I don't agree that that's what's being said by people here on/.
What I believe will happen is that rather than having a mafia-like organization (or rather a cartel) you'll have successful artists making the albums using technology that's readily available that surpasses what the music industry had available in the 70s, 80s, and even 90s. And, we'll see the distribution channel change making distribution easier. On top of that, artists won't rely solely on their music, but rather some other finite goods provided in conjunction with the infinite (music).
Again, let's stop embracing the old outdated model and make these artists some money using the newer models that guarantee the artists get compensated. These artists will then be able to hold onto their own intellectual property instead of signing it all over to a third party that can and will leverage it against them.
Very few, but the super successful make any money from their recording contracts, and even then some artists may sell millions of CDs and still owe the RIAA. Look into their accounting practices and hear the complaints of the vocal bands that are disgruntled at how they are cheated by the RIAA. None of the money made collecting settlements from alleged infringers went to artists.
The cart horse horse cart conundrum plays in your post. For instance, the costs of studio time wouldn't be so great if the superstar artists weren't getting paid so much. And there are significantly more failures than there are successes; studio time costs cause the failure (failed album or even band) as much as the successful ones demonstrates that the costs drive the loss, rather than "loss due to success having the rug pulled out from under it via pirating". Let me rephrase. The costs of the studio time and the post processing time creates the greatest loss, for if it was reasonable it wouldn't cost so much. Not every band that uses studio time and post processing time should be charged at the rate that the superstar gets charged--and maybe they don't but they are close and the RIAA would love to make that happen. Very few artists that win these million dollar contracts actually see any of that million dollars--it all goes to studio time and post processing--and, if they are lucky, to costs associated with marketing and distribution.
Most people don't learn to become song writers or singers or band members. They become them because they are already talented. This isn't an education system where they are paying their $70,000 for their college tuition.
The loss of income to artists are generally much lower than are reported. This has been shown time and again to be exaggerated in order to influence law makers to lean one way. Many studies and federal government reports clearly show that these numbers have been exaggerated.
It has also been shown time and again that those people that pirate music tend to purchase more than those people that don't.
Copyright infringement in music today is a matter of gluttony. If someone downloads 60,000 songs over 10 years they have no possibility of gaining the benefit of those 60,000 songs--only a small percentage of them would even be appealing. The artists/RIAA have no real loss because they didn't loose a physical thing, and the space is wasted being nothing but bits set on the HDD for the most part. The only real benefactor are the hard drive manufacturers. They don't gain that much either as 60,000 songs can sit on a relatively small HDD.
The problem with the RIAA today is that they spend way to much fucking time bitching about what's happening rather than going out and making money off what they already have while figuring out new business models that don't continually get driven by their old models.
You don't know your history. Books weren't the only printed material that was copied illegally centuries ago. And the impact was as great relative to today. Today, most people collect and rarely benefit from what they copy. How can you listen to 60,000 songs? You can't. So, you collect and hope to listen to some. The point is that it is just gluttony today with no real impact in either loss to the author/artist nor gain to the glutton.
Amid the furor of increasing crime rates the National Association of Police Chiefs declared that the home owners and citizens were not doing enough to deter crime on their own. The association members concurred that citizens should be wielding tools that allow police authorities to monitor their behavior and the behavior of those around them including voluntarily installing equipment in their homes and vehicles that would allow police authorities to monitor and deter crime in whatever way was possible. The Police Chief's association declared that they would not be able to deter crime at the current rates because they couldn't possibly know where all the crime was occurring and when, nor to the degree it would break the law. As a consequence the Police Chief's Association asked that new laws be passed that would require citizens to become participants in monitoring and reporting crimes. Otherwise crime would continue, other citizens would continue to loose money, their health, and risk their safety./s
I think your point about Standard Oil is moot. They were broken up. Did you know that Microsoft was broken up in the initial ruling? That's moot too. Whether a better business model might have come along and usurped Standard Oil is a definite possibility. Standard Oil didn't get to be the monopoly by providing a superior product. It was their business model that accomplished that. Had Standard Oil been allowed to exist they would have damaged the consumer (by way of damaging the industry) in the same manner that Microsoft did.
