If RMS had his way there would still be plenty of people out there making a living writing software. Don't buy into that anti-OSS FUD
Not just writing software - writing it better and more efficiently because they don't have to constantly re-invent the wheel nor worry about violating patents they aren't even aware of.
Progress comes from research, not from hordes of monkeys copying someone else's work.
Where you see hordes of monkeys, others see skilled practioners of all levels of economic background standing on the shoulders of those who came before them, rapidly advancing the state of the art.
Just as there is no way a company like Disney could come into existence under the current copyright regime that they've promulgated on the US and lots of the rest of the world, there is no way a company like Microsoft or Oracle could have been successful under the software patent system that they've created.
And you know what?
They like it that way. They got theirs, and they don't want anyone else to have a piece of that pie.
I thnk the information revolution is just barely getting started and when I see these companies trying to stagnate it for their own benefit -- clearly not society's benefit -- then it seems obvious that society should not be a willing accomplice.
As for that drug industry, you might want to look deeper into how much of those billions are going into duplicated research and how the historically open centers of research at universities that have helped to jumpstart the bio-tech industry are slowly being gagged, even starved so as to lock out newcomers. Also, just look at how many ridiculously expensive drugs have been created recently that provide little to no benefit over existing treatments, except they come with better PR.
So what do you propose? That MS bribes every single political party, in every single country in Europe? I'm sure you can see how that's impractical
You yourself just explained how it can be done when you said, "If the political alliances form the other way around, who's the current leader can change right in the middle of a term." All they have to do is pay off the right people to ripple that "fragile alliance" and the entire landscape changes. If they do it right, that landscape changes to their benefit.
Don't be so naive as to think that just because the EU is different from the USA that it is also immune from manipulation. Money and power are universal forces in politics, they just manifest differently in different systems.
I think you misspelled bribe. Corporate 'citizen' or not, they can still beat drums made of euros and the pols will still shake their booties to the rhythm. Just look how close the software patents fight has been so far and imagine 10x the pressure.
Most cableco's give you a "discount" on their ISP service if you also have a minimum tier of tv with them. In many cases, it works out to be a wash - the price of the minimum tier is equal to the discount.
That said, in my experience the cable discount is $10-$15. While the total cost of a voice-line, even the absolute cheapest possible one, after all the fees, taxes and whatever else nickle-and-diming, is somewhere in the $25-$35 range.
So, telcos - sell us naked dsl, put a line-cost-recovery fee in there equal to what the recovery rate is for a voice line, and I'll call that fair. But don't make me pay for all the extra crap that I'm never going to use when I don't even have a handset connected to the line.
Or watch the emergence of uber-cheap community wireless internet access eat your lunch for both DSL and VoIP. It may happen anyway, cheap is cheap.
So it is pretty conclusive that they don't have to pay it back.
Unless they want to work that is. If the label terminates the contract, the unrecouped advance is waived. But if the artist wants to terminate the contract, the standard form says they have to pay it back as part of the termination. So, the artist sits in limbo until the contract expires, I think it is usually seven years.
They can't make another album because they can't get the funding from their label and they can't go to another label because they are still bound by the terms of the original contract.
They can keep on performing the same songs they were when their first album was released, anything new they write becomes property of their current label, even if it is never published. They can usually perform those new songs live, but they'll never make it onto a published album because the label, who won't publish any more of their albums, owns them. Then the problems with performing live is that they'll get no backing from their label on that, making touring that much harder - not impossible, but definitely hardscrabble.
So, I was wrong, no collection agency from the label, but unless they've got decent paying jobs outside of the biz they are going to be forced into more than a few years of near-poverty and artistic void. That's a scenario that makes it likely they will default on debts to other creditors.
But does the term "debt" really apply is the artist is not legally obligated to pay it back? I mean, it's not like it's really debt.
Yes it is real debt, yes they have to pay it back or their own label starts to sic collection agencies on them and many end up having to go through bankruptcy.
If the first album didn't sell well, I think it's safe to say the label isn't worried about the competition.
