10% off (10 days left) all pharmaceutical products (bombs), including viagra (dirty bomb) to help make your lover scream with pleasure (explode).
10 days left till dirty bombs explode! EVERYBODY PANIC
It's even worse than that. I heard them talking about it on that newest hotspot for terrorists, World of Warcraft. This guy codenamed "Leeroy" is gonna charge in out of nowhere and cause carnage!
Not only that, there are other hot-button issues of great practical importance we should be debating on Slashdot:
Perhaps we need to install an emotion circuit in all household androids to improve their efficiency...but what about corporate androids??
Oh, heavens no. I've been trying to figure out how to yank the emotional chips out of certain people for years. "Hello? My roommate's not here. No, I don't think he's cheating on you because he canceled your date, his sister was in a car accident and he's at the hospital. No, we're not all covering for him. His cell phone's off because he's in a hospital. Well, maybe she didn't want to talk to you because she was waiting for a call about her daughter, the one who was just in a car accident. I'm hanging up and unplugging the phone now."
I read all of the none Americans gripping about America and all this procedures. Yet, back in the 70 and 80, Germany, Spain, France, Israel, etc. had issues with terrorists and implemented FAR FAR harsher procedures.
So, are you generally mocking non-Americans for being hypocrites, or are you saying that it's OK for the DHS to be like they are because the Stasi was worse...?
Which makes little sense from the POV of encouraging publication of new works. Mr Jackson isn't going to write another note and Mr Crichton isn't going to write another word. Nor does increasing copyright terms on pre-existing works.
And yet they can still nail you to the wall for it, and extort $20,000 per song out of you.
$20,000 is the upper limit for statutory damages for copyright infringement, but nobody is fined anything for private use, because in Canada that's legal.
They've tried arguments to get around that, like if you download music using a file sharing program, you're serving it out as you download it and therefore are distributing it. The only reason they're not pushing it is because they're afraid of setting precedents with the law in its current shape. So now they're trying to get the law changed by claiming we need WIPO compliance and to get this compliance we somehow need to be more Draconian than the United States.
> any songwriting money that would go to John Lennon presumably goes to Yoko
> Ono via Lennon's estate. So, by buying Beatles music we're encouraging - or
> at least enabling - her to make more songs.
Last I checked most Beatles song 'rights' were owned by Michael Jackson.
Not to step on your joke, but no. First off, there's a difference between performer and writer even if they're the same person. Each gets a cut, and the Beatles library only covers one part of that. IIRC, the Beatles who wrote songs still make money off the library, just not as much as if they owned it. And the ones who didn't write much are out of luck.
And Michael Jackson didn't own it in his last days. Hold on, this gets confusing. He transferred it to a company he owned. So the Beatles library was owned by a company owned by Michael Jackson. No biggie, it's still his, right? Well, no. The company merged with a subsidiary of... Sony? One of the big RIAA boys, anyway. So now the Beatles library is owned by a company who is in turn owned in part by Sony and in part by the estate of Michael Jackson.
Now, I'm a Canadian, and one thing I've always been fuzzy on is exactly how the CD-R fee benefits "The Artist". My understanding, based on hearsay and no research, is that the fee is pocketed by the corporations and never trickles down to the artist.
It ostensibly goes to the artists, for a very specific definition of "artist". Only the biggest of the big - the names you know - and their songwriters get a cut.
However, I do know that the federal and provincial governments do provide funding for "The Arts"; presumably some of that must go to this mythical "The Artist", right?
Completely different entities. "The Arts" can be anything. A painting, a symphony, a guy who covers things in plastic. In the context of the media levy, "the artist" is a very specific group, see above.
I wonder if any of the CD-R fee goes to fund those grants.
None. The fee is a levy, not a tax. While the government are the ones who made the law demanding it, just like a tax, they don't collect it. It's collected and used by a private third party. Government funding for ANYTHING can't come from a levy, because it's not theirs. They hold the gun to your head, but it's another guy who goes through your wallet.
If they already found everyone who buys a ipod of pirating, then there is no reason not to pirate every song now. Do not spend another single penny on buying another song and instead just pirate the shit.
And yet they can still nail you to the wall for it, and extort $20,000 per song out of you. They get money, indignation pushes you to piracy, they sue you, they get more per song than if you just bought it. Ain't it neat how that works?
And we certainly need to recognize all those DEAD artists like John Lennon so we can encourage them to make more songs.