Frankly, I see breaking up Standard Oil as flaw. Technically, the industry would have managed that itself, but alas Standard Oil was breaking the law.
Software, especially the OS and all that goes with it (programming API, applications with their dependent proprietary formats), are much harder to counter than countering Standard Oil's monopoly.
I'm arguing that it is inevitable, period. That it will, period. That one day, sooner or later, it will, even if that time-frame is very long.
Microsoft's day is inevitable. I think they know this. You can't saturate the market and sell incrmental changes forever. People will realize that what they have works. Sure, Microsoft will vary the model some here and there, such as trying to get you to rent software, or outdating the OS so that your old application versions won't work.
I actually think your comments are somewhat naive. It seems you see the industry in a box with all these boundaries and that business and the consumer will always function within that box and that if the box must be altered it will be by Microsoft.
Standard Oil was broken up because Standard Oil's business model failed them--in regards to how it was perceived as a business, how long they got away with doing something illegal, and the changing perception of the needs of the consumer over the rights of the company. If they'd have let Standard Oil continue or if they hadn't been caught breaking the law, then Standard Oil would have had a significantly detrimental affect on the world.
One would have to be utterly blind to not realize that Microsoft not only is a monopoly, but was one, operated as one even before being declared one. The court ruled Microsoft a monopoly and then ruled that they were operating as a monopoly prior to being ruled one, even though they were trying hard to ensure they were not ruled a monopoly. It's when the court rules you a monopoly that you are bound by the rules of a monopoly, which are slightly different than for those not ruled a monopoly.
MS-DOS was purchased at the right time. Microsoft, when they entered the deal with IBM, didn't own QDOS. They bought it as a result of the commitment to IBM.
The benefit Microsoft gave to DOS was that it was a power house of programming back then and maybe the only real company capable of advancing it to the point that was needed to foster growth. They certainly weren't as distracted as some of the companies back then--and a special note is that they weren't even the first one approached by IBM. This all happened long before standards, open source, or even the PC became the dominant platform.
Whether or not they copied from IBM is moot. They didn't invent it, they didn't conceive it, they didn't learn how to do it themselves, they instead copied it, then conveniently forgot how to implement it in their own products.
Repetition begets consistency, therefore it was an obviousness issue.
And if they have an older version of Office and open a newer file format it looks like shit, if it even opens.
And, this has been the case for years with competing office products. There have been interchange formats for as long as PCs have been in use (and longer).
Really, let's not be stupid. Most documents aren't complex. Most are basic letters, memos, etc. Most don't have complex formatting. As a result the vast majority will open and look good in Open Office. Most that don't can be quickly edited to correct the formatting. And document authors can be trained to create attractive documents that can transfer flawlessly.
Let's please not do the straw-man here--emphasize a little problem to divert from the bigger picture.
The idiocy of that statement is quite telling. You could just as easily say that about Microsoft. Just flip Microsoft and Linux in that sentence and you have a statement that is just as idiotic.
And to even remotely compare Linux to Hitler is offensive.
I remember taking apart executables in DOS with a debugger. I noted how they were designed (and used with switches/this or/that) just like unices. I remember the arguments about how Linux is too complex and how people don't even know what the/etc folder is for (people saying Linux is too complex to learn, but in reality Windows has its own/etc folder (\windows\system32\drivers\etc) and a very complex directory structure that most people won't learn). (And note that they are called folders just like Apple named them, when for years they were called directories.) I remember seeing compiz and beryl come out with 3d accelerated desktops and attractive visual effects. I remember thinking about Windows Vista and Win7 having copied those ideas. Even simple ones were copied by Microsoft.
