"I mean, how would it look if they had to justify a cost of $40 billion of what is essentially public funding and produce something that can barely compete with free opensource software?!"
It'd look like any one of many government projects in a wide range of countries that pissed vast amounts of public money down a hole without producing anything worthwhile.
"both politicians and regular people actually believe in the 'fight piracy' mantra"
Politicians may believe it, but every survey done by both media companies and independent polling organisations indicates that the vast majority of regular people don't believe that not-for-profit piracy is morally wrong (most seem to agree that commercial piracy cannot be morally justified, however), even though most are aware of the fact that it's illegal. It seems that they'll need more than some laws, advertising campaigns, and political shills to overcome tens of generations of being conditioned by both society and most major religions to believe that sharing is a virtuous act.
"This is why both the US and the EU gladly embrace massive unyielding monopolies in this field while they combat all other forms of monopolies and fixed-price cartels vigorously"
The EU at least has the excuse that it started out as a trade organisation (it used to be called the "Common Market" before all the "European Community" bosh starting being bandied about), and in many ways still is, so the fact that it is biased towards industry rather than individuals isn't really surprising, just the WTO's industry bias isn't surprising. And the US system of government of the people by big industry is of course an inevitable result of its campaign finance system, where side with most money stands the best chance of being elected -- the only surprising thing here is the fact that so many of those living under such a system expect the people they elect not to be a bunch of favour-owing shills!
As Josephe de Maistre once wrote, every country has the government it deserves.
"An extremely primitive version might have appeared in Windows 3.1 (I can't remember) as part of the migration strategy from DOS-based to NT-based Windows, however."
The registry in Win 3.1 wasn't part of a migration strategy, but was used to store settings that programs used to communicate with other software such OLE IDs. It was therefore much more like a localized version of the object repositories used with CORBA and Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) than the NT registry, as system and application settings were still kept in SYSTEM.INI, WIN.INI, and application-specific INI files.
The only thing that excuses the absolute drooling stupidity of this post is that it's obviously from someone who is 12 years old, because nobody capable of wiping their own zit pus from the bathroom mirror could possibly equate _a game not working_ with an entire computer being disabled because it got sent back to a manufacturer for repair, and they replaced something XP uses to identify the machine.
"It flat out floors me that almost everyone I know steals software AND movies AND songs, yet they don't see this as stealing."
That's because it's copyright infringement, not theft. There are a number of illegal acts that have financial implications, but aren't legally defined as theft, e.g:
Thus, the people you know who don't see copyright infringement as theft are correct, just as a judge who regards counterfeiting as being a different crime from theft is correct.
"Vinyl sucks; it always did and people who love it today love it in spite of how terrible it is."
Agreed. I became really interested in music in the 1970s, when vinyl was king, and well remember how horrid the things were. You had to store them just so to avoid warping (more of a problem with albums than singles, though), even though most of them were warped when purchased anyway; good record decks had stroboscopes and arms with little weights and dampers hanging off them at weird angles, all of which had to be adjusted just so or things didn't work properly; they also had to be very flat, so the best ones had sets of little sprit levels that could be centred by adjusting their legs; it was impossible to keep dust out of record grooves, so audiophiles used elabourate wet-tracking systems to float all the crud to the top where it didn't make so much noise; high-end cartridges had ludicrously low outputs that required massive pre-amp gain, and therefore extra electronic noise; the fact that the whole assembly was microphonic meant that it had to be stood on little sets of shock absorbers to avoid picking up audio interference; and those with less than solid floors had better walk carefully lest that arm tracking at 1.1 grammes skip merrily across the surface of the record, damaging both record and stylus.
Then, to add insult to injury, the oil crisis during the 1970s meant that materials were difficult to come by, so the companies recycled old vinyl to make new records. Unfortunately, the fact that the paper labels on the middles of these old records were never centred properly meant that the machines which stamped the middles out left bits of paper that got into the mix, and therefore the records, meaning that paper started coming through the grooves of your new album after a couple of plays. Not only did this make a very horrible noise indeed, but it could also damage the delicate stylus assemblies of the most expensive cartridges, which hadn't been designed to withstand being dragged through a lump of ragged cardboard.
Of course, there are probably people out there who enjoyed the ten minute ritual that was required to extract each record from its sleeve, apply at least three different cleaning systems to it, apply another three cleaning systems to the turntable mat, place the record on the turntable using the special felt record handling thingies that no audiophile would be seen without, set the wet tracker up, adjust the turntable speed using the strobe, raise the arm with a hydraulically-assisted lever, move it carefully over the grooves with a little device like a gun-sight, and then use the hydraulic lever to lower it slowly onto the record surface (no decent record deck worth the name had any automatic facilities -- they were only present on "grockle crap"). I however was not one of them because I wanted to listen to music, not spend hours pissing around with the mechanics of getting it to play, so for me vinyl sucked donkey balls, and I'm willing to bet that it still sucks donkey balls, even though the "nouveau vynel" set say otherwise.
"It's exactly like DRM - the shopping malls have to put up with a minority of people shop lifting. So they could force everyone going into the mall to sit through a "do not steal" presentation."
DRM doesn't involve any sort of presentation -- it is a locking system, not an ad.
"This is pretty much identical to a DVD - the media corporations have to put up with a minority of people infringing their copyright. So they force everyone using the content to sit through a "do not infringe" video."