There are plenty of reasons that an album does not sell well, for example poor to non-existant marketing. In that article I linked to, the band being interviewed complains that their label spent just enough money on marketing to get a few posters printed up, and no more.
You seem to think that music labels wish to make as much possible money from all of their acts. That would probably be true in a free market, but they have an oligopoly market which means all the standard free-market assumptions go out the window. For the music labels, in the long run maintaining monopoly control of the market is more important than maximizing revenue from each act because monopoly control means they can make hugely out-of-proportion money on a few acts instead. Much more money in total than they could make in a free market scenario, and with a lot less work. Kind of the biz equivalent of "put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket very carefully."
Same thing with books, ever wonder why so many books go out of print today when we have the technology to do stuff like print-on-demand? They may not be bestsellers, but they are competition, and taking them off the shelves at the retailers makes it that much easier for the latest big hit by Clancy or King or whomever to sell even more copies.
I wasn't talking about the authors not complaining, I was talking about all those "music wants to be free" morons not complaining.
A) Well, that must make it OK, then. B) You may call them "morons" I say they are people who have figured out that the net makes copying a zero-cost operation and that business models based on prohibitive marginal costs are no longer feasible and have historically been abusive to their customers and their suppliers. Just because the "morons" may not be able to propose alternative business plans does not mean their initial observation that music, and really all information, "wants to be free" is any less valid. The net is the net and trying to deny it is like denying that water is wet.
But what all these articles imply is that the artist is then required to pay back the rest of the advance, and this is not true.
Generally they are not required to repay the advance if the label terminates the contract. However, more often then not, the label does not terminate the contract, it leaves it in place but refuses to take any action to move forward on the production any new albums Thus preventing the band from going out on their own and competing with the label's own established acts, and conincidentally, keeping them in debt.
I might point out that the book industry works about the same way, but people don't complain about that.
You must not know many aspiring or published authors. Google around a bit, you will find that generally, unlike most unsigned bands with stars in their eyes, authors do tend to know how the publishing industry is stacked against them but have been just as powerless to do anything about it.
OnStar equipment includes a phone.. Could somebody record what you are doing without you knowing? I'd bet it is possible.
More than possible, it has already been done. The FBI got the Mercedes equivalent of On-Star to route a suspect's telemetry to them first. They remotely turned on the "phone" and listened to all the conversations in the car.
We know about it because Mercedes took the FBI to court over it after the monitoring had extended for more than a month. Mercedes's problem with it was that if there was a real emergency, the FBI's wiretap prevented normal emergency services from being provided to the car owner who had paid for them.
The courts ruled in favor of Mercedes, without addressing the privacy issues at all, instead basing their opinion pretty much on the issue of the wiretap interefering with normal usage.
Here's an article that summarizes it pretty well. The part they missed is that the car vendor in question was Mercedes. I read in a different article at the time that while the company's name was sealed or otherwise not made public, the lawyer for the auto company in the suit was public knowledge and it was also public knowledge that his firm primarily worked for Mercedes with few, if any, other auto manufacturer clients. Thus the inference to Mercedes.
Pure mechanics question: any good suggestions on where to set up such an account? Obviously something with wide accessibility and someplace your fans would trust, non
No, I don't -- at least not one geared to this kind of use. Setting up a regular escrow account and then getting hooked up with paypal and the like to sell "pre-orders" and then manually depositing the proceeds into the regular escrow account may be the best available option today.
But, I consider that lack of a simple, pre-built escrow solution to be a business opportunity that I may try to take advantage of myself in the coming year or two, if no one good enough beats me to it first.
I've heard this claim many times before, but I can't find any information to back it up. Maybe you can, since you seem so confident about it's veracity. I think it might just be an urban legend. I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'd just like some proof.
I used to have a somewhat formal breakdown of the typical costs and credits in line-item form, but lost the bookmark to it a while back.
I googled for about 90 seconds and came up with this somewhat specific description of the typical contractual details:
Over the last 7 years, I've generated ~$1.6M in revenue for my work alone.
I'm not a musician, but I do commissioned work.
