The problem is that today the reality is the cost of software is high and the risk of being "caught" with an illegal copy is zero. Zero. No risk. Therefore, there is zero incentive to purchase anything that you have the knowledge to find on the Internet for free.
What does this leave for software sales?
Beginners. People that are unaware of the vast stores of pirated software that exists out there.
People without access to a high speed Internet connection.
If it was possible to eliminate software piracy, someone who owns a software company might be able to hire a another developer. Like maybe you - or hire someone in the US rather than paying someone in Romaina or China to do some contract work on the cheap.
Sure, it may not make that much difference to Microsoft or Adobe, but it sure makes a difference to smaller companies. And we get hit just as hard (if not more because of smaller sales volume). So, the next time you think about saying that pirating software hurts nobody that it just might be you that isn't getting hired next week because product sales aren't what they would be if all users paid.
True, it is a very strange mix that you find posted on Warez sites and requested in the binaries groups. Let's see, according to the parent consumer stuff from Microsoft, Adobe and Roxio must be crap - passed out freely - and the really good stuff must be educational software for schools and MS SQL and IIS patches because I can't find them anywhere.
Until a majority of the world is online and trusts online purchases, the physical, brick-and-mortar retail sales of CDs will remain. And, physical, offline methods of promoting and selling music will remain the most important. This means we better learn to get along with the record promotion and advertising companies, because they are going to be around for a long time to come.
I think we are far more likely to see music being created primarily by sampling and copying everything that has been transformed into digital form for the last 50 years. What we have seen in the last 10 has been where laziness and theft can subsitute for creativity, laziness and theft win hands down every time. Do you really think music is going to be any different?
Wait a minute, I thought the latest was that 9/11 was faked just to enrich the Republicans and to let the Israelis kill more innocent children in the Middle East. You can read more about it at The Fatal Flaw in The 911 Coverup.
So, would you rather have the government chasing after imaginary terrorists and squashing the civil rights of citizens? Or going after software thieves?
If you get a $20K+ testing system and a large number of CD-R samples, write them at various speeds and check the results, you will find that writing at a speed other than the "optimal" for the recorder results in a measurable degradation in the quality of the recording. This sort of testing has been done at Media Sciences (www.mscience.com
This means that if you have a 2X recorder, writing at 2X is *much* better than 1X. If you have a 32X recorder, writing at 32X will produce measurably better discs than writing at 4X, 2X or 1X. This has been true since around 1998 or so. It is quite true that you could get better results with some early 4X recorders when writing at 1X than 4X. However, none of those devices are current any longer.
The "writing slower is better" story is a myth. Please don't spread it further. And yes, if you want more information about disc testing Media Sciences is a company that is dedicated to disc quality and testing. I do not work for them.
The "war on p2p" could be ended with a few minor adjustments:
No more recording companies. They are unncessary.
No more music distribution offline. You want something, you have to download it or stream it.
No limitations on "sampling". I can "digitally remaster" anything I want and sell it. It might be two really *big* samples, but that's OK.
If we could live with that, there is a way out of the present mess. Unfortunately, I don't think the 60-70% of the world that does not download music today is all that interested in this sort of system. They would be feeling cut out of the loop, and they would be.
Let's see here, your average Indian programmer working for $5 an hour is working for a consulting company that is CMM level 5 and ISO certified.
Better code, better standards, for less money than anyone in the US or Europe. There is no competition here. Until the Indian economy and the Indian people catch up with the US and European standard of living (and government regulations), they are always going to be the clear winners.
Of course, when they do price themselves out of the market, all the jobs will be going to Chinese contractors.
Hey, I think gas became too high priced when it reached $1.00 a gallon. I remember driving endlessly and seeing gas prices between 29.9 and 33.9 (cents per gallon) and that is where it is supposed to be.
This $2.00 a gallon stuff is absurd.
Soon as they come up with an electric car that can go more than about 100 miles on a 20 hour charge, I'm all set. Oh, and I wouldn't like to replace that $10,000 battery more than once every five years or so.