It is an ad like the unskippable trailers, not a form of DRM.
"You are talking about commercial success - my original comment was about _quality_, not success."
As I said before, commercial success is the sole measure of quality for any commercial art form, because it is the only one that can be quantified. Anything beyond that is merely somebody saying their preference is more valid than that of someone else, i.e. elitist snobbery.
"Because they are heavilly marketted."
People must also like and want what is being marketed, otherwise there wouldn't be countless massively hyped flops.
"I suspect if you compare the number of people listening to the big acts and the small acts proportionally over the years you will find that the _proportion_ of sales going to the small acts has increased."
I have seen no evidence to either support or refute this, and so cannot argue for or against it.
"And I'm sure when bandwidth catches up you will see HD movies ripped from BluRay and posted online."
You are very likely correct.
"I haven't purposefully "found a way around" the problem - I use an unlicenced DVD player because it better does what I need (integrates with MythTV, runs under the OS I use, etc.). The fact that it allows me to skip stuff I'm not supposed to skip is just a side effect."
Fair enough.
"I only "had to download" it because I downloaded my entire Linux distribution - it came as an integral part of the distro. I no more "had to download" mplayer than I "had to download" my text editor."
Ah, I forgot that desktop Linux now comes pre-installed on 95% of PCs and laptops, thus ensuring that the majority of the public who you say lack the technical wherewithall to understand what DRM is will already have mplayer and know how to use it. You'll have to chalk it up to me being an old timer who used to live in a time when a company called Microsoft had a desktop monopoly, desktop Linux was only used by a few geeks who were totally atypical of the market for media products, and most music players actually came without support for Ogg or FLAC.
"A "good man" and "honest person" generally avoid purging their government in mass executions every few years. "Good" and "honest" men don't brutally and violently put down any form of political expression."
Now be fair, that's not necessarily true. Take "Uncle" Joe Stalin for example: he wasn't averse to the odd purge, and did his share of brutally putting down, but apart from chronic paranoia (which anyone can suffer from) that made being around him a largely posthumous activity, was, according to testimony in various trials that preceded various purges and bouts of brutal putting down, a good and honest fellow beloved by all, and not a power-mad sociopath, as some who've never even met him have claimed.
"this is closer to preventing people from entering a public building, such as a shopping mall, until they've sat through a 5 minute presentation telling them not to break the law."
How is this like DRM?
"I think you'd find any shopping malls that tried that would suddenly start losing a whole load of customers who would go elsewhere."
Not if everyone was doing the same thing.
"I recall seeing statistics showing that whilest singles sales have been dropping since MP3 sharing became popular, album sales have increased."
The statistics I've seen indicate that both have decreased, but singles have decreased more than albums. Note though that I think piracy plays a relatively minor role in this, and that there are other much more significant reasons for the decline in sales.
"The "quality" of art can be determined by what people _like_, which is not the same as what _sells_ due to marketting"
Read what I said again, because I specifically referred to _commercial art_, not art in general. As with other commercial offerings, the sole measure of success for commercial art is how well it sells, irrespective of the reason for this.
"Currently, the media's marketting tactics are to hype up a few acts."
This is what they've always done.
"The advent of peer-to-peer sharing has meant that the consumers discover acts who haven't been marketted so aggressively but are "better" (i.e. the consumer prefers their music)."
If this is true, then why have illegal downloads of the heavily marketed acts / movies always massively outnumbered those of not so heavily marketed ones?
"If I want to casually copy some DRM'd content I only have to fire up my Gnutella or Bittorrent client - it only takes one person to rip the content and put it online, and when you're distributing your content to millions of people you can pretty much guarantee that _someone_ will do it."
That's because most such content is either ripped from unprotected CDs, or DVDs whose DRM is so weak that it was broken years ago, and cannot now be replaced with something better. I am willing to bet that very little of what's out there was obtained by cracking a modern DRM scheme, just like very few of today's pirated games come from commercial DRM-protected disks, but are instead put on the net by "insiders" who had access to unprotected internal versions.
"Some of my DVDs have *5 minute* unskippable videos at the start telling me that "copying is stealing" (which it isn't). Add to this that some DVDs have unskippable trailors for other movies and you've got a lot more than "a one minute unskippable ad". If I were using a licenced DVD player instead of Xine (and thus were affected by unskippable content) then these discs would go straight back to the shop - I didn't pay to have to put up with that kind of crap."
The correct action would be to take them back and demand a refund instead of finding ways around what you deem to be unacceptable. If enough people did thus, then shareholder pressure would force the media companies to change their tactics, whereas simply pirating their content or using computer software or a DVD player with workarounds does nothing to alleviate the problem, and piracy actively compound it. All that'd be required is a few percent of users to effect a change, because with relatively low-margin high volume goods like DVDs (where the store makes much more than the studio), two or three percentage points can have a big impact on profits, and therefore shareholder returns on their investment.
"I've never had to install extra codecs to play any videos - mplayer handles most stuff out of the box."
The fact that you had to download and install mplayer does however prove rather than refute my point.