The point here is that Microsoft still isn't inventing. What Microsoft does best is polish a product they've had in development for 20+ years by copying others. And they've clearly given credit to open source by making public claims that Open Source has made them a better company -- I've always took that to mean that open source is giving them more ideas to copy.
This is wrong on so many levels. In fact, it is almost insanely wrong. Standards would have emerged. In the DOS world there were emerging interface standards. There were menus, there were consistent menu choices, programs were being written with common functionality (such as save, print, etc.). Programmers were learning when and when not to write directly to hardware. There were other companies writing GUIs. Other companies were developing things such as fonts, page layout, etc. Microsoft wasn't inventing them, they were copying them. True type font didn't come into this world without a fight.
Standard ways of doing things were dictated by other industries, such as paper size, keyboard layouts, hardware designs. It was inevitable that we would have ended up with a consistency similar to what we have today, even without Microsoft and likely without any abusive monopoly.
Standards bodies existed before Microsoft. It was inevitable that they were to be created by the software industry.
Damn, I keep reading your post and I can't help but think about how misleading that is. Just look at computer hardware. There's no "Microsoft" of hardware yet we get parts that are interchangable. The ISO was created as a body to approve standards.
You weren't paying attention back then or you weren't involved. Microsoft actually hindered standards by obfuscating them to the point that the industry would be force to adopt theirs. There were file system standards for word processing that had issues because of Microsoft's interference. There was the W3 which was responsible for standardizing HTML back then which Microsoft tried to manipulate. Even within recent years they have tried to contravene the standard's process to favor themselves.
Microsoft was a monopoly that abused it's power to gain the position it is in. While building that position (and monopoly) they broke the law, and that injured everyone. The only problem is that the punishment for their crimes wasn't harsh enough to open the software market back up. The damage had been done.
The world would have been better off without the abusive monopoly created by Microsoft. Monopolies are not better than the competition that is fostered without them.
Who's the Ford today (equaling the Ford of the past)? Who's the Standard Oil today? Certainly no American company.
And, it is total fiction that we'd have some other company doing the same thing. Microsoft got where it was by abusing it's monopoly power. We all know that. If we didn't have a Microsoft we'd have more markets with more players in each market and competition would be greater providing us with more innovative products propelling computing to a much more sane plateau.
MySQL played a big part in why Oracle grabbed Sun. Having control of the product (even if they don't discontinue it) will certainly slow down the time-frame where it might gain feature and performance parity (if it's not just left to rot in the sun) with Oracle's flagship product. I think Ellison understands that given enough time it would hurt their bottom line. At least now they control it.
You cannot sustain the Windows and Office cash cow forever. All manner of products will whittle away at it over time. Given open and ISO formats the need for Office dwindles (by some measure, some degree). Given the cloud Office dwindles. By advancing the state of OOo and other derivatives Office dwindles. Office can't be sustained indefinitely. Once Ford was the king of automobile industry. Today that's not the case, for a reason. Once Standard Oil was a massive monopoly and yet they no longer exist.
The same cause and effect will occur in every product Microsoft offers. No one wants to keep paying for incremental changes to software when the costs are so high, when the alternatives are raising the ante, and when the incremental changes are interface oriented or minor functionality.
You would have to be pretty blind or prejudiced to not understand that everything changes. Sooner or later there'll be an end to Microsoft as it is being challenged left and right. Even they understand that. We've seen some of the flailing. Once the lock in technologies are removed the market competition factors play a bigger role. As OSS and other software options gain parity the monopolist looses it's foothold.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it was. It was foisted as a system to collect money for the artists.
I don't agree that that's what's being said by people here on /.
What I believe will happen is that rather than having a mafia-like organization (or rather a cartel) you'll have successful artists making the albums using technology that's readily available that surpasses what the music industry had available in the 70s, 80s, and even 90s. And, we'll see the distribution channel change making distribution easier. On top of that, artists won't rely solely on their music, but rather some other finite goods provided in conjunction with the infinite (music).
