Movie trading clearly doesn't seem to hurt movie attendance
First, movie trading is still pretty marginal, so its effects will be hard to observe in a vast market. But in any case, movie admissions have been plummeting in the last year, so at least at face value, it DOES seem that pirating is hurting the movie business. Of course, correlation is not causation, but it is evidence.
making the MPAA's little pseudo-PSA showing the person behind the popcorn counter utterly silly (since those folks will be employed as long as the theater doesn't completely go out of business).
Do you think a movie theatre has as many employees on staff on Wednesday as Saturday? Sorry, Charlie, but attendance affects employment.
"the vast majority of time in recording studios...is... independent artists trying to make a name for themselves. In the latter case, file sharing has significantly helped those independent artists"
You are now confusing legal and illegal file sharing. There are many ways a small, unknown band can use file-sharing to gain some traction. This does not usually mean that they let all of their music be copied for free.
And that's really the problem with the RIAA's claims. For every sale that they claim was lost, someone else can claim with just as much validity that they gained sales because people heard music they otherwise would not have.
That is a wonderful argument for giving away sample tracks or 30-second snippets - not your whole album. Either way, the choices belong to the band, not pirates.
Have you ever heard a slashdotter admit to how badly they are screwing the hundreds of other people besides the band and the bigwigs at RIAA that are involved in making their music? For every band member and CEO, there are countless sound engineers, managers, marketers, designers, etc whose livelyhood is being threatened.
I also get sick of the "new business model crap", unless it is explicitly followed by a suggestion of what business model is going to compete with free music. iTunes et al are drops in an ocean and are not the correct answer to my query.
You help the environment and your pocketbook substantially more by buying proper insulation for your house, among other numerous examples.
The difference - you don't get to drive insulation around, show it off to your friends, and brag about how earth-concious of a person you are.
At this point in time, you put more into a hybrid than you get back out at the other end. This will probably change in the future, but it is the reality now.
However, the location of CO2 emissions is irrelevant. NOx and SOx emissions, however, to matter locally. I am not sure how hybrids perform with respect to these emissions. They are rather hard to deal with. Catalytic converters do a wonderful job of removing them - after they have heated up. Nowadays, the majority of your NOx and SOx emissions occur in the first mile or so, when the catalytic converter is still cold and can't do its job.
I am willing to bet there are cheaper alternatives to reducing these emissions than hybrid cars, even locally.
The supernode is no different than the bartender or the sign in my earlier analogy.
If you advertise that you want to participate in a crime, it is not entrapment. Period. Putting your name on a supernode (this doesn't happen by accident!) negates any possibility that this would count as entrapment.
You can help the enviroment far more with the same money. For example, for around $75 a year, several companies will buy pollution credits on your behalf, negating the emissions by your regular vehicle. In most states, the same amount of money can also be used to have your electricity come from "green" sources. Therefore, if you had two cars and a home, you could negate ALL of your primary emissions for about $225/year, which is far less than the cost of owning a hybrid.
Hybrids, at this point in time, are nothing but a wasteful political statement. There is almost no circumstance where they are socially beneficial, nor beneficial to the owner in any other respect than his or her ability to feel righteous.
Your computer has been sending out a broadcast "Hey, come over here for a copy of LatestBritneyAlbum", or some variant thereof (depending on which system you use). RIAA or any other downloader is not searching all computers on earth randomly.
It is not entrapment if you put up a sign "For some good crack, come over to 123 Main", to which an undercover cop comes over and makes a purchase, and then busts you. But this is a pretty good analogy for how you file share.
Read your own definition. First, entrapment, in the legal sense, can only be done by government. But in any case, entrapment involves approaching someone who was not doing anything suspicious and offering them the chance to commit a crime. It is not entrapment if the suspect is asking you to participate in the crime.
I fail to see why this would be irrelevant. An actual crime would have been committed. It is obvious that the crime is likely to have been committed many other times.