"You're right that most people won't care too much about a $1 song not playing... However, if your library of 1000 $1 tracks suddenly stopped working you'd probably be pretty pissed off, right? I dunno about you but I still regularly play a lot of m
Why use 0.02% when one could invent a more authoritative-looking 0.020773091522850061%. After all, If we're going to use survey results that are below the survey's own quoted statistical noise, then why not pad them with some extraneous yet no less meaningful digits to impress mathematically challenged press types?
"People who would break into my house are never "legitimate users"."
So firefighters should leave you to burn if your house is locked...
" I chose to put the lock on my door to protect *me*"
Just like the copyright holders put locks on their doors to protect them. They aren't locking up your property, because you don't own the copyrights to what's being protected -- all you own is the media they're distributed on, and a limited license to use it certain ways.
" I am simply saying that if you make it way more inconvenient for people to take the legitimate route than the illegal route then you will push more people towards the illegal side."
And I am saying that the legal route to many things is less convenient than the illegal one. As an example, driving a car or flying a plane legally requires a considerable amount of time and effort that can be avoided by simply ignoring the need for a license and the lessons required to get it, insurance, regular road or air worthiness checks, etc.
"This is also a bogus argument - most people *have* the money to buy CDs"
Why then are extremely large numbers of them stolen every year, leading many stores to put empty boxes on display?
"you seem to be using theft analogies a lot - copyright infringement is _not_ theft, despite what certain people want to to believe"
Well, hush my mouth, I didn't know that, so the bit accompanying my theft analogy stating that it is an analogy, and that copyright infringement isn't theft must have been a typo.
"I will suggest the problem isn't anywhere near as big as the music industry maintain"
Both media and software companies produce ludicrous figures for so-called "losses to piracy" which assume that every illegal download would be a sale if the illegal download wasn't there. Nobody else can get away with this sort of rubbish: a prosecutor who seriously suggested that three guys who made off with 500 TV sets would have bought them all if the warehouse had been empty would be laughed out of court, yet the media and software industries get away with saying precisely this, and people believe them.
"in many cases music piracy seems to cause people to *buy* music they otherwise wouldn't have bought"
While countless others didn't buy something they might have bought if there wasn't an easily accessible free version. IMO there is one, and only one justification for illegal downloading, i.e. those who are seeking specific works that cannot now be obtained legally.
"Maybe the industry's problem is that more people are buying higher quality music rather than the music the industry is trying to promote"
There is no objective measure of quality in commercial art beyond what sells, and anyone who suggests otherwise is an elitest snob. IMO the main problem is that music has less importance for teenagers in particular than used to be the case because they have so many other distractions nowadays: video games, the Internet and EMAIL, mobile phones, and various other things are all vying for their attention, so music has lost the prominent, generation-defining nature that it had for much of the 20th century. Television has exactly the same problem, i.e. a declining and aging audience due to the fact that the younger people so beloved of advertisers are increasingly seeking other forms of entertainment, and it's likely that both industries will eventually be forced to change their modus operandi if they are to avoid becoming increasingly irrelevant.
"DRM won't prevent copying so it doesn't solve the problem"
Like DRM on computer software or satellite / cable TV systems, it prevents casual copying, and that's the best that can be expected from a purely technological system. As I said previously, those with enough determination and resources can bypass any security system, but this doesn't mean that people just give up and leave their possessions unprotected.
"and in the process it has also annoyed legitimate consumers who, as a result, are pushed
"Since when is it a creator's (and what an abused term that is for the deriviative pap we're discussing) right to limit every citizen's abiity to distribute information to preserve one version of a business model for an extremely low-priorty 'product', as their distributors now call it?"
Let's frame this in other terms: since when is it anybody's right to limit the free flow of goods by using locks, alarms, and laws to preserve a business model based on an abstracted barter system?
"My point was that musicians dont have the option of retaining their intellectual property in the same way that say authors or painters do."
We do, actually.
"The recording house *owns* the music, not the artist."
The recording house owns a particular recording of the music, not the music itself _unless_ the artist happens to sign away their publishing and performing rights as well, hence the fact that it's common to see sheet music to an album published by a company that isn't affiliated with the one who distributes the album itself, and concerts containing performances of pieces that don't "belong" to the label the performer(s) is currently signed with. This is precisely the same situation as exists with writers and visual artists (including photographers). Some choose to maintain a good deal of freedom (and possibly starve in the process, or work a day job to avoid doing so), while others work as salaried employees of magazines / newspapers / assorted media companies, or commissioned freelancers, and sign all rights to a particular work over to whoever is paying them.
"They're not making things impossible, just more effort, and that simply means it hits the legitimate users"
All technological protection measures affect legitimate users. Having a lock on your door means carrying a key around with you at all times - lose it, and you're in deep shit. Same thing with burglar alarms, files protected by ciphers, computer security systems that require remembering user names and passwords, airport security, etc., etc., etc. All of them are inconvenient to legitimate users, and all can be bypassed by determined people with the necessary resources.
"and pushes them more towards the non-legitimate side."
No, it does not, any more than having a lock on your door "pushes" people into breaking into your house (NB: I am not equating copyright violation with theft here, but merely drawing an analogy). Like many who do illegal things, you are attempting to justify your own actions by pretending that you were somehow forced into them instead of merely having _chosen to act illegally_.
"If I were to buy my music from Apple then in order to convert it to Ogg format I need to burn it to CD and then rip the CD - that's a lot of effort... Just firing up gnutella and downloading it is far easier."
