My guess that all this pandemic talk is just more fear mongering to take the public's mind off of politics and the economy is more likely.
Are you REALLY that clueless, or are you just trolling because you think you're scoring some anti-the-current-administration points, somehow?
The last real doozy of a flu pandemic killed 50-100 MILLION people - most of whom were young, and otherwise healthy. This isn't like a once every 50 millions years asteroid collision we're talking about. Plenty of people alive right now were around when the last one happened, and lost family members. It was real. And that one happened before ubiquitous air travel between continents. We now have vastly more dense population centers, and arguably a much more fragile "just-in-time" style economy. Pretending this isn't a risk is foolish. Pretending that it's only hype from your political opponents is childish.
It costs the taxpayers *nothing* to have free wireless internet access... at no charge (128kbps symmetric) or pay extra for faster speeds
To stick with the municiple water supply analogy, that's like saying you can get free water, as long as you don't mind taking a shower, watering your lawn, doing your laundry, and everything else based on what you can get through a drinking straw. Real-life, participate-in-the-economy, good-enough-to-telecommute service (what most people would call "real" access) IS NOT FREE. Further, the stuff you DO get for "free" is NOT free! It's being subsidized by the people who are paying for higher, actually useful speeds. There never has been, is no, and won't ever be free lunch. Or bandwidth. Someone has to physically tend to the infrastructure, pay for the electrcity it burns, administer the peering connections to the outside world, and so on. If you're content with the lower-grade 128k throughput, then you're also content to let someone ELSE pay for your very-much-NOT-free internet access. Calling lunch "free" when someone else buys it for you is pretty disengenuous. Doesn't mean it's a bad decision to use it, but let's at least be honest, here.
With every day, I become more disgusted with the corporate greed stranglehold.
So, what do you propose instead? That YOU get to mandate what services are provided, and that we are all charged taxes (pushed through a notoriously inefficient beaurocracy) to support those services - which, in turn, are built and provided by private sector contractors and infrastructure companies ANYWAY... but which now everyone is forced to pay for, whether they want it or not? Your urge to make us all participate in funding what you want is the actually "greedy" perspective, here. You want it, and you want ME to pay for it.
do not make grand judgements of humanity based on my highly limited and narrow view. You do, because you are a fucking asshole.
Just out of curiosity, were you out of school the day they covered irony?
People may not realize that when they download something, where it was downloaded is being shared back out
"People" don't?
Does that make me a criminal? By yours and the MPAA standards, yes
Wow, you don't actually understand the difference between civil and criminal issues, do you? For someone who is stamping his feet about how much more he knows than someone else, maybe you should brush up a bit.
I help my friends with their computers. Every single one of them has filesharing software on their computer.
I think that says more about your social circles than it does about anything else.
They don't have any idea what is legal or not, somebody showed them this cool program you load up, type in a song name and there it is.
What, they've been living in a cave for the last 10 years? They think that professional musicians and filmakers suddenly all found a way to practice their art and produce studio material while making a living mowing lawns? You're really insulting your "friends," here, by assuming (well, saying - not assuming - I don't think you actually believe it) they're too dumb to think that something that universally costs money from any and all obviously legitimate sources is somehow now free to them personally because of a piece of magic software (do your friends know that you're calling them that stupid? really?).
You are just using the topic of whether or not people really are being pirates by DOWNLOADING, to go off on a tirade about copyright infringement.
Gee... maybe that's because making a copy in violation of the artist's copyright actually is infringement of that copyright? "Using the topic?" That IS the topic.
I'm one of those guys that tends to be IT support for all of the friends and family. Uninstalling malware, straightening out messes - the usual stuff. Out of - conservatively - 50 or so friend/family machines I've touched in the last year (covering a wide range of user sophistication demographics), precisely ONE machine had a P2P client installed (not counting my own), and on the machine in question, sharing was disabled - the user uses it for nerdy stuff, not entertainment stuff. That doesn't translate to "most average people," not by a long shot. Of course, you already knew that, and you're just trolling in order to dull the pointy edge of Occam's Razor. To wit: the simple explanation is that some people hear there's a way to sneakily get themselves some free stuff, and assume that they probably won't get caught swimming in music/movie-pirating waters, and so they try it. It's not like they get some music downloading widget installed on their machines through a phishing attack - they get caught doing exactly what they are TRYING to do... rip stuff off, and in many cases improving the RATE at which they can rip stuff off by deliberately making more uploads available from their own machines. It's not exactly mysterious.
There are also plenty of people out there that are stupid enough to "make available" without even realizing it. A supermajority of Windows users likely fall into this category.
Really? You REALLY think that most Windows users know what P2P systems are, have installed the client, and have accidentally put music that they've purchased into the file structure on their machine that "shares" that music with a couple million of their best-friends-for-life-that-they've-never-met?
No, I'd say that a minority of Windows users - of computer users in general - make a habit of grabbing up infringing copies of other people's work, and then place it in a bucket that a has-to-be-installed-to-work piece of software that in turn exposes it to the ranks of other to-cheap-to-pay-for-entertainment users. It's not like this stuff happens by default through the C$ share over the user's WAN connection. It requires action, and usually a weird (though, lamentably, more and more common) sense of entitlement, and usually some very small voice in the back of the head that says, "you're gambling against being caught, here, but - OMG! - I got that new Avril CD without having to pay for it!"
People who install P2P clients to download Linux distros or game patches can't complain about this either: that ISO image of some album they're making available through the same interface didn't get there by accident.
There are also plenty of people out there that are stupid enough to "make available" without even realizing it.
Yes, it's a shame that so many people who DO know better have polluted the landscape on this issue, somehow contributing to a loss of clarity on the central notion: that artists who choose to sell their work are not, actually, very happy when you rip off a copy. You can't seriously tell me that you think that MOST low-tech users who end up with a P2P client full of downloaded, copyrighted music they didn't pay for (and offering back up a folder full of copyrighted music) really think that their ISP's monthly bill somehow grants them unlimied Gwen Stefani recordings or the entire 2006 works of the NSO or all of the movies that they used to have to pay NetFlix to see, but which now, miraculously, they get for free from their best friends in... Russia? Belgium? The script kiddie next door? People DO know better. The thing they don't yet seem to understand is how much of a trail they leave behind them as they look for ways to avoid spending a flippin' DOLLAR for a song to listen to while drinking their $3 latte, or while jogging in their $200 shoes.
Re:Just like HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley...
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PCI Compliance
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· Score: 4, Informative
if someone steals your credit card numbers or social security number, just get copies of your credit reports, make the appropriate phone calls, and the problem goes away
Never had it happen to anyone you know, huh? The problem doesn't just "go away" if your checking account is cleaned out right when you need to make a mortgage payment. It doesn't just "go away" if this happens to you during your job application cycle, especially to a secure or trusted position. It can take months or years to clean up after something like this, and you have to watch it like a hawk pretty much for the rest of your life.
