Yeah, I know I won't be beloved by slashdot commenters for this. It's true that "open" doesn't necessarily mean incompetent (e.g. Firefox is still better than IE), but there's plenty of cases where open-source is the strategy used when a company doesn't have the money to property develop a product. I sometimes use open-source software not because it's better, but because it's cheaper. I'm under no illusion that it's often not as good as paid, closed software that does the same thing.
I don't remember where I read the 270,000 copies sold for Modern Warfare 2, but this quote should give you an indication:
The boxed PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold around 170,000 units in November, according to Gamasutra’s NPD analysis. Compared to the 6 million units the game shifted on consoles in one month, that’s a rounding error. http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/12/modern-warfare-2-pc-sales/
In general, poor sales on the PC has been blamed on piracy, rather than lack of interest. The numbers I saw showed 6 million copies sold and 1 million copies pirated on the XBox. In comparison, there were 270,000 copies sold and 4 million copies pirated on the PC. In other words, 7 million players on the XBox, 86% of them paid for the game; 4.25 million players on the PC, 6% of them paid for the game.
I work in the indie game business, and 600,000 Euros sounds wrong to me, too. No one I know is anywhere close to being that successful (most indie game developers are working for ridiculously substandard pay) - and these are pre-orders? By the way 60K preorders, for comparison, is about 1/4th the total sales of Modern Warfare 2 on the PC - a game with a far larger budget.
You thought you should get everything for free. But, you're like a parasite who thinks your host will continue to tolerate you forever. When the chickens come home to roost, you want to disavow blame. My finger is pointed squarely at you. This is your fault.
What is it called when, instead of every individual consumer of a product paying for what they use, everyone is forced to pay for it whether they use it or not?... I believe that would be "socialized music."
Blame the pirates. It's obvious that the people enjoying the entertainment should be the ones paying for it. But, pirates have found too many ways to get their entertainment for free.
Brazil wasn't always a haven for piracy. After all, up until the mid-'90s, the games market in Brazil was overwhelmingly legal; companies would officially launch and provide support for consoles, such as Tectoy (Sega) and Gradiente (Nintendo). The piracy epidemic only came about with the combination of exceptionally high taxes (EGM Brazil estimated in their March 2005 edition that at least 45 percent of the price of a PC game consisted of taxes), the low income of most Brazilians, the lack of an effective government anti-piracy program and, ironically, the very factor that helped make games more mass-market: the change of media from cartridges to CDs, making it much easier to copy games.
For many years now, Brazilian society has seen piracy not just as commonplace, but as the default way of buying a game. This has had a profound impact on society in general and those who play games in particular. ...
What can we say will happen in other countries where piracy is becoming more prevalent? If big markets, such as the U.S. and Japan, become more afflicted by piracy, you can reasonably expect the industry will shrink and that hardcore gamers will probably be the most affected. After all, the people who are more inclined to pirate games are younger, more tech oriented and, above all, spend more of their time and income on games. Losing these players wouldn't be a death blow to the industry, but you could expect publishers and developers to compensate by trending toward casual games and MMOGs (one of the few types of PC games that is still hard to pirate).
If Brazil's example teaches us anything, it's that the games industry is more vulnerable to piracy than it may be willing to admit. After all, games in Brazil went from a legitimate marketplace to an underground economy in less than half a decade. It demonstrates that if the conditions are just right, it's not all that hard for piracy to become the norm.
Is this the inevitable future? I hope not. But the current economic crisis will make the lure of piracy stronger than ever. You can be certain that both gamers and the unscrupulous will act upon this temptation, creating a more extensive pirate infrastructure in the process and laying the seeds for a difficult future for the games industry.
So, what you're saying is that, instead of using a nuclear weapon to shut them down, the government should simply place a blanket over the air-intake or exhaust vent?
This story is a few weeks old - which is why they're talking about the "upcoming" primary. Since this story was written, Maes won the Republican primary (just barely). He is now the official Republican candidate for Colorado Governor.
