Market forces, eh? Here you go: spam-style ads will go away if their marginal cost skyrockets. Definitely look into counterspam measures. Any email address or website that spams you is game for a bit of hackery.
Buy up bandwidth in the U.S. and re-sell it in Europe at a premium? Make, sorta, a tradable commodity out of it? I bet you could make billions, or at the very least convice speculative stock traders that you could make billions.
Pervasive advertising, no matter how relevant to my needs, gets a little annoying, but on the whole I'd rather pretty-much see Dell ads over "Get the Facts" any day.
"Perhaps you could let the oil companies know of a location where they could set up a new refinery."
Actually, perhaps first you could persuade them to do so. As I understand it, they're not actually dying to build new refineries. That's B.S. that has been made up for you. Or is driving the cost of their product down somehow in their interest?
"Verizon (for example) spends billions to lay fiber to everyone's house"..."Why should they be required to subsidize competitors"
Poor verizon. So unfair for them to invest their hard-earned money only to have the governments that granted them a geographic monopoly actually start enforcing the common-carrier rules that have been on the books for 30 years or so.
"I suspect that the only reason people think it is "OK" is because it is so easy!"
Alternatively, people might think it's OK because it doesn't harm anyone. But I see you've trotted out the old "lost sales" argument. I never get tired of replying to that one:
Say I'm listening to a CD on my computer. There is a certain amount I'd pay to put one of the songs on my iPod as well. 25 cents maybe. Instead, I copy it. "Lost sale"=25c. This is the point at which you and **AA leave off your analysis -- except that **AA likes assuming that everyone who copies would have paid full price for an iTune, which is patently false.
The problem is that you've stopped analyzing the situation at an arbitrary point. 'Cause now I carry that copy around; I let my friend Charlie listen to it. He likes it and buys the iTune. He lets someone else hear it. She buys a copy too, or likes it so much that she shells out $18 for the whole disc. She plays it for her friend, James L. Brooks, who options the movie rights for $90,000. If you're going to start down the "lost sales" path, you have to go all the way to the end
X harms somebody if you can point to the harmful effect of X. Not if you can demonstrate that doing Y instead of X would have some beneficial effect. If I buy a bag of pretzels for $2, it doesn't to $2 of "harm" to the homeless person I otherwise would've given the money to. Only when I deprive that person of $2 that they currently possess do I harm her.
I think the problem would be when you roll out your fiber-delivered TV service, the best that any internet-based competing service could achieve is 1/4 the speed your own service gets. The competitor will look "broken" by comparison.
Now, if the subscriber has the option to buy that bandwidth, without your TV service, then heshe can access GBC (Google Broadcasting Corporation) at a competitive speed. And your service competes with GBC on a level playing field.
There's an enormous range between the $50 movie and the $50 million movie. To justify a copyright term, you need some analysis of its effect on the range as a whole. With no copyright whatsoever, most movies would probably be very cheap ones, as you suggest. Some rich patrons would fund more expensive movies for their own purposes, or for the hell of it, so there would still be some of those
I suspect that with 5 years of copyright protection a *large number of ordinary Hollywood-style blockbusters would still get made. A large number of expensive, well-made records would get pressed. It's not that hard to recover several million in five years nowadays. I'd go as far as to suggest that the "spread" across the range of production values would be pretty similar to what it is now.
Maybe I'm wrong and 10 years, or 15, are required. Before it gets to 125 (where it is now), someone needs to demonstrate that this term would have a *huge beneficial effect to outweigh its impoverishment of the public domain.
"if it was IMPOSSIBLE to get the audio off there, it would never sell"
Dead on. Lost in the **AA's shrieking is a painful truth: Even the hypothetical airtight DRM + broadcast flag + kitchen sink scheme has to allow the music to play at some point. That crippled DRMy CD player is at some point going to send an audible signal down a wire to a speaker. There it can be picked up. Uber-Pirate.com can burn their master, DRM-free disc there if they have to. And proceed with business as usual.
The casual copying that amateur, part-time pirates do is -- by all indications -- increasing music sales. And the professional infringement cannot (ever) be stopped technologically. It is as though people, fed up with violence, tried to make it impossible -- technologically -- for humans to harm other humans.
(btw I don't think copying "intellectual property" harms anyone; just an analogy)
"If you read the rest of that bloggers post (another slashdot member posted it above) you'll really see my point."