But that's not what you actually MEAN, is it? What you mean to say is "what people, based on their own subjective notions, peer pressure, and world view believe to be their understanding of what they think they've see"... which, just like a witness to a crime, can mean a whole lot of NOTHING when it comes to sizing up reality and causality. Most people make horrible winesses, and worse scientists.
a renowned scientist who in his 50's had a major religious experience
Also known as a psychotic break. Or perhaps a small stroke? There are lots of things that can happen later in life to induce or make one more vulnerable to delusions. It's like that thing that happens to single 50-year-olds who suddenly think that owning a red muscle car will make 20-something women thing he's hot. The aging brain is a funny piece of meat, that's for sure.
...Even just a teaspoon. Maybe NASA can hook it up. Can't weigh all that much, can it?
See, the problem is you're asking for it volumetrically. You need to ask for it terms of mass, as usually expressed in LOC (Libraries of Congress). This is NOT to be confused with the the ECLOC (Entire Contents of the Library of Congress), which is a data throughput metric. No, we're talking about the mass of the actual masonry, furnishings, and plumbing. The mass of the staff is only taken into account under special circumstances, since they are getting fatter as their jobs become more and more IT-related. The LOC is a tricky unit - sort of like ounces. Troy ounces? Fluid ounces? Damn, astrology is HARD!
Isn't funny, that a country of South Korea does just fine with super fast broadband connections many times faster than ours in both directions?
How about trying South Korea's infrastructure in a country that has nearly 100 times the landmass, with a population density that completely destroys the cost effectiveness of close-in networking topographies? Right: it doesn't work. And of course, ask people in the most rural areas of South Korea if they're seeing anything like what someone in a beehive-like apartment building in Seoul is seeing. They're not.
foolish trust in corporations to deliver essential public services
Are you saying that fake UFO videos, footage of idiotic junior high school students lip-synching, dogs doing tricks, and pirated re-runs of The Simpsons are an "essential public service?" The bandwidth that's being burned up, here, is being burned up primarily for entertainment. You seem inclined to nationalize/socialize that. You're willing to place control over entertainment infrastructure in the hands of the government so that you can imagine that you'll get it somehow cheaper. I can't imagine what track record, government-wise, you're thinking of that suggests it would cost them LESS to build out and administer fiber to your door than it would for competing businesses to do so... but you're probably in the camp that just hopes that someone who pays more taxes than you do will pick up the tab, because, by making more money than you do, they deserve to pay for your entertainment plumbing, since you're entitled to that Essential Public Service.
Or as more frequently seems to have been the case, civillians got an even bigger surprise than usual.
Civilians certainly haven't been surprised to have armed insurgents forcing them to shelter them (or in some cases, happily sheltering them). If it's coming as a surprise that sometimes those insurgents will be attacked wherever they happen to have set up shop (and now, with a greater element of surprise), one advantage of that is... exactly what's now happening more frequently: the civilians are providing intel on the insurgents so that they no longer have to themselves be at risk by having those snakes store weapons in and operate out of their neighborhoods. It's a shame when an insurgent's choice of schoolyard-as-mortar-position tends to draw fire into neighborhoods (which they do very much on purpose, of course), but as we're seeing in lots of towns in Iraq, the locals are getting sick of it, and the insurgents are having a harder time finding quiet places from which to operate. Hence the need for more sophisticated support. Hence the Iranian involvement being more and more important to the insurgents. Hence the fit being pitched from Iran this weekend, as their tactics are being described for what they are.
What's the point of bringing it up in an election debate?
It tells you things about the person's character, and, to a certain degree, about their education and upbringing.
I am not religious. At all. I'm a big ol' flaming atheist. But: I would rather have a president who was raised in a religious setting, and has tucked that world view somewhere in their skull, and become a relatively solid, decent person... than someone who has the incredible, insulting hypocrisy to have developed a world view that is NOT religious, but who none the less attends "prayer breakfasts" and similar events for political benefit, puts on their Hat O' Piety when delivering in-church speeches to urban audiences, and - essentially - has completely and slickly decided that they're willing to lie and pander about it. Fake religiosity - which is rampant on the lefter side of politics, if it's deemed handy at that moment - is a pretty disgusting display. Crazy fundamentalist loons are bad, too... but I think someone like Bush comes by his convictions honestly, however many mixed premises it takes to support an "honest" religious world view. But someone like Hillary Clinton changes her religious posture as often as she does her accent, when in front of certain audiences. Hard to say which is worse. I wince at actually religious people, and I want to puke at the opportunistic fake ones who preach integrity at the same time.
Re:WHBQ Fox13 != Fox News
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Fox Hacks Fark
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· Score: 1
Fox News Channel is an entirely different thing than a local Fox affiliate, even one that is owned by News Corp. The summary above should make that more clear.
Ah, you're new here!
Re:Fark front page
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Fox Hacks Fark
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Wait, the fact that it was greenlit on Fark indicates that it is true?
No, the fact that is was greenlit by Fark and that it unblinkingly bashes Fox does that. If it had been an IP address at NPR, that would be different. Then there would have be peer review, done by Digg.
Let's try a different approach. See if you can answer some direct questions without resorting to the tactic of all people who know that have a weak argument (and since you're probably too dim to know that that is, I'll help: your constant avoidance of the actual topic at hand, and your reliance on what you think are insulting labels and language - and considerably invertabrate ad hominem spouting, no less - are the hallmarks of a someone who knows he's just plain wrong, or who wishes to hide his actual agenda). So, here are some questions. You can use your usual flamebaiting insults along with your answers if you like - I just filter them out anyway, it's typical of someone who is... what, twelve or thirteen? - but at least try to actually answer the questions. If you continue to avoid the topics as you have, then we can both agree that you'd like to avoid getting busted actually saying what you believe out loud where it might suffer some rational scrutiny.
1) Do you have the right to use something I create without involving me, or the people I hire to handle that sort of thing (like a publisher, distributor, or exhibitor) in making it available to you?
2) Do you think that your own assessment of the practicalities and effectiveness of one marketing method or another change your ethics and the values on which they're based? (trick question, sort of: this presumes you have an indentifiable and fully formed value system from which to actually derive workable ethics).
3) Do you think that the ability to acquire something, whether or not it's offered to you, grants you the right to do so?
in fact, free product on the internet means more money for movie producers because of the golden rule of exposure in media, means there are more eyeballs intested in your future product and in venues where the financial control is not artificial: movie houses, for instance. meat space can be controlled
If, as you seem to prefer, there is no recourse when someone rips off your work, how does this model work? Major pictures are stolen and spread online before they are even released in the theaters. At that point, the material is in the zone where you consider yourself to have a right to it. People buy 60" home theater screens specifically to avoid having to burn fuel to drive to a theater where a party of 4 people with some bad food means a $60 tab, plus parking. If the DVD for a major release is on your hard drive before that theatrical opening even occurs, and your take on it is that once it's "in cyberspace" there is and should be no control and no recourse against abuse, what's your take on that? This isn't a hypothetical, it happens all the time.
you can listen to music off the radio for free. by the time some people buy albums (or bought albums, circa 1980) they had already heard the songs 100 times already on the radio for free. so how does that all work then?