Plaintiff is engaged in promoting a music festival known as the “MILE HIGH MUSIC FESTIVAL” (the "Festival") and also is in the business of manufacturing, distributing and selling of various types of merchandise sold and distributed at the Festival including but not limited to tour and program books, T-shirts, jerseys, sweatshirts, hats, buttons and posters which embody the trademarks of the Festival (collectively “Festival Merchandise”)." ...
Plaintiff possesses the exclusive right to utilize all trademarks, service- marks, logos and other indicia of the Festival on and in connection with Festival Merchandise sold and offered for sale in the vicinity of the Festival (collectively the “Festival Trademarks”). Plaintiff uses its Festival Trademarks on officially authorized goods and services. ...
On August 14 and 15, 2010 at the Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, in Commerce City, Colorado, the Festival will occur. Only Plaintiff has the right to sell merchandise bearing the Festival Trademarks at and near the Festival.
On information and belief, Defendants will sell and distribute unauthorized T-shirts, jerseys, and other merchandise bearing any or all of the Festival Trademarks (the "Unauthorized Merchandise") in the vicinity of the Festival before, during and after their performances.
Mike Masnick is a horrible, horrible source of information. He's quite the font of misinformation, however. Whoever approves these articles on slashdot needs to get their head on straight and understand that Slashdot, as a source of information, declines in credibility every time they cite Mike Masnick. Slashdot looks more and more like some "out-of-touch-with-reality but confirming everyone's biases and making them angry" news source everyday.
By that logic, spending any money tracking down any crime (whether it be car theft, burglary, counterfeiting, speeding, etc) can be considered "prioritizing" those other things over missing persons cases. Afterall, the fact that the government isn't reducing the amount of money spent on X "while they need more people assigned to DNA labs" means prioritizing X over missing persons.
Still though, 90% seems high. Where did they get that number from?
Based on numbers I've heard from other PC developers, 90% is pretty typical. It doesn't seem out of the ordinary.
Anyways, it's the same old argument that's been kicking around for years. Because somebody downloaded it for free means it is a 'lost' sale? Hardly.
Almost no one makes that argument. Anymore, I regard the "piracy doesn't equal one lost sale" to be something that pirates complain about, but almost no developer actually claims. It's just an argument that pirates can bring up so that they can knock it down - as if their side is winning arguments.
I know friends who got obsessed with downloading gazillions of MP3s off the 'net, most of which they probably will never listen to.
By the way, most of the piracy numbers on the PC are based on people connecting to the company's servers because they're running the game. This isn't just a download count.
To be fair, I've heard stuff about open-source textbooks for a while. This isn't really a "Scott McNealy and his friends" idea, more of a "Scott McNeally showed up to put some weight behind his version of an idea that other people have already been working hard to do." http://www.google.com/search?q=open+source+textbooks
I also thought that the 10 + 10 = 20 example was a bit simplistic, since textbooks get updated frequently. Although, to be fair, if people can create open-source textbooks, it's a benefit to society - that means $8 billion to $15 billion per year that stays in the pockets of society or state governments to be used elsewhere. Although I suppose there's still printing costs.
From the article:
"At first, Sun fought the open-source set, and then it joined the party by making the source code to its most valuable software available to anyone. Too little, too late. Sun’s sales continued to decline, making it vulnerable to a takeover."
Uh, what? It's weird to act like Sun's decline was due to the fact that they went "too little, too late" with open-source. Open Source was never going to save Sun no matter when they "switched over".
One of the major complaints by the gov't was that some of the Afghan informers that were named will now be Taliban targets. Seems an easy way to flush out more Talibs...just set up surveillance on the informers, and wait for the rats to find their way to the cheese...
