They were in a lose-lose situation before they started. Ignore the problem, and the copyright law is useless. Try to enforce your rights, and the legal protections degrade, as you observed.
No, they were NOT in a lose-lose situation, they fucked up by fearing their tiny competitors like some coward standing on a chair screaming because there's a spider.
For nearly a century, they held all the cards. Recording equipment was incredibly expensive. They controlled the only outlet for music - radio. They bought legislation in the '50s that gave them copyright to the songs the artists recorded, who had no other way of recording and being heard.
When the price of CD burners went down to the point that mere mortals could afford them, and the internet made every nerd capable of being a radio station, they should have embraced it. They could have used their clout to convince everyone that a factory CD with its cover art and liner notes were worth something, and touted the CD's far superior to MP3's sound.
They could then have used P2P alongside the other "free download", the radio, to show everyone that indeed, there WASN'T just one good song on the CD but that the whole thing was good. And face it, if a band only has one good song on a CD, that band sucks ass.
In an age when musical gatekeepers are obsolete, they should have become publicists, being far more selective about who they signed. Face it, they got used to shoveling crap down kids' throats, because the kids didn't know any better. Anyone remember Milli Vanilli?
Sadly, the majors deteriorated to the point that they no longer recognize good music. Instead of Led Zeppelins, Pink Floyds, and Beatles, we have have minor key whiners and rappers. Jesus, how about giving us singers that can actually sing?
The majors are dying, and it is by their own hand. A spider crawled on their foot, they blew the spider off with a shotgun and now they're bleeding to death.
I, for one, won't miss them. I have a lot of friends who make their money playing music, and none of them would touch a record company contract with a ten foot pole. Perhaps that's why you get the likes of Britney Spears and Eminem.
I think of it as "dumb record mangling." My copy of the CD of Led Zeppelin's first album (that I bought at Recycled Records) has two songs that won't play, despite the fact that there are no visible scratches or other defects.
So I ripped all the songs to.wav and replaced the two that wouldn't play with songs sampled from my cassette copy. As I have a very good used cassette deck I paid $50 for (that originally sold for $600), there is little audible difference between the digitally mangled CD and the cassette's sound, whether played on my home JBL three ways (12 inch woofers) or the six speaker car stereo.
In fact, the DRM on that CD and listening to my workaround to its designed defects is what convinced me to stop replacing my tapes and LPs with CDs, and to write the above linked article.
I'd already got a CD copy of their Presence album and it lacked presence. So I tried sampling the LP and guess what? My burned CD of the LP sounds better than the factory CD, which obviously suffers from bad remastering.
The record companies are obviously run by idiots who think their customers are all fools. Sadly, the idiots may be right.
If I rent a house, for the term of the lease the property is mine. law enforcement still needs a warrant to come in. Yet I don't own the house any more than I own the works to which I own copyright.
Do you always signal at least 200 feet before a turn and 500 in residential areas?
In Illinois it's 100 feet, and yes. And not signalling is a pet peeve of mine, as I try to conserve gas; when I see a signal I take my foot off the gas. The brakes convert my kinetic energy to heat and throw it away. And stopping on the crosswalk is another pet peeve, especially when I'm on foot.
The last time I was pulled over it was because I gave two young ladies a ride to a house in the ghetto after certain illegal services that should NOT be illegal in a free society were performed, and they pulled me over because it was a "known drug house".
"Have you ever been arrested for crack?"
"I ain't been arrested for NOTHIN'!"
"We can check."
"I figured you already did."
"Did you know those girls smoke crack?"
"They do?" (note that I did not make a false statement; yes I knew they were crackwhores but neither admitted nor denied it)
I wasn't actually pulled over; I was cut off by a big black SUV and several large men, armed sith firearms and tasers, with shirts that read POLICE, FBI, abnd DEA (one DEA fellow was wearing a ski mask in July) ordered us out of the car. After my 4th amendment rights against unwarranted search and seizure were violated (and I didn't appreciate that cop, who I assume was a homosucksyouall, grabbing by balls) we were let go after it was found that there was, in fact, no conrtaband.
