They were selling the songs for profit though. Even if they were to set a figure of $1 per infraction, that would be $1 for each copy of a song that was sold which will still be a very significant sum - 300,000 songs on the list, assume they each sold a paltry 1000 copies and suddenly they're liable for $300 Million which would be a significant but manageable amount for those corporations to pay off.
I think it's a little more likely they'll end up paying a much higher rate as they were willfully infringing for commercial gain - look how much harder the pirates selling fake CDs were hit by the law than those who just downloaded.
Hmm, you may have sold me on vinyl there, I'm sick of crappy masterings which destroy music with range compression. Now if only the bands I listened to were popular enough to record on vinyl. (Well actually I did already buy Century Child by Nightwish on backonblack vinyl a few years ago - when i already owned the cd - for the novelty, will be giving it a very close listen to compare the mix now.
So today there's a news story about it being used without permission and suddenly it's dead? If it's good enough to make it into the end product of a company as well known as Palm obviously it's working and there will be more companies who decide to licence GPL code and have an end product out faster that was cheaper to code.
SETI is a fairly pointless hobby (even if we 'prove' there are aliens out there we won't be able to communicate with them for decades even assuming we can decode their signal AND they're listening in the right fragment of sky to hear us if we transmit back).
folding@home is valuable research on human biology with real world applications.(and not just curing^H^H^H^H^H^H improving treatments for cancer)
Available yes, but there's a market of people who aren't going to buy a wii to play that game but already have a phone. Also, the games you can play on the Wii are all specifically tweaked by Nintendo before they sell them, costing them far more programmers time than just releasing the original ROM would.
Either start selling copies of these roms (or licenses to play them) on your website or shut the hell up. You're not losing profit on games for consoles which are 3 and 4 generations obsolete if you're not selling new copies of those games. Charging people say $1, $2 a pop to download 1meg roms off your site would have a pretty damn high profit margin I think.
Yeah, the current 'ChromeOS only' decide idea is stupid and will make it fail (at least until it marges with android...). But it's open source and there will be a version out there compiled by someone for people to dual boot on netbooks - your own netbook I mean, not a chrome netbook.
Not for displaying them to people. Just yesterday my aunt showed us all the pictures from her last vacation on her netbook, it was brilliant for the purpose. Small enough to be easily carried along with other things (unlike a full sizes laptop) and plenty of battery life. Physical size of the display is a lot more important than ppi for this purpose and having a screen roughly 3x the physical size of the Droid's is quite significant. ChromeOS would fail horribly here if they don't give you access to storage on the device though - we were at a picnic and while I had plenty of 3g reception (i know because I uploaded 200mb of pictures I took on my digital camera to the net just after I took them using my Android phone), viewing pictures over this type of connection isn't anywhere near as good as having them load instantly from the hard drive. Boy i'm getting sidetracked here.
Nobody's going to whip out a netbook to take candid pictures.
They're still going to be carrying around a cameraphone, maybe not one as chunky as the droid though.
Email? Smartphones win again, due to their better portability.
Actually i'd say the opposite. Smartphones are capable of reading emails fine, but if you want to compose something more than a paragraph long, watch video attachments, edit an attached word document and return it etc, chrome os wins by far.
Netbooks are portable, but smartphones are even more so, and that gives them a strategic advantage.
But their portability limits them, particularly battery life for extensive use (if i'm using my HTC Magic all day it'll go flat before I get home. OK well not running cyanogen, but running hero roms it does. Droids gotta be at least that bad with the faster processor, bigger screen etc.
So, word processing and spreadsheets? Do you *really* want to do that on a tiny netbook?
Sure. The 7 inch netbooks aren't great for that, but a 10 inch is perfectly adequate for all kinds of work. I know plenty of people who write word docs on them, code on them, most things you'd do on a full PC actually.
