... where jobs will be posted in open forums/sites, and people will take them on and get paid, be it contract jobs, be it support for open source software - a truly open world we are going towards ?
It was yesterday that those now-big artists had to be launched with big money.
Now we are on internet. Noone paid nothing for the promotion of the video, but Star Wars Kid has become more famous than many artists that were being advertised for years.
I do not see any reason to justify those high prices anymore.
Come on - marketing costs on the internet ? For already known, established artists ?
Heck, even 'fan' sites that have no official connection to the artists get millions of uniques monthly. Marketing has never been easier - arrange a teaser and put it in your publisher site, release it to fan sites, put it in emule, edonkey, bearshare, gnutella. People market their cheap products without serious advertising budget this way.
Is the cost of production and distribution (note we have very high tech computerized studios now and the web to distribute) THAT high to justify reaping $100 m in profits from a copyrighted title and squandering money on extravagant parties, houses, overpriced designer items, and such ? By copying a 4 mb data file ?
Or is it a new kind of aristocracy with a similar understanding of nobility with their historic counterparts ?
It is not much different from the period that the nobility in 18th century france tried to hold on to their ancient 'rights' to exploit, dictate, and get their way, against the will and in expense of the people - the commons, the low, the 'subjects'.
Sure, things seem very different now, and in many respects they are - there are no more hereditary nobility that hold judiciary power on us, there is no 'unelected' persona that can pass laws that might dictate whether we should die or live, whether we should give 8/10 of our earnings to the 'state' or not.
But in some respects the thing still goes on - You have the personas/groups who have overgrown in respect to money and as a result in power.
They now dictate what we do, what we do not, through 'laws' that are passed by the people we elect - but there is a catch; we can only elect the people who can get enough money to make their publicity - we are not able to elect a person who appears in nowhere, but still a candidate. Where can the candidates get the money ? The people with the money of course. Is money given without expecting anything in return ? Very, very rarely, and not in the case of 'big businesses' for sure.
So actually we are just electing people who are the ones deemed electable by the holders of big money, big corporations and such.
And what these people are trying to ENFORCE through an organisation which have almost come to act like it IS a third of the u.s. congress, RIAA, is not much different from what british parliament had tried in 1774 - we have to hand them money, in style and in amounts that they want us to.
This is not something much different from feudal times - the one with the power, which is not 'the people' wants the people to bend to its will, for its own profit.
Whole thing is in a different disguise now for sure, there are laws, centuries old learning and practices of economy, faces that appear to be from the public but which are not - a lot of shapely differences.
But that does not change the basics of what is going on - there is something forced upon people, exorbitant prices, and outrageous ways to ensure that these prices stay.
This is in short, the people versus the overlords, again, after 250 years. We are 'the people' and they are the 'overlords'.
I am actually expecting that the new thing going on the net, 'the people' concept with all its informedness and connectivity might change things in the voting booth.
The high prices that the products were sold by then were justified - it was an ethical profit on top of the cost. However it is not now. The prices are the same, but the cost is too little.
Its no logic to propose 'it is free market, if you choose so you buy it if not you do not, and invisible hand adjusts the prices' - no !
Its free market when the market is free. And with the publishers, RIAA, their money greedy extravagantly living 'artists', and their purchased senators, market is NOT free, and the invisible hand is in fact the hand of RIAA.
Hence there is not a free market, free price situation here - the public are not willing to pay these exorbitant prices, but IN LIEU of market's wishes, these prices are FORCED upon the public. The result ? Piracy.
As there is monopolisation of a different sort in this case, the exorbitant prices can not be shown as justified and legal - they are just highway robbery.
The invisible hand is still dictating the prices though - for mp3s that cost almost nothing to reproduce, it dictated that its price should be zero, or close to zero. Hence people are either acquiring it 'for free', or they are buying them for only prices in vicinity of 'cents'.
Your "robber barons" are Bono, KT Tunstall, Celine Dion, Slipknot, 50 Cent, and every other artist that uses an RIAA-member company to deal with the money side of their publishing.......Are you really comparing a relative monopoly on, say, energy distribution, mining, or rail transport with a trade association made up of hundreds of publishing companies representing thousands of artists?
Indeed !
The difference in formation/nature of an organisation from another is not much important, if the two entities produce the same negative effect.