You, like almost everyone else with a job in the USA works on commission too, you just haven't realized it yet. You go to work, you get paid for putting in a day's worth of labor and then you do not care about what happens to the end results of your labor. If you consistently do good work, you get promoted or move to a job at a new employer that pays better. If the quality of your work sucks, you get fired or "parked" in a dead-end position.
The internet just makes it possible to aggregate the payment from thousands, even millions, of people to commission the work of artists.
Or are you talking out your ass?
Nope, my vocal chords are anatomically correct.
It is precisely because of my personal experience doing commissioned work that I realized artists could do the same thing if they leveraged the internet to directly reach their customers rather than rely on the disintegrating business model of using (or really being used by) a distributor of physical goods.
Don't be stupid. If a label offers you a contract take it. If your career goes anywhere, you can renegotiate a better contract after the terms of the first have been completed.
I agree, don't be stupid. But that's all I agree with.
90% of signed bands never release a second album, because their label dumps them first. Meanwhile, just about all bands make negative money from their first contract. This is important, if you sign with a label, you will end up in debt, you will also end up not owning your own work made while on contract. Standard label contracts are really that abusive. They get away with it, because prior to the internet, they were the only game in town.
You know why Prince changed his name for a few years to that weird multisexual symbol? Because his label owned his name. We got to hear all those jokes about it, when it was really a creative way to escape a hideously abusive recording contract.
Don't be stupid, don't sign with a major label. You never win the lottery, you ain't going to win the label lottery either.
If you are good, you don't need the labels anymore (and chances are they don't want you because "good" does not usually equal "easily packaged up as sex symbols for young teenagers").
Make your own way.
Release your current work to the net with a Creative Commons license. Promote your live performances, sell doodads.
If you are good, you'll gain a following after a while (years probably - so don't quit those day jobs just yet). With a substantial fanbase you can start working on commission. Here's how in a nutshell:
1) Set up an escrow account that people can deposit money in via paypal, credit cards and electronic checks.
2) Name your asking price for the release of a new recording - a whole album or just a track or somewhere in between.
3) Make sure your fanbase knows about your offer, publicisize it every which way you can.
4) When enough people have pre-ordered your new music (via the escrow account) to reach your asking price, release the new performance with a Creative Commons license, and take your money.
If you continue to make good music, each time you release a new track to the public, it becomes advertising for your next commission. If you get popular enough, say just 1 million fans (out of the possible 1 billion or so people on the net), you can really start raking in the bucks on the commissions - ask for a cool $1M to release your next album and all it takes is just 10% of your fans to pay $10 and you are now a very well paid artist. Your fans are happy because unlike with RIAA music, they really will own the music they buy from you, no guilt, shame or jail time for sharing copies with all of their friends and strangers too.
Everybody wins, except the RIAA and their old guard distributors, and nobody will shed a tear for them.
Alternatively, let's get a large enough minority to turn in the rebates.
That's already happened. Rebate redemption rates went from typically under 20% of the total number of purchases to bouncing off of 40% for some types of products over the last 5-6 years.
The result? More rebates with more restrictions. Lots of stupid little restrictions like, you have to buy B&M and not mail-order and you have to mail the rebate out within 7 days of the purchase instead of within 7 days of the end of the rebate period (gotta love the ones that say 7 days from purchase and the clock starts ticking on mail order items when they are shipped, not when they arrive). Also the rebate processing centers have become a lot more unreliable - losing the paperwork is now so common that there have been class action lawsuits about it.
So, the end result of your approach is a war of attrition, how much bullshit is the customer willing to put with in order to get their money back? The more bullshit that people put up with, the higher they raise the threshold next time. The only way to stop that cycle is to opt out completely and achieve rebate nirvana Believe me when I say this, for I am the rebate bodisattva.
Sounds to me like you go in saying "I'll never be bothered to send in this rebate so I'll just pay full price." Who's the sucker?
Please. Is that what you would do? Maybe you really are that stupid, meanwhile the rest of us who have figured out the rebate scam understand that ignoring all items with rebates simply means that you price-shop amongst the remaining, unrebated products taking advantage of coupons, sales and other forms of upfront discounting -- not that you, "just pay full price."
