As an independent software developer, I work like crazy trying to create stuff that will sell. I don't really care for the excessively long copyrights, but the conclusion of your argument seems to be that copyright shouldn't exist at all and piracy should be legal. This would devastate us, which would in the long term harm you as well. I think every society with an enlightened self-interest would support copyright. Of course, there seem to be a lot of people looking out for their own short-term self-interest, which is what piracy is. The law exists because people are doing the latter rather than the former.
As for why the ISPs "don't like the law either", I'm sure they don't like the extra work of keeping track of this information. Plus, there's the *money* aspect to it. A handful of ISPs obviously see it in their interest to cater to a self-serving pirate if it means more customers (which means more money). From their point of view, as long as they get an extra $5 a month, who cares if someone else who should've gotten paid for their work takes a $100 loss. That strikes me as pretty selfish from the ISPs standpoint.
They broke into a federal agency and stole documents without repercussion.
If you're talking about Operation Snow White, a bunch of scientologists went to jail for that. L. Ron Hubbard, himself, went into hiding the rest of his life to avoid getting caught by the US government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
They blackmailed the IRS into granting them a tax exemption.
Do you mean they classified themselves as a religion to get tax exemption status?
An indie developer studio can charge $5-15 per game and most of the cash goes to the people who made it. A traditional big studio game sells for $50 and maybe ten cents goes to the developers. The rest goes to a faceless corp that is manned by MBas who hate games anyway.
Do you have a source for that? I'm just thinking the "maybe ten cents goes to the developers" is more of a rash assumption based on lack of knowledge and the belief that the suits always take 99%. It's been a while since I examined big-budget game pricing, but I think the numbers were something like this: the store (e.g. BestBuy) takes 50% of the sales money (e.g. you buy a game for $50, and BestBuy keeps $25). The publisher takes some money and also spends money on advertising (which can get pricey, I think I remember advertising on some games getting upto $200 million). The game developer ends up with something like 10% to 20% of the original sales money. The exact percentage depends on the company and how well established they are at putting out hits. My knowledge on these numbers is a few years old now, so I don't know if they're accurate anymore.
If you can make music and script a little, you can churn out games quite easily with something like Unity 3D. Whether they're any good will probably depend on how creative you are, but it really isn't hard these days at all.
If it were really that easy, I'm sure there would be an avalanche of great indie games - which, of course, would increase competition, driving down sales again. The reality is that you have to be head and shoulders over what other indie developers are doing. Also, there's something about the phrase "churn out games quite easily" that doesn't smell like quality.
Has anyone of you by chance had sex with Swedish women? They're completely out of control in bed, like furias or something. It's fireworks all the way.
Heh, heh. How ridiculous to say that all Swedish women are crazy in bed.
Imagine you're a guy exclusively preoccupied with waging war on unrighteous and the liars and idealistic enough to stand up to U.S. government, you come to Sweden..
Or, imagine your a cool hacker who likes having power over other people ("I can break into your computers and steal your secrets. You can't stop me. I am a god.") And you have a dictatorial streak (as confirmed by people who have worked with him) and you crave fame for your ego's appeasement. Now, you can also use this newfound fame for sex. Women are easy for a man like that. In fact, you'd even steal men's girlfriends in bars, as a sign of your power (he's been known to hit on women at bars right in front of their boyfriends). Is that a manifestation of his power - to take the girlfriend, to disrespect the boyfriend despite his desire to stop it from happening? Imagine what an ego-trip it would be if you could sleep with famous politicians wives (he's also bragged about that). Not only are you manifesting your power over those politicians by sleeping with their wives, but you've now got a secret scandal that could end up in major newspapers. Meh. Assange sounds like a pretty ugly human being with a sex and power addiction, and Wikileaks is his vehicle.
But perhaps the software developer can learn from the electrician... raise the 1800$ first from future users (whether you find 1000 of them to pay $1.80... or 100 of them who want it badly enough to pay $18, then write and release the software, and then it doesn't matter how many copies get made.
Well, I agree, but some of the issues I see with this is that:
- You have to catch the eye of a lot of people before you'll find enough people who want to support your work, and you'll still miss a lot of people who would've paid you but didn't know about your project. I'm not sure if this would be an advertising cost (which you can't recoup) or if websites would (for some reason) promote your project for free. For example, if you wanted to find 1000 people to pay $1.80, then you might have to get your project idea seen by 100,000 people and only 1% of them actually agree to support you. In the end, there might be 50,000 people who would be interested in your software, but 98% of them never knew about it beforehand (this is all lost revenue, and it means money that can't be spent actually producing the software).