You seem to think netbooks are a lot more limited than they are. Granted Chrome isn't going to do all these things but dualbooting so you have quick access to the web within 7 seconds will be popular with a lot of people who don't want a smartphone or find a smartphone's small screen insufficient, and you'll be able to do this as long as they keep is open source. I've already run the damn OS in a VM (wouldn't bother though, it's basically just Chrome with an option to connect to WiFi or not.
Driving a car is not a right, either catch public transportation or live within walking distance of your work.
Not everyone in the world is responsible/coordinated/skilled enough to drive a car. And when I say responsible I'm including people who are certainly not hoons but don't check their mirrors, don't pay attention, don't know the road rules or try to do other things (call, text, eat, drink, other things which distract them) while driving.
You have no idea what you're talking about. F1 cars are that much faster because they have an incredible amount of downforce that a motorcycle can't compete with. i.e. that often quoted fact that (assuming it could somehow start off up there at high speed), an F1 car could drive on the ceiling.
F1 cars and roadcars are about as similar as a WWII fighter and a modern JetFighter.
No. There should be higher taxes on whoever causes the accident, which is usually the car because a lot of drivers don't know what they're doing and don't properly check their blind spots for motorcycles. Of course if it's the motorcyclists fault, they're fair game, but generally if it's their fault and they're being an idiot, they wind up dead.
Really, more people should be riding motorcycles, if they drive sensibly it would do a hell of a lot more for the environment and congestion on our roads which are mostly taken up by sedans with single occupants.
And you're blatantly wrong about the cost to the community of motorcycle accidents, you're underestimating their contribution.
I have a horrible sense of smell as my nose is usually blocked from hayfever and other allergies (I know this because other people often notice odours that I simply can't) but I can still smell a smoker by being within 2 meters of them. My mother was even more sensitive to it, she could tell if i'd been near a smoker in town, which is impressive considering I would just be walking past them - while waiting at bus stops i'd always move upwind of any smokers as I couldn't stand the smell and irritation of the smoke.
Yes, but I have a phone anyway. If I started wearing my watch again I'd still be carrying around my phone because my watch doesn't make phonecalls (or browse the web, receive email, play music, wake me up on weekdays but not weekends, have games, tell me the weather etc).
3. I don't need to recharge my wrist watch every few days. How many days can you talk on your cell phone run without a recharge?
Not many, but I wouldn't let it go flat.. I'd still like to have a working phone with me. Wearing a watch doesn't make my phone not go flat.
4. Does your cell phone fit conveniently on your wrist like a watch? Or would you have to duct-tape it?
No, but it doesn't pull our the hair on my arm either. Takes 3 seconds to check it from my pocket when I need to check it which isn't often. Also, many of my friends have pocket watches, because they're awesome. I would get one if I had the clothes to go with it. Fortunately my phone is purely functional rather than a fashion statement.
5. Is your cell phone as light as a watch?
Yep. Well, as light as makes no difference to a decent metal watch
6. Can you make calls on your cell phone without some sort of plan, even if it's pay-as-you-go? I can still tell time with my watch - no plan needed.
I can still tell time on my phone without a plan! And yes, I could actually make calls on it without a plan - I'd need a free wifi hotspot nearby thouugh. And I can always call the emergency services
7. My watch doesn't have "dead zones" where it stops telling time. Does your cell phone have dead zones where you can't make calls?
My phone doesn't have a dead zone where it stops telling the time. Your watch has a dead zone covering the entire universe where it can't make calls
8. I don't have to worry about my watch interrupting an important meeting with an embarrassing ring-tone.
My phone goes on silent when I walk into the office automatically.
9. If someone steals my watch, I don't have to worry that they have a lot of my contacts.
People can't see my phone glinting on my wrist and don't steal it.
10. A thief can't run u a big bill for me on my watch.
You don't know that you can call your carrier and tell them to brick your phone?
11. I don't have to back up my watch.
I don't have to backup my phone, it does that automatically
12. It's legal to look at my watch while driving.
My car isn't so crappy that it doesn't have a clock in it.