It (the monopoly type) is just apparent, obvious and already identified and known as a 'bad effect' in the case of mining, oil or other type of monopolies in already long established fields, but even the very nature of multimedia loaded internet, heck the workings, social aspects of the internet are not known yet. It wont be much to people's surprise when in the future we identify what is exactly doing what, and discover that centuries old concepts are not too valid for application on internet.
Further, all you have to do is just not consume the music by these artists you obviously hate. After all, they are the ones that expressly chose to have a company handle their publishing, and to make use of their copyrights on the work they produce. OK, so you hate that... great! That means that you must also, if you have any intellectul honesty, have no interest in being entertained by someone who so annoys you with their business decisions. After all, from the tone of so many conversations one hears, there must by thousands of stellar musicians who have no interest in making a living from their recordings, or in protecting their rights... so, surely somewhere in that range of non-profit musicians (or, musicians willing to hope you'll send some money when you download a "free" copy of their work) that will replace, for you, the stupid, annoying, robber-baron musicians you don't really like anyway.
I must point out that, i already havent ever made any consumptuion of any products of most of the 'artists' you gave as examples.
The proposition you make seems right in that 'just do not buy then'. But it is not !..
RIAA is setting a trend, it is setting standards on price, proceedings and on how and in which way the products should be consumed, who should sell their products for what price, and who should not even sell.
And they happen not to be conscious moves by the RIAA or participating artists at all ! You set something in motion, somebody does something, and in an unknown field, others take their action as example.
What is the result ? The result is, even though they might be willing to let us use their product in ways different than RIAA enforces, or in prices other than the group setting the trend with RIAA emphasizes, they can not.
Why they can not ? Because the publishing companies will not accept them, instead of 'artists' who are willing to sell their products at a higher price, hence a higher profit for the publisher.
And it is an endless cycle - if you do not provide more profit margin for the publisher - ie you go all 'hip' with the new understanding of 'the people' on the net - the publisher wont help you sell your products. And furthermore, they are actually making it impossible for such 'renegade' artists to distrubute by bypassing them, through RIAA, with various absurd legal proceedings and patents they are chasing.
In short, whatever RIAA does, even though i do not use any, is harming me. Not only in the case of products, but for net neutrality, freedom of speech and privacy too - as RIAA is pushing for medieval measures in many areas related to internet.
But different from the times of Teddy Roosevelt, this time they are hiding behind outdated intellectual property laws from the last century - the times when something was reproducable and distributable at great cost. The cost of reproduction and distribution of intellectual property items (mainly songs, text, publications etc) have taken a deep dive, but prices have not. They want to preserve this profit margin, and they are maintaining a rightful face because of the a century old laws.
But in fact, what they are doing is a new style of Robber Baron practice.
I wish to point out an important fact - when the concept of 'state secret' gets ahold of a directing body and its nation, anything in accordance with the interest parties' or governing groups' interests can be hidden and justified by naming them as 'state secrets', and they generally prove to be damaging to the interests of the nation. There are too many 'state secrets' in united states right now. And a many of them are not the state's secrets.
On the contrary, do you think that the OSS staff just evaporized into thin air ? Or who constituted founding crew of CIA ?
Note that this is not an unknown thread, von braun and other nazi scientists were the backbone of nasa in the same years. They were a little more publicisizable from their gestapo counterparts, so in their case the government had to only just not talk about what they did in the war, and let their deeds fade into obscurity.
British were too busy executing former nazi criminals in post war germany. But surprisingly not many gestapo members were executed.
Well, it was 1945, and the u.s. government had enough lack of vision and stupidity to incorporate remnants of the gestapo as 'experts' in 'intelligence' to then newly being formed CIA. Some of these 'people' are still alive !
Naturally a big change in the practices of government intelligence has formed there - Herd the crowds, hide anything that is against your or your interest group's profit from the public, do any plot neccessary to reach your ends even if it contradicts with your nation's heritage. These men were NAZI. They tortured people, their loved ones in front of their eyes, barred nothing in order to reach their ends, even not their own relatives, sons, daughters.
The simplest result of this have been the erection of puppet dictatorships throughout the 3rd world countries. And u.s. is paying the price for them now, in form of regional wars.
There are still nazi in u.s. government. The likes of which, many u.s. citizens have died or lost their close ones to remove from the face of the earth. And they have shaped the CIA, which has become a government on its own. Not to mention many other that were founded in the lines of it.
