Only for a few more years. Then MPEG4 and the H.264 subsection will be public domain. i.e. FREE (the world all open sourcers love)
You do realize that the H.264 patent expires in 2023, right? In technology, that's around three generations, WAAAAAY more than just "a few more years."
Can you imagine how much better life would have been had PNG been established early as the de facto image standard on the Internet instead of GIF, and later, JPG?
There's none of that NOW.
Which is why I specifically said early. Yes, there isn't much of a possibility of being sued for violating a GIF or JPG patent now (although in some countries in which the patents weren't filed until much later, some developers still face that risk). But there were millions of dollars wasted in the 1990s and early 2000s on such lawsuits.
No, it's not. I've seen both in action, and they're perceptually identical. I see this argument a lot, and the people who make it are simply pulling it out of their ass.
I get the reason behind liking something for being open source. <bogus claim snipped!> Please tell my why I should use it when I have a superior option available at a reasonable price?
What if you want to upgrade that software? And then upgrade it again? And again? That all cost $$$, and as someone who uses both FOSS and commercial software, I can tell you that the difference isn't so "reasonable." What if you are a design studio and you need 100 copies of the software? That price isn't so "reasonable" either.
It strikes me that a lot of people made the same stupid arguments you just did about Linux--especially Microsoft, which stands to have the most to lose if people switch to Linux. "You have this expensive infrastructure that you can't get rid of!" And a lot of stupid companies buy into it, too. To save the $500 thousand it would cost to switch over and maintain the environment after doing so, they spend millions over the course of three to five years.
There's a better way. I know it. Google knows it. Most laypeople don't, and Apple, as the company who sells a lot of legacy H.264 hardware software and who earns royalties from other people who make such things, has a high financial stake in doing their damned best to make sure people don't act in their own long-term financial interest or freedom.
The list goes on and on. The Fourth Amendment is a joke today. I know it, the government knows it, and apparently you didn't get the memo. It's at the point where we need to pass a new amendment that basically says, "Goddammit, we mean it." Realistically, it's probably never going to change because too many people stupidly think that 1) if you're innocent you shouldn't have anything to hide, and 2) it could never happen to them.
I wish I could mod this +5 Brilliant. Finally, someone who understands 1) why Google is doing this, and 2) how important the stakes are!
Can you imagine how much easier life would have been if PNG had been established early on as the de facto standard image format? You would have thought that people would have learned that lesson well. None of those stupid ass lawsuits, and a hell of a lot of very early patent trolls would have been preemptively defanged.
The web need to operate on free and open standards, period, end of story. Anything else is asking for a lot of trouble, trouble which is avoided relatively easily, trouble for which there is well-established precedent.
What makes this decision even more annoying is that Google are part of the H264 patent pool. They have more to lose by removing support for it.
No, they don't. Can you imagine how much better life would have been had PNG been established early as the de facto image standard on the Internet instead of GIF, and later, JPG? Aside from the superior feature set, there never would have been any of the silly threats of massive lawsuits, no need to pay someone royalties to implement an editor, etc.
Google isn't just smart, it is freakin' brilliant with this move. If they can help to establish WebM as the de facto standard for Internet video, they don't have to be part of the H.264 patent pool. Also, people can write video editors and other utilities galore for Chrome with no viable threat of being sued.
H.264 is not a free codec and consequently, you have to pay if you wish to encode content in it or decode content encoded with it. They just are gracious enough not to charge you for streaming it.
Consequently, it's not supported by Firefox natively nor in any other browser that cares about being sued and can't or won't pay.
Google's motivation is obviously to try to establish an open source, free (as in speech) codec as the web standard for video. That way, we won't have the silly issues you mention above. So why are you not happy with this move?
Keep in mind that browsers like Firefox, Konquerer, Seamonkey, etc., because they are open source, cannot legally integrate H.264 into its browser. On the other hand, there is nothing stopping Microsoft, Apple, Opera, and Google, and anyone else who wants to from integrating WebM into their browsers. It simply boils down to an administrative decision to do so.