Actually, when you think about it, any songwriting money that would go to John Lennon presumably goes to Yoko Ono via Lennon's estate. So, by buying Beatles music we're encouraging - or at least enabling - her to make more songs.
Man, the more I think about copyright, the worse it gets....
As I would be paying for stolen music via a tax, surely I can't be stealing material when I copy it?
Isn't this silly idea just a blanket permission to copy music?
Nope. If they can get it signed into law, the government is free to declare that everyone has to pay $100 a year to be split up and given to the families of murder victims but that doesn't make murder legal. The government can, if they can get the support for it, also declare that use of any peer-to-peer protocol for any reason is punishable by a minimum of 20 years in a supermax prison, unless you stood on your head and sang "Yankee Doodle" while you used it. In places without protections against double jeopardy, they can then retroactively change the law so that anyone who was off-key while singing has to go to jail anyway and round up the bad singers.
Laws are arbitrary, more so when written with a profit motive in mind.
It is the tragedy of the commons in action. Person A breaks a law but the fine is spread across persons ABCDEF... It's the justice system socialized.
Tragedy of the Commons is when ABCDEF all did something wrong on the assumption that the other five wouldn't. Everyone acting in their own short-term self-interest destroys a common resource permanently. The levy only makes sense if it IS the Tragedy of the Commons, since in that case everyone is copying music and no one is buying. The levy would in that case be the only thing saving the industry from bankruptcy.
I'd also hesitate to call it socialized. Seeing as it is a levy, not a tax, it's more a case of the government directly acting as the enforcer for a corporation, who takes the money and distributes/keeps it as they see fit. It's precisely the opposite of any sort of collectivist or socialist idea.
Companies need to learn that copyright is not a business model.
They do. But it won't happen while they can make a profit off it. You want a child to stop breaking things, you don't give him candy whenever he breaks something. As long as the laws let them do this and make money in the process, they'll do it.
It is a license, granted by the citizens of a country, to have certain restrictions on the commercial use of a work for a limited time. There is no right to be paid or make money, it is simply an opportunity to do so and if you fail, too bad.
Copyright - particularly modern variants that run for decades after the original producer has died, and thus are used best by ageless companies - is precisely that. "We own X and we have a right to make money off it, and bring the power of the courts down on anyone who attempts to use X without giving us money."
Don't like the idea? Be politically active, if only on this one topic. Push for copyright reform. It won't get better if we do nothing.
If it's done like the CD levy, then it goes only to Canadians. Except songwriters for Canadian singers, IIRC, they can be from elsewhere. So copy a Led Zeppelin song and Roch Voisine gets the money.
and how its divided?
Again, if it's done like the CD levy then it depends on your airplay on major radio stations and music store/big-box retail sales. In other words, if you're not playing on Clear Channel (et al.) and don't have a platinum album, you get nothing.
Right. Unfair, isn't it? I have never burned a CD with commercial music. All of the CDs I have burned contain software, hard drive backups, or research data.
I mentioned this gem elsewhere in the thread: People with disabilities still need to back up their data. Since it's pretty much a given that at least one completely deaf person used a CD-R for backup purposes, then the music industry has profited off deaf people buying products for their own use. I'm trying to think of a better description of why the industry is rotten to the core, but I can't. The creators of an audio product have figured out how to turn a profit on the backs of deaf people.
And I want to rule the world. So? Nobody cares about that, why should we care about their wishes?
Because they've got the lobbyists to make it happen.
I don't give a flying fuck about what the content industry wants. They obviously don't care about what I want, the quality of what has been released lately is enough proof of that. Gimme a reason to waste a nanosecond pondering what they could possibly want.
Because of things like the blank CD levy, where you pay even if you don't do anything illegal, or even anything related to them. You buy no music whatsoever but back up your business data onto CD-R? If you're Canadian then congratulations, you've paid them money without even being a consumer of their product. So they add iPods to that. How long before flash RAM and hard drives get added to the list? They've already proven they can get a levy on a form of storage, regardless of what you do with said storage. If you want to pay an extra cent a gig, fine, but my terabyte drive array takes issue with that.
The first thing that will happen if such restrictions appear is that people will break out their digital crowbars and break it. Simple as that.
Which is just another sort of crime, and one which they're pushing for ever stiffer punishments for. Think they'll never catch you because everyone's doing it? Tell that to Joel Tenenbaum. Just because everyone does it doesn't make it legal, it just means they have more targets. And if they can think of a legal gimmick that lets them drag one hundred thousand people through the court simultaneously (or extort settlements out of same), you can bet they'll do it. Then the fact that there's a million people doing it is trivial. Suddenly you're not one of a million, you're one of TEN.
