What the heck? Consumers are not the only player in a market. Producers have to be there too, or else there is no market. Consumers would set the price of *everything* at free if they could.
The only reason anything costs anything is because there is a non-zero marginal cost of production. We now have markets where there is zero marginal cost to production. You are suggesting that that leads to the inevitable conclusion that the actual sale price of that product is $0. I am arguing that such a market won't work. I don't know what more can be said other than insults back and forth. Hope you get off throwing those around on Slashdot.
My advice to you would be to go ahead and try your ancillary revenue stream model, and see how well it works. I hope it works, but I don't think it will work as well as you think it will.
If that's what they're objecting to, then I agree, they are stupid and deserve to die. Their content delivery model no longer adds much, if any, value to content consumers, and it should be allowed to die.
I briefly skimmed chapter 6, and I don't get it. Every analogy the author makes is to a product with a non-zero duplication cost. He draws classic supply and demand curves and argues that since goods are produced and sold at their marginal cost of production, markets for non-zero production costs operate the same way as markets for zero production costs. I don't see how he can assert that. The demand curve for a zero-production-cost good looks *radically* different than a non-zero production cost good. It's basically a delta function at 1, and zero everywhere else. I have no idea how to extrapolate information about a competitive marketplace from that curve.
At one point, unless I'm understanding him wrong, he argues that ideas also have non-zero duplication costs. I don't really understand that either.
I addressed broadcast TV and broadcast radio at the very top of my post. Content creators sell their content to broadcasters for a non-zero price. Broadcasters pay for content, and then recoup the content cost via advertising revenue. BitTorrent does not have any revenue model to the best of my knowledge.
I addressed the ancillary stream argument by giving examples where it does not work: TV shows, books (if e-book readers ever become as easy and enjoyable to read as paper books, watch the same thing happen to that industry), software. Furthermore I would argue that middlemen (not distributors per se, but other middleman-types) *are* needed for all ancillary revenue streams, because the original content creator has no expertise in selling or marketing in those ancillary areas.
And you finally put forth the classic "starving artist" argument and how we will have great art and content without copyright. I will counter that by saying that before copyright, we had either 1) professional content that was commissioned by wealthy individuals, appealed to the wealthy, and was accessible mostly only to the wealthy, or 2) folk content that was created for free by people "out of love for the art" and accessible to everyone. With modern copyright, we have professional content that is accessible and affordable to everyone - for example I can pay $10 to see a movie with a production budget of $100 million. I don't really want to go back to the former system which would preclude something like that.
Broadcast TV and broadcast radio* both have advertisements, so while the content cost you $0, the advertisers were paying for it. In other words, the content creators were selling it to broadcasters for more than $0, and the broadcasters would recoup the content cost via advertisement revenue. I addressed this at the very top of my post. BitTorrent does not have any revenue model that I am aware of.
* Other than your local classical music stations and PBS, which are charity-supported (i.e. they solicit donations) and/or tax-supported (government grants, funded via taxes).
Entitlement goes both ways. The entire generation you speak of feels entitled to enjoy free content because its *distribution cost* and *replication cost* is $0. The creation cost for the content has always been, and will always be, non-zero, but it was always amortized into the distribution cost. Distribution via broadcasting always brought in advertising revenue, which covered all the costs. Distribution via BitTorrent brings in $0 in revenue and covers no costs. [1]
This generation grew up wanting certain things, the dinosaurs in the content industries refused to adapt and now people are used to getting music, movies, and games they want for free.
I disagree. There is iTunes/Amazon for music, Hulu for TV (*even* if they go to a subscription model), Netflix on demand for movies. I would say lots of good content is now available on-demand, via the Internet, pretty easy to get to. The business models weren't going to change in the one year that Napster came out. It's taken 10 years. But it has happened. The only thing that hasn't happened is content creators giving away stuff for $0, and if these creators are going to stay in business, I don't see how that's ever going to happen.
Look, everyone here can make up plenty of reasons for why they deserve free content, but in a capitalist economy I have yet to hear a single good one. "Live performance" isn't good enough. Many TV shows that I enjoy can't be live. Software developers should *not* have to go on speaking tours to make money, like that ridiculous study out of Harvard said they should. I do not want to go to a book reading.
[1] As an aside, I fully support the notion that *distributors* should get much less of the money. They are just a pipe, a utility for the content creators to sell their content. No one on Slashdot ever wants to make the distinction between distributors, who are invariably big media conglomerates that are easy to hate, and content creators, who might be a team of talented writers and actors and filmmakers that actually produce enjoyable stuff.