Again, let's stop embracing the old outdated model and make these artists some money using the newer models that guarantee the artists get compensated. These artists will then be able to hold onto their own intellectual property instead of signing it all over to a third party that can and will leverage it against them.
Very few, but the super successful make any money from their recording contracts, and even then some artists may sell millions of CDs and still owe the RIAA. Look into their accounting practices and hear the complaints of the vocal bands that are disgruntled at how they are cheated by the RIAA. None of the money made collecting settlements from alleged infringers went to artists.
The cart horse horse cart conundrum plays in your post. For instance, the costs of studio time wouldn't be so great if the superstar artists weren't getting paid so much. And there are significantly more failures than there are successes; studio time costs cause the failure (failed album or even band) as much as the successful ones demonstrates that the costs drive the loss, rather than "loss due to success having the rug pulled out from under it via pirating". Let me rephrase. The costs of the studio time and the post processing time creates the greatest loss, for if it was reasonable it wouldn't cost so much. Not every band that uses studio time and post processing time should be charged at the rate that the superstar gets charged--and maybe they don't but they are close and the RIAA would love to make that happen. Very few artists that win these million dollar contracts actually see any of that million dollars--it all goes to studio time and post processing--and, if they are lucky, to costs associated with marketing and distribution.
Most people don't learn to become song writers or singers or band members. They become them because they are already talented. This isn't an education system where they are paying their $70,000 for their college tuition.
The loss of income to artists are generally much lower than are reported. This has been shown time and again to be exaggerated in order to influence law makers to lean one way. Many studies and federal government reports clearly show that these numbers have been exaggerated.
It has also been shown time and again that those people that pirate music tend to purchase more than those people that don't.
Copyright infringement in music today is a matter of gluttony. If someone downloads 60,000 songs over 10 years they have no possibility of gaining the benefit of those 60,000 songs--only a small percentage of them would even be appealing. The artists/RIAA have no real loss because they didn't loose a physical thing, and the space is wasted being nothing but bits set on the HDD for the most part. The only real benefactor are the hard drive manufacturers. They don't gain that much either as 60,000 songs can sit on a relatively small HDD.
The problem with the RIAA today is that they spend way to much fucking time bitching about what's happening rather than going out and making money off what they already have while figuring out new business models that don't continually get driven by their old models.
You don't know your history. Books weren't the only printed material that was copied illegally centuries ago. And the impact was as great relative to today. Today, most people collect and rarely benefit from what they copy. How can you listen to 60,000 songs? You can't. So, you collect and hope to listen to some. The point is that it is just gluttony today with no real impact in either loss to the author/artist nor gain to the glutton.
Amid the furor of increasing crime rates the National Association of Police Chiefs declared that the home owners and citizens were not doing enough to deter crime on their own. The association members concurred that citizens should be wielding tools that allow police authorities to monitor their behavior and the behavior of those around them including voluntarily installing equipment in their homes and vehicles that would allow police authorities to monitor and deter crime in whatever way was possible. The Police Chief's association declared that they would not be able to deter crime at the current rates because they couldn't possibly know where all the crime was occurring and when, nor to the degree it would break the law. As a consequence the Police Chief's Association asked that new laws be passed that would require citizens to become participants in monitoring and reporting crimes. Otherwise crime would continue, other citizens would continue to loose money, their health, and risk their safety. /s
I think your point about Standard Oil is moot. They were broken up. Did you know that Microsoft was broken up in the initial ruling? That's moot too. Whether a better business model might have come along and usurped Standard Oil is a definite possibility. Standard Oil didn't get to be the monopoly by providing a superior product. It was their business model that accomplished that. Had Standard Oil been allowed to exist they would have damaged the consumer (by way of damaging the industry) in the same manner that Microsoft did.
