Item 2 is a dead certainty. Take a look around with Google maps. See if you can find spots on the planet where there are marks of impact craters. Look at the small one in Arizona - it is 3 miles across and a mile deep still after 50,000 years of erosion. Now think about what the day was like 50,000 year ago when it hit. Likely to have been a very, very bad day in the Southwest US. I suspect stuff was falling in what is now San Francisco. Lots of stuff. Big stuff. If that rock hit us today it would likely wipe out all life in most of the Southwest US and possibly take out everyone in Mexico as well. Remember, 50,000 years ago there were people on the planet, people that you would recognize as human.
Take a look at Wolfe Creek in Australia - it is 35 million years old and you can still easily see it from space. Think about the day that hit.
There are plenty more examples. Look around for nice round lakes in Canada. A good portion of them are impact craters.
OK, these things are spread out over a long period of time. But the key here is that we haven't been hit in a long time. We haven't been hit by anything big in a very long time. Over a long enough period, it is an absolute certainty we will be hit again. Even a small rock is going to cause a massive loss of life, whereas a big one could wipe out all life on a continent. A water strike - actually the most likely - would probably scoure everything off the grouund for hundreds of miles on all nearby coasts. An Atlantic hit would utterly destroy Europe to nearly Switzerland and Indiana on the US side. South America would be almost devoid of life.
There are three choices: hope that God will protect us and it will never happen to his Chosen people (whoever they are), be able to go out and prevent an impact, or be somewhere else when it comes. Right now, we are operating under the first alternative which I suspect most people will agree sucks. The second is not utterly beyond our capabilities, but it would be tough and require plenty of warning. I'm certainly in favor of a combination of the second and third alternatives. The third implies a self-sustaining outpost that could survive if Earth was wiped out. We are a long way from that being a realistic possibility. But it is something to strive for.
The way things are now, all we can do is hope for a benevolent God that will protect us. And maybe hope for Santa Clause to come and give us all what we need if it did happen. Sorry, I gave up on these options when I was about eight.
You have an odd opinion of labor laws. Maybe if everyone worked for a union it might somehow be a contract violation to fire anyone. However, if an employee is told to do something, legal or illegal, and they don't do it they can be fired for insubordination. Or for no reason at all, because there are no laws preventing people from being fired.
In Europe there are plenty of laws preventing people from being fired, for any reason at all. If you decide to employ someone you take on the responsibility for their future employment potentially forever. And paying into the state for them as well. It is practically impossible to fire someone after they have been working for six months in most places. The result of this is very high unemployment - no company can afford to hire someone without knowing in advance they can afford the position for the long term.
Contrast this with the US, where I can hire a sales person and if there is a downturn I can fire them anytime I want. There are no regulations, no laws preventing this. The result is more people get hired. Period. Would it be nice if everyone was assured by the government that they couldn't be fired? Maybe. But the result would be a lot fewer people getting hired. And that isn't good for anyone.
OK, they are lying. Everybody lies. All advertising is lying in one form or another. Do believe that went some celebrity appears on TV for a product that they really use it? Or know anything about it other than what the teleprompter is telling them to say?
Yes, this company sounds like they were using the "power of the Internet" a little more forcefully than others are today, but exactly what law did they break? False advertising? I doubt it. Certainly no more false than Wilford Brimley talking about Liberty Medical products as if he was at all familiar with the company before they started paying him.
No, this isn't a good start. This is not "making the Internet safer." If you believe testimonials on the Internet you are a fool, because all of them are designed to elicit behavior - yours. Every single review someone takes the time to write is either telling you how great something is or how bad. Either way, someone was so motivated as to write the review to "help" others to make the "right" decision. I wouldn't trust any of them, especially when it is not tied to anyone's real identity. How many people are out there putting up fake reviews, positive or negative, because they are paid to do so? How many people are putting up fake reviews because they have some other motive? For all you know, the person doing it could just hate the founder of the company because he beat them up in 3rd grade.
I don't believe you can claim any sort of trademark infringement for selling the Rosetta Stone product from a pirate site. The product being sold is the trademarked item. Period. That pretty much allows the use of the trademark.
The fact that the product is pirated may be illegal, but you aren't going to be able to stop that unless the pirate site is hosted in some US-friendly country. Maybe UK or Australia. Most other countries these days are going to suggest you retain a local lawyer to research the matter and inform you that they don't recognize the Berne convention or US copyright.
