I'm glad they decided to pull back. It shows how savvy they really are.
But who can remember when IBM was the monstrosity of the market? When they were the litigious ones? The stiff-suited giant wasn't always this open to reason. I think what sets them apart is they wised up, where others believe they will always be the status-quo.
IBM used to think that... Now they know you have to constantly raise the bar. This action shows they know how to.
Somehow I don't think money will speak any less loudly in ten years. I don't see Microsoft suffering terribly in the next ten years either.
A company as litigious as Microsoft (themselves victims of the litigious) will just use the cost of litigation to stifle their opponents. Their opponents (the little guys) would have to first have something Microsoft was really interested in, and would have to have the financial wherewithall to pursue Microsoft.
"...if every other software maker enforced its patents in the same way then Microsoft would find it very difficult and expensive to do business."
I'd be interested to find out how many artists approve of DRM, and how many oppose it. Most of the names I see tossed about are has-beens, or never-heard-ofs -- I said mostnotall.
Seems to me that an artist would want their art spread as widely as possible, since most of their money is made in merchandising, and touring. Name recognition is everything.
The point is the same, the record labels aren't held accountable for some of the total garbage they put out in the interest of simply satisfying a contract. They don't care if 90% of an album sucks, so long as it has a recognizable name on the label, and the minimum requirement (usually a single) is met... So, you get what, ONE or TWO quality songs?
They have a lot of nerve expecting more and more, and we just let it continue. The music-loving public doesn't really care one way or the other because most people (I know of 3 people within 3 feet of me) believe the majority of the $14 they spent on their last CD purchase went to the artist(s). Not only that, they can't fathom the profit margins. It's technology, it's gotta be expensive to produce CD's! They're SO advanced!
...one must wonder how long the music industry can keep pushing.
Indefinitely?
The majority of people are ignorant to these demands. The only informed people are the ones that follow the blogs, and news sites (like/.); last I knew, I don't think/. had readership on the scale necessary to effect change.
The answer is a simple one to state, but a difficult one to implement. While media is completely different from every product in that it is possible to reproduce (copy) it, I also believe it's longevity implies copies should be permitted. Let's look at CD's, even if you take care of them they wear out. You didn't buy the CD for the plastic disk, you bought it for the music on the plastic disk. Compare that to say, a TV, when it dies, it dies, you have to buy a new one, period. You can't copy it. On the other hand, you didn't purchase what you're going to watch on the TV. And you can't blame the TV's or their manufacturers for crappy TV stations. The TV manufacturers have to make the TV last longer or the reputation is at stake. They can store music on a low quality media, and get away with making you buy it repeatedly... so the media and the music can both suck, and you're screwed.
The point is everything the music industry is involved in revolves around greed, plain and simple. You don't believe there was some greedy bastard at each of the record labels wringing his hands in glee when he realized the recurring income from worn out CD's?
Stop buying it. Or stop bitching about it.
That's what we have to do, present company included...
I received one of these letters in the mail, it claimed that I owed $4,583 for having downloaded "Enter Sandman" by Metallica... Well, I've never downloaded that MP3, and I've never even owned a Metallica CD to rip the song from.
Reason: I really don't like Metallica, at all. (simple!)
There is still an outstanding debt to these people, and it's still in collections. I hope she sets a precedent (which involves tying several statutes together) by winning.
In recent weeks I've read more and more about the RIAA and the MPAA. I think they should help the tobacco industry run new campaigns... the tobacco guys could learn a thing or two from these greedies...
Some of their numbers don't fly with me... Most of my associates either subscribe to iTunes, RealRhapsody, or Yahoo! Music. The main reason is having to pay for an entire CD (IMHO, overpriced) to get one or two songs.
The primary motivation for me spending $7/month for Yahoo! Music is so that I get only the songs I like and can ignore the garbage that these artists had to develop as filler.
I'm also realistic enough to know that the majority are downloading music they've never paid for. Which brings up another question: If I bought a vinyl album 20 years ago, do I have the right to have those songs? I know the answer. I don't like it. I think if I paid $10.99 in 1985 for a Pink Floyd album I purchased a license to have those songs, no matter how I get them.
While many people don't use eDonkey (and the like) to pirate, the simple fact of the matter is that most do. Everyone suffers.
It would take a company with an enormous amount of funding, and legal stamina to keep up with all of the litigation involved with something that can be abused so easily. The RIAA and MPAA (the most litigious groups) do have that stamina, funding, and will to carry out all of their pursuits.
Hopefully artists will continue to open their music up to the masses. I think they stand to make more money (you know, they clearly do not make enough already) by publishing directly to these online music libraries (ala Yahoo, Rhapsody, iTunes, etc.).
