Umm, you didn't specify if your life had improved or degraded.
I didn't, did I?
Hmmm... I guess I could argue either proposition.
I will assume improved, afterall who wouldn't want to hang out with a bunch of nerds who all have an opinion but no credentials to fall back on.
I, for one, welcome the opinions of my Nerd Overlords, especially those with no credentials. (Credentials, it seems to me, are an overpraised attribute. What matters is that the opinion be formed through rigorous reasoning, based on provable facts, advance human thought, and prove to be empirically infallible -- i.e., that it should be in agreement with mine.)
I wish that there were some way for Slashdot and readers were able to label NewYorkCountryLawyer's posts as a news service rather than just another post. Yes, I realize I can go and list all his posts, but I wish there were a way to quickly do so from the front page so that all users could easily benefit from this hugely beneficial information source. Lets not forget groklaw either.
Many of us like to assume we know something about the law here. These two people (perhaps others) have done much to keep such discussions and news both current and held in a view that does not stray very far for very long from goodness. I believe that they have done more to educate the public than anyone else and their efforts deserve some recognition here.
Thank you very much, for your kind words, zappepcs, and especially for mentioning me in the same breath as PJ who is a real professional journalist; I am just an amateur.
I would remind you that Groklaw's main feed is available on Slashdot as a "Slashbox"; I know because I (of course) subscribe to it.
This was also the case that introduced me to Slashdot. One day I discovered that people on some crazy place called "Slashdot.org" were going nuts analyzing the transcript of Patti's court appearance. I couldn't understand what I was seeing. It looked like an online Talmudic debate. The people seemed a little like lawyers -- but they clearly were not lawyers -- and many of them seemed to be smarter than lawyers. So I asked a few people, and eventually found one -- my youngest son who is a techie -- who explained it to me.
Since discovering Slashdot, my life hasn't quite been the same.
Well, this might work for young unmarried developers with little work experience, but try to convince your wife that you are doing everything you can to get a job while programming open source projects for free.
What's so hard about telling her that you're working on adding some additional experience to your CV? As long as you are actually doing that (and not posting to slashdot), I would expect most wives to understand, at least mine would.
Indeed--my wife did `understand':
After a month of being unemployed, I had to start hacking on Open Source projects--part of it was that being productive like that helped to pick my morale back up off the floor, but the other (and bigger, more pragmatic) reason was that hacking on Open Source projects kept my skillset from rotting.
She did question me a couple of times, but I just told her that.
In the end, I got top-notch job--which I wouldn't have been able to get if I'd shown up to the interview and been unable to answer engineering-questions due to having not done any engineering for 3+ months. Being able to show my prospective employer which projects were using my code (and show the code) was a definite plus, too--I'm certain that it helped me win-out over the other candidates.
Very informative post, hope you get modded up for that.
The reality is that only a very small percentage of open source programmers actually *live* off of open source programming. The overwhelming majority of contributors to OSS projects are employed doing other things (usually but not always computer related), and simply code for the fun of it. Being unemployed will have minimal effect on these contributors (unless their financial situation reaches a point where they can't afford an internet connection any more, that is). "Looking for a job" is *not* an 8 hour a day, 5 day a week task, so these people may have even *more* time than they did before to work on OSS.
This economy will probably put a dent in the number of jobs where employers willingly allow employees to work on OSS projects during working hours (and given standard management techniques in the tech sector, which includes "reducing headcount" and "pile the extra work on the remaining employees", there will probably be a reduction the number of non-working hours employees have as well), so the still-employed may contribute less than before.
But the notion of "I'm unemployed so I can't do any OSS stuff" is pretty ludicrous...
I would like to thank you, Lloyd, for taking the time to answer my question, and give me a little more perspective on the economics of it.
I have a followup question, if anyone is still reading this thread, which is: Aren't some people getting paid to do open source work?
Although I find it abhorrent from a copyright law perspective, this might have been a very clever move by Amazon. These rights holders who can't make money legitimately have been going around trying to make money by making extortionate threats. Amazon just removed that card from the Authors Guild's hand. I wonder how the authors -- who are supposed to be served by the Authors Guild -- feel about it. Kindle and Kindle 2 were 2 of the best things that have happened to authors; nice to alienate Amazon.
I wonder how many of the authors will now 'opt out' of the text-to-speech feature. I'm guessing: none.
Amazon showed this threat for what it was: extortion.
And I hope as much as the next guy that this means what it says in the summary. The RIAA is finally getting the results it has worked so hard for.
But it might just be the crappy economy.
Music is a luxury item, and they're usually the first thing to go when things get tough. This might be nothing more than a consequence of the current economic picture. I've seen massive layoffs pretty much everywhere lately.