I hope you're joking. Not only would you not want to be "the cheese", but the fact that you don't know when or where the Taliban will attempt to kill an informant makes protecting your informants next to impossible. Think about it this way: let's say that you knew for a fact that the mafia was going to attempt to kill you within the next 12 months. Would you be able to get the local police to send an officer to follow you around and protect you? No way. The police would say, "Sorry, we've got lots of things to do. Even if we *know* for a fact that they'll attempt to kill you in the next 12 months, we can't protect you because: 12 months is a long time to protect someone and we have no idea when or where they'll attempt to strike - which means we have a very low chance of actually protecting you anyway. They could plant a bomb in your car. They could try to walk up and shoot you when you go to the school to pickup your kids or go grocery shopping. They could sneak into your house at night. They could hire a sniper to shoot you through a window in your house. They could setup a situation to "accidentally" hit your car, and then shoot you when you get out of your car to inspect the damage. etc.etc.etc." Keep in mind that this is the same Taliban who killed a warlord by posing as journalists with a camera that was actually a bomb. (Yeah, famous people can get bodyguards, but they also have millions of dollars to spend paying for their own individual protection.) The only way to protect an informant is to put them into a witness protection-type program - but, even then, their family will still be at risk.
"Also, would it be okay if among those 195 (you're blind) were your mother, father, brothers/sisters and best friends?"
Arguments that follow the line of "what if those dead included your mother, father, brother, and child, etc" aren't good arguments. Why not? Because you can use the personal connections to leverage your way into all kinds of bad conclusions. Example: "1 out of million people vaccinated develop complications and die". Using the "mother, father, sibling" test, we might immediately declare that all vaccinations should be halted. Or, "what if going to war against Nazi Germany means civilians will get killed in the crossfire - would you support the US going to war if you knew your mother, father, wife, and child were among those who would be killed?" Lots of people would be against vaccination and against getting the US involved in WW2 under those hypotheticals - but that doesn't mean those are the *right* conclusions, it just means you leveraged their personal ties knowing that they were more important to them than the political situation in Europe. You have to take the entirety of the situation into account - not focus on the outcome for particular, hand-picked persons who had negative consequences.
Y'know what really puts the 300 billion figure in perspective? That the GDP of Afghanistan is ~13 billion. If you can't crush an adversary like a bug for almost a quarter-century's worth of its GDP(and that is comparing your military expenditures vs. their entire economy) there is some part of you technique that you really need to take a hard look at...
The problem is Pakistan. There's a safe haven of Islamic militants across the border. Even the Pakistani government doesn't know what to do with them. Even worse, approval ratings for the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden are in the 35-50 percent range in Pakistan - which is, no doubt, concentrated in the tribal north west. When we're the demonized "evil West trying to destroy Islam" and the Taliban is "one of them" - i.e. fanatical muslims who "just want to implement God's government on earth", even when it means throwing acid in women's faces for wearing the wrong clothing. When they're that mired in conspiracy and in-group loyalty, it can be difficult to win a war.
2007 Poll: "According to poll results, bin Laden has a 46 percent approval rating...al Qaeda has a 43 percent approval rate; the Taliban has a 38 percent approval rate; and local radical extremist groups had an approval rating between 37 percent to 49 percent."
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/09/11/poll.pakistanis/index.html
Ha. Ha. I'd like to see some documentation for that absurd claim. Here's a fact for you: the invention of the smallpox vaccine ALONE saves more than 2 million children worldwide EVERY YEAR (that was the death toll as recently as 1967). The Smallpox vaccine has already saved more lives than all the lives lost in World War 2. Shall we move on to some other Western vaccines and medical treatments that have saved millions of lives, or can I just expect you to throw up your hands and admit you're wrong now?
More like:
1986: Hey man, can I get a copy of [name of movie]?
98% of the time: no I don't have it. Guess you'll have to find some other way to get it.
2% of the time: yeah, here's a degraded copy of that movie. Sorry about the poor quality.
2010: Hey man, can I get a copy of [name of movie]?
Which movie do you want? I've got high quality copies of 100,000 movies, many of them haven't been released to DVD - they're still in movie theaters, and some of them haven't even made it to movie theaters. Why would anybody pay for anything? I don't know why the RIAA hates us, I mean all entertainment should be free, right?
Maybe because podcasts need to tie into the system. I'm pretty sure that iTunes can't download torrents.
Bram could actually do himself a great big favor towards this kind of legitimate adoption if it were actually possible to police torrents. Of course, I think he knows that Torrents are effectively the lawless wild-west, and he realizes that's his nitch in the market - enabling the delivery of illegal wares outside the long arm of the law. Torrents would be a pretty obscure technology if it wasn't for the illegal activity it enables.