There are still the issues with software "sharing." There is blatant piracy there. I've seen my neighbors kids come over with CD's of burned software that they got "for free" from Kazaa. They put me at risk that way. I don't want that crap installed on my computer so I can be their next target and example.
Will anyone miss P2P if it goes away? I won't even notice.
If this were to work out it would put a halt to the "I can justify abortion because I'm providing stem cells" argument.
We had a demonstration locally at an abortion clinic. Ironically, it wasn't anti-abortionists. It was pro-abortionists (versus pro-choice) touting the magic of embryonic stem-cells. I bet this discovery might put a damper on any such demonstration in the future.
I doubt it, though. I suspect that it's easier to keep being wrong than to admit being wrong and accepting an alternative.
Note: I made a distinction here between "pro-choice" and "pro-abortion". I truly there are those that support a woman's choice, and are advocates for the women. Then there are those that just want abortion legal because they can't keep their peckers in their pants, or they can't keep the peckers out of their pants (depending on gender, obviously). They're just too cool for condoms!
I'm both shocked, and amazed since most "exclusive groups" answer to the almighty dollar and not the true nature of their goals. Which, in this case, is "security."
I still see the rumors fly about Redhat being a sieve with regards to security. I've always used both Redhat and Slackware, and frankly haven't seen it. Is this the end of the accusations? Will this stop the inflammatory remarks in the my Penix is better than your Penix flame-wars? I say no! A Zealot is a Zealot.
She was the only redeeming value in the Buffy show.
Honestly, I'm not impressed by their work. It's definitely geek material. It's like watching EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and EverQuest II on TV. A bunch of well endowed girls with doll-like figures capable of defeating creatures 10 times their size. They should go into game development.
It's amazing how many programming languages there are. I would never have thought that Haskell and Dylan would have even placed.
I've been in a Java bubble for far too long. Time to burst that bubble and look into things like Ruby, Python, etc. I know they're not new languages, but it seems like once you get buried in Java, Perl, C, or PHP it's hard to escape.
On the other hand, my mind is like a FIFO -- in order to learn another language, I have to forget one.
There were teams using Amigas doing this years ago. I recall 2 such products: ProVu, and Cosmo. ProVu was used for "interior design." And Cosmo was used by cosmetic surgeons.
StarOffice, although complete, is too different from MS Office. It's not that people can't use StarOffice as efficiently as they can use MS Office...they simply do not want to. It was difficult to get anyone to take it seriously. Even though every single feature of MS-Office that they actually use is in there, they were hell-bent on refusing to use it because of the features StarOffice lacks that they never use.
It's all the nvidia folks clammering. A new kind of religious ferver.
Apparently competition doesn't always encourage technical advancements. This setup is rather a joke. Reminds me of when people got excited about 16 colors, over 4 colors...
After listening to a group of 18 to 25 year olds in a coffee shop discussing how Clinton was clearly set up by the Bush family -- who apparently planted Monica Lewinsky. This same group of people couldn't tell me who the vice president was. They had also heard from unknown, but completely reliable sources that Bush "wagged the dog" by orchestrating the attacks of 9/11.
Don't go encouraging random people to vote... Perot might come back.
Cookies are benign. No one can track YOUR every move on the net -- at least not YOU specifically. Rather, they are tracking that browser. There's this massive misconception that cookies expose your life and habits for all the Web to read at their leisure. The reality is quite different.
If you go to a web site and they set cookies, only that site can actually read those cookies. If you don't want to be tracked by anyone other than the site you're visiting, simply turn off "third party cookies" (in IE5+). In Mozilla/Firefox simply enable cookies only for the originating site. You'd do better to manually accept all cookies, rather than automatically denying them all.
Cookies are not little pieces of malicious code that can run arbitrarily.
I work in the search industry, and cookies are a good healthy thing as they are used by the majority of sites. They allow airlines, retail stores, hotels, and any other vendor decide how and when to run sales. By tracking [anonymous] people's habits they can better target their pricing. Lots of people looking for PC3200 DDR RAM? Yep, tracking says lots of people are!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad they decided to pull back. It shows how savvy they really are.
But who can remember when IBM was the monstrosity of the market? When they were the litigious ones? The stiff-suited giant wasn't always this open to reason. I think what sets them apart is they wised up, where others believe they will always be the status-quo.
IBM used to think that... Now they know you have to constantly raise the bar. This action shows they know how to.
Mr. Coon, you're not gettin' any from Britney anyway, she's married, you can be honest here. Don't need to syncopate her.
Oops I did it again, I assumed stars were monogomous.
