I hate to break it to you but some of the prices people are willing to pay aren't far from what LP records cost when some people were still riding horses to get to work or a hot date. If you look in adjusted dollars the cost of CDs have actually not kept up with the inflation rate so they are in line with old record prices and are cheaper when you consider there's 25% more music on most CDs. This is not about the exploding price of CDs. If file sharing technology and ripping technology didn't exist and we all still had dial up modems music sales would have continued it's growth rate. I think films sales may be hurt by video games but I doubt it has much affect on music and definitely doesn't explain the drop. When people constantly talk about filling iPods that's a hell of a lot of music in a declining market. This is strictly about people no longer seeing a need to pay. A percentage are offering to pay a token amount but I doubt charging $1 to $5 an album would cause an increase in sales totals. They could double and tripple their sales and still see a radical reduction in income. The genie is out of the bottle and he ain't going back. I just wish we could get over the "I'll pay a buck" or "they're just a bunch of greedy SOBs ripping off artists so I don't think I should have to pay" arguments. Sales are going to continue to drop like a rock and nothing is going to stop it. People aren't flocking to paid download services either so the writing is on the wall. I think it's interesting that the download explosion has some what mirrored the growth of iPods. I don't think they were in any way the direct cause but I think there is an attitude of "gee I can hold 10,000 songs on this sucker so how am I gonna fill it up?" I just paid $300 or $400 so why should I pay thousands for the music needed to fill it? I'd love to see a poll on what percentage of iPod space is taken up on most iPods? In the 70s most people wouldn't have owned enough music to fill 10% of a modern iPod and only a tiny number of fanatics might have had that much. I'm guessing the majority have their iPods over half full. Those numbers pretty much answer any questions and pretty much drive a nail in the coffin of retail music. There's a point where CDs are no longer worth producing even if a small number are still willing to pay. I'll be surprised if they last another ten years and I wouldn't be surprised if record companies cried uncle in five.
Dude if there's anything on this planet that qualifies for prior art it's suing for patent infringement. They're the ambulance chasers of the tech world.
It's so other sad, bored lonely people can watch you loose at Solitare across the network. Next step will be a solitare MMO. Wonder if they patented that yet?
To patent chess or checkers? How about tick tac toe? Yes it's a new use for it but you might as well say printing on ePaper requires a separate copyright since it was never copyrighted specifically for that purpose. There has to be a limit set on persuing these claims as well. You shouldn't be able to wait until lots of deep pockets are involved for multiple years to sue so you know the damages will be high. The absolute maxium should be 12 months since a product was released but they should be required to give notice the moment they are aware of the infringement. Solitare is like traditional folk music which can't be copyrighted. It's been around too long and simply doing a computer version isn't changing it enough to warrant a patent. The code would be patentable but not the game. If they were all stealing code then that's a different issue.
