I suspect this sort of comparison would be even more interesting if it was done with some other areas of the world. Europe vs. Japan, for instance.
I do not believe the average American consumer believes any company is going to "do the right thing" without some sort of legal force behind it. And even then, it will be a question of risk vs. benefit.
So the Canadian company that believes having some extensive privacy statement and following it closely will net them better customer relations is deluding themselves. Similarly, an American company that does not have as extensive a committment to privacy - and perhaps actually does not provide as much "real privacy" to customers is likely operating in an environment where spending more dollars on "improving privacy" is a waste of time and money. In either case, the majority is likely to assume whatever they say, they are lying. What ever they claim to be doing, they are doing whatever they need to do. Period.
Now, it would be nice if there was some organization that actually investigated privacy practices and reported on them. Unfortunately, what we have is membership-based organizations where you pay a fee and get to put a logo on your web page. Does this come with any follow through, education, training or publicity? No. You have a logo on your web page. This pretty much tells the consumer nothing but it does look nice.
If you believe that email is useless unless you keep yourself isolated and "only give your address to those you trust", then the spammers have made email a marketing tool only. You obviously wouldn't use it for asking questions of some unknown person - they would block it, trash it or let it sit on some never-examined email system.
Would you go around telling everyone in the world your real, physical address?
Absolutely - it is called a phone book. Or an Internet listing of the same. Or about a hundred other such things. It is how we find people in the real world. What you are describing is limiting the usefulness of email to "friends and family". This means businesses can't use email and people can't use email to communicate outside of their circle of friends. This is clearly an anti-spammer goal, but it doesn't happen to be mine. I do not long for the days of receiving endless postal mail.
Unless a product is hopelessly overcomplicated, the support will consist of things like asking "Is it plugged in?" for totally clueless users. Anybody can handle that level of support without even knowing what the product is supposed to do.
The next level of support is helping people use the product that don't bother reading whatever limited documentation there might be. That can be handled by someone with a 6th grade education that actually can read the documentation and read it back to the slightly more clueful users that didn't bother.
Neither of these levels of support is going to require anything in the way of "understanding the code". If a product needs more support than this to be usable, it is the wrong solution.
Understand, there can be bugs that do actually require fixes. But if that isn't a lot less than 5% of the users, again it is the wrong solution. Someone can easily write off those 5% of sales in favor of the 95% that don't need that level of support.
My conclusion is therefore that support is something that any 6th grader can handle.
The problem with blacklists is they are often administered by volunteers hapazardly. And, often the person using the blacklist (administrator) has little or no connection with the end user. So the end user has no control over the use of a blacklist. This then puts the responsibility for blocking communications with users (desired or not) firmly in the hands of the blacklist creator/maintainer and the administrator.
Unfortunately, both are currently protected:
The list creator/maintainer says "I just produce this list, I don't tell anyone to use it." In some cases they actively tell people not to use it.
The administrator says "I just use this list, I have no responsibility for what is in the list."
These arguments are pretty much why legal attacks against blacklists have failed in the past.
Where is spamming illegal? I know of no laws whatsoever that make it illegal to send email to lots of people. There are laws about how email addresses can be collected, and that is primarily what the CAN-SPAM act is all about. It also lays out some rules about removal and sender identification. It clearly does not make spam illegal.
The problem isn't that the email address becomes known to the spammer. They already have that one. The problem is what anti-spam folks call "listwashing". The idea is that anti-spammers want to get spam from everyone sending it so they can (hopefully) shut down spammers. If you send the spammer the email address of a complainer the could just remove from their list.
The whole point is to do this without the spammers knowledge of who the complainer is and have the ISP terminate their service. Put them out of business. Of course, if the accused isn't really a "spammer" with endless T1 connections to choose from you they may have a problem and end up really being put out of business.
Well heck, it was their fault for trying to use email in a commercial manner. We get reported all the time for sending sales confirmations out. People complain and we get blocked. Sometimes the blocks are lifted after they figure out the complainer is an idiot. Sometimes idiocy is rewarded. We are moving to techniques that do not involve email at all. Have to. No choice.
I think you have missed the point. Spam is bad. Unsolicited email or commercial email is spam. There is no such thing as "legitimate spam".
You can give up on the idea that you can endlessly spam - or communicate with customers via email. It doesn't work. Somewhere, somehow it is going to get blocked.
If you believe you have a dedicated audience that wants to receive your message, figure out another way. Email does notwork for this any longer.