Amen, brother. I've been fighting the Slashdot anti-copyright propaganda machine for about a year now (check my comment history), and I'm getting pretty sick of it. It's an interesting point you make about the Pirate Party and other anti-copyright groups infiltrating tech websites. I hadn't considered it before, but the more I think about it, the more it seems likely to be true.
On a related note, I've been looking for a new science/technology/social site to replace Slashdot (one without the anti-copyright bias), but haven't found a good one yet. Have you?
How about integrating the binary-only Skype support into Ekiga or Pidgin or whatever other open-source video/conference/chat programs? Gets close to using one program for all of your real-time communcation needs, regardless of protocol...Skype was the big missing protocol in most of those programs, IMHO. Hopefully it wouldn't be too hard to write a wrapper layer around the binary Skype library and make it appear as just another protocol library/plugin to those programs.
Also as FlyingBishop brought up, it takes the (somewhat buggy) audio/mic/video/webcam support out of their closed code, so hopefully it will get cleaned up or just replaced entirely by Ekiga/Pidgin/etc.
Not everyone reading Slashdot has a degree in chemistry or chemical engineering. I appreciated OP's questions since I had the same ones. I appreciate your answers but not the attitude that I had to endure when reading your post.
Plug up with what? You naturally would have a mechanical filter to keep the crap out. It's not a major problem.
You answered the dumb question but failed to answer the smarter one. Does the ion bridge ever somehow lose its effectiveness after a good amount of use? If it does, it will need to be replaced. How often does this happen? How much water can one of them desalinate before needing replacement? If it never needs replacement because of *use* (not mechanical crap getting in the way), then that's great, but I don't know the answer. Again, I do not have a degree in any of this stuff, so please enlighten me.
You make good points, and I hope something along the lines of what you say comes to pass. My only objection is something another commenter raised elsewhere: Google as a benevolent monopoly. What if they turn malevolent? What about anything new that might arise but basically not be able to survive because they don't play nice with Google?
No, they aren't. Google is caching entire stories that his reporters have put together, and people are reading them without their eyeballs seeing the ads that the advertisers pay for. If that keeps up, advertisers are going to stop paying to show ads on his site (since no one ever sees them), and thus their dollars are going to stop paying the reporters to write those stores. That's the *entire* point of the original article.
His subscriptions (if any of his sites are subscription based) are paying for it.
Yes, but as the OP alluded to with Slate, as soon as news sites turn subscription-based, they go out of business because people just get free news elsewhere. My question (which you failed to answer) was what would happen to news once all of the news companies go out of business because no one is used to paying for news and real reporting.[1]
But Google should not be paying for it.
I mostly agree, but then who should be paying for it? Charity is not a business model.
[1] Of any of the responses to my original post, Romancer's is really the only one that makes an attempt to answer this question, and he has some good points that I agree with.
Let's continue that line of thought. What will Google News have if all of the real news corporations go out of business as they attempt to stay in business by charging for their services? Blogs? But what where will the blogs get the news to rehash if no one is reporting news because they all went out of business? Crowd-sourced news? Come on Slashdot, throw the "big media is biased, news sucks, free news is better" line at me and tell me how much better news will be after the death of real reporting.
Sorry people, but Murdoch has a point. Professional reporting takes time and money, and if no one pays for it, it's not going to happen.
The answer to this is that the world does not owe programmers, or session drummers, or sound engineers a living. Any more than horseshoe manufacturers were owed a living when other forms of transports overtook the horse.
I hate this analogy, and Slashdot is absolutely the worst proponent of it.
Horseshoe manufacturers, manual telephone switch operators, monks who manually copied documents, etc., all lost their jobs because they no longer added value to society and/or their employers. No one needed horseshoes when cars supplanted horses and horse-drawn carriages, no one needed a person to switch calls if a computer could do it faster and cheaper, and no one needed monks to manually copied documents when the printing press could do it faster and cheaper. That all makes sense.
The analogy fails for media (and software) because people still want media, and still want media to be created by media creators (writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, session drummers, programmers, etc.). In other words, the creators still add value to society and/or their employer and there is still demand for their work.
However the media's value is in its creation, not in its distribution. And as everyone loves to point out, distribution costs can go to $0 or close to it...but creation costs do not. You still have to pay writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc., to create the media. If you choose not to pay your creators, then you end up with amateurs recording home movies of their cats doing stupid things and uploading them to YouTube. Which has yet to make a profit for anyone.
