We, the Companies Making Tables, primarily care about selling 100,000 units at a time to Verizon and Best Buy. We do whatever they need in order to make those tablets disappear off their shelves, causing them to order more tablets. Also if Verizon says that a Blockbuster app and VZ navigator will help them sell tablets, we always take their word for it and make sure the gear does exactly as they say, because they're our customer (a much bigger customer than you I might add), and much better at turning 100,000 tablets into retail sales than we are.
We do know these folks called "Apple," and they make tablets and are really good at turning them into money on a retail basis, but they basically agree with us on several of the lockdown issues for support and market positioning reasons. They hate carriers and channel resellers, though, so they never do what they tell them to do with their tablets, elitists!
Thank you for your concerns, we'll refer them to our marketing department.
Okay I pulled those numbers out of my ass. On the App Store we got 174 "mortgage interest" , and on the Android Market we have 234. OTOH, on the Android Market about 50 or so of these apps are just branded "$reatlor Mortgage Calculator" apps like this one and another 50 that are just RSS feed readers of some guy's blog on the financial crisis. All of the Apple store apps were legit, destinguishable calculators from a variety of vendors.
That's not completely reasonable -- Android is free to be used on any carrier network and by any handset manufacturer, so I'm told this spurs competition and improves consumer choice.*
If there are six people writing mortgage interest calculator apps instead of two, it's pretty clear which market has better competition and consumer choice. The fact that 3rd party developer revenues on the Android store are significantly less than on Apple's store, leading to less developer interest, less choice and competition, and more ads and undesirable misfeatures (like customer data gathering) despite having a more open market, is a perverse but real outcome and directly attributable to the business model.
(* Set aside for a moment the fact that any Android phone without "Nexus" in its name is more locked-down than an iPhone.)
To be fair, this data dump is fulfilling a FOIA that was filed two YEARS ago, when she had just been nominated vice president (by a few thousand people that probably shouldn't have just taken everything on authority and should have known better, I might add.)
The OP was making the point that phones in 2007 were better compared to iPhones; this was only superficially true, since smartphones pre-iPhone were hella unreliable.
I'm happy to concede that Android, when free of vendor and carrier crap is competitive with iOS. But the actual phones you can buy I'm not so sure; Google can code but the phone manufacturers and carriers, whom Google abets, are still as crappy as they've always been. Just look at your case: I've only had to buy two iPhones in four years, and you've had to buy three in three? The cheaper hardware and lazy OS update non-policy takes a toll. It seriously seems like the only reliable way to upgrade the OS of any randomly-selected Android phone is buy a new one.
I remember this slightly differently -- the iPhone I got that first day in 2007 never crashed (like my Treo and Nokia), never crashed during phone calls (Treo), never pocket dialed (Treo and Moto), and was never stranded with a years-old OS while the carrier dragged their heels (Treo). It also lasted all day on a charge, and the battery door never fell off when I dropped it, and dust never clogged the SD slot on account of the lost the little blank that was supposed to cover it (Treo).
Also, when the touchscreen became unresponsive two weeks after I bought it, I was able to bring it to a store and get it replaced in 10 minutes, and backup restore worked perfectly. I never had to ship my phone somewhere and be phoneless for a week, only to get the phone back and be told that the techs in Arizona couldn't reproduce my problem (Nokia). It also had a web browser, maps app, and video player that was actually usable and didn't destroy the battery. It also had the nice Visual Voicemail thing.
It did not run apps. But the other stuff far outweighed the apps issue. Frankly if iPhones didn't have native apps TODAY I'd probably still be using the things. No Android manufacturer can match Apple's hardware service, or even tries to. All the apps in the world aren't worth having to wait a week to get a phone fixed through the mail.
....And then you can get a letter from Patent Ventures for 0.05% of your revenue to use UI buttons to actuate numerical addition in your app. And then a letter from Intellectual Troll Partners for $30 flat in order to use shake gestures to delete app objects. And then Fraunhofer can ask for 1% because you're encoding an MP3 with Apple's implementation of their codec (sure Apple licensed it, but now that they see you'll roll over, maybe they think that license doesn't apply to phones all of the sudden, and maybe they'd lose but you'd have to go to court over that)...