- People don't know the quality of your project before its done. At least with electricians, there's a pretty good idea of what the outcome will be when he's done, but software could be all over the map: it could be buggy, it could have terrible AI, it could have great artwork and animation or it could be terrible, the project might get 75% done and then the developer runs out of money and pushes it out.
- There's an incentive for people to sit on the sidelines and contribute nothing because they know they'll get the product for free when it's done. While "not contributing" might slightly increase the chances that the project will never be produced, it's also true that one individual person's contribution will not make the difference between making and breaking the project. By analogy, if everyone had to pay $50 when they wanted to vote for the president, I think most people would stay home and just say, "My $50 probably isn't going to be the deciding vote, therefore, I'll just keep my money and wind up with the same guy in office whether or not I voted."
You did notice the title of this thread, right? It's "Monster Success" (it's a phrase that was used in the article summary). I'm just pointing out that, while a million dollars sounds like bathtubs full of money, once you slice up the money, it's not the millionaire-creating event that people assume it is.
Yeah, it's the secret truth of the internet: people like to imagine that they (the crowd) are more generous than they really are. The fundraising goal this year was 10.4 million dollars, and 4 million of that came from EBay and Google. That's 6.4 million from everyone else. For comparison, the Encyclopedia Britannica had revenue of $650 million in 1990 (their peak year). That's a hundred-fold more money than 6.4 million.
I'm not necessarily saying it's good or bad. It just has to be put into a bigger context - specifically, you have to make some guesses about how much the Indie Bundle is making up their total sales. Also, how many people worked on the game, and how long did it take. In the case of Braid - it's been out a while (so it's at the end of it's sales cycle) and I think it was only one person plus an artist. It's probably good money for him. Revenge of the Titans? It took three years, and I don't know how many developers worked on it (they used the word "us" in one posting, so it makes me think it's at least two people). This would mean six-man years (minimum) for Revenge of the Titans. Split $180,000 among six man-years (and this assumes this Indie bundle will reach $1.3 million like the last one - which is probably won't) and you've got $30,000 per person per year - which is not very good money. Fortunately, this isn't the entirety of their sales - so maybe it's not bad.
Nor is the absolute number - 1 million bucks - all that much money in the game development world. 10 people's salaries for a year? 20 on the outside? Hardly seems like the costs of development would be covered!
While the original money was something more like 1.27 million dollars, that money was split seven ways. So, each game company saw around $180,000.
I do not consider his statement to be dumb at all, since I want laws to be perceived as just by the people.
"The people" are composed of more than "the youth". Also, the fact that many youth are pirating stuff doesn't automatically mean "the laws are unjust" - otherwise, you'd have to say that "the people don't support laws against underage drinking, traffic laws, etc, as evidenced by the fact that people are breaking those laws."
Sure, lots of youths don't like laws against piracy (just as they don't like laws against underage drinking, smoking pot, etc), but that's more an issue of education and youthful self-centeredness.
"All those laws which you claim he would also need to disavow have strong support from the people."
And that's a different argument because you expanded it from "the youth" to "the people" and changed it from "breaking the laws" to whether or not they support the laws. (I know some people who pirate stuff and they consider it an absolutely wrong thing to do. Case in point: the podcaster Keith Malley says that he pirates stuff and he's a scumbag just like all the other pirates, so pirates need to stop trying to convince him that pirating is perfectly okay.)
He said [in regard to filesharing] "we can not criminalize an entire generation of youths".
Wow. What a dumb statement considering that lots of kids also shoplift, get in fights, drink underage (the drinking age in Sweden is 20), smoke pot, and break traffic laws. So, to be consistent, he'd have to disavow all of those laws as well. I guess enforcing those laws also amounts to "criminalizing an entire generation of youths". The fact that there's people breaking those laws doesn't justify complete legalization of all those things. There are ways to work against all of those actions without boisterously labeling it "they're criminalizing an entire generation!!!!" (And you can be against piracy without accepting that massive fines are the way to accomplish it.)
Interestingly, for the most part, personal non-commercial use of a software shouldn't really be taking money from anyone IMHO.
I'm confused as to how you could arrive at that conclusion. Since lots of companies are creating software for the average person, then how is it possible that "average people can use their software for free" result in a no-loss situation for them?