It is a zero-sum game - there are only so many consumer dollars out there that can be spent. That is called "disposable income". The rest is what you live on.
Marketing and sales are all about how to get you to spend you disposable income in one place vs. somewhere else. If you buy stuff at Wal-Mart, then the folks at Target have failed. Being a failure sucks. Kmart has found this out the hard way - they are practically out of business.
So, without marketing and sales at all everyone's disposable income might be evenly distributed over "quality" products leaving inferior products out of the game. I doubt this very, very much but it makes for a nice story. Unfortunately, one guy with a sign is going to mess this up and get more than his "fair share". We aren't going to be seeing the end of marketing and sales promotions anytime soon.
We have a right to know. If my military is abusing or torturing anyone, I have a right to know.
I think this is roughly equivalent to saying that if people are being murdered and raped in the streets of a city, you deserve pictures. Right now. Let's start publishing the pictures of murder and rape victims so we can all be properly informed and outraged that this is happening.
OK, this would have an effect on crime but I am not sure it is the kind of effect you would want.
Excuse me, but if people were to see what was going on in any war, they would be sickened and want to stop. If people saw what was going on in Africa and Italy in 1943 and 1944 they would never have voted for an invasion of Europe against Hitler.
Not a single person would have wanted one of the most brutal wars ever to continue - the American Civil war. It would have been over in a month with calls for letting the south go their own way and keep their slaves.
The American Revolutionary War wasn't all that popular with the general population of the colonies and nobody would have wanted to continue after seeing some battlefield scenes. Since we didn't have TV or even photography then, all it would have taken was a few visits from officials to see how terribly young men were dying.
Is pulling a sheet over a dead body to hide it from view distorting the truth? What the news media on both sides would like is more blood, more guts, more outrage. This feeds their ratings and the morbid attraction that most people have. It does not help anything except their commercial interests. Nobody is better informed for seeing dead bodies, bloody corpses and pieces of bodies.
Face it, there are some things that are pretty unpleasent. If you got to watch a couple of surgeries before signing up for yours, you would probably say, "No thanks!" Things are not quite as neat and clean as we would like.
Iraq may have been a situation that was better left to someone else. Unfortunately, nobody was stepping up to the plate. The UN was more than happy to continue the financial relationships they had built up with the totally corrupt "Oil for Food" program. Saddam was more than happy to never present any argument that he might not have banned weapons - because it increased his local standing. Everyone here had something to lose, but nobody wanted to get involved.
So now the US is trying to establish order in a very, very disorderly place. I don't see instant photographs of US casualties - or Iraqi casualties - making it any easier to establish order. Yes, there have been mistakes made. Yes, it would have been better to devote more resources to preventing looting in the beginning. But the alternatives now are limited and just walking out now leads to things being much worse than they were before.
If the news media presents nothing more than how awful all of this is then naturally the people will demand that it end. Right now. I don't see how that helps anyone, least of all Iraq.
I think there are two clarifications in order that I see.
First, there isn't any need to "repeal copyrights", but there is a clearly seen requirement to allow unrestricted redistribution, especially in digital form. This would eliminate the problems with giving a copy of a song to a friend. You can get all weasely with notions like restricting to non-commercial redistribution, but I think that would restrict things that GPL allows, for instance. So, I think a goal that a lot of people have in mind is indeed unrestricted redistribution.
The "collapse of the economy" is perhaps overstated, but what a lot of people do not understand is until everyone is using the Internet for music, movies and books there will be a substantial amount of physical media being sold. Once you allow "unrestricted redistribution" that means I can make my own Elton John albums and sell them. Similarly, I can take a relatively unknown band's CD and resell it.
The problem there is this is a game that will be won by the very largest corporations with huge distribution channels. This will not open the market for common people - it will just mean stuff gets snatched up by megacorporations and resold with their name on it. How do you prevent that?
Let us assume there is at some point in time unrestricted redistribution. Anyone can copy and redistribute (share) anything they want. Let's assume this "sharing" takes place on the Internet.
I claim that this sets up a situation whereby there are two classes of people: those that have fast Internet connections with the knowledge to use them, and those that do not. The "Internet savvy" folks get everything they want for free, the others have to pay.
Is this a tax on ignorance? On lack of tech skills? Is this fair?
Similarly, with unrestricted redistribution there is nothing to stop a large company with extensive distribution channels from picking up anything and reselling it. They get it for free - no annoying artist contracts - and they publish it for the folks that don't use the Internet. OK, so their market is only 60% of what it is today. But the counterbalance is that they pay nothing for the music, books or anything else they pick up off the Internet to republish.