So if you want your web-based video to "Just Work," you absolutely must support WebM. Or more precisely, you absolutely must not support H.264 unless MPEG releases it to the public domain or under a free (as in speech) license, which I think there's exactly zero chance of happening.
You need to understand that the latency in Internet connectivity would make playing real-time online games almost impossible. Even simple IM messages could take 20 minutes or so to get across. YouTube would probably be virtually inaccessible, as would any site that depends on streaming. I'm just sayin'.
Of course, you could play other volunteers with you, as long as some enterprising game company (no pun intended) allowed you to run a server there.
Actually, it is. I just know how inevitable it is that some dipwad who doesn't know what irony is will post that it's not, so I thought I'd go ahead and get it out of the way. Please proceed with your regular comments!
So what happens when the voting system does not work?
Then you need to pack up, leave the country, and find one where people agree with you more. Because the only alternative is letting some single or small group of authority decide what is best for you with no say-so or recourse in the matter, and that is the very definition of dictatorship and/or tyranny. That's great if you happen to be the dictator. It's not so much when you're not.
You do realize that we had a war in the 1860's that dealt with many of these same issues, right? And that it was pretty definitively decided that in reality you do not unilaterally get to decide to simply shed off the federal government, especially through violence?
Personally, I'd like to see anyone who thinks that our current government is a tyranny worthy of armed revolt go live for a while in a country where there is real tyranny to get a little perspective. I'd also like to see how these "I want my guns in case there's a revolution!" nuts fare when the government sends in the National Guard. Maybe you sleep better at night thinking that at any moment you can rise up against the government, but practically speaking, all of your little pea shooters won't do crap against one well-equipped soldier who could vaporize you just by pressing a button.
But by all means, you keep thinking that the Second Amendment even crosses any legislator's mind when they're making laws. "Ooh, we can't do that; that will go too far and all those people with guns will come after us!" Have you even been watching the news? When people with guns do go after government representatives, there's more of a backlash than anything. We're about ten million times more likely to ultimately go down the tubes because of lack of vision and leadership than we are from tyranny, and all the guns in the world won't do a damn thing to solve that problem.
I hope you're being sarcastic. Because if not, you are espousing that if you don't like someone's viewpoint, just kill 'em.
Our republic was set up explicitly to avoid that, not encourage it. If you don't like Obama or your Congresscritter's stance on the issues, you vote against them. If your friends and neighbors disagree, that's too damn bad, suck it up. The ammo box, in fact, is not a choice, and anyone who chooses to use it needs to be removed from said society.
If you're one of those Second Amendment nuts, you really need to read your history book on why it was passed. Here's a hint: Contrary to popular Second Amendment nut mantra, it was to defend the United States against outsiders, not to attack the United States and its institutions yourself. Duh.
If you are being sarcastic, knock it off. It's too soon after a tragedy for those kinds of comments, and people will take you seriously.
Software companies already do this without government intervention. If I buy Adobe Photoshop, I pay full price. If they come out with a new version, I only need to pay for the upgrade, not the full retail price.
Right, but if you then buy Microsoft Office, you now have license information maintained in two different places by two different companies. If you're a retailer, it would be onerous to say the least interacting with possibly thousands of content providers. I really think the best chance of this working for everyone is to have one central clearinghouse.
First, for this idea to work, there needs to be one and only one clearinghouse.
Why?
Couldn't Amazon, ITMS (etc) each implement their own?
Couldn't content creators do it? (especially if it's just a "paper license")
Because if, say, Amazon and Apple maintain separate license services, then if you bought the license on Amazon's service, there's exactly no chance in hell that Apple will allow you to upgrade that license on their service. If you're Apple, how do you know that license is legitimate? What if Amazon goes out of business?
Yes, because of the stellar track record the government has with respecting privacy.