Why? Because they don't care what someone wants who doesn't care about what they want.
Disproven by the CD levy. Since it gets every CD-R, it's safe to assume they've made profit off deaf people.
Illegal? Here's a phone, iPhone, no less, call someone who cares. Crack down? Ok, go ahead. Encryption works like a charm and sorry, that isn't encrypted, that's data garbage from my last HD crash, I saved it but so far couldn't get around to figuring out what this is, but you're experts, right, have fun.
They've threatened people who don't even have computers. Do you really think hiding your data matters? They've hauled people into court on less than an IP address. Flimsy evidence? You bet, but you gotta pay your lawyer by the hour, not by the strength of the opponent's case. If they make it too expensive to fight, then they'll make money on settlements, and the evidence will never see the light of day.
If everything else fails, dear content industry: I can live without music. Can you live without my money? I hope not. Please die.
Again, you could be stone deaf and still required to give the music industry money. They don't even have to produce much music, all they need to do is convince politicians that your entire demographic group is stealing whatever they do produce and they can tax it out of you. Still doesn't affect you?
1) Make a site where everyone in Canada can karaoke into and sing whatever they want, or upload their garage band songs. however badly (bring on the Thrash yodling).
2) Have the EULA of the site say the uploader releases his revenue via the iPod Fee to the site.
3) Make said songs available for ipod download.
4) Go to the Canadian Private Copying Collectivem and demand the percentage of the fee your users represent.. if there are 10.000 artists and you have 10.000 users, you should get half.
5) Profit.
Won't work. They'll only give the money to who they want to. My proof? Look at the blank media levy. You burn a CD full of Swedish metal, do they send a few cents to the Swedes? Nope. They keep a cut, and send the rest to Avril Lavigne. Burn a CD full of pictures of your baby, do they refund the levy? Hell no! They keep a cut, send the rest to Celine Dion. They've said as much when artists who didn't get a piece of the levy - hell, garage artists who had to PAY THE LEVY TO GET THE BLANK DISKS TO DISTRIBUTE THEIR MUSIC - came calling for a slice of the pie. The money goes where they say, how they say, and anyone not on their list of worthy recipients can go fuck themselves - because once the Collective is done fucking them, they're not even gonna give a reach-around.
In an ideal world, yes. You pay for something, you use it. But not these guys. They want you to pay for every format shift.
Indeed, while logically it should be the other way around. You should get a compensation off the original price for doing the work (converting to a different media) that logically is the job of the publisher (to publish the work in a playable format).
In fact we should move towards a model where the music you buy isn't in any playable format to start with.
If it wasn't playable to start with, it would be encrypted, since any nonencrypted format could be made playable simply by writing a player. It would play into their hands - they could sell you something you couldn't use until you bought the digital keys for their digital locks. And they've already gone through pains to establish that digital lockpicking is as vile a sin as robbing the poor sound engineers at gunpoint.
You buy the music in the non-playable distribution format, and then whatever you use to play it converts it to a suitable format.
Oh, they'd love that, because they'd require you to buy every shift you do. 100 transfers to your iPod for $x, 10 to your PC for $y, burn it to a CD for $z. They'd sell you the razor AND the blades.
Bullshit, there are no extreme expenses in making music.
I'll play devil's advocate here: what about the marketing and distribution costs associated with making and selling an album? It could be argued that the present day distribution should be next to $0.00 by doing it electronically however there is marketing and even using banner ads costs money.
Oh, absolutely. And when you can show me the math that explains why the banner ads take up so much of the cost that the artist is lucky to make a penny on the dollar, then I'll agree with you.
Here's my problem with the whole thing - the artist doesn't make any money directly off a CD. He can't, he's signed away his rights to his corporate masters - which is why they want the copyright to go for more than half a century after he kicks the bucket - they'll still be around. He writes the song, he sings the song, and then THEY take the song, THEY sell the song, THEY take the profits, and give him a check for $100,000 and a bill for $200,000 of studio time, half to be paid now. (Oh, they didn't mention that they sometimes shunt expenses off on the artist? Funny how they'd forget to mention that when they tell you that the artist can't afford to feed his kids.)