Frankly, I see breaking up Standard Oil as flaw. Technically, the industry would have managed that itself, but alas Standard Oil was breaking the law.
Software, especially the OS and all that goes with it (programming API, applications with their dependent proprietary formats), are much harder to counter than countering Standard Oil's monopoly.
I'm arguing that it is inevitable, period. That it will, period. That one day, sooner or later, it will, even if that time-frame is very long.
Microsoft's day is inevitable. I think they know this. You can't saturate the market and sell incrmental changes forever. People will realize that what they have works. Sure, Microsoft will vary the model some here and there, such as trying to get you to rent software, or outdating the OS so that your old application versions won't work.
I actually think your comments are somewhat naive. It seems you see the industry in a box with all these boundaries and that business and the consumer will always function within that box and that if the box must be altered it will be by Microsoft.
Standard Oil was broken up because Standard Oil's business model failed them--in regards to how it was perceived as a business, how long they got away with doing something illegal, and the changing perception of the needs of the consumer over the rights of the company. If they'd have let Standard Oil continue or if they hadn't been caught breaking the law, then Standard Oil would have had a significantly detrimental affect on the world.
One would have to be utterly blind to not realize that Microsoft not only is a monopoly, but was one, operated as one even before being declared one. The court ruled Microsoft a monopoly and then ruled that they were operating as a monopoly prior to being ruled one, even though they were trying hard to ensure they were not ruled a monopoly. It's when the court rules you a monopoly that you are bound by the rules of a monopoly, which are slightly different than for those not ruled a monopoly.
MS-DOS was purchased at the right time. Microsoft, when they entered the deal with IBM, didn't own QDOS. They bought it as a result of the commitment to IBM.
The benefit Microsoft gave to DOS was that it was a power house of programming back then and maybe the only real company capable of advancing it to the point that was needed to foster growth. They certainly weren't as distracted as some of the companies back then--and a special note is that they weren't even the first one approached by IBM. This all happened long before standards, open source, or even the PC became the dominant platform.
Whether or not they copied from IBM is moot. They didn't invent it, they didn't conceive it, they didn't learn how to do it themselves, they instead copied it, then conveniently forgot how to implement it in their own products.
Repetition begets consistency, therefore it was an obviousness issue.
And if they have an older version of Office and open a newer file format it looks like shit, if it even opens.
And, this has been the case for years with competing office products. There have been interchange formats for as long as PCs have been in use (and longer).
Really, let's not be stupid. Most documents aren't complex. Most are basic letters, memos, etc. Most don't have complex formatting. As a result the vast majority will open and look good in Open Office. Most that don't can be quickly edited to correct the formatting. And document authors can be trained to create attractive documents that can transfer flawlessly.
Let's please not do the straw-man here--emphasize a little problem to divert from the bigger picture.
That's common use in the English language. Back off to school sunny boy.
The idiocy of that statement is quite telling. You could just as easily say that about Microsoft. Just flip Microsoft and Linux in that sentence and you have a statement that is just as idiotic.
And to even remotely compare Linux to Hitler is offensive.
I remember taking apart executables in DOS with a debugger. I noted how they were designed (and used with switches /this or /that) just like unices. I remember the arguments about how Linux is too complex and how people don't even know what the /etc folder is for (people saying Linux is too complex to learn, but in reality Windows has its own /etc folder (\windows\system32\drivers\etc) and a very complex directory structure that most people won't learn). (And note that they are called folders just like Apple named them, when for years they were called directories.) I remember seeing compiz and beryl come out with 3d accelerated desktops and attractive visual effects. I remember thinking about Windows Vista and Win7 having copied those ideas. Even simple ones were copied by Microsoft.
The point here is that Microsoft still isn't inventing. What Microsoft does best is polish a product they've had in development for 20+ years by copying others. And they've clearly given credit to open source by making public claims that Open Source has made them a better company -- I've always took that to mean that open source is giving them more ideas to copy.