The precedent would basically make any kind of 3rd party development on any application platform impossible.
I was aware that Lodsys was also suing Android developers, but what does Microsoft have to do about this right now?
This actually might be an interesting differentiation strategy -- if Apple can show that it will go to bat for its developers, then Google is obliged to do at least as much, or else Android begins to look unsafe. It's sortof sick (or interesting) to think that a legal team and patent indemnification has now become a part of a computing platform as important as the APIs, the brand and the marketing.
... he typed, just as his Gnash plugin crashed and Gnome put up a warning. So he launched The Gimp and balanced his checkbook with Gnucash, because he'd just gotten a check back from some GnuStep implementation work he did -- he'd be sure to thank the client with a gnupg-encrypted email. He didn't have the client's address handly so he launched GNOME-find to find the invoice.
It depends... I don't think copyright in the US is about protecting the particular income of particular people as much as it is about making sure that creative works are still available. Copyright lets you do this because you can attach conditions to a copy that benefit you, either making people pay money, or, as we've seen more recently, making people always publish their source code, or making people always give complete attributions. Would you say it was a "victimless crime" if NCR were to ship a Linux POS system without releasing the source?
I've seen crowdsourced / Creative Commons projects, and they're awful. They make The Expendables look like Die Hard. I just have no confidence in such models sustaining the creative arts, unless you were to arbitrarily draw a line around some media, the cheap medias, and assert that they're the only ones worthy of protection, and any media that could only sustain itself by selling DVDs was illegitimate and unworthy of creation in the New Copyleft Order.
(I mean that's what I see lurking in the background of many of these comments in thread: people hate Hollywood, want to see it dead, and think that the entire craft of filmmaking, in excess of a camcorder, is frivolous and doesn't meet their standard of what's art. Changing copyright is just a smokescreen for censoring the Hollywood aesthetic.)
Nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. The only artists that are hurt by file sharing are talentless hacks. If your films are good, P2P will help sales, not hurt.
Disease is caused by an imbalance in the humors, the sun rotates about the Earth, and P2P helps sales. Dogma you say? Uncritically accepted by those with the most to gain, you say? Nonsense, it's just common sense.
I *am* in favor of reasonable copyrights. Say 5-10 years. Even 20 would be acceptable. The current abuse is not defensible by any sane and fair person.
I agree with you. What I'm opposed to is people wanting to reform copyright, but instead of fessing up to their position, arguing about how "mean" the MPAA is and how enforcement doesn't work. If you want to decriminalize X, change the law, don't spend all your time whingeing about jackbooted thugs busting down doors, or how the lawbreakers aren't really doing any harm.
I can't trust them to have any morals at all, other than greed.
Well maybe laws should only protect the rights of people that live up to particular moral standard. I'm sure that would work peachy. Greed's bad, but letting people break laws because we find the victim distasteful is barbaric.
Cogitate and assimilate: If you copy something that is protected by copyright, and you did not have license to do so, or you make a copy in violation of your license (be that license a license for home exhibition, the Creative Commons license, or the GPL), you are liable to civil and criminal penalties. It does not matter what you may have done if you did not have the means to make the copy. It does not matter how zealously you are pursued. It does not matter if you violated the rights of a rich party as opposed to a poor party. If your act caused a party a loss, they are entitled to sue for compensatory damages. It does not matter if your act did or did not create any deficiency in the revenue or the profit of the violated party, as far as punitive damages or criminal penalties are concerned.
If you think the law is immoral, challenge the law. Don't complain about how "counterproductive" enforcement it, as if you'd agree with the law if it were better enforced. Don't, as Al Capone said, "say I'm a murder but give me a ticket for spitting on the sidewalk."
It doesn't really matter for the purpose of your argument, since you defend it. Or rather, you're happy to concede it's an offense, as long as it goes unpunished or the punishment is framed as counterproductive, which is a contradiction if one accepts that nulla crimen sine poena, which I think is reasonable.
If I can sit on the couch and point the remote at the TV and get Dance of the Dead for a 99 cent rental, fuck torrents. Want me to watch it? Get Cox to carry it on pay-per-view.