Compared to private companies, the government's track record with respecting privacy is indeed stellar. Plus, like I said above, this would be optional. If you want to pay full price for a new license every time and never register what you're purchasing, then go right ahead.
Bad answer,
I don't want the Government knowing (or private companies either) keeping track of what pay to watch.
It wouldn't be mandatory; people like you are free to go out and pay the whole $140 for the set if you want and never register your license. Next time another edition comes out, by gummy, feel free to pay another $200 (or whatever it will cost after inflation). And so on, ad nausem. If your privacy is worth owning umpteen licenses of the movie just so that no one will know that you own even one, that will still be your prerogative.
If you want and you can convince somebody that you haven't registered your license yet, you can even sell those licenses at some point.
Content providers would not like this. Right now, LucasFilm can release the Star Wars films over and over again, knowing they have a built-in purchasing base of people willing to pay $140 for the same product.
There really aren't that many people who are willing to do so. I have bought the original trilogy exactly twice: once on VHS and once on DVD. I have zero intention of buying them on Blu-ray, or buying any other editions. I've bought the prequels exactly once, on DVD, and I'm sure as hell not going to buy them again. And while I'm not a rabid Star Wars fan, I do consider myself at least a moderate fan.
On the other hand, if I could pay something like $40 or so to "upgrade" my existing videos to hi-def copies, I'd probably fork out the money. In another five years if they add a bunch of extra features or come out with them in some edition that gives me better quality or whatnot, I'd probably be willing to fork out another $40.
So for me--again, whom I consider a bit above-average fan of the movies--it really boils down to a choice between $40 now versus $0, and possibly who knows how much $??? in future lost revenue because I already own them and don't really see the value in buying them again.
I've been saying for years that ultimately, the system I describe below is the most fair and equitable for both consumers and studios.
Someone--probably either the government or a government-regulated entity--should set up a "copyright clearinghouse" for media such as movies. If you want to buy a movie, you play a license fee plus a media fee. So say you went out and bought the original Star Wars movie (Episode IV) on DVD for $15. That $15 would technically be, say, $12 for the unlimited private viewing license, plus $3 for the cost of the box, media, distribution, etc. Inside the DVD case you would get a code that you register with the clearinghouse so that they now know that you own the rights to watch Episode IV.
Okay, now let's say that you want to be able to stream it online. Instead of paying another $15, you only pay $3, which covers the cost of hosting and bandwidth for whoever it is streaming it to you. Want to Blu-ray version? Okay, that will be an extra $5. $2 of that $5 is the cost of upgrading your license to the high-def remastered version, and $3 of it is for the cost again of the media and distribution. Oh, now you want the whole original trilogy? Well, normally it's $45, but since you already own a license for Episode IV, you get $8 shaved off the license cost and only pay $37.
Content providers could offer discounts on license fees for things like stores that buy the licenses in volume, or for customers who buy several licenses for different products (e.g. a Star Wars/Indiana Jones bundle) at once. Retailers like Amazon could pass those discounts on to customers, or have bundle discounts by applying some of their cut of the media fee to the license fee as a loss leader.
Content providers win because there would be a shitload more legal copies of the premium editions of their products sold. Retailers win because their profit comes from a cut of the media fee, not the license, and more sales--even for lower amounts--means more money. Consumers win because when you buy a movie on physical media x today, you don't get screwed from having to re-buy it on media y tomorrow or media z in five years.
Some of you may have had pause when I mentioned the government being involved. The reason why the government needs to be involved is twofold. First, for this idea to work, there needs to be one and only one clearinghouse. Because it would be a monopoly, it would need to be regulated as such. Second, if it's solely a private company endeavor, it would take exactly three nanoseconds for that company to say, "Hey, you know, with all of this data on what media people own, we could make a killing if we sold it to marketing companies," and it would take either direct government ownership or strict government regulation to ensure that privacy is upheld.
What a coincidence, go figure! While you were posting your complaint ("waaaah!"), you totally missed out on the amusement of the story posted that was right there at the top of the page the whole time that the rest of us saw!