Point #1 is valid in that it doesn't hurt Windows so much as Linux and Mac having superior features and stability is going to drive Windows in that direction. They are in fact tag teaming Windows in a sense. It'll be good for everyone and it's what competition is for. Linux and Mac should be friendly. Point #2, Linux isn't likely to ever get cool stores because there isn't the same cash flow involved. Profits make stores possible. It doesn't have the market share and since even the flavors of Linux are based on open sourced software they can't charge a lot for them, although some server versions are quite expensive. Point #3 No it isn't just as good but that isn't the point. It's like electric cars that have a 100 mile range. They'll only work for 95% of the people. Non professional and most professionals can get by just fine with Open Office. It's very much like Mac if you got people to try Open Office for a week most wouldn't waste their money on Microsoft Office. Some still would because of the "what if" factor. It's very much like electric cars. Gee what if I need to drive a 101 miles? If you go to the store a couple of times a week and pick up the kids from school you're probably fine. Same with Open Office. Point #4 Non issue. Who really cares about Aqua. I always go into prefs and shift even XP towards performance. Not as slick? I use software and couldn't care less about the look of the OS. If it'd give me a 10% performance increase I'd go back to shell commands to open apps. I realize that's not normal but the point is how many minutes a day do you spend crawling around in a shell compared to inside a given software. Yes there's more to it like switching between open apps but my point is software performance is more desireable in a real sense than pretty effects. Point #5 I guess you can refer back to point #3. A lot of the same issues. For what non pros do Gimp is just fine. Some pros can get by with it but for your average person that needs a painter or photo retoucher there's nothing wrong with Gimp. Pros aren't likely to switch but the vast majority of users aren't doing it professionally. There's more to Photoshop than most people realize and your average user will use 2% to 5% of what it's capible of. It's largely wasted on most users so they are wasting their money when Gimp is free. There are other painters out there like Dogwaffle that are open source and fun to play with but Gimp is the only one that is at least in the range of Photoshop. It lacks some pro features and I personally can't get past the interface but it's far more user friendly than Blender so I'd use it if I didn't have the money for Photoshop. I'd probably be using Blender if I was still in High School. The point is there are perfectly adequate open source softwares available. Are they as good as the closed source? No. Why would they be the closed source has had 10X to a 100X the resources thrown at them? Thinking of it in that way the open source versions are pretty staggering. I may use Photoshop and Maya but I use Open Office on both my PCs and Mac. It does what I need and it's less hassle to use than Microsoft Office. I can aford Office I just prefer Open Office. I got my first copy of Word back in the late 80s and ironically other than the speed of the computers, spell check took forever, I preferred it back then over the recent versions. It did what I needed and wasn't suffering from bloat. I need a word processor not something that reformats my document for me when I slip and hit CTRL+Shift+D, it's been a few years but I think that was the short cut that used to make my like a living hell. Back in the days of one level of Undo I used to slip every once and a while but I typed faster than the computers of the time so I'd have several words entered before it could reformat making Undo impossible. Used to drive me nuts.
Sell one for $400, that's called breaking even since you paid $400 and only recieved one machine. Also I'm assuming you paid shipping for the one unit so you lost money at $400. I guess you could try buying a 100 machines and make it up in volume but that never seems to work for some strange reason.
Codec. Can you say Codec? C-O-D-E-C. Do you know what a codec is? How about compression? What about proprietary? No? Try this one "license fee". Makes me yearn for the days when we used to tie pork chops on lawyers and toss them in a pen full of pit bulls Saturday nights. Then the damn PETA people made us stop. I was never sure if they was worried about the pit bulls or the lawyers? In all seriousness this should be a five minute case. All that should be needed is to explain to a judge what a codec is and how they function and which ones are open sourced and which ones, "WMA" as an example, have to be licensed. That should in a sane world be enough to get it thrown out and not waste the court's time. It's called a free market system if you want a player that uses WMA it's called a Zune.
and prevent foreign outsourcing of Russian web site construction they plan to launch a version of HTML in Cyrillic. Soon to be followed by C++ in Cyrillic. Microsoft decided it was a niffty idea so they plan to start a Pig Latin based coding language called "Squeal Like".
So Vista was an "attempt" to fix XP and the Firewall from hell was an "attempt" to secure the OS? Since Service Pack 2 on XP every time I install a component or piece of software Microsoft rebricks my computer. As near as I can tell they're approach to security is deny all actions then you don't have to worry about plugging holes. Sorry but kiss the puppy it's hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that deep down Microsoft are a bunch of white hat softies. Microsoft has been a bully for a long time and being a bully makes you paranoid. Even with profits going up every year they still see all the competitors as talking food from their mouths. They'd try to run Apple out of the computer business but remember Apple was their shining example of why they weren't a monopoly. They see Apple as the devil they have to live with they just don't want them to gain market share. If they openly attack Apple they risk another court judgement, not that the last one had any affect. Instead they chip away making things not quite compatible and play dumb. All Microsoft is "attempting" to do is line their pockets. So are most companies Microsoft just tends to be more anticompetitive than most.