So many people either forget or don't bother with rebates that Best Buy would be crazy to abandon them. It's easy money in their pockets...
It's only easy money as long as people don't wise up to the scam. BBY and almost all other merchants have been riding the rebate scam hard enough to kill a mule for the last half decade at least. It is amazing that it still fools so many people.
All it takes is for a large enough minority (probably less than 20% of all their customers) to decide that any product offered with a rebate is automatically disqualified from consideration for purchase and all that extra margin the merchants have been making on the rebate scam goes away.
The immediate effect will be that any sharp merchant will cease (ab)using the rebate scam in order to try to recapature those customers who've decide they won't play the rebate game any more.
That may possibly be what's going on here now, but I have my doubts about BBY management being akamai enough to notice and react to a rebate backlash. I expect other merchants to act first before BBY gets it in gear. I just don't have any confidence in a company that is primarily known for building and populating big, square smurf caves.
I mean, we've already established that I buy condoms, right?
No WE have not already established that you buy condoms, that's the problem. YOU have and the store WANTS to, when it is really none of their effing business. Literaly.
Your argument seems to be that we should give up our privacy to make marketing easier for businesses and to reduce the amount of junk mail we receive? Sorry man, but that is hardly persuasive.
If she's smoking she should not be on the pill to begin with, that combination increases her risk of cancer at least a couple of hundred percent, probably more.
Re:Is Skype [dev'd outside of USA] exempt?
on
VoIP Wiretapping
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· Score: 0, Troll
How will you force a company based in Luxembourg to insert backdoors in its software when it has no obligation to do so?
How terribly naive.
How about the CIA threatening his business, or family, or just his reputation - maybe Niklas has a few girls (or guys) he doesn't want his wife to find out about. Even if he is squeeky clean, kiddee porn is so easy to plant - you don't even have to physically get to his computer...
Or, slightly less evil, planting an agent on the development team who will put a hidden back door in the code? Doesn't even have to be a "real" back door, just a subtle bug that can be exploited to open things up.
Maybe just a big fat bribe to Zennstrom to make sure it gets done and then act as if it didn't?
Or, slightly less evil, the bait of a huge, lucrative government contract - as long as the product contains certain extra crispy features. That was the plan for the Clipper chip and it wasn't even a secret.
Yeah, I'm not clever, I'm pedantic. That's why I'm going to spell out just how much of an idiot you are.
You see, if you are cheating on your wife you don't want her to find out. That's why it's called "cheating."
So whether you deserve to get caught or not does not matter - if you wanted to get caught you would have just told her in the first place.
Since you don't want to get caught, you don't want anyone else telling her either. When the drugstore sends a "come back for more condoms" advert to your home, the drugstore is doing something that you don't want them to do, something that most people would not even consider it possible for the drugstore to do because they think the drugstore does not know their mailing address. But because they used their credit card there, the drugstore does know their mailing address.
Now, for the average reader that was clear in the first message I posted. But for an idiot like yourself, it took a while for you figure it out and then you thought it was your OWN idea so you went and made your dumbass repetitive posting.
Then, when I called you on it, you responded with the equivalent of, "I know you are, but what am I?"
I'm fairly certain that even this post is far beyond your mental capacity and you'll just come back with some other response that reveals more about your own mental inadequecies than it says about anything else, despite your sincere belief it is in fact brilliant repartee on your part.
Good luck, and here's to you having a moment of epiphany!
PS, see that other post in the thread that uses the word, "example?" That one's for you too.
Slashdot Mirror
At least you aren't doing it constantly though, since we all know that's what proprietary programmers spend their time doing.
If RMS had his way there would still be plenty of people out there making a living writing software. Don't buy into that anti-OSS FUD
Not just writing software - writing it better and more efficiently because they don't have to constantly re-invent the wheel nor worry about violating patents they aren't even aware of.
This could cause a lung disease similar to silicosis.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicolunarosis!!!
Progress comes from research, not from hordes of monkeys copying someone else's work.