I think we have a ways to go on that. And, I think we'll have 6-hour laptop batteries long before practical car batteries. The big battle now is to have a 1-year-old laptop that can play a DVD all the way through.
The problem comes from EULAs and what happens if you get rid of them. If, as someone proposed above, you just got rid of the EULA, you get rid of the liability disclaimer and - ugh! - the current "immunity from liability" that we all enjoy.
I don't think I would like a situation where some software was exempt from liability - all that would do is make it where Microsoft delivers a buggy OS for free and charges for support. You better believe support would become manatory in that world, so we would be even worse off than we are now.
I can understand the comparison to malpractice, and unfortunately it wouldn't be like a business E&O (Errors and Omissions) insurance policy - it would be a lot more like medical malpractice probably with oversight agencies and endless red tape.
I think the original poster thinks that states encourage this sort of thing. Well, no.
About the best I can think of would be the income tax regulations that could make it beneficial to put money into a business and even if the business fails they aren't too unhappy because they get to write off the investment against other profits.
Ten years ago that was a lot more popular than it is now. People don't want write-offs now, they want 50% returns.
The government does not make business loans. The government does, under some conditions and with a lot of qualifications, guarantee bank loans. But the qualification process is just a little short of winning the lottery.
Any company that invests 401k money (or allows employees to select to invest their 401k money) into a startup company will last very long - the IRS will not only shut the 401K down but the company along with it. You might see a big pension fund invest in a venture capital fund. A fund with a lot of other money in it and a lot of distributed risk.
I'll have to check my schedule - I guess by your standards I need to start bribing politicans, since that is the only way profit-making businesses succeed. Since I've got employees that want to be paid (yup, they do - just asked), there needs to be a profit on sales here.
I own a software company that sells closed-source products. So, according to this crowd I am the devil incarnate, evil, without morals and generally the sort of person you would cross the street to avoid.
Seriously, if you remove the "disclaimer of liability" from all software and said the author was liable for flaws and losses by the end user, MS might be bankrupt in a week. As a minor side benefit whatever replaced them would be damn sure to do some testing before releasing a product.
The problem here is the WhenU software is free. They aren't charging for it, so by your rules, they couldn't be held liable for it.
I think it would be much simpler to push it back to around 1975 or so - the act of writing a piece of software makes the author responsible for it in all incarnations. If someone finds a security hole, the author is at least 50% responsible. Any losses the user incurs are at least 50% the responsibility of the author.
More than 50% liability is triggered by difficulty in uninstalling the program or any sort of legalese EULA that implies (incorrectly) that there is any limitation on the liability of the author.
Why only 50%? Because the user has to bear some of the risk no matter what.
This would inject some badly needed sanity into the OS and office suite world. It would also make virtually all software a lot more user-friendly by eliminating the notion that you can build a defective product, distribute it and claim that you aren't responsible.
Wouldn't this just make clean water available to the rich and keep the poor people from getting any? It might be better environmentally for there to be fewer people, but this sounds like a really bad way to go about it.
The problem isn't that the RIAA and record companies don't understand they can distribute stuff on the Internet. Oh, they get that just fine. The problem is that a large percentage of their customer base wants something different.
They don't have a broadband Internet connection.
They don't have a CD writer.
They don't want to hassle with it and just want a CD.
All of this represents well over 50% of the market, probably something more like 80%. So, there is still a need for shipping physical products to record stores.
I haven't seen anyone come up with anything except a lot of whining about how the RIAA and rest of the record industry just doesn't get it and how physical distribution is a dead end. Maybe someday when we all have fiber-to-home connections. Not today and not likely for years at least.
So, how would you fix this? Everyone in the west convert to Islam?
How about taking the Israeli population and moving them to Idaho?
Maybe eliminating poverty in Saudi Arabia by giving everyone a million dollars?
I don't think there is a solution that gets everyone to like us - or even a reasonable majority - without doing some pretty extreme things. And, even if the US did them, we'd be chided for doing it just for safety and without any real committment.