How could a corporation do this? Simple - by out-distributing smaller competitors, even when those competitors are distributing a free product.
The problem is that currently, the way software patents work, there are two ways to insure that you don't get nailed infringing someone's patent:
Have a massive legal staff with nothing else to do.
Have a portfolio of patents to cross-license.
The idea is that everybody is infringing on something, so the best defense is to just cross-license the stuff. This means that the more patents you have, the easier it is to defend against any potential infringement.
Of course, this also means that if you don't have several million dollars to invest in patenting everything in sight, you are going to lose in developing any sort of commercial software product. Sooner or later someone will come along with the patent that they got last week that covers something you've been doing for three years. And then, since you don't have the portfolio of patents that they are infringing on, you have to either try to defend yourself in court or just fold up.
Folding up isn't nice, but it is by far the more realistic of the two options.
I do not see anything changing anytime soon here - it is considered just a cost of doing business to build a patent portfolio for defense purposes.
Why would there be any accrediation? If you can copy freely, then anyone can copy and reuse freely.
What you are really asking for is absolute control by the largest corporations that can be second to market - with the financial power to dwarf anyone else's distribution. Say you publish a song and ask people to pay you $1 for it. Some large corporation takes it, sells it on street corners for $0.80 because they can afford the people to stand on street corners to distribute it. Economy of scale - they make money at a lower selling price than you do and they have better/faster distribution. End of story.
OK, so people that are Internet-savvy maybe don't have to pay for anything. What about those that aren't? Geek tyranny?
The only balance for the out-distribute problem is some kind of civil right/law that prevents redistribution like that.
I do not believe any cost-benefit analysis enters into the picture here. Retailers pretty much dictate the prices. They have a model that says $49.99 is what a game costs, so they "encourage" the publisher to price it there. If they price it lower, it will not be shelved because the retailer makes less per copy than the other 400 games they have to choose from. If it is priced higher, it might be put on the shelf but it won't sell.
This could be considered the big-box retailer effect. If you don't go along with it, you don't get to be on retail shelves.
Excuse me? Lazy? I think you should be focusing on the primary content of games today if you want to talk about where the bottleneck is. As a former game developer, trust me, it isn't the software.
It's the artwork.
Nobody pays for text-mode games anymore or games with crude developer-created graphics. Oh no, they want 3D realism with extensive models. The last game I worked on (a baseball game) they had models come in for motion capture so they could then move the 3D models realistically based on how a real pitcher, batter, etc. moved. Was this expensive? You bet. Was this time-consuming? Yup. How long did it take to merge the motion capture data with the 3D models to create the animation? Nearly a year.
There were over 30 people involved in that production, from designers to artists and programmers. No "new development tool" is going to change that in any meaningful way.
Oh, and for other types of software development, yes, there are tools for doing things in different ways than they were done in 1970. Having been a software developer in 1974 I can tell you things have indeed changed - mostly for corporate software development. Where extensive runtime systems can be required and where interpreted code can be used extensively.
If you want to distribute something to relatively clueless Windows users, it needs to install cleanly, not conflict with other applications they have installed and not be easily stolen, rebranded and sold under a different name. That leaves out many recent development environments.
Console games are a special breed - you end up writing lots in Assembler because the requirements for the game push the limits of the hardware. If you let some unneeded overhead creep in, you lose - someone else's game is faster, more responsive and has better graphics because they are using Assembler coding.
Emailed newsletters that are paid for are blocked.
Emails from friends and family are blocked.
Forget it. Email is broken. It cannot be used in a reliable sense by any commercial entity. Partly this is due to the anti-spam activists that want all "commercial" email banned. Partly this is due to ISPs that implement filters and have decided that they do not need to whitelist anyone without performing their special procedure. You cannot win at this game - the anti-spam activists have won what they think is the game they are playing. Unfortunately, what they do not understand is the rest of the world is playing a different game with different rules.
I do not know what the final answer to this is, but email isn't any part of it. RSS might work, but this requires other software for clueless newbie users to install. I think the only answer is a web page where the user signs in to read messages, print receipts, and so on.
This argument didn't carry much weight with the judge on the 321 Studios vs. MPAA case. DVD copying software was found to have no redeeming value and it has been pulled.
OK, you can say this must show how desperate they are.
I think a different view of this is that if a generation of children is allowed to grow up thinking that music, movies, software and anything else they can find on the Internet is there for the taking we are looking at some fundamental changes in both our way of life and our economy. And this applies not just to the USA but to Europe, Australia and (probably) Japan as well.