Sorry if this dampens the mood in here. But it's worth considering. The last thing we need to do is to start bullshitting ourselves. Seeing things as they are best prepares you to deal with them.
But that being said, this is still a good thing. The less of these goons working the better. It would be nice if it was simply their just desserts for their failed plan, but if they go out as collateral damage to our ailing economy, well...at least some good has come from that.
I don't think it's a "transformation", either; it's just a bunch of layoffs. I think the primary reason is that they're starting to fold their tents on the dumb litigation campaign against ordinary folks, and have finally woken up to the fact as to how much money they've been wasting.
"Piracy" is not a synonym for "copyright infringement". It is a subcategory of "copyright infringement"... largescale commercial reproduction of exact copies for resale.
Finally, a post on the member companies being responsible for RIAA's actions. You Sir, are a good independent, objective thinker.
I'd say RIAA, being a trade group, is nothing more than a tool controlled by the member companies.
Therefore, our emotions should not be directed at RIAA itself, but instead, should be at the individual companies.
Skimming through Mr Beckerman's blog, I don't see "RIAA vs Joe", but rather "Company vs Joe".
What do you think?
P/S: I suspect some Web trolls can't even remember the names of the big 4. They simply like to pick a single entity - RIAA - to cast the blame on.
Don't blame them, I'm equally to blame. The real culprits are 4 large record companies (SONY BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Bros Records, Vivendi/Universal, and EMI) along with 20 or so of their affiliated labels (see plaintiffs). They use the RIAA as a front to mask their collusion. I use the term "RIAA" as shorthand. Sorry, but I write too much on this issue to keep writing out all those names.
this was a bad move by the RIAA because they didn't anyone would pay attention.
well someone did.
and it appears that enough help is being focused on particular cases that some unfortunate for the RIAA precedents have been or are going to be shortly set.
lets not stop now. but score one for the internet.
Agreed. They embarked upon a ludicrous campaign and they have lost. It is now all over except for the mopping up. Unfortunately for the families caught up in it, though, there's still a lot of mopping up.
The RIAA will never really transform itself as long as the same eggheads are in charge of its member companies.
I wouldn't call them "eggheads". I'd call them phonies.
They are failures as business managers, and have been trying to scapegoat the blame to everyone but themselves... and have no concern for the harm they do.
Meanwhile there are signs of a possible power shift: (1) the absence of new "John Doe" cases, (2) a possible change in lawyers (they did not use Jenner & Block on the Seeqpod case), (3) the firing of MediaSentry.
Ray nailed a +5 on the FP slot, so no one bothered with the usual 6 leadoff trolls.
Yo, Mr. Taco! Can members get a special perk for high-grade FP's? The whole board topic improves in quality!
Why, thank you, Mr. Phoenix. Actually I was feeling kind of guilty afterwards. I realized there was a chance mine would be the 'first post', but I knew it wasn't being written in the traditional 'first post' style. I felt that I was a spoilsport.
I didn't plan it by the way, I just happened to see the story immediately after it turned from "red" to "green".
I've run into quite a few people like this, who proudly say "I don't use computers", and to me it would be no less horrifying to hear them smugly declare "I don't know how to read". Where did people get the idea that not being able to operate the gateway to modern information exchange is anything but a personal deficit?
It's more than just a 'gateway to information'; it's also exercise for the mind.
As of mid-1991, at the age of 43, I had never actually used a computer, other than to input legal research queries into Lexis and Westlaw terminals. I was the only person in my office that didn't use a computer. I wasn't 'proud', but I was extremely fearful. When forced by necessity to plunge into computer use, I started soaking it up, and enjoying it immensely, actually learning DOS as well as anything else I could get my hands on. In the first few days I could actually feel something going on in my brain. One of the things I felt was that parts of my brain which had been inactive for several decades were now working. I also realized that if I'd waited another decade, it would have been harder, and that the older one gets without using those parts of the brain, the more difficult it would have been.
So I think those people are missing out on not only information, but also exercise for the mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, you didn't specify if your life had improved or degraded.
I didn't, did I?
Hmmm... I guess I could argue either proposition.
I will assume improved, afterall who wouldn't want to hang out with a bunch of nerds who all have an opinion but no credentials to fall back on.
I, for one, welcome the opinions of my Nerd Overlords, especially those with no credentials. (Credentials, it seems to me, are an overpraised attribute. What matters is that the opinion be formed through rigorous reasoning, based on provable facts, advance human thought, and prove to be empirically infallible -- i.e., that it should be in agreement with mine.)
We all love you here.
You must be new here.