It works because it's not free. Radio stations pay artists for their work when they air it, and they collect money from advertisors. Listeners fund that activity by being the targets for that advertising, and the advertisers have very sophisticated ways of measuring how it's working, and thus setting the price. You constantly harp on how thoroughly you understand economics, and then gloss over the stuff that actually makes industries like that function, financially. Why is that?
frankly, a mind like yours is ill suited to understand the vagarities of the relationship between media and commerce
Perhaps because "vagarities" isn't an actual word.
the relationship between media and making money is all about exposure
Wrong. The relationship between media and making money is all about actual money changing hands. If people don't want to buy something, then there are no sales. Exposure is a component of creating demand, but preventing the artists from seeking recourse when they're ripped off means that you have no interest in actually seeing money change hands. You're focusing on creating demand, but you also want the product for free. Musicians that spend three years working on a collaborative recording effort with a coming-and-going collection of other studio musicians can only make money through the sales of the their recording. Your model seems to demand that no such projects are worth the trouble, because these guys should be happy when people rip off their work, and should only expect to be able to collect money when they perform at bars. Which is a crock. If such a recording doesn't have the merit to generate sales, then so be it - they didn't do a good enough job. But you can't see what's wrong with deciding you want the recording, but that you're going to just rip it off because the artist - whom you pretend to like - is asking for money you don't want to give them?
you think that when it comes to the media, its all about controlling the audience to extract money from them
Since you know I haven't said that, why would you lie? It's not ME that wants to control the audience, it's YOU that wants to control the people who create what the audience wants. You want to be in charge of how an artist's material is distributed, rather than leaving it up to the artists to succeed or fail based on their own choices. I like that artists can choose to sell their work, or give it away. That's up to THEM. You advocate removing that choice.
i'm sick of laying out the facts of media and commerce to you
You mean, you're sick of trying to spin your fantasy of how you'd prefer it to be, and being call
when i have a copy of "the terminator" on my hard drive i have not deprived the governator of some theoretical cinema house visit or dvd purchase that would result in residuals for him. you understand that, right? a copy of "the terminator" on my hard drive is not the same as the $15 dvd
So, you wish to be entertained by the actors and film makers that spent time and money to produce (in your example), "The Terminator." You want that experience to be free for you. Though the people who produced it are offering it for sale, you're bypassing that offer, and finding a way to rip it off, instead. How is that NOT depriving them of a sale? You are using force to dictate the terms of a transaction. If you don't want to pay what an artist is asking for their work, just walk away. They'll either offer it differently, or not sell as much. What do you care? But no... you're saying that you don't like the price at which they're offering it, so you're just going to take it anyway. There: now you've seen the movie - perhaps at high def on a 60" plasma screen in a nice home theater - and you're done. You've had half a dozen friends over, you've all had a beer and enjoyed the film, and that experience is DONE. And the people who offered that entertainment up for sale get nothing, because - as an equally talented maker of low-budget horror movies, you know that your personal enjoyment of the movie will, indirectly, somehow generate some in-theater sales for Arnold? You either did want to see the movie enough to procure it, or you didn't. If you don't like what you'd have to pay to procure it, then too bad - you obviously didn't want to watch it enough to pay that price. THAT is economics at work. You don't WANT economics to play a role, here - you want to simply take what you want without any mutually agreed-upon interaction with the artist who created what you want. That's not economics, that's you being a parasite.
Personally, I don't know very many people who watch the same movies over and over once they're past being about 6 years old. I don't know anybody who will sit through the full-length presentation of a film they've ripped off, and then go spend another two hours to go see it in a sticky-floored theater full of talking idiots in a part of town with no parking where some popcorn and a drink cost $10. There's a reason that paying for a download, or having Netflix deliver the DVD is so attractive to most people. You seem to like it too, but you want your entertainment for free, because only chumps actually pay artists for their work, right?
the problem with you is you don't understand that free product might foster more cinema house patrons
Might? Prpobably not. It might, in some very narrow, very limited ways. But mostly, it seems to serve as a way for you to justify NOT paying for your entertainment. But what does it matter? In my world, the people who create the work can decide how they want to advertise and sell it, and if people don't like it, they simply won't consume it. In your world, the people who want some entertainment can just take it, and screw the people who made it. Could you keep a straight face and stand in front of Martin Scorsese and say, "That's a great new piece of work you've just done, there - but you're retarded if you think I'm going to pay you to see it, you old dinosaur. Hey, when's your next film going to be done - I can't wait until someone has ripped off a copy of your work so that I can download it into my personal hi-def collection. Keep on making great movies, Mr. Scorsese!"
the studios reap all the money they can from the cinema houses. which is obviously a lot of money and is still growing
And you're the one asking ME if I understand economics? You're obviously completely clueless about where that $10 goes when you buy a ticket. You've just illustrated how completely child-like your understanding of this entire topic actually is.
you're not really that scary in the end. just sad and pathetic. ig
but the punishment must ALWAYS be less severe than the crime itself
So, if you commit a crime that gains you a million dollars, the punishment should always be in some way less than that, leaving you ahead of the game? You advocate a justice system that always, by definition, makes the crime somewhat worthwhile to the criminal, even if they get caught doing it? What a load of rubbish.
just accept the new rules of a new game
Here's an idea: how about you actually articulate the New Rules you're so pleased with. What are they? Does anyone in your new system have any prospect of making a living at a full-time creative job? Or, since there's no mechanism for protection of copyright in your world, will all production work become limited to just what people can produce after they get off work from the day job that actually pays their bills?
Really: define your "new game," and how it will manage to produce things beside low-budget horror movies for small, indulgent audiences of friends and family. Please spell out your "new rules," and how they will govern the use of your creative work by other people. And if you don't think there should be any framework governing your rights to your own work, then just fess up and explain that you think a good feature of your brave new creative future will be the complete absence of any projects that can't be done on shoestring in someone's basement. Because if the people who do the creating and come up with the money it costs to pay the talent that does the work have no expectation of their going un-ripped-off, then they're simply not going to invest in that sort of work. No money invested in professionals doing work means no professional, full-time work being done. Is it possible you're rooting for that situation (where quality, professional people disappear from the scene) so that your own low-budget work won't appear so amateur by comparison? Brilliant!
"charging for each and every print of the photograph", which was precisely my point, in case you missed it.