I know it's fun to burn the school down but then you're left wondering what will replace it? I know the current preference is a pay if you want/download for free if you don't business model but it isn't exactly sustainable. The problem is always people will eventually get tired of paying and stop since they don't have to pay. Look at what happened when the 55 mph speed limit was lifted. I was living in LA at the time. For the first month people drove 55 out of habit but after that they slowly increased speeds to the new 65 limit and within three months they were already back to speeding. If you made the speed limit 100 mph some people would still speed. If the groups released their albums for free but asked people to not post them for download and to please only download them from the official site there'd be a copy on a file sharing web site with in the first hour. They can try to make money off ads on their web sites but like I say the majority will probably download from file sharing sites. Eventually the professionals will give up on releasing albums and songs entirely and just go back to playing live. Odd that things might go full circle to the pre technology days. Technology created the music industry we know and it's likely to kill it in the end.
I'm a big proponent on copyright laws and I think "Fair Use" is too often used as a defense but this case falls squarely under it. Here's some Wikipedia quotes on the subject(below). The fourth condition mentioned would negate copying for a friend since it could be percieved as allowing your friend to use the work without paying for it but copying for your own use is covered under the first condition since it's not commercial. Yes copying for a friend is non commercial but it also has a potential impact since he no longer needs to buy the work to benefit. That condition will be agrued until doomsday but personal use and scholarly use are covered.
From Wikipedia:
"Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. It is based on free speech rights provided by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The term "fair use" is unique to the United States; a similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright."
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
This isn't meant to troll Microsoft but I've spent the night fighting with a Microsoft Firewall and various other XP related hassles. I really seriously wonder if it wouldn't do their engineers some good to force them to use DOS 6.2 and a Unix based system for a week a month. Windows has gotten so bloated and cumbersome I think it'd do them some good to see how a more straightforward OS functions. What they seem to have into their heads is we all can't wait to get the new version of Windows. The problem is most of us don't use an OS we use software and all the bloat is slowing down the software and creating nightmarish stability problems. My windows software crashes several times an hour on average where as the Mac it's several times a month. This isn't trying to troll Windows in favor of Mac but Mac went back to a Unix type OS and gained a lot of stability doing it, not to mention security. The more crap you pile ontop the more holes form. They need to strip it back to the bone and preferrably take a page from Apple and start over. They're kind of like a frieghter at this point so turning around will be slow and painful but they blew their chance with Vista so instead and following Mac they kept piling on the code and now it takes up drastically more drive space, ram and it's slower. Why is this a surprise? I still say NT 3.51 was the best OS I ever used. It was stable and for the time fairly easy to use. They were headed in the right direction but they strayed off the path. I was a devoted Windows user back then and laughed when my Mac friends tried to convince me it was superior. It wasn't back then but a lot has changed and Windows needs to get back to it's roots. DOS may not have been user friendly but it was lean and stable.
Not exactly it's easier than it ever was which is a double edged sword. Now almost anyone can release an album. That severely dilutes the market. I saw this happen in independent film. Low budget horror films virtually turned into a non profit industry because everyone with a video camera started making them and Blockbuster and other vendors starting accepting crappy ones because they could pick them up cheap. I used to be a fan of the genre but I don't even bother to rent them anymore because they're all bad. It used to be that if you were going to shoot a film you needed half a mill to a mill so you had to maintain a certain quality or no one would touch it. Now large numbers are made for 10K to 50K and a 100K to 500K are considered real budgets. It's going to get harder and harder to get recognized as the market floods. Lets says there are 10X as many bands that now can get their music out there. In five years it'll be 100X and in ten years it'll be a 1000X. There are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of garage bands in this country alone. How many hours a day do you have to listen to music? Yes some of the good ones will shine through but the irony is it probably just got radically harder to succeed. People may find it easier to hear your music but it's going to get harder to make a living at it and instruments and recording equipment cost money.
I keep heaing people complain about Apple refusing to unlock the iPhone. Here's an ugly fact, they can't. They have a contract with AT&T preventing them from opening up the iPhone to other carriers, right or wrong they can't open it up without getting sued. Also it may be a condition of the contract they they prevent people from hacking them so they can use other carriers. Nothing is going to change until the contract is up. Once that happens expect changes. iPhone is now a proven product so now everyone is interested in getting a piece of the pie.