This isn't a new form of life, as some (including the Slashdot title) have suggested. This is a form of life that can use phosphorus or arsenic in it's DNA and RNA backbone. It evolved from a common type of bacteria that uses only phosphorus. Quotes:
NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical
The newly discovered microbe, strain GFAJ-1, is a member of a common group of bacteria, the Gammaproteobacteria. In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic. When researchers removed the phosphorus and replaced it with arsenic the microbes continued to grow. Subsequent analyses indicated that the arsenic was being used to produce the building blocks of new GFAJ-1 cells. http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html
Reuters:
The GFAJ-1 strain of the Halomonadaceae grew when arsenic was in the water and when phosphorus was in the water, but not when both were taken away.
"This organism has dual capability," Paul Davies of NASA and Arizona State said in a statement.
"It can grow with either phosphorous or arsenic. That makes it very peculiar, though it falls short of being some form of truly 'alien' life belonging to a different tree of life with a separate origin."
But it does suggest that astrobiologists looking for life on other planets do not need to look only for planets with the same balance of elements as Earth has. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101202/sc_nm/us_arsenic_bacteria
To repost a comment I added to another thread: It's part of the existing tree of life, not a separate evolutionary tree. It sounds like a phosphorus-based lifeform that evolved into an arsenic-based lifeform.
The newly discovered microbe, strain GFAJ-1, is a member of a common group of bacteria, the Gammaproteobacteria. In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic. When researchers removed the phosphorus and replaced it with arsenic the microbes continued to grow. Subsequent analyses indicated that the arsenic was being used to produce the building blocks of new GFAJ-1 cells. (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html)
No, it's part of the existing tree of life, not a separate evolutionary tree:
The newly discovered microbe, strain GFAJ-1, is a member of a common group of bacteria, the Gammaproteobacteria. In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic. When researchers removed the phosphorus and replaced it with arsenic the microbes continued to grow. Subsequent analyses indicated that the arsenic was being used to produce the building blocks of new GFAJ-1 cells. (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html)
It sounds like a phosphorus-based lifeform evolved into an arsenic-based lifeform.
"It would be like forcing car manufacturers to take responsibility for bad drivers," IIA chief Peter Coroneos said. Some 91 ISPs have signed on to the iCode [a kind industry self-regulation] to help users resolve computer infections and quarantine some if needed.
To extend the metaphor to include iCode, then I guess car manufacturers will be working to help bad drivers and quarantine some of them if needed.
That haemorrhage (insert haemophilia crack here) resulted in the "royal puppet family" who to this day have to perform public rituals of humiliation to remind everyone they have no say in matters.
Yeah, God knows that whenever I see the royal family, I think of how difficult their luxury-filled life must be.
We are offering a bounty of $100 million dollars plus US citizen status for information leading to arrest. That is enough money to literally buy Muslim paradise for the rest of your life.
You know that the US offered bounties on a lot of the jihandis, right? Bin Laden has a $25 million bounty on his head, and he's still not caught: "The Rewards For Justice Program, United States Department of State, is offering a reward of up to $25 million for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction of Usama Bin Laden."http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/usama-bin-laden
Just because someone benefits doesn't mean they're the reason it happened. Example: Just because some sham homeopathic medicine doesn't get government approval doesn't mean that the conventional medicine industry was behind their failure. (Even worse, some homeopaths have "prescribed" homeopathic malaria vaccines [read: totally ineffective] for people going to Africa: http://www.dcscience.net/?p=22) Another example would be, that if your friend and his girlfriend break up, and you start dating her, then you must've caused the breakup to happen because "you're the one who benefited".
"The simple fact that the RIAA disagrees with them is sufficient indication that PC Mag is doing the right thing here."
Kinda sounds like a variation on "Hitler was wrong about everything, therefore always do the opposite and you'll be right" fallacy. Did you know that Hitler was a vegetarian? That's a reason not to be a vegetarian, right?
To be fair, the summary doesn't claim that "RIAA Now Blames Journalists For Its Piracy Trouble". Rather, the RIAA is merely saying "you aren't helping". To use an analogy, if a magazine published an article on how to get past airport security with a bomb, that doesn't mean anyone would say "we blame [magazine X] for our terrorism problem" (as if it's the one and only reason for terrorism on airplanes), but you could certainly see how they aren't helping things.
I wish Slashdot was a little more objective in reporting the news, instead of just spinning the story in a sensationalist way to confirm what people want to hear.
Slashdot Mirror
Do the words "viruses", "denial of service attacks", "botnets", and "hacking" have any meaning in your vocabulary?
As an independent software developer, I work like crazy trying to create stuff that will sell. I don't really care for the excessively long copyrights, but the conclusion of your argument seems to be that copyright shouldn't exist at all and piracy should be legal. This would devastate us, which would in the long term harm you as well. I think every society with an enlightened self-interest would support copyright. Of course, there seem to be a lot of people looking out for their own short-term self-interest, which is what piracy is. The law exists because people are doing the latter rather than the former.
