Disagree.
Government agencies are not what I consider responsive to voting populace. I'd prefer limited government interaction regarding how broadband is commercially available to me.
With one exception, antitrust regulation, which is regulated by the FTC rather than the FCC. I feel the FTC should compel cable companies to open use of their infrastructure to competing companies at reasonable operating rates if they can be defined as monopolies.
This would allow you to actually vote the proper way - with your wallet. If multiple companies could compete to offer you broadband, and Comcast decided to limit your traffic, you can vote by switching to one who doesn't.
If that company allowed P2P or other services that clog the tubes, then Comcast will bill them for their higher usage and you'd in turn be charged more for your outrageous consumption.
In the end, I think what's fundamental is that we need to be prepared to pay for what we use as these tubes can only carry finite amounts of data, and with scarcity, you find high pricing.
The market will find the best solution, as long as the infrastructure is "properly" regulated (antitrust vs. net neutrality).
That being said, I wished they focused more on what counts: phone service. I CAN PLAY DRM'D MP3'S BUT YOU WON'T GIVE ME MY 3G NETWORK!?
Wah, wah. They do focus on what counts - shareholder value. Their management apparently believes they can make a higher margin / total profit on charging for media services than providing a great 3G network
Fact is, you need to be willing to pay a lot more for 3G than you are. If you (as in all customers) were willing to pay more and increase the margin they project for that service, you could shift their focus to 3Q services instead of music services, because it's all about the bottom line.
Oh, I agree with your economics lesson on how prices are set in monopolies, but I don't think iTMS or the music labels represent a monopoly or even an oligopoly.
Online music stores are not oligopolies because all the other stores do not follow iTMS' lead. They try different pricing, and within those schemes, they vary greatly.
Music labels are also not an oligopoly, because of your point that there is a long tail of demand in multimedia. There are so many small labels that can promote music on iTMS and other online stores, that the large labels do not set total market conditions. Even Sony/BMG raises their new artists songs to $1.50 / song, that small label doesn't necessarily have to.
Nothing that your replies have said have convinced me that $1 or less is the best / only price for the industry. It may be, and I think that plenty of songs will drive higher volume and revenue with lower prices. Still, some songs can increase revenue for the labels with higher prices, and that is for the labels to decide.
Plus, if the higher prices really result in lower revenue, what do you think will happen? Oh yes, they will lower the price back to $1 / song. As the original post said, the COGS is $0 for the label. If that is the case, every song sold gives 100% contribution margin, which means that they will try to maximize revenue because it directly maximizes profit. It's a great market for them, so why not test it and see what happens. I would.
Every label is going to want their songs at the highest price point.
Every company is going to want their product at the highest price point.
If a company isn't charging the best price to maximize revenue based on demand, they are fools. If the labels can raise what they charge Apple per song, thereby forcing Apple to raise prices to the consumer to maintain Apple's margin, I still think they can. Trust me, some songs, say the Top 10, can be priced at $1.50 a song and drive more revenue for Apple and the labels than if they are priced at $1.
This is a over-simplification of their business though. Sure, the COGS for one song on iTunes is $0.00 to the music label. They still have all the overhead in finding / developing / producing / marketing artists. Now, you may believe they do this inefficiently, but that doesn't mean they don't have those costs.
My question is, why is it so hard / bad to vary prices on iTunes? It's basically considered a success, and if price tiers prove to lower overall revenue (volumn sold vs. price), they can revert to $1 / song. This is just a market approach to pricing songs. If Green Day's label can make more revenue on iTunes by selling their hits for $1.50, why not? It's their call. If they can also increase revenue by lowering new artist prices to increase overall demand (units sold), so be it.
Why do people defend the $1 price so much? It was just an initial, simple price to test the market. The market has been proven and is very strong. Pricing strategies are usually executed at this point, Apple is just being controlling. IMHO, I think labels will succeed in implementing a new online pricing strategy, as well as forcing hardware and software vendors to introduce compatibility between players.