For example, what use is there in having a library when all books are free? Why would anyone donate books to a library or check off a box when the vote to fund a library with more tax dollars? Assuming the library actually pays for their books, music, art and so on, wouldn't we have a generation of people just thinking that was stupid?
Folks talk about how buying music is funding an obsolete distribution model and nothing really goes to the artist. Fine - if you have a high-speed Internet connection, maybe you can make the decision to "only download" music and never buy another CD. What if you don't have that connection? What about the folks that need to spend that $50 a month on food rather than the Internet? There are still a large number of people (more than 50% in the US I believe) that do not have access to the Internet at all at home or work. Sure, they can go to the library - but I thought we were closing the libraries as obsolete anyway.
I think there are a lot of issues here before it can be assumed that physical distribution is obsolete.
Anyway, if we aren't to raise an entire generation thinking that anything that can be distributed digitally should be free, then it makes sense that eventually all industry groups associated with anything covered by copyright will be promoting their cause in schools and anywhere else they can get a forum. This is their last hope for the future, folks. If they cannot succeed in convincing people that their ownership/property rights/copyright/whatever means something then we need to start figuring out what the effects are going to be and how to deal with them right now. All I've seen here is the blanket assumption that
There will be no serious effects
Artists will be compensated, somehow.
Creative works will still get made for the joy of doing it, not for some dirty profit.
Maybe there will be no effects at all...
I think we need to think this through a lot more before deciding this. The potential consequences are there and some discussion of how to adapt is worthwhile.
How about if all taxes are banned and we just pay for everything as it is used?
Stop at a stop sign and pay $0.10 for maintenance.
Drive on a road and pay $0.001 per mile.
Get a traffic ticket and pay $1200 for all of the officials involved.
How about paying $5000 for the fire department to put out your house>?li>
Unfortunately, I think we're in this tax thing because of the the way people find it shifts costs around and makes everyone pay a little bit for stuff. The goal (obviously) is to make the taxes low enough to prevent people from complaining too much but high enough to keep things going. That pretty much means everything is taxed in some way. Lucky that we haven't heard about taxes like:
Drunk tax. Pay if you drink too much.
Sex tax - with different rates for different stuff.
Air tax. Pay for breathing, pay for lighting matches, pay for turning on a gas stove. Makes electric stoves cheaper to use.
I hear they are looking at some pretty strange taxes in California because they are in a real bind there.
I think the problem is right now the PSTN companies have figured out a way to bypass long distance charges for long distance calls. They use VoIP to move the call from one area to another. It has nothing to do with individual use of VoIP, it has everything to do with Sprint switching voice calls over the Internet rather than a line leased from MCI. The line leased from MCI is taxed, regulated and metered. The Internet isn't.
It is also important to understand that local phone service is cheap because of long distance phone service being charged as it is. If you destroy long distance charges (as VoIP currently being used would do), the facilities are going to have to be paid for somehow. Right now, we don't see it because of cost shifting.
This is all about finding a loophole and getting something for nothing. They want to close the loophole. I don't see any other way to resolve this without restructuring all wired communications in the US.
Re:Read the "Terms Of Service"
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Update on Playfair
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't think you are breaking the law, but you are leaving yourself open to civil liability with Apple. They can sue you. They will almost certainly win unless you get baffle the judge with technical nonsense.
This could be far worse than any criminal penalty, because Apple could (in theory) go for pretty unreasonable damages. I don't see this happening - I think they will settle for the program going away from being publicly available. This does mean playing wack-a-mole for a while where they chase down every appearance on the Internet. It is possible to win that sort of thing if you are motivated enough.
Remember the DeCSS stuff and how long that took. Notice how long and how expensive the case against 321 Studios (DVD X Copy) has been. This stuff is now out of "public" view and confined to a few places that most people can't find easily. Is it gone? Heck no. Can every Joe Sixpack find it in five minutes? Maybe that is good enough.
Re:Not agreeing with Apple here
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Update on Playfair
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· Score: 3, Insightful
So what is wrong with building a business based on supplying music for the iPod only? This seems to be exactly the point of Apple's complaint - that converting the files easily and quickly makes it too easy to play them on non-Apple hardware. Since it is generally known that iTMS is a loss-leader supplying content for the iPod series, this sounds like a perfectly valid complaint.