It's not that the record industry is merely a middleman, it's that they're the company store. They don't pay musicians in scrip, but they make them sign a paper that says they'll only buy from them, even if everyone else is selling at a tenth of the price, so it's no different. They keep artists as slaves, and they want as tight a lock on the consumer. It's why they hate the Internet - they can't force everyone to install a magic program that stops them from downloading or format shifting music, ever. But damn, do they try (cough cough, Sony rootkit, cough). They also don't like it when you - GASP - pay the money directly to the artist. It threatens their existence.
It's all unmitigated, naked greed. If they weren't profiting off CDs, they'd either change their marketing, or raise the prices on CDs, or cut costs, or go under. Nope. They see that the government has this sweet scam called "taxes" and they want in on it. Since raising an army or police force to enforce said tax would be prohibitively expensive, they just want to hijack the existing infrastructure. So they take that money they got from the starving artist, that money you gave them because you thought the artist put out a good CD and wanted to support his work, and they use it to hire lobbyists, and spokesmen, and lawyers, and build a nice big fat expense account for said lobbyists, and spokesmen, and lawyers. So they can make even more money, and hire more lobbyists, and spokesmen, and lawyers, and then invent another way to squeeze more pennies out of you.
You paid to listen to their music, you can listen to it on whatever device you want.
In an ideal world, yes. You pay for something, you use it. But not these guys. They want you to pay for every format shift. In the case of televised programs, they want to you pay for every time shift. But what if you need to time or format shift it to properly use it? Tough luck, bucko, then you just bought a very nice coaster, good luck returning opened merchandise to the store. They've already pushed the idea that you're only borrowing their music, that putting down money for a disk doesn't grant you the right to use it in any legal way you please.
Their ultimate goal appears to be pay PER USE. Did your daughter put the latest bubblegum pop princess single on repeat ALL this afternoon? Fifty cents a play autocharged to your credit card. Good thing you pay $50 a month for the discount plan, or that would have been a buck fifty a play! We can also sell you the ultra-discount plan that's only $100 a month and ten cents a play! This week only, get TEN FREE PLAYS of any Flava Flav song already in your collection with a three year contract!
Banning or restricting time shifting and format shifting is of no use to the busker on the street, but allows a company to profit by re-selling the same product to the same customer in different wrappers should technology or even a person's work schedule change. Many of the 'little people' (or people who claim to represent the 'little people' or the 'starving artists') who insist that Canada needs copyright reform so they can better feed their families strangely don't explain why their neighbor, whose family won't see paychecks in the fifty years after he dies, should have to enjoy the things he has bought and paid for only on their terms, even if it means he never gets to enjoy them at all.
To my fellow Canadians: The more of this shit we put up with, the more that they'll shovel on us.
http://copyright.econsultation.ca/ - Let them know what you think of the copyright reforms - like this one - being discussed right now. http://www.pirateparty.ca/sign-up - Let's see if we can get an actual political party off the ground, one that actually fights for the rights of the people!
(Do I sound like an activist? I was completely politically apathetic, voted twice in my entire life, until they started pulling this garbage. We can't put up with this anymore.)
I'll take the damn course if it'll get me a $10 copy of Win 7.
No kidding. Some of my techie fellows in the industry who work at smaller shops (and thus, actually pride themselves in their work, not in their sales volume) got subjected to a lighter form of this propaganda (similar pro-7 content but no Linux attacks). All they got was a donut each. Boston cream, I think. The diabetics in the audience weren't too thrilled about that. They got to watch Windows 7 propaganda while holding sugar death in their hand. It's a novel form of torture, like the guy who sets up Room 101 had a really off day.
...unless Kid 'n Play show up!
Maybe we could get Steve Balmer and Bill Gates to reprise the roles - not sure who would look better with the fade though.
Not sure? Ballmer with a high top fade? You ask for a forest in the Sahara! An Eden on an Antarctic plateau!
But there's a thought: If Windows 7 can grow Ballmer a Kid-style fade, then it could be a box of rocks, AOL disks, and dead puppies and you still wouldn't be able to keep it on the shelves.
Unlikely. Your neighbors will probably ignore the Windows 7 and spend their time on the couch, having an in-depth discussion about birth control options.
Two questions:
1) Are they willing to provide live demonstrations of birth control options while the host demonstrates Windows 7?
2) Are they hot?
If so, then he may well have the most successful Windows 7 launch party on his hands! (And possibly on other parts of him.)
Slashdot Mirror
Mods, hello? Are we a tad bit challenged by the metric system today?
Nah, it's just that all our mods work at Verizon's billing department, and factors of 100 give them a bit of trouble.
10% off (10 days left) all pharmaceutical products (bombs), including viagra (dirty bomb) to help make your lover scream with pleasure (explode).