When what happened to me hapens to enough people we will have another revolution. I fear that day more than I fear the God damned Gestapo that stopped us that day.
You don't have to do anything wrong to get pulled over, just be in the wrong part of town with the wrong color of skin!
No, they were for "adjustment disorder with depressed mood". There is a rebound effect when you are weaned from the SSRIs, which they took me off of right as my home was being foreclosed. I could have sued for malpractice for the timing of being taken off of them, and won easily.
It was truly a dark time in my life. And computer parts were indeed the least of my problems.
I hate to break it to you, but we aren't so free as we would have the world believe. I wrote an article about this a couple of years ago. Things have only gotten worse since.
That's true, but TFA's representation is bogus. When you send someone an email, your consent to make copies in order for them to read the damnmed thing are assumed.
Clearly, reading email is NOT violation of copyright. TFA does proponents of copyright reform no favors, as it makes really stupid assertations like this. It only makes us, as a whole, look as stupid as TFA itself.
How many of you think that you could drive to work without making a single violation?
Me. The cost.benefit ratio isn't worth it. Why should I NOT signal when I change lanes or turn? What's the use of breaking the speed limit when your speed is determioned not by the speed limit laws, but by traffic signals? I could have renewed my license by mail as it's been over a decade sinse I've gotten a ticket, but for the first time in my life I have no vision restrictions (click the sig for details).
However, I agree completely with the point you are making. I don't worry about the law, although I try to be careful around law enforcement personnel.
The only way this can change is to break through the lobbying stranglehold that the content-producing cartels have on our legislatures.
And there's the rub - you're talking about making fire cold, at least in the US. Sony gives ten million to the DemocRATs and ten million to the Re(prehensible)publicans and it doesn't matter which candidate loses, Sony wins. And as they own all the politicians, the only two chances this will change are slim and none.
You should not be able to "contribute" to more than one candidate in any race. That's clearly a bribe. Clearly bribery is legal in the US.
You should not be able to contribute to the election of someone you aren't eligible to vote for. John Shimkis is supposed to be MY representative, not Sony's or Bill Gates'. But a Sony lobbyist Bill Gates has easy access to Shimkis, while I have next to none.
We have the best politicians money can buy. So long as our laws are for sale to the highest bidder, I refuse to respect them and will instead follow my own conscience.
-mcgrew
PS- I have a friend who reports to prison on the 1st for a drug posession charge. I have another friend whose brother spent five years in prison for loaning a drug dealer money, while the dealer spent 2 years. There is no justice in the US!
Everyone treats the internet like laws can't apply, but were the laws reasonable there would be no problem. Take copyright for example - if copyright law were written in such a way that noncommercial use of a work would automatically be non-infringeing, there would be no problem.
IMO, anyone who believes that P2P really costs artists money has not given much thought to the matter. Clearly, if I've never heard of you I'm not going to buy your CD or book.
Plagairism is another matter entirely; it should be severely punished.
I respect Schneider, I am for copyright reform (but never expect to see it un the US so long as we remain a plutocracy with a more or less meaningless vote), yet I was disappointed. I should not have RTFA; I only did so because it was Schneider's blog, yet the entire post was in the slashdot summary.
I clicked on his link to the paper, and was disappionted to find a PDF. Google failed me when I made a cursory effort to find an HTML version.
The paper he links is itself incorrect in its very first page when it speaks of "the rights of owners and users of creative works." The US Constitution makes it quite clear that the "owners" of creative works are we, the people. The copyright holder is NOT the "owner". He has a "limited time" monopoly on publication, NOT "ownership".
When I've paid off my house, I will own it. I can pass it down to my decendants who can hand it down to theirs. My two registered copyrighted works, however, pass into the public domain after a rediculously long time.
When I see an inaccuracy in the very first page of a paper, especially a whopper like this, hat's as far as I read. Sorry.
"Small Business" is a slippery concept. My late Uncle ran a landscaping business in Colorado; one of three. He couldn't get a Small Business Loan from the feds because his business was comparable to the other two landscapiong firms in Colorado Springs at the time. It really pissed him off that he couldn't get a small business loan while the AMC car company could. He needed a loan to get him through a drought with city government watering restrictions; his business went under.