As for why the ISPs "don't like the law either", I'm sure they don't like the extra work of keeping track of this information. Plus, there's the *money* aspect to it. A handful of ISPs obviously see it in their interest to cater to a self-serving pirate if it means more customers (which means more money). From their point of view, as long as they get an extra $5 a month, who cares if someone else who should've gotten paid for their work takes a $100 loss. That strikes me as pretty selfish from the ISPs standpoint.
If you're talking about Operation Snow White, a bunch of scientologists went to jail for that. L. Ron Hubbard, himself, went into hiding the rest of his life to avoid getting caught by the US government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
Do you mean they classified themselves as a religion to get tax exemption status?
Okay.
Yes, I agree that we need some citations, please.
Do you have a source for that? I'm just thinking the "maybe ten cents goes to the developers" is more of a rash assumption based on lack of knowledge and the belief that the suits always take 99%. It's been a while since I examined big-budget game pricing, but I think the numbers were something like this: the store (e.g. BestBuy) takes 50% of the sales money (e.g. you buy a game for $50, and BestBuy keeps $25). The publisher takes some money and also spends money on advertising (which can get pricey, I think I remember advertising on some games getting upto $200 million). The game developer ends up with something like 10% to 20% of the original sales money. The exact percentage depends on the company and how well established they are at putting out hits. My knowledge on these numbers is a few years old now, so I don't know if they're accurate anymore.
If it were really that easy, I'm sure there would be an avalanche of great indie games - which, of course, would increase competition, driving down sales again. The reality is that you have to be head and shoulders over what other indie developers are doing. Also, there's something about the phrase "churn out games quite easily" that doesn't smell like quality.
Heh, heh. How ridiculous to say that all Swedish women are crazy in bed.
Or, imagine your a cool hacker who likes having power over other people ("I can break into your computers and steal your secrets. You can't stop me. I am a god.") And you have a dictatorial streak (as confirmed by people who have worked with him) and you crave fame for your ego's appeasement. Now, you can also use this newfound fame for sex. Women are easy for a man like that. In fact, you'd even steal men's girlfriends in bars, as a sign of your power (he's been known to hit on women at bars right in front of their boyfriends). Is that a manifestation of his power - to take the girlfriend, to disrespect the boyfriend despite his desire to stop it from happening? Imagine what an ego-trip it would be if you could sleep with famous politicians wives (he's also bragged about that). Not only are you manifesting your power over those politicians by sleeping with their wives, but you've now got a secret scandal that could end up in major newspapers. Meh. Assange sounds like a pretty ugly human being with a sex and power addiction, and Wikileaks is his vehicle.
Well, I agree, but some of the issues I see with this is that:
- You have to catch the eye of a lot of people before you'll find enough people who want to support your work, and you'll still miss a lot of people who would've paid you but didn't know about your project. I'm not sure if this would be an advertising cost (which you can't recoup) or if websites would (for some reason) promote your project for free. For example, if you wanted to find 1000 people to pay $1.80, then you might have to get your project idea seen by 100,000 people and only 1% of them actually agree to support you. In the end, there might be 50,000 people who would be interested in your software, but 98% of them never knew about it beforehand (this is all lost revenue, and it means money that can't be spent actually producing the software).
- People don't know the quality of your project before its done. At least with electricians, there's a pretty good idea of what the outcome will be when he's done, but software could be all over the map: it could be buggy, it could have terrible AI, it could have great artwork and animation or it could be terrible, the project might get 75% done and then the developer runs out of money and pushes it out.
- There's an incentive for people to sit on the sidelines and contribute nothing because they know they'll get the product for free when it's done. While "not contributing" might slightly increase the chances that the project will never be produced, it's also true that one individual person's contribution will not make the difference between making and breaking the project. By analogy, if everyone had to pay $50 when they wanted to vote for the president, I think most people would stay home and just say, "My $50 probably isn't going to be the deciding vote, therefore, I'll just keep my money and wind up with the same guy in office whether or not I voted."
You did notice the title of this thread, right? It's "Monster Success" (it's a phrase that was used in the article summary). I'm just pointing out that, while a million dollars sounds like bathtubs full of money, once you slice up the money, it's not the millionaire-creating event that people assume it is.
Yeah, it's the secret truth of the internet: people like to imagine that they (the crowd) are more generous than they really are. The fundraising goal this year was 10.4 million dollars, and 4 million of that came from EBay and Google. That's 6.4 million from everyone else. For comparison, the Encyclopedia Britannica had revenue of $650 million in 1990 (their peak year). That's a hundred-fold more money than 6.4 million.