Stealing CDs is also a lot easier than earning money to buy them. And note that _you do not buy music_: you buy the medium it is recorded on, and some limited rights to use what is on that medium in specific ways. This has been the case since long before recorded music existed (sheet music carried and still carries similar terms), so it's hardly something new that has taken people by surprise.
"And once they're having to download it to make use of it I'd bet a large chunk of people will just plain stop paying for it in the first place."
The problem is that people were already doing precisely that before music DRM was widespread, hence the insistence on its use. DRM is a response to a perceived problem (which is not of course the same as an actual problem): rightly or wrongly, the music and movie industries believe that illegal downloads are seriously impacting their bottom line, and DRM is currently their preferred solution. Note though that they are experimenting with other systems such as free downloads supported by ads, so DRM may just be a stop-gap measure, or indeed the last gasp of entrenched industry players who are past their sell-by date, and will eventually be replaced by companies with a better grasp of the modern world.
"Essentially the media companies have completely lost their customer focus"
I'm not sure where you got the idea that they ever had a customer focus. The media industry has always been about control, and they've fought fiercely against any technology that could potentially threaten it: the theatre industry fought the fledgeling movie industry; the music and theatre industries opposed radio; everyone fought against TV; the music industry tried to get audio cassettes banned, and eventually got a levy imposed on every tape in many countries; the movie and TV industries tried to get video cassettes banned: etc., etc., etc. All of these actions were intended solely to maintain control over a particular lucrative delivery mechanism, and all were to the overall detriment of customers, who have never been anything more than mindless ambulant wallets to the media industry.
"Take DVDs for example - if I legitimately buy a DVD and play it on a licenced DVD player I have to put up with a long "piracy is stealing" video which I can't skip"
Take a moment to think of why it's there now, but not on older DVDs that came out before broadband Internet connections became commonplace. Again,it is a response to _a perceived problem_.
"If I were to get a pirated copy of the movie, or use it on an unlicenced player, I wouldn't have to put up with that"
You wouldn't have to put up with it if there weren't any pirated copies or unlicensed players either, just like you wouldn't have to put locks on your doors if there weren't
"This too shall pass. Just like it did the last three times somebody tried it."
Great IT Myth Of The 20th Century: web browsers will become the platform of choice, thereby making the OS irrelevant. This will break Microsoft's hold on the desktop. Great IT Myth Of The 21st Century: web browsers will become the platform of choice, thereby making the OS irrelevant. This will break Microsoft's hold on the desktop.
Reality: those who want something hard enough will be very frustrated indeed if they find that they can't have it.
And the Express editions which are specifically targeted at those learning to program can be downloaded free of charge. An interesting alternative (again on Windows, but not from MS) is ethosBASIC, a games-oriented BASIC with some good beginner tutorials and plenty of examples. Commercial, but costs no more than a game ($40), and kids would I think find it a very much more entertaining way of learning to program than a line-oriented language running in a CLI.
Those who prefer Macs might find METAL Basic interesting. It's free, has plenty of graphics and sound capabilities, and works on both Classic and OS X.
" I suppose part of it was they had to clone BIOS because IBM wouldn't sell or license, whereas DOS was (falsely) proffered as an open platform."
Neither MS or IBM claimed that DOS was an open platform because nobody cared about open platforms in those days. If they had, the IBM PC would have been a total flop, because IBM were famed for being the absolute antithesis of openness.
"Can someone tell me why nobody is going after Apple?"
Because companies with 3% of the European desktop market aren't monopolies, and therefore don't attract the attention of those who regulate the behaviour of monopolies.
There was no IBM anti-trust trial: the US DOJ had a 12 year anti-trust _investigation_, but the Raegan govt. shut it down. Note also that there was nothing in the mountain of evidence that had been gathered pertaining to IBM only offering operating systems for their own computers -- indeed, the trust busters would probably have been far more interested if Big Blue had started selling an OS for competitors' systems, as this would have been regarded as an attempt to leverage their existing hardware monopoly to gain a foothold in software.
"If they were a monopoly it'd be called product tying and it would, in fact, be illegal."
If that were the case, then all embedded systems (including games consoles) would also be illegal, as their operating software is completely tied to the hardware they designed it for.
Clue stick: the vast majority (i.e. well over 99%) of operating systems have targeted specific hardware from a single manufacturer, and often, only a single item from that manufacturer. Yet despite the fact that some of those items or the companies that make them have achieved monopoly status in their respective markets (e.g. IBM in the 1960s and 1970s), no country's trust busters have ever prosecuted anyone for this, and they never will, because _nobody is obliged to write software for a competitor's hardware/OS/whatever_.
"I'd have to say MS has it backwards--the EU is helping enforce responsible behavior on its industries by delaying early adoption of unproven software, so it has the ADVANTAGE over the rest of the world."
Especially if they delay it until the most glaring holes that it'll inevitably come with have been patched by at least two service packs. A year to 18 months would do nicely!
Slashdot Mirror
"I mean, how would it look if they had to justify a cost of $40 billion of what is essentially public funding and produce something that can barely compete with free opensource software?!"
It'd look like any one of many government projects in a wide range of countries that pissed vast amounts of public money down a hole without producing anything worthwhile.
