A "move to e-books" suggests a "move away from physical books". I didn't see where that was suggested at all. A library widening its offering to include both physical and electronic books actually means it's becoming more inclusive, not less so (especially if it enables people who wouldn't otherwise be able to use the service to do so, either by remote distribution, or removing the need to be able to get books back by a certain deadline). Okay they might buy a few less copies of each book in order to fund a few digital license instead, but on the other hand maybe digital copies will actually put more money back into the system, since they don't get damaged and need replacing over time like physical copies, and it's impossible to steal them. Ultimately if nobody reads the digital edition of a book a library will order more physical copies, and vice versa, it's not in their interests to have people not reading their books.
You're assuming that if the price dropped to near zero, the sales would grow inline with that, and if that were true then you'd be correct. The sad fact though is that even in the realm of physical books, a lot of books go unsold and end up pulped. These are books which have already been paid for, typeset, printed, distributed - bookshops could sell them for next to nothing and it would be better than the alternative where they need to get shipped again and then destroyed, but the issue is they just don't sell.
Outside the first few months of a books life, you have to be one of the established elite of authors for your books to shift in any numbers. For most authors you will make pocket change after the first run of hard and then paperbacks, and if you're writing to a minority or niche market the issue is further compounded.
Now we can distribute the books at virtually zero cost, but the initial costs in producing the book are still there and the big issue is that even if you reduce the cost to virtually nothing, you're unlikely to see many more sales. There will be a few edge cases but largely the people who read a lot are already at or near capacity, the people who read little won't be swayed unless the price drops massively, but to do that you kill your profit on the core market who would have bought at the higher price and you probably don't bring in enough eyeballs to make up anywhere near the difference.
For an author's perspective on some of this stuff, I find Charles Stross' blog quite useful (he's obviously ultimately interested in what's best for the author, but as a sci-fi writer and a massive geek he understands more about this new line of distribution than most, a lot of what he says about the drop in quality if you do away with editors and publishers, and the long tail issues when it comes to books really ring true).
I agree if you're boycotting said company to make a point. However, as a consumer who has seen their customers get their fingers burned time and again, I feel safer not giving them my money until such time has passed without them repeating this behaviour that I feel I can trust them. In the case of both rootkits and Other OS these were instances of them hurting their legitimate customers after they've already given them their money. In the Other OS case, a long time after for some people who bought early. That plants the seed of doubt that, maybe they'll release a great bit of kit today, but what's to stop them crippling it remotely in the future? I'm not expecting them to change their behaviour through my not buying their products, I'm just protecting myself from their demonstrated modus operandi. If they do eventually start doing right by their customers I'll be happy to give them my money, I have owned very good Sony products in the distant past.
While I largely agree with the Sony sentiments - so long as there's no insistence that you use their device or their standards, I can still say they're doing something good here. It wouldn't convince me to buy their technology, but if I can buy someone else's e-reader and enjoy the benefits of Sony pushing for this then they might win back a couple of points of goodwill (they'd still have a hell of a long way to go to get me back as a customer, not that I'm on some kind of personal crusade, I just don't want to get stung by them so this works for me).
I suppose that depends if the digital copy counts as a sufficiently different work that it attaches its own copyright, and if it did, whether the person who transcribed it did it free of charge and offered their work up under a creative commons license or something. There's no reason a library couldn't digitise its own public domain works and give them out without restriction (although whether they'd do that is another matter - it's in their interest that you have short term loans that keep you coming back - if everyone who visited could download and walk away with several hundred books for free, they might lose a fair chunk of their losers and hence their funding).
Yes - DRM on things I have paid for and should own is always a bad thing. DRM on something someone else has paid for and owns and is loaning to me free of charge is not even in the same league. It'd be nice not to have it, but if having it means we get a free service with lots of benefits and no disadvantages over the current system, I'd struggle to say that's a bad thing (albeit any kind of DRM raises a feeling of unease).
In some ways it probably is a little better even than the current system. If I forget to take my book back or renew it, and they can remotely disable it without imposing a late fee, that's a net bonus to me (as someone who used to to this not infrequently when I was at university and couldn't always make it back to my local library). Additionally it opens up the possibility (and admittedly I don't know if they have any plans for this) of loaning library books over the air or via download on the internet, so I don't even need to go into my library - they could just fire me an email when the book's available, I click a link and get a file I can put on my device. Another bonus for the library user (it means I can get library books even when my working hours make physical access difficult). And finally, no more hunting for hours for a book which the system tells me is on a shelf but which is actually nowhere to be seen when I have no idea if it's just been moved or stolen, etc (although I guess things like RFID will help with this with physical books, but with digital books it's a complete non-issue).