I think you might be confused, and talking about the Ultimate Flame? That wasn't really Zuniga's complete answer. It was a joke.
As to controlling our anger, I sort of agree. But I also understand perfectly when people reach a tipping poing and get emotional. This article starts with "That's it. Burn DC to the ground. " but becomes a very well-argued piece.
Corporations that
-Have explicitly said they plan to make Google et al pay twice to use "their" pipes
-Have already blocked e.g. Vonage
-Have (unconfirmed, someone check) reserved 80% of the bandwidth in their fiber for their own TV service
-Have constantly said "There's no problem; the free market will work it out". Which to me translates as "We just want to make sure we have the power to degrade everyone's net service in order to benefit ourselves; we're not actually going to do if of course..."
My other reply to you is a little over-the-top. I apologize. Since you're part of the "content industry" let me ask you something:
Have you ever analyzed the cost of piracy to you. I don't mean the "lost sales". As you acknowledge, the people who download your thing don't represent lost sales. They aren't going to give you money for the game. They are going to download it or ignore it.
I mean the actual marginal cost of the downloads. Hint: it's zero. Now subtract from this "cost" the number of sales made by a friend, or friend-of-a-friend, of someone who downloaded/cracked the game.
If the result of this calculation is zero, you should be indifferent to "piracy". If it is less than zero, you should encourage it.
P.S.: I know this leaves out a supposedly-important sector: people are ready to pay for the game until they become aware that they can have it for free, and then download it. I'd love a business person's estimate of how often that actually happens.
"The economics surey dictate that everyone should pay for what they consume."
Except that downloading/listening to a song doesn't consume it.
"By this system we encourage artists to produce content that people like."
If you produce only for the sake of selling, you are a salesperson, not an artist. By this system we get Britney instead of Bach.
"DRM sucks, but people enjoying content they dont pay for also sucks."
Does it suck if I look at a sunrise and -- gasp -- enjoy it, too? Does that need to be fixed?
"In a capitalist system, its the payment in dollars from the consumer to the producer that enables the market to function. Take that away and the system will mean no more production."
Unless -- gasp -- the producer enjoys producing whatever-it-is for its own sake. Like maybe poetry. Or sunrises.
"Until now, its been academic, because with physical goods, free-riding wasnt possible. Now we live in an age where it IS possible for people not to pay for what they consume in some industries."
Most hilarious bit of idiocy in the whole post. Free-riding wasn't invented by Shawn Fanning in 1995. It has always been possible. What the digital age does to free-riding is make it so that it doesn't hurt anyone. The "commons" being tragically free-ridden upon never diminishes.
"There has to be a solution. I think DRM is a crap solution, but unfortunately I can't think of a better one that actually works, and removes the free-rider problem."
The problem is not that DRM is the best answer to this quandary where people share music with each other. Pay close attention here:
Whoever produces anything, including songs, is free to attach whatever stupid-ass crap they want to it. Like for example DRM. I don't want that stuff. If you do, go buy it. Have fun. But what the hell are you doing trying to make sure every machine I possess, in my house, "supports" the DRM that I want nothing to do with.
That's an excellent point, and reminds me of Janice Ian's points about out-of-print music. But I don't find that the MPAA thinks this way. Making it easier/cheaper for niche markets to get permanent, durable copies of weird movies isn't a big priority. They seem to think DVD release happens in exactly one way: establish the market potential for a film, pad "extras" of immense-to-zero value, and put a $22.99 sticker on it.
I wonder whether it's partly because they can't/shouldn't admit that there are second-rate movies. Business realities compel them to pretend that Two-Cops-of-Different-Races-Fight-Some-Crime #1,224 belongs on the shelf right next to "Capote"
I'd like you to be modded underrated, but have something to say about this line: "complain about copyright law, not the companies."
The reason the copyright law sucks is because the companies bought it that way. They requested that feature specifically, and paid for it. For good measure, in Eldred v Ashcroft, they essentially bought the right to buy any kind of copyright law they want -- without having to demonstrate that it fulfills the Constitutional mandate (promoting science & useful arts).
The problem with copyright law is that it more-or-less is writen by the companies. So it's not possible to just complain about one.
**AA have obviously decided to go full speed ahead, push the envelope a bit. See if their interests can be made to trump even national sovereignty. I put it at 50/50 whether the "civilized world" will accept this.
It was just a guess, but to clarify I should say I meant that the content industry probably has some of the highest profit margins. And, yes, I could be dead wrong about all of it. In which case it's the copyright cartel's fault for brainwashing me.