Because most users don't care if it's hackable or not. The masses you are talking about are a small percentage of their user base. Far more are interested in unbundling it but the device is sold bundled so there shouldn't be any shock when they rebundle it on you by disabling the hack. Look I want to buy a hybrid car but I can't expect them to make any model available today as a hybrid. If I want a hybrid I have to buy what is available. Similarly if I convert a car into some form of biodiesel or hybrid I have to assume I'm breaking warrantly so if something happens to the engine there's a chance it won't be covered. I'm not sure how much clearer they have to be when they say they don't want them modded or unbundled and at this point they don't intend it for 3rd software. I do know of companies working towards 3rd party apps but they are still a ways off and they are working with Apple towards that goal. I think most people will get what they want out of an iPhone eventually but they are working on their schedule not yours. If you don't like them don't buy one. It's a free market system. If large numbers don't buy they'll respond but the simple fact is they are selling them faster than they expected to so I doubt they are afraid of the detractors. Everyone boasts about so many other devices that they consider potentially superior. Why's it so important that iPhone do or allow precisely what you personally want? Get a competing product and be happy. Everyone wins.
Actually there tends to be more than one level of middleman and some want a big piece of the pie. Say with a theatrical release the studio makes roughly 50% of the box office based on a sliding percentage. Something like 60% the first week then dropping to 50% then gradually dropping from there so the theaterial gets a bigger piece of the pie as the numbers drop. Some one like Walmart of Blockbuster are going to negoiate for a very big piece of the pie compared to smaller distributors. The small retailers aren't going to buy from the studio they buy froma sub distributor. Even the studios don't nessaccarily release films so they may deal with a distributor before it even gets to Blockbuster. Most of the time a distributor is going to take 15% to 25% but like I say they aren't the only ones with their hands out. I'm guessing since Apple is just taking a cut they are able to offer a far better deal than say Blockbuster is and there's zero risk in that they don't have to fire sale a stack of DVDs if it tanks. The point is the fewer people between the studio and the customer the bigger the studio's cut is. Most any distribution works in a similar way. Walmart are the really bad ones since they control enough of the market to demand cut rate deals to maximize their profits. Just remember it's not all the studios keeping prices high every one wants to make as much as possible.
Not entirely true. You can rent services and things like bandwidth that has no physical form to return. It's semantics when you get down to it. I guess it could be called a Limited Use Purchase but the intent is to function like a rental. I'd prefer this over the play once or twice disks that have been tried once before. That really was pointless and a rediculous waste of landfills. It was like trying to commercialize those America On-Line trial disks. All we need is more trash to throw out after we use it once. There are benefits to no physical media. The problem is most of these services try to charge nearly the purchase price of the DVD itself. I think Blockbuster is over priced so why would I pay $9.99 for essentially the same thing only with a higher compression? Yes it's more convient but price will be the decider. I don't personally mind the pricing for iTunes but if they try the $10 crap I'll never use the service. They may not want to compete with DVDs and threaten those but unless it's less than Blockbuster rentals I can't see using the service. I checked out Amazon's service but they were $10 and wouldn't play on my Mac. No thanks. If I wait a couple of months I can buy a used copy at Blockbuster for that and it'll play on any of my machines. At $10 it's a novelty at $2.50 I think a lot of people would be interested. I don't agree with the everything should be a $1 approach but when I'm not getting a physical media I think under $3 is reasonable. If they decide to offer full 1080P I'd be happy to pay $10 for a 48 hour rental but not for an over compressed copy.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry Negroponte is no fool he's insisting they dual boot to a full copy of Vista.
Yeah but this time they are hoping to run a car with the fuel instead of running your grandfather.