As it happens, programmers found ways to get paid for writing free software.
Yes, they get paid...by large corporations...who pay them to write software. Look at where most of the high-quality free software (not the abandonware at SourceForge or Freshmeat) comes from - it's done by paid developers that are funded by big corporations that sell their software in combination with hardware and support services. Also note that programmer jobs are not dying off, like the horseshoe makers that you analogized to. That's because there still is demand for their work.
So then people look at the large corporation "software and services" business model and say, let's apply it to any art or copyright business model. That's where you get ridiculous stories like this one that think it's a good idea for software developers to stop developing software and go on speaking tours to make money.
Slashdot editors, please put this story in "Your Rights Online", or maybe "Politics". Anything other than "Technology". I can find no interesting technology of note in this story.
I think some graphics cards either don't need the GART at all (can do high DMA natively), or don't need all of the GART's entries (maybe they just need a few). If GART hardware is present, the OS can effectively hijack some of the GART entries and use it as a general-purpose IOMMU, allowing devices limited to 32-bit DMA to do DMA to high addresses without bounce buffers by using the GART to translate from 32-bit space to high addresses .
Sigh. Everyone on Slashdot apparently thinks that people will just keep making stuff for free if no one can get paid. Open-source software, for example? Most of the high-quality stuff (not the abandonware at SourceForge or Freshmeat) is done by paid developers that are funded by big corporations that sell their software in combination with hardware and support services.
So then people look at that model and say, let's apply it to any art or copyright business model. That's where you get ridiculous stories like this one that think it's a good idea for software developers to stop developing software and go on speaking tours to make money.
I completely agree that the best stuff comes out of people that are passionate about their art/work. But I think most of them hope to make money at it "someday". If they can't make a living doing it, they're going to have to make a living doing something else, like wash floors, and that just takes time away from what they could be working on. Since they're creating something of value, I don't see why we can't pay them for it.
Not only that, but with art and music, before the rise of copyright-controlled mass distribution, tons of it was commissioned by wealthy individuals, or by the church. Have you ever been to the Vatican museums? There are probably 2000 Madonnas, all by different artists. That's how artists paid the bills 600 years ago - commission-based painting for the church.
And to take that one step further, both Intel and AMD are planning on integrating the GPU on-die in future products, just like the math coprocessor moved on-die 15-20 years ago.
Except of course, the corporations being analyzed by the analogy are not media creators.
Yes, they were. Read the posts again. The OP was talking about *reporters*, and the first response was to analogize *reporters* to other people and other jobs (not corporations) that had been replaced by technology. My post was intended to address that one issue - the issue of reporters and the value they create, not the corporations. Various other responses like yours have steered the thread back to the original submission topic of news corporations, which are much easier to deconstruct and hate on, but that's not what this thread was discussing.
Yes, but who pays the AP/Reuters reporters? Used to be the newspapers, who would fund their wire subscriptions by selling their own newspaper with the wire stories in it.
Granted, with the advent of the Internet and nearly-free distribution, we don't need multiple newspapers per city, or even multiple newspapers across the country for that matter, reprinting AP stories, since everyone can get it online from the AP itself.
But, again, reporters (AP/Reuters, local, foreign, whoever) are doing their jobs, investigating, writing stories of value that people want to read, etc. In capitalist society, they have to be paid somehow.
Ads have always paid for the creation of the news.
Citation and/or balance sheet needed. I was under the impression that ads, classified revenue, and subscription revenue combined paid for everything - writers, editors, staff, printing/distribution costs. If you have more detailed data, that would be great. I'm actually very interested to see how much printing/distribution costs are vs. paying the reporters' and editors' salaries.
With a free, online-only, online-ad-supported business model, there is no subscription revenue and no classified revenue (people just use Craigslist which is free). Online distribution is much cheaper, but I'd need to see real numbers to believe that it works for anyone. Is there a free ad-supported newspaper, or online division of a print newspaper, that makes a profit or at least breaks even on paying salaries plus online distribution costs?
That is why you don't have to pay a subscription to watch the news on broadcast television or terrestrial radio.
Those are different forms of getting the news, with different ad revenues and cost structures. Everyone on Slashdot is predicting the death of radio because of free internet streams and/or a good selection of cheap music via iTunes or Amazon, so let's say radio goes away in a few years.