" iv. You are not permitted to copy or cut from any page or its HTML source code to the Windows(TM) clipboard (or equivalent on other platforms) onto any other website. "
Intellectual Property Notice and Disclaimer
Captain C/The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency,: Please do not sue me, but I copied and pasted the URL into the link above. If this is a violation, have the Swedish police sieze Slashdot's servers.
Captain Copyright will say 'Creative Commons? Wow! I have the same initials as those guys. Have fun downloading, listening to, burning, sharing, and basically doing whatever you want with that music.'
Slashdot Mirror
Market forces, eh? Here you go: spam-style ads will go away if their marginal cost skyrockets. Definitely look into counterspam measures. Any email address or website that spams you is game for a bit of hackery.
Buy up bandwidth in the U.S. and re-sell it in Europe at a premium? Make, sorta, a tradable commodity out of it? I bet you could make billions, or at the very least convice speculative stock traders that you could make billions.
Pervasive advertising, no matter how relevant to my needs, gets a little annoying, but on the whole I'd rather pretty-much see Dell ads over "Get the Facts" any day.
Actually, perhaps first you could persuade them to do so. As I understand it, they're not actually dying to build new refineries. That's B.S. that has been made up for you. Or is driving the cost of their product down somehow in their interest?
Poor verizon. So unfair for them to invest their hard-earned money only to have the governments that granted them a geographic monopoly actually start enforcing the common-carrier rules that have been on the books for 30 years or so.
Oh wait: Was that our hard-earned money?
Alternatively, people might think it's OK because it doesn't harm anyone. But I see you've trotted out the old "lost sales" argument. I never get tired of replying to that one:
Say I'm listening to a CD on my computer. There is a certain amount I'd pay to put one of the songs on my iPod as well. 25 cents maybe. Instead, I copy it. "Lost sale"=25c. This is the point at which you and **AA leave off your analysis -- except that **AA likes assuming that everyone who copies would have paid full price for an iTune, which is patently false.
The problem is that you've stopped analyzing the situation at an arbitrary point. 'Cause now I carry that copy around; I let my friend Charlie listen to it. He likes it and buys the iTune. He lets someone else hear it. She buys a copy too, or likes it so much that she shells out $18 for the whole disc. She plays it for her friend, James L. Brooks, who options the movie rights for $90,000. If you're going to start down the "lost sales" path, you have to go all the way to the end
X harms somebody if you can point to the harmful effect of X. Not if you can demonstrate that doing Y instead of X would have some beneficial effect. If I buy a bag of pretzels for $2, it doesn't to $2 of "harm" to the homeless person I otherwise would've given the money to. Only when I deprive that person of $2 that they currently possess do I harm her.
Now, if the subscriber has the option to buy that bandwidth, without your TV service, then heshe can access GBC (Google Broadcasting Corporation) at a competitive speed. And your service competes with GBC on a level playing field.
I suspect that with 5 years of copyright protection a *large number of ordinary Hollywood-style blockbusters would still get made. A large number of expensive, well-made records would get pressed. It's not that hard to recover several million in five years nowadays. I'd go as far as to suggest that the "spread" across the range of production values would be pretty similar to what it is now.
Maybe I'm wrong and 10 years, or 15, are required. Before it gets to 125 (where it is now), someone needs to demonstrate that this term would have a *huge beneficial effect to outweigh its impoverishment of the public domain.
Dead on. Lost in the **AA's shrieking is a painful truth:
Even the hypothetical airtight DRM + broadcast flag + kitchen sink scheme has to allow the music to play at some point. That crippled DRMy CD player is at some point going to send an audible signal down a wire to a speaker. There it can be picked up. Uber-Pirate.com can burn their master, DRM-free disc there if they have to. And proceed with business as usual.
The casual copying that amateur, part-time pirates do is -- by all indications -- increasing music sales. And the professional infringement cannot (ever) be stopped technologically. It is as though people, fed up with violence, tried to make it impossible -- technologically -- for humans to harm other humans.
(btw I don't think copying "intellectual property" harms anyone; just an analogy)
I think you might be confused, and talking about the Ultimate Flame? That wasn't really Zuniga's complete answer. It was a joke.
As to controlling our anger, I sort of agree. But I also understand perfectly when people reach a tipping poing and get emotional. This article starts with "That's it. Burn DC to the ground. " but becomes a very well-argued piece.