10 days left till dirty bombs explode! EVERYBODY PANIC
It's even worse than that. I heard them talking about it on that newest hotspot for terrorists, World of Warcraft. This guy codenamed "Leeroy" is gonna charge in out of nowhere and cause carnage!
You never learned to play properly. First, it is about business, i.e., anything you can cheat without getting caught is legal.
And chess is about war, but people are still surprised when I bury an axe in my opponent's skull.
Not only that, there are other hot-button issues of great practical importance we should be debating on Slashdot:
Oh, heavens no. I've been trying to figure out how to yank the emotional chips out of certain people for years. "Hello? My roommate's not here. No, I don't think he's cheating on you because he canceled your date, his sister was in a car accident and he's at the hospital. No, we're not all covering for him. His cell phone's off because he's in a hospital. Well, maybe she didn't want to talk to you because she was waiting for a call about her daughter, the one who was just in a car accident. I'm hanging up and unplugging the phone now."
I read all of the none Americans gripping about America and all this procedures. Yet, back in the 70 and 80, Germany, Spain, France, Israel, etc. had issues with terrorists and implemented FAR FAR harsher procedures.
So, are you generally mocking non-Americans for being hypocrites, or are you saying that it's OK for the DHS to be like they are because the Stasi was worse...?
Which makes little sense from the POV of encouraging publication of new works. Mr Jackson isn't going to write another note and Mr Crichton isn't going to write another word. Nor does increasing copyright terms on pre-existing works.
Of interest is Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants, a short story that's about copyright in the post-scarcity future. http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
And yet they can still nail you to the wall for it, and extort $20,000 per song out of you.
$20,000 is the upper limit for statutory damages for copyright infringement, but nobody is fined anything for private use, because in Canada that's legal.
They've tried arguments to get around that, like if you download music using a file sharing program, you're serving it out as you download it and therefore are distributing it. The only reason they're not pushing it is because they're afraid of setting precedents with the law in its current shape. So now they're trying to get the law changed by claiming we need WIPO compliance and to get this compliance we somehow need to be more Draconian than the United States.
> any songwriting money that would go to John Lennon presumably goes to Yoko > Ono via Lennon's estate. So, by buying Beatles music we're encouraging - or > at least enabling - her to make more songs.
Last I checked most Beatles song 'rights' were owned by Michael Jackson.
Not to step on your joke, but no. First off, there's a difference between performer and writer even if they're the same person. Each gets a cut, and the Beatles library only covers one part of that. IIRC, the Beatles who wrote songs still make money off the library, just not as much as if they owned it. And the ones who didn't write much are out of luck.
And Michael Jackson didn't own it in his last days. Hold on, this gets confusing. He transferred it to a company he owned. So the Beatles library was owned by a company owned by Michael Jackson. No biggie, it's still his, right? Well, no. The company merged with a subsidiary of... Sony? One of the big RIAA boys, anyway. So now the Beatles library is owned by a company who is in turn owned in part by Sony and in part by the estate of Michael Jackson.
Now, I'm a Canadian, and one thing I've always been fuzzy on is exactly how the CD-R fee benefits "The Artist". My understanding, based on hearsay and no research, is that the fee is pocketed by the corporations and never trickles down to the artist.
It ostensibly goes to the artists, for a very specific definition of "artist". Only the biggest of the big - the names you know - and their songwriters get a cut.
However, I do know that the federal and provincial governments do provide funding for "The Arts"; presumably some of that must go to this mythical "The Artist", right?
Completely different entities. "The Arts" can be anything. A painting, a symphony, a guy who covers things in plastic. In the context of the media levy, "the artist" is a very specific group, see above.
I wonder if any of the CD-R fee goes to fund those grants.
None. The fee is a levy, not a tax. While the government are the ones who made the law demanding it, just like a tax, they don't collect it. It's collected and used by a private third party. Government funding for ANYTHING can't come from a levy, because it's not theirs. They hold the gun to your head, but it's another guy who goes through your wallet.
Old but informative: http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml
If they already found everyone who buys a ipod of pirating, then there is no reason not to pirate every song now. Do not spend another single penny on buying another song and instead just pirate the shit.
And yet they can still nail you to the wall for it, and extort $20,000 per song out of you. They get money, indignation pushes you to piracy, they sue you, they get more per song than if you just bought it. Ain't it neat how that works?
And we certainly need to recognize all those DEAD artists like John Lennon so we can encourage them to make more songs.