Probably a dumb idea, but we do have SonyEricsson. Maybe we are looking at a possible AppleMoto design venture.
Gizmodo mentioned taping a Nano to your RAZR and having phone still smaller than the ROKR. That gave me this idea. Imagine a nice color screen and click wheel on the outside of the flip and then 4GB of memory on the inside of the keypad. Thicker, but I would buy in a heartbeat.
It's only illegal to display an ad which uses the trademarked term inside the ad.
IANAL, but if this is actually true, how does Pepsi run all those ads with Coca-Cola products in the ad?
Seems like the same premise to me. Pepsi uses Coke's trademark to claim that Pepsi is better in their ad... "Car Insurance A" uses GEICO's trademark to claim that "Car Insurance A" is better in their ad.
Vengence shouldn't be a part of a court system. Your personal feelings (and mine if it happened to my child) shouldn't really be taken into account. That personal rage is not a solid foundation for justice.
17 years is and has always been the patent length in the US since the inception of the Constitution. I understand that copyright law has been ruined by lobbyists, extending their life beyond a reasonable timeframe.
I don't agree that I support patents because I want "the glory AND the profit". My belief in the system is that there is a start-up cost in real innovation. Patents allow the innovator to recover their initial investment of time and materials and then be rewarded for their contribution to society. Then, after 17 years, the openly-published patent is released to the public domain for further use in innovation.
Edison might seem antiquated to you. That's ok. Take a modern example of patent controversy. Pharmaceuticals. Some people believe drug companies charge too much for drugs. I don't. I feel / believe that there are large start-up costs to developing new drugs. There are major risks involved. FDA approval can take years and eat away at the 17-year patent lifetime. In some instances a company may only have 10 years of exclusivity to recover their initial investment. And on top of that, they need an eventual profit to have the cash to invest in developing the next new drug. So drugs cost money when they are new. It is only to support the drugs development and the development of future drugs. High risk to the company, high cost to the company, high price to the consumer, and optimistically high benefit to the consumer also.
Without patent law, where would the motivation come from? You compare apples to oranges when you slam patent law because of stupid decisions by the USPTO on software patents when it obviously is a working system for other industries. The problem lies in the competency of the reviewers, not in patent theory itself.
Why should any inovator be able to patent generic simple algorithm that can be devised in 2 hours?
I agree. My post doesn't reveal that I would support this either. Clearly the USPTO doesn't have the resources or skills to appropriately review patents. That is a money issue, I would suppose. Or maybe the fact that the US graduated more sports medicine majors last year than certain engineering fields.
Why, in reality, only powerful companies are able to sue, while small inovators don't have the money needed for lawyers?
Again, another good question. But it only address flaws in the system that need reform, not the underlying theory and benefits of copyrights and patents and their ability to encourage innovation in a market-based economy.
Why lawyers and big (US) corporations are only ones that benefit from software patents, in fact from all sorts of patents?
Ok, well, on your last question, I have to bite. Big corporations are not the only benefactors of patents and copyrights. They give protection to small business and small artisans to reap a temporary reward for their innovation before it is released to the public domain. Take Thomas Edison as a grand example. His patents took him from a small-time innovator to one of the greatest inventors of the 19th / 20th century. His patents (think light bulb) BUILT big corporations (think General Electric) that were able to invest the profits into new products for future generations. After the patents expired, other companies (think Philips) were able to use the original work and patent further innovation in the field. It's a cycle that has proven to work. Reform is needed, but suggesting that innovation would soar without this type of protection confuses me.
Interesting. I won't attempt to debate, but I do have one question.
In your new POV, what will motivate innovation in a world where the content / product creator has to deal with immediate reproduction and competition of their own hard work?
In other words, how will the innovator benefit from innovating?
Re:Click here to download plugin
on
The Onion in 2056
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Seeing as how the **IA and its international counterparts have been successful in shutting down the tracker sites and this will help them locate these sites, don't you think the impact will be a move to only legal files being indexed for the search. This could actually lead to a vindication of p2p as a useful piece of software and a decline in the number of sites specializing in illegal copyrighted downloads.