About the only thing that would make everyone happy would be if the economy crashed worldwide and everyone was living like a peasant in Bangladesh. We'd all be way too worried about filling our bellies to be concerned about what was going on elsewhere.
The point here is that the Social Security Administration said they were "putting on hold" recognizing all marriages in the state of California at one point in the last month or so. I don't know if they reversed themselves or not, but that is what the point of an amendment is all about.
The US cannot have a policy where some states allow gay marriage and others do not. That sort of thing would lead to situations where getting a divorce would me walking over to the next state. The legal situation would be impossible to resolve.
As I see it, the only way is to nail this down - for all states - is to have an amendment that says yes or no. I don't see all states agreeing anytime in the next hundred years by themselves. About the only alternative I can see to that would be to eliminate any legal or government involvement in marriage. That would get the states out of the picture completely. That would mean that being married has no more legal standing, for any purpose. While I don't necessarily object to that sort of thing, it would require a lot of changes.
I think the issue here is that both Australia and the US would like to scare the bejeezus out of the guy. Doing so in the US is just icing on the cake.
Let's see, if Australia said "Hell no, our chum here's done no wrong." the response from the US could be to make all Australian produced software, music and movies free in the US. Free to distribute on the Internet, back to Australia. Why not? Isn't that the logical conclusion of lack of international enforcement?
You would like a government-owned telecom system? One that owns fiber to every home? Nobody else would be able to compete with that, so the government would then own a telecom monopoly.
That doesn't sound like a very sensible idea to me.
The issue is clear here. If Oracle puts some MS code (illegally) into their product and Oracle distributors and system integrators bundle it with systems, where does the liability lie? With Oracle, eventually.
With Linux it might be possible to find someone that put the infringing code into the distribution, but if they are an individual you aren't going to get much from them, if anything.
So, let's say that somebody puts out a Outlook clone for Linux that is picked up by every distribution there is and millions of copies of it end up in the world. Then, Microsoft announces that this really is Outlook code and they want $1 for each copy. Where do they get the millions from? The guy that put it in? Would they try to get it from Suse, Mandrake and Red Hat? Sure. And maybe, they would get it there. But probably they would have to send a bill to every Linux user on the face of the earth.
As to just buying a T1, I assure you that most of the time it comes with no AUP. I have had two companies providing a T1 and neither had any policy about use, any abuse handling or anything that indicated they were interested in the traffic on the T1.
If I was a minor-league spammer, I would find this relationship just fine for business. There is no "ISP" relationship here - the company provides zero service other than a data connection.
I think you are missing the point. Spam isn't something that Jr. Viagra Distributor, Inc. sends out trying to get new customers - it is something that Spam-Is-Us sends out. Spam-Is-Us then sends a bill to Jr. Viagra Distributor for the email that was sent out.
Spam-Is-Us cares not how much was delivered, opened, read or anything else. Maybe - just maybe - they send out HTML email so they can track how many are opened. These "opened" are either then reported or billed at a higher rate.
Note: Outlook preview accesses the HTML picture, so therefore counts as "opening" the email.
The problem is that Spam-Is-Us sends out spam they don't care about, and Jr. Viagra Distributor thinks paying for spamming will get them some customers. After a while, Jr. figures out it isn't working but SuperSizeNow has contracted with Spam-Is-Us for selling their Viagra and we perceive no net difference - we're still getting Viagra spam written by the same person at Spam-Is-Us.
This makes it look like it must be selling because we keep getting the same message over and over again.
Slashdot Mirror
What does this leave for software sales?
- Beginners. People that are unaware of the vast stores of pirated software that exists out there.
- People without access to a high speed Internet connection.
Everyone else gets their software for free!I believe the IRS calls businesses like you describe "hobbies" as they have no intention of being profitable.
Sure, it may not make that much difference to Microsoft or Adobe, but it sure makes a difference to smaller companies. And we get hit just as hard (if not more because of smaller sales volume). So, the next time you think about saying that pirating software hurts nobody that it just might be you that isn't getting hired next week because product sales aren't what they would be if all users paid.