They did, it's great! People claim as you do that they'd do this, but then they don't. And all the while the salve their conscience with a bunch of rather self-serving rationalization about how they weren't going to pay for the movie anyways, and isn't the MPAA so heavyhanded?, pricks like that don't deserve my money. None of this of course is responsive to the issue that they watched a movie without paying for it, and made a copy of a copyright work without having the right to do this. Nobody wants to talk about the fundamental violation, it's all just a mishmash of unrelated bull meant to blame the victim for complaining too much.
Also, The Expendables did have a $34 mil opening and did great foreign numbers, it made money. It did not do shitty at the box office. The quality issue idunno, but I'd rather ticket-buying consumers decided what was a good movie rather than the tomatometer or the ivory tower of aintitcool.
Well, if they didn't pay you for the work you did, then it's your fault for not specifying that you wanted to be paid up front like everybody else.
I got paid, it's not about that; it's about wether or not they're going to be able to make the next one, or will even want to.
I don't know where you get your statistics, but the number of mass-market studio features has dropped significantly, and any growth I've seen has come from downscale, non-union, crappy genre films and direct-to-home-video titles. (Oh wait, that's what Dance of the Dead was. Shit.);)
On a related note, the producers of The Expendables have about two dozen movies in development at this moment, including a sequel, so I don't think file sharing has hurt them enough to keep them from providing a lot of jobs, too.
"In development" means they put out a press release. It doesn't mean they've spent a dime.
Went to a party recently, my director on Dance of the Dead remarked that both his features now were available on FilesTube!
When you actually know and work with the people who are supposed to get paid for this stuff, and your paycheck comes from that money too, it sorta rubs you a different way.
When a piece of gear downgrades your Bluray to 480p it's suddenly a vast government conspiracy that merits paragraphs of whingeing about freedom and the right to access "my movies." But when a small business loses hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue because people are too friggin' cheap to go watch something on Instant Queue, it's a moment for lolz. Noted.
The MPAA doesn't make money on films. In this case the money would have gone to Lionsgate, the distributor, then Nu Image and Millenium Films, both smaller companies known for downscale genre fare and many direct-to-DVD films. And then to Avi Lerner and the producers, then the upfront split that Stallone and Willis probably got (Stallone also directed), and then royalties to all the actors, the writers (including Stallone) and Brian Tyler, the composer.
The reason you're seeing these lawsuits from shops like Voltage Pictures, of The Hurt Locker fame, and Nu Image is because they're tiny and don't make a lot of money, and just can't afford (in their eyes) losing so much money. The big studios treat it like spoilage at a grocery store, but these are really small companies that make payroll with box office money.
other Android phones from different manufacturers and on different networks have different suites of such software (including, theoretically, no such software).
Google sells these, when they sell them. They're the Nexus phones.
Google isn't to blame for this, because vanilla Android doesn't come with this software.
They're a beneficial partner to the arrangement -- remember they make Android for the OEMs and the carriers, to their specifications and with their prior input and collaboration. It's not like Apple where they put their foot down and say "NO SHOVELWARE! NO BRANDED 3RD PARTY EXPERIENCE!" Google respects the rights of its customers, which is to say, the OEMs and carriers, far too much to prevent them from tinkering.
Are you saying he absconded with the secret plans, Snidely Whiplash-style? I like my iPhones but Google had a mobile strategy just as long as Apple probably did; they did buy Android in 2005, and their prototypes gave no impression of apeing the iPhone until after the iPhone announcement. As far as I can tell Google was full steam ahead to sell GoogBerry's until at least late 2007, when the whole landscape was in the leading edge of iPhone disruption.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear whistlingtony
We, the Companies Making Tables, primarily care about selling 100,000 units at a time to Verizon and Best Buy. We do whatever they need in order to make those tablets disappear off their shelves, causing them to order more tablets. Also if Verizon says that a Blockbuster app and VZ navigator will help them sell tablets, we always take their word for it and make sure the gear does exactly as they say, because they're our customer (a much bigger customer than you I might add), and much better at turning 100,000 tablets into retail sales than we are.