With other companies, you'd probably be right. However, over the years, I've noticed that Google doesn't strive for "good enough." It's why Google is one of the few companies I genuinely feel has earned their billions of dollars, and continue to do so. If "good enough" were good enough for Google, they would have been killed before they even got started good in the search engine game. Does anyone else here remember Alta Vista, Lycos, Yahoo, and probably at least a half dozen other search engines that have fallen by the wayside? Do you think that it's just because people happened to randomly choose Google, or because they looked at the status quo and said, "We can do better."?
Also, does anyone remember what search engines were becoming? They were basically ad portals. Lots of "CLICK THE MONKEY!" banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, etc. In theory, this is what the advertisers loved, right? Google came along and said, "Hey, if we look out for the people using the search engine, even at the expense of short-term profits, we'll be huge and famous, and the money will come later." As you can see, it did.
I know I sound like a commercial, and I assure you that I don't work for Google and I'm not affiliated with the company in any way other than as a user. But it's one of the few major corporations that I really respect. Most companies, once they become giants, shift into the mode of protecting their assets by preventing innovation that could be a threat to their business model. Google, on the other hand, is doing everything they can to promote innovation and hard-core research and development. To date, they have done a hell of a lot for its users, even when they didn't have to, under the theory that long-term, it will all work out.
I don't know why you have the idea that they're in it just to do "good enough," or that they'd sacrifice user experience for the sake of short-term advertiser happiness, but based on their past record, I'd say you're projecting a general impression of large companies onto one that breaks the mold, and you're wrong.
Are you referring to Defying Gravity? It was short-lived. It used to be on Hulu.com, but I guess they took it off. It came on ABC and was canceled after just one season, and here in the U.S., the last episodes weren't even aired.
I think you are misunderstanding this case, or didn't read the summary.
The government issued an injunction to remove comments from the web site that the site refused to obey, which puts it squarely in First Amendment territory. Their claim to be protecting the First Amendment is perfectly valid, as that amounts to government censorship of speech. From TFA:
Plaintiffs got an injunction that ordered defendants to remove defamatory content from the web that defendants had posted. When the defendants did not comply with the injunction, plaintiffs asked the court to enforce the injunction against Ripoffreport.com, the website on which some of the defamatory content appeared.
I don't know where you got the notion that this is just a private entity acting without any government intervention or involvement.
He also invented the internet, so he probably should be the go-to guy on this.
Saw that one coming. You need to educate yourself before spreading this knee-jerk lie.
Al Gore didn't say he invented the Internet. What he said was that he took the initiative in creating the Internet, and the very next sentence ('cause, you know, context actually matters), referred to other initiatives he advanced as a legislator. If you and the thousands of sheep that repeat this tired old joke bothered to look it up, you'd find that he's 100% right, he did significantly advance the underlying research through his legislation and funding.
If President Eisenhower had said in the mid-1960s that he, while president, "created" the Interstate Highway System, we would not have seen dozens and dozens of editorials lampooning him for claiming he "invented" the concept of highways or implying that he personally went out and dug ditches across the country to help build the roadway. Everyone would have understood that Ike meant he was a driving force behind the legislation that created the highway system, and this was the very same concept Al Gore was expressing about himself with his Internet statement.
That's an awesome definition, and extraordinarily insightful. Thanks for the description, I'm going to start using this to explain net neutrality to my friends and family so they can finally understand why it's so important.
Slashdot Mirror
Only for a few more years. Then MPEG4 and the H.264 subsection will be public domain. i.e. FREE (the world all open sourcers love)
You do realize that the H.264 patent expires in 2023, right? In technology, that's around three generations, WAAAAAY more than just "a few more years."
Can you imagine how much better life would have been had PNG been established early as the de facto image standard on the Internet instead of GIF, and later, JPG?
There's none of that NOW.