This continues to be an important practice because most people that handle their own printing (or take it to Wal-Mart, etc) to a really crappy job of printing the image. And a professional photographer's entire reputation hinges on what people actually see, in the way of finished work. Cheesily-made albums slapped together from otherwise good JPGs are not the stuff that properly fuels the word-of-mouth buzz that gets a pro new business. Again, the low-rent people aren't as worried about it, and hence their willingness to let go of that all-important stage of quality control.
ohh, and if you haven't met any professional photographer who still uses film and chemicals, let alone a medium- or large-format camera, I'd say that it's you who doesn't know much of the industry
And the reason that folks are still using medium-format and large-format film is that the costs of capturing that same amount of data by other means (and handling the post production "darkroom" workflow and archiving) remains prohibitive for most photographers. Medium format digital backs are great, but most people still can't afford a $25k 'blad, whereas a 12mp Canon 1D's output is perfectly servicable, relative to 35mm film. In the area where the available technology is actually adequate to the job (resolution, dynamic range, noise, etc), the new stuff has largely supplanted the old for pretty much everyone in that line of work. Your characterization of photographers, as an entire group, as luddites, is demonstrably absurd.
So, what's your problem then? You've got no interest in media produced by groups of people that won't fit in a basement. Great! So, why are you comfortable ripping it off? If you don't want it, don't like the people who choose to invest money in larger scale productions, why do you care about the work they produce? If you want it badly enough to rip it off, don't you see your hypocrisy? Or is it that you DO want them to make such work, but you want them to be your pet entertainment slaves and do it for free? Which is it? If you don't care about it (it's "dead" in your vernacular), then why not just walk away from it? People who want to rip it off still want it. Maybe you're not one of them - maybe you really do only want to see small-scale work produced without any real cost or the coordinated effort of large teams of people over a long period of time. Maybe anyone with editing tools is, to you, a good editor. Whatever. But do you have the intellectual integrity to simply skip the consumption of the work produced by the people you're so busy spitting on?
time to die friend
You're a real class act, though. You must be very persuasive when trying to line up people to work with.
the photography industry is slowly moving in that direction too
There is no such thing as "the photography industry," unless you mean the people who manufacture the equipment. There are only people who, in the course of what they do for a living, happen to use photography as a component of that activity. Professional wedding photographers spend perhaps 5% of their actual working time with a camera in hand. The rest of it is marketing, post production, etc. In many cases, they have indeed raised rates for the shoot, and then handed off a well-processed collection of images on CD or DVD. But contrary to your implication, they generally NEVER waive their copyrights. They license those images, in a limited way for use by their customers. The bride, for example, isn't generally allowed to sell one of the photographer's images of her for use on a magazine cover. The real impact of what you're describing tends to be the low-budget photographers that don't have the time, inclination, or skill to really handle all the post production, and can't do a good job of educating their prospective customer about how $500 worth of coverage of their event isn't even going to come CLOSE to covering the post production work that would be involved. So, they dump to CD, hand off the disk, and call it a day. And the results are exactly as crappy as you'd expect them to be.
On the other hand, you've got entirely OTHER classes of photographers - such as people doing product shots, technical work, fashion, editorial images, etc. Totally different pricing models, and VERY much driven by how the image will be used, by whom, how often, and in what medium/a. If your take on what a it costs to produce a multi-million dollar film or expensive collaborative studio recording is being modified by extrapolating what one branch of lower-cost event photographers are doing in a competitive service market, then you're completely off base.
they're probably one of the most technophobe industries there are
I guess you don't know any professional photographers, huh. They buy tons of RAID storage, optical media, mobile devices, UPSes, high-end displays, fantastically expensive digital bodies, matching glass, RF transcievers, lithion-ion batteries, carbon-fiber supports, infra-red and RF-triggered multi-strobe remote systems, pen/tablet input devices, backup widgets, card creaders, flash ram of every sort, digital meters, display/printer color calibration hardware, constantly evolving post production software, web hosting services, online transaction systems... no, if you actually knew anyone in the business, you'd know that you've selected the worst possible example to try to make your case. And when one of those pro photogs busts someone using one of their images outside of how they've licensed it, they are very quick to trot out lawyers, exactly like their counterparts who produce films and audio material. And for good reason.
technology is getting to the point that a teenager in his basement is as powerful as an entire studio in 1930
Really? Where, in that basement, does the teenager have room to stash the writing teams, the costumers, the lighting crews, the people that feed the team that's taking care of the talent, the insurance team that makes sure that teenager won't be sued into oblivion if a lighting boom falls on an actor's head, and all the rest? A studio in the 1930s might not have had the CGI and editing tools of a modern workstation, but you seem to think that all audiences want to see (instead of well-executed films shot beautifully at locations we can't all personally visit, for example) "Sky Captain"-style work, only with less talented actors. I liked that film for its innovation, but I guarantee that the talent involved didn't do it for free, and why should they have? I want entertainment produced by people who are BETTER at it than my neighbor's high school student son. Just what's needed to produce one serious tracking boom shot, with well-recorded audio synched to complex camera work is enough to bankrupt the kid-in-the-basement production team. Where do you think that money comes from? From people that risk it, up front, as an investment in the future earnings of the produced work. No prospect for selling the work, no reason to risk the investment, and no production budget.
i think that high culture existed long before the studio system. listening to you, it's as if they invented music and shakespeare in a studio chief's office
Do you really think that Shakespeare could have spent all of his time working on his material if there was no prospect of making a living at it? It doesn't matter if the money was from patronage (which is exactly like a studio exec investing money in advance of a production) or from recouping expenses by selling to people the opportunity to see the material performed. Of course, he did both. It sure as hell wasn't "basement" production work - it was work done within the context of a professional system that included paid writers, paid performers, paid venue operators. Of course anyone that felt like writing and putting on a play could (provided the Queen didn't mind it), but the work done by playwrights, actors, seamstresses, musicians and the rest either was paid for, or didn't get done. If you're satisified by the quality of entertainment that doesn't involve professionally trained and equipped talent and facilities, then you're all set! There are plenty of amateur productions out there for you to enjoy. All you have to do is ignore the stuff that costs real money to produce. Obviously, you're not the one that's ripping off professionally-made material, right?
if the big studios have to sue regular people that to shore up their bottom line, then they have no right to shore up their bottom line.
That's the only way you can see this? How about, "if regular people would rather rip off their entertainment than pay what the producers of that entertainment ask for their work, then they have nothing to complain about if they get busted for doing so." NOBODY is forcing anyone to consume professionally produced entertainment. People who are too cheap to buy that entertainment can simply find another way to be entertained. Clearly, you think that no-charge basement productions are every bit as good as something that costs millions to produce, and don't think that such stuff should be charged for. So why aren't you simply telling the people who rip off the expensive stuff to instead just ignore it, and opt for the equally polished, just as desireable work made by the kid next door and displayed on YouTube in a beautiful high-res presentation?
technology has changed the landscape of corporate entertainment. permanently. inexorably. get fucking used to it. no amount of lawyers is going to preserve a way of life that technological progress has rendered extinct. sorry if that doesn't seem fair to you
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My guess that all this pandemic talk is just more fear mongering to take the public's mind off of politics and the economy is more likely.