True, it is a very strange mix that you find posted on Warez sites and requested in the binaries groups. Let's see, according to the parent consumer stuff from Microsoft, Adobe and Roxio must be crap - passed out freely - and the really good stuff must be educational software for schools and MS SQL and IIS patches because I can't find them anywhere.
I think we are far more likely to see music being created primarily by sampling and copying everything that has been transformed into digital form for the last 50 years. What we have seen in the last 10 has been where laziness and theft can subsitute for creativity, laziness and theft win hands down every time. Do you really think music is going to be any different?
So, would you rather have the government chasing after imaginary terrorists and squashing the civil rights of citizens? Or going after software thieves?
This means that if you have a 2X recorder, writing at 2X is *much* better than 1X. If you have a 32X recorder, writing at 32X will produce measurably better discs than writing at 4X, 2X or 1X. This has been true since around 1998 or so. It is quite true that you could get better results with some early 4X recorders when writing at 1X than 4X. However, none of those devices are current any longer.
The "writing slower is better" story is a myth. Please don't spread it further. And yes, if you want more information about disc testing Media Sciences is a company that is dedicated to disc quality and testing. I do not work for them.
- No more recording companies. They are unncessary.
- No more music distribution offline. You want something, you have to download it or stream it.
- No limitations on "sampling". I can "digitally remaster" anything I want and sell it. It might be two really *big* samples, but that's OK.
If we could live with that, there is a way out of the present mess. Unfortunately, I don't think the 60-70% of the world that does not download music today is all that interested in this sort of system. They would be feeling cut out of the loop, and they would be.Better code, better standards, for less money than anyone in the US or Europe. There is no competition here. Until the Indian economy and the Indian people catch up with the US and European standard of living (and government regulations), they are always going to be the clear winners.
Of course, when they do price themselves out of the market, all the jobs will be going to Chinese contractors.
If we adopt a more eastern model, we won't be eating beef. Those guys in Bangalore seem to be doing fine without it.
Hey, I think gas became too high priced when it reached $1.00 a gallon. I remember driving endlessly and seeing gas prices between 29.9 and 33.9 (cents per gallon) and that is where it is supposed to be.
This $2.00 a gallon stuff is absurd.
Soon as they come up with an electric car that can go more than about 100 miles on a 20 hour charge, I'm all set. Oh, and I wouldn't like to replace that $10,000 battery more than once every five years or so.
I think we have a ways to go on that. And, I think we'll have 6-hour laptop batteries long before practical car batteries. The big battle now is to have a 1-year-old laptop that can play a DVD all the way through.
I don't think I would like a situation where some software was exempt from liability - all that would do is make it where Microsoft delivers a buggy OS for free and charges for support. You better believe support would become manatory in that world, so we would be even worse off than we are now.
I can understand the comparison to malpractice, and unfortunately it wouldn't be like a business E&O (Errors and Omissions) insurance policy - it would be a lot more like medical malpractice probably with oversight agencies and endless red tape.
So, is the EULA the right solution?
About the best I can think of would be the income tax regulations that could make it beneficial to put money into a business and even if the business fails they aren't too unhappy because they get to write off the investment against other profits.
Ten years ago that was a lot more popular than it is now. People don't want write-offs now, they want 50% returns.
Any company that invests 401k money (or allows employees to select to invest their 401k money) into a startup company will last very long - the IRS will not only shut the 401K down but the company along with it. You might see a big pension fund invest in a venture capital fund. A fund with a lot of other money in it and a lot of distributed risk.
I'll have to check my schedule - I guess by your standards I need to start bribing politicans, since that is the only way profit-making businesses succeed. Since I've got employees that want to be paid (yup, they do - just asked), there needs to be a profit on sales here.
Seriously, if you remove the "disclaimer of liability" from all software and said the author was liable for flaws and losses by the end user, MS might be bankrupt in a week. As a minor side benefit whatever replaced them would be damn sure to do some testing before releasing a product.
I think it would be much simpler to push it back to around 1975 or so - the act of writing a piece of software makes the author responsible for it in all incarnations. If someone finds a security hole, the author is at least 50% responsible. Any losses the user incurs are at least 50% the responsibility of the author.