Oh yes it is possible - it is possible that many much-sought-for technologies might be found, and still kept hidden from public use, and reserved only for the so called 'government' - something which only cares about your own participants' interests and not the nation by now.
Hayashibara Megumi was the Aunt Haruka in Love Hina and sang the theme song didnt she ? That love hina was one of the best anime i watched. I still have it.
Theoritically seems the only possible way it is aint it ?
To be infinite, infinity has to be infinite in all aspects, dimensionally, timewise (dont take time as a dimension here), inwards, outwards, conceptually, any quantity and quality we can name...
And this is only possible if the existence we dwell in is infinite, but universes are finite in the area they occupy, but infinite in number through the infinity.
What do we have ? An endless amount of infinity with infinite expanding universes in it - an infinity for which the universes in it will need an infinite time to fill it up.
Yes, they indeed DO filter many of the legitimate emails - including ones that carry new business proposals, emails from colleagues, or ones coming as a part of an ongoing correspondence thread.
And you will never know if you have lost the deal or not - youll simply think the party you have contacted were not even interested enough to reply you, or the person you were in contact have simply chose to ignore you.
And this all comes courtesy of isps, and hosting providers. You pay them to lose your own money by using their services.
WORST is hotmail. Hotmail urges users to raise their junk filter to normal, a setting in which MANY legitimate emails, including the emails arriving to inform you of your domain renewal or registration goes to bust, without ever seeing junk mail folder. Then you have the infinite struggle to snatch your domain back from hit farmers at exorbitant costs in your hands. and this is one of the mildest monetary losses that can happen.
I dont even want to talk about what happens in hotmail's high junk filter setting.
Slashdot Mirror
Will wonders never cease
... where jobs will be posted in open forums/sites, and people will take them on and get paid, be it contract jobs, be it support for open source software - a truly open world we are going towards ?
Oh well come on.
It was yesterday that those now-big artists had to be launched with big money.
Now we are on internet. Noone paid nothing for the promotion of the video, but Star Wars Kid has become more famous than many artists that were being advertised for years.
I do not see any reason to justify those high prices anymore.
Im positive towards all jean sizes and all 'butt' proportions. Egalite, Fraternite, Eternite.
Rating, my butt.
Not if they did not want to show themselves.
Come on - marketing costs on the internet ? For already known, established artists ?
Heck, even 'fan' sites that have no official connection to the artists get millions of uniques monthly. Marketing has never been easier - arrange a teaser and put it in your publisher site, release it to fan sites, put it in emule, edonkey, bearshare, gnutella. People market their cheap products without serious advertising budget this way.
Oh well. Yes lotr was risky. So what about cost of producing mp3s ?
Not if they can slowly suppress and scare.
But i agree with you wholeheartedly.
But that said, how can we cry over a company which made ad revenues based on pirated content? Scum versus scam: who cares who wins? We are the losers.
Just like Queen Elizabeth have cared about pirated content by Drake and Hawkins an d the like - They were pirates, but they were pirates on HER side.
Is the cost of production and distribution (note we have very high tech computerized studios now and the web to distribute) THAT high to justify reaping $100 m in profits from a copyrighted title and squandering money on extravagant parties, houses, overpriced designer items, and such ? By copying a 4 mb data file ?
Or is it a new kind of aristocracy with a similar understanding of nobility with their historic counterparts ?
This is it. No more, no less.
It is not much different from the period that the nobility in 18th century france tried to hold on to their ancient 'rights' to exploit, dictate, and get their way, against the will and in expense of the people - the commons, the low, the 'subjects'.
Sure, things seem very different now, and in many respects they are - there are no more hereditary nobility that hold judiciary power on us, there is no 'unelected' persona that can pass laws that might dictate whether we should die or live, whether we should give 8/10 of our earnings to the 'state' or not.
But in some respects the thing still goes on - You have the personas/groups who have overgrown in respect to money and as a result in power.
They now dictate what we do, what we do not, through 'laws' that are passed by the people we elect - but there is a catch; we can only elect the people who can get enough money to make their publicity - we are not able to elect a person who appears in nowhere, but still a candidate. Where can the candidates get the money ? The people with the money of course. Is money given without expecting anything in return ? Very, very rarely, and not in the case of 'big businesses' for sure.