I wouldn't consider AMC a small business, I wouldn't consider Ernie Ball a small business. I would consider the bar down the street a small business, whether or not the feds would give its owner a loan.
Windows versions built upon the NT platform (NT, 2000, XP, 2003) are very stable.
Then why is it that if my C: drive (partitioned into Windows C: and Linux HDa) gets too fragmented the damned thing refuses to boot; or rather, boots over and over and over until I tell it Linux or Windows safe mode? MY copy of XP sure isn't stable, and I paid a hundred bucks for it. I feel cheated by that purchase. At least when I bought (yes, bought and paid for) 98 they didn't give me the "it's stable" lie like XP.
Vista is decent
I wouldn't know, but from what I've read just about everyone but you Microsoft employees/stockholders think it's a bloated piece of candy flavored shit. Personally, I think anything that makes your computer run SLOWER can hardly be caled an "upgrade". "Upgrading" from XP to Vista would be like "upgrading" my car from a fuel injected V-6 to a carburated 4 cylinder.
Did you ever stop to think that malware writers are out to make money or to infect the most computers possible? Again, market share drives developers.
You say that like the ONLY reason all viruses are for Windows is market share. Yet there isn't a single virus out there for Mac or Linux. It's not like there are only 500 Macs and 10 Linux machines out there. there are more than enough of both to make a shitload of sizeable botnets. yet there are no viruses for Mac or Linux in the wild.
There's also a surprising number of rootkits out there for Linux
Not surprising; any system can be compromised. You can easily make a trojan for any system. Yet even with a rootkit, it still takes some effort to compromise either a Mac or Linux system; you can't automate it like with Windows.
A bank vault can be broken into, yet my house is still infinitely easier to break into.
You know those people that think they're really technical and everyone just kind of rolls their eyes and listens because they might pick up some ignorant crap to quote and laugh about later? That's you.
You know those people who sigh in disgist when a shill for some company that makes absolute crap that they're forced to use at work gets a pained expression? That's me.
I only hate Microsoft products because I use them. They're crap. Apple? I only know what I read about Apple, but I don't see anybody trashing it. Linux? I use Linux and have no complaints.
You talk about Microsoft like it's a single person or perhaps a hive mind.
It's a single company with one CEO and one board of directors. Everyone else's job is to satisty that CEO and board.
Do you think the cars with their software are running the same Windows you've used?
I've never used any version of Windows that wasn't buggy and unstable, why should I assume that this one would be different? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice (or ten times with Windows) shame on me.
Graphical !=quality. When my kids were in school, the Macs they had there were deficiant in SO many ways; tiny monitors, tiny, flimsy keyboards, mice that were torturously unergonomical and had only one button (IINM still do), yet cost 2-3x what a DOS system cost.
Apple's quality has improved, as has their price, while MS's quality has declined while the price has skyrocketed.
Back in the late 90s of course
The late 90s weren't that long ago, kid. By then MS's quality had already hit the toilet while Apple had started making computers that didn't look and feel like toys.
Slashdot Mirror
They were in a lose-lose situation before they started. Ignore the problem, and the copyright law is useless. Try to enforce your rights, and the legal protections degrade, as you observed.
No, they were NOT in a lose-lose situation, they fucked up by fearing their tiny competitors like some coward standing on a chair screaming because there's a spider.
For nearly a century, they held all the cards. Recording equipment was incredibly expensive. They controlled the only outlet for music - radio. They bought legislation in the '50s that gave them copyright to the songs the artists recorded, who had no other way of recording and being heard.
When the price of CD burners went down to the point that mere mortals could afford them, and the internet made every nerd capable of being a radio station, they should have embraced it. They could have used their clout to convince everyone that a factory CD with its cover art and liner notes were worth something, and touted the CD's far superior to MP3's sound.
They could then have used P2P alongside the other "free download", the radio, to show everyone that indeed, there WASN'T just one good song on the CD but that the whole thing was good. And face it, if a band only has one good song on a CD, that band sucks ass.