You are asking the wrong question. It is not "Do file sharers buy more music than average?" but rather "Do file sharers buy more music than they otherwise would if they didn't file share?". The answer to the former is yes, but that shouldn't be a surprise. The conclusion that music fans buy more music than average should not be a surprise. The average college kid with 4000 illegal songs on his computer probably still owns a couple dozen honest CDS, which puts him ahead of the average soccer mom or grandma, who owns three. However, the comparison group should be college kids from a decade ago (myself included), when CDs were common and file sharing not. I knew lots of people with hundreds of CDS, not a few. I sure don't see that now.
The "sampling music" excuse is utterly lame. There are lots of ways to do it without filesharing and you know it. Honestly, it is easier than ever to find information about music before you buy than it ever has been.
Entrapment works the other way. If a secret RIAA member came up to you and said "Give me this file, please" and you gave it to them, that would be an example of entrapment, though as you noted, this is irrelevant in civil cases.
In this case, we have the opposite. The uploader is saying "Hey, you wanna have a file?" and the RIAA member is simply saying "OK". This is not entrapment.
It works the same way for drugs. The cops cannot initiate a drug sale and then bust you for possession. They can, however, participate in a sale that you initiate, and then bust you.
but you can make it a real pain in the butt for the common college kid, who are the bulk of the problem.
Imagine a world with Grokster Offical Version and Grokster Hacked Version, the former with some DRM and latter without. The former is widely available and safe. The latter has to be pulled from spurious difficult-to-find websites and can get you into trouble. Worse yet, the RIAA and MPAA lay a pile of lawsuits on anyone distributing or creating the hacked version.
Yes, the warez community will still bother with hacking, but far fewer of the average Joes will.
There is a glaring difference between guns and P2P.
In the case of guns, there is no existing (or even plausible) technology that would significantly reduce gun abuse without significantly increasing costs and decreasing their legal utility.
This is not the case in P2P. Grokster, EDonkey and the gang could easily and for almost no cost implement basic copyright-protection algorithms. Nothing is foolproof, of course, but such algorithms could put a huge bit in the illegal swapping on their networks while barely affecting legal sharing. Yet these organizations choose not to do this. In fact, they do just the opposite - they deliberately design their networks in such a way as to make copyright protection difficult for them to implement, so they can whine that they can't do it.
Imagine there were two types of guns. One is the regular type, that could be used for both legitimate purposes and crime. The second had some new-fangled technology that quite securely limited the guns use to legitimate activity only. You can be darned sure that the government would ban old-style guns in this case. The same logic should apply to P2P.
Also, as a secondary argument, only a very small fraction of guns (less than 1%) are ever used to commit a crime. As for copies of EDonkey, it is probably closer to 90%.
If I were to win some absurdly large amount of money tomorrow, I would (OK, after a long vacation) spend my life teaching and learning. I would get bored with a permanent vacation.
Unfortunately, the best job I could hope to get teaching (at a 4-year liberal arts school) still pays far less than I will make as a corporate monkey - and that is assuming I can even get such a teaching job, which is not easy. Here in the real world, taking a 40% pay cut is not a very appealing option, especially because I have nothing but debts at age 30 due to grad school.
I am a native speaker, and routinely got hit with questions to which I did not know the answer. It was not unusual for the question to not even make that much sense, and I can definitely see how they would confuse someone who did not have a supreme grasp of the language.
I routinely communiate, in English, with people whose English is as bad as any TA you have ever encountered. I can ask them any technical question in their field that I want, have them understand the question, and understand the response.
It can be easy to be funny in a foreign language. I had my Japanese colleages rolling in the floor yesterday when I started calling (not seriously, obviously) one of the women in my group a skank - in front of the assistant professor. Of course, the aburdity came from the fact that as a gaijin I am allowed to get away with such things. We call it our "gaijin license". No Japanese student would use such expressions within a country mile of anyone with authority.
It is not difficult to be funny, but I will grant that it is difficult to understand natives' humor, or to be funny in the same way they are. Humor is often based on subtle word meanings, and therefore requires a deep understanding of the language.
I really dislike the whining about foreign teaching assistants and professors. Yes, it can be a bit challenging sometimes but this is relevant job-training experience. You will be working with these people in the future.