Sony is made up of many different wings under one umbrella. The hardware department responsible for pushing the e-reader obviously think this is a good move, since it's likely to shift a few units (actually if I'm paying money for a book I like the physical copy, I can put it on my bookshelf, it's easier to read and hold, I don't care if I forget it on a train, etc - being able to get a free copy from the library makes these e-readers marginally more attractive to me), and they're probably allowed to do this right now because it doesn't step on any other department's toes. I can imagine if it was the walkman department suggesting libraries allow free music loans, they'd be shot down in short order by the music wing of the company. Still, I think it's positive and while I'd wish they didn't impose the artificial restriction, I can see the reason why they'd want to (if they didn't you could effectively keep the book forever, the library wouldn't mind renewing it every two weeks or whatever because they'd have unlimited copies).
You'd want it to record encrypted to a drive on the device (either instead of, or as well as streaming somewhere else), otherwise you'd have a lot of suspects "falling over" and hurting themselves when going through known wireless not-spots such as tunnels. It's ironic that the police would probably claim this infringed their privacy rights, even though they're public servants, meanwhile the public have their privacy rights infringed constantly in the name of fighting crime/terrorists.
I can't find the link now, but I saw a site a few months ago dedicated to allowing people to post their photos of destroyed speed cameras (apparently the favoured method is throwing an old tyre over them and setting it alight). And more recently a couple of councils have voted to remove speed cameras from their districts, believing the money spent on them can be better spent elsewhere. It's not a sea change just yet, but they're already largely disliked and, if some figures are to be believed, reasonable ineffective when you get to the point of blanket coverage (they can be highly effective but tend to work better when used sparingly on real accident hotspots).
They hardly cost the country billions, £37M is barely enough to put together a premier football team these days. In return I like the fact that we don't have a president - the power of the monarchy might only be theoretical these days but it's a reminder that parliament is not meant to be an absolute power, and the royals themselves contribute a lot in terms of bringing tourism (around £500m per year) and business investment to the country. I used to be anti-monarchy, and I'll admit I still like to grumble about them from time to time, and they do seem to enjoy making life difficult for themselves with contoversial public actions, but I've come around to thinking they probably are, on balance, good for the country.
Maybe I'm failing to see the bigger picture, but how does the question of whether a protest is controlled or uncontrolled have any bearing on whether it is hijacked by a splinter group with an agenda? Here in the UK we can now only have controlled assemblies by law, yet we still have riots, even as recently as last year with the G20 riots (where 350+ people were arrested). Use traffic flow or commerce or politically/religious/ethnic sensitivity or whatever other reason you can think of to justify laws controlling peaceful assembly, but don't use the fear of riots because we are living proof that riots happen regardless. On the other hand, when a million people turn up in the capital to protest an illegal war and the government presses on regardless, you can begin to understand why a frustrated handful of people think violence is the answer - after all, the government is setting the example.
Not to mention that the law against assembly without permission only punishes law-abiding citizens. If a bunch of people want to gather together to illegally riot, they're not going to be put off by a law telling them they can't do it, since what they're planning is a worse crime anyway, and as we've seen in the past, even when there is permission granted to peacefully protest, this can be hijacked by rioters with an agenda, so the whole reasoning behind the law is flawed. This law is aimed at limiting peaceful protests, not preventing violent ones. There might be some validity to that (for instance, if you know a town centre is going to be gridlocked you might want to arrange traffic police to help, or set up diversions) but really sufficient notice should be the requirement, i.e. we tell the authorities a march is going to happen on this date, and they have the choice to deploy police to help or not but they should not have the right to just outlaw the gathering.
The difference is that they are compiling data and keeping it on record for the possibility of future crime - that's a lot different to collecting evidence in an ongoing investigation.
Well the big shoe companies would probably just cooperate with the police, but assuming the photographer owns the IP (and the shoe company only the rights to use the image in a specific manner that doesn't include building a police database), what's the betting that IP troll lawyers are already firing off emails to solicit the business of shoe photographers, or just outright offering them cash for the IP rights?
The company where I work has previously had to buy stock photography of just about everything imaginable, yes including shoes, for use in campaigns - or did you imagine professional photographers work for free?
The point is the police are active in pursuing people who are guilty of the same "crime" of infringing other people's IP rights that it appears they themselves are committing. We either accept that it's a police matter, in which case I hope we see some investigations, confiscated equipment and potentially further action against individuals within the police force, or the police admit that going after IP infringers who are not seeking to profit through sale the content they acquire is actually not in their remit, or the police/government explain what legal exemption applies to place the police above the rule of law.
This raises the point that often knowing which lines of enquiry not to pursue is important. If the type of shoe is worn by a significant number of people in the area, it's a waste of resources to send out officers to find out who has been buying said shoe, or to go door to door asking about this piece of evidence. If, on the other hand, it turns out the shoe is imported and quite rare it's probably worth throwing some resource at following up the lead. In most crimes, the police have to sift through