I hate to break it to you but some of the prices people are willing to pay aren't far from what LP records cost when some people were still riding horses to get to work or a hot date. If you look in adjusted dollars the cost of CDs have actually not kept up with the inflation rate so they are in line with old record prices and are cheaper when you consider there's 25% more music on most CDs. This is not about the exploding price of CDs. If file sharing technology and ripping technology didn't exist and we all still had dial up modems music sales would have continued it's growth rate. I think films sales may be hurt by video games but I doubt it has much affect on music and definitely doesn't explain the drop. When people constantly talk about filling iPods that's a hell of a lot of music in a declining market. This is strictly about people no longer seeing a need to pay. A percentage are offering to pay a token amount but I doubt charging $1 to $5 an album would cause an increase in sales totals. They could double and tripple their sales and still see a radical reduction in income. The genie is out of the bottle and he ain't going back. I just wish we could get over the "I'll pay a buck" or "they're just a bunch of greedy SOBs ripping off artists so I don't think I should have to pay" arguments. Sales are going to continue to drop like a rock and nothing is going to stop it. People aren't flocking to paid download services either so the writing is on the wall. I think it's interesting that the download explosion has some what mirrored the growth of iPods. I don't think they were in any way the direct cause but I think there is an attitude of "gee I can hold 10,000 songs on this sucker so how am I gonna fill it up?" I just paid $300 or $400 so why should I pay thousands for the music needed to fill it? I'd love to see a poll on what percentage of iPod space is taken up on most iPods? In the 70s most people wouldn't have owned enough music to fill 10% of a modern iPod and only a tiny number of fanatics might have had that much. I'm guessing the majority have their iPods over half full. Those numbers pretty much answer any questions and pretty much drive a nail in the coffin of retail music. There's a point where CDs are no longer worth producing even if a small number are still willing to pay. I'll be surprised if they last another ten years and I wouldn't be surprised if record companies cried uncle in five.
Dude if there's anything on this planet that qualifies for prior art it's suing for patent infringement. They're the ambulance chasers of the tech world.
It's so other sad, bored lonely people can watch you loose at Solitare across the network. Next step will be a solitare MMO. Wonder if they patented that yet?
To patent chess or checkers? How about tick tac toe? Yes it's a new use for it but you might as well say printing on ePaper requires a separate copyright since it was never copyrighted specifically for that purpose. There has to be a limit set on persuing these claims as well. You shouldn't be able to wait until lots of deep pockets are involved for multiple years to sue so you know the damages will be high. The absolute maxium should be 12 months since a product was released but they should be required to give notice the moment they are aware of the infringement. Solitare is like traditional folk music which can't be copyrighted. It's been around too long and simply doing a computer version isn't changing it enough to warrant a patent. The code would be patentable but not the game. If they were all stealing code then that's a different issue.
1.Come up with a plan for a keyboard we can't build but is so cool some one will want to.
2.Sue first company to actually try to build keyboard.
3.Profit!
Now wait'll some one tries to knock off Duke Nuke Em Forever!