"both politicians and regular people actually believe in the 'fight piracy' mantra"
Politicians may believe it, but every survey done by both media companies and independent polling organisations indicates that the vast majority of regular people don't believe that not-for-profit piracy is morally wrong (most seem to agree that commercial piracy cannot be morally justified, however), even though most are aware of the fact that it's illegal. It seems that they'll need more than some laws, advertising campaigns, and political shills to overcome tens of generations of being conditioned by both society and most major religions to believe that sharing is a virtuous act.
"This is why both the US and the EU gladly embrace massive unyielding monopolies in this field while they combat all other forms of monopolies and fixed-price cartels vigorously"
The EU at least has the excuse that it started out as a trade organisation (it used to be called the "Common Market" before all the "European Community" bosh starting being bandied about), and in many ways still is, so the fact that it is biased towards industry rather than individuals isn't really surprising, just the WTO's industry bias isn't surprising. And the US system of government of the people by big industry is of course an inevitable result of its campaign finance system, where side with most money stands the best chance of being elected -- the only surprising thing here is the fact that so many of those living under such a system expect the people they elect not to be a bunch of favour-owing shills!
As Josephe de Maistre once wrote, every country has the government it deserves.
"An extremely primitive version might have appeared in Windows 3.1 (I can't remember) as part of the migration strategy from DOS-based to NT-based Windows, however."
The registry in Win 3.1 wasn't part of a migration strategy, but was used to store settings that programs used to communicate with other software such OLE IDs. It was therefore much more like a localized version of the object repositories used with CORBA and Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) than the NT registry, as system and application settings were still kept in SYSTEM.INI, WIN.INI, and application-specific INI files.
The only thing that excuses the absolute drooling stupidity of this post is that it's obviously from someone who is 12 years old, because nobody capable of wiping their own zit pus from the bathroom mirror could possibly equate _a game not working_ with an entire computer being disabled because it got sent back to a manufacturer for repair, and they replaced something XP uses to identify the machine.
"It flat out floors me that almost everyone I know steals software AND movies AND songs, yet they don't see this as stealing."
That's because it's copyright infringement, not theft. There are a number of illegal acts that have financial implications, but aren't legally defined as theft, e.g:
Insider trading
Fraud
Price fixing
Counterfeiting
Smuggling
Patent or trademark infringement
Tax evasion
Bribery
Criminal damage
Product dumping
Thus, the people you know who don't see copyright infringement as theft are correct, just as a judge who regards counterfeiting as being a different crime from theft is correct.
"Vinyl sucks; it always did and people who love it today love it in spite of how terrible it is."
Agreed. I became really interested in music in the 1970s, when vinyl was king, and well remember how horrid the things were. You had to store them just so to avoid warping (more of a problem with albums than singles, though), even though most of them were warped when purchased anyway; good record decks had stroboscopes and arms with little weights and dampers hanging off them at weird angles, all of which had to be adjusted just so or things didn't work properly; they also had to be very flat, so the best ones had sets of little sprit levels that could be centred by adjusting their legs; it was impossible to keep dust out of record grooves, so audiophiles used elabourate wet-tracking systems to float all the crud to the top where it didn't make so much noise; high-end cartridges had ludicrously low outputs that required massive pre-amp gain, and therefore extra electronic noise; the fact that the whole assembly was microphonic meant that it had to be stood on little sets of shock absorbers to avoid picking up audio interference; and those with less than solid floors had better walk carefully lest that arm tracking at 1.1 grammes skip merrily across the surface of the record, damaging both record and stylus.
Then, to add insult to injury, the oil crisis during the 1970s meant that materials were difficult to come by, so the companies recycled old vinyl to make new records. Unfortunately, the fact that the paper labels on the middles of these old records were never centred properly meant that the machines which stamped the middles out left bits of paper that got into the mix, and therefore the records, meaning that paper started coming through the grooves of your new album after a couple of plays. Not only did this make a very horrible noise indeed, but it could also damage the delicate stylus assemblies of the most expensive cartridges, which hadn't been designed to withstand being dragged through a lump of ragged cardboard.
Of course, there are probably people out there who enjoyed the ten minute ritual that was required to extract each record from its sleeve, apply at least three different cleaning systems to it, apply another three cleaning systems to the turntable mat, place the record on the turntable using the special felt record handling thingies that no audiophile would be seen without, set the wet tracker up, adjust the turntable speed using the strobe, raise the arm with a hydraulically-assisted lever, move it carefully over the grooves with a little device like a gun-sight, and then use the hydraulic lever to lower it slowly onto the record surface (no decent record deck worth the name had any automatic facilities -- they were only present on "grockle crap"). I however was not one of them because I wanted to listen to music, not spend hours pissing around with the mechanics of getting it to play, so for me vinyl sucked donkey balls, and I'm willing to bet that it still sucks donkey balls, even though the "nouveau vynel" set say otherwise.
"It's exactly like DRM - the shopping malls have to put up with a minority of people shop lifting. So they could force everyone going into the mall to sit through a "do not steal" presentation."
DRM doesn't involve any sort of presentation -- it is a locking system, not an ad.
"This is pretty much identical to a DVD - the media corporations have to put up with a minority of people infringing their copyright. So they force everyone using the content to sit through a "do not infringe" video."
It is an ad like the unskippable trailers, not a form of DRM.