Lately I've noticed a trend on Slashdot to tar workers as being overpaid and making obscene profits. (For example, in the recent article about newspapers and paywalls - where some commenters assumed journalists were living large, although none of the journalists I know are well paid.)
Not only do I think they're wrong, but even if it was true that workers are overpaid, it still doesn't justify underpaying them. I mean, if you're earning $50 an hour, and someone comes along and wants to pay everyone $3 an hour - what's your response to that? That $50/hour is way too much? That still doesn't fix the fact that $3/hour is still far too little. It's unfortunate that so much of the Slashdot community immediately jumps to condemning the worker with inaccurate assumptions whenever something bad happens in their industry.
Here's how I see things playing out. First, a lot of professional designers boycott these kinds of sites. A few weeks ago, I was on a design site and they had posted an article about some design contest posted by a local company. The comments section was full of designers mocking the company for underpaying anyone doing work. It makes me think that the design contest / crowdsourcing system will ultimately be filled with amateurs. Professionals will avoid them not only because they're seen as bad for their industry, but also because it's darn hard to get paid for their time. If you're only making money on 1 out of 10 contests (because you're better than the average designer), and you spend 5 hours on each design, then you'd better be making enough money to compensate you for 50 hours of work. So -- let's say that people end up with inferior designs because they're done by naive amateurs. Now, companies still have to pay someone. Even though they only have to pay one person, it might not be worth their money to pay someone for an inferior design. Or, maybe they'll be allowed to pick no design and pay no one. There's still a time-investment. Maybe the company will eventually discover that it isn't worth their time to even attempt these things when none of the designs are workable. (I actually remember Fog Creek complaining that they crowdsourced their new logo - and weren't happy with *any* of the designs that were submitted.)
Perhaps designers in China or India might pickup the ball, since the cost of living is lower there. I don't know. Who knows whether crowdsourcing design in this way will end up being seen as a good way to get a cheap, inferior design.
You must think we're extremely naive. Everyone knows that "privacy" is merely a veneer that the pirate party uses to appear legitimate while their true motives are unrestricted piracy. They aren't even the least bit timid about admitting they're pro-piracy, so I don't know why people try to play these mind games to convince us that their motives are pure.
I'm not sure how your solution solves anything. People are going to sell through the newspaper even though craigslist is free? And they'll do that because of "revenue sharing"? Sharing of what revenue? When someone sells through craigslist, they keep 100% of the revenue. I guess I disagree with your analysis that "the newspapers screwed up their business models", and think it's more a matter of getting hit by the "everything is free on the internet, jump in and give it away for free (destroying your own revenue) or let someone else do it for free (craigslist) and watch your revenue get destroyed." Damned if they do. Damned if they don't.
I don't think that analogy works. For one thing, what the store owner wants is sales in his store. By charging for parking, he's driving away store customers. In the NYT example, it's entirely possible to make more money from 10% of the readers than from keeping all the readers and getting ad-revenue. For example, if you make 1 cent per reader on an ad-based revenue model, and 20 cents per reader on a paywall model, then moving 10% of your readers to paywall and losing the other 90% will still give you twice as much money. It all depends on the numbers, and your analogy is flawed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know I won't be beloved by slashdot commenters for this. It's true that "open" doesn't necessarily mean incompetent (e.g. Firefox is still better than IE), but there's plenty of cases where open-source is the strategy used when a company doesn't have the money to property develop a product. I sometimes use open-source software not because it's better, but because it's cheaper. I'm under no illusion that it's often not as good as paid, closed software that does the same thing.
I don't remember where I read the 270,000 copies sold for Modern Warfare 2, but this quote should give you an indication:
The boxed PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold around 170,000 units in November, according to Gamasutra’s NPD analysis. Compared to the 6 million units the game shifted on consoles in one month, that’s a rounding error.