We do know these folks called "Apple," and they make tablets and are really good at turning them into money on a retail basis, but they basically agree with us on several of the lockdown issues for support and market positioning reasons. They hate carriers and channel resellers, though, so they never do what they tell them to do with their tablets, elitists!
Thank you for your concerns, we'll refer them to our marketing department.
Signed, Companies Making Tables
Okay I pulled those numbers out of my ass. On the App Store we got 174 "mortgage interest" , and on the Android Market we have 234. OTOH, on the Android Market about 50 or so of these apps are just branded "$reatlor Mortgage Calculator" apps like this one and another 50 that are just RSS feed readers of some guy's blog on the financial crisis. All of the Apple store apps were legit, destinguishable calculators from a variety of vendors.
That's not completely reasonable -- Android is free to be used on any carrier network and by any handset manufacturer, so I'm told this spurs competition and improves consumer choice.*
If there are six people writing mortgage interest calculator apps instead of two, it's pretty clear which market has better competition and consumer choice. The fact that 3rd party developer revenues on the Android store are significantly less than on Apple's store, leading to less developer interest, less choice and competition, and more ads and undesirable misfeatures (like customer data gathering) despite having a more open market, is a perverse but real outcome and directly attributable to the business model.
(* Set aside for a moment the fact that any Android phone without "Nexus" in its name is more locked-down than an iPhone.)
The $429 16GB Galaxy Tab you're looking at is not the 10.1, but the small-screen kind. The price of a 16GB Galaxy Tab 10.1 with no 3/4G is $499, identical to the iPad 2.
To be fair, this data dump is fulfilling a FOIA that was filed two YEARS ago, when she had just been nominated vice president (by a few thousand people that probably shouldn't have just taken everything on authority and should have known better, I might add.)
The OP was making the point that phones in 2007 were better compared to iPhones; this was only superficially true, since smartphones pre-iPhone were hella unreliable.
I'm happy to concede that Android, when free of vendor and carrier crap is competitive with iOS. But the actual phones you can buy I'm not so sure; Google can code but the phone manufacturers and carriers, whom Google abets, are still as crappy as they've always been. Just look at your case: I've only had to buy two iPhones in four years, and you've had to buy three in three? The cheaper hardware and lazy OS update non-policy takes a toll. It seriously seems like the only reliable way to upgrade the OS of any randomly-selected Android phone is buy a new one.
I remember this slightly differently -- the iPhone I got that first day in 2007 never crashed (like my Treo and Nokia), never crashed during phone calls (Treo), never pocket dialed (Treo and Moto), and was never stranded with a years-old OS while the carrier dragged their heels (Treo). It also lasted all day on a charge, and the battery door never fell off when I dropped it, and dust never clogged the SD slot on account of the lost the little blank that was supposed to cover it (Treo).
Also, when the touchscreen became unresponsive two weeks after I bought it, I was able to bring it to a store and get it replaced in 10 minutes, and backup restore worked perfectly. I never had to ship my phone somewhere and be phoneless for a week, only to get the phone back and be told that the techs in Arizona couldn't reproduce my problem (Nokia). It also had a web browser, maps app, and video player that was actually usable and didn't destroy the battery. It also had the nice Visual Voicemail thing.
It did not run apps. But the other stuff far outweighed the apps issue. Frankly if iPhones didn't have native apps TODAY I'd probably still be using the things. No Android manufacturer can match Apple's hardware service, or even tries to. All the apps in the world aren't worth having to wait a week to get a phone fixed through the mail.
....And then you can get a letter from Patent Ventures for 0.05% of your revenue to use UI buttons to actuate numerical addition in your app. And then a letter from Intellectual Troll Partners for $30 flat in order to use shake gestures to delete app objects. And then Fraunhofer can ask for 1% because you're encoding an MP3 with Apple's implementation of their codec (sure Apple licensed it, but now that they see you'll roll over, maybe they think that license doesn't apply to phones all of the sudden, and maybe they'd lose but you'd have to go to court over that)...
The precedent would basically make any kind of 3rd party development on any application platform impossible.