I seriously doubt anyone is basing advertising on the original stone "Rosetta Stone".
The problem is, Google sees nothing wrong with my bidding on the keyword "Rosetta Stone" or "Microsoft Word" or "Acrobat Professional" or anything else to advertise my warez site. If I bid high enough, I can take over the top spot on ads for these products and there is little or nothing the trademark owner can do to keep me out. Assuming my warez site is hosted in some bulletproof country that cares nothing about piracy, nothing is going to keep people from buying pirated copies of Photoshop for $14.95.
Sounds like the free market at work, right? And just like the current global environment, the high-price innovator gets to figure out how to contend with the low-cost ripoff artist. Because you can make downloads available from anywhere for almost nothing, you have taken the product from the developer and publisher and now pretty much own distribution at whatever price you set. The uncomfortable fact that it cost someone a lot of money to develop something means nothing when you have large-scale companies dedicated to duplicating any successful Western product.
And Google is raking in their percentage of this market. Certainly helps get the word out. At the fact that the price for a pirated copy of Photoshop has to sell for $39.95 now because of the bidding on keywords doesn't help Adobe one tiny little bit. Do you believe that Adobe has any "rights" here at all? Most people don't. Do you think that having an "original" Photoshop disc is better than a download from a pirate site? Most people are very willing to look the other way when the price difference is $700 or so.
And nobody would know about the pirate sites if not for Google, helping to open the marketplace and defeat the high-price monopolists.
Lifting shielding is pointless and silly. The key, as we have known for at least fourty years is to dig into the lunar surface and use the materials there as shielding. We have tunnel boring machines on Earth that will dig huge tunnels at a rate of many feet per day. We don't need that to start out - something on the order of 3 or 4 meters in diameter would be very usable. Spray the raw rocks with a sealent and you have an airtight living chamber.
Leave the boring machines going and you have a city.
Well, the private healthcare industry is likely to survive only as long as the government plan is more expensive or has less coverage. The minute the government has a taxpayer-subsidized plan that is cheaper than private healthcare, the game is over. No more private insurance.
By the way, this is the admitted goal of most of the advisors on the Obama healthcare team.
Wouldn't it be grand if they just put up photos of stuff on the Internet and left the museums for old people? After all, once it is on the Internet, who needs the museum, right?
From what I understand of it the primary reason for not allowing photography in museums (pretty much all museums) is twofold: flash photography damages things because of actinic light emitted by the flash, and all that flashing would annoy people.
The trouble it causes museums to take photographs and sell materials with these photographs vastly outweighs any "profit" they might get from such sales. I believe most museums sell this material because they can direct people that come in with cameras to their professionally produced materials so it isn't quite as harsh just saying "No photographs." If there is a profit from these sales, it is so small as to be insignificant. The costs of producing all the different materials that sit around waiting for someone to buy them are significant and for most museums, even famous ones, the sales are not brisk.
No museum with materials that can be damaged by actinic light is going to allow photography, because even with a sign "no flash" people are going to do it. That will destroy the value of their materials. As a secondary consideration, people would certainly take flash pictures no matter how many people it annoyed. So it isn't allowed in any museum I've been in. Courtesy is just so 1950's unless it is enforced by guards.
As far as I know, no museum allows photography of their collection. And you can include natural history museums, science museums and just about ever other sort of museum in addition to all art museums.
The problem with simple copyright protection is that it applies to one instance alone. Sure, you can copyright your implementation. But my implementation, modeled completely on your implementation is not proected. I can copy substantial portions of your code, if I can get them, as well and there is nothing that can be done about it legally.
About the only thing copyright protects is stealing a copy of the original and redistributing it. Independently recreating it doesn't count. This isn't any sort of competition, this is a lot closer to theft. But over and over again for the last 50 years or so it has been proven that copyright does not protect against this.
The Kindle will display a well-documented and for all practical purposes format -.mobi. Books in this format have no DRM or other restrictions. You can download one from Gutenburg anytime and it displays just fine on the Kindle.
The Kindle will also display a format that Amazon came up with for THEIR books. This has no effect on displaying unrestricted DRM-free books from others.
Absolutely, any format that allows sharing or exchange will result in everything being posted almost immediately. First person to buy a copy will pay, the rest do not have to. The magic of the Internet.
Unfortunately, not many e-book publishers will have a favorable view of this "magic".
YouTube. It is the model for the future and the model that is being embraced by young people.