Where you see hordes of monkeys, others see skilled practioners of all levels of economic background standing on the shoulders of those who came before them, rapidly advancing the state of the art.
Just as there is no way a company like Disney could come into existence under the current copyright regime that they've promulgated on the US and lots of the rest of the world, there is no way a company like Microsoft or Oracle could have been successful under the software patent system that they've created.
And you know what?
They like it that way. They got theirs, and they don't want anyone else to have a piece of that pie.
I thnk the information revolution is just barely getting started and when I see these companies trying to stagnate it for their own benefit -- clearly not society's benefit -- then it seems obvious that society should not be a willing accomplice.
As for that drug industry, you might want to look deeper into how much of those billions are going into duplicated research and how the historically open centers of research at universities that have helped to jumpstart the bio-tech industry are slowly being gagged, even starved so as to lock out newcomers. Also, just look at how many ridiculously expensive drugs have been created recently that provide little to no benefit over existing treatments, except they come with better PR.
So what do you propose? That MS bribes every single political party, in every single country in Europe? I'm sure you can see how that's impractical
You yourself just explained how it can be done when you said, "If the political alliances form the other way around, who's the current leader can change right in the middle of a term." All they have to do is pay off the right people to ripple that "fragile alliance" and the entire landscape changes. If they do it right, that landscape changes to their benefit.
Don't be so naive as to think that just because the EU is different from the USA that it is also immune from manipulation. Money and power are universal forces in politics, they just manifest differently in different systems.
3:) MS has no option but to comply
I think you misspelled bribe. Corporate 'citizen' or not, they can still beat drums made of euros and the pols will still shake their booties to the rhythm. Just look how close the software patents fight has been so far and imagine 10x the pressure.
Just as long as your business isn't based upon "IP".
Yes, best to stick with TCP and UDP.
It is extremely rare that another protocol at that level proves to be successful in the long run.
Most cableco's give you a "discount" on their ISP service if you also have a minimum tier of tv with them. In many cases, it works out to be a wash - the price of the minimum tier is equal to the discount.
That said, in my experience the cable discount is $10-$15. While the total cost of a voice-line, even the absolute cheapest possible one, after all the fees, taxes and whatever else nickle-and-diming, is somewhere in the $25-$35 range.
So, telcos - sell us naked dsl, put a line-cost-recovery fee in there equal to what the recovery rate is for a voice line, and I'll call that fair. But don't make me pay for all the extra crap that I'm never going to use when I don't even have a handset connected to the line.
Or watch the emergence of uber-cheap community wireless internet access eat your lunch for both DSL and VoIP.
It may happen anyway, cheap is cheap.
So it is pretty conclusive that they don't have to pay it back.
Unless they want to work that is. If the label terminates the contract, the unrecouped advance is waived. But if the artist wants to terminate the contract, the standard form says they have to pay it back as part of the termination. So, the artist sits in limbo until the contract expires, I think it is usually seven years.
They can't make another album because they can't get the funding from their label and they can't go to another label because they are still bound by the terms of the original contract.
They can keep on performing the same songs they were when their first album was released, anything new they write becomes property of their current label, even if it is never published. They can usually perform those new songs live, but they'll never make it onto a published album because the label, who won't publish any more of their albums, owns them. Then the problems with performing live is that they'll get no backing from their label on that, making touring that much harder - not impossible, but definitely hardscrabble.
So, I was wrong, no collection agency from the label, but unless they've got decent paying jobs outside of the biz they are going to be forced into more than a few years of near-poverty and artistic void. That's a scenario that makes it likely they will default on debts to other creditors.
But does the term "debt" really apply is the artist is not legally obligated to pay it back? I mean, it's not like it's really debt.
Yes it is real debt, yes they have to pay it back or their own label starts to sic collection agencies on them and many end up having to go through bankruptcy.
If the first album didn't sell well, I think it's safe to say the label isn't worried about the competition.
There are plenty of reasons that an album does not sell well, for example poor to non-existant marketing. In that article I linked to, the band being interviewed complains that their label spent just enough money on marketing to get a few posters printed up, and no more.