I put this on the same level as the "subsidized" price for game consoles with the understanding that you are going to use the device to play games. If they charged what the game console hardware really cost, it would be two or three times as much. Similar models exist everywhere where the hardware is artifically cheap and revenue is made up for by future sales.
Sort of like giving away staplers and charging lots for staples.
The reason for the existence of the EULA is first and foremost the phrase that is in every single one about not being liable for consequential damages. Probably the second most important one is that you are not allowed to steal the product, or parts of the product and resell them independently. Just about everything after that is to reinforce those two phrases. At least that is what the lawyers tell me about our EULA.
You see, with every other product on the face of the earth there is substantial precendent for what constitutes use and misuse of the product. If you decide to open a bottle of catsup with a stick of dynamite you will not find a court anywhere that will let you sue because you got hurt. However, if you install a backup program, never run it and lose all your data you probably can find a lawyer that will file saying the backup software company should have done something to prevent this from happening.
This is the legal climate that exists today. Doctors have to join large groups just to afford the malpractice insurance. Small companies need to have a full time lawyer on staff to review stuff and properly set up agreements. If you don't do this, you lose everything and maybe end up all working for somebody that takes over the whole thing.
I do not see any way to get away from every product published by someone with anything to lose having a EULA. Failure to do this will result in someone, sometime trying to get compensated for their perception of a failing. This goes equally well for free, open and even public domain software. There is no legal precedent as far as I know that says liability is limited to the purchase price or that free stuff has no liability.
I don't know any way out of the current situation other than revamping the entire legal system and maybe more. A few court cases where some precedent was established clearly identifying there not being liability except in cases of gross negligence would be nice.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not believe the average American consumer believes any company is going to "do the right thing" without some sort of legal force behind it. And even then, it will be a question of risk vs. benefit.
So the Canadian company that believes having some extensive privacy statement and following it closely will net them better customer relations is deluding themselves. Similarly, an American company that does not have as extensive a committment to privacy - and perhaps actually does not provide as much "real privacy" to customers is likely operating in an environment where spending more dollars on "improving privacy" is a waste of time and money. In either case, the majority is likely to assume whatever they say, they are lying. What ever they claim to be doing, they are doing whatever they need to do. Period.
Now, it would be nice if there was some organization that actually investigated privacy practices and reported on them. Unfortunately, what we have is membership-based organizations where you pay a fee and get to put a logo on your web page. Does this come with any follow through, education, training or publicity? No. You have a logo on your web page. This pretty much tells the consumer nothing but it does look nice.
Unless a product is hopelessly overcomplicated, the support will consist of things like asking "Is it plugged in?" for totally clueless users. Anybody can handle that level of support without even knowing what the product is supposed to do.
The next level of support is helping people use the product that don't bother reading whatever limited documentation there might be. That can be handled by someone with a 6th grade education that actually can read the documentation and read it back to the slightly more clueful users that didn't bother.
Neither of these levels of support is going to require anything in the way of "understanding the code". If a product needs more support than this to be usable, it is the wrong solution.
Understand, there can be bugs that do actually require fixes. But if that isn't a lot less than 5% of the users, again it is the wrong solution. Someone can easily write off those 5% of sales in favor of the 95% that don't need that level of support.
My conclusion is therefore that support is something that any 6th grader can handle.
Unfortunately, both are currently protected:
In some cases they actively tell people not to use it.
These arguments are pretty much why legal attacks against blacklists have failed in the past.
Where is spamming illegal? I know of no laws whatsoever that make it illegal to send email to lots of people. There are laws about how email addresses can be collected, and that is primarily what the CAN-SPAM act is all about. It also lays out some rules about removal and sender identification. It clearly does not make spam illegal.
The whole point is to do this without the spammers knowledge of who the complainer is and have the ISP terminate their service. Put them out of business. Of course, if the accused isn't really a "spammer" with endless T1 connections to choose from you they may have a problem and end up really being put out of business.
Well heck, it was their fault for trying to use email in a commercial manner. We get reported all the time for sending sales confirmations out. People complain and we get blocked. Sometimes the blocks are lifted after they figure out the complainer is an idiot. Sometimes idiocy is rewarded. We are moving to techniques that do not involve email at all. Have to. No choice.
You can give up on the idea that you can endlessly spam - or communicate with customers via email. It doesn't work. Somewhere, somehow it is going to get blocked.
If you believe you have a dedicated audience that wants to receive your message, figure out another way. Email does notwork for this any longer.
It is a zero-sum game - there are only so many consumer dollars out there that can be spent. That is called "disposable income". The rest is what you live on.