Sure, WALL-E was a $200 million dollar movie. Unfortunately, some folks think that a similar quantity of entertainment (per unit hour, I suppose) can be obtained on YouTube (or Shufuni...) at significantly less cost. Which then means lower or zero cost to the entertainment consumer. At least this certainly seems to be where things are going.
I suspect that we are going to have to let them try this approach. It is unfortunate, but I believe that most "entertainers" of one sort or another have just about had their fill and are seriously questioning if it is all worth it. I'll bet that more than few folks in the big-name music and movie production houses are also wondering why they are bothering.
Piracy is reaching out it tenacles everywhere and given the structure of the Internet today it is pretty much impossible to stop. Most people under 30 have enough knowledge to understand how to download pirated materials even if they don't know how to rip a DVD or CD themselves. They also have the attitude that if it is on the Internet, it is free. So why pay money for something that is free. Besides, they are already paying plenty for high speed Internet access and doesn't all this come with it?
I think we are going to have to see if YouTube and amature production can replace professionals. Sure, I think I know the answer already, as do most people if they stop to think about it. But it is all incredibly seductive, this idea of getting everything they want for free. It won't work, but I don't see any real alternative on the horizon. I do know that until the value of professional media is displayed to people and their nose rubbed in it really well people will not be willing to pay.
You are confusing retail with the price for distribution.
If I want to buy a song for distribution, what do you think the price would be? I'd guess as a starting point you would figure out how much you might ever make, ever, from retail sales.
So $100,000 a song might not be that low a price tag.
The problem is, the retail cost of the music is meaningless. She did not "buy" the songs for herself, she obtained them in a manner that assured they were available for others to download from her.
You want to ask someone what the cost of buying one song for distribution is? It is almost certainly ore than $60,000 per song. Michael Jackson apparently has left a lot of songs recorded for his children. All estimates I have heard indicate that they aren't going to be in any financial difficultly, ever. I suspect they were counting on getting more than $60,000 per song for the distribution rights.
There is no comparison between the retail price and the price for distribution.
I think the jury was responding to two things. In the original trial she was found to be liable for damages of over $200,000 but the trial was thrown out because of bad jury instructions. In the second trial there were numerous attempts to deflect any fact-finding through obfuscation involving various technical strategies, including referring to the possiblity of a wireless router when no such device was ever used.
Finally, to top things off, Jammie herself got caught having destroyed evidence (the original hard drive) and lying about it on the stand.
None of these things made her out to be a person that was just being mistreated by the RIAA or the legal system. Her lawyers advised her rather poorly about strategies that did not attack the facts of the case but instead just tried to confuse matters. A strategy the judge and likely jury both saw through.
She can appeal all she wants. If she were to get a third trial with the same strategy it is likely the award would be increased yet again.
Well, that pretty much wipes out web sales. Most people buying software on the web are going to be put off by #1 all by itself. Number 2 absolutely eliminates web sales because nobody is going to do it.
Suing people? Sorry, in today's climate you can't sue people in foreign countries. Unless you have millions to pay the lawyers, nobody is going to even bother and unless you have a rock-solid case and going for millions, nobody is going to touch it. They will just tell you to suck it up.
Yes, there are hardcore people out on the Internet that make it their business to ensure that software, books, movies and music do not generate revenue. They will do this by whatever means they can, including using stolen credit cards to purchase products and post them for others to download. If you are relying on Internet sales you are going to run into this and there are very few ways to successfully combat it.
Nothing the parent had to say is at all useful towards this.
There is a threshold of popularity. Once you cross it, people will buy the product with stolen credit cards or anything else and then post the results of their purchase.
Until you cross the threshold of popularity, you have nothing to worry about. Once you do cross that point if you aren't in retail or some other non-Internet distribution everyone will see quickly they have a choice to pay or not. Your worst enemy will be older versions that are posted on pirate sites and such because people will assume version 2 is just as good as version 3, but version 2 is free for them.
Serial numbers are not the answer, because they are easily shared. Check out some popular software on Google and see what comes up.
Retail sales is pretty much the answer, because people in stores do not really look over the selection and the decide to pirate at home. They either buy it or not. On the web you may as well just have a link next to the "buy" button that says "get if free here" which links to a pirate site. Once the pirates grab it you will find it very difficult to not have a pirate site at the top of the Google search results.
Problem is, with the Star Wars example, the name is everything. The content? Who cares. People pay their money to see Star Wars stuff and it if is some crappy rip-off, well, they paid, didn't they?