I'm not necessarily saying it's good or bad. It just has to be put into a bigger context - specifically, you have to make some guesses about how much the Indie Bundle is making up their total sales. Also, how many people worked on the game, and how long did it take. In the case of Braid - it's been out a while (so it's at the end of it's sales cycle) and I think it was only one person plus an artist. It's probably good money for him. Revenge of the Titans? It took three years, and I don't know how many developers worked on it (they used the word "us" in one posting, so it makes me think it's at least two people). This would mean six-man years (minimum) for Revenge of the Titans. Split $180,000 among six man-years (and this assumes this Indie bundle will reach $1.3 million like the last one - which is probably won't) and you've got $30,000 per person per year - which is not very good money. Fortunately, this isn't the entirety of their sales - so maybe it's not bad.
While the original money was something more like 1.27 million dollars, that money was split seven ways. So, each game company saw around $180,000.
"The people" are composed of more than "the youth". Also, the fact that many youth are pirating stuff doesn't automatically mean "the laws are unjust" - otherwise, you'd have to say that "the people don't support laws against underage drinking, traffic laws, etc, as evidenced by the fact that people are breaking those laws."
Sure, lots of youths don't like laws against piracy (just as they don't like laws against underage drinking, smoking pot, etc), but that's more an issue of education and youthful self-centeredness.
And that's a different argument because you expanded it from "the youth" to "the people" and changed it from "breaking the laws" to whether or not they support the laws. (I know some people who pirate stuff and they consider it an absolutely wrong thing to do. Case in point: the podcaster Keith Malley says that he pirates stuff and he's a scumbag just like all the other pirates, so pirates need to stop trying to convince him that pirating is perfectly okay.)
July 2005: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/07/the-acid-ocean-the-other-problem-with-cosub2sub-emission/
Wow. What a dumb statement considering that lots of kids also shoplift, get in fights, drink underage (the drinking age in Sweden is 20), smoke pot, and break traffic laws. So, to be consistent, he'd have to disavow all of those laws as well. I guess enforcing those laws also amounts to "criminalizing an entire generation of youths". The fact that there's people breaking those laws doesn't justify complete legalization of all those things. There are ways to work against all of those actions without boisterously labeling it "they're criminalizing an entire generation!!!!" (And you can be against piracy without accepting that massive fines are the way to accomplish it.)
I'm confused as to how you could arrive at that conclusion. Since lots of companies are creating software for the average person, then how is it possible that "average people can use their software for free" result in a no-loss situation for them?
NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical
Reuters:
It sounds like a phosphorus-based lifeform evolved into an arsenic-based lifeform.
To extend the metaphor to include iCode, then I guess car manufacturers will be working to help bad drivers and quarantine some of them if needed.
Yeah, God knows that whenever I see the royal family, I think of how difficult their luxury-filled life must be.
You know that the US offered bounties on a lot of the jihandis, right? Bin Laden has a $25 million bounty on his head, and he's still not caught:
"The Rewards For Justice Program, United States Department of State, is offering a reward of up to $25 million for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction of Usama Bin Laden." http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/usama-bin-laden
Just because someone benefits doesn't mean they're the reason it happened. Example: Just because some sham homeopathic medicine doesn't get government approval doesn't mean that the conventional medicine industry was behind their failure. (Even worse, some homeopaths have "prescribed" homeopathic malaria vaccines [read: totally ineffective] for people going to Africa: http://www.dcscience.net/?p=22) Another example would be, that if your friend and his girlfriend break up, and you start dating her, then you must've caused the breakup to happen because "you're the one who benefited".
"The simple fact that the RIAA disagrees with them is sufficient indication that PC Mag is doing the right thing here."
Kinda sounds like a variation on "Hitler was wrong about everything, therefore always do the opposite and you'll be right" fallacy. Did you know that Hitler was a vegetarian? That's a reason not to be a vegetarian, right?
To be fair, the summary doesn't claim that "RIAA Now Blames Journalists For Its Piracy Trouble". Rather, the RIAA is merely saying "you aren't helping". To use an analogy, if a magazine published an article on how to get past airport security with a bomb, that doesn't mean anyone would say "we blame [magazine X] for our terrorism problem" (as if it's the one and only reason for terrorism on airplanes), but you could certainly see how they aren't helping things.
I wish Slashdot was a little more objective in reporting the news, instead of just spinning the story in a sensationalist way to confirm what people want to hear.