I was aware that Lodsys was also suing Android developers, but what does Microsoft have to do about this right now?
This actually might be an interesting differentiation strategy -- if Apple can show that it will go to bat for its developers, then Google is obliged to do at least as much, or else Android begins to look unsafe. It's sortof sick (or interesting) to think that a legal team and patent indemnification has now become a part of a computing platform as important as the APIs, the brand and the marketing.
... he typed, just as his Gnash plugin crashed and Gnome put up a warning. So he launched The Gimp and balanced his checkbook with Gnucash, because he'd just gotten a check back from some GnuStep implementation work he did -- he'd be sure to thank the client with a gnupg-encrypted email. He didn't have the client's address handly so he launched GNOME-find to find the invoice.
Your point assumes that the end user doesn't just decide to use the Amazon Cloud Drive for free, instead.
Considering the GP said he was paying in Euros, using Cloud Drive or Google probably isn't an option, as they aren't available there.
It depends... I don't think copyright in the US is about protecting the particular income of particular people as much as it is about making sure that creative works are still available. Copyright lets you do this because you can attach conditions to a copy that benefit you, either making people pay money, or, as we've seen more recently, making people always publish their source code, or making people always give complete attributions. Would you say it was a "victimless crime" if NCR were to ship a Linux POS system without releasing the source?
I've seen crowdsourced / Creative Commons projects, and they're awful. They make The Expendables look like Die Hard. I just have no confidence in such models sustaining the creative arts, unless you were to arbitrarily draw a line around some media, the cheap medias, and assert that they're the only ones worthy of protection, and any media that could only sustain itself by selling DVDs was illegitimate and unworthy of creation in the New Copyleft Order.
(I mean that's what I see lurking in the background of many of these comments in thread: people hate Hollywood, want to see it dead, and think that the entire craft of filmmaking, in excess of a camcorder, is frivolous and doesn't meet their standard of what's art. Changing copyright is just a smokescreen for censoring the Hollywood aesthetic.)
Nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. The only artists that are hurt by file sharing are talentless hacks. If your films are good, P2P will help sales, not hurt.
Disease is caused by an imbalance in the humors, the sun rotates about the Earth, and P2P helps sales. Dogma you say? Uncritically accepted by those with the most to gain, you say? Nonsense, it's just common sense.
I *am* in favor of reasonable copyrights. Say 5-10 years. Even 20 would be acceptable. The current abuse is not defensible by any sane and fair person.
I agree with you. What I'm opposed to is people wanting to reform copyright, but instead of fessing up to their position, arguing about how "mean" the MPAA is and how enforcement doesn't work. If you want to decriminalize X, change the law, don't spend all your time whingeing about jackbooted thugs busting down doors, or how the lawbreakers aren't really doing any harm.
I can't trust them to have any morals at all, other than greed.
Well maybe laws should only protect the rights of people that live up to particular moral standard. I'm sure that would work peachy. Greed's bad, but letting people break laws because we find the victim distasteful is barbaric.
I guess I'll respond to the AC.
Cogitate and assimilate: If you copy something that is protected by copyright, and you did not have license to do so, or you make a copy in violation of your license (be that license a license for home exhibition, the Creative Commons license, or the GPL), you are liable to civil and criminal penalties. It does not matter what you may have done if you did not have the means to make the copy. It does not matter how zealously you are pursued. It does not matter if you violated the rights of a rich party as opposed to a poor party. If your act caused a party a loss, they are entitled to sue for compensatory damages. It does not matter if your act did or did not create any deficiency in the revenue or the profit of the violated party, as far as punitive damages or criminal penalties are concerned.
If you think the law is immoral, challenge the law. Don't complain about how "counterproductive" enforcement it, as if you'd agree with the law if it were better enforced. Don't, as Al Capone said, "say I'm a murder but give me a ticket for spitting on the sidewalk."
I don't pirate.
It doesn't really matter for the purpose of your argument, since you defend it. Or rather, you're happy to concede it's an offense, as long as it goes unpunished or the punishment is framed as counterproductive, which is a contradiction if one accepts that nulla crimen sine poena, which I think is reasonable.