The Kox piece has useful, good info in it. Give it a read. W quotes Jesus; that doesn't make him (W) God, though.
Not democratic reps. Accepting bribes etc.
Corporations that
-Have explicitly said they plan to make Google et al pay twice to use "their" pipes
-Have already blocked e.g. Vonage
-Have (unconfirmed, someone check) reserved 80% of the bandwidth in their fiber for their own TV service
-Have constantly said "There's no problem; the free market will work it out". Which to me translates as "We just want to make sure we have the power to degrade everyone's net service in order to benefit ourselves; we're not actually going to do if of course..."
Have you ever analyzed the cost of piracy to you. I don't mean the "lost sales". As you acknowledge, the people who download your thing don't represent lost sales. They aren't going to give you money for the game. They are going to download it or ignore it.
I mean the actual marginal cost of the downloads. Hint: it's zero. Now subtract from this "cost" the number of sales made by a friend, or friend-of-a-friend, of someone who downloaded/cracked the game.
If the result of this calculation is zero, you should be indifferent to "piracy". If it is less than zero, you should encourage it.
P.S.: I know this leaves out a supposedly-important sector: people are ready to pay for the game until they become aware that they can have it for free, and then download it. I'd love a business person's estimate of how often that actually happens.
Except that downloading/listening to a song doesn't consume it.
"By this system we encourage artists to produce content that people like."
If you produce only for the sake of selling, you are a salesperson, not an artist. By this system we get Britney instead of Bach.
"DRM sucks, but people enjoying content they dont pay for also sucks."
Does it suck if I look at a sunrise and -- gasp -- enjoy it, too? Does that need to be fixed?
"In a capitalist system, its the payment in dollars from the consumer to the producer that enables the market to function. Take that away and the system will mean no more production."
Unless -- gasp -- the producer enjoys producing whatever-it-is for its own sake. Like maybe poetry. Or sunrises. "Until now, its been academic, because with physical goods, free-riding wasnt possible. Now we live in an age where it IS possible for people not to pay for what they consume in some industries."
Most hilarious bit of idiocy in the whole post. Free-riding wasn't invented by Shawn Fanning in 1995. It has always been possible. What the digital age does to free-riding is make it so that it doesn't hurt anyone. The "commons" being tragically free-ridden upon never diminishes.
"There has to be a solution. I think DRM is a crap solution, but unfortunately I can't think of a better one that actually works, and removes the free-rider problem." The problem is not that DRM is the best answer to this quandary where people share music with each other. Pay close attention here:
Whoever produces anything, including songs, is free to attach whatever stupid-ass crap they want to it. Like for example DRM. I don't want that stuff. If you do, go buy it. Have fun. But what the hell are you doing trying to make sure every machine I possess, in my house, "supports" the DRM that I want nothing to do with.
I wonder whether it's partly because they can't/shouldn't admit that there are second-rate movies. Business realities compel them to pretend that Two-Cops-of-Different-Races-Fight-Some-Crime #1,224 belongs on the shelf right next to "Capote"
The reason the copyright law sucks is because the companies bought it that way. They requested that feature specifically, and paid for it. For good measure, in Eldred v Ashcroft, they essentially bought the right to buy any kind of copyright law they want -- without having to demonstrate that it fulfills the Constitutional mandate (promoting science & useful arts).
The problem with copyright law is that it more-or-less is writen by the companies. So it's not possible to just complain about one.
DUDES! Get up out of my jock and get back to word. For God's sake. Literally: for God's sake. God is going to die if you don't do this.
H.R. 859634: Calling copyright infringement "theft" will be considered libel from now on.
**AA have obviously decided to go full speed ahead, push the envelope a bit. See if their interests can be made to trump even national sovereignty. I put it at 50/50 whether the "civilized world" will accept this.
There's a reason mrchaotica was the first person on my friend list.
It was just a guess, but to clarify I should say I meant that the content industry probably has some of the highest profit margins. And, yes, I could be dead wrong about all of it. In which case it's the copyright cartel's fault for brainwashing me.
Captain C/The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency,: Please do not sue me, but I copied and pasted the URL into the link above. If this is a violation, have the Swedish police sieze Slashdot's servers.
hehehe. i'm clever.
Captain Copyright will say 'Creative Commons? Wow! I have the same initials as those guys. Have fun downloading, listening to, burning, sharing, and basically doing whatever you want with that music.'