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/12/modern-warfare-2-pc-sales/
In general, poor sales on the PC has been blamed on piracy, rather than lack of interest. The numbers I saw showed 6 million copies sold and 1 million copies pirated on the XBox. In comparison, there were 270,000 copies sold and 4 million copies pirated on the PC. In other words, 7 million players on the XBox, 86% of them paid for the game; 4.25 million players on the PC, 6% of them paid for the game.
I work in the indie game business, and 600,000 Euros sounds wrong to me, too. No one I know is anywhere close to being that successful (most indie game developers are working for ridiculously substandard pay) - and these are pre-orders? By the way 60K preorders, for comparison, is about 1/4th the total sales of Modern Warfare 2 on the PC - a game with a far larger budget.
You thought you should get everything for free. But, you're like a parasite who thinks your host will continue to tolerate you forever. When the chickens come home to roost, you want to disavow blame. My finger is pointed squarely at you. This is your fault.
What is it called when, instead of every individual consumer of a product paying for what they use, everyone is forced to pay for it whether they use it or not?... I believe that would be "socialized music."
Blame the pirates. It's obvious that the people enjoying the entertainment should be the ones paying for it. But, pirates have found too many ways to get their entertainment for free.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_201/6059-A-Nation-of-Pirates.2
So, what you're saying is that, instead of using a nuclear weapon to shut them down, the government should simply place a blanket over the air-intake or exhaust vent?
This story is a few weeks old - which is why they're talking about the "upcoming" primary. Since this story was written, Maes won the Republican primary (just barely). He is now the official Republican candidate for Colorado Governor.
Mike Masnick is a horrible, horrible source of information. He's quite the font of misinformation, however. Whoever approves these articles on slashdot needs to get their head on straight and understand that Slashdot, as a source of information, declines in credibility every time they cite Mike Masnick. Slashdot looks more and more like some "out-of-touch-with-reality but confirming everyone's biases and making them angry" news source everyday.
By that logic, spending any money tracking down any crime (whether it be car theft, burglary, counterfeiting, speeding, etc) can be considered "prioritizing" those other things over missing persons cases. Afterall, the fact that the government isn't reducing the amount of money spent on X "while they need more people assigned to DNA labs" means prioritizing X over missing persons.
Still though, 90% seems high. Where did they get that number from?
Based on numbers I've heard from other PC developers, 90% is pretty typical. It doesn't seem out of the ordinary.
Anyways, it's the same old argument that's been kicking around for years. Because somebody downloaded it for free means it is a 'lost' sale? Hardly.
Almost no one makes that argument. Anymore, I regard the "piracy doesn't equal one lost sale" to be something that pirates complain about, but almost no developer actually claims. It's just an argument that pirates can bring up so that they can knock it down - as if their side is winning arguments.
I know friends who got obsessed with downloading gazillions of MP3s off the 'net, most of which they probably will never listen to.
By the way, most of the piracy numbers on the PC are based on people connecting to the company's servers because they're running the game. This isn't just a download count.
To be fair, they lay into pirates and piracy pretty hard in this video: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/pa-the-series/120/
To be fair, I've heard stuff about open-source textbooks for a while. This isn't really a "Scott McNealy and his friends" idea, more of a "Scott McNeally showed up to put some weight behind his version of an idea that other people have already been working hard to do."
http://www.google.com/search?q=open+source+textbooks
I also thought that the 10 + 10 = 20 example was a bit simplistic, since textbooks get updated frequently. Although, to be fair, if people can create open-source textbooks, it's a benefit to society - that means $8 billion to $15 billion per year that stays in the pockets of society or state governments to be used elsewhere. Although I suppose there's still printing costs.
From the article:
"At first, Sun fought the open-source set, and then it joined the party by making the source code to its most valuable software available to anyone. Too little, too late. Sun’s sales continued to decline, making it vulnerable to a takeover."
Uh, what? It's weird to act like Sun's decline was due to the fact that they went "too little, too late" with open-source. Open Source was never going to save Sun no matter when they "switched over".
One of the major complaints by the gov't was that some of the Afghan informers that were named will now be Taliban targets. Seems an easy way to flush out more Talibs...just set up surveillance on the informers, and wait for the rats to find their way to the cheese...