Which is why I specifically said early. Yes, there isn't much of a possibility of being sued for violating a GIF or JPG patent now (although in some countries in which the patents weren't filed until much later, some developers still face that risk). But there were millions of dollars wasted in the 1990s and early 2000s on such lawsuits.
Have you learned nothing from the past?
Except H.264 is superior to WebM.
No, it's not. I've seen both in action, and they're perceptually identical. I see this argument a lot, and the people who make it are simply pulling it out of their ass.
I get the reason behind liking something for being open source. <bogus claim snipped!> Please tell my why I should use it when I have a superior option available at a reasonable price?
What if you want to upgrade that software? And then upgrade it again? And again? That all cost $$$, and as someone who uses both FOSS and commercial software, I can tell you that the difference isn't so "reasonable." What if you are a design studio and you need 100 copies of the software? That price isn't so "reasonable" either.
It strikes me that a lot of people made the same stupid arguments you just did about Linux--especially Microsoft, which stands to have the most to lose if people switch to Linux. "You have this expensive infrastructure that you can't get rid of!" And a lot of stupid companies buy into it, too. To save the $500 thousand it would cost to switch over and maintain the environment after doing so, they spend millions over the course of three to five years.
There's a better way. I know it. Google knows it. Most laypeople don't, and Apple, as the company who sells a lot of legacy H.264 hardware software and who earns royalties from other people who make such things, has a high financial stake in doing their damned best to make sure people don't act in their own long-term financial interest or freedom.
The only problem is that there are no good, free image editors that support PNG. Why? Because they all use freakin' JPG!
See how silly it sounds?
Tell that to the guy who has his cell phone rummaged through without a warrant. And tell it to the the guy who has a GPS tracker attached to his car without a warrant. Tell it to the guy who has his computer searched, with anything found being prosecutable, whether it was what the warrant specified or not. Tell it to the people whose cars (and possibly even persons) have been subjected to airport "naked body" scanners from vans on the street without--you guessed it--a warrant. Tell it to the people whose Internet information is handed over to the government willy-nilly without any kind of warrant. Tell it to the guy whose cell phone signal is geo-located without a warrant. Tell it to 94 baseball players whose drug results that were obtained without a warrant.
The list goes on and on. The Fourth Amendment is a joke today. I know it, the government knows it, and apparently you didn't get the memo. It's at the point where we need to pass a new amendment that basically says, "Goddammit, we mean it." Realistically, it's probably never going to change because too many people stupidly think that 1) if you're innocent you shouldn't have anything to hide, and 2) it could never happen to them.
I wish I could mod this +5 Brilliant. Finally, someone who understands 1) why Google is doing this, and 2) how important the stakes are!
Can you imagine how much easier life would have been if PNG had been established early on as the de facto standard image format? You would have thought that people would have learned that lesson well. None of those stupid ass lawsuits, and a hell of a lot of very early patent trolls would have been preemptively defanged.
The web need to operate on free and open standards, period, end of story. Anything else is asking for a lot of trouble, trouble which is avoided relatively easily, trouble for which there is well-established precedent.
What makes this decision even more annoying is that Google are part of the H264 patent pool. They have more to lose by removing support for it.
No, they don't. Can you imagine how much better life would have been had PNG been established early as the de facto image standard on the Internet instead of GIF, and later, JPG? Aside from the superior feature set, there never would have been any of the silly threats of massive lawsuits, no need to pay someone royalties to implement an editor, etc.
Google isn't just smart, it is freakin' brilliant with this move. If they can help to establish WebM as the de facto standard for Internet video, they don't have to be part of the H.264 patent pool. Also, people can write video editors and other utilities galore for Chrome with no viable threat of being sued.
H.264 is not a free codec and consequently, you have to pay if you wish to encode content in it or decode content encoded with it. They just are gracious enough not to charge you for streaming it. Consequently, it's not supported by Firefox natively nor in any other browser that cares about being sued and can't or won't pay.