Marketing and sales are all about how to get you to spend you disposable income in one place vs. somewhere else. If you buy stuff at Wal-Mart, then the folks at Target have failed. Being a failure sucks. Kmart has found this out the hard way - they are practically out of business.
So, without marketing and sales at all everyone's disposable income might be evenly distributed over "quality" products leaving inferior products out of the game. I doubt this very, very much but it makes for a nice story. Unfortunately, one guy with a sign is going to mess this up and get more than his "fair share". We aren't going to be seeing the end of marketing and sales promotions anytime soon.
I think this is roughly equivalent to saying that if people are being murdered and raped in the streets of a city, you deserve pictures. Right now. Let's start publishing the pictures of murder and rape victims so we can all be properly informed and outraged that this is happening.
OK, this would have an effect on crime but I am not sure it is the kind of effect you would want.
Excuse me, but if people were to see what was going on in any war, they would be sickened and want to stop. If people saw what was going on in Africa and Italy in 1943 and 1944 they would never have voted for an invasion of Europe against Hitler.
Not a single person would have wanted one of the most brutal wars ever to continue - the American Civil war. It would have been over in a month with calls for letting the south go their own way and keep their slaves.
The American Revolutionary War wasn't all that popular with the general population of the colonies and nobody would have wanted to continue after seeing some battlefield scenes. Since we didn't have TV or even photography then, all it would have taken was a few visits from officials to see how terribly young men were dying.
Is pulling a sheet over a dead body to hide it from view distorting the truth? What the news media on both sides would like is more blood, more guts, more outrage. This feeds their ratings and the morbid attraction that most people have. It does not help anything except their commercial interests. Nobody is better informed for seeing dead bodies, bloody corpses and pieces of bodies.
Face it, there are some things that are pretty unpleasent. If you got to watch a couple of surgeries before signing up for yours, you would probably say, "No thanks!" Things are not quite as neat and clean as we would like.
Iraq may have been a situation that was better left to someone else. Unfortunately, nobody was stepping up to the plate. The UN was more than happy to continue the financial relationships they had built up with the totally corrupt "Oil for Food" program. Saddam was more than happy to never present any argument that he might not have banned weapons - because it increased his local standing. Everyone here had something to lose, but nobody wanted to get involved.
So now the US is trying to establish order in a very, very disorderly place. I don't see instant photographs of US casualties - or Iraqi casualties - making it any easier to establish order. Yes, there have been mistakes made. Yes, it would have been better to devote more resources to preventing looting in the beginning. But the alternatives now are limited and just walking out now leads to things being much worse than they were before.
If the news media presents nothing more than how awful all of this is then naturally the people will demand that it end. Right now. I don't see how that helps anyone, least of all Iraq.
I think we need to get the photos from the contractors that were burned and hung from a bridge in Bagdad. Let's not forget that.
I think there are two clarifications in order that I see.
First, there isn't any need to "repeal copyrights", but there is a clearly seen requirement to allow unrestricted redistribution, especially in digital form. This would eliminate the problems with giving a copy of a song to a friend. You can get all weasely with notions like restricting to non-commercial redistribution, but I think that would restrict things that GPL allows, for instance. So, I think a goal that a lot of people have in mind is indeed unrestricted redistribution.
The "collapse of the economy" is perhaps overstated, but what a lot of people do not understand is until everyone is using the Internet for music, movies and books there will be a substantial amount of physical media being sold. Once you allow "unrestricted redistribution" that means I can make my own Elton John albums and sell them. Similarly, I can take a relatively unknown band's CD and resell it.
The problem there is this is a game that will be won by the very largest corporations with huge distribution channels. This will not open the market for common people - it will just mean stuff gets snatched up by megacorporations and resold with their name on it. How do you prevent that?
Let us assume there is at some point in time unrestricted redistribution. Anyone can copy and redistribute (share) anything they want. Let's assume this "sharing" takes place on the Internet.
I claim that this sets up a situation whereby there are two classes of people: those that have fast Internet connections with the knowledge to use them, and those that do not. The "Internet savvy" folks get everything they want for free, the others have to pay.
Is this a tax on ignorance? On lack of tech skills? Is this fair?
Similarly, with unrestricted redistribution there is nothing to stop a large company with extensive distribution channels from picking up anything and reselling it. They get it for free - no annoying artist contracts - and they publish it for the folks that don't use the Internet. OK, so their market is only 60% of what it is today. But the counterbalance is that they pay nothing for the music, books or anything else they pick up off the Internet to republish.