"Sit down and shut up boy, the adults are speaking."
Spoken from a 10 year old's perspective.
This is wrong on so many levels. In fact, it is almost insanely wrong. Standards would have emerged. In the DOS world there were emerging interface standards. There were menus, there were consistent menu choices, programs were being written with common functionality (such as save, print, etc.). Programmers were learning when and when not to write directly to hardware. There were other companies writing GUIs. Other companies were developing things such as fonts, page layout, etc. Microsoft wasn't inventing them, they were copying them. True type font didn't come into this world without a fight.
Standard ways of doing things were dictated by other industries, such as paper size, keyboard layouts, hardware designs. It was inevitable that we would have ended up with a consistency similar to what we have today, even without Microsoft and likely without any abusive monopoly.
Standards bodies existed before Microsoft. It was inevitable that they were to be created by the software industry.
Damn, I keep reading your post and I can't help but think about how misleading that is. Just look at computer hardware. There's no "Microsoft" of hardware yet we get parts that are interchangable. The ISO was created as a body to approve standards.
You weren't paying attention back then or you weren't involved. Microsoft actually hindered standards by obfuscating them to the point that the industry would be force to adopt theirs. There were file system standards for word processing that had issues because of Microsoft's interference. There was the W3 which was responsible for standardizing HTML back then which Microsoft tried to manipulate. Even within recent years they have tried to contravene the standard's process to favor themselves.
Microsoft was a monopoly that abused it's power to gain the position it is in. While building that position (and monopoly) they broke the law, and that injured everyone. The only problem is that the punishment for their crimes wasn't harsh enough to open the software market back up. The damage had been done.
The world would have been better off without the abusive monopoly created by Microsoft. Monopolies are not better than the competition that is fostered without them.
Microsoft didn't create any of that interface consistency. They copied from Apple.
At the end of the day, just before the last balloon is popped who will bid the highest for the last of that precious resource? :)
If you are replying to me, and if you read the post before mine, the one I was replying to, you would understand what I said.
Which is a total straw-man. There's no evidence that the market would have created one, regardless of that other person's sig.
I think it is more like saying that without a monopoly we'd have more competition. And in fact, Open Source would be stronger for it.
Who's the Ford today (equaling the Ford of the past)? Who's the Standard Oil today? Certainly no American company.
And, it is total fiction that we'd have some other company doing the same thing. Microsoft got where it was by abusing it's monopoly power. We all know that. If we didn't have a Microsoft we'd have more markets with more players in each market and competition would be greater providing us with more innovative products propelling computing to a much more sane plateau.
I'm sure there are forks ahead in the road.
MySQL played a big part in why Oracle grabbed Sun. Having control of the product (even if they don't discontinue it) will certainly slow down the time-frame where it might gain feature and performance parity (if it's not just left to rot in the sun) with Oracle's flagship product. I think Ellison understands that given enough time it would hurt their bottom line. At least now they control it.
You cannot sustain the Windows and Office cash cow forever. All manner of products will whittle away at it over time. Given open and ISO formats the need for Office dwindles (by some measure, some degree). Given the cloud Office dwindles. By advancing the state of OOo and other derivatives Office dwindles. Office can't be sustained indefinitely. Once Ford was the king of automobile industry. Today that's not the case, for a reason. Once Standard Oil was a massive monopoly and yet they no longer exist.
The same cause and effect will occur in every product Microsoft offers. No one wants to keep paying for incremental changes to software when the costs are so high, when the alternatives are raising the ante, and when the incremental changes are interface oriented or minor functionality.
You would have to be pretty blind or prejudiced to not understand that everything changes. Sooner or later there'll be an end to Microsoft as it is being challenged left and right. Even they understand that. We've seen some of the flailing. Once the lock in technologies are removed the market competition factors play a bigger role. As OSS and other software options gain parity the monopolist looses it's foothold.