That leaves television as the major free ad-supported content service. It is definitely ad-only revenue, but TV gets the benefit of allowing ad revenue for other things (live events, sitcoms, etc.) subsidize the entire lineup of broadcasting which includes news. And TV news is somewhat different than print news: lots less coverage, more major headlines and fewer smaller pieces. At least I still like print news because of the much wider coverage I get. And ads on TV are different than online ads - viewers are arguably forced to watch them, and probably because of that they bring in much more revenue. And a bit more on the forced-to-watch and subsidization points: if ad-free, a-la-carte, on-demand TV services arrive, and people can just pay a few bucks for their favorite shows, free ad-supported news on TV might take a nosedive.
I realize these are not terribly strong arguments for my point, but I don't think your arguments were much stronger.
Newspapers are not free, books are not free, movies are not free. All these mediums have people behind them. People like you that like to eat. To buy clothes. To ensure their kids have a great Christmas.
... and the same was true with buggywhip manufacturers, and telephone operators who manually connected every phone call, and GM. Why should I have to bail them, or you, out?
I hate this analogy, and Slashdot is absolutely the worst proponent of it.
Buggywhip manufacturers, manual telephone switch operators, monks who manually copied documents, etc., all lost their jobs because they no longer added value to society and/or their employers. No one needed buggywhips when cars supplanted horse-drawn carriages, no one needed a person to switch calls if a computer could do it faster and cheaper, and no one needed monks to manually copied documents when the printing press could do it faster and cheaper. That all makes sense.
The analogy fails for media because people still want media, and still want media to be created by media creators (writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc.). In other words, the media creators still add value to society and/or their employer. The media's value is in its creation, not in its distribution.
And as everyone loves to point out, distribution costs can go to $0 or close to it...but creation costs do not. You still have to pay writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc., to create the media. If you choose not to pay your media creators, then you end up with amateurs recording home movies of their cats doing stupid things and uploading them to YouTube. Which has yet to make a profit for anyone.
So, no, news and reporters are not on par with monks who copied documents thousands of years ago. They are reporting news, and there is still value in, and demand for, that.
I see absolutely nothing in this story that in any way relates to Technology. This belongs in the Politics section, editors. Please stop cluttering my Slashdot frontpage with anti-government flamebait.
Slashdot, what has happened to you? I joined you about 9 years ago wanting a science & tech news aggregator. You appear to no longer be a science & tech news aggregator. Stories about copyright and censorship have come to dominate Slashdot. There is at least one story per day, and probably more like 3 or 4. If I wanted a site that aggregated news about copyright and censorship, I would go to the ACLU or EFF. Instead, I want one about science & tech, and Slashdot no longer provides that service.
In addition to becoming a mecca of censorship and copyright stories, Slashdot also seems to be a mecca of pro-piracy, pro-anarchy, pro-communist thought. I do not support piracy of IP goods, and I haven't seen a good argument on why I should. Again, see my post history for lots of people that have tried to convince me. I can't imagine why someone would think that it's good for capitalist society if anyone can obtain a thing of value, where someone else spent time to create that value, without compensating the creator monetarily. Maybe that's where society is headed, but I seriously doubt it. Until then, I'd rather read news about censorship and copyright without the pro-piracy, pro-communist slant, and I can get that elsewhere too.
I don't support the RIAA suing its customers. I don't support ridiculously-long copyright. I think the media companies need to stop bullying and lobbying, and get back to thinking about business models that work.
However, I think they're trying AND making progress on that front. Hulu for TV, iTunes/Amazon for music. Netflix for films. I can usually get whatever media content I want online, as a paying customer. Those who continue to talk about how their business models are still outdated or obsolete are just throwing up smoke.
What I really DO NOT support is views like the above, which equate copyright enforcement with human rights violations. My post here does not address the issues raised in the parent post - again, see my prior posts in my history for a complete litany of posts which do. However, back to my original point, such posts like the above have become increasingly common on Slashdot, and have gotten increasingly positive moderation. This is completely absurd, and only serves to reinforce the thought that Slashdot has jumped the shark on being a science & tech news aggregator.
Keep it up, Slashdot. Just know that I'm seriously looking for a replacement. If anyone has good suggestions, please respond and let me know.
Need conversion to units of Libraries of Congress
on
How Heavy Is a Petabyte?
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· Score: 5, Funny
What are these Petabytes of which you speak? America measures data in units of Libraries of Congress.