Point #1 is valid in that it doesn't hurt Windows so much as Linux and Mac having superior features and stability is going to drive Windows in that direction. They are in fact tag teaming Windows in a sense. It'll be good for everyone and it's what competition is for. Linux and Mac should be friendly. Point #2, Linux isn't likely to ever get cool stores because there isn't the same cash flow involved. Profits make stores possible. It doesn't have the market share and since even the flavors of Linux are based on open sourced software they can't charge a lot for them, although some server versions are quite expensive. Point #3 No it isn't just as good but that isn't the point. It's like electric cars that have a 100 mile range. They'll only work for 95% of the people. Non professional and most professionals can get by just fine with Open Office. It's very much like Mac if you got people to try Open Office for a week most wouldn't waste their money on Microsoft Office. Some still would because of the "what if" factor. It's very much like electric cars. Gee what if I need to drive a 101 miles? If you go to the store a couple of times a week and pick up the kids from school you're probably fine. Same with Open Office. Point #4 Non issue. Who really cares about Aqua. I always go into prefs and shift even XP towards performance. Not as slick? I use software and couldn't care less about the look of the OS. If it'd give me a 10% performance increase I'd go back to shell commands to open apps. I realize that's not normal but the point is how many minutes a day do you spend crawling around in a shell compared to inside a given software. Yes there's more to it like switching between open apps but my point is software performance is more desireable in a real sense than pretty effects. Point #5 I guess you can refer back to point #3. A lot of the same issues. For what non pros do Gimp is just fine. Some pros can get by with it but for your average person that needs a painter or photo retoucher there's nothing wrong with Gimp. Pros aren't likely to switch but the vast majority of users aren't doing it professionally. There's more to Photoshop than most people realize and your average user will use 2% to 5% of what it's capible of. It's largely wasted on most users so they are wasting their money when Gimp is free. There are other painters out there like Dogwaffle that are open source and fun to play with but Gimp is the only one that is at least in the range of Photoshop. It lacks some pro features and I personally can't get past the interface but it's far more user friendly than Blender so I'd use it if I didn't have the money for Photoshop. I'd probably be using Blender if I was still in High School. The point is there are perfectly adequate open source softwares available. Are they as good as the closed source? No. Why would they be the closed source has had 10X to a 100X the resources thrown at them? Thinking of it in that way the open source versions are pretty staggering. I may use Photoshop and Maya but I use Open Office on both my PCs and Mac. It does what I need and it's less hassle to use than Microsoft Office. I can aford Office I just prefer Open Office. I got my first copy of Word back in the late 80s and ironically other than the speed of the computers, spell check took forever, I preferred it back then over the recent versions. It did what I needed and wasn't suffering from bloat. I need a word processor not something that reformats my document for me when I slip and hit CTRL+Shift+D, it's been a few years but I think that was the short cut that used to make my like a living hell. Back in the days of one level of Undo I used to slip every once and a while but I typed faster than the computers of the time so I'd have several words entered before it could reformat making Undo impossible. Used to drive me nuts.
"Emergency protocol Penguin. Please click here to install Linux of this machine."
Sell one for $400, that's called breaking even since you paid $400 and only recieved one machine. Also I'm assuming you paid shipping for the one unit so you lost money at $400. I guess you could try buying a 100 machines and make it up in volume but that never seems to work for some strange reason.
Codec. Can you say Codec? C-O-D-E-C. Do you know what a codec is? How about compression? What about proprietary? No? Try this one "license fee". Makes me yearn for the days when we used to tie pork chops on lawyers and toss them in a pen full of pit bulls Saturday nights. Then the damn PETA people made us stop. I was never sure if they was worried about the pit bulls or the lawyers? In all seriousness this should be a five minute case. All that should be needed is to explain to a judge what a codec is and how they function and which ones are open sourced and which ones, "WMA" as an example, have to be licensed. That should in a sane world be enough to get it thrown out and not waste the court's time. It's called a free market system if you want a player that uses WMA it's called a Zune.
As a cheer of communal defiance rang out from basements around the country........
and prevent foreign outsourcing of Russian web site construction they plan to launch a version of HTML in Cyrillic. Soon to be followed by C++ in Cyrillic. Microsoft decided it was a niffty idea so they plan to start a Pig Latin based coding language called "Squeal Like".
So Vista was an "attempt" to fix XP and the Firewall from hell was an "attempt" to secure the OS? Since Service Pack 2 on XP every time I install a component or piece of software Microsoft rebricks my computer. As near as I can tell they're approach to security is deny all actions then you don't have to worry about plugging holes. Sorry but kiss the puppy it's hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that deep down Microsoft are a bunch of white hat softies. Microsoft has been a bully for a long time and being a bully makes you paranoid. Even with profits going up every year they still see all the competitors as talking food from their mouths. They'd try to run Apple out of the computer business but remember Apple was their shining example of why they weren't a monopoly. They see Apple as the devil they have to live with they just don't want them to gain market share. If they openly attack Apple they risk another court judgement, not that the last one had any affect. Instead they chip away making things not quite compatible and play dumb. All Microsoft is "attempting" to do is line their pockets. So are most companies Microsoft just tends to be more anticompetitive than most.