If I can sit on the couch and point the remote at the TV and get Dance of the Dead for a 99 cent rental, fuck torrents. Want me to watch it? Get Cox to carry it on pay-per-view.
They did, it's great! People claim as you do that they'd do this, but then they don't. And all the while the salve their conscience with a bunch of rather self-serving rationalization about how they weren't going to pay for the movie anyways, and isn't the MPAA so heavyhanded?, pricks like that don't deserve my money. None of this of course is responsive to the issue that they watched a movie without paying for it, and made a copy of a copyright work without having the right to do this. Nobody wants to talk about the fundamental violation, it's all just a mishmash of unrelated bull meant to blame the victim for complaining too much.
Also, The Expendables did have a $34 mil opening and did great foreign numbers, it made money. It did not do shitty at the box office. The quality issue idunno, but I'd rather ticket-buying consumers decided what was a good movie rather than the tomatometer or the ivory tower of aintitcool.
Well, if they didn't pay you for the work you did, then it's your fault for not specifying that you wanted to be paid up front like everybody else.
I got paid, it's not about that; it's about wether or not they're going to be able to make the next one, or will even want to.
I don't know where you get your statistics, but the number of mass-market studio features has dropped significantly, and any growth I've seen has come from downscale, non-union, crappy genre films and direct-to-home-video titles. (Oh wait, that's what Dance of the Dead was. Shit.) ;)
On a related note, the producers of The Expendables have about two dozen movies in development at this moment, including a sequel, so I don't think file sharing has hurt them enough to keep them from providing a lot of jobs, too.
"In development" means they put out a press release. It doesn't mean they've spent a dime.
Went to a party recently, my director on Dance of the Dead remarked that both his features now were available on FilesTube!
When you actually know and work with the people who are supposed to get paid for this stuff, and your paycheck comes from that money too, it sorta rubs you a different way.
When a piece of gear downgrades your Bluray to 480p it's suddenly a vast government conspiracy that merits paragraphs of whingeing about freedom and the right to access "my movies." But when a small business loses hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue because people are too friggin' cheap to go watch something on Instant Queue, it's a moment for lolz. Noted.
The MPAA doesn't make money on films. In this case the money would have gone to Lionsgate, the distributor, then Nu Image and Millenium Films, both smaller companies known for downscale genre fare and many direct-to-DVD films. And then to Avi Lerner and the producers, then the upfront split that Stallone and Willis probably got (Stallone also directed), and then royalties to all the actors, the writers (including Stallone) and Brian Tyler, the composer.
The reason you're seeing these lawsuits from shops like Voltage Pictures, of The Hurt Locker fame, and Nu Image is because they're tiny and don't make a lot of money, and just can't afford (in their eyes) losing so much money. The big studios treat it like spoilage at a grocery store, but these are really small companies that make payroll with box office money.
other Android phones from different manufacturers and on different networks have different suites of such software (including, theoretically, no such software).
Google sells these, when they sell them. They're the Nexus phones.
Google isn't to blame for this, because vanilla Android doesn't come with this software.
They're a beneficial partner to the arrangement -- remember they make Android for the OEMs and the carriers, to their specifications and with their prior input and collaboration. It's not like Apple where they put their foot down and say "NO SHOVELWARE! NO BRANDED 3RD PARTY EXPERIENCE!" Google respects the rights of its customers, which is to say, the OEMs and carriers, far too much to prevent them from tinkering.
Some people do write software for money, ya know :) That "Angry Birds" doesn't show up on SourceForge often enough.
You can remove whatever you like from Android. Removing whatever you like from actual marketed phones, on the other hand...
Are you saying he absconded with the secret plans, Snidely Whiplash-style? I like my iPhones but Google had a mobile strategy just as long as Apple probably did; they did buy Android in 2005, and their prototypes gave no impression of apeing the iPhone until after the iPhone announcement. As far as I can tell Google was full steam ahead to sell GoogBerry's until at least late 2007, when the whole landscape was in the leading edge of iPhone disruption.
If you used a four-digit numerical password, somebody sells a program that can brute-force it. That's not really "cracking" it.