"You are talking about commercial success - my original comment was about _quality_, not success."
As I said before, commercial success is the sole measure of quality for any commercial art form, because it is the only one that can be quantified. Anything beyond that is merely somebody saying their preference is more valid than that of someone else, i.e. elitist snobbery.
"Because they are heavilly marketted."
People must also like and want what is being marketed, otherwise there wouldn't be countless massively hyped flops.
"I suspect if you compare the number of people listening to the big acts and the small acts proportionally over the years you will find that the _proportion_ of sales going to the small acts has increased."
I have seen no evidence to either support or refute this, and so cannot argue for or against it.
"And I'm sure when bandwidth catches up you will see HD movies ripped from BluRay and posted online."
You are very likely correct.
"I haven't purposefully "found a way around" the problem - I use an unlicenced DVD player because it better does what I need (integrates with MythTV, runs under the OS I use, etc.). The fact that it allows me to skip stuff I'm not supposed to skip is just a side effect."
Fair enough.
"I only "had to download" it because I downloaded my entire Linux distribution - it came as an integral part of the distro. I no more "had to download" mplayer than I "had to download" my text editor."
Ah, I forgot that desktop Linux now comes pre-installed on 95% of PCs and laptops, thus ensuring that the majority of the public who you say lack the technical wherewithall to understand what DRM is will already have mplayer and know how to use it. You'll have to chalk it up to me being an old timer who used to live in a time when a company called Microsoft had a desktop monopoly, desktop Linux was only used by a few geeks who were totally atypical of the market for media products, and most music players actually came without support for Ogg or FLAC.
"A "good man" and "honest person" generally avoid purging their government in mass executions every few years. "Good" and "honest" men don't brutally and violently put down any form of political expression."
Now be fair, that's not necessarily true. Take "Uncle" Joe Stalin for example: he wasn't averse to the odd purge, and did his share of brutally putting down, but apart from chronic paranoia (which anyone can suffer from) that made being around him a largely posthumous activity, was, according to testimony in various trials that preceded various purges and bouts of brutal putting down, a good and honest fellow beloved by all, and not a power-mad sociopath, as some who've never even met him have claimed.
"this is closer to preventing people from entering a public building, such as a shopping mall, until they've sat through a 5 minute presentation telling them not to break the law."
How is this like DRM?
"I think you'd find any shopping malls that tried that would suddenly start losing a whole load of customers who would go elsewhere."
Not if everyone was doing the same thing.
"I recall seeing statistics showing that whilest singles sales have been dropping since MP3 sharing became popular, album sales have increased."
The statistics I've seen indicate that both have decreased, but singles have decreased more than albums. Note though that I think piracy plays a relatively minor role in this, and that there are other much more significant reasons for the decline in sales.
"The "quality" of art can be determined by what people _like_, which is not the same as what _sells_ due to marketting"
Read what I said again, because I specifically referred to _commercial art_, not art in general. As with other commercial offerings, the sole measure of success for commercial art is how well it sells, irrespective of the reason for this.
"Currently, the media's marketting tactics are to hype up a few acts."
This is what they've always done.
"The advent of peer-to-peer sharing has meant that the consumers discover acts who haven't been marketted so aggressively but are "better" (i.e. the consumer prefers their music)."
If this is true, then why have illegal downloads of the heavily marketed acts / movies always massively outnumbered those of not so heavily marketed ones?
"If I want to casually copy some DRM'd content I only have to fire up my Gnutella or Bittorrent client - it only takes one person to rip the content and put it online, and when you're distributing your content to millions of people you can pretty much guarantee that _someone_ will do it."
That's because most such content is either ripped from unprotected CDs, or DVDs whose DRM is so weak that it was broken years ago, and cannot now be replaced with something better. I am willing to bet that very little of what's out there was obtained by cracking a modern DRM scheme, just like very few of today's pirated games come from commercial DRM-protected disks, but are instead put on the net by "insiders" who had access to unprotected internal versions.
"Some of my DVDs have *5 minute* unskippable videos at the start telling me that "copying is stealing" (which it isn't). Add to this that some DVDs have unskippable trailors for other movies and you've got a lot more than "a one minute unskippable ad". If I were using a licenced DVD player instead of Xine (and thus were affected by unskippable content) then these discs would go straight back to the shop - I didn't pay to have to put up with that kind of crap."
The correct action would be to take them back and demand a refund instead of finding ways around what you deem to be unacceptable. If enough people did thus, then shareholder pressure would force the media companies to change their tactics, whereas simply pirating their content or using computer software or a DVD player with workarounds does nothing to alleviate the problem, and piracy actively compound it. All that'd be required is a few percent of users to effect a change, because with relatively low-margin high volume goods like DVDs (where the store makes much more than the studio), two or three percentage points can have a big impact on profits, and therefore shareholder returns on their investment.
"I've never had to install extra codecs to play any videos - mplayer handles most stuff out of the box."
The fact that you had to download and install mplayer does however prove rather than refute my point.
"You're right that most people won't care too much about a $1 song not playing... However, if your library of 1000 $1 tracks suddenly stopped working you'd probably be pretty pissed off, right? I dunno about you but I still regularly play a lot of m
Why use 0.02% when one could invent a more authoritative-looking 0.020773091522850061%. After all, If we're going to use survey results that are below the survey's own quoted statistical noise, then why not pad them with some extraneous yet no less meaningful digits to impress mathematically challenged press types?