And if it gives all Star Wars material a bad name, well that isn't the rip-off artist's problem, now is it?
Yes, but do we have to encourage the lowest common denominator?
If the architect owns your house, then damn right he can say you cannot put an addition on it. If you own it, that is a different matter.
Same thing with Calvin. If nobody "owns" the Calvin character, then it is all fair game. Today, someone "owns" the Calvin character so that use isn't allowed. When that ownership expires, whenever that might be, then we can have Calvin peeing on stuff and Billy's Mom doing whatever with that carrot. I'd personally say that I think Mary Poppins as a pole dancer would be a lot more fun.
Do you begin to understand why some folks are somewhat concerned about opening up access to popular works in this sort of way? Once that door is open and the "ownership" and control is gone, well then it is open season and you can expect the basest sort of stuff to start appearing.
Why don't we have this happening already? Because in order to make money from it, you need something popular. I don't think anyone has a lock on Adolf Hitler branded items, but he isn't popular. You want to bring out a "Britney Spears Twirl-o Vibrator" and you are going to have problems because not only is she popular, but there is indeed a lock on that.
1a. It sucks. People buying it decide that ALL "Batman" stuff sucks. Nobody gets any money for stuff that sucks.
This is the problem unless you envision a world where everyone hears about everything on an equal basis. Sorry, nobody is that well informed, no matter how much time they spend on the Internet looking around and following links.
It is perfectly possible to destroy a "brand" with inferior merchandise, just as long as the inferior crap is put in front of people. This is what the battle for "counterfit" goods is all about and "derivative works" as well. If I can take over any brand and distribute my own version of it it cannot help the original brand much. It may not hurt it, or it can destroy it.
Here is another concept of "unauthorized" works. How about a film about the secret passions of Pol Pot enacted with nothing but Disney characters. I'll bit Minny Mouse would look real cute in the gangbang scene. Do you believe this would encourage more parents to bring their children to the Disney store? Why would you assume that this wouldn't happen?
Slashdot Mirror
Item 2 is a dead certainty. Take a look around with Google maps. See if you can find spots on the planet where there are marks of impact craters. Look at the small one in Arizona - it is 3 miles across and a mile deep still after 50,000 years of erosion. Now think about what the day was like 50,000 year ago when it hit. Likely to have been a very, very bad day in the Southwest US. I suspect stuff was falling in what is now San Francisco. Lots of stuff. Big stuff. If that rock hit us today it would likely wipe out all life in most of the Southwest US and possibly take out everyone in Mexico as well. Remember, 50,000 years ago there were people on the planet, people that you would recognize as human.
Take a look at Wolfe Creek in Australia - it is 35 million years old and you can still easily see it from space. Think about the day that hit.
There are plenty more examples. Look around for nice round lakes in Canada. A good portion of them are impact craters.
OK, these things are spread out over a long period of time. But the key here is that we haven't been hit in a long time. We haven't been hit by anything big in a very long time. Over a long enough period, it is an absolute certainty we will be hit again. Even a small rock is going to cause a massive loss of life, whereas a big one could wipe out all life on a continent. A water strike - actually the most likely - would probably scoure everything off the grouund for hundreds of miles on all nearby coasts. An Atlantic hit would utterly destroy Europe to nearly Switzerland and Indiana on the US side. South America would be almost devoid of life.
There are three choices: hope that God will protect us and it will never happen to his Chosen people (whoever they are), be able to go out and prevent an impact, or be somewhere else when it comes. Right now, we are operating under the first alternative which I suspect most people will agree sucks. The second is not utterly beyond our capabilities, but it would be tough and require plenty of warning. I'm certainly in favor of a combination of the second and third alternatives. The third implies a self-sustaining outpost that could survive if Earth was wiped out. We are a long way from that being a realistic possibility. But it is something to strive for.
The way things are now, all we can do is hope for a benevolent God that will protect us. And maybe hope for Santa Clause to come and give us all what we need if it did happen. Sorry, I gave up on these options when I was about eight.
You have an odd opinion of labor laws. Maybe if everyone worked for a union it might somehow be a contract violation to fire anyone. However, if an employee is told to do something, legal or illegal, and they don't do it they can be fired for insubordination. Or for no reason at all, because there are no laws preventing people from being fired.
