Technically it's just once the music is in tangible form (e.g. a recording, sheet music, music box, whatever) you own the copyright. However, if somebody ever sues you, you'll have a much easier go of it in court if you registered with the library of congress.
Meh, I'd be surprised if they ever took advantage of the text service in that way. There are too many ways to profit from it that are far less evil. I wouldn't be as surprised if they started putting "sponsored results" first, like they do with their search engine (i.e. home depot gets top spot nationwide). Now they just conveniently prioritize by proximity to the zip code you enter.
I think the other reply had a good point with the data that they acquire from the service. Another reason on top of branding that they provide some of the services that they do is very likely data mining, since that helps refine their core product (is it still search?). Plus everybody's doin' it these days. Then again, it's hard to see something like google earth as much more than a neat spinoff of google maps (which does give them lots of useful data).
Maybe Google knows they make enough money on search and that they just want to release good, useful, user-friendly products that are miles better than the competition, even if they aren't profitable.
I think that the point of them doing this is that it adds value to their brand. Maybe they aren't turning a profit with some of their niche services, but those services are driving users to the rest of google's more profitable offerings. Have you used the google text messaging service? It's incredibly useful, and probably not directly profitable for google. Often when i'm driving around and realize i need to go somewhere (for example a hardware store) i can just text google, and seconds later receive a text with addresses and phone numbers of nearby hardware stores. They haven't made any money directly off me with this service, but since I enjoy and use the service so much I'd say I'm more likely to look out for other google offerings and use other google products in the future.
It's kind of like advertising - they're just building their brand and driving more and more users to their products. Even if their new products don't "succeed," per se, as long as they're pretty neat it will help them in the long run.
Evidence of that is how charmingly disparaging the entire page is towards windows. "With boot camp, the mac can operate smoothly in both centuries." Classic.
disclaimer - I am a professional musician/engineer, who makes my livelihood from my copyrighted works.
It should be noted that 5 years is way too short of a time period. Plenty of works don't see the light of day until several years after composition or recording. Lets consider that a band writes an album, records it a year later, and self-releases it. It sells fairly well, and a year after this it is picked up by a label with some money to throw into promotion. They dawdle for a year, and re-release. After promoting for another year, a song gets picked up on radio, and it starts to sell pretty well. This is four years into copyright, mind you, and we're just starting to sell legitimate numbers of records. Maybe two singles will do pretty well on radio the next year but then a song gets picked up internationally and becomes a smash hit. Well, too bad, their five years are up. Who gets the money from this? Is it fair that this band finally finds big success and they can't claim a penny from it? These numbers are not unrealistic - things often take this long or longer in the music business. Plus, if copyright is only five years, what's to keep this record label from sitting on the album for another year or two and just taking the album for theirselves?
Don't just think about bands and singers, either - consider also people who write for tv, film, commercials, etc. People who do this often have large libraries of their own material that they will use for whatever job comes along that calls for it. I personally have sold music that I wrote more than five years ago. Forget about doing this under these laws though.
Copyright is probably too long as it is, but it needs to be long enough to provide a reasonable incentive for composers, and 5 years just isn't long enough. Maybe I'm biased because of my line of work, but I see a lot of cases where 5 years does not do the composer financial justice. (How about classical composers? Only very established composers have an opportunity to have their pieces recorded within 5 years of composition.)
Online rebates really do make the rebate process much much easier. Of all my black friday purchases this year, I only had one that required a mail-in rebate (some batteries from circuit city) and it was the only one I didn't get around to filling in. Just doesn't take nearly as long online. CompUSA had a really cool thing where you just enter in a couple numbers from your receipt and your address, and all three of the things I bought were automatically filled in and ready to go. Staples was really easy too (they had online rebates in 2004 as well), and they sent my rebate checks very quickly.
I *am* the slashdot type, so maybe there are other people who would much rather fill out forms and mail them in. For me, though, the online rebates were done in 5 minutes and completely painless.
fw800 card will come fast. there have been a slew of fw800 audio interfaces to hit hte market lately, and all those manufacturers aren't just going to sit around and watch their products go obsolete a month or two after they were released.
Kind of unusual to see this microsoft story in the apple section. Yeah, yeah, apple's got a music store, but I don't expect to see linux stories go in the apple section just cause apple makes an os too.
I doubt they'd give it up for their pro products. Ibook and imac i can understand, but I agree that it's a bit disappointing. They'd be in deep shit from the audio and video worlds if they dropped firewire support on the powerbook or pro desktops, though... breaking compatibility for everybody's hardware is not something you want to do. (I personally would have $500 or so worth of audio gear that would be rendered worthless on the next upgrade cycle, and pretty much everyone else i work with would be worse off than that.)
Perhaps. I go to school in miami, where people tend to be a bit trendier. Both in my hometown, nashville, and miami the ipods are certainly prevalent, though. Probably more of a big city thing.