Mine keeps track when out of range fine (well at least I assume so, I'll check it today but would be extremely surprised if it's out at all - I have my phone on aeroplane mode at work so there's 8 hours of it relying on it's own little clock. 2 hours in and it's within 3 seconds of this XP PC's clock so it can't be that bad. At this rate it might go out by 1 minute a day... assuming that 3 seconds is even drift and not just a slight difference.
Can't confirm it auto shifts time zones, but I would be very surprised if it didn't (as it's an android phone and very location aware, it gives me weather for whatever suburb i'm in on the home screen!)
Everyone let's hit Ctrl+F and see how many posts tomhudson has made on this page. Look at the content of each one.
Tom, do you need some vaseline to help you get your dick out of that droid? Betting you're an ex iPhone fanboy, haven't seen this level of fanaticism for something other than an apple product before.
Maybe you should actually go and buy that droid, then come back here and tell us how much you enjoy serious web browsing on it. I've got an android phone and while it's good, it's still light years away from having a full tabbed desktop browser (particularly in speed, flash and video playback) as well as a mouse and a keyboard you can type on with digits other than your thumbs.
If someone was selling a $200 Chrome OS device I would snap it up for browsing on the go
Android is fairly locked down - in the process of installing an application from the market the market tells you exactly what that app has the API hooks to do - see this screenshot http://media.photobucket.com/image/android%20market%20access%20rights/msanto/One-Offs%202008/AndroidMarket.jpg. Of course users are lazy and a lot won't bother to read this screen, so you'll have some apps doing bad things, which will get pulled from the market as soon as anyone notices, sure, but in the meantime they can't really brick your phone. Being based on linux regular applications don't have su rights and can't touch anything important. On a rooted phone (think jailbroken except it's not against their terms!) like mine any application which tries to use root privledges makes a screen pop up asking me whether this app should be allowed to or not so I'm still protected.
For all the rampant piracy the chinese government ignores, google can't just ignore their IP rights - china will end up blocking them and they'll all start using yahoo or bing. Would be nice if they could stick it to them and say that the copyright doesn't apply in the US or something but really, you just can't with these people.
Good points. Starting with the simplest (i'm mainly looking at the music industry here)
2) is not really true, while protools has lowered the entry price for 'garage bands' the production of more mainstream successful albums takes expensive equipment and expertise which can't be reduced. It would be very true for the blockbuster movie industry, then untrue again for the majority TV series which are on lower budgets (though this is more guesswork)
3) is certainly not true, marketing is only really an important expense in the popular market where there are a large number of products of similar quality and market presence seems to determine success. In other circles 'word of mouth' is more important.
1) This is very hard to determine empirically, for my opinion I'm working off the assumptions a) given a choice of what to pay, people will pay a lot less than current retail b) lowered cost will not increase sales of individual works sufficiently to offset the price decrease assuming all products in the market undergo the same price decrease. b depends on peoples buying habits, I'm making an assumption that people who are currently forced to spend x amount to get everything they really want would given the choice, buy more items at a lower price but still spend
The other issue with abolishing copyright is plagarism / IP theft, which is an issue even with the copyright system. Granted the current system is unfair to those who are plagarised by parties they do not have the funding to challenge legally but there is a lot of theft it currently prevents.
It worked for radiohead and reznor because they were already very well known and got plenty of publicity for it (in addition to all the fans who would have bought the album anyway). I myself almost downloaded Reznors despite not listening to any of his work pretty much ever.
World of goo also rode the publicity wave being one of (if not the) first to do the 'pay what you want' thing in the games market. If you read that article you linked it mentions that Steam sales (fixed price, more conventional) had a very significant 40% increase from the promotion. And this was a fairly popular 'casual' game by that time anyway (a lot of people I know had it around january, myself included). Add in that the production costs for it were very low and yes, that model can work. My point however was that would not work for products with more significant development costs which do not already have a large following.
Slashdot Mirror
They were selling the songs for profit though. Even if they were to set a figure of $1 per infraction, that would be $1 for each copy of a song that was sold which will still be a very significant sum - 300,000 songs on the list, assume they each sold a paltry 1000 copies and suddenly they're liable for $300 Million which would be a significant but manageable amount for those corporations to pay off.