Just imagine it from the other side - not only does your TA have to be engineers/scientist, but much of the relevant research is written only in English, and they must be able to speak English to do their jobs. Despite the complaints, it is a lot easier to struggle to communicate in your own language than in the other guy's language. We Americans have the good end of the bargain in this matter.
I would love to see one of these "my-TA-sucks" whiners learn a language like Chinese. It is hard. Really really "#$"#" hard. I live in Japan and know from experience how challenging it is to learn a language whose fundamental grammar and logic is different from your own. I have never heard anyone who has struggled to learn a non-European language complain about not being able to understand their TA. I wonder why......
Several times on this thread, I have seen someone basically say "I asked my TA (insert absurdly complicated, 40-word-sentence question here), and he had no clue".
This is as much a failure on the student's part as the TA. When speaking to a non-native speaker, one should know that it is best to use simple sentence structures and simple words (in-field technical words are OK). It is part of the learning process to learn how to choose one's words to fit the audience.
I am the opposite person. I have my PhD. I love teaching. I think I am good at it. I have always received exceptional reviews and comments from my students. I wish I had a dollar for everytime I heard "You are the best TA I have ever had!" variants I have heard.
Yet I will not teach. Why?
Because I do not love research enough to enslave myself to the professor's life, which frankly put, is 80% grubbing for money so one's graduate student/post-doc army can spew out more papers. Teaching is completely an afterthought. Of course, I could teach at a community college or even a high school, but I would be paid only half what I would make working in the corporate world. As much as I love teaching, the difference between $40k and $80k is too much too pass up.
Hence, though I want to teach, and it would be to the obvious benefit of my students that I teach, the system forces in another direction.
Teaching and research are different skills. We should quit pretending otherwise.
than someone with a few illegal albums. I know people with thousands of songs, and you probably do too.
You probably are safe as long as you are not one of the big fish, just like you can readily expect to exceed the speed limit by 10%, as long as others are doing 15%.
Either way, you should be paying for what you consume.
You should feel a bit irritated about not following the law and not compensating those that entertain you. I hope RIAA irritates you to the tune of a few grand, too.
I live in Japan and know a fair bit of the language. English is just as "expressive", in my opinion. The problem is that we express things in such fundamentally different ways that one-for-one translation is impossible. I agree with you - subs are better - but not because they are more accurate or expressive. They are better because you still get the emotion as it was emoted in Japanese, with the neutral English translation below. When it is dubbed, the emotion must be placed directly atop an English phrase, and they often do not match or sound really silly.
There does appear to be a small effect of outcome vs funding source, but it is not big enough to routinely switch the main point of the results. In all honesty, the researchers' own biases towards producing anything interesting/publishable is a much greater problem than any external pressure put upon them by the agency or corporation funding the work.
I was a poor undergraduate as well. I have about 300 of them. Most of my DVDs (about 100) were purchased while I was a poor graduate student. These serve to cover most of the old music and movies I care about. I occasionally purchase new ones when something new appears that I like. As I said, it is not that expensive. I probably paid no more than $2000 for the CDs and no more than $1500 for the DVDs, over the course of about ten years. Thats about $30 each month.
Either way, poverty is not an excuse. Nor is not having all you want. I sure don't have everything I want, either, nor does anyone else.
Actually, I applaud the RIAA and hope they "irritate" people like you. It almost makes me feel like donating to their cause.
You seem like an intelligent person with plenty of resources. There is no excuse for downloading what you obviously could and should be paying for. It is not that expensive to collect a wide variety of legal music, movies, etc.
And don't give me the "I just want to test to see if it is good" garbage. There are plenty of legitimate ways to do that, too. In fact, it is easier than ever thanks to the internet. Reviews and samples are easily found and shared.
There are plenty of legitimate problems in the world to solve. Why waste everyone's time by finding devious ways to subvert the law or other peoples' legitimate rights?
If you want a challenge, cure cancer for Christ's sake.