I hope you're joking. Not only would you not want to be "the cheese", but the fact that you don't know when or where the Taliban will attempt to kill an informant makes protecting your informants next to impossible. Think about it this way: let's say that you knew for a fact that the mafia was going to attempt to kill you within the next 12 months. Would you be able to get the local police to send an officer to follow you around and protect you? No way. The police would say, "Sorry, we've got lots of things to do. Even if we *know* for a fact that they'll attempt to kill you in the next 12 months, we can't protect you because: 12 months is a long time to protect someone and we have no idea when or where they'll attempt to strike - which means we have a very low chance of actually protecting you anyway. They could plant a bomb in your car. They could try to walk up and shoot you when you go to the school to pickup your kids or go grocery shopping. They could sneak into your house at night. They could hire a sniper to shoot you through a window in your house. They could setup a situation to "accidentally" hit your car, and then shoot you when you get out of your car to inspect the damage. etc.etc.etc." Keep in mind that this is the same Taliban who killed a warlord by posing as journalists with a camera that was actually a bomb. (Yeah, famous people can get bodyguards, but they also have millions of dollars to spend paying for their own individual protection.) The only way to protect an informant is to put them into a witness protection-type program - but, even then, their family will still be at risk.
This sounds like one of those situations where a DMCA takedown would work...
Boing Boing is run out of Canada. They've laughed off DMCA takedown notices before because the DMCA doesn't apply to Canada.
"Also, would it be okay if among those 195 (you're blind) were your mother, father, brothers/sisters and best friends?"
Arguments that follow the line of "what if those dead included your mother, father, brother, and child, etc" aren't good arguments. Why not? Because you can use the personal connections to leverage your way into all kinds of bad conclusions. Example: "1 out of million people vaccinated develop complications and die". Using the "mother, father, sibling" test, we might immediately declare that all vaccinations should be halted. Or, "what if going to war against Nazi Germany means civilians will get killed in the crossfire - would you support the US going to war if you knew your mother, father, wife, and child were among those who would be killed?" Lots of people would be against vaccination and against getting the US involved in WW2 under those hypotheticals - but that doesn't mean those are the *right* conclusions, it just means you leveraged their personal ties knowing that they were more important to them than the political situation in Europe. You have to take the entirety of the situation into account - not focus on the outcome for particular, hand-picked persons who had negative consequences.
Y'know what really puts the 300 billion figure in perspective? That the GDP of Afghanistan is ~13 billion. If you can't crush an adversary like a bug for almost a quarter-century's worth of its GDP(and that is comparing your military expenditures vs. their entire economy) there is some part of you technique that you really need to take a hard look at...
The problem is Pakistan. There's a safe haven of Islamic militants across the border. Even the Pakistani government doesn't know what to do with them. Even worse, approval ratings for the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden are in the 35-50 percent range in Pakistan - which is, no doubt, concentrated in the tribal north west. When we're the demonized "evil West trying to destroy Islam" and the Taliban is "one of them" - i.e. fanatical muslims who "just want to implement God's government on earth", even when it means throwing acid in women's faces for wearing the wrong clothing. When they're that mired in conspiracy and in-group loyalty, it can be difficult to win a war.
2007 Poll: "According to poll results, bin Laden has a 46 percent approval rating...al Qaeda has a 43 percent approval rate; the Taliban has a 38 percent approval rate; and local radical extremist groups had an approval rating between 37 percent to 49 percent." http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/09/11/poll.pakistanis/index.html
we Westerners kill more children then we save.
Ha. Ha. I'd like to see some documentation for that absurd claim. Here's a fact for you: the invention of the smallpox vaccine ALONE saves more than 2 million children worldwide EVERY YEAR (that was the death toll as recently as 1967). The Smallpox vaccine has already saved more lives than all the lives lost in World War 2. Shall we move on to some other Western vaccines and medical treatments that have saved millions of lives, or can I just expect you to throw up your hands and admit you're wrong now?
More like:
1986: Hey man, can I get a copy of [name of movie]?
98% of the time: no I don't have it. Guess you'll have to find some other way to get it.