You've really only ever seen one mp3 player in your life? A lot of this might have to do with your age (I don't know it, but I'm guessing it isn't anywhere between 16-24). I'm in college, and last january after returning from break just about every other person you passed had the telltale white headphones popping out. For people around my age, if you want an mp3 player you get an ipod. I only know one other person who has a non-ipod mp3 player, but he's also a linux junkie, which sort of explains that.
I'm not going to call bullshit on you, but it's not like the ipod is a made-up phenomenon. Quickly googled numbers
, in fact, suggest 90% of the mp3 player market (pretty far off from the 0% you suggested). Not really a minority. There is certainly hype surrounding the ipod machine, but that doesn't mean there are hard numbers as well.
Well, considering the Mororola RAZR phone is one of the hottest-selling out there, and the Apple iTunes phone is a flop, I'd say I believe the guy from Motorola.
Well, considering the ipod nano is one of the hottest selling mp3 players out there, and the itunes phone is made by motorola, I'll go with apple.
Good call. What was the most popular christmas gift last year? Probably the ipod. This year? Probably the ipod video. Evolution. Not too shabby though... baby steps are better than nothing. We'll be in flying cars before too long.:)
Article is slow, so I can't speak to it specifically, but I personally still use XPSP1 for audio work because the sp2 firewall creates a lot of instability. (This was my opinion, and I later discovered it to be a general consensus in the audio community.) For people who need their windows box to be as stable as possible, it's probably best to stick with sp1 for a while.
I've made quality recordings with a couple sm57s, which run $60 each or so, recorded into $500+ software. I've certainly made better recordings with $20,000 worth of gear, and I am aware of the concept of one cheap link in the chain dragging the rest down, but i think that as long as your hardware is acceptable these days, you can fix it all with good software. At least this is true in the audio world, but I'd imagine it holds true in imaging and video.
I'd be okay with them not allowing anon edits. It's not that difficult to register, and every little bit of accountability helps. Wikipedia isn't exactly a little geek forum anymore - this is a good step in the direction of legitimacy.
Slashdot Mirror
> What is proof of music ownership?
Copyright registration in your name.
Technically it's just once the music is in tangible form (e.g. a recording, sheet music, music box, whatever) you own the copyright. However, if somebody ever sues you, you'll have a much easier go of it in court if you registered with the library of congress.
Meh, I'd be surprised if they ever took advantage of the text service in that way. There are too many ways to profit from it that are far less evil. I wouldn't be as surprised if they started putting "sponsored results" first, like they do with their search engine (i.e. home depot gets top spot nationwide). Now they just conveniently prioritize by proximity to the zip code you enter.
I think the other reply had a good point with the data that they acquire from the service. Another reason on top of branding that they provide some of the services that they do is very likely data mining, since that helps refine their core product (is it still search?). Plus everybody's doin' it these days. Then again, it's hard to see something like google earth as much more than a neat spinoff of google maps (which does give them lots of useful data).
P.
Maybe Google knows they make enough money on search and that they just want to release good, useful, user-friendly products that are miles better than the competition, even if they aren't profitable.
I think that the point of them doing this is that it adds value to their brand. Maybe they aren't turning a profit with some of their niche services, but those services are driving users to the rest of google's more profitable offerings. Have you used the google text messaging service? It's incredibly useful, and probably not directly profitable for google. Often when i'm driving around and realize i need to go somewhere (for example a hardware store) i can just text google, and seconds later receive a text with addresses and phone numbers of nearby hardware stores. They haven't made any money directly off me with this service, but since I enjoy and use the service so much I'd say I'm more likely to look out for other google offerings and use other google products in the future.
It's kind of like advertising - they're just building their brand and driving more and more users to their products. Even if their new products don't "succeed," per se, as long as they're pretty neat it will help them in the long run.
Evidence of that is how charmingly disparaging the entire page is towards windows. "With boot camp, the mac can operate smoothly in both centuries." Classic.
P.
disclaimer - I am a professional musician/engineer, who makes my livelihood from my copyrighted works.
It should be noted that 5 years is way too short of a time period. Plenty of works don't see the light of day until several years after composition or recording. Lets consider that a band writes an album, records it a year later, and self-releases it. It sells fairly well, and a year after this it is picked up by a label with some money to throw into promotion. They dawdle for a year, and re-release. After promoting for another year, a song gets picked up on radio, and it starts to sell pretty well. This is four years into copyright, mind you, and we're just starting to sell legitimate numbers of records. Maybe two singles will do pretty well on radio the next year but then a song gets picked up internationally and becomes a smash hit. Well, too bad, their five years are up. Who gets the money from this? Is it fair that this band finally finds big success and they can't claim a penny from it? These numbers are not unrealistic - things often take this long or longer in the music business. Plus, if copyright is only five years, what's to keep this record label from sitting on the album for another year or two and just taking the album for theirselves?