Slashdot Mirror
And increases one's propensity for rum, parrots, and the letter R.
What the heck? Consumers are not the only player in a market. Producers have to be there too, or else there is no market. Consumers would set the price of *everything* at free if they could.
The only reason anything costs anything is because there is a non-zero marginal cost of production. We now have markets where there is zero marginal cost to production. You are suggesting that that leads to the inevitable conclusion that the actual sale price of that product is $0. I am arguing that such a market won't work. I don't know what more can be said other than insults back and forth. Hope you get off throwing those around on Slashdot.
My advice to you would be to go ahead and try your ancillary revenue stream model, and see how well it works. I hope it works, but I don't think it will work as well as you think it will.
If that's what they're objecting to, then I agree, they are stupid and deserve to die. Their content delivery model no longer adds much, if any, value to content consumers, and it should be allowed to die.
I briefly skimmed chapter 6, and I don't get it. Every analogy the author makes is to a product with a non-zero duplication cost. He draws classic supply and demand curves and argues that since goods are produced and sold at their marginal cost of production, markets for non-zero production costs operate the same way as markets for zero production costs. I don't see how he can assert that. The demand curve for a zero-production-cost good looks *radically* different than a non-zero production cost good. It's basically a delta function at 1, and zero everywhere else. I have no idea how to extrapolate information about a competitive marketplace from that curve.
At one point, unless I'm understanding him wrong, he argues that ideas also have non-zero duplication costs. I don't really understand that either.
I addressed broadcast TV and broadcast radio at the very top of my post. Content creators sell their content to broadcasters for a non-zero price. Broadcasters pay for content, and then recoup the content cost via advertising revenue. BitTorrent does not have any revenue model to the best of my knowledge.
I addressed the ancillary stream argument by giving examples where it does not work: TV shows, books (if e-book readers ever become as easy and enjoyable to read as paper books, watch the same thing happen to that industry), software. Furthermore I would argue that middlemen (not distributors per se, but other middleman-types) *are* needed for all ancillary revenue streams, because the original content creator has no expertise in selling or marketing in those ancillary areas.
And you finally put forth the classic "starving artist" argument and how we will have great art and content without copyright. I will counter that by saying that before copyright, we had either 1) professional content that was commissioned by wealthy individuals, appealed to the wealthy, and was accessible mostly only to the wealthy, or 2) folk content that was created for free by people "out of love for the art" and accessible to everyone. With modern copyright, we have professional content that is accessible and affordable to everyone - for example I can pay $10 to see a movie with a production budget of $100 million. I don't really want to go back to the former system which would preclude something like that.
Broadcast TV and broadcast radio* both have advertisements, so while the content cost you $0, the advertisers were paying for it. In other words, the content creators were selling it to broadcasters for more than $0, and the broadcasters would recoup the content cost via advertisement revenue. I addressed this at the very top of my post. BitTorrent does not have any revenue model that I am aware of.
* Other than your local classical music stations and PBS, which are charity-supported (i.e. they solicit donations) and/or tax-supported (government grants, funded via taxes).
Entitlement goes both ways. The entire generation you speak of feels entitled to enjoy free content because its *distribution cost* and *replication cost* is $0. The creation cost for the content has always been, and will always be, non-zero, but it was always amortized into the distribution cost. Distribution via broadcasting always brought in advertising revenue, which covered all the costs. Distribution via BitTorrent brings in $0 in revenue and covers no costs. [1]
This generation grew up wanting certain things, the dinosaurs in the content industries refused to adapt and now people are used to getting music, movies, and games they want for free.
I disagree. There is iTunes/Amazon for music, Hulu for TV (*even* if they go to a subscription model), Netflix on demand for movies. I would say lots of good content is now available on-demand, via the Internet, pretty easy to get to. The business models weren't going to change in the one year that Napster came out. It's taken 10 years. But it has happened. The only thing that hasn't happened is content creators giving away stuff for $0, and if these creators are going to stay in business, I don't see how that's ever going to happen.
Look, everyone here can make up plenty of reasons for why they deserve free content, but in a capitalist economy I have yet to hear a single good one. "Live performance" isn't good enough. Many TV shows that I enjoy can't be live. Software developers should *not* have to go on speaking tours to make money, like that ridiculous study out of Harvard said they should. I do not want to go to a book reading.