In an age when musical gatekeepers are obsolete, they should have become publicists, being far more selective about who they signed. Face it, they got used to shoveling crap down kids' throats, because the kids didn't know any better. Anyone remember Milli Vanilli?
Sadly, the majors deteriorated to the point that they no longer recognize good music. Instead of Led Zeppelins, Pink Floyds, and Beatles, we have have minor key whiners and rappers. Jesus, how about giving us singers that can actually sing?
The majors are dying, and it is by their own hand. A spider crawled on their foot, they blew the spider off with a shotgun and now they're bleeding to death.
I, for one, won't miss them. I have a lot of friends who make their money playing music, and none of them would touch a record company contract with a ten foot pole. Perhaps that's why you get the likes of Britney Spears and Eminem.
-mcgrew
My neighbors are a couple lawyers. Albeit they are criminal and Divorce
What a coincidence, I'm a divorced criminal too! But these days lots of people are divorced, and everyone's a criminal.
-mcgrew
DRM=Digital Restrictions Management
.wav and replaced the two that wouldn't play with songs sampled from my cassette copy. As I have a very good used cassette deck I paid $50 for (that originally sold for $600), there is little audible difference between the digitally mangled CD and the cassette's sound, whether played on my home JBL three ways (12 inch woofers) or the six speaker car stereo.
I think of it as "dumb record mangling." My copy of the CD of Led Zeppelin's first album (that I bought at Recycled Records) has two songs that won't play, despite the fact that there are no visible scratches or other defects.
So I ripped all the songs to
In fact, the DRM on that CD and listening to my workaround to its designed defects is what convinced me to stop replacing my tapes and LPs with CDs, and to write the above linked article.
I'd already got a CD copy of their Presence album and it lacked presence. So I tried sampling the LP and guess what? My burned CD of the LP sounds better than the factory CD, which obviously suffers from bad remastering.
The record companies are obviously run by idiots who think their customers are all fools. Sadly, the idiots may be right.
-mcgrew
"YOUR PAPERSS PLEASE!!!!"
"Um, but I only have a pipe, man..."
"THEN YOU VILL HAFF TO COME VITH ME!!"
-A Child's Garden of Grass (a pre-legalization comedy)
Another piece of New Jersey legislation requires business owners to disclose to the public whether or not they have ties to organized crime
That would be useless in Illinois, where businesses would automatically have to say "yes". Our last Governor is in prison...
-mcgrew
"Dating"... doesn't that mean telling how old an object, like a fossil or something, is? Carbon dating, etc?
-mcgrew
If I rent a house, for the term of the lease the property is mine. law enforcement still needs a warrant to come in. Yet I don't own the house any more than I own the works to which I own copyright.
Do you always signal at least 200 feet before a turn and 500 in residential areas?
In Illinois it's 100 feet, and yes. And not signalling is a pet peeve of mine, as I try to conserve gas; when I see a signal I take my foot off the gas. The brakes convert my kinetic energy to heat and throw it away. And stopping on the crosswalk is another pet peeve, especially when I'm on foot.
The last time I was pulled over it was because I gave two young ladies a ride to a house in the ghetto after certain illegal services that should NOT be illegal in a free society were performed, and they pulled me over because it was a "known drug house".
"Have you ever been arrested for crack?"
"I ain't been arrested for NOTHIN'!"
"We can check."
"I figured you already did."
"Did you know those girls smoke crack?"
"They do?" (note that I did not make a false statement; yes I knew they were crackwhores but neither admitted nor denied it)
I wasn't actually pulled over; I was cut off by a big black SUV and several large men, armed sith firearms and tasers, with shirts that read POLICE, FBI, abnd DEA (one DEA fellow was wearing a ski mask in July) ordered us out of the car. After my 4th amendment rights against unwarranted search and seizure were violated (and I didn't appreciate that cop, who I assume was a homosucksyouall, grabbing by balls) we were let go after it was found that there was, in fact, no conrtaband.
When what happened to me hapens to enough people we will have another revolution. I fear that day more than I fear the God damned Gestapo that stopped us that day.
You don't have to do anything wrong to get pulled over, just be in the wrong part of town with the wrong color of skin!