Google's motivation is obviously to try to establish an open source, free (as in speech) codec as the web standard for video. That way, we won't have the silly issues you mention above. So why are you not happy with this move?
Keep in mind that browsers like Firefox, Konquerer, Seamonkey, etc., because they are open source, cannot legally integrate H.264 into its browser. On the other hand, there is nothing stopping Microsoft, Apple, Opera, and Google, and anyone else who wants to from integrating WebM into their browsers. It simply boils down to an administrative decision to do so.
So if you want your web-based video to "Just Work," you absolutely must support WebM. Or more precisely, you absolutely must not support H.264 unless MPEG releases it to the public domain or under a free (as in speech) license, which I think there's exactly zero chance of happening.
You're forgetting Moore's law. In 25 years, that 20 minutes will only be 20 seconds.
Heh, good one.
You need to understand that the latency in Internet connectivity would make playing real-time online games almost impossible. Even simple IM messages could take 20 minutes or so to get across. YouTube would probably be virtually inaccessible, as would any site that depends on streaming. I'm just sayin'.
Of course, you could play other volunteers with you, as long as some enterprising game company (no pun intended) allowed you to run a server there.
Actually, it is. I just know how inevitable it is that some dipwad who doesn't know what irony is will post that it's not, so I thought I'd go ahead and get it out of the way. Please proceed with your regular comments!
So what happens when the voting system does not work?
Then you need to pack up, leave the country, and find one where people agree with you more. Because the only alternative is letting some single or small group of authority decide what is best for you with no say-so or recourse in the matter, and that is the very definition of dictatorship and/or tyranny. That's great if you happen to be the dictator. It's not so much when you're not.
You do realize that we had a war in the 1860's that dealt with many of these same issues, right? And that it was pretty definitively decided that in reality you do not unilaterally get to decide to simply shed off the federal government, especially through violence?
Personally, I'd like to see anyone who thinks that our current government is a tyranny worthy of armed revolt go live for a while in a country where there is real tyranny to get a little perspective. I'd also like to see how these "I want my guns in case there's a revolution!" nuts fare when the government sends in the National Guard. Maybe you sleep better at night thinking that at any moment you can rise up against the government, but practically speaking, all of your little pea shooters won't do crap against one well-equipped soldier who could vaporize you just by pressing a button.
But by all means, you keep thinking that the Second Amendment even crosses any legislator's mind when they're making laws. "Ooh, we can't do that; that will go too far and all those people with guns will come after us!" Have you even been watching the news? When people with guns do go after government representatives, there's more of a backlash than anything. We're about ten million times more likely to ultimately go down the tubes because of lack of vision and leadership than we are from tyranny, and all the guns in the world won't do a damn thing to solve that problem.
Yup.
I hope you're being sarcastic. Because if not, you are espousing that if you don't like someone's viewpoint, just kill 'em.
Our republic was set up explicitly to avoid that, not encourage it. If you don't like Obama or your Congresscritter's stance on the issues, you vote against them. If your friends and neighbors disagree, that's too damn bad, suck it up. The ammo box, in fact, is not a choice, and anyone who chooses to use it needs to be removed from said society.
If you're one of those Second Amendment nuts, you really need to read your history book on why it was passed. Here's a hint: Contrary to popular Second Amendment nut mantra, it was to defend the United States against outsiders, not to attack the United States and its institutions yourself. Duh.
If you are being sarcastic, knock it off. It's too soon after a tragedy for those kinds of comments, and people will take you seriously.
Software companies already do this without government intervention. If I buy Adobe Photoshop, I pay full price. If they come out with a new version, I only need to pay for the upgrade, not the full retail price.
Right, but if you then buy Microsoft Office, you now have license information maintained in two different places by two different companies. If you're a retailer, it would be onerous to say the least interacting with possibly thousands of content providers. I really think the best chance of this working for everyone is to have one central clearinghouse.
First, for this idea to work, there needs to be one and only one clearinghouse.