You seem to think that music labels wish to make as much possible money from all of their acts. That would probably be true in a free market, but they have an oligopoly market which means all the standard free-market assumptions go out the window. For the music labels, in the long run maintaining monopoly control of the market is more important than maximizing revenue from each act because monopoly control means they can make hugely out-of-proportion money on a few acts instead. Much more money in total than they could make in a free market scenario, and with a lot less work. Kind of the biz equivalent of "put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket very carefully."
Same thing with books, ever wonder why so many books go out of print today when we have the technology to do stuff like print-on-demand? They may not be bestsellers, but they are competition, and taking them off the shelves at the retailers makes it that much easier for the latest big hit by Clancy or King or whomever to sell even more copies.
I wasn't talking about the authors not complaining, I was talking about all those "music wants to be free" morons not complaining.
A) Well, that must make it OK, then.
B) You may call them "morons" I say they are people who have figured out that the net makes copying a zero-cost operation and that business models based on prohibitive marginal costs are no longer feasible and have historically been abusive to their customers and their suppliers. Just because the "morons" may not be able to propose alternative business plans does not mean their initial observation that music, and really all information, "wants to be free" is any less valid. The net is the net and trying to deny it is like denying that water is wet.
But what all these articles imply is that the artist is then required to pay back the rest of the advance, and this is not true.
Generally they are not required to repay the advance if the label terminates the contract. However, more often then not, the label does not terminate the contract, it leaves it in place but refuses to take any action to move forward on the production any new albums Thus preventing the band from going out on their own and competing with the label's own established acts, and conincidentally, keeping them in debt.
I might point out that the book industry works about the same way, but people don't complain about that.
You must not know many aspiring or published authors. Google around a bit, you will find that generally, unlike most unsigned bands with stars in their eyes, authors do tend to know how the publishing industry is stacked against them but have been just as powerless to do anything about it.
OnStar equipment includes a phone.. Could somebody record what you are doing without you knowing? I'd bet it is possible.
More than possible, it has already been done. The FBI got the Mercedes equivalent of On-Star to route a suspect's telemetry to them first. They remotely turned on the "phone" and listened to all the conversations in the car.
We know about it because Mercedes took the FBI to court over it after the monitoring had extended for more than a month. Mercedes's problem with it was that if there was a real emergency, the FBI's wiretap prevented normal emergency services from being provided to the car owner who had paid for them.
The courts ruled in favor of Mercedes, without addressing the privacy issues at all, instead basing their opinion pretty much on the issue of the wiretap interefering with normal usage.
Here's an article that summarizes it pretty well. The part they missed is that the car vendor in question was Mercedes. I read in a different article at the time that while the company's name was sealed or otherwise not made public, the lawyer for the auto company in the suit was public knowledge and it was also public knowledge that his firm primarily worked for Mercedes with few, if any, other auto manufacturer clients. Thus the inference to Mercedes.
Pure mechanics question: any good suggestions on where to set up such an account? Obviously something with wide accessibility and someplace your fans would trust, non
No, I don't -- at least not one geared to this kind of use. Setting up a regular escrow account and then getting hooked up with paypal and the like to sell "pre-orders" and then manually depositing the proceeds into the regular escrow account may be the best available option today.
But, I consider that lack of a simple, pre-built escrow solution to be a business opportunity that I may try to take advantage of myself in the coming year or two, if no one good enough beats me to it first.
It's idiotic to give a "miles per gallon" figure when you don't include the cost of producing the electricity you use to recharge the battery.
Nah, its perfectly acceptable, as long as you plug your car into someone else's power outlet.
I've heard this claim many times before, but I can't find any information to back it up. Maybe you can, since you seem so confident about it's veracity. I think it might just be an urban legend. I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'd just like some proof.
4 1/music.labels.html
I used to have a somewhat formal breakdown of the typical costs and credits in line-item form, but lost the bookmark to it a while back.
I googled for about 90 seconds and came up with this somewhat specific description of the typical contractual details:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/vol17/issue
So how much money have you made so far?