-mcgrew
No, they were for "adjustment disorder with depressed mood". There is a rebound effect when you are weaned from the SSRIs, which they took me off of right as my home was being foreclosed. I could have sued for malpractice for the timing of being taken off of them, and won easily.
It was truly a dark time in my life. And computer parts were indeed the least of my problems.
It's not about what they can afford, but how much they are willing to waste.
And here I made a typo/misspelling. *sigh*
Hap-happy birthday! hap-happy birthday!
happy happy happy happy hap
Hap-happy birthday! hap-happy birthday!
happy happy happy happy hap
Sung to the tune of "La Cucaracha" (Spanish for "The Cockroach")
-mcgrew
I hate to break it to you, but we aren't so free as we would have the world believe. I wrote an article about this a couple of years ago. Things have only gotten worse since.
-mcgrew
That's true, but TFA's representation is bogus. When you send someone an email, your consent to make copies in order for them to read the damnmed thing are assumed.
Clearly, reading email is NOT violation of copyright. TFA does proponents of copyright reform no favors, as it makes really stupid assertations like this. It only makes us, as a whole, look as stupid as TFA itself.
-mcgrew
"Intellectual property" is a fiction in the US, as the Constitution makes plain. You have a "limited time monopoly", not "ownership".
"Imaginary Property" is a far more useful and honest term.
-mcgrew
How many of you think that you could drive to work without making a single violation?
Me. The cost.benefit ratio isn't worth it. Why should I NOT signal when I change lanes or turn? What's the use of breaking the speed limit when your speed is determioned not by the speed limit laws, but by traffic signals? I could have renewed my license by mail as it's been over a decade sinse I've gotten a ticket, but for the first time in my life I have no vision restrictions (click the sig for details).
However, I agree completely with the point you are making. I don't worry about the law, although I try to be careful around law enforcement personnel.
-mcgrew
The only way this can change is to break through the lobbying stranglehold that the content-producing cartels have on our legislatures.
And there's the rub - you're talking about making fire cold, at least in the US. Sony gives ten million to the DemocRATs and ten million to the Re(prehensible)publicans and it doesn't matter which candidate loses, Sony wins. And as they own all the politicians, the only two chances this will change are slim and none.
You should not be able to "contribute" to more than one candidate in any race. That's clearly a bribe. Clearly bribery is legal in the US.
You should not be able to contribute to the election of someone you aren't eligible to vote for. John Shimkis is supposed to be MY representative, not Sony's or Bill Gates'. But a Sony lobbyist Bill Gates has easy access to Shimkis, while I have next to none.
We have the best politicians money can buy. So long as our laws are for sale to the highest bidder, I refuse to respect them and will instead follow my own conscience.
-mcgrew
PS- I have a friend who reports to prison on the 1st for a drug posession charge. I have another friend whose brother spent five years in prison for loaning a drug dealer money, while the dealer spent 2 years. There is no justice in the US!
Everyone treats the internet like laws can't apply, but were the laws reasonable there would be no problem. Take copyright for example - if copyright law were written in such a way that noncommercial use of a work would automatically be non-infringeing, there would be no problem.
IMO, anyone who believes that P2P really costs artists money has not given much thought to the matter. Clearly, if I've never heard of you I'm not going to buy your CD or book.
Plagairism is another matter entirely; it should be severely punished.
-mcgrew
I respect Schneider, I am for copyright reform (but never expect to see it un the US so long as we remain a plutocracy with a more or less meaningless vote), yet I was disappointed. I should not have RTFA; I only did so because it was Schneider's blog, yet the entire post was in the slashdot summary.
I clicked on his link to the paper, and was disappionted to find a PDF. Google failed me when I made a cursory effort to find an HTML version.
The paper he links is itself incorrect in its very first page when it speaks of "the rights of owners and users of creative works." The US Constitution makes it quite clear that the "owners" of creative works are we, the people. The copyright holder is NOT the "owner". He has a "limited time" monopoly on publication, NOT "ownership".
When I've paid off my house, I will own it. I can pass it down to my decendants who can hand it down to theirs. My two registered copyrighted works, however, pass into the public domain after a rediculously long time.