It could be compared to bootlegs being move from inside the music/video/etc. store to the street merchants that have to pick up and move everytime the cop walks near them.
1. A combination of independent business organizations formed to regulate production, pricing, and marketing of goods by the members.
2. An official agreement between governments at war, especially one concerning the exchange of prisoners.
3. A group of parties, factions, or nations united in a common cause; a bloc.
I'd say 1 and 3 are pretty close when you talk about the RIAA / MPAA. It may not be the illegal cartel by the FTA definition, a la OPEC, but it can still be accurately classified as one by definition.
The industry you refer to is the entire global market, and yes, there are smaller producers out there, just like with oil (if we can continue to use that comparison). But to say that the MPAA doesn't try to regulate market conditions for movies is a little short-sighted.
It's interesting to think of it this way. It is almost giving the legal groups a direct way to find the tracker and attack the distributer. Maybe over time this will cause the illegal trackers to disappear and Bram will have a protocol used for legit, commercial and non-profit reasons.
I was just referring to the GP post's question about having to pay Mass taxes. That wouldn't be the case unless his office in Texas closed and he didn't relocate to Mass. Otherwise, Mass. has no claim to that income since he works for a legal entity in Texas.
I agree with the whole benefit argument, and this was obivously close to warrant a 4-3 ruling. It's just not apples to oranges when you compare telecommuting across state lines to telecommuting across town for a company HQ'ed in Mass.
Slashdot Mirror
Disagree. Government agencies are not what I consider responsive to voting populace. I'd prefer limited government interaction regarding how broadband is commercially available to me. With one exception, antitrust regulation, which is regulated by the FTC rather than the FCC. I feel the FTC should compel cable companies to open use of their infrastructure to competing companies at reasonable operating rates if they can be defined as monopolies. This would allow you to actually vote the proper way - with your wallet. If multiple companies could compete to offer you broadband, and Comcast decided to limit your traffic, you can vote by switching to one who doesn't. If that company allowed P2P or other services that clog the tubes, then Comcast will bill them for their higher usage and you'd in turn be charged more for your outrageous consumption. In the end, I think what's fundamental is that we need to be prepared to pay for what we use as these tubes can only carry finite amounts of data, and with scarcity, you find high pricing. The market will find the best solution, as long as the infrastructure is "properly" regulated (antitrust vs. net neutrality).
That being said, I wished they focused more on what counts: phone service. I CAN PLAY DRM'D MP3'S BUT YOU WON'T GIVE ME MY 3G NETWORK!?
Wah, wah. They do focus on what counts - shareholder value. Their management apparently believes they can make a higher margin / total profit on charging for media services than providing a great 3G network
Fact is, you need to be willing to pay a lot more for 3G than you are. If you (as in all customers) were willing to pay more and increase the margin they project for that service, you could shift their focus to 3Q services instead of music services, because it's all about the bottom line.
Well, according to Al Gore, it has a lot more to do with Global Warming than the tilt of the axis.
Yeah, my current session is hogging 84MB of memory with two tabs (Google and /.), and I use no extensions.
Oh, I agree with your economics lesson on how prices are set in monopolies, but I don't think iTMS or the music labels represent a monopoly or even an oligopoly.
Online music stores are not oligopolies because all the other stores do not follow iTMS' lead. They try different pricing, and within those schemes, they vary greatly.
Music labels are also not an oligopoly, because of your point that there is a long tail of demand in multimedia. There are so many small labels that can promote music on iTMS and other online stores, that the large labels do not set total market conditions. Even Sony/BMG raises their new artists songs to $1.50 / song, that small label doesn't necessarily have to.
Nothing that your replies have said have convinced me that $1 or less is the best / only price for the industry. It may be, and I think that plenty of songs will drive higher volume and revenue with lower prices. Still, some songs can increase revenue for the labels with higher prices, and that is for the labels to decide.