In Europe there are plenty of laws preventing people from being fired, for any reason at all. If you decide to employ someone you take on the responsibility for their future employment potentially forever. And paying into the state for them as well. It is practically impossible to fire someone after they have been working for six months in most places. The result of this is very high unemployment - no company can afford to hire someone without knowing in advance they can afford the position for the long term.
Contrast this with the US, where I can hire a sales person and if there is a downturn I can fire them anytime I want. There are no regulations, no laws preventing this. The result is more people get hired. Period. Would it be nice if everyone was assured by the government that they couldn't be fired? Maybe. But the result would be a lot fewer people getting hired. And that isn't good for anyone.
OK, they are lying. Everybody lies. All advertising is lying in one form or another. Do believe that went some celebrity appears on TV for a product that they really use it? Or know anything about it other than what the teleprompter is telling them to say?
Yes, this company sounds like they were using the "power of the Internet" a little more forcefully than others are today, but exactly what law did they break? False advertising? I doubt it. Certainly no more false than Wilford Brimley talking about Liberty Medical products as if he was at all familiar with the company before they started paying him.
No, this isn't a good start. This is not "making the Internet safer." If you believe testimonials on the Internet you are a fool, because all of them are designed to elicit behavior - yours. Every single review someone takes the time to write is either telling you how great something is or how bad. Either way, someone was so motivated as to write the review to "help" others to make the "right" decision. I wouldn't trust any of them, especially when it is not tied to anyone's real identity. How many people are out there putting up fake reviews, positive or negative, because they are paid to do so? How many people are putting up fake reviews because they have some other motive? For all you know, the person doing it could just hate the founder of the company because he beat them up in 3rd grade.
I don't believe you can claim any sort of trademark infringement for selling the Rosetta Stone product from a pirate site. The product being sold is the trademarked item. Period. That pretty much allows the use of the trademark.
The fact that the product is pirated may be illegal, but you aren't going to be able to stop that unless the pirate site is hosted in some US-friendly country. Maybe UK or Australia. Most other countries these days are going to suggest you retain a local lawyer to research the matter and inform you that they don't recognize the Berne convention or US copyright.
I seriously doubt anyone is basing advertising on the original stone "Rosetta Stone".
The problem is, Google sees nothing wrong with my bidding on the keyword "Rosetta Stone" or "Microsoft Word" or "Acrobat Professional" or anything else to advertise my warez site. If I bid high enough, I can take over the top spot on ads for these products and there is little or nothing the trademark owner can do to keep me out. Assuming my warez site is hosted in some bulletproof country that cares nothing about piracy, nothing is going to keep people from buying pirated copies of Photoshop for $14.95.
Sounds like the free market at work, right? And just like the current global environment, the high-price innovator gets to figure out how to contend with the low-cost ripoff artist. Because you can make downloads available from anywhere for almost nothing, you have taken the product from the developer and publisher and now pretty much own distribution at whatever price you set. The uncomfortable fact that it cost someone a lot of money to develop something means nothing when you have large-scale companies dedicated to duplicating any successful Western product.
And Google is raking in their percentage of this market. Certainly helps get the word out. At the fact that the price for a pirated copy of Photoshop has to sell for $39.95 now because of the bidding on keywords doesn't help Adobe one tiny little bit. Do you believe that Adobe has any "rights" here at all? Most people don't. Do you think that having an "original" Photoshop disc is better than a download from a pirate site? Most people are very willing to look the other way when the price difference is $700 or so.
And nobody would know about the pirate sites if not for Google, helping to open the marketplace and defeat the high-price monopolists.
Lifting shielding is pointless and silly. The key, as we have known for at least fourty years is to dig into the lunar surface and use the materials there as shielding. We have tunnel boring machines on Earth that will dig huge tunnels at a rate of many feet per day. We don't need that to start out - something on the order of 3 or 4 meters in diameter would be very usable. Spray the raw rocks with a sealent and you have an airtight living chamber.
Leave the boring machines going and you have a city.
Well, the private healthcare industry is likely to survive only as long as the government plan is more expensive or has less coverage. The minute the government has a taxpayer-subsidized plan that is cheaper than private healthcare, the game is over. No more private insurance.
By the way, this is the admitted goal of most of the advisors on the Obama healthcare team.
OK, so where is the Blackberry integration that allows wireless sync of contacts, calendar and email?
Wouldn't it be grand if they just put up photos of stuff on the Internet and left the museums for old people? After all, once it is on the Internet, who needs the museum, right?