So actually we are just electing people who are the ones deemed electable by the holders of big money, big corporations and such.
And what these people are trying to ENFORCE through an organisation which have almost come to act like it IS a third of the u.s. congress, RIAA, is not much different from what british parliament had tried in 1774 - we have to hand them money, in style and in amounts that they want us to.
This is not something much different from feudal times - the one with the power, which is not 'the people' wants the people to bend to its will, for its own profit.
Whole thing is in a different disguise now for sure, there are laws, centuries old learning and practices of economy, faces that appear to be from the public but which are not - a lot of shapely differences.
But that does not change the basics of what is going on - there is something forced upon people, exorbitant prices, and outrageous ways to ensure that these prices stay.
This is in short, the people versus the overlords, again, after 250 years. We are 'the people' and they are the 'overlords'.
I am actually expecting that the new thing going on the net, 'the people' concept with all its informedness and connectivity might change things in the voting booth.
You are missing one point here :
The high prices that the products were sold by then were justified - it was an ethical profit on top of the cost. However it is not now. The prices are the same, but the cost is too little.
Its no logic to propose 'it is free market, if you choose so you buy it if not you do not, and invisible hand adjusts the prices' - no !
Its free market when the market is free. And with the publishers, RIAA, their money greedy extravagantly living 'artists', and their purchased senators, market is NOT free, and the invisible hand is in fact the hand of RIAA.
Hence there is not a free market, free price situation here - the public are not willing to pay these exorbitant prices, but IN LIEU of market's wishes, these prices are FORCED upon the public. The result ? Piracy.
As there is monopolisation of a different sort in this case, the exorbitant prices can not be shown as justified and legal - they are just highway robbery.
The invisible hand is still dictating the prices though - for mp3s that cost almost nothing to reproduce, it dictated that its price should be zero, or close to zero. Hence people are either acquiring it 'for free', or they are buying them for only prices in vicinity of 'cents'.
Yea thats a problem with no solution in sight.
Your "robber barons" are Bono, KT Tunstall, Celine Dion, Slipknot, 50 Cent, and every other artist that uses an RIAA-member company to deal with the money side of their publishing.......Are you really comparing a relative monopoly on, say, energy distribution, mining, or rail transport with a trade association made up of hundreds of publishing companies representing thousands of artists?
Indeed !
The difference in formation/nature of an organisation from another is not much important, if the two entities produce the same negative effect.
It (the monopoly type) is just apparent, obvious and already identified and known as a 'bad effect' in the case of mining, oil or other type of monopolies in already long established fields, but even the very nature of multimedia loaded internet, heck the workings, social aspects of the internet are not known yet. It wont be much to people's surprise when in the future we identify what is exactly doing what, and discover that centuries old concepts are not too valid for application on internet.
Further, all you have to do is just not consume the music by these artists you obviously hate. After all, they are the ones that expressly chose to have a company handle their publishing, and to make use of their copyrights on the work they produce. OK, so you hate that... great! That means that you must also, if you have any intellectul honesty, have no interest in being entertained by someone who so annoys you with their business decisions. After all, from the tone of so many conversations one hears, there must by thousands of stellar musicians who have no interest in making a living from their recordings, or in protecting their rights... so, surely somewhere in that range of non-profit musicians (or, musicians willing to hope you'll send some money when you download a "free" copy of their work) that will replace, for you, the stupid, annoying, robber-baron musicians you don't really like anyway.
I must point out that, i already havent ever made any consumptuion of any products of most of the 'artists' you gave as examples.
The proposition you make seems right in that 'just do not buy then'. But it is not !..
RIAA is setting a trend, it is setting standards on price, proceedings and on how and in which way the products should be consumed, who should sell their products for what price, and who should not even sell.
And they happen not to be conscious moves by the RIAA or participating artists at all ! You set something in motion, somebody does something, and in an unknown field, others take their action as example.
What is the result ? The result is, even though they might be willing to let us use their product in ways different than RIAA enforces, or in prices other than the group setting the trend with RIAA emphasizes, they can not.
Why they can not ? Because the publishing companies will not accept them, instead of 'artists' who are willing to sell their products at a higher price, hence a higher profit for the publisher.