Somehow I don't think money will speak any less loudly in ten years. I don't see Microsoft suffering terribly in the next ten years either.
A company as litigious as Microsoft (themselves victims of the litigious) will just use the cost of litigation to stifle their opponents. Their opponents (the little guys) would have to first have something Microsoft was really interested in, and would have to have the financial wherewithall to pursue Microsoft.
"...if every other software maker enforced its patents in the same way then Microsoft would find it very difficult and expensive to do business."
That's a very big if...
I'd be interested to find out how many artists approve of DRM, and how many oppose it. Most of the names I see tossed about are has-beens, or never-heard-ofs -- I said most not all.
Seems to me that an artist would want their art spread as widely as possible, since most of their money is made in merchandising, and touring. Name recognition is everything.
Agreed.
The point is the same, the record labels aren't held accountable for some of the total garbage they put out in the interest of simply satisfying a contract. They don't care if 90% of an album sucks, so long as it has a recognizable name on the label, and the minimum requirement (usually a single) is met... So, you get what, ONE or TWO quality songs?
They have a lot of nerve expecting more and more, and we just let it continue. The music-loving public doesn't really care one way or the other because most people (I know of 3 people within 3 feet of me) believe the majority of the $14 they spent on their last CD purchase went to the artist(s). Not only that, they can't fathom the profit margins. It's technology, it's gotta be expensive to produce CD's! They're SO advanced!
So easy to brainwash...
...one must wonder how long the music industry can keep pushing.
/.); last I knew, I don't think /. had readership on the scale necessary to effect change.
Indefinitely?
The majority of people are ignorant to these demands. The only informed people are the ones that follow the blogs, and news sites (like
The answer is a simple one to state, but a difficult one to implement. While media is completely different from every product in that it is possible to reproduce (copy) it, I also believe it's longevity implies copies should be permitted. Let's look at CD's, even if you take care of them they wear out. You didn't buy the CD for the plastic disk, you bought it for the music on the plastic disk. Compare that to say, a TV, when it dies, it dies, you have to buy a new one, period. You can't copy it. On the other hand, you didn't purchase what you're going to watch on the TV. And you can't blame the TV's or their manufacturers for crappy TV stations. The TV manufacturers have to make the TV last longer or the reputation is at stake. They can store music on a low quality media, and get away with making you buy it repeatedly... so the media and the music can both suck, and you're screwed.
The point is everything the music industry is involved in revolves around greed, plain and simple. You don't believe there was some greedy bastard at each of the record labels wringing his hands in glee when he realized the recurring income from worn out CD's?
Stop buying it. Or stop bitching about it.
That's what we have to do, present company included...
I received one of these letters in the mail, it claimed that I owed $4,583 for having downloaded "Enter Sandman" by Metallica... Well, I've never downloaded that MP3, and I've never even owned a Metallica CD to rip the song from.
Reason: I really don't like Metallica, at all. (simple!)
There is still an outstanding debt to these people, and it's still in collections. I hope she sets a precedent (which involves tying several statutes together) by winning.
In recent weeks I've read more and more about the RIAA and the MPAA. I think they should help the tobacco industry run new campaigns... the tobacco guys could learn a thing or two from these greedies...
Some of their numbers don't fly with me... Most of my associates either subscribe to iTunes, RealRhapsody, or Yahoo! Music. The main reason is having to pay for an entire CD (IMHO, overpriced) to get one or two songs.
...just my opinion.
The primary motivation for me spending $7/month for Yahoo! Music is so that I get only the songs I like and can ignore the garbage that these artists had to develop as filler.
I'm also realistic enough to know that the majority are downloading music they've never paid for. Which brings up another question: If I bought a vinyl album 20 years ago, do I have the right to have those songs? I know the answer. I don't like it. I think if I paid $10.99 in 1985 for a Pink Floyd album I purchased a license to have those songs, no matter how I get them.
...more contract work for me!
Whatever the U.S. can manage poorly, a conglomoration of bureaucracies can do poorerestly.
While many people don't use eDonkey (and the like) to pirate, the simple fact of the matter is that most do. Everyone suffers.
It would take a company with an enormous amount of funding, and legal stamina to keep up with all of the litigation involved with something that can be abused so easily. The RIAA and MPAA (the most litigious groups) do have that stamina, funding, and will to carry out all of their pursuits.
Hopefully artists will continue to open their music up to the masses. I think they stand to make more money (you know, they clearly do not make enough already) by publishing directly to these online music libraries (ala Yahoo, Rhapsody, iTunes, etc.).
There are still the issues with software "sharing." There is blatant piracy there. I've seen my neighbors kids come over with CD's of burned software that they got "for free" from Kazaa. They put me at risk that way. I don't want that crap installed on my computer so I can be their next target and example.