Actually, when you think about it, any songwriting money that would go to John Lennon presumably goes to Yoko Ono via Lennon's estate. So, by buying Beatles music we're encouraging - or at least enabling - her to make more songs.
Man, the more I think about copyright, the worse it gets....
As I would be paying for stolen music via a tax, surely I can't be stealing material when I copy it?
Isn't this silly idea just a blanket permission to copy music?
Nope. If they can get it signed into law, the government is free to declare that everyone has to pay $100 a year to be split up and given to the families of murder victims but that doesn't make murder legal. The government can, if they can get the support for it, also declare that use of any peer-to-peer protocol for any reason is punishable by a minimum of 20 years in a supermax prison, unless you stood on your head and sang "Yankee Doodle" while you used it. In places without protections against double jeopardy, they can then retroactively change the law so that anyone who was off-key while singing has to go to jail anyway and round up the bad singers.
Laws are arbitrary, more so when written with a profit motive in mind.
It is the tragedy of the commons in action. Person A breaks a law but the fine is spread across persons ABCDEF... It's the justice system socialized.
Tragedy of the Commons is when ABCDEF all did something wrong on the assumption that the other five wouldn't. Everyone acting in their own short-term self-interest destroys a common resource permanently. The levy only makes sense if it IS the Tragedy of the Commons, since in that case everyone is copying music and no one is buying. The levy would in that case be the only thing saving the industry from bankruptcy.
I'd also hesitate to call it socialized. Seeing as it is a levy, not a tax, it's more a case of the government directly acting as the enforcer for a corporation, who takes the money and distributes/keeps it as they see fit. It's precisely the opposite of any sort of collectivist or socialist idea.
It's too bad the populace doesn't realize that it has the power to destroy all of this nonsense.
The populace is too busy listening to Britney Spears to realize it. It's a nice neat feedback loop the music industry has going on there.
Companies need to learn that copyright is not a business model.
They do. But it won't happen while they can make a profit off it. You want a child to stop breaking things, you don't give him candy whenever he breaks something. As long as the laws let them do this and make money in the process, they'll do it.
It is a license, granted by the citizens of a country, to have certain restrictions on the commercial use of a work for a limited time. There is no right to be paid or make money, it is simply an opportunity to do so and if you fail, too bad.
Copyright - particularly modern variants that run for decades after the original producer has died, and thus are used best by ageless companies - is precisely that. "We own X and we have a right to make money off it, and bring the power of the courts down on anyone who attempts to use X without giving us money."
Don't like the idea? Be politically active, if only on this one topic. Push for copyright reform. It won't get better if we do nothing.
Who gets the Money
If it's done like the CD levy, then it goes only to Canadians. Except songwriters for Canadian singers, IIRC, they can be from elsewhere. So copy a Led Zeppelin song and Roch Voisine gets the money.
and how its divided?
Again, if it's done like the CD levy then it depends on your airplay on major radio stations and music store/big-box retail sales. In other words, if you're not playing on Clear Channel (et al.) and don't have a platinum album, you get nothing.
Right. Unfair, isn't it? I have never burned a CD with commercial music. All of the CDs I have burned contain software, hard drive backups, or research data.
I mentioned this gem elsewhere in the thread: People with disabilities still need to back up their data. Since it's pretty much a given that at least one completely deaf person used a CD-R for backup purposes, then the music industry has profited off deaf people buying products for their own use. I'm trying to think of a better description of why the industry is rotten to the core, but I can't. The creators of an audio product have figured out how to turn a profit on the backs of deaf people.
They want you to pay for every format shift.
And I want to rule the world. So? Nobody cares about that, why should we care about their wishes?
Because they've got the lobbyists to make it happen.
I don't give a flying fuck about what the content industry wants. They obviously don't care about what I want, the quality of what has been released lately is enough proof of that. Gimme a reason to waste a nanosecond pondering what they could possibly want.
Because of things like the blank CD levy, where you pay even if you don't do anything illegal, or even anything related to them. You buy no music whatsoever but back up your business data onto CD-R? If you're Canadian then congratulations, you've paid them money without even being a consumer of their product. So they add iPods to that. How long before flash RAM and hard drives get added to the list? They've already proven they can get a levy on a form of storage, regardless of what you do with said storage. If you want to pay an extra cent a gig, fine, but my terabyte drive array takes issue with that.
The first thing that will happen if such restrictions appear is that people will break out their digital crowbars and break it. Simple as that.