I think it's a little more likely they'll end up paying a much higher rate as they were willfully infringing for commercial gain - look how much harder the pirates selling fake CDs were hit by the law than those who just downloaded.
I bet you'll find more new music in DVD-A than on vinyl though.
Hmm, you may have sold me on vinyl there, I'm sick of crappy masterings which destroy music with range compression. Now if only the bands I listened to were popular enough to record on vinyl. (Well actually I did already buy Century Child by Nightwish on backonblack vinyl a few years ago - when i already owned the cd - for the novelty, will be giving it a very close listen to compare the mix now.
So today there's a news story about it being used without permission and suddenly it's dead? If it's good enough to make it into the end product of a company as well known as Palm obviously it's working and there will be more companies who decide to licence GPL code and have an end product out faster that was cheaper to code.
They're talking about filing charges because he's also accused of stealing stuff, dling pron on school pcs etc. Read the article.
SETI is a fairly pointless hobby (even if we 'prove' there are aliens out there we won't be able to communicate with them for decades even assuming we can decode their signal AND they're listening in the right fragment of sky to hear us if we transmit back). folding@home is valuable research on human biology with real world applications.(and not just curing^H^H^H^H^H^H improving treatments for cancer)
Wifi with an Optus SIM won't give you access to the paid market? That sucks. Glad I'm with vodafone.
Available yes, but there's a market of people who aren't going to buy a wii to play that game but already have a phone. Also, the games you can play on the Wii are all specifically tweaked by Nintendo before they sell them, costing them far more programmers time than just releasing the original ROM would.
Either start selling copies of these roms (or licenses to play them) on your website or shut the hell up. You're not losing profit on games for consoles which are 3 and 4 generations obsolete if you're not selling new copies of those games. Charging people say $1, $2 a pop to download 1meg roms off your site would have a pretty damn high profit margin I think.
I know, I'm surprised no other comments have picked up on this. What the hell is chrome OS knocking off - author is a moron.
Yeah, the current 'ChromeOS only' decide idea is stupid and will make it fail (at least until it marges with android...). But it's open source and there will be a version out there compiled by someone for people to dual boot on netbooks - your own netbook I mean, not a chrome netbook.
Pictures? Smartphones win there.
Not for displaying them to people. Just yesterday my aunt showed us all the pictures from her last vacation on her netbook, it was brilliant for the purpose. Small enough to be easily carried along with other things (unlike a full sizes laptop) and plenty of battery life. Physical size of the display is a lot more important than ppi for this purpose and having a screen roughly 3x the physical size of the Droid's is quite significant. ChromeOS would fail horribly here if they don't give you access to storage on the device though - we were at a picnic and while I had plenty of 3g reception (i know because I uploaded 200mb of pictures I took on my digital camera to the net just after I took them using my Android phone), viewing pictures over this type of connection isn't anywhere near as good as having them load instantly from the hard drive. Boy i'm getting sidetracked here.
Nobody's going to whip out a netbook to take candid pictures.
They're still going to be carrying around a cameraphone, maybe not one as chunky as the droid though.
Email? Smartphones win again, due to their better portability.
Actually i'd say the opposite. Smartphones are capable of reading emails fine, but if you want to compose something more than a paragraph long, watch video attachments, edit an attached word document and return it etc, chrome os wins by far.
Netbooks are portable, but smartphones are even more so, and that gives them a strategic advantage.
But their portability limits them, particularly battery life for extensive use (if i'm using my HTC Magic all day it'll go flat before I get home. OK well not running cyanogen, but running hero roms it does. Droids gotta be at least that bad with the faster processor, bigger screen etc.
So, word processing and spreadsheets? Do you *really* want to do that on a tiny netbook?
Sure. The 7 inch netbooks aren't great for that, but a 10 inch is perfectly adequate for all kinds of work. I know plenty of people who write word docs on them, code on them, most things you'd do on a full PC actually.