Plus, if the higher prices really result in lower revenue, what do you think will happen? Oh yes, they will lower the price back to $1 / song. As the original post said, the COGS is $0 for the label. If that is the case, every song sold gives 100% contribution margin, which means that they will try to maximize revenue because it directly maximizes profit. It's a great market for them, so why not test it and see what happens. I would.
Every label is going to want their songs at the highest price point.
Every company is going to want their product at the highest price point.
If a company isn't charging the best price to maximize revenue based on demand, they are fools. If the labels can raise what they charge Apple per song, thereby forcing Apple to raise prices to the consumer to maintain Apple's margin, I still think they can. Trust me, some songs, say the Top 10, can be priced at $1.50 a song and drive more revenue for Apple and the labels than if they are priced at $1.This is a over-simplification of their business though. Sure, the COGS for one song on iTunes is $0.00 to the music label. They still have all the overhead in finding / developing / producing / marketing artists. Now, you may believe they do this inefficiently, but that doesn't mean they don't have those costs.
My question is, why is it so hard / bad to vary prices on iTunes? It's basically considered a success, and if price tiers prove to lower overall revenue (volumn sold vs. price), they can revert to $1 / song. This is just a market approach to pricing songs. If Green Day's label can make more revenue on iTunes by selling their hits for $1.50, why not? It's their call. If they can also increase revenue by lowering new artist prices to increase overall demand (units sold), so be it.
Why do people defend the $1 price so much? It was just an initial, simple price to test the market. The market has been proven and is very strong. Pricing strategies are usually executed at this point, Apple is just being controlling. IMHO, I think labels will succeed in implementing a new online pricing strategy, as well as forcing hardware and software vendors to introduce compatibility between players.
Probably a dumb idea, but we do have SonyEricsson. Maybe we are looking at a possible AppleMoto design venture.
Gizmodo mentioned taping a Nano to your RAZR and having phone still smaller than the ROKR. That gave me this idea. Imagine a nice color screen and click wheel on the outside of the flip and then 4GB of memory on the inside of the keypad. Thicker, but I would buy in a heartbeat.
Moto needs to work on their OS though.
According to Engadget, it will.
See, I tend to agree with this.
Say the text of the ad is...
"We may save you up to 15% over GEICO."
What's wrong? No fraud. No nothing. Just saying that, Hey!, are you looking at GEICO? Guess what, Prudential may save you 15% over them.
Not false. Not fraud. Why can' they do this? I know the court had reasons, but I think it's fair as long as it can be proven. My 2 cents.
It's only illegal to display an ad which uses the trademarked term inside the ad.
IANAL, but if this is actually true, how does Pepsi run all those ads with Coca-Cola products in the ad?
Seems like the same premise to me. Pepsi uses Coke's trademark to claim that Pepsi is better in their ad ... "Car Insurance A" uses GEICO's trademark to claim that "Car Insurance A" is better in their ad.
Jigga, who?
Vengence shouldn't be a part of a court system. Your personal feelings (and mine if it happened to my child) shouldn't really be taken into account. That personal rage is not a solid foundation for justice.
17 years is and has always been the patent length in the US since the inception of the Constitution. I understand that copyright law has been ruined by lobbyists, extending their life beyond a reasonable timeframe.
I don't agree that I support patents because I want "the glory AND the profit". My belief in the system is that there is a start-up cost in real innovation. Patents allow the innovator to recover their initial investment of time and materials and then be rewarded for their contribution to society. Then, after 17 years, the openly-published patent is released to the public domain for further use in innovation.
Edison might seem antiquated to you. That's ok. Take a modern example of patent controversy. Pharmaceuticals. Some people believe drug companies charge too much for drugs. I don't. I feel / believe that there are large start-up costs to developing new drugs. There are major risks involved. FDA approval can take years and eat away at the 17-year patent lifetime. In some instances a company may only have 10 years of exclusivity to recover their initial investment. And on top of that, they need an eventual profit to have the cash to invest in developing the next new drug. So drugs cost money when they are new. It is only to support the drugs development and the development of future drugs. High risk to the company, high cost to the company, high price to the consumer, and optimistically high benefit to the consumer also.