More than 50% liability is triggered by difficulty in uninstalling the program or any sort of legalese EULA that implies (incorrectly) that there is any limitation on the liability of the author.
Why only 50%? Because the user has to bear some of the risk no matter what.
This would inject some badly needed sanity into the OS and office suite world. It would also make virtually all software a lot more user-friendly by eliminating the notion that you can build a defective product, distribute it and claim that you aren't responsible.
Wouldn't this just make clean water available to the rich and keep the poor people from getting any? It might be better environmentally for there to be fewer people, but this sounds like a really bad way to go about it.
- They don't have a broadband Internet connection.
- They don't have a CD writer.
- They don't want to hassle with it and just want a CD.
All of this represents well over 50% of the market, probably something more like 80%. So, there is still a need for shipping physical products to record stores.I haven't seen anyone come up with anything except a lot of whining about how the RIAA and rest of the record industry just doesn't get it and how physical distribution is a dead end. Maybe someday when we all have fiber-to-home connections. Not today and not likely for years at least.
How about taking the Israeli population and moving them to Idaho?
Maybe eliminating poverty in Saudi Arabia by giving everyone a million dollars?
I don't think there is a solution that gets everyone to like us - or even a reasonable majority - without doing some pretty extreme things. And, even if the US did them, we'd be chided for doing it just for safety and without any real committment.
About the only thing that would make everyone happy would be if the economy crashed worldwide and everyone was living like a peasant in Bangladesh. We'd all be way too worried about filling our bellies to be concerned about what was going on elsewhere.
The point here is that the Social Security Administration said they were "putting on hold" recognizing all marriages in the state of California at one point in the last month or so. I don't know if they reversed themselves or not, but that is what the point of an amendment is all about.
The US cannot have a policy where some states allow gay marriage and others do not. That sort of thing would lead to situations where getting a divorce would me walking over to the next state. The legal situation would be impossible to resolve.
As I see it, the only way is to nail this down - for all states - is to have an amendment that says yes or no. I don't see all states agreeing anytime in the next hundred years by themselves. About the only alternative I can see to that would be to eliminate any legal or government involvement in marriage. That would get the states out of the picture completely. That would mean that being married has no more legal standing, for any purpose. While I don't necessarily object to that sort of thing, it would require a lot of changes.
Let's see, if Australia said "Hell no, our chum here's done no wrong." the response from the US could be to make all Australian produced software, music and movies free in the US. Free to distribute on the Internet, back to Australia. Why not? Isn't that the logical conclusion of lack of international enforcement?
That doesn't sound like a very sensible idea to me.
With Linux it might be possible to find someone that put the infringing code into the distribution, but if they are an individual you aren't going to get much from them, if anything.
So, let's say that somebody puts out a Outlook clone for Linux that is picked up by every distribution there is and millions of copies of it end up in the world. Then, Microsoft announces that this really is Outlook code and they want $1 for each copy. Where do they get the millions from? The guy that put it in? Would they try to get it from Suse, Mandrake and Red Hat? Sure. And maybe, they would get it there. But probably they would have to send a bill to every Linux user on the face of the earth.
That is what this guy is talking about.
If I was a minor-league spammer, I would find this relationship just fine for business. There is no "ISP" relationship here - the company provides zero service other than a data connection.
Spam-Is-Us cares not how much was delivered, opened, read or anything else. Maybe - just maybe - they send out HTML email so they can track how many are opened. These "opened" are either then reported or billed at a higher rate.
Note: Outlook preview accesses the HTML picture, so therefore counts as "opening" the email.
The problem is that Spam-Is-Us sends out spam they don't care about, and Jr. Viagra Distributor thinks paying for spamming will get them some customers. After a while, Jr. figures out it isn't working but SuperSizeNow has contracted with Spam-Is-Us for selling their Viagra and we perceive no net difference - we're still getting Viagra spam written by the same person at Spam-Is-Us.
This makes it look like it must be selling because we keep getting the same message over and over again.