Are you REALLY that clueless, or are you just trolling because you think you're scoring some anti-the-current-administration points, somehow?
The last real doozy of a flu pandemic killed 50-100 MILLION people - most of whom were young, and otherwise healthy. This isn't like a once every 50 millions years asteroid collision we're talking about. Plenty of people alive right now were around when the last one happened, and lost family members. It was real. And that one happened before ubiquitous air travel between continents. We now have vastly more dense population centers, and arguably a much more fragile "just-in-time" style economy. Pretending this isn't a risk is foolish. Pretending that it's only hype from your political opponents is childish.
It costs the taxpayers *nothing* to have free wireless internet access ... at no charge (128kbps symmetric) or pay extra for faster speeds
To stick with the municiple water supply analogy, that's like saying you can get free water, as long as you don't mind taking a shower, watering your lawn, doing your laundry, and everything else based on what you can get through a drinking straw. Real-life, participate-in-the-economy, good-enough-to-telecommute service (what most people would call "real" access) IS NOT FREE. Further, the stuff you DO get for "free" is NOT free! It's being subsidized by the people who are paying for higher, actually useful speeds. There never has been, is no, and won't ever be free lunch. Or bandwidth. Someone has to physically tend to the infrastructure, pay for the electrcity it burns, administer the peering connections to the outside world, and so on. If you're content with the lower-grade 128k throughput, then you're also content to let someone ELSE pay for your very-much-NOT-free internet access. Calling lunch "free" when someone else buys it for you is pretty disengenuous. Doesn't mean it's a bad decision to use it, but let's at least be honest, here.
With every day, I become more disgusted with the corporate greed stranglehold.
So, what do you propose instead? That YOU get to mandate what services are provided, and that we are all charged taxes (pushed through a notoriously inefficient beaurocracy) to support those services - which, in turn, are built and provided by private sector contractors and infrastructure companies ANYWAY... but which now everyone is forced to pay for, whether they want it or not? Your urge to make us all participate in funding what you want is the actually "greedy" perspective, here. You want it, and you want ME to pay for it.
do not make grand judgements of humanity based on my highly limited and narrow view. You do, because you are a fucking asshole.
Just out of curiosity, were you out of school the day they covered irony?
People may not realize that when they download something, where it was downloaded is being shared back out
"People" don't?
Does that make me a criminal? By yours and the MPAA standards, yes
Wow, you don't actually understand the difference between civil and criminal issues, do you? For someone who is stamping his feet about how much more he knows than someone else, maybe you should brush up a bit.
I help my friends with their computers. Every single one of them has filesharing software on their computer.
I think that says more about your social circles than it does about anything else.
They don't have any idea what is legal or not, somebody showed them this cool program you load up, type in a song name and there it is.
What, they've been living in a cave for the last 10 years? They think that professional musicians and filmakers suddenly all found a way to practice their art and produce studio material while making a living mowing lawns? You're really insulting your "friends," here, by assuming (well, saying - not assuming - I don't think you actually believe it) they're too dumb to think that something that universally costs money from any and all obviously legitimate sources is somehow now free to them personally because of a piece of magic software (do your friends know that you're calling them that stupid? really?).
You are just using the topic of whether or not people really are being pirates by DOWNLOADING, to go off on a tirade about copyright infringement.
Gee... maybe that's because making a copy in violation of the artist's copyright actually is infringement of that copyright? "Using the topic?" That IS the topic.
most average people install a P2P
How do you come by that? Statistics?
I'm one of those guys that tends to be IT support for all of the friends and family. Uninstalling malware, straightening out messes - the usual stuff. Out of - conservatively - 50 or so friend/family machines I've touched in the last year (covering a wide range of user sophistication demographics), precisely ONE machine had a P2P client installed (not counting my own), and on the machine in question, sharing was disabled - the user uses it for nerdy stuff, not entertainment stuff. That doesn't translate to "most average people," not by a long shot. Of course, you already knew that, and you're just trolling in order to dull the pointy edge of Occam's Razor. To wit: the simple explanation is that some people hear there's a way to sneakily get themselves some free stuff, and assume that they probably won't get caught swimming in music/movie-pirating waters, and so they try it. It's not like they get some music downloading widget installed on their machines through a phishing attack - they get caught doing exactly what they are TRYING to do... rip stuff off, and in many cases improving the RATE at which they can rip stuff off by deliberately making more uploads available from their own machines. It's not exactly mysterious.
There are also plenty of people out there that are stupid enough to "make available" without even realizing it. A supermajority of Windows users likely fall into this category.
Really? You REALLY think that most Windows users know what P2P systems are, have installed the client, and have accidentally put music that they've purchased into the file structure on their machine that "shares" that music with a couple million of their best-friends-for-life-that-they've-never-met?
No, I'd say that a minority of Windows users - of computer users in general - make a habit of grabbing up infringing copies of other people's work, and then place it in a bucket that a has-to-be-installed-to-work piece of software that in turn exposes it to the ranks of other to-cheap-to-pay-for-entertainment users. It's not like this stuff happens by default through the C$ share over the user's WAN connection. It requires action, and usually a weird (though, lamentably, more and more common) sense of entitlement, and usually some very small voice in the back of the head that says, "you're gambling against being caught, here, but - OMG! - I got that new Avril CD without having to pay for it!"
People who install P2P clients to download Linux distros or game patches can't complain about this either: that ISO image of some album they're making available through the same interface didn't get there by accident.
There are also plenty of people out there that are stupid enough to "make available" without even realizing it.
Yes, it's a shame that so many people who DO know better have polluted the landscape on this issue, somehow contributing to a loss of clarity on the central notion: that artists who choose to sell their work are not, actually, very happy when you rip off a copy. You can't seriously tell me that you think that MOST low-tech users who end up with a P2P client full of downloaded, copyrighted music they didn't pay for (and offering back up a folder full of copyrighted music) really think that their ISP's monthly bill somehow grants them unlimied Gwen Stefani recordings or the entire 2006 works of the NSO or all of the movies that they used to have to pay NetFlix to see, but which now, miraculously, they get for free from their best friends in... Russia? Belgium? The script kiddie next door? People DO know better. The thing they don't yet seem to understand is how much of a trail they leave behind them as they look for ways to avoid spending a flippin' DOLLAR for a song to listen to while drinking their $3 latte, or while jogging in their $200 shoes.
if someone steals your credit card numbers or social security number, just get copies of your credit reports, make the appropriate phone calls, and the problem goes away
Never had it happen to anyone you know, huh? The problem doesn't just "go away" if your checking account is cleaned out right when you need to make a mortgage payment. It doesn't just "go away" if this happens to you during your job application cycle, especially to a secure or trusted position. It can take months or years to clean up after something like this, and you have to watch it like a hawk pretty much for the rest of your life.
Hope your happy Billyboy Gates!
I'm not sure which is worse: unpatched Windows machines, or Linux boxes without the critical patch that allows fanboys to type the word "you're."