You seem to think netbooks are a lot more limited than they are. Granted Chrome isn't going to do all these things but dualbooting so you have quick access to the web within 7 seconds will be popular with a lot of people who don't want a smartphone or find a smartphone's small screen insufficient, and you'll be able to do this as long as they keep is open source. I've already run the damn OS in a VM (wouldn't bother though, it's basically just Chrome with an option to connect to WiFi or not.
Driving a car is not a right, either catch public transportation or live within walking distance of your work.
Not everyone in the world is responsible/coordinated/skilled enough to drive a car. And when I say responsible I'm including people who are certainly not hoons but don't check their mirrors, don't pay attention, don't know the road rules or try to do other things (call, text, eat, drink, other things which distract them) while driving.
You have no idea what you're talking about. F1 cars are that much faster because they have an incredible amount of downforce that a motorcycle can't compete with. i.e. that often quoted fact that (assuming it could somehow start off up there at high speed), an F1 car could drive on the ceiling.
F1 cars and roadcars are about as similar as a WWII fighter and a modern JetFighter.
No. There should be higher taxes on whoever causes the accident, which is usually the car because a lot of drivers don't know what they're doing and don't properly check their blind spots for motorcycles. Of course if it's the motorcyclists fault, they're fair game, but generally if it's their fault and they're being an idiot, they wind up dead.
Really, more people should be riding motorcycles, if they drive sensibly it would do a hell of a lot more for the environment and congestion on our roads which are mostly taken up by sedans with single occupants.
And you're blatantly wrong about the cost to the community of motorcycle accidents, you're underestimating their contribution.
I have a horrible sense of smell as my nose is usually blocked from hayfever and other allergies (I know this because other people often notice odours that I simply can't) but I can still smell a smoker by being within 2 meters of them. My mother was even more sensitive to it, she could tell if i'd been near a smoker in town, which is impressive considering I would just be walking past them - while waiting at bus stops i'd always move upwind of any smokers as I couldn't stand the smell and irritation of the smoke.
Yes, but I have a phone anyway. If I started wearing my watch again I'd still be carrying around my phone because my watch doesn't make phonecalls (or browse the web, receive email, play music, wake me up on weekdays but not weekends, have games, tell me the weather etc).
3. I don't need to recharge my wrist watch every few days. How many days can you talk on your cell phone run without a recharge?
Not many, but I wouldn't let it go flat.. I'd still like to have a working phone with me. Wearing a watch doesn't make my phone not go flat.
4. Does your cell phone fit conveniently on your wrist like a watch? Or would you have to duct-tape it?
No, but it doesn't pull our the hair on my arm either. Takes 3 seconds to check it from my pocket when I need to check it which isn't often. Also, many of my friends have pocket watches, because they're awesome. I would get one if I had the clothes to go with it. Fortunately my phone is purely functional rather than a fashion statement.
5. Is your cell phone as light as a watch?
Yep. Well, as light as makes no difference to a decent metal watch
6. Can you make calls on your cell phone without some sort of plan, even if it's pay-as-you-go? I can still tell time with my watch - no plan needed.
I can still tell time on my phone without a plan! And yes, I could actually make calls on it without a plan - I'd need a free wifi hotspot nearby thouugh. And I can always call the emergency services
7. My watch doesn't have "dead zones" where it stops telling time. Does your cell phone have dead zones where you can't make calls?
My phone doesn't have a dead zone where it stops telling the time. Your watch has a dead zone covering the entire universe where it can't make calls
8. I don't have to worry about my watch interrupting an important meeting with an embarrassing ring-tone.
My phone goes on silent when I walk into the office automatically.
9. If someone steals my watch, I don't have to worry that they have a lot of my contacts.
People can't see my phone glinting on my wrist and don't steal it.
10. A thief can't run u a big bill for me on my watch.
You don't know that you can call your carrier and tell them to brick your phone?
11. I don't have to back up my watch.
I don't have to backup my phone, it does that automatically
12. It's legal to look at my watch while driving.
My car isn't so crappy that it doesn't have a clock in it.