Which is just another sort of crime, and one which they're pushing for ever stiffer punishments for. Think they'll never catch you because everyone's doing it? Tell that to Joel Tenenbaum. Just because everyone does it doesn't make it legal, it just means they have more targets. And if they can think of a legal gimmick that lets them drag one hundred thousand people through the court simultaneously (or extort settlements out of same), you can bet they'll do it. Then the fact that there's a million people doing it is trivial. Suddenly you're not one of a million, you're one of TEN.
Why? Because they don't care what someone wants who doesn't care about what they want.
Disproven by the CD levy. Since it gets every CD-R, it's safe to assume they've made profit off deaf people.
Illegal? Here's a phone, iPhone, no less, call someone who cares. Crack down? Ok, go ahead. Encryption works like a charm and sorry, that isn't encrypted, that's data garbage from my last HD crash, I saved it but so far couldn't get around to figuring out what this is, but you're experts, right, have fun.
They've threatened people who don't even have computers. Do you really think hiding your data matters? They've hauled people into court on less than an IP address. Flimsy evidence? You bet, but you gotta pay your lawyer by the hour, not by the strength of the opponent's case. If they make it too expensive to fight, then they'll make money on settlements, and the evidence will never see the light of day.
If everything else fails, dear content industry: I can live without music. Can you live without my money? I hope not. Please die.
Again, you could be stone deaf and still required to give the music industry money. They don't even have to produce much music, all they need to do is convince politicians that your entire demographic group is stealing whatever they do produce and they can tax it out of you. Still doesn't affect you?
1) Make a site where everyone in Canada can karaoke into and sing whatever they want, or upload their garage band songs. however badly (bring on the Thrash yodling). 2) Have the EULA of the site say the uploader releases his revenue via the iPod Fee to the site. 3) Make said songs available for ipod download. 4) Go to the Canadian Private Copying Collectivem and demand the percentage of the fee your users represent.. if there are 10.000 artists and you have 10.000 users, you should get half. 5) Profit.
Won't work. They'll only give the money to who they want to. My proof? Look at the blank media levy. You burn a CD full of Swedish metal, do they send a few cents to the Swedes? Nope. They keep a cut, and send the rest to Avril Lavigne. Burn a CD full of pictures of your baby, do they refund the levy? Hell no! They keep a cut, send the rest to Celine Dion. They've said as much when artists who didn't get a piece of the levy - hell, garage artists who had to PAY THE LEVY TO GET THE BLANK DISKS TO DISTRIBUTE THEIR MUSIC - came calling for a slice of the pie. The money goes where they say, how they say, and anyone not on their list of worthy recipients can go fuck themselves - because once the Collective is done fucking them, they're not even gonna give a reach-around.
In an ideal world, yes. You pay for something, you use it. But not these guys. They want you to pay for every format shift.
Indeed, while logically it should be the other way around. You should get a compensation off the original price for doing the work (converting to a different media) that logically is the job of the publisher (to publish the work in a playable format).
In fact we should move towards a model where the music you buy isn't in any playable format to start with.
If it wasn't playable to start with, it would be encrypted, since any nonencrypted format could be made playable simply by writing a player. It would play into their hands - they could sell you something you couldn't use until you bought the digital keys for their digital locks. And they've already gone through pains to establish that digital lockpicking is as vile a sin as robbing the poor sound engineers at gunpoint.
You buy the music in the non-playable distribution format, and then whatever you use to play it converts it to a suitable format.
Oh, they'd love that, because they'd require you to buy every shift you do. 100 transfers to your iPod for $x, 10 to your PC for $y, burn it to a CD for $z. They'd sell you the razor AND the blades.
Bullshit, there are no extreme expenses in making music.
I'll play devil's advocate here: what about the marketing and distribution costs associated with making and selling an album? It could be argued that the present day distribution should be next to $0.00 by doing it electronically however there is marketing and even using banner ads costs money.
Oh, absolutely. And when you can show me the math that explains why the banner ads take up so much of the cost that the artist is lucky to make a penny on the dollar, then I'll agree with you.
Here's my problem with the whole thing - the artist doesn't make any money directly off a CD. He can't, he's signed away his rights to his corporate masters - which is why they want the copyright to go for more than half a century after he kicks the bucket - they'll still be around. He writes the song, he sings the song, and then THEY take the song, THEY sell the song, THEY take the profits, and give him a check for $100,000 and a bill for $200,000 of studio time, half to be paid now. (Oh, they didn't mention that they sometimes shunt expenses off on the artist? Funny how they'd forget to mention that when they tell you that the artist can't afford to feed his kids.)