Over the last 7 years, I've generated ~$1.6M in revenue for my work alone.
I'm not a musician, but I do commissioned work.
You, like almost everyone else with a job in the USA works on commission too, you just haven't realized it yet. You go to work, you get paid for putting in a day's worth of labor and then you do not care about what happens to the end results of your labor. If you consistently do good work, you get promoted or move to a job at a new employer that pays better. If the quality of your work sucks, you get fired or "parked" in a dead-end position.
The internet just makes it possible to aggregate the payment from thousands, even millions, of people to commission the work of artists.
Or are you talking out your ass?
Nope, my vocal chords are anatomically correct.
It is precisely because of my personal experience doing commissioned work that I realized artists could do the same thing if they leveraged the internet to directly reach their customers rather than rely on the disintegrating business model of using (or really being used by) a distributor of physical goods.
Don't be stupid. If a label offers you a contract take it. If your career goes anywhere, you can renegotiate a better contract after the terms of the first have been completed.
I agree, don't be stupid. But that's all I agree with.
90% of signed bands never release a second album, because their label dumps them first. Meanwhile, just about all bands make negative money from their first contract. This is important, if you sign with a label, you will end up in debt, you will also end up not owning your own work made while on contract. Standard label contracts are really that abusive. They get away with it, because prior to the internet, they were the only game in town.
You know why Prince changed his name for a few years to that weird multisexual symbol? Because his label owned his name. We got to hear all those jokes about it, when it was really a creative way to escape a hideously abusive recording contract.
Don't be stupid, don't sign with a major label. You never win the lottery, you ain't going to win the label lottery either.
If you are good, you don't need the labels anymore (and chances are they don't want you because "good" does not usually equal "easily packaged up as sex symbols for young teenagers").
Make your own way.
Release your current work to the net with a Creative Commons license. Promote your live performances, sell doodads.
If you are good, you'll gain a following after a while (years probably - so don't quit those day jobs just yet). With a substantial fanbase you can start working on commission. Here's how in a nutshell:
1) Set up an escrow account that people can deposit money in via paypal, credit cards and electronic checks.
2) Name your asking price for the release of a new recording - a whole album or just a track or somewhere in between.
3) Make sure your fanbase knows about your offer, publicisize it every which way you can.
4) When enough people have pre-ordered your new music (via the escrow account) to reach your asking price, release the new performance with a Creative Commons license, and take your money.
If you continue to make good music, each time you release a new track to the public, it becomes advertising for your next commission. If you get popular enough, say just 1 million fans (out of the possible 1 billion or so people on the net), you can really start raking in the bucks on the commissions - ask for a cool $1M to release your next album and all it takes is just 10% of your fans to pay $10 and you are now a very well paid artist. Your fans are happy because unlike with RIAA music, they really will own the music they buy from you, no guilt, shame or jail time for sharing copies with all of their friends and strangers too.
Everybody wins, except the RIAA and their old guard distributors, and nobody will shed a tear for them.
Alternatively, let's get a large enough minority to turn in the rebates.
That's already happened. Rebate redemption rates went from typically under 20% of the total number of purchases to bouncing off of 40% for some types of products over the last 5-6 years.
The result? More rebates with more restrictions. Lots of stupid little restrictions like, you have to buy B&M and not mail-order and you have to mail the rebate out within 7 days of the purchase instead of within 7 days of the end of the rebate period (gotta love the ones that say 7 days from purchase and the clock starts ticking on mail order items when they are shipped, not when they arrive). Also the rebate processing centers have become a lot more unreliable - losing the paperwork is now so common that there have been class action lawsuits about it.
So, the end result of your approach is a war of attrition, how much bullshit is the customer willing to put with in order to get their money back? The more bullshit that people put up with, the higher they raise the threshold next time. The only way to stop that cycle is to opt out completely and achieve rebate nirvana Believe me when I say this, for I am the rebate bodisattva.
Sounds to me like you go in saying "I'll never be bothered to send in this rebate so I'll just pay full price." Who's the sucker?