I know it's fun to burn the school down but then you're left wondering what will replace it? I know the current preference is a pay if you want/download for free if you don't business model but it isn't exactly sustainable. The problem is always people will eventually get tired of paying and stop since they don't have to pay. Look at what happened when the 55 mph speed limit was lifted. I was living in LA at the time. For the first month people drove 55 out of habit but after that they slowly increased speeds to the new 65 limit and within three months they were already back to speeding. If you made the speed limit 100 mph some people would still speed. If the groups released their albums for free but asked people to not post them for download and to please only download them from the official site there'd be a copy on a file sharing web site with in the first hour. They can try to make money off ads on their web sites but like I say the majority will probably download from file sharing sites. Eventually the professionals will give up on releasing albums and songs entirely and just go back to playing live. Odd that things might go full circle to the pre technology days. Technology created the music industry we know and it's likely to kill it in the end.
How do you train them to run in a nano hamster wheel.
I'm a big proponent on copyright laws and I think "Fair Use" is too often used as a defense but this case falls squarely under it. Here's some Wikipedia quotes on the subject(below). The fourth condition mentioned would negate copying for a friend since it could be percieved as allowing your friend to use the work without paying for it but copying for your own use is covered under the first condition since it's not commercial. Yes copying for a friend is non commercial but it also has a potential impact since he no longer needs to buy the work to benefit. That condition will be agrued until doomsday but personal use and scholarly use are covered.
From Wikipedia:
"Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. It is based on free speech rights provided by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The term "fair use" is unique to the United States; a similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright."
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
This isn't meant to troll Microsoft but I've spent the night fighting with a Microsoft Firewall and various other XP related hassles. I really seriously wonder if it wouldn't do their engineers some good to force them to use DOS 6.2 and a Unix based system for a week a month. Windows has gotten so bloated and cumbersome I think it'd do them some good to see how a more straightforward OS functions. What they seem to have into their heads is we all can't wait to get the new version of Windows. The problem is most of us don't use an OS we use software and all the bloat is slowing down the software and creating nightmarish stability problems. My windows software crashes several times an hour on average where as the Mac it's several times a month. This isn't trying to troll Windows in favor of Mac but Mac went back to a Unix type OS and gained a lot of stability doing it, not to mention security. The more crap you pile ontop the more holes form. They need to strip it back to the bone and preferrably take a page from Apple and start over. They're kind of like a frieghter at this point so turning around will be slow and painful but they blew their chance with Vista so instead and following Mac they kept piling on the code and now it takes up drastically more drive space, ram and it's slower. Why is this a surprise? I still say NT 3.51 was the best OS I ever used. It was stable and for the time fairly easy to use. They were headed in the right direction but they strayed off the path. I was a devoted Windows user back then and laughed when my Mac friends tried to convince me it was superior. It wasn't back then but a lot has changed and Windows needs to get back to it's roots. DOS may not have been user friendly but it was lean and stable.
Not exactly it's easier than it ever was which is a double edged sword. Now almost anyone can release an album. That severely dilutes the market. I saw this happen in independent film. Low budget horror films virtually turned into a non profit industry because everyone with a video camera started making them and Blockbuster and other vendors starting accepting crappy ones because they could pick them up cheap. I used to be a fan of the genre but I don't even bother to rent them anymore because they're all bad. It used to be that if you were going to shoot a film you needed half a mill to a mill so you had to maintain a certain quality or no one would touch it. Now large numbers are made for 10K to 50K and a 100K to 500K are considered real budgets. It's going to get harder and harder to get recognized as the market floods. Lets says there are 10X as many bands that now can get their music out there. In five years it'll be 100X and in ten years it'll be a 1000X. There are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of garage bands in this country alone. How many hours a day do you have to listen to music? Yes some of the good ones will shine through but the irony is it probably just got radically harder to succeed. People may find it easier to hear your music but it's going to get harder to make a living at it and instruments and recording equipment cost money.