How could a corporation do this? Simple - by out-distributing smaller competitors, even when those competitors are distributing a free product.
- Have a massive legal staff with nothing else to do.
- Have a portfolio of patents to cross-license.
The idea is that everybody is infringing on something, so the best defense is to just cross-license the stuff. This means that the more patents you have, the easier it is to defend against any potential infringement.Of course, this also means that if you don't have several million dollars to invest in patenting everything in sight, you are going to lose in developing any sort of commercial software product. Sooner or later someone will come along with the patent that they got last week that covers something you've been doing for three years. And then, since you don't have the portfolio of patents that they are infringing on, you have to either try to defend yourself in court or just fold up.
Folding up isn't nice, but it is by far the more realistic of the two options.
I do not see anything changing anytime soon here - it is considered just a cost of doing business to build a patent portfolio for defense purposes.
Why would there be any accrediation? If you can copy freely, then anyone can copy and reuse freely.
What you are really asking for is absolute control by the largest corporations that can be second to market - with the financial power to dwarf anyone else's distribution. Say you publish a song and ask people to pay you $1 for it. Some large corporation takes it, sells it on street corners for $0.80 because they can afford the people to stand on street corners to distribute it. Economy of scale - they make money at a lower selling price than you do and they have better/faster distribution. End of story.
OK, so people that are Internet-savvy maybe don't have to pay for anything. What about those that aren't? Geek tyranny?
The only balance for the out-distribute problem is some kind of civil right/law that prevents redistribution like that.
I do not believe any cost-benefit analysis enters into the picture here. Retailers pretty much dictate the prices. They have a model that says $49.99 is what a game costs, so they "encourage" the publisher to price it there. If they price it lower, it will not be shelved because the retailer makes less per copy than the other 400 games they have to choose from. If it is priced higher, it might be put on the shelf but it won't sell.
This could be considered the big-box retailer effect. If you don't go along with it, you don't get to be on retail shelves.
Excuse me? Lazy? I think you should be focusing on the primary content of games today if you want to talk about where the bottleneck is. As a former game developer, trust me, it isn't the software.
It's the artwork.
Nobody pays for text-mode games anymore or games with crude developer-created graphics. Oh no, they want 3D realism with extensive models. The last game I worked on (a baseball game) they had models come in for motion capture so they could then move the 3D models realistically based on how a real pitcher, batter, etc. moved. Was this expensive? You bet. Was this time-consuming? Yup. How long did it take to merge the motion capture data with the 3D models to create the animation? Nearly a year.
There were over 30 people involved in that production, from designers to artists and programmers. No "new development tool" is going to change that in any meaningful way.
Oh, and for other types of software development, yes, there are tools for doing things in different ways than they were done in 1970. Having been a software developer in 1974 I can tell you things have indeed changed - mostly for corporate software development. Where extensive runtime systems can be required and where interpreted code can be used extensively.
If you want to distribute something to relatively clueless Windows users, it needs to install cleanly, not conflict with other applications they have installed and not be easily stolen, rebranded and sold under a different name. That leaves out many recent development environments.
Console games are a special breed - you end up writing lots in Assembler because the requirements for the game push the limits of the hardware. If you let some unneeded overhead creep in, you lose - someone else's game is faster, more responsive and has better graphics because they are using Assembler coding.
Confirmation emails for purchases are blocked.
Emailed newsletters that are paid for are blocked.
Emails from friends and family are blocked.
Forget it. Email is broken. It cannot be used in a reliable sense by any commercial entity. Partly this is due to the anti-spam activists that want all "commercial" email banned. Partly this is due to ISPs that implement filters and have decided that they do not need to whitelist anyone without performing their special procedure. You cannot win at this game - the anti-spam activists have won what they think is the game they are playing. Unfortunately, what they do not understand is the rest of the world is playing a different game with different rules.
I do not know what the final answer to this is, but email isn't any part of it. RSS might work, but this requires other software for clueless newbie users to install. I think the only answer is a web page where the user signs in to read messages, print receipts, and so on.
Note: there is no parole from federal prison.
R>I.P. 321 Studios
I think a different view of this is that if a generation of children is allowed to grow up thinking that music, movies, software and anything else they can find on the Internet is there for the taking we are looking at some fundamental changes in both our way of life and our economy. And this applies not just to the USA but to Europe, Australia and (probably) Japan as well.
For example, what use is there in having a library when all books are free? Why would anyone donate books to a library or check off a box when the vote to fund a library with more tax dollars? Assuming the library actually pays for their books, music, art and so on, wouldn't we have a generation of people just thinking that was stupid?