I recall mentioning what people have WITNESSED.
... which, just like a witness to a crime, can mean a whole lot of NOTHING when it comes to sizing up reality and causality. Most people make horrible winesses, and worse scientists.
But that's not what you actually MEAN, is it? What you mean to say is "what people, based on their own subjective notions, peer pressure, and world view believe to be their understanding of what they think they've see"
a renowned scientist who in his 50's had a major religious experience
Also known as a psychotic break. Or perhaps a small stroke? There are lots of things that can happen later in life to induce or make one more vulnerable to delusions. It's like that thing that happens to single 50-year-olds who suddenly think that owning a red muscle car will make 20-something women thing he's hot. The aging brain is a funny piece of meat, that's for sure.
I'm not running out of ammo any time soon
What about primers and propellant? Not being a smart-ass... those are just a lot harder to make yourself, that's all.
...Even just a teaspoon. Maybe NASA can hook it up. Can't weigh all that much, can it?
See, the problem is you're asking for it volumetrically. You need to ask for it terms of mass, as usually expressed in LOC (Libraries of Congress). This is NOT to be confused with the the ECLOC (Entire Contents of the Library of Congress), which is a data throughput metric. No, we're talking about the mass of the actual masonry, furnishings, and plumbing. The mass of the staff is only taken into account under special circumstances, since they are getting fatter as their jobs become more and more IT-related. The LOC is a tricky unit - sort of like ounces. Troy ounces? Fluid ounces? Damn, astrology is HARD!
Isn't funny, that a country of South Korea does just fine with super fast broadband connections many times faster than ours in both directions?
How about trying South Korea's infrastructure in a country that has nearly 100 times the landmass, with a population density that completely destroys the cost effectiveness of close-in networking topographies? Right: it doesn't work. And of course, ask people in the most rural areas of South Korea if they're seeing anything like what someone in a beehive-like apartment building in Seoul is seeing. They're not.
foolish trust in corporations to deliver essential public services
Are you saying that fake UFO videos, footage of idiotic junior high school students lip-synching, dogs doing tricks, and pirated re-runs of The Simpsons are an "essential public service?" The bandwidth that's being burned up, here, is being burned up primarily for entertainment. You seem inclined to nationalize/socialize that. You're willing to place control over entertainment infrastructure in the hands of the government so that you can imagine that you'll get it somehow cheaper. I can't imagine what track record, government-wise, you're thinking of that suggests it would cost them LESS to build out and administer fiber to your door than it would for competing businesses to do so... but you're probably in the camp that just hopes that someone who pays more taxes than you do will pick up the tab, because, by making more money than you do, they deserve to pay for your entertainment plumbing, since you're entitled to that Essential Public Service.
Or as more frequently seems to have been the case, civillians got an even bigger surprise than usual.
Civilians certainly haven't been surprised to have armed insurgents forcing them to shelter them (or in some cases, happily sheltering them). If it's coming as a surprise that sometimes those insurgents will be attacked wherever they happen to have set up shop (and now, with a greater element of surprise), one advantage of that is... exactly what's now happening more frequently: the civilians are providing intel on the insurgents so that they no longer have to themselves be at risk by having those snakes store weapons in and operate out of their neighborhoods. It's a shame when an insurgent's choice of schoolyard-as-mortar-position tends to draw fire into neighborhoods (which they do very much on purpose, of course), but as we're seeing in lots of towns in Iraq, the locals are getting sick of it, and the insurgents are having a harder time finding quiet places from which to operate. Hence the need for more sophisticated support. Hence the Iranian involvement being more and more important to the insurgents. Hence the fit being pitched from Iran this weekend, as their tactics are being described for what they are.
What's the point of bringing it up in an election debate?
It tells you things about the person's character, and, to a certain degree, about their education and upbringing.
I am not religious. At all. I'm a big ol' flaming atheist. But: I would rather have a president who was raised in a religious setting, and has tucked that world view somewhere in their skull, and become a relatively solid, decent person... than someone who has the incredible, insulting hypocrisy to have developed a world view that is NOT religious, but who none the less attends "prayer breakfasts" and similar events for political benefit, puts on their Hat O' Piety when delivering in-church speeches to urban audiences, and - essentially - has completely and slickly decided that they're willing to lie and pander about it. Fake religiosity - which is rampant on the lefter side of politics, if it's deemed handy at that moment - is a pretty disgusting display. Crazy fundamentalist loons are bad, too... but I think someone like Bush comes by his convictions honestly, however many mixed premises it takes to support an "honest" religious world view. But someone like Hillary Clinton changes her religious posture as often as she does her accent, when in front of certain audiences. Hard to say which is worse. I wince at actually religious people, and I want to puke at the opportunistic fake ones who preach integrity at the same time.
Fox News Channel is an entirely different thing than a local Fox affiliate, even one that is owned by News Corp. The summary above should make that more clear.
Ah, you're new here!
Wait, the fact that it was greenlit on Fark indicates that it is true?
No, the fact that is was greenlit by Fark and that it unblinkingly bashes Fox does that. If it had been an IP address at NPR, that would be different. Then there would have be peer review, done by Digg.
Let's try a different approach. See if you can answer some direct questions without resorting to the tactic of all people who know that have a weak argument (and since you're probably too dim to know that that is, I'll help: your constant avoidance of the actual topic at hand, and your reliance on what you think are insulting labels and language - and considerably invertabrate ad hominem spouting, no less - are the hallmarks of a someone who knows he's just plain wrong, or who wishes to hide his actual agenda). So, here are some questions. You can use your usual flamebaiting insults along with your answers if you like - I just filter them out anyway, it's typical of someone who is... what, twelve or thirteen? - but at least try to actually answer the questions. If you continue to avoid the topics as you have, then we can both agree that you'd like to avoid getting busted actually saying what you believe out loud where it might suffer some rational scrutiny.
1) Do you have the right to use something I create without involving me, or the people I hire to handle that sort of thing (like a publisher, distributor, or exhibitor) in making it available to you?
2) Do you think that your own assessment of the practicalities and effectiveness of one marketing method or another change your ethics and the values on which they're based? (trick question, sort of: this presumes you have an indentifiable and fully formed value system from which to actually derive workable ethics).
3) Do you think that the ability to acquire something, whether or not it's offered to you, grants you the right to do so?
in fact, free product on the internet means more money for movie producers because of the golden rule of exposure in media, means there are more eyeballs intested in your future product and in venues where the financial control is not artificial: movie houses, for instance. meat space can be controlled
If, as you seem to prefer, there is no recourse when someone rips off your work, how does this model work? Major pictures are stolen and spread online before they are even released in the theaters. At that point, the material is in the zone where you consider yourself to have a right to it. People buy 60" home theater screens specifically to avoid having to burn fuel to drive to a theater where a party of 4 people with some bad food means a $60 tab, plus parking. If the DVD for a major release is on your hard drive before that theatrical opening even occurs, and your take on it is that once it's "in cyberspace" there is and should be no control and no recourse against abuse, what's your take on that? This isn't a hypothetical, it happens all the time.
you can listen to music off the radio for free. by the time some people buy albums (or bought albums, circa 1980) they had already heard the songs 100 times already on the radio for free. so how does that all work then?