[1] As an aside, I fully support the notion that *distributors* should get much less of the money. They are just a pipe, a utility for the content creators to sell their content. No one on Slashdot ever wants to make the distinction between distributors, who are invariably big media conglomerates that are easy to hate, and content creators, who might be a team of talented writers and actors and filmmakers that actually produce enjoyable stuff.
Amen, brother. I've been fighting the Slashdot anti-copyright propaganda machine for about a year now (check my comment history), and I'm getting pretty sick of it. It's an interesting point you make about the Pirate Party and other anti-copyright groups infiltrating tech websites. I hadn't considered it before, but the more I think about it, the more it seems likely to be true.
On a related note, I've been looking for a new science/technology/social site to replace Slashdot (one without the anti-copyright bias), but haven't found a good one yet. Have you?
How about integrating the binary-only Skype support into Ekiga or Pidgin or whatever other open-source video/conference/chat programs? Gets close to using one program for all of your real-time communcation needs, regardless of protocol...Skype was the big missing protocol in most of those programs, IMHO. Hopefully it wouldn't be too hard to write a wrapper layer around the binary Skype library and make it appear as just another protocol library/plugin to those programs.
Also as FlyingBishop brought up, it takes the (somewhat buggy) audio/mic/video/webcam support out of their closed code, so hopefully it will get cleaned up or just replaced entirely by Ekiga/Pidgin/etc.
Not everyone reading Slashdot has a degree in chemistry or chemical engineering. I appreciated OP's questions since I had the same ones. I appreciate your answers but not the attitude that I had to endure when reading your post.
Plug up with what? You naturally would have a mechanical filter to keep the crap out. It's not a major problem.
You answered the dumb question but failed to answer the smarter one. Does the ion bridge ever somehow lose its effectiveness after a good amount of use? If it does, it will need to be replaced. How often does this happen? How much water can one of them desalinate before needing replacement? If it never needs replacement because of *use* (not mechanical crap getting in the way), then that's great, but I don't know the answer. Again, I do not have a degree in any of this stuff, so please enlighten me.
You make good points, and I hope something along the lines of what you say comes to pass. My only objection is something another commenter raised elsewhere: Google as a benevolent monopoly. What if they turn malevolent? What about anything new that might arise but basically not be able to survive because they don't play nice with Google?
His advertisers are paying for it.
No, they aren't. Google is caching entire stories that his reporters have put together, and people are reading them without their eyeballs seeing the ads that the advertisers pay for. If that keeps up, advertisers are going to stop paying to show ads on his site (since no one ever sees them), and thus their dollars are going to stop paying the reporters to write those stores. That's the *entire* point of the original article.
His subscriptions (if any of his sites are subscription based) are paying for it.
Yes, but as the OP alluded to with Slate, as soon as news sites turn subscription-based, they go out of business because people just get free news elsewhere. My question (which you failed to answer) was what would happen to news once all of the news companies go out of business because no one is used to paying for news and real reporting.[1]
But Google should not be paying for it.
I mostly agree, but then who should be paying for it? Charity is not a business model.
[1] Of any of the responses to my original post, Romancer's is really the only one that makes an attempt to answer this question, and he has some good points that I agree with.
Let's continue that line of thought. What will Google News have if all of the real news corporations go out of business as they attempt to stay in business by charging for their services? Blogs? But what where will the blogs get the news to rehash if no one is reporting news because they all went out of business? Crowd-sourced news? Come on Slashdot, throw the "big media is biased, news sucks, free news is better" line at me and tell me how much better news will be after the death of real reporting.
Sorry people, but Murdoch has a point. Professional reporting takes time and money, and if no one pays for it, it's not going to happen.
The answer to this is that the world does not owe programmers, or session drummers, or sound engineers a living. Any more than horseshoe manufacturers were owed a living when other forms of transports overtook the horse.
I hate this analogy, and Slashdot is absolutely the worst proponent of it.
Horseshoe manufacturers, manual telephone switch operators, monks who manually copied documents, etc., all lost their jobs because they no longer added value to society and/or their employers. No one needed horseshoes when cars supplanted horses and horse-drawn carriages, no one needed a person to switch calls if a computer could do it faster and cheaper, and no one needed monks to manually copied documents when the printing press could do it faster and cheaper. That all makes sense.
The analogy fails for media (and software) because people still want media, and still want media to be created by media creators (writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, session drummers, programmers, etc.). In other words, the creators still add value to society and/or their employer and there is still demand for their work.