I wish that there were some way for Slashdot and readers were able to label NewYorkCountryLawyer's posts as a news service rather than just another post. Yes, I realize I can go and list all his posts, but I wish there were a way to quickly do so from the front page so that all users could easily benefit from this hugely beneficial information source. Lets not forget groklaw either. Many of us like to assume we know something about the law here. These two people (perhaps others) have done much to keep such discussions and news both current and held in a view that does not stray very far for very long from goodness. I believe that they have done more to educate the public than anyone else and their efforts deserve some recognition here.
Thank you very much, for your kind words, zappepcs, and especially for mentioning me in the same breath as PJ who is a real professional journalist; I am just an amateur.
I would remind you that Groklaw's main feed is available on Slashdot as a "Slashbox"; I know because I (of course) subscribe to it.
Also I recently figured out (I'm a little slow, sometimes, I know) how to find out the RSS Feed for my Submissions on Slashdot, so you can pop it into a feed reader, or "follow" me on Twitter. The feed is: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=rss&content_type=rss&fhfilter=%22author%3A+NewYorkCountryLawyer%22+submission&orderdir=DESC&orderby=createtime&color=black&duration=-1&startdate=&logtoken=912032%3A%3ADbgOV9ng3HbPRRrcloMyqC
Thanks again.
This was also the case that introduced me to Slashdot. One day I discovered that people on some crazy place called "Slashdot.org" were going nuts analyzing the transcript of Patti's court appearance. I couldn't understand what I was seeing. It looked like an online Talmudic debate. The people seemed a little like lawyers -- but they clearly were not lawyers -- and many of them seemed to be smarter than lawyers. So I asked a few people, and eventually found one -- my youngest son who is a techie -- who explained it to me.
Since discovering Slashdot, my life hasn't quite been the same.
Well, this might work for young unmarried developers with little work experience, but try to convince your wife that you are doing everything you can to get a job while programming open source projects for free.
What's so hard about telling her that you're working on adding some additional experience to your CV? As long as you are actually doing that (and not posting to slashdot), I would expect most wives to understand, at least mine would.
Indeed--my wife did `understand': After a month of being unemployed, I had to start hacking on Open Source projects--part of it was that being productive like that helped to pick my morale back up off the floor, but the other (and bigger, more pragmatic) reason was that hacking on Open Source projects kept my skillset from rotting. She did question me a couple of times, but I just told her that. In the end, I got top-notch job--which I wouldn't have been able to get if I'd shown up to the interview and been unable to answer engineering-questions due to having not done any engineering for 3+ months. Being able to show my prospective employer which projects were using my code (and show the code) was a definite plus, too--I'm certain that it helped me win-out over the other candidates.
Very informative post, hope you get modded up for that.
Thanks very much for the insight.
Thanks DMalic, much appreciated.
The reality is that only a very small percentage of open source programmers actually *live* off of open source programming. The overwhelming majority of contributors to OSS projects are employed doing other things (usually but not always computer related), and simply code for the fun of it. Being unemployed will have minimal effect on these contributors (unless their financial situation reaches a point where they can't afford an internet connection any more, that is). "Looking for a job" is *not* an 8 hour a day, 5 day a week task, so these people may have even *more* time than they did before to work on OSS.
This economy will probably put a dent in the number of jobs where employers willingly allow employees to work on OSS projects during working hours (and given standard management techniques in the tech sector, which includes "reducing headcount" and "pile the extra work on the remaining employees", there will probably be a reduction the number of non-working hours employees have as well), so the still-employed may contribute less than before.
But the notion of "I'm unemployed so I can't do any OSS stuff" is pretty ludicrous...
I would like to thank you, Lloyd, for taking the time to answer my question, and give me a little more perspective on the economics of it.
I have a followup question, if anyone is still reading this thread, which is: Aren't some people getting paid to do open source work?
Although I find it abhorrent from a copyright law perspective, this might have been a very clever move by Amazon. These rights holders who can't make money legitimately have been going around trying to make money by making extortionate threats. Amazon just removed that card from the Authors Guild's hand. I wonder how the authors -- who are supposed to be served by the Authors Guild -- feel about it. Kindle and Kindle 2 were 2 of the best things that have happened to authors; nice to alienate Amazon.
I wonder how many of the authors will now 'opt out' of the text-to-speech feature. I'm guessing: none.
Amazon showed this threat for what it was: extortion.
And I hope as much as the next guy that this means what it says in the summary. The RIAA is finally getting the results it has worked so hard for. But it might just be the crappy economy. Music is a luxury item, and they're usually the first thing to go when things get tough. This might be nothing more than a consequence of the current economic picture. I've seen massive layoffs pretty much everywhere lately. Sorry if this dampens the mood in here. But it's worth considering. The last thing we need to do is to start bullshitting ourselves. Seeing things as they are best prepares you to deal with them. But that being said, this is still a good thing. The less of these goons working the better. It would be nice if it was simply their just desserts for their failed plan, but if they go out as collateral damage to our ailing economy, well...at least some good has come from that.