It works because it's not free. Radio stations pay artists for their work when they air it, and they collect money from advertisors. Listeners fund that activity by being the targets for that advertising, and the advertisers have very sophisticated ways of measuring how it's working, and thus setting the price. You constantly harp on how thoroughly you understand economics, and then gloss over the stuff that actually makes industries like that function, financially. Why is that?
frankly, a mind like yours is ill suited to understand the vagarities of the relationship between media and commerce
Perhaps because "vagarities" isn't an actual word.
the relationship between media and making money is all about exposure
Wrong. The relationship between media and making money is all about actual money changing hands. If people don't want to buy something, then there are no sales. Exposure is a component of creating demand, but preventing the artists from seeking recourse when they're ripped off means that you have no interest in actually seeing money change hands. You're focusing on creating demand, but you also want the product for free. Musicians that spend three years working on a collaborative recording effort with a coming-and-going collection of other studio musicians can only make money through the sales of the their recording. Your model seems to demand that no such projects are worth the trouble, because these guys should be happy when people rip off their work, and should only expect to be able to collect money when they perform at bars. Which is a crock. If such a recording doesn't have the merit to generate sales, then so be it - they didn't do a good enough job. But you can't see what's wrong with deciding you want the recording, but that you're going to just rip it off because the artist - whom you pretend to like - is asking for money you don't want to give them?
you think that when it comes to the media, its all about controlling the audience to extract money from them
Since you know I haven't said that, why would you lie? It's not ME that wants to control the audience, it's YOU that wants to control the people who create what the audience wants. You want to be in charge of how an artist's material is distributed, rather than leaving it up to the artists to succeed or fail based on their own choices. I like that artists can choose to sell their work, or give it away. That's up to THEM. You advocate removing that choice.
i'm sick of laying out the facts of media and commerce to you
You mean, you're sick of trying to spin your fantasy of how you'd prefer it to be, and being call
when i have a copy of "the terminator" on my hard drive i have not deprived the governator of some theoretical cinema house visit or dvd purchase that would result in residuals for him. you understand that, right? a copy of "the terminator" on my hard drive is not the same as the $15 dvd
So, you wish to be entertained by the actors and film makers that spent time and money to produce (in your example), "The Terminator." You want that experience to be free for you. Though the people who produced it are offering it for sale, you're bypassing that offer, and finding a way to rip it off, instead. How is that NOT depriving them of a sale? You are using force to dictate the terms of a transaction. If you don't want to pay what an artist is asking for their work, just walk away. They'll either offer it differently, or not sell as much. What do you care? But no... you're saying that you don't like the price at which they're offering it, so you're just going to take it anyway. There: now you've seen the movie - perhaps at high def on a 60" plasma screen in a nice home theater - and you're done. You've had half a dozen friends over, you've all had a beer and enjoyed the film, and that experience is DONE. And the people who offered that entertainment up for sale get nothing, because - as an equally talented maker of low-budget horror movies, you know that your personal enjoyment of the movie will, indirectly, somehow generate some in-theater sales for Arnold? You either did want to see the movie enough to procure it, or you didn't. If you don't like what you'd have to pay to procure it, then too bad - you obviously didn't want to watch it enough to pay that price. THAT is economics at work. You don't WANT economics to play a role, here - you want to simply take what you want without any mutually agreed-upon interaction with the artist who created what you want. That's not economics, that's you being a parasite.
Personally, I don't know very many people who watch the same movies over and over once they're past being about 6 years old. I don't know anybody who will sit through the full-length presentation of a film they've ripped off, and then go spend another two hours to go see it in a sticky-floored theater full of talking idiots in a part of town with no parking where some popcorn and a drink cost $10. There's a reason that paying for a download, or having Netflix deliver the DVD is so attractive to most people. You seem to like it too, but you want your entertainment for free, because only chumps actually pay artists for their work, right?
the problem with you is you don't understand that free product might foster more cinema house patrons
Might? Prpobably not. It might, in some very narrow, very limited ways. But mostly, it seems to serve as a way for you to justify NOT paying for your entertainment. But what does it matter? In my world, the people who create the work can decide how they want to advertise and sell it, and if people don't like it, they simply won't consume it. In your world, the people who want some entertainment can just take it, and screw the people who made it. Could you keep a straight face and stand in front of Martin Scorsese and say, "That's a great new piece of work you've just done, there - but you're retarded if you think I'm going to pay you to see it, you old dinosaur. Hey, when's your next film going to be done - I can't wait until someone has ripped off a copy of your work so that I can download it into my personal hi-def collection. Keep on making great movies, Mr. Scorsese!"
the studios reap all the money they can from the cinema houses. which is obviously a lot of money and is still growing
And you're the one asking ME if I understand economics? You're obviously completely clueless about where that $10 goes when you buy a ticket. You've just illustrated how completely child-like your understanding of this entire topic actually is.
you're not really that scary in the end. just sad and pathetic. ig
Nice contextless cut-and-paste, there.
but the punishment must ALWAYS be less severe than the crime itself
So, if you commit a crime that gains you a million dollars, the punishment should always be in some way less than that, leaving you ahead of the game? You advocate a justice system that always, by definition, makes the crime somewhat worthwhile to the criminal, even if they get caught doing it? What a load of rubbish.
just accept the new rules of a new game
Here's an idea: how about you actually articulate the New Rules you're so pleased with. What are they? Does anyone in your new system have any prospect of making a living at a full-time creative job? Or, since there's no mechanism for protection of copyright in your world, will all production work become limited to just what people can produce after they get off work from the day job that actually pays their bills?
Really: define your "new game," and how it will manage to produce things beside low-budget horror movies for small, indulgent audiences of friends and family. Please spell out your "new rules," and how they will govern the use of your creative work by other people. And if you don't think there should be any framework governing your rights to your own work, then just fess up and explain that you think a good feature of your brave new creative future will be the complete absence of any projects that can't be done on shoestring in someone's basement. Because if the people who do the creating and come up with the money it costs to pay the talent that does the work have no expectation of their going un-ripped-off, then they're simply not going to invest in that sort of work. No money invested in professionals doing work means no professional, full-time work being done. Is it possible you're rooting for that situation (where quality, professional people disappear from the scene) so that your own low-budget work won't appear so amateur by comparison? Brilliant!
"charging for each and every print of the photograph", which was precisely my point, in case you missed it.