From what I understand of it the primary reason for not allowing photography in museums (pretty much all museums) is twofold: flash photography damages things because of actinic light emitted by the flash, and all that flashing would annoy people.
The trouble it causes museums to take photographs and sell materials with these photographs vastly outweighs any "profit" they might get from such sales. I believe most museums sell this material because they can direct people that come in with cameras to their professionally produced materials so it isn't quite as harsh just saying "No photographs." If there is a profit from these sales, it is so small as to be insignificant. The costs of producing all the different materials that sit around waiting for someone to buy them are significant and for most museums, even famous ones, the sales are not brisk.
No museum with materials that can be damaged by actinic light is going to allow photography, because even with a sign "no flash" people are going to do it. That will destroy the value of their materials. As a secondary consideration, people would certainly take flash pictures no matter how many people it annoyed. So it isn't allowed in any museum I've been in. Courtesy is just so 1950's unless it is enforced by guards.
As far as I know, no museum allows photography of their collection. And you can include natural history museums, science museums and just about ever other sort of museum in addition to all art museums.
The problem with simple copyright protection is that it applies to one instance alone. Sure, you can copyright your implementation. But my implementation, modeled completely on your implementation is not proected. I can copy substantial portions of your code, if I can get them, as well and there is nothing that can be done about it legally.
About the only thing copyright protects is stealing a copy of the original and redistributing it. Independently recreating it doesn't count. This isn't any sort of competition, this is a lot closer to theft. But over and over again for the last 50 years or so it has been proven that copyright does not protect against this.
The Kindle will display a well-documented and for all practical purposes format - .mobi. Books in this format have no DRM or other restrictions. You can download one from Gutenburg anytime and it displays just fine on the Kindle.
The Kindle will also display a format that Amazon came up with for THEIR books. This has no effect on displaying unrestricted DRM-free books from others.
The Kindle is Linux-based. So are all other e-book readers that I have heard of.
There are PLENTY of books on torrent web sites.
Absolutely, any format that allows sharing or exchange will result in everything being posted almost immediately. First person to buy a copy will pay, the rest do not have to. The magic of the Internet.
Unfortunately, not many e-book publishers will have a favorable view of this "magic".
YouTube. It is the model for the future and the model that is being embraced by young people.
Sure, WALL-E was a $200 million dollar movie. Unfortunately, some folks think that a similar quantity of entertainment (per unit hour, I suppose) can be obtained on YouTube (or Shufuni...) at significantly less cost. Which then means lower or zero cost to the entertainment consumer. At least this certainly seems to be where things are going.
I suspect that we are going to have to let them try this approach. It is unfortunate, but I believe that most "entertainers" of one sort or another have just about had their fill and are seriously questioning if it is all worth it. I'll bet that more than few folks in the big-name music and movie production houses are also wondering why they are bothering.
Piracy is reaching out it tenacles everywhere and given the structure of the Internet today it is pretty much impossible to stop. Most people under 30 have enough knowledge to understand how to download pirated materials even if they don't know how to rip a DVD or CD themselves. They also have the attitude that if it is on the Internet, it is free. So why pay money for something that is free. Besides, they are already paying plenty for high speed Internet access and doesn't all this come with it?
I think we are going to have to see if YouTube and amature production can replace professionals. Sure, I think I know the answer already, as do most people if they stop to think about it. But it is all incredibly seductive, this idea of getting everything they want for free. It won't work, but I don't see any real alternative on the horizon. I do know that until the value of professional media is displayed to people and their nose rubbed in it really well people will not be willing to pay.
You are confusing retail with the price for distribution.
If I want to buy a song for distribution, what do you think the price would be? I'd guess as a starting point you would figure out how much you might ever make, ever, from retail sales.
So $100,000 a song might not be that low a price tag.
The problem is, the retail cost of the music is meaningless. She did not "buy" the songs for herself, she obtained them in a manner that assured they were available for others to download from her.
You want to ask someone what the cost of buying one song for distribution is? It is almost certainly ore than $60,000 per song. Michael Jackson apparently has left a lot of songs recorded for his children. All estimates I have heard indicate that they aren't going to be in any financial difficultly, ever. I suspect they were counting on getting more than $60,000 per song for the distribution rights.
There is no comparison between the retail price and the price for distribution.
Charge people for downloading the music you are sharing?
Google AdWords?