When I see an inaccuracy in the very first page of a paper, especially a whopper like this, hat's as far as I read. Sorry.
-mcgrew
"Small Business" is a slippery concept. My late Uncle ran a landscaping business in Colorado; one of three. He couldn't get a Small Business Loan from the feds because his business was comparable to the other two landscapiong firms in Colorado Springs at the time. It really pissed him off that he couldn't get a small business loan while the AMC car company could. He needed a loan to get him through a drought with city government watering restrictions; his business went under.
I wouldn't consider AMC a small business, I wouldn't consider Ernie Ball a small business. I would consider the bar down the street a small business, whether or not the feds would give its owner a loan.
A $10 license for 100 machines is $400. $150-200 per seat is quite a bit more for the $0 per seat you pay for Linux and Star.
If companies were forced to pay for Professional what you pay for the Home version, my guess is that Linux would be a hell of a lot more widespread.
Windows versions built upon the NT platform (NT, 2000, XP, 2003) are very stable.
Then why is it that if my C: drive (partitioned into Windows C: and Linux HDa) gets too fragmented the damned thing refuses to boot; or rather, boots over and over and over until I tell it Linux or Windows safe mode? MY copy of XP sure isn't stable, and I paid a hundred bucks for it. I feel cheated by that purchase. At least when I bought (yes, bought and paid for) 98 they didn't give me the "it's stable" lie like XP.
Vista is decent
I wouldn't know, but from what I've read just about everyone but you Microsoft employees/stockholders think it's a bloated piece of candy flavored shit. Personally, I think anything that makes your computer run SLOWER can hardly be caled an "upgrade". "Upgrading" from XP to Vista would be like "upgrading" my car from a fuel injected V-6 to a carburated 4 cylinder.
Did you ever stop to think that malware writers are out to make money or to infect the most computers possible? Again, market share drives developers.
You say that like the ONLY reason all viruses are for Windows is market share. Yet there isn't a single virus out there for Mac or Linux. It's not like there are only 500 Macs and 10 Linux machines out there. there are more than enough of both to make a shitload of sizeable botnets. yet there are no viruses for Mac or Linux in the wild.
There's also a surprising number of rootkits out there for Linux
Not surprising; any system can be compromised. You can easily make a trojan for any system. Yet even with a rootkit, it still takes some effort to compromise either a Mac or Linux system; you can't automate it like with Windows.
A bank vault can be broken into, yet my house is still infinitely easier to break into.
You know those people that think they're really technical and everyone just kind of rolls their eyes and listens because they might pick up some ignorant crap to quote and laugh about later? That's you.
You know those people who sigh in disgist when a shill for some company that makes absolute crap that they're forced to use at work gets a pained expression? That's me.
I only hate Microsoft products because I use them. They're crap. Apple? I only know what I read about Apple, but I don't see anybody trashing it. Linux? I use Linux and have no complaints.
You talk about Microsoft like it's a single person or perhaps a hive mind.
It's a single company with one CEO and one board of directors. Everyone else's job is to satisty that CEO and board.
Do you think the cars with their software are running the same Windows you've used?
I've never used any version of Windows that wasn't buggy and unstable, why should I assume that this one would be different? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice (or ten times with Windows) shame on me.
Your products suck. My opinion stands.
I intend to register as a Republican in the primaries so I can do just that. When he loses I'll vote Libertarian in the general election.
Except... well, I may just register as a Democrat so I can vote against Hillary And Obama.
Damn, what choices.
Graphical !=quality. When my kids were in school, the Macs they had there were deficiant in SO many ways; tiny monitors, tiny, flimsy keyboards, mice that were torturously unergonomical and had only one button (IINM still do), yet cost 2-3x what a DOS system cost.
Apple's quality has improved, as has their price, while MS's quality has declined while the price has skyrocketed.
Back in the late 90s of course
The late 90s weren't that long ago, kid. By then MS's quality had already hit the toilet while Apple had started making computers that didn't look and feel like toys.
If those are features, then so are stability and freedom from viruses.