"People who would break into my house are never "legitimate users"."
So firefighters should leave you to burn if your house is locked...
" I chose to put the lock on my door to protect *me*"
Just like the copyright holders put locks on their doors to protect them. They aren't locking up your property, because you don't own the copyrights to what's being protected -- all you own is the media they're distributed on, and a limited license to use it certain ways.
" I am simply saying that if you make it way more inconvenient for people to take the legitimate route than the illegal route then you will push more people towards the illegal side."
And I am saying that the legal route to many things is less convenient than the illegal one. As an example, driving a car or flying a plane legally requires a considerable amount of time and effort that can be avoided by simply ignoring the need for a license and the lessons required to get it, insurance, regular road or air worthiness checks, etc.
"This is also a bogus argument - most people *have* the money to buy CDs"
Why then are extremely large numbers of them stolen every year, leading many stores to put empty boxes on display?
"you seem to be using theft analogies a lot - copyright infringement is _not_ theft, despite what certain people want to to believe"
Well, hush my mouth, I didn't know that, so the bit accompanying my theft analogy stating that it is an analogy, and that copyright infringement isn't theft must have been a typo.
"I will suggest the problem isn't anywhere near as big as the music industry maintain"
Both media and software companies produce ludicrous figures for so-called "losses to piracy" which assume that every illegal download would be a sale if the illegal download wasn't there. Nobody else can get away with this sort of rubbish: a prosecutor who seriously suggested that three guys who made off with 500 TV sets would have bought them all if the warehouse had been empty would be laughed out of court, yet the media and software industries get away with saying precisely this, and people believe them.
"in many cases music piracy seems to cause people to *buy* music they otherwise wouldn't have bought"
While countless others didn't buy something they might have bought if there wasn't an easily accessible free version. IMO there is one, and only one justification for illegal downloading, i.e. those who are seeking specific works that cannot now be obtained legally.
"Maybe the industry's problem is that more people are buying higher quality music rather than the music the industry is trying to promote"
There is no objective measure of quality in commercial art beyond what sells, and anyone who suggests otherwise is an elitest snob. IMO the main problem is that music has less importance for teenagers in particular than used to be the case because they have so many other distractions nowadays: video games, the Internet and EMAIL, mobile phones, and various other things are all vying for their attention, so music has lost the prominent, generation-defining nature that it had for much of the 20th century. Television has exactly the same problem, i.e. a declining and aging audience due to the fact that the younger people so beloved of advertisers are increasingly seeking other forms of entertainment, and it's likely that both industries will eventually be forced to change their modus operandi if they are to avoid becoming increasingly irrelevant.
"DRM won't prevent copying so it doesn't solve the problem"
Like DRM on computer software or satellite / cable TV systems, it prevents casual copying, and that's the best that can be expected from a purely technological system. As I said previously, those with enough determination and resources can bypass any security system, but this doesn't mean that people just give up and leave their possessions unprotected.
"and in the process it has also annoyed legitimate consumers who, as a result, are pushed
"Since when is it a creator's (and what an abused term that is for the deriviative pap we're discussing) right to limit every citizen's abiity to distribute information to preserve one version of a business model for an extremely low-priorty 'product', as their distributors now call it?"
Let's frame this in other terms: since when is it anybody's right to limit the free flow of goods by using locks, alarms, and laws to preserve a business model based on an abstracted barter system?
"My point was that musicians dont have the option of retaining their intellectual property in the same way that say authors or painters do."
We do, actually.
"The recording house *owns* the music, not the artist."
The recording house owns a particular recording of the music, not the music itself _unless_ the artist happens to sign away their publishing and performing rights as well, hence the fact that it's common to see sheet music to an album published by a company that isn't affiliated with the one who distributes the album itself, and concerts containing performances of pieces that don't "belong" to the label the performer(s) is currently signed with. This is precisely the same situation as exists with writers and visual artists (including photographers). Some choose to maintain a good deal of freedom (and possibly starve in the process, or work a day job to avoid doing so), while others work as salaried employees of magazines / newspapers / assorted media companies, or commissioned freelancers, and sign all rights to a particular work over to whoever is paying them.
"They're not making things impossible, just more effort, and that simply means it hits the legitimate users"
All technological protection measures affect legitimate users. Having a lock on your door means carrying a key around with you at all times - lose it, and you're in deep shit. Same thing with burglar alarms, files protected by ciphers, computer security systems that require remembering user names and passwords, airport security, etc., etc., etc. All of them are inconvenient to legitimate users, and all can be bypassed by determined people with the necessary resources.
"and pushes them more towards the non-legitimate side."
No, it does not, any more than having a lock on your door "pushes" people into breaking into your house (NB: I am not equating copyright violation with theft here, but merely drawing an analogy). Like many who do illegal things, you are attempting to justify your own actions by pretending that you were somehow forced into them instead of merely having _chosen to act illegally_.
"If I were to buy my music from Apple then in order to convert it to Ogg format I need to burn it to CD and then rip the CD - that's a lot of effort... Just firing up gnutella and downloading it is far easier."