2% of the time: yeah, here's a degraded copy of that movie. Sorry about the poor quality.
2010: Hey man, can I get a copy of [name of movie]?
Which movie do you want? I've got high quality copies of 100,000 movies, many of them haven't been released to DVD - they're still in movie theaters, and some of them haven't even made it to movie theaters. Why would anybody pay for anything? I don't know why the RIAA hates us, I mean all entertainment should be free, right?
Maybe because podcasts need to tie into the system. I'm pretty sure that iTunes can't download torrents.
Bram could actually do himself a great big favor towards this kind of legitimate adoption if it were actually possible to police torrents. Of course, I think he knows that Torrents are effectively the lawless wild-west, and he realizes that's his nitch in the market - enabling the delivery of illegal wares outside the long arm of the law. Torrents would be a pretty obscure technology if it wasn't for the illegal activity it enables.
Lately I've noticed a trend on Slashdot to tar workers as being overpaid and making obscene profits. (For example, in the recent article about newspapers and paywalls - where some commenters assumed journalists were living large, although none of the journalists I know are well paid.)
Not only do I think they're wrong, but even if it was true that workers are overpaid, it still doesn't justify underpaying them. I mean, if you're earning $50 an hour, and someone comes along and wants to pay everyone $3 an hour - what's your response to that? That $50/hour is way too much? That still doesn't fix the fact that $3/hour is still far too little. It's unfortunate that so much of the Slashdot community immediately jumps to condemning the worker with inaccurate assumptions whenever something bad happens in their industry.
Here's how I see things playing out. First, a lot of professional designers boycott these kinds of sites. A few weeks ago, I was on a design site and they had posted an article about some design contest posted by a local company. The comments section was full of designers mocking the company for underpaying anyone doing work. It makes me think that the design contest / crowdsourcing system will ultimately be filled with amateurs. Professionals will avoid them not only because they're seen as bad for their industry, but also because it's darn hard to get paid for their time. If you're only making money on 1 out of 10 contests (because you're better than the average designer), and you spend 5 hours on each design, then you'd better be making enough money to compensate you for 50 hours of work. So -- let's say that people end up with inferior designs because they're done by naive amateurs. Now, companies still have to pay someone. Even though they only have to pay one person, it might not be worth their money to pay someone for an inferior design. Or, maybe they'll be allowed to pick no design and pay no one. There's still a time-investment. Maybe the company will eventually discover that it isn't worth their time to even attempt these things when none of the designs are workable. (I actually remember Fog Creek complaining that they crowdsourced their new logo - and weren't happy with *any* of the designs that were submitted.)
Perhaps designers in China or India might pickup the ball, since the cost of living is lower there. I don't know. Who knows whether crowdsourcing design in this way will end up being seen as a good way to get a cheap, inferior design.
You must think we're extremely naive. Everyone knows that "privacy" is merely a veneer that the pirate party uses to appear legitimate while their true motives are unrestricted piracy. They aren't even the least bit timid about admitting they're pro-piracy, so I don't know why people try to play these mind games to convince us that their motives are pure.
I'm not sure how your solution solves anything. People are going to sell through the newspaper even though craigslist is free? And they'll do that because of "revenue sharing"? Sharing of what revenue? When someone sells through craigslist, they keep 100% of the revenue. I guess I disagree with your analysis that "the newspapers screwed up their business models", and think it's more a matter of getting hit by the "everything is free on the internet, jump in and give it away for free (destroying your own revenue) or let someone else do it for free (craigslist) and watch your revenue get destroyed." Damned if they do. Damned if they don't.
I meant Times Online, sorry.
I don't think that analogy works. For one thing, what the store owner wants is sales in his store. By charging for parking, he's driving away store customers. In the NYT example, it's entirely possible to make more money from 10% of the readers than from keeping all the readers and getting ad-revenue. For example, if you make 1 cent per reader on an ad-based revenue model, and 20 cents per reader on a paywall model, then moving 10% of your readers to paywall and losing the other 90% will still give you twice as much money. It all depends on the numbers, and your analogy is flawed.