Please. Is that what you would do? Maybe you really are that stupid, meanwhile the rest of us who have figured out the rebate scam understand that ignoring all items with rebates simply means that you price-shop amongst the remaining, unrebated products taking advantage of coupons, sales and other forms of upfront discounting -- not that you, "just pay full price."
So many people either forget or don't bother with rebates that Best Buy would be crazy to abandon them. It's easy money in their pockets...
It's only easy money as long as people don't wise up to the scam. BBY and almost all other merchants have been riding the rebate scam hard enough to kill a mule for the last half decade at least. It is amazing that it still fools so many people.
All it takes is for a large enough minority (probably less than 20% of all their customers) to decide that any product offered with a rebate is automatically disqualified from consideration for purchase and all that extra margin the merchants have been making on the rebate scam goes away.
The immediate effect will be that any sharp merchant will cease (ab)using the rebate scam in order to try to recapature those customers who've decide they won't play the rebate game any more.
That may possibly be what's going on here now, but I have my doubts about BBY management being akamai enough to notice and react to a rebate backlash. I expect other merchants to act first before BBY gets it in gear. I just don't have any confidence in a company that is primarily known for building and populating big, square smurf caves.
On a note of that, I've been told that the social security act banned certain uses of the SSN as ID.
Is that really really true?
Yes.
If so, where does it say that?
On the back of your social security card, "Not to be used for identification." At least they used to.
I would love to actually take a university to court and make them change. Why hasn't anyone done this?
Because it only applied to the card, not the actual number.
Read the straight dope about it for more details.
I mean, we've already established that I buy condoms, right?
No WE have not already established that you buy condoms, that's the problem.
YOU have and the store WANTS to, when it is really none of their effing business. Literaly.
Your argument seems to be that we should give up our privacy to make marketing easier for businesses and to reduce the amount of junk mail we receive? Sorry man, but that is hardly persuasive.
If she's smoking she should not be on the pill to begin with, that combination increases her risk of cancer at least a couple of hundred percent, probably more.
How will you force a company based in Luxembourg to insert backdoors in its software when it has no obligation to do so?
How terribly naive.
How about the CIA threatening his business, or family, or just his reputation - maybe Niklas has a few girls (or guys) he doesn't want his wife to find out about. Even if he is squeeky clean, kiddee porn is so easy to plant - you don't even have to physically get to his computer...
Or, slightly less evil, planting an agent on the development team who will put a hidden back door in the code? Doesn't even have to be a "real" back door, just a subtle bug that can be exploited to open things up.
Maybe just a big fat bribe to Zennstrom to make sure it gets done and then act as if it didn't?
Or, slightly less evil, the bait of a huge, lucrative government contract - as long as the product contains certain extra crispy features. That was the plan for the Clipper chip and it wasn't even a secret.
Ah, you brits have a different use for laws. You see, in the USA laws are written to protect businesses interests, not people interests.
Yeah, I'm not clever, I'm pedantic. That's why I'm going to spell out just how much of an idiot you are.
You see, if you are cheating on your wife you don't want her to find out. That's why it's called "cheating."
So whether you deserve to get caught or not does not matter - if you wanted to get caught you would have just told her in the first place.
Since you don't want to get caught, you don't want anyone else telling her either. When the drugstore sends a "come back for more condoms" advert to your home, the drugstore is doing something that you don't want them to do, something that most people would not even consider it possible for the drugstore to do because they think the drugstore does not know their mailing address. But because they used their credit card there, the drugstore does know their mailing address.
Now, for the average reader that was clear in the first message I posted. But for an idiot like yourself, it took a while for you figure it out and then you thought it was your OWN idea so you went and made your dumbass repetitive posting.
Then, when I called you on it, you responded with the equivalent of, "I know you are, but what am I?"
I'm fairly certain that even this post is far beyond your mental capacity and you'll just come back with some other response that reveals more about your own mental inadequecies than it says about anything else, despite your sincere belief it is in fact brilliant repartee on your part.
Good luck, and here's to you having a moment of epiphany!
PS, see that other post in the thread that uses the word, "example?" That one's for you too.