Slashdot Mirror
Movie trading clearly doesn't seem to hurt movie attendance
...is ... independent artists trying to make a name for themselves. In the latter case, file sharing has significantly helped those independent artists"
First, movie trading is still pretty marginal, so its effects will be hard to observe in a vast market. But in any case, movie admissions have been plummeting in the last year, so at least at face value, it DOES seem that pirating is hurting the movie business. Of course, correlation is not causation, but it is evidence.
making the MPAA's little pseudo-PSA showing the person behind the popcorn counter utterly silly (since those folks will be employed as long as the theater doesn't completely go out of business).
Do you think a movie theatre has as many employees on staff on Wednesday as Saturday? Sorry, Charlie, but attendance affects employment. "the vast majority of time in recording studios
You are now confusing legal and illegal file sharing. There are many ways a small, unknown band can use file-sharing to gain some traction. This does not usually mean that they let all of their music be copied for free.
And that's really the problem with the RIAA's claims. For every sale that they claim was lost, someone else can claim with just as much validity that they gained sales because people heard music they otherwise would not have.
That is a wonderful argument for giving away sample tracks or 30-second snippets - not your whole album. Either way, the choices belong to the band, not pirates.
Have you ever heard a slashdotter admit to how badly they are screwing the hundreds of other people besides the band and the bigwigs at RIAA that are involved in making their music? For every band member and CEO, there are countless sound engineers, managers, marketers, designers, etc whose livelyhood is being threatened.
I also get sick of the "new business model crap", unless it is explicitly followed by a suggestion of what business model is going to compete with free music. iTunes et al are drops in an ocean and are not the correct answer to my query.
Quit whining and pay for your music.
You help the environment and your pocketbook substantially more by buying proper insulation for your house, among other numerous examples.
The difference - you don't get to drive insulation around, show it off to your friends, and brag about how earth-concious of a person you are.
At this point in time, you put more into a hybrid than you get back out at the other end. This will probably change in the future, but it is the reality now.
However, the location of CO2 emissions is irrelevant. NOx and SOx emissions, however, to matter locally. I am not sure how hybrids perform with respect to these emissions. They are rather hard to deal with. Catalytic converters do a wonderful job of removing them - after they have heated up. Nowadays, the majority of your NOx and SOx emissions occur in the first mile or so, when the catalytic converter is still cold and can't do its job.
I am willing to bet there are cheaper alternatives to reducing these emissions than hybrid cars, even locally.
The supernode is no different than the bartender or the sign in my earlier analogy.
If you advertise that you want to participate in a crime, it is not entrapment. Period. Putting your name on a supernode (this doesn't happen by accident!) negates any possibility that this would count as entrapment.
You can help the enviroment far more with the same money. For example, for around $75 a year, several companies will buy pollution credits on your behalf, negating the emissions by your regular vehicle. In most states, the same amount of money can also be used to have your electricity come from "green" sources. Therefore, if you had two cars and a home, you could negate ALL of your primary emissions for about $225/year, which is far less than the cost of owning a hybrid.
Hybrids, at this point in time, are nothing but a wasteful political statement. There is almost no circumstance where they are socially beneficial, nor beneficial to the owner in any other respect than his or her ability to feel righteous.
Your computer has been sending out a broadcast "Hey, come over here for a copy of LatestBritneyAlbum", or some variant thereof (depending on which system you use). RIAA or any other downloader is not searching all computers on earth randomly.
It is not entrapment if you put up a sign "For some good crack, come over to 123 Main", to which an undercover cop comes over and makes a purchase, and then busts you. But this is a pretty good analogy for how you file share.
Read your own definition. First, entrapment, in the legal sense, can only be done by government. But in any case, entrapment involves approaching someone who was not doing anything suspicious and offering them the chance to commit a crime. It is not entrapment if the suspect is asking you to participate in the crime.
I fail to see why this would be irrelevant. An actual crime would have been committed. It is obvious that the crime is likely to have been committed many other times.