It's not that the record industry is merely a middleman, it's that they're the company store. They don't pay musicians in scrip, but they make them sign a paper that says they'll only buy from them, even if everyone else is selling at a tenth of the price, so it's no different. They keep artists as slaves, and they want as tight a lock on the consumer. It's why they hate the Internet - they can't force everyone to install a magic program that stops them from downloading or format shifting music, ever. But damn, do they try (cough cough, Sony rootkit, cough). They also don't like it when you - GASP - pay the money directly to the artist. It threatens their existence.
It's all unmitigated, naked greed. If they weren't profiting off CDs, they'd either change their marketing, or raise the prices on CDs, or cut costs, or go under. Nope. They see that the government has this sweet scam called "taxes" and they want in on it. Since raising an army or police force to enforce said tax would be prohibitively expensive, they just want to hijack the existing infrastructure. So they take that money they got from the starving artist, that money you gave them because you thought the artist put out a good CD and wanted to support his work, and they use it to hire lobbyists, and spokesmen, and lawyers, and build a nice big fat expense account for said lobbyists, and spokesmen, and lawyers. So they can make even more money, and hire more lobbyists, and spokesmen, and lawyers, and then invent another way to squeeze more pennies out of you.
You paid to listen to their music, you can listen to it on whatever device you want.
In an ideal world, yes. You pay for something, you use it. But not these guys. They want you to pay for every format shift. In the case of televised programs, they want to you pay for every time shift. But what if you need to time or format shift it to properly use it? Tough luck, bucko, then you just bought a very nice coaster, good luck returning opened merchandise to the store. They've already pushed the idea that you're only borrowing their music, that putting down money for a disk doesn't grant you the right to use it in any legal way you please.
Their ultimate goal appears to be pay PER USE. Did your daughter put the latest bubblegum pop princess single on repeat ALL this afternoon? Fifty cents a play autocharged to your credit card. Good thing you pay $50 a month for the discount plan, or that would have been a buck fifty a play! We can also sell you the ultra-discount plan that's only $100 a month and ten cents a play! This week only, get TEN FREE PLAYS of any Flava Flav song already in your collection with a three year contract!
Banning or restricting time shifting and format shifting is of no use to the busker on the street, but allows a company to profit by re-selling the same product to the same customer in different wrappers should technology or even a person's work schedule change. Many of the 'little people' (or people who claim to represent the 'little people' or the 'starving artists') who insist that Canada needs copyright reform so they can better feed their families strangely don't explain why their neighbor, whose family won't see paychecks in the fifty years after he dies, should have to enjoy the things he has bought and paid for only on their terms, even if it means he never gets to enjoy them at all.
To my fellow Canadians: The more of this shit we put up with, the more that they'll shovel on us.
http://copyright.econsultation.ca/ - Let them know what you think of the copyright reforms - like this one - being discussed right now.
http://www.pirateparty.ca/sign-up - Let's see if we can get an actual political party off the ground, one that actually fights for the rights of the people!
(Do I sound like an activist? I was completely politically apathetic, voted twice in my entire life, until they started pulling this garbage. We can't put up with this anymore.)
I'll take the damn course if it'll get me a $10 copy of Win 7.
No kidding. Some of my techie fellows in the industry who work at smaller shops (and thus, actually pride themselves in their work, not in their sales volume) got subjected to a lighter form of this propaganda (similar pro-7 content but no Linux attacks). All they got was a donut each. Boston cream, I think. The diabetics in the audience weren't too thrilled about that. They got to watch Windows 7 propaganda while holding sugar death in their hand. It's a novel form of torture, like the guy who sets up Room 101 had a really off day.
...unless Kid 'n Play show up! Maybe we could get Steve Balmer and Bill Gates to reprise the roles - not sure who would look better with the fade though.
Not sure? Ballmer with a high top fade? You ask for a forest in the Sahara! An Eden on an Antarctic plateau!
But there's a thought: If Windows 7 can grow Ballmer a Kid-style fade, then it could be a box of rocks, AOL disks, and dead puppies and you still wouldn't be able to keep it on the shelves.
Unlikely. Your neighbors will probably ignore the Windows 7 and spend their time on the couch, having an in-depth discussion about birth control options.
Two questions:
1) Are they willing to provide live demonstrations of birth control options while the host demonstrates Windows 7?
2) Are they hot?
If so, then he may well have the most successful Windows 7 launch party on his hands! (And possibly on other parts of him.)