However the media's value is in its creation, not in its distribution. And as everyone loves to point out, distribution costs can go to $0 or close to it...but creation costs do not. You still have to pay writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc., to create the media. If you choose not to pay your creators, then you end up with amateurs recording home movies of their cats doing stupid things and uploading them to YouTube. Which has yet to make a profit for anyone.
As it happens, programmers found ways to get paid for writing free software.
Yes, they get paid...by large corporations...who pay them to write software. Look at where most of the high-quality free software (not the abandonware at SourceForge or Freshmeat) comes from - it's done by paid developers that are funded by big corporations that sell their software in combination with hardware and support services. Also note that programmer jobs are not dying off, like the horseshoe makers that you analogized to. That's because there still is demand for their work.
So then people look at the large corporation "software and services" business model and say, let's apply it to any art or copyright business model. That's where you get ridiculous stories like this one that think it's a good idea for software developers to stop developing software and go on speaking tours to make money.
Slashdot editors, please put this story in "Your Rights Online", or maybe "Politics". Anything other than "Technology". I can find no interesting technology of note in this story.
I think some graphics cards either don't need the GART at all (can do high DMA natively), or don't need all of the GART's entries (maybe they just need a few). If GART hardware is present, the OS can effectively hijack some of the GART entries and use it as a general-purpose IOMMU, allowing devices limited to 32-bit DMA to do DMA to high addresses without bounce buffers by using the GART to translate from 32-bit space to high addresses .
Sigh. Everyone on Slashdot apparently thinks that people will just keep making stuff for free if no one can get paid. Open-source software, for example? Most of the high-quality stuff (not the abandonware at SourceForge or Freshmeat) is done by paid developers that are funded by big corporations that sell their software in combination with hardware and support services.
So then people look at that model and say, let's apply it to any art or copyright business model. That's where you get ridiculous stories like this one that think it's a good idea for software developers to stop developing software and go on speaking tours to make money.
I completely agree that the best stuff comes out of people that are passionate about their art/work. But I think most of them hope to make money at it "someday". If they can't make a living doing it, they're going to have to make a living doing something else, like wash floors, and that just takes time away from what they could be working on. Since they're creating something of value, I don't see why we can't pay them for it.
Not only that, but with art and music, before the rise of copyright-controlled mass distribution, tons of it was commissioned by wealthy individuals, or by the church. Have you ever been to the Vatican museums? There are probably 2000 Madonnas, all by different artists. That's how artists paid the bills 600 years ago - commission-based painting for the church.
And to take that one step further, both Intel and AMD are planning on integrating the GPU on-die in future products, just like the math coprocessor moved on-die 15-20 years ago.
Except of course, the corporations being analyzed by the analogy are not media creators.
Yes, they were. Read the posts again. The OP was talking about *reporters*, and the first response was to analogize *reporters* to other people and other jobs (not corporations) that had been replaced by technology. My post was intended to address that one issue - the issue of reporters and the value they create, not the corporations. Various other responses like yours have steered the thread back to the original submission topic of news corporations, which are much easier to deconstruct and hate on, but that's not what this thread was discussing.
Yes, but who pays the AP/Reuters reporters? Used to be the newspapers, who would fund their wire subscriptions by selling their own newspaper with the wire stories in it.
Granted, with the advent of the Internet and nearly-free distribution, we don't need multiple newspapers per city, or even multiple newspapers across the country for that matter, reprinting AP stories, since everyone can get it online from the AP itself.
But, again, reporters (AP/Reuters, local, foreign, whoever) are doing their jobs, investigating, writing stories of value that people want to read, etc. In capitalist society, they have to be paid somehow.
Ads have always paid for the creation of the news.
Citation and/or balance sheet needed. I was under the impression that ads, classified revenue, and subscription revenue combined paid for everything - writers, editors, staff, printing/distribution costs. If you have more detailed data, that would be great. I'm actually very interested to see how much printing/distribution costs are vs. paying the reporters' and editors' salaries.
With a free, online-only, online-ad-supported business model, there is no subscription revenue and no classified revenue (people just use Craigslist which is free). Online distribution is much cheaper, but I'd need to see real numbers to believe that it works for anyone. Is there a free ad-supported newspaper, or online division of a print newspaper, that makes a profit or at least breaks even on paying salaries plus online distribution costs?
That is why you don't have to pay a subscription to watch the news on broadcast television or terrestrial radio.