You are asking the wrong question. It is not "Do file sharers buy more music than average?" but rather "Do file sharers buy more music than they otherwise would if they didn't file share?". The answer to the former is yes, but that shouldn't be a surprise. The conclusion that music fans buy more music than average should not be a surprise. The average college kid with 4000 illegal songs on his computer probably still owns a couple dozen honest CDS, which puts him ahead of the average soccer mom or grandma, who owns three. However, the comparison group should be college kids from a decade ago (myself included), when CDs were common and file sharing not. I knew lots of people with hundreds of CDS, not a few. I sure don't see that now.
The "sampling music" excuse is utterly lame. There are lots of ways to do it without filesharing and you know it. Honestly, it is easier than ever to find information about music before you buy than it ever has been.
Entrapment works the other way. If a secret RIAA member came up to you and said "Give me this file, please" and you gave it to them, that would be an example of entrapment, though as you noted, this is irrelevant in civil cases.
In this case, we have the opposite. The uploader is saying "Hey, you wanna have a file?" and the RIAA member is simply saying "OK". This is not entrapment.
It works the same way for drugs. The cops cannot initiate a drug sale and then bust you for possession. They can, however, participate in a sale that you initiate, and then bust you.
Before they sue anyone, simply have one of their employees download a few songs to their private PC from the defendant's system.
There you go. Actual distribution. Actual copyright infringment. Known date and time.
but you can make it a real pain in the butt for the common college kid, who are the bulk of the problem.
Imagine a world with Grokster Offical Version and Grokster Hacked Version, the former with some DRM and latter without. The former is widely available and safe. The latter has to be pulled from spurious difficult-to-find websites and can get you into trouble. Worse yet, the RIAA and MPAA lay a pile of lawsuits on anyone distributing or creating the hacked version.
Yes, the warez community will still bother with hacking, but far fewer of the average Joes will.
There is a glaring difference between guns and P2P.
In the case of guns, there is no existing (or even plausible) technology that would significantly reduce gun abuse without significantly increasing costs and decreasing their legal utility.
This is not the case in P2P. Grokster, EDonkey and the gang could easily and for almost no cost implement basic copyright-protection algorithms. Nothing is foolproof, of course, but such algorithms could put a huge bit in the illegal swapping on their networks while barely affecting legal sharing. Yet these organizations choose not to do this. In fact, they do just the opposite - they deliberately design their networks in such a way as to make copyright protection difficult for them to implement, so they can whine that they can't do it.
Imagine there were two types of guns. One is the regular type, that could be used for both legitimate purposes and crime. The second had some new-fangled technology that quite securely limited the guns use to legitimate activity only. You can be darned sure that the government would ban old-style guns in this case. The same logic should apply to P2P.
Also, as a secondary argument, only a very small fraction of guns (less than 1%) are ever used to commit a crime. As for copies of EDonkey, it is probably closer to 90%.
If I were to win some absurdly large amount of money tomorrow, I would (OK, after a long vacation) spend my life teaching and learning. I would get bored with a permanent vacation.
Unfortunately, the best job I could hope to get teaching (at a 4-year liberal arts school) still pays far less than I will make as a corporate monkey - and that is assuming I can even get such a teaching job, which is not easy. Here in the real world, taking a 40% pay cut is not a very appealing option, especially because I have nothing but debts at age 30 due to grad school.
I am a native speaker, and routinely got hit with questions to which I did not know the answer. It was not unusual for the question to not even make that much sense, and I can definitely see how they would confuse someone who did not have a supreme grasp of the language.
I routinely communiate, in English, with people whose English is as bad as any TA you have ever encountered. I can ask them any technical question in their field that I want, have them understand the question, and understand the response.
It is a skill. Learn it.
It can be easy to be funny in a foreign language. I had my Japanese colleages rolling in the floor yesterday when I started calling (not seriously, obviously) one of the women in my group a skank - in front of the assistant professor. Of course, the aburdity came from the fact that as a gaijin I am allowed to get away with such things. We call it our "gaijin license". No Japanese student would use such expressions within a country mile of anyone with authority.
It is not difficult to be funny, but I will grant that it is difficult to understand natives' humor, or to be funny in the same way they are. Humor is often based on subtle word meanings, and therefore requires a deep understanding of the language.