And it is an endless cycle - if you do not provide more profit margin for the publisher - ie you go all 'hip' with the new understanding of 'the people' on the net - the publisher wont help you sell your products. And furthermore, they are actually making it impossible for such 'renegade' artists to distrubute by bypassing them, through RIAA, with various absurd legal proceedings and patents they are chasing.
In short, whatever RIAA does, even though i do not use any, is harming me. Not only in the case of products, but for net neutrality, freedom of speech and privacy too - as RIAA is pushing for medieval measures in many areas related to internet.
But different from the times of Teddy Roosevelt, this time they are hiding behind outdated intellectual property laws from the last century - the times when something was reproducable and distributable at great cost. The cost of reproduction and distribution of intellectual property items (mainly songs, text, publications etc) have taken a deep dive, but prices have not. They want to preserve this profit margin, and they are maintaining a rightful face because of the a century old laws.
But in fact, what they are doing is a new style of Robber Baron practice.
We need a new Teddy Roosevelt.
I wish to point out an important fact - when the concept of 'state secret' gets ahold of a directing body and its nation, anything in accordance with the interest parties' or governing groups' interests can be hidden and justified by naming them as 'state secrets', and they generally prove to be damaging to the interests of the nation. There are too many 'state secrets' in united states right now. And a many of them are not the state's secrets.
A wonderful and intricate comment, one which i was unable to delve into its depths. Kudos.
On the contrary, do you think that the OSS staff just evaporized into thin air ? Or who constituted founding crew of CIA ?
Note that this is not an unknown thread, von braun and other nazi scientists were the backbone of nasa in the same years. They were a little more publicisizable from their gestapo counterparts, so in their case the government had to only just not talk about what they did in the war, and let their deeds fade into obscurity.
British were too busy executing former nazi criminals in post war germany. But surprisingly not many gestapo members were executed.
Well, it was 1945, and the u.s. government had enough lack of vision and stupidity to incorporate remnants of the gestapo as 'experts' in 'intelligence' to then newly being formed CIA. Some of these 'people' are still alive !
Naturally a big change in the practices of government intelligence has formed there - Herd the crowds, hide anything that is against your or your interest group's profit from the public, do any plot neccessary to reach your ends even if it contradicts with your nation's heritage. These men were NAZI. They tortured people, their loved ones in front of their eyes, barred nothing in order to reach their ends, even not their own relatives, sons, daughters.
The simplest result of this have been the erection of puppet dictatorships throughout the 3rd world countries. And u.s. is paying the price for them now, in form of regional wars.
There are still nazi in u.s. government. The likes of which, many u.s. citizens have died or lost their close ones to remove from the face of the earth. And they have shaped the CIA, which has become a government on its own. Not to mention many other that were founded in the lines of it.
Oh yes it is possible - it is possible that many much-sought-for technologies might be found, and still kept hidden from public use, and reserved only for the so called 'government' - something which only cares about your own participants' interests and not the nation by now.
Tried episode 1. Well, its humor is too 'dark' for my taste.
Hayashibara Megumi was the Aunt Haruka in Love Hina and sang the theme song didnt she ? That love hina was one of the best anime i watched. I still have it.
... universes in it.
...
Theoritically seems the only possible way it is aint it ?
To be infinite, infinity has to be infinite in all aspects, dimensionally, timewise (dont take time as a dimension here), inwards, outwards, conceptually, any quantity and quality we can name
And this is only possible if the existence we dwell in is infinite, but universes are finite in the area they occupy, but infinite in number through the infinity.
What do we have ? An endless amount of infinity with infinite expanding universes in it - an infinity for which the universes in it will need an infinite time to fill it up.
Yes, they indeed DO filter many of the legitimate emails - including ones that carry new business proposals, emails from colleagues, or ones coming as a part of an ongoing correspondence thread.
And you will never know if you have lost the deal or not - youll simply think the party you have contacted were not even interested enough to reply you, or the person you were in contact have simply chose to ignore you.
And this all comes courtesy of isps, and hosting providers. You pay them to lose your own money by using their services.
WORST is hotmail. Hotmail urges users to raise their junk filter to normal, a setting in which MANY legitimate emails, including the emails arriving to inform you of your domain renewal or registration goes to bust, without ever seeing junk mail folder. Then you have the infinite struggle to snatch your domain back from hit farmers at exorbitant costs in your hands. and this is one of the mildest monetary losses that can happen.
I dont even want to talk about what happens in hotmail's high junk filter setting.