Will anyone miss P2P if it goes away? I won't even notice.
If this were to work out it would put a halt to the "I can justify abortion because I'm providing stem cells" argument.
We had a demonstration locally at an abortion clinic. Ironically, it wasn't anti-abortionists. It was pro-abortionists (versus pro-choice) touting the magic of embryonic stem-cells. I bet this discovery might put a damper on any such demonstration in the future.
I doubt it, though. I suspect that it's easier to keep being wrong than to admit being wrong and accepting an alternative.
Note: I made a distinction here between "pro-choice" and "pro-abortion". I truly there are those that support a woman's choice, and are advocates for the women. Then there are those that just want abortion legal because they can't keep their peckers in their pants, or they can't keep the peckers out of their pants (depending on gender, obviously). They're just too cool for condoms!
Google is the next Microsoft. Duh.
MS-Windows is NOT in this exclusive group.
I'm both shocked, and amazed since most "exclusive groups" answer to the almighty dollar and not the true nature of their goals. Which, in this case, is "security."
I still see the rumors fly about Redhat being a sieve with regards to security. I've always used both Redhat and Slackware, and frankly haven't seen it. Is this the end of the accusations? Will this stop the inflammatory remarks in the my Penix is better than your Penix flame-wars? I say no! A Zealot is a Zealot.
San Dimas High School Football Rules!
No. And I don't care to. :)
I'm a new-geek luddite. I prefer the geeks of old, hands down.
Is that cute red-head in Serenity? Willow?
She was the only redeeming value in the Buffy show.
Honestly, I'm not impressed by their work. It's definitely geek material. It's like watching EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and EverQuest II on TV. A bunch of well endowed girls with doll-like figures capable of defeating creatures 10 times their size. They should go into game development.
It's amazing how many programming languages there are. I would never have thought that Haskell and Dylan would have even placed.
I've been in a Java bubble for far too long. Time to burst that bubble and look into things like Ruby, Python, etc. I know they're not new languages, but it seems like once you get buried in Java, Perl, C, or PHP it's hard to escape.
On the other hand, my mind is like a FIFO -- in order to learn another language, I have to forget one.
Every time I hear another rush of VC's I have horrible nightmares of the DOT BOMB...
They're like a bad form of birth-control -- where pulling out doesn't always work.
Thank God it's clean. Last thing we need is Universal Warming. Imagine if the universes Vacuum Layer had a hole in it!
Going after 13 year olds... it's like some sort of electronic pedophilia.
There were teams using Amigas doing this years ago. I recall 2 such products: ProVu, and Cosmo. ProVu was used for "interior design." And Cosmo was used by cosmetic surgeons.
We tried the "open source initiative" here.
StarOffice, although complete, is too different from MS Office. It's not that people can't use StarOffice as efficiently as they can use MS Office...they simply do not want to. It was difficult to get anyone to take it seriously. Even though every single feature of MS-Office that they actually use is in there, they were hell-bent on refusing to use it because of the features StarOffice lacks that they never use.
Talk about stifling oneself.
It's all the nvidia folks clammering. A new kind of religious ferver.
Apparently competition doesn't always encourage technical advancements. This setup is rather a joke. Reminds me of when people got excited about 16 colors, over 4 colors...
Yay?
So it's only illegal if you pull out?
Only if it was intentional.
After listening to a group of 18 to 25 year olds in a coffee shop discussing how Clinton was clearly set up by the Bush family -- who apparently planted Monica Lewinsky. This same group of people couldn't tell me who the vice president was. They had also heard from unknown, but completely reliable sources that Bush "wagged the dog" by orchestrating the attacks of 9/11. Don't go encouraging random people to vote... Perot might come back.
Cookies are benign. No one can track YOUR every move on the net -- at least not YOU specifically. Rather, they are tracking that browser. There's this massive misconception that cookies expose your life and habits for all the Web to read at their leisure. The reality is quite different.
If you go to a web site and they set cookies, only that site can actually read those cookies. If you don't want to be tracked by anyone other than the site you're visiting, simply turn off "third party cookies" (in IE5+). In Mozilla/Firefox simply enable cookies only for the originating site. You'd do better to manually accept all cookies, rather than automatically denying them all.
Cookies are not little pieces of malicious code that can run arbitrarily.
I work in the search industry, and cookies are a good healthy thing as they are used by the majority of sites. They allow airlines, retail stores, hotels, and any other vendor decide how and when to run sales. By tracking [anonymous] people's habits they can better target their pricing. Lots of people looking for PC3200 DDR RAM? Yep, tracking says lots of people are!
This is good for all of us.