Those are different forms of getting the news, with different ad revenues and cost structures. Everyone on Slashdot is predicting the death of radio because of free internet streams and/or a good selection of cheap music via iTunes or Amazon, so let's say radio goes away in a few years.
That leaves television as the major free ad-supported content service. It is definitely ad-only revenue, but TV gets the benefit of allowing ad revenue for other things (live events, sitcoms, etc.) subsidize the entire lineup of broadcasting which includes news. And TV news is somewhat different than print news: lots less coverage, more major headlines and fewer smaller pieces. At least I still like print news because of the much wider coverage I get. And ads on TV are different than online ads - viewers are arguably forced to watch them, and probably because of that they bring in much more revenue. And a bit more on the forced-to-watch and subsidization points: if ad-free, a-la-carte, on-demand TV services arrive, and people can just pay a few bucks for their favorite shows, free ad-supported news on TV might take a nosedive.
I realize these are not terribly strong arguments for my point, but I don't think your arguments were much stronger.
Newspapers are not free, books are not free, movies are not free. All these mediums have people behind them. People like you that like to eat. To buy clothes. To ensure their kids have a great Christmas.
... and the same was true with buggywhip manufacturers, and telephone operators who manually connected every phone call, and GM. Why should I have to bail them, or you, out?
I hate this analogy, and Slashdot is absolutely the worst proponent of it.
Buggywhip manufacturers, manual telephone switch operators, monks who manually copied documents, etc., all lost their jobs because they no longer added value to society and/or their employers. No one needed buggywhips when cars supplanted horse-drawn carriages, no one needed a person to switch calls if a computer could do it faster and cheaper, and no one needed monks to manually copied documents when the printing press could do it faster and cheaper. That all makes sense.
The analogy fails for media because people still want media, and still want media to be created by media creators (writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc.). In other words, the media creators still add value to society and/or their employer. The media's value is in its creation, not in its distribution.
And as everyone loves to point out, distribution costs can go to $0 or close to it...but creation costs do not. You still have to pay writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc., to create the media. If you choose not to pay your media creators, then you end up with amateurs recording home movies of their cats doing stupid things and uploading them to YouTube. Which has yet to make a profit for anyone.
So, no, news and reporters are not on par with monks who copied documents thousands of years ago. They are reporting news, and there is still value in, and demand for, that.
I see absolutely nothing in this story that in any way relates to Technology. This belongs in the Politics section, editors. Please stop cluttering my Slashdot frontpage with anti-government flamebait.
Slashdot, what has happened to you? I joined you about 9 years ago wanting a science & tech news aggregator. You appear to no longer be a science & tech news aggregator. Stories about copyright and censorship have come to dominate Slashdot. There is at least one story per day, and probably more like 3 or 4. If I wanted a site that aggregated news about copyright and censorship, I would go to the ACLU or EFF. Instead, I want one about science & tech, and Slashdot no longer provides that service.
In addition to becoming a mecca of censorship and copyright stories, Slashdot also seems to be a mecca of pro-piracy, pro-anarchy, pro-communist thought. I do not support piracy of IP goods, and I haven't seen a good argument on why I should. Again, see my post history for lots of people that have tried to convince me. I can't imagine why someone would think that it's good for capitalist society if anyone can obtain a thing of value, where someone else spent time to create that value, without compensating the creator monetarily. Maybe that's where society is headed, but I seriously doubt it. Until then, I'd rather read news about censorship and copyright without the pro-piracy, pro-communist slant, and I can get that elsewhere too.
I don't support the RIAA suing its customers. I don't support ridiculously-long copyright. I think the media companies need to stop bullying and lobbying, and get back to thinking about business models that work.
However, I think they're trying AND making progress on that front. Hulu for TV, iTunes/Amazon for music. Netflix for films. I can usually get whatever media content I want online, as a paying customer. Those who continue to talk about how their business models are still outdated or obsolete are just throwing up smoke.
What I really DO NOT support is views like the above, which equate copyright enforcement with human rights violations. My post here does not address the issues raised in the parent post - again, see my prior posts in my history for a complete litany of posts which do. However, back to my original point, such posts like the above have become increasingly common on Slashdot, and have gotten increasingly positive moderation. This is completely absurd, and only serves to reinforce the thought that Slashdot has jumped the shark on being a science & tech news aggregator.
Keep it up, Slashdot. Just know that I'm seriously looking for a replacement. If anyone has good suggestions, please respond and let me know.
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