Folks talk about how buying music is funding an obsolete distribution model and nothing really goes to the artist. Fine - if you have a high-speed Internet connection, maybe you can make the decision to "only download" music and never buy another CD. What if you don't have that connection? What about the folks that need to spend that $50 a month on food rather than the Internet? There are still a large number of people (more than 50% in the US I believe) that do not have access to the Internet at all at home or work. Sure, they can go to the library - but I thought we were closing the libraries as obsolete anyway.
I think there are a lot of issues here before it can be assumed that physical distribution is obsolete.
Anyway, if we aren't to raise an entire generation thinking that anything that can be distributed digitally should be free, then it makes sense that eventually all industry groups associated with anything covered by copyright will be promoting their cause in schools and anywhere else they can get a forum. This is their last hope for the future, folks. If they cannot succeed in convincing people that their ownership/property rights/copyright/whatever means something then we need to start figuring out what the effects are going to be and how to deal with them right now. All I've seen here is the blanket assumption that
- There will be no serious effects
- Artists will be compensated, somehow.
- Creative works will still get made for the joy of doing it, not for some dirty profit.
- Maybe there will be no effects at all...
I think we need to think this through a lot more before deciding this. The potential consequences are there and some discussion of how to adapt is worthwhile.- Stop at a stop sign and pay $0.10 for maintenance.
- Drive on a road and pay $0.001 per mile.
- Get a traffic ticket and pay $1200 for all of the officials involved.
- How about paying $5000 for the fire department to put out your house>?li>
Unfortunately, I think we're in this tax thing because of the the way people find it shifts costs around and makes everyone pay a little bit for stuff. The goal (obviously) is to make the taxes low enough to prevent people from complaining too much but high enough to keep things going. That pretty much means everything is taxed in some way. Lucky that we haven't heard about taxes like:- Drunk tax. Pay if you drink too much.
- Sex tax - with different rates for different stuff.
- Air tax. Pay for breathing, pay for lighting matches, pay for turning on a gas stove. Makes electric stoves cheaper to use.
I hear they are looking at some pretty strange taxes in California because they are in a real bind there.It is also important to understand that local phone service is cheap because of long distance phone service being charged as it is. If you destroy long distance charges (as VoIP currently being used would do), the facilities are going to have to be paid for somehow. Right now, we don't see it because of cost shifting.
This is all about finding a loophole and getting something for nothing. They want to close the loophole. I don't see any other way to resolve this without restructuring all wired communications in the US.
This could be far worse than any criminal penalty, because Apple could (in theory) go for pretty unreasonable damages. I don't see this happening - I think they will settle for the program going away from being publicly available. This does mean playing wack-a-mole for a while where they chase down every appearance on the Internet. It is possible to win that sort of thing if you are motivated enough.
Remember the DeCSS stuff and how long that took. Notice how long and how expensive the case against 321 Studios (DVD X Copy) has been. This stuff is now out of "public" view and confined to a few places that most people can't find easily. Is it gone? Heck no. Can every Joe Sixpack find it in five minutes? Maybe that is good enough.
I put this on the same level as the "subsidized" price for game consoles with the understanding that you are going to use the device to play games. If they charged what the game console hardware really cost, it would be two or three times as much. Similar models exist everywhere where the hardware is artifically cheap and revenue is made up for by future sales.
Sort of like giving away staplers and charging lots for staples.
You see, with every other product on the face of the earth there is substantial precendent for what constitutes use and misuse of the product. If you decide to open a bottle of catsup with a stick of dynamite you will not find a court anywhere that will let you sue because you got hurt. However, if you install a backup program, never run it and lose all your data you probably can find a lawyer that will file saying the backup software company should have done something to prevent this from happening.
This is the legal climate that exists today. Doctors have to join large groups just to afford the malpractice insurance. Small companies need to have a full time lawyer on staff to review stuff and properly set up agreements. If you don't do this, you lose everything and maybe end up all working for somebody that takes over the whole thing.
I do not see any way to get away from every product published by someone with anything to lose having a EULA. Failure to do this will result in someone, sometime trying to get compensated for their perception of a failing. This goes equally well for free, open and even public domain software. There is no legal precedent as far as I know that says liability is limited to the purchase price or that free stuff has no liability.
I don't know any way out of the current situation other than revamping the entire legal system and maybe more. A few court cases where some precedent was established clearly identifying there not being liability except in cases of gross negligence would be nice.