This continues to be an important practice because most people that handle their own printing (or take it to Wal-Mart, etc) to a really crappy job of printing the image. And a professional photographer's entire reputation hinges on what people actually see, in the way of finished work. Cheesily-made albums slapped together from otherwise good JPGs are not the stuff that properly fuels the word-of-mouth buzz that gets a pro new business. Again, the low-rent people aren't as worried about it, and hence their willingness to let go of that all-important stage of quality control.
ohh, and if you haven't met any professional photographer who still uses film and chemicals, let alone a medium- or large-format camera, I'd say that it's you who doesn't know much of the industry
And the reason that folks are still using medium-format and large-format film is that the costs of capturing that same amount of data by other means (and handling the post production "darkroom" workflow and archiving) remains prohibitive for most photographers. Medium format digital backs are great, but most people still can't afford a $25k 'blad, whereas a 12mp Canon 1D's output is perfectly servicable, relative to 35mm film. In the area where the available technology is actually adequate to the job (resolution, dynamic range, noise, etc), the new stuff has largely supplanted the old for pretty much everyone in that line of work. Your characterization of photographers, as an entire group, as luddites, is demonstrably absurd.
So, what's your problem then? You've got no interest in media produced by groups of people that won't fit in a basement. Great! So, why are you comfortable ripping it off? If you don't want it, don't like the people who choose to invest money in larger scale productions, why do you care about the work they produce? If you want it badly enough to rip it off, don't you see your hypocrisy? Or is it that you DO want them to make such work, but you want them to be your pet entertainment slaves and do it for free? Which is it? If you don't care about it (it's "dead" in your vernacular), then why not just walk away from it? People who want to rip it off still want it. Maybe you're not one of them - maybe you really do only want to see small-scale work produced without any real cost or the coordinated effort of large teams of people over a long period of time. Maybe anyone with editing tools is, to you, a good editor. Whatever. But do you have the intellectual integrity to simply skip the consumption of the work produced by the people you're so busy spitting on?
time to die friend
You're a real class act, though. You must be very persuasive when trying to line up people to work with.
the photography industry is slowly moving in that direction too
There is no such thing as "the photography industry," unless you mean the people who manufacture the equipment. There are only people who, in the course of what they do for a living, happen to use photography as a component of that activity. Professional wedding photographers spend perhaps 5% of their actual working time with a camera in hand. The rest of it is marketing, post production, etc. In many cases, they have indeed raised rates for the shoot, and then handed off a well-processed collection of images on CD or DVD. But contrary to your implication, they generally NEVER waive their copyrights. They license those images, in a limited way for use by their customers. The bride, for example, isn't generally allowed to sell one of the photographer's images of her for use on a magazine cover. The real impact of what you're describing tends to be the low-budget photographers that don't have the time, inclination, or skill to really handle all the post production, and can't do a good job of educating their prospective customer about how $500 worth of coverage of their event isn't even going to come CLOSE to covering the post production work that would be involved. So, they dump to CD, hand off the disk, and call it a day. And the results are exactly as crappy as you'd expect them to be.
On the other hand, you've got entirely OTHER classes of photographers - such as people doing product shots, technical work, fashion, editorial images, etc. Totally different pricing models, and VERY much driven by how the image will be used, by whom, how often, and in what medium/a. If your take on what a it costs to produce a multi-million dollar film or expensive collaborative studio recording is being modified by extrapolating what one branch of lower-cost event photographers are doing in a competitive service market, then you're completely off base.
they're probably one of the most technophobe industries there are
I guess you don't know any professional photographers, huh. They buy tons of RAID storage, optical media, mobile devices, UPSes, high-end displays, fantastically expensive digital bodies, matching glass, RF transcievers, lithion-ion batteries, carbon-fiber supports, infra-red and RF-triggered multi-strobe remote systems, pen/tablet input devices, backup widgets, card creaders, flash ram of every sort, digital meters, display/printer color calibration hardware, constantly evolving post production software, web hosting services, online transaction systems... no, if you actually knew anyone in the business, you'd know that you've selected the worst possible example to try to make your case. And when one of those pro photogs busts someone using one of their images outside of how they've licensed it, they are very quick to trot out lawyers, exactly like their counterparts who produce films and audio material. And for good reason.
technology is getting to the point that a teenager in his basement is as powerful as an entire studio in 1930
Really? Where, in that basement, does the teenager have room to stash the writing teams, the costumers, the lighting crews, the people that feed the team that's taking care of the talent, the insurance team that makes sure that teenager won't be sued into oblivion if a lighting boom falls on an actor's head, and all the rest? A studio in the 1930s might not have had the CGI and editing tools of a modern workstation, but you seem to think that all audiences want to see (instead of well-executed films shot beautifully at locations we can't all personally visit, for example) "Sky Captain"-style work, only with less talented actors. I liked that film for its innovation, but I guarantee that the talent involved didn't do it for free, and why should they have? I want entertainment produced by people who are BETTER at it than my neighbor's high school student son. Just what's needed to produce one serious tracking boom shot, with well-recorded audio synched to complex camera work is enough to bankrupt the kid-in-the-basement production team. Where do you think that money comes from? From people that risk it, up front, as an investment in the future earnings of the produced work. No prospect for selling the work, no reason to risk the investment, and no production budget.
i think that high culture existed long before the studio system. listening to you, it's as if they invented music and shakespeare in a studio chief's office
Do you really think that Shakespeare could have spent all of his time working on his material if there was no prospect of making a living at it? It doesn't matter if the money was from patronage (which is exactly like a studio exec investing money in advance of a production) or from recouping expenses by selling to people the opportunity to see the material performed. Of course, he did both. It sure as hell wasn't "basement" production work - it was work done within the context of a professional system that included paid writers, paid performers, paid venue operators. Of course anyone that felt like writing and putting on a play could (provided the Queen didn't mind it), but the work done by playwrights, actors, seamstresses, musicians and the rest either was paid for, or didn't get done. If you're satisified by the quality of entertainment that doesn't involve professionally trained and equipped talent and facilities, then you're all set! There are plenty of amateur productions out there for you to enjoy. All you have to do is ignore the stuff that costs real money to produce. Obviously, you're not the one that's ripping off professionally-made material, right?
if the big studios have to sue regular people that to shore up their bottom line, then they have no right to shore up their bottom line.
That's the only way you can see this? How about, "if regular people would rather rip off their entertainment than pay what the producers of that entertainment ask for their work, then they have nothing to complain about if they get busted for doing so." NOBODY is forcing anyone to consume professionally produced entertainment. People who are too cheap to buy that entertainment can simply find another way to be entertained. Clearly, you think that no-charge basement productions are every bit as good as something that costs millions to produce, and don't think that such stuff should be charged for. So why aren't you simply telling the people who rip off the expensive stuff to instead just ignore it, and opt for the equally polished, just as desireable work made by the kid next door and displayed on YouTube in a beautiful high-res presentation?
technology has changed the landscape of corporate entertainment. permanently. inexorably. get fucking used to it. no amount of lawyers is going to preserve a way of life that technological progress has rendered extinct. sorry if that doesn't seem fair to you
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