Without patent law, where would the motivation come from? You compare apples to oranges when you slam patent law because of stupid decisions by the USPTO on software patents when it obviously is a working system for other industries. The problem lies in the competency of the reviewers, not in patent theory itself.
Why should any inovator be able to patent generic simple algorithm that can be devised in 2 hours?
I agree. My post doesn't reveal that I would support this either. Clearly the USPTO doesn't have the resources or skills to appropriately review patents. That is a money issue, I would suppose. Or maybe the fact that the US graduated more sports medicine majors last year than certain engineering fields.
Why, in reality, only powerful companies are able to sue, while small inovators don't have the money needed for lawyers?
Again, another good question. But it only address flaws in the system that need reform, not the underlying theory and benefits of copyrights and patents and their ability to encourage innovation in a market-based economy.
Why lawyers and big (US) corporations are only ones that benefit from software patents, in fact from all sorts of patents?
Ok, well, on your last question, I have to bite. Big corporations are not the only benefactors of patents and copyrights. They give protection to small business and small artisans to reap a temporary reward for their innovation before it is released to the public domain. Take Thomas Edison as a grand example. His patents took him from a small-time innovator to one of the greatest inventors of the 19th / 20th century. His patents (think light bulb) BUILT big corporations (think General Electric) that were able to invest the profits into new products for future generations. After the patents expired, other companies (think Philips) were able to use the original work and patent further innovation in the field. It's a cycle that has proven to work. Reform is needed, but suggesting that innovation would soar without this type of protection confuses me.
Interesting. I won't attempt to debate, but I do have one question.
In your new POV, what will motivate innovation in
a world where the content / product creator has to deal with immediate reproduction and competition of their own hard work?
In other words, how will the innovator benefit from innovating?
That'll be about $2.00 for the Swear Jar.
Seeing as how the **IA and its international counterparts have been successful in shutting down the tracker sites and this will help them locate these sites, don't you think the impact will be a move to only legal files being indexed for the search. This could actually lead to a vindication of p2p as a useful piece of software and a decline in the number of sites specializing in illegal copyrighted downloads.
It could be compared to bootlegs being move from inside the music/video/etc. store to the street merchants that have to pick up and move everytime the cop walks near them.
Dana Jones: [after Craig punches Deebo out] He thinks he's the Mac...
Mr. Jones: Hehe. Macaroni.
My company's proxies block Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo. I hate it. So basically, since I refuse to use my work email for personal stuff, I get screwed.
Baltimore!!!
cartel
Pronunciation Key (kär-tl)
n.
1. A combination of independent business organizations formed to regulate production, pricing, and marketing of goods by the members.
2. An official agreement between governments at war, especially one concerning the exchange of prisoners.
3. A group of parties, factions, or nations united in a common cause; a bloc.
I'd say 1 and 3 are pretty close when you talk about the RIAA / MPAA. It may not be the illegal cartel by the FTA definition, a la OPEC, but it can still be accurately classified as one by definition.
The industry you refer to is the entire global market, and yes, there are smaller producers out there, just like with oil (if we can continue to use that comparison). But to say that the MPAA doesn't try to regulate market conditions for movies is a little short-sighted.
Thank you.
It's interesting to think of it this way. It is almost giving the legal groups a direct way to find the tracker and attack the distributer. Maybe over time this will cause the illegal trackers to disappear and Bram will have a protocol used for legit, commercial and non-profit reasons.
I was just referring to the GP post's question about having to pay Mass taxes. That wouldn't be the case unless his office in Texas closed and he didn't relocate to Mass. Otherwise, Mass. has no claim to that income since he works for a legal entity in Texas.
I agree with the whole benefit argument, and this was obivously close to warrant a 4-3 ruling. It's just not apples to oranges when you compare telecommuting across state lines to telecommuting across town for a company HQ'ed in Mass.