I keep heaing people complain about Apple refusing to unlock the iPhone. Here's an ugly fact, they can't. They have a contract with AT&T preventing them from opening up the iPhone to other carriers, right or wrong they can't open it up without getting sued. Also it may be a condition of the contract they they prevent people from hacking them so they can use other carriers. Nothing is going to change until the contract is up. Once that happens expect changes. iPhone is now a proven product so now everyone is interested in getting a piece of the pie.
Because most users don't care if it's hackable or not. The masses you are talking about are a small percentage of their user base. Far more are interested in unbundling it but the device is sold bundled so there shouldn't be any shock when they rebundle it on you by disabling the hack. Look I want to buy a hybrid car but I can't expect them to make any model available today as a hybrid. If I want a hybrid I have to buy what is available. Similarly if I convert a car into some form of biodiesel or hybrid I have to assume I'm breaking warrantly so if something happens to the engine there's a chance it won't be covered. I'm not sure how much clearer they have to be when they say they don't want them modded or unbundled and at this point they don't intend it for 3rd software. I do know of companies working towards 3rd party apps but they are still a ways off and they are working with Apple towards that goal. I think most people will get what they want out of an iPhone eventually but they are working on their schedule not yours. If you don't like them don't buy one. It's a free market system. If large numbers don't buy they'll respond but the simple fact is they are selling them faster than they expected to so I doubt they are afraid of the detractors. Everyone boasts about so many other devices that they consider potentially superior. Why's it so important that iPhone do or allow precisely what you personally want? Get a competing product and be happy. Everyone wins.
So they dropped the idea of easerable markers and registering school children?
Snortable Red Bull!
Actually there tends to be more than one level of middleman and some want a big piece of the pie. Say with a theatrical release the studio makes roughly 50% of the box office based on a sliding percentage. Something like 60% the first week then dropping to 50% then gradually dropping from there so the theaterial gets a bigger piece of the pie as the numbers drop. Some one like Walmart of Blockbuster are going to negoiate for a very big piece of the pie compared to smaller distributors. The small retailers aren't going to buy from the studio they buy froma sub distributor. Even the studios don't nessaccarily release films so they may deal with a distributor before it even gets to Blockbuster. Most of the time a distributor is going to take 15% to 25% but like I say they aren't the only ones with their hands out. I'm guessing since Apple is just taking a cut they are able to offer a far better deal than say Blockbuster is and there's zero risk in that they don't have to fire sale a stack of DVDs if it tanks. The point is the fewer people between the studio and the customer the bigger the studio's cut is. Most any distribution works in a similar way. Walmart are the really bad ones since they control enough of the market to demand cut rate deals to maximize their profits. Just remember it's not all the studios keeping prices high every one wants to make as much as possible.
Not entirely true. You can rent services and things like bandwidth that has no physical form to return. It's semantics when you get down to it. I guess it could be called a Limited Use Purchase but the intent is to function like a rental. I'd prefer this over the play once or twice disks that have been tried once before. That really was pointless and a rediculous waste of landfills. It was like trying to commercialize those America On-Line trial disks. All we need is more trash to throw out after we use it once. There are benefits to no physical media. The problem is most of these services try to charge nearly the purchase price of the DVD itself. I think Blockbuster is over priced so why would I pay $9.99 for essentially the same thing only with a higher compression? Yes it's more convient but price will be the decider. I don't personally mind the pricing for iTunes but if they try the $10 crap I'll never use the service. They may not want to compete with DVDs and threaten those but unless it's less than Blockbuster rentals I can't see using the service. I checked out Amazon's service but they were $10 and wouldn't play on my Mac. No thanks. If I wait a couple of months I can buy a used copy at Blockbuster for that and it'll play on any of my machines. At $10 it's a novelty at $2.50 I think a lot of people would be interested. I don't agree with the everything should be a $1 approach but when I'm not getting a physical media I think under $3 is reasonable. If they decide to offer full 1080P I'd be happy to pay $10 for a 48 hour rental but not for an over compressed copy.