I think the jury was responding to two things. In the original trial she was found to be liable for damages of over $200,000 but the trial was thrown out because of bad jury instructions. In the second trial there were numerous attempts to deflect any fact-finding through obfuscation involving various technical strategies, including referring to the possiblity of a wireless router when no such device was ever used.
Finally, to top things off, Jammie herself got caught having destroyed evidence (the original hard drive) and lying about it on the stand.
None of these things made her out to be a person that was just being mistreated by the RIAA or the legal system. Her lawyers advised her rather poorly about strategies that did not attack the facts of the case but instead just tried to confuse matters. A strategy the judge and likely jury both saw through.
She can appeal all she wants. If she were to get a third trial with the same strategy it is likely the award would be increased yet again.
Well, that pretty much wipes out web sales. Most people buying software on the web are going to be put off by #1 all by itself. Number 2 absolutely eliminates web sales because nobody is going to do it.
Suing people? Sorry, in today's climate you can't sue people in foreign countries. Unless you have millions to pay the lawyers, nobody is going to even bother and unless you have a rock-solid case and going for millions, nobody is going to touch it. They will just tell you to suck it up.
Yes, there are hardcore people out on the Internet that make it their business to ensure that software, books, movies and music do not generate revenue. They will do this by whatever means they can, including using stolen credit cards to purchase products and post them for others to download. If you are relying on Internet sales you are going to run into this and there are very few ways to successfully combat it.
Nothing the parent had to say is at all useful towards this.
There is a threshold of popularity. Once you cross it, people will buy the product with stolen credit cards or anything else and then post the results of their purchase.
Until you cross the threshold of popularity, you have nothing to worry about. Once you do cross that point if you aren't in retail or some other non-Internet distribution everyone will see quickly they have a choice to pay or not. Your worst enemy will be older versions that are posted on pirate sites and such because people will assume version 2 is just as good as version 3, but version 2 is free for them.
Serial numbers are not the answer, because they are easily shared. Check out some popular software on Google and see what comes up.
Retail sales is pretty much the answer, because people in stores do not really look over the selection and the decide to pirate at home. They either buy it or not. On the web you may as well just have a link next to the "buy" button that says "get if free here" which links to a pirate site. Once the pirates grab it you will find it very difficult to not have a pirate site at the top of the Google search results.
Problem is, with the Star Wars example, the name is everything. The content? Who cares. People pay their money to see Star Wars stuff and it if is some crappy rip-off, well, they paid, didn't they?
And if it gives all Star Wars material a bad name, well that isn't the rip-off artist's problem, now is it?
Yes, but do we have to encourage the lowest common denominator?
If the architect owns your house, then damn right he can say you cannot put an addition on it. If you own it, that is a different matter.
Same thing with Calvin. If nobody "owns" the Calvin character, then it is all fair game. Today, someone "owns" the Calvin character so that use isn't allowed. When that ownership expires, whenever that might be, then we can have Calvin peeing on stuff and Billy's Mom doing whatever with that carrot. I'd personally say that I think Mary Poppins as a pole dancer would be a lot more fun.
Do you begin to understand why some folks are somewhat concerned about opening up access to popular works in this sort of way? Once that door is open and the "ownership" and control is gone, well then it is open season and you can expect the basest sort of stuff to start appearing.
Why don't we have this happening already? Because in order to make money from it, you need something popular. I don't think anyone has a lock on Adolf Hitler branded items, but he isn't popular. You want to bring out a "Britney Spears Twirl-o Vibrator" and you are going to have problems because not only is she popular, but there is indeed a lock on that.
You missed the real case.
1a. It sucks. People buying it decide that ALL "Batman" stuff sucks. Nobody gets any money for stuff that sucks.
This is the problem unless you envision a world where everyone hears about everything on an equal basis. Sorry, nobody is that well informed, no matter how much time they spend on the Internet looking around and following links.
It is perfectly possible to destroy a "brand" with inferior merchandise, just as long as the inferior crap is put in front of people. This is what the battle for "counterfit" goods is all about and "derivative works" as well. If I can take over any brand and distribute my own version of it it cannot help the original brand much. It may not hurt it, or it can destroy it.
Here is another concept of "unauthorized" works. How about a film about the secret passions of Pol Pot enacted with nothing but Disney characters. I'll bit Minny Mouse would look real cute in the gangbang scene. Do you believe this would encourage more parents to bring their children to the Disney store? Why would you assume that this wouldn't happen?