Don't just think about bands and singers, either - consider also people who write for tv, film, commercials, etc. People who do this often have large libraries of their own material that they will use for whatever job comes along that calls for it. I personally have sold music that I wrote more than five years ago. Forget about doing this under these laws though.
Copyright is probably too long as it is, but it needs to be long enough to provide a reasonable incentive for composers, and 5 years just isn't long enough. Maybe I'm biased because of my line of work, but I see a lot of cases where 5 years does not do the composer financial justice. (How about classical composers? Only very established composers have an opportunity to have their pieces recorded within 5 years of composition.)
p.
Online rebates really do make the rebate process much much easier. Of all my black friday purchases this year, I only had one that required a mail-in rebate (some batteries from circuit city) and it was the only one I didn't get around to filling in. Just doesn't take nearly as long online. CompUSA had a really cool thing where you just enter in a couple numbers from your receipt and your address, and all three of the things I bought were automatically filled in and ready to go. Staples was really easy too (they had online rebates in 2004 as well), and they sent my rebate checks very quickly.
I *am* the slashdot type, so maybe there are other people who would much rather fill out forms and mail them in. For me, though, the online rebates were done in 5 minutes and completely painless.
P.
fw800 card will come fast. there have been a slew of fw800 audio interfaces to hit hte market lately, and all those manufacturers aren't just going to sit around and watch their products go obsolete a month or two after they were released.
Wow. That's dangerous.
Kind of unusual to see this microsoft story in the apple section. Yeah, yeah, apple's got a music store, but I don't expect to see linux stories go in the apple section just cause apple makes an os too.
p.
I doubt they'd give it up for their pro products. Ibook and imac i can understand, but I agree that it's a bit disappointing. They'd be in deep shit from the audio and video worlds if they dropped firewire support on the powerbook or pro desktops, though... breaking compatibility for everybody's hardware is not something you want to do. (I personally would have $500 or so worth of audio gear that would be rendered worthless on the next upgrade cycle, and pretty much everyone else i work with would be worse off than that.)
P.
Except it will play DVDs, be two inches wide, and be 25% thinner than the ipod video.
From what I could tell, it was due to dick clark actually being dead and operated by puppeteers.
(They probably had a hard time seeing the official countdown, what with being behind the desk and all)
It was a giant swarm of graphic designers - they took my money, my clothes... I was lucky to escape alive! Apple stores are FRIGHTening...
Perhaps. I go to school in miami, where people tend to be a bit trendier. Both in my hometown, nashville, and miami the ipods are certainly prevalent, though. Probably more of a big city thing.
Sorry, replace "you've never seen an mp3 player" with "you've never seen an ipod" in my above comment. Proofreading.
You've really only ever seen one mp3 player in your life? A lot of this might have to do with your age (I don't know it, but I'm guessing it isn't anywhere between 16-24). I'm in college, and last january after returning from break just about every other person you passed had the telltale white headphones popping out. For people around my age, if you want an mp3 player you get an ipod. I only know one other person who has a non-ipod mp3 player, but he's also a linux junkie, which sort of explains that.
I'm not going to call bullshit on you, but it's not like the ipod is a made-up phenomenon. Quickly googled numbers , in fact, suggest 90% of the mp3 player market (pretty far off from the 0% you suggested). Not really a minority. There is certainly hype surrounding the ipod machine, but that doesn't mean there are hard numbers as well.
P.
Well, considering the Mororola RAZR phone is one of the hottest-selling out there, and the Apple iTunes phone is a flop, I'd say I believe the guy from Motorola.
Well, considering the ipod nano is one of the hottest selling mp3 players out there, and the itunes phone is made by motorola, I'll go with apple.
Good call. What was the most popular christmas gift last year? Probably the ipod. This year? Probably the ipod video. Evolution. Not too shabby though... baby steps are better than nothing. We'll be in flying cars before too long. :)
Article is slow, so I can't speak to it specifically, but I personally still use XPSP1 for audio work because the sp2 firewall creates a lot of instability. (This was my opinion, and I later discovered it to be a general consensus in the audio community.) For people who need their windows box to be as stable as possible, it's probably best to stick with sp1 for a while.
How about letting us in on some of those games that nobody mentioned?
Of course you get disorders related to repetitive strain. You Are A Penis, or so your name says... what did you expect?
Replace "a vulnerability" with "drugs."
I've made quality recordings with a couple sm57s, which run $60 each or so, recorded into $500+ software. I've certainly made better recordings with $20,000 worth of gear, and I am aware of the concept of one cheap link in the chain dragging the rest down, but i think that as long as your hardware is acceptable these days, you can fix it all with good software. At least this is true in the audio world, but I'd imagine it holds true in imaging and video.
P.
I'd be okay with them not allowing anon edits. It's not that difficult to register, and every little bit of accountability helps. Wikipedia isn't exactly a little geek forum anymore - this is a good step in the direction of legitimacy.
P.
Or, according to the BBC's "bigger perspective," gamers were "queueing" around the block. Hah. Wankers.