Stealing CDs is also a lot easier than earning money to buy them. And note that _you do not buy music_: you buy the medium it is recorded on, and some limited rights to use what is on that medium in specific ways. This has been the case since long before recorded music existed (sheet music carried and still carries similar terms), so it's hardly something new that has taken people by surprise.
"And once they're having to download it to make use of it I'd bet a large chunk of people will just plain stop paying for it in the first place."
The problem is that people were already doing precisely that before music DRM was widespread, hence the insistence on its use. DRM is a response to a perceived problem (which is not of course the same as an actual problem): rightly or wrongly, the music and movie industries believe that illegal downloads are seriously impacting their bottom line, and DRM is currently their preferred solution. Note though that they are experimenting with other systems such as free downloads supported by ads, so DRM may just be a stop-gap measure, or indeed the last gasp of entrenched industry players who are past their sell-by date, and will eventually be replaced by companies with a better grasp of the modern world.
"Essentially the media companies have completely lost their customer focus"
I'm not sure where you got the idea that they ever had a customer focus. The media industry has always been about control, and they've fought fiercely against any technology that could potentially threaten it: the theatre industry fought the fledgeling movie industry; the music and theatre industries opposed radio; everyone fought against TV; the music industry tried to get audio cassettes banned, and eventually got a levy imposed on every tape in many countries; the movie and TV industries tried to get video cassettes banned: etc., etc., etc. All of these actions were intended solely to maintain control over a particular lucrative delivery mechanism, and all were to the overall detriment of customers, who have never been anything more than mindless ambulant wallets to the media industry.
"Take DVDs for example - if I legitimately buy a DVD and play it on a licenced DVD player I have to put up with a long "piracy is stealing" video which I can't skip"
Take a moment to think of why it's there now, but not on older DVDs that came out before broadband Internet connections became commonplace. Again,it is a response to _a perceived problem_.
"If I were to get a pirated copy of the movie, or use it on an unlicenced player, I wouldn't have to put up with that"
You wouldn't have to put up with it if there weren't any pirated copies or unlicensed players either, just like you wouldn't have to put locks on your doors if there weren't
"This too shall pass. Just like it did the last three times somebody tried it."
Great IT Myth Of The 20th Century: web browsers will become the platform of choice, thereby making the OS irrelevant. This will break Microsoft's hold on the desktop.
Great IT Myth Of The 21st Century: web browsers will become the platform of choice, thereby making the OS irrelevant. This will break Microsoft's hold on the desktop.
Reality: those who want something hard enough will be very frustrated indeed if they find that they can't have it.
And the Express editions which are specifically targeted at those learning to program can be downloaded free of charge. An interesting alternative (again on Windows, but not from MS) is ethosBASIC, a games-oriented BASIC with some good beginner tutorials and plenty of examples. Commercial, but costs no more than a game ($40), and kids would I think find it a very much more entertaining way of learning to program than a line-oriented language running in a CLI.
Those who prefer Macs might find METAL Basic interesting. It's free, has plenty of graphics and sound capabilities, and works on both Classic and OS X.
"judging from Microsoft's past experiences in court, they'll probably be found guilty"
There is no "guilty" verdict in civil suits.
Eiffel the computer language isn't French, although Eiffel and his tower were / are.
" I suppose part of it was they had to clone BIOS because IBM wouldn't sell or license, whereas DOS was (falsely) proffered as an open platform."
Neither MS or IBM claimed that DOS was an open platform because nobody cared about open platforms in those days. If they had, the IBM PC would have been a total flop, because IBM were famed for being the absolute antithesis of openness.
"Can someone tell me why nobody is going after Apple?"
Because companies with 3% of the European desktop market aren't monopolies, and therefore don't attract the attention of those who regulate the behaviour of monopolies.
Whereas the US system isn't broken because Microsoft exploit it for their own gains.
There was no IBM anti-trust trial: the US DOJ had a 12 year anti-trust _investigation_, but the Raegan govt. shut it down. Note also that there was nothing in the mountain of evidence that had been gathered pertaining to IBM only offering operating systems for their own computers -- indeed, the trust busters would probably have been far more interested if Big Blue had started selling an OS for competitors' systems, as this would have been regarded as an attempt to leverage their existing hardware monopoly to gain a foothold in software.
"If they were a monopoly it'd be called product tying and it would, in fact, be illegal."
If that were the case, then all embedded systems (including games consoles) would also be illegal, as their operating software is completely tied to the hardware they designed it for.
Clue stick: the vast majority (i.e. well over 99%) of operating systems have targeted specific hardware from a single manufacturer, and often, only a single item from that manufacturer. Yet despite the fact that some of those items or the companies that make them have achieved monopoly status in their respective markets (e.g. IBM in the 1960s and 1970s), no country's trust busters have ever prosecuted anyone for this, and they never will, because _nobody is obliged to write software for a competitor's hardware/OS/whatever_.
"I'd have to say MS has it backwards--the EU is helping enforce responsible behavior on its industries by delaying early adoption of unproven software, so it has the ADVANTAGE over the rest of the world."
Especially if they delay it until the most glaring holes that it'll inevitably come with have been patched by at least two service packs. A year to 18 months would do nicely!
"consider, for instance, Eclipse."
He did, as is evidenced by the fact that he not only mentioned Eclipse, and its integration, but also said he admires it,