Why? Couldn't Amazon, ITMS (etc) each implement their own? Couldn't content creators do it? (especially if it's just a "paper license")
Because if, say, Amazon and Apple maintain separate license services, then if you bought the license on Amazon's service, there's exactly no chance in hell that Apple will allow you to upgrade that license on their service. If you're Apple, how do you know that license is legitimate? What if Amazon goes out of business?
Yes, because of the stellar track record the government has with respecting privacy.
Compared to private companies, the government's track record with respecting privacy is indeed stellar. Plus, like I said above, this would be optional. If you want to pay full price for a new license every time and never register what you're purchasing, then go right ahead.
Bad answer, I don't want the Government knowing (or private companies either) keeping track of what pay to watch.
It wouldn't be mandatory; people like you are free to go out and pay the whole $140 for the set if you want and never register your license. Next time another edition comes out, by gummy, feel free to pay another $200 (or whatever it will cost after inflation). And so on, ad nausem. If your privacy is worth owning umpteen licenses of the movie just so that no one will know that you own even one, that will still be your prerogative.
If you want and you can convince somebody that you haven't registered your license yet, you can even sell those licenses at some point.
Content providers would not like this. Right now, LucasFilm can release the Star Wars films over and over again, knowing they have a built-in purchasing base of people willing to pay $140 for the same product.
There really aren't that many people who are willing to do so. I have bought the original trilogy exactly twice: once on VHS and once on DVD. I have zero intention of buying them on Blu-ray, or buying any other editions. I've bought the prequels exactly once, on DVD, and I'm sure as hell not going to buy them again. And while I'm not a rabid Star Wars fan, I do consider myself at least a moderate fan.
On the other hand, if I could pay something like $40 or so to "upgrade" my existing videos to hi-def copies, I'd probably fork out the money. In another five years if they add a bunch of extra features or come out with them in some edition that gives me better quality or whatnot, I'd probably be willing to fork out another $40.
So for me--again, whom I consider a bit above-average fan of the movies--it really boils down to a choice between $40 now versus $0, and possibly who knows how much $??? in future lost revenue because I already own them and don't really see the value in buying them again.
I've been saying for years that ultimately, the system I describe below is the most fair and equitable for both consumers and studios.
Someone--probably either the government or a government-regulated entity--should set up a "copyright clearinghouse" for media such as movies. If you want to buy a movie, you play a license fee plus a media fee. So say you went out and bought the original Star Wars movie (Episode IV) on DVD for $15. That $15 would technically be, say, $12 for the unlimited private viewing license, plus $3 for the cost of the box, media, distribution, etc. Inside the DVD case you would get a code that you register with the clearinghouse so that they now know that you own the rights to watch Episode IV.
Okay, now let's say that you want to be able to stream it online. Instead of paying another $15, you only pay $3, which covers the cost of hosting and bandwidth for whoever it is streaming it to you. Want to Blu-ray version? Okay, that will be an extra $5. $2 of that $5 is the cost of upgrading your license to the high-def remastered version, and $3 of it is for the cost again of the media and distribution. Oh, now you want the whole original trilogy? Well, normally it's $45, but since you already own a license for Episode IV, you get $8 shaved off the license cost and only pay $37.
Content providers could offer discounts on license fees for things like stores that buy the licenses in volume, or for customers who buy several licenses for different products (e.g. a Star Wars/Indiana Jones bundle) at once. Retailers like Amazon could pass those discounts on to customers, or have bundle discounts by applying some of their cut of the media fee to the license fee as a loss leader.
Content providers win because there would be a shitload more legal copies of the premium editions of their products sold. Retailers win because their profit comes from a cut of the media fee, not the license, and more sales--even for lower amounts--means more money. Consumers win because when you buy a movie on physical media x today, you don't get screwed from having to re-buy it on media y tomorrow or media z in five years.