I really dislike the whining about foreign teaching assistants and professors. Yes, it can be a bit challenging sometimes but this is relevant job-training experience. You will be working with these people in the future.
Just imagine it from the other side - not only does your TA have to be engineers/scientist, but much of the relevant research is written only in English, and they must be able to speak English to do their jobs. Despite the complaints, it is a lot easier to struggle to communicate in your own language than in the other guy's language. We Americans have the good end of the bargain in this matter.
I would love to see one of these "my-TA-sucks" whiners learn a language like Chinese. It is hard. Really really "#$"#" hard. I live in Japan and know from experience how challenging it is to learn a language whose fundamental grammar and logic is different from your own. I have never heard anyone who has struggled to learn a non-European language complain about not being able to understand their TA. I wonder why......
Several times on this thread, I have seen someone basically say "I asked my TA (insert absurdly complicated, 40-word-sentence question here), and he had no clue".
This is as much a failure on the student's part as the TA. When speaking to a non-native speaker, one should know that it is best to use simple sentence structures and simple words (in-field technical words are OK). It is part of the learning process to learn how to choose one's words to fit the audience.
I am the opposite person. I have my PhD. I love teaching. I think I am good at it. I have always received exceptional reviews and comments from my students. I wish I had a dollar for everytime I heard "You are the best TA I have ever had!" variants I have heard.
Yet I will not teach. Why?
Because I do not love research enough to enslave myself to the professor's life, which frankly put, is 80% grubbing for money so one's graduate student/post-doc army can spew out more papers. Teaching is completely an afterthought. Of course, I could teach at a community college or even a high school, but I would be paid only half what I would make working in the corporate world. As much as I love teaching, the difference between $40k and $80k is too much too pass up.
Hence, though I want to teach, and it would be to the obvious benefit of my students that I teach, the system forces in another direction.
Teaching and research are different skills. We should quit pretending otherwise.
than someone with a few illegal albums. I know people with thousands of songs, and you probably do too.
You probably are safe as long as you are not one of the big fish, just like you can readily expect to exceed the speed limit by 10%, as long as others are doing 15%.
Either way, you should be paying for what you consume.
You should feel a bit irritated about not following the law and not compensating those that entertain you. I hope RIAA irritates you to the tune of a few grand, too.
I live in Japan and know a fair bit of the language. English is just as "expressive", in my opinion. The problem is that we express things in such fundamentally different ways that one-for-one translation is impossible. I agree with you - subs are better - but not because they are more accurate or expressive. They are better because you still get the emotion as it was emoted in Japanese, with the neutral English translation below. When it is dubbed, the emotion must be placed directly atop an English phrase, and they often do not match or sound really silly.
There does appear to be a small effect of outcome vs funding source, but it is not big enough to routinely switch the main point of the results. In all honesty, the researchers' own biases towards producing anything interesting/publishable is a much greater problem than any external pressure put upon them by the agency or corporation funding the work.
I was a poor undergraduate as well. I have about 300 of them. Most of my DVDs (about 100) were purchased while I was a poor graduate student. These serve to cover most of the old music and movies I care about. I occasionally purchase new ones when something new appears that I like. As I said, it is not that expensive. I probably paid no more than $2000 for the CDs and no more than $1500 for the DVDs, over the course of about ten years. Thats about $30 each month.
Either way, poverty is not an excuse. Nor is not having all you want. I sure don't have everything I want, either, nor does anyone else.
Actually, I applaud the RIAA and hope they "irritate" people like you. It almost makes me feel like donating to their cause.
when people cease paying them for their work?
You seem like an intelligent person with plenty of resources. There is no excuse for downloading what you obviously could and should be paying for. It is not that expensive to collect a wide variety of legal music, movies, etc.
And don't give me the "I just want to test to see if it is good" garbage. There are plenty of legitimate ways to do that, too. In fact, it is easier than ever thanks to the internet. Reviews and samples are easily found and shared.
There are plenty of legitimate problems in the world to solve. Why waste everyone's time by finding devious ways to subvert the law or other peoples' legitimate rights?
If you want a challenge, cure cancer for Christ's sake.