Mine keeps track when out of range fine (well at least I assume so, I'll check it today but would be extremely surprised if it's out at all - I have my phone on aeroplane mode at work so there's 8 hours of it relying on it's own little clock. 2 hours in and it's within 3 seconds of this XP PC's clock so it can't be that bad. At this rate it might go out by 1 minute a day... assuming that 3 seconds is even drift and not just a slight difference. Can't confirm it auto shifts time zones, but I would be very surprised if it didn't (as it's an android phone and very location aware, it gives me weather for whatever suburb i'm in on the home screen!)
Everyone let's hit Ctrl+F and see how many posts tomhudson has made on this page. Look at the content of each one.
Tom, do you need some vaseline to help you get your dick out of that droid? Betting you're an ex iPhone fanboy, haven't seen this level of fanaticism for something other than an apple product before.
Maybe you should actually go and buy that droid, then come back here and tell us how much you enjoy serious web browsing on it. I've got an android phone and while it's good, it's still light years away from having a full tabbed desktop browser (particularly in speed, flash and video playback) as well as a mouse and a keyboard you can type on with digits other than your thumbs. If someone was selling a $200 Chrome OS device I would snap it up for browsing on the go
I'm not sure on the exacting rules of it but they're certainly not going to brick phones or anything.
Android is fairly locked down - in the process of installing an application from the market the market tells you exactly what that app has the API hooks to do - see this screenshot http://media.photobucket.com/image/android%20market%20access%20rights/msanto/One-Offs%202008/AndroidMarket.jpg. Of course users are lazy and a lot won't bother to read this screen, so you'll have some apps doing bad things, which will get pulled from the market as soon as anyone notices, sure, but in the meantime they can't really brick your phone. Being based on linux regular applications don't have su rights and can't touch anything important. On a rooted phone (think jailbroken except it's not against their terms!) like mine any application which tries to use root privledges makes a screen pop up asking me whether this app should be allowed to or not so I'm still protected.
For all the rampant piracy the chinese government ignores, google can't just ignore their IP rights - china will end up blocking them and they'll all start using yahoo or bing. Would be nice if they could stick it to them and say that the copyright doesn't apply in the US or something but really, you just can't with these people.
Good points. Starting with the simplest (i'm mainly looking at the music industry here) 2) is not really true, while protools has lowered the entry price for 'garage bands' the production of more mainstream successful albums takes expensive equipment and expertise which can't be reduced. It would be very true for the blockbuster movie industry, then untrue again for the majority TV series which are on lower budgets (though this is more guesswork) 3) is certainly not true, marketing is only really an important expense in the popular market where there are a large number of products of similar quality and market presence seems to determine success. In other circles 'word of mouth' is more important.
1) This is very hard to determine empirically, for my opinion I'm working off the assumptions
a) given a choice of what to pay, people will pay a lot less than current retail
b) lowered cost will not increase sales of individual works sufficiently to offset the price decrease assuming all products in the market undergo the same price decrease.
b depends on peoples buying habits, I'm making an assumption that people who are currently forced to spend x amount to get everything they really want would given the choice, buy more items at a lower price but still spend
The other issue with abolishing copyright is plagarism / IP theft, which is an issue even with the copyright system. Granted the current system is unfair to those who are plagarised by parties they do not have the funding to challenge legally but there is a lot of theft it currently prevents.
It worked for radiohead and reznor because they were already very well known and got plenty of publicity for it (in addition to all the fans who would have bought the album anyway). I myself almost downloaded Reznors despite not listening to any of his work pretty much ever.
World of goo also rode the publicity wave being one of (if not the) first to do the 'pay what you want' thing in the games market. If you read that article you linked it mentions that Steam sales (fixed price, more conventional) had a very significant 40% increase from the promotion. And this was a fairly popular 'casual' game by that time anyway (a lot of people I know had it around january, myself included). Add in that the production costs for it were very low and yes, that model can work. My point however was that would not work for products with more significant development costs which do not already have a large following.