Some of you may have had pause when I mentioned the government being involved. The reason why the government needs to be involved is twofold. First, for this idea to work, there needs to be one and only one clearinghouse. Because it would be a monopoly, it would need to be regulated as such. Second, if it's solely a private company endeavor, it would take exactly three nanoseconds for that company to say, "Hey, you know, with all of this data on what media people own, we could make a killing if we sold it to marketing companies," and it would take either direct government ownership or strict government regulation to ensure that privacy is upheld.
What a coincidence, go figure! While you were posting your complaint ("waaaah!"), you totally missed out on the amusement of the story posted that was right there at the top of the page the whole time that the rest of us saw!
With other companies, you'd probably be right. However, over the years, I've noticed that Google doesn't strive for "good enough." It's why Google is one of the few companies I genuinely feel has earned their billions of dollars, and continue to do so. If "good enough" were good enough for Google, they would have been killed before they even got started good in the search engine game. Does anyone else here remember Alta Vista, Lycos, Yahoo, and probably at least a half dozen other search engines that have fallen by the wayside? Do you think that it's just because people happened to randomly choose Google, or because they looked at the status quo and said, "We can do better."?
Also, does anyone remember what search engines were becoming? They were basically ad portals. Lots of "CLICK THE MONKEY!" banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, etc. In theory, this is what the advertisers loved, right? Google came along and said, "Hey, if we look out for the people using the search engine, even at the expense of short-term profits, we'll be huge and famous, and the money will come later." As you can see, it did.
I know I sound like a commercial, and I assure you that I don't work for Google and I'm not affiliated with the company in any way other than as a user. But it's one of the few major corporations that I really respect. Most companies, once they become giants, shift into the mode of protecting their assets by preventing innovation that could be a threat to their business model. Google, on the other hand, is doing everything they can to promote innovation and hard-core research and development. To date, they have done a hell of a lot for its users, even when they didn't have to, under the theory that long-term, it will all work out.
I don't know why you have the idea that they're in it just to do "good enough," or that they'd sacrifice user experience for the sake of short-term advertiser happiness, but based on their past record, I'd say you're projecting a general impression of large companies onto one that breaks the mold, and you're wrong.
Are you referring to Defying Gravity? It was short-lived. It used to be on Hulu.com, but I guess they took it off. It came on ABC and was canceled after just one season, and here in the U.S., the last episodes weren't even aired.
I think you are misunderstanding this case, or didn't read the summary.
The government issued an injunction to remove comments from the web site that the site refused to obey, which puts it squarely in First Amendment territory. Their claim to be protecting the First Amendment is perfectly valid, as that amounts to government censorship of speech. From TFA:
Plaintiffs got an injunction that ordered defendants to remove defamatory content from the web that defendants had posted. When the defendants did not comply with the injunction, plaintiffs asked the court to enforce the injunction against Ripoffreport.com, the website on which some of the defamatory content appeared.
I don't know where you got the notion that this is just a private entity acting without any government intervention or involvement.
He also invented the internet, so he probably should be the go-to guy on this.
Saw that one coming. You need to educate yourself before spreading this knee-jerk lie.
Al Gore didn't say he invented the Internet. What he said was that he took the initiative in creating the Internet, and the very next sentence ('cause, you know, context actually matters), referred to other initiatives he advanced as a legislator. If you and the thousands of sheep that repeat this tired old joke bothered to look it up, you'd find that he's 100% right, he did significantly advance the underlying research through his legislation and funding.
If President Eisenhower had said in the mid-1960s that he, while president, "created" the Interstate Highway System, we would not have seen dozens and dozens of editorials lampooning him for claiming he "invented" the concept of highways or implying that he personally went out and dug ditches across the country to help build the roadway. Everyone would have understood that Ike meant he was a driving force behind the legislation that created the highway system, and this was the very same concept Al Gore was expressing about himself with his Internet statement.
That's an awesome definition, and extraordinarily insightful. Thanks for the description, I'm going to start using this to explain net neutrality to my friends and family so they can finally understand why it's so important.