I don't think it's a "transformation", either; it's just a bunch of layoffs. I think the primary reason is that they're starting to fold their tents on the dumb litigation campaign against ordinary folks, and have finally woken up to the fact as to how much money they've been wasting.
people who download may be pirates
"Piracy" is not a synonym for "copyright infringement". It is a subcategory of "copyright infringement"... largescale commercial reproduction of exact copies for resale.
The courts do seem to have seen uploading as infringement
The issue hasn't come up yet; there hasn't been an RIAA case with any evidence of uploading... at least not of which I am aware.
copyright law talks specifically about offering distribution
No it doesn't. (There is a single case that does say that, but there are 3 other better reasoned cases proving that that case was wrongly decided).
How much you want to bet that said "transformation" is going to include a name change
I think the articles suggesting this is a "transformation" are a bit misleading. I think it's just a bunch of layoffs.
Finally, a post on the member companies being responsible for RIAA's actions. You Sir, are a good independent, objective thinker. I'd say RIAA, being a trade group, is nothing more than a tool controlled by the member companies. Therefore, our emotions should not be directed at RIAA itself, but instead, should be at the individual companies. Skimming through Mr Beckerman's blog, I don't see "RIAA vs Joe", but rather "Company vs Joe". What do you think? P/S: I suspect some Web trolls can't even remember the names of the big 4. They simply like to pick a single entity - RIAA - to cast the blame on.
Don't blame them, I'm equally to blame. The real culprits are 4 large record companies (SONY BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Bros Records, Vivendi/Universal, and EMI) along with 20 or so of their affiliated labels (see plaintiffs). They use the RIAA as a front to mask their collusion. I use the term "RIAA" as shorthand. Sorry, but I write too much on this issue to keep writing out all those names.
what he really means is that he uploaded them
No, because there was no evidence that he uploaded them, either.
I dunno if I'd call their mission a complete failure...
Well I always admire an independent thinker who's willing to go out on a limb and espouse a thought that no one else agrees with.
You've certainly established your credentials.
They didn't know that he had downloaded any songs when they sued him. They sued him because he had made the files "available".
this was a bad move by the RIAA because they didn't anyone would pay attention. well someone did. and it appears that enough help is being focused on particular cases that some unfortunate for the RIAA precedents have been or are going to be shortly set. lets not stop now. but score one for the internet.
Agreed. They embarked upon a ludicrous campaign and they have lost. It is now all over except for the mopping up. Unfortunately for the families caught up in it, though, there's still a lot of mopping up.
The RIAA will never really transform itself as long as the same eggheads are in charge of its member companies.
I wouldn't call them "eggheads". I'd call them phonies.
They are failures as business managers, and have been trying to scapegoat the blame to everyone but themselves... and have no concern for the harm they do.
Meanwhile there are signs of a possible power shift: (1) the absence of new "John Doe" cases, (2) a possible change in lawyers (they did not use Jenner & Block on the Seeqpod case), (3) the firing of MediaSentry.
Ray nailed a +5 on the FP slot, so no one bothered with the usual 6 leadoff trolls. Yo, Mr. Taco! Can members get a special perk for high-grade FP's? The whole board topic improves in quality!
Why, thank you, Mr. Phoenix. Actually I was feeling kind of guilty afterwards. I realized there was a chance mine would be the 'first post', but I knew it wasn't being written in the traditional 'first post' style. I felt that I was a spoilsport.
I didn't plan it by the way, I just happened to see the story immediately after it turned from "red" to "green".
If they are being "transformed", I hope my work had something to do with it.
Well I would imagine the excess employees will be much in demand as witnesses.
I've run into quite a few people like this, who proudly say "I don't use computers", and to me it would be no less horrifying to hear them smugly declare "I don't know how to read". Where did people get the idea that not being able to operate the gateway to modern information exchange is anything but a personal deficit?
It's more than just a 'gateway to information'; it's also exercise for the mind.
As of mid-1991, at the age of 43, I had never actually used a computer, other than to input legal research queries into Lexis and Westlaw terminals. I was the only person in my office that didn't use a computer. I wasn't 'proud', but I was extremely fearful. When forced by necessity to plunge into computer use, I started soaking it up, and enjoying it immensely, actually learning DOS as well as anything else I could get my hands on. In the first few days I could actually feel something going on in my brain. One of the things I felt was that parts of my brain which had been inactive for several decades were now working. I also realized that if I'd waited another decade, it would have been harder, and that the older one gets without using those parts of the brain, the more difficult it would have been.
So I think those people are missing out on not only information, but also exercise for the mind.
I meant "not as knowledgeable".