate customers to the point where it's counter-productive. But if you can make piracy even somewhat inconvenient, and meanwhile make legitimate purchases extremely convenient and reasonably priced, then I think you'll probably be able to capture enough customers to stay profitable.
Of course, I'll acknowledge that all this is just my opinion/prediction. I might turn out to be wrong. I also think pursuing piracy should only be done for the purpose of shutting down any convenient methods of distributing content in violation of copyright law. You're never going to stop it, but you can probably make it inconvenient enough that people will pay some amount of money for the highly convenient legal distribution.
And I'm also left wondering, what is the lawsuit going to accomplish? I say your donut shop is dirty, and either people believe it or not. Now are the people who believed it going to reconsider because they've heard on the news that a court determined they weren't dirty? Or now what if they lose the case-- should we assume that they really are dirty?
Or is this just to try to wring some money out of some random person who posted on a forum that they thought the place was dirty? They're probably spend tens of thousands of dollars to discover it was a 12 year old who has no money.
No, you're right, and that's exactly why I put "own" in quotes in the first place. However, even though I'm technically "licensing" the right to copy that movie according to law, if I go into iTunes, they have a button next to it that says "Buy".
All the language of the marketing and advertising talks about "buying" the movie. On a non technical level, that's how we all talk about it and think about it, and that's even what the business model is built to support. If movie studios and stores start talking about "licensing" movies instead, they know no one will give them money anymore.
On a certain level, what you're talking about is worth talking about. It's the legal technicality that allows the content industry to function. On the other hand, it is only the technicality that allows the content industry to function. It's not the reality of how these things work, how people think of these things working, or what consumers will accept.
I don't know if the reality will ever come around and shift the law to reflect it, but when I buy an album from iTunes or Amazon, I don't think anyone involved in the transaction (setting aside lawyers employed by these companies) is really interested in the licensing issues. I am paying them to "buy" the album, intellectually as close to buying a record or CD as digital transfers will allow. In return, I get to own that copy and any other copies I make, and I'm allowed to do whatever I want with them, just so long as I don't distribute them. That's the reality of the transaction that we make, and in our current climate, there isn't a lawyer involved who would dare to bring me to court to challenge that, in spite of all legal technicalities.
there is little evidence that early detection makes a difference in whether treatment could save your life.
I have to say that I don't like this way of talking about these things. There is little evidence that early detection makes a difference? Does that mean that there is a little evidence that it does? How much evidence is there that it doesn't?
I'll tell you, if there's a test that there is some evidence that it might save my life, then I don't particularly like the idea of my doctor disregarding that test because it might not save my life.
I'm not saying that the doctor or the residency program did the wrong thing here, and of course there are limits. We can't go overboard and do all the most expensive tests on everyone all the time with absolutely no evidence that it will help anyone. But at the same time, I resent the way some people use statistics. You might say, "There's no point in running this test because it will only save the person's life 0.1% of the time." And that makes a lot of sense up until the day where you're in that 0.1%.
I mean, what's Netflix afraid of? They think the movies they offer are so good that their customers will pay all over again to download the same bytes a second time?
It's probably more the movie studios than Netflix, and what they're worried about is that the movies are good enough quality to watch. They're worried that if people have free copies of movies that are good enough to watch, that they won't bother buying movies.
If you take away the DRM, then movie studios have no reason to allow Netflix to do this business at all.
However, even movie execs aren't stupid enough to drop a profit generating customer.
First of all, yes they are. Second, once Netflix streams can be ripped, from the movie studio's perspective, it's just as harmful to their business as piracy.
Yes, I agree, that is the problem with DRM: it turns everything into rented content. But that's not such a big problem when you're explicitly renting it.
For example, iTunes has the option to rent movies for $4 (giving you 24 hours to watch it) or to buy movies that you keep for $15. The rentals are effectively the same as my cable company's pay-per-view service, and it doesn't bother me on any practical or ideological level. Without that DRM, they probably wouldn't offer that option of "renting" digital downloads, whereas I find those rentals useful.
However, I won't "buy" iTunes DRMed video. If I'm supposed to be "buying" it for keeps, and I'm paying a price that's commensurate with a purchase, then DRM is unacceptable. I'll buy movies and TV series, but not unless it's in a high-quality format that I can rip/transcode if I really want to.
Possibly. Just as an alternate theory, I'm going to throw this out there as an alternative-- instead of this:
1) Management got a phone call from Microsoft, or an MSCE Certified Bonehead, who said "Switch to Silverlight, they will wuv you 4ever!"
It may have been something like this:
1) Management got a phone call from a movie studio exec saying, "Do you know that people can get around the copy protection on your download service? Fix it now, or I'm going to sue your ass, you'll lose all of our content, and god help you in trying to get rights to stream my movies ever again."
1.3) Management called Microsoft and said, "Do you know that your copy protection is useless? How do we stop people from capturing the movies that we're streaming?"
1.6) Microsoft tells management, "Just use Silverlight! It will solve everything, and we promise that we're not pushing a sub-par solution in order to displace Flash."
The thing is, this is one use of DRM that I think I might be able to live with: when you're renting content. Most of the things that I believe make DRM inherently unacceptable come from someone else trying to exercise control over something that I purchased and "own".
Sure, and "Don't you know that no productive trade ever happened before property rights?"
I don't see a valid argument that the reason we have property rights is to produce productive trade. We have property rights because they're generally considered to be a natural right (i.e. inalienable human right).
But at least in the US, patents and copyrights are only constitutional in that they are specifically supposed to promote the "progress of science and useful arts". They are specifically not an inalienable human rights.
I agree, and that was more or less what I was expressing, I think. By saying that I believe the business model will shift from being copy-based to distribution-based, I'm saying that businesses that were build around "copying" (e.g. book publishers and record labels) will decrease in relevance because copying is becoming irrelevant. The business models that seem to be increasing in relevance are services like iTunes, Amazon (ebooks and MP3s), Netflix, and Steam. In other words: the distributors.
As wide distribution becomes the primary legal issue and the primary mechanism by which creators are compensated, excess middlemen can be cut out, but these distributors can still provide some important services for the creator. They can provide search features and recommendation engines, take care of all the technical issues of distribution, set up the groundwork for receiving payments, and probably some other things that I'm not thinking of at the moment. Oh, right, and they can also device a business model and marketing plan for how this content can be viewed/used-- in the sense that Netflix can market a set-top box, Amazon can market the Kindle, and Apple can market the iPod/iPhone/AppleTV.
The way ahead isn't simple, but I think we're agreeing that distributors are in line to take over the role of compensating content creators in the way that labels/publishers have traditionally done.
Well yes, I had in mind that the actual goal in us, as a society, supporting a business model that supplies us with intellectual content is, in the end, to financially support those who create the content.
To backtrack and restate my post a little more thoroughly, our past and current attempt to do this has been focused on the creation of copies. The people printing the books and cutting the records, and that in itself was a valid business. In addition, those businesses had an exclusive right to create those copies, and in having such exclusivity, they were able to mark up the cost of those copies well above the production costs, thereby having enough enough money to subsidize the creative process. That was the mechanism by which artists and musicians got paid.
Now that we have computers and cheap storage and networks and the internet, we can make an unlimited number of copies without losing any quality and at virtually no cost. The result has been that the business of "copying" often provides no value anymore, and in itself is no longer a valid business.
So I'm saying that there are a lot of people trying to work out all the details of the new business model that will replace the businesses whose main value was in "copying". An obvious business model to explore is in distribution, and to some degree, that's the avenue that businesses are already headed down. Copyright has essentially been repurposed, through technicalities, from regulating the actual act of "copying" to the regulation of content distribution. Legal/technical technicalities aside, copyright holders effectively have no control over copies being made of their work anymore, but instead are giving control of any wide distribution channels of their work. Customers then pay the distributor for the ability to download the work, and copyright holders get a share of that fee.
This is already pretty much what's happening, and as far as I've seen, that's the direction things will continue to go. So the rest is just an issue of how you make it profitable and keep it profitable.
Does anyone else think this idea of trying to re-create the subscription based model of AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc that the Internet successfully killed off 10 years ago is a bit strange?
I'm not sure how old you are, but if you have enough experience watching the world, then it shouldn't be too strange to see old ideas come back after seeming to be "killed off". If anything, that's the default state of things. Ideas don't disappear; they just recycled.
I think we're in a very strange place right now, because it's clear that there has to be some kind of business model that makes money from intellectual property, but selling "copies" doesn't make sense now that an unlimited number of digital copies can be made for free (or at least virtually "free"). So what's the business model going to be?
I think the best possible thing to happen right now is for businesses to be experimenting to find something that works. I would find it strange if they weren't trying to make money from facilitating distribution, storage, and use of intellectual property rather than "copies". Copies are easy and free. Distribution, storage, backups-- and generally ensuring that you have what you want, when you want it, where you want it, and how you want it-- that stuff is still challenging. There's money to be made there, still.
What's worse is how many phone applications come as subscriptions. I know people who get charged $20 a month for an email application. And then sometimes they make it somewhat difficult to cancel.
On the other hand, businesses exist to make money. Too far in the restrictive direction, and the employees will become unproductive and leave...It's all about balance - security is a process, not a rule set.
Well security also isn't something that you either "do" or "don't do". It comes in degrees, and has to be targeted toward diminishing and mitigating-- not really eliminating-- specific risks. You can always be "more secure", but it's not always feasible or even desirable, given that you have to operate with limited resources and allow some level of accessibility.
However, it's pretty common for people to get annoyed at levels of security that are actually pretty appropriate. Everyone always wants what they want, immediately and with no hoops to jump through. It's understandable, but not always reasonable.
In every company I've worked for, users have complained when their account is anything less than a full admin, when not all ports on the firewall are allowed to pass freely to their desktop, and when they are not permitted to install every piece of software that they believe would be useful. I've read complaints from people here on Slashdot that come down to, "I know what I'm doing! Why don't those bastards in IT just let me do whatever I want?"
I guess I'm just trying to say, (a) that a reasonable balance might still leave employees feeling like the IT staff isn't responsive; and (b) the level of security that constitutes a "reasonable balance" depends entirely on the importance of security (top secret documents warrant more stringent security than your MP3 collection).
Are all the people that use P2P software to distribute FOSS putting themselves at risk? Yes. But it's ok, it's a known and controlled risk.
I'm not saying that P2P is bad on principle. Still, if you let everyone in your company install P2P programs on their own computers, then it's not a highly-controlled risk. The risk isn't because of something inherent in the fact that it's P2P, and wouldn't necessarily be different from allowing everyone to run their own web server on their own computers.
I'm saying allowing everyone in your company to run their own servers is a stupid security risk. The software might have bugs, people might fail to keep it up to date, and people might misconfigure the server software, exercising poor judgment in their own security policies. And those are the reasons why companies generally do not and should not allow people to install their own software or allow external traffic to be routed to unauthorized machines (anything not set up specifically to act as a server for external traffic).
This is especially important if you have access on your network to information that needs access to be very restricted. I worked for a defense contractor, and all of the information that needed to be secured was kept on a separate network that was not connected to the Internet at all. For someone with that sort of data to install server software on their computer while connected to the Internet is reckless. I'm assuming that it wasn't intentional, but rather that whoever set up the software did not accurately assess the risk.
And so in that case, I think that the story is correct to say, "OMG file sharers are breaching national security!" Apparently someone was ignorant to the risk.
I don't think there's anything unfair about the summary. P2P applications are a security risk, and I know I don't allow my users to install them on their work computers.
Let me put it this way: Any time you're setting a computer up to be a server on the Internet, it's always a security risk. There are risks associated with bugs and things like that, but also (and perhaps more importantly) there are risks associated with misconfiguration. This is very relevant for P2P applications, which might come configured by default to share files that you don't want to share.
So yes, if people with high security clearances are installing Kazaa on their work computers and sharing out all their documents, then "OMG file sharers are breaching national security!"
Well the things you describe are really just startling. Something pops out, catches you by surprise, and you jump. Overuse of that technique is pretty much the definition or poorly made horror.
Good horror, I think, is more about what you expect to see, what you think you might have seen but can't be sure, and what you don't see at all. It builds an idea in your mind, suggests the most awful things, and then leaves you to fill in the gaps with the worst thing you can imagine. Because really, once you've seen the monster, know what it is, and know what the rules are, it's not that scary anymore.
I think that in the best horror, the monster is just a stand-in for all the horrible things that might happen to you, that you might not have even imagined yet, and that you'd be powerless to stop once they started coming after you.
I happen to know that in some cases, it's the very same people. I've seen people here on Slashdot flip-flop on exactly this topic-- same username arguing both sides of the point. I've seen people that I know in real life argue both sides, and I've seen political pundits on TV arguing both sides. And in many of those cases, I've observed that these people have a political viewpoint that inclines them to pick whichever of these statements will most improve the arguing position of large businesses.
Now sure, there are probably a fair number of people who only argue one of these things, and I can't say to them "You can't have it both ways." In the case of someone making the first statement ("It's all supply and demand.") they're in better shape because they're understanding more about how these things actually work. In the case of someone making the second statement, they're failing to understand that prices aren't necessarily determined by cost.
This can be achieved through campaigns, e.g. publishing an article about increased cost to widely read websites.
Good point. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if these telcos had PR people out pushing this story. It's kind of win/win. Either you drum up enough support that people the administration won't have the political will to do it, or else you convince customers to accept a price hike.
Not only critics say that, anyone who has ever run a business will tell you that ALL costs are passed on to the customers in one way or another.
Well that's definitely true in that eventually all costs must be paid, and businesses get their money from customers, and therefore all costs are in some way paid by customers. However, it's not true that all cost increases to a business result in cost increases to the customer, nor do cost decreases for the company necessarily lead to cost decreases for the consumer.
I find it almost funny how when you talk about customers getting overcharged-- "overcharged" in the sense that they're paying far most than something costs to produce-- everyone comes out of the woodwork to say, "Of course! This is capitalism! It's about supply and demand, and charging what the market will bear. Even if it costs $0.02 to product, they'll charge $100 for as long as people are willing to pay that price." Then these same people, when you mention that some regulation will increase the cost of production, they complain, "Well that cost is just going to get passed along to consumers!" Well you can't have it both ways.
There's some truth to it, but it's also true that companies do a lot of research to determine an optimal price for their product. If they charge too little, they sell lots of units but don't make as much per unit and they don't make as much money. If they charge too much, then they make more per unit but there volume is so low that they don't make as much money. There is often some kind of optimal point where they make the most money, and that's the price they charge.
Same thing with cell phone companies. The prices we're being charged per month is based on what will make the carriers the most money. Not cost. If you raise the costs sufficiently to "diminish supply", then you'll see an increase in price. But costs at this scale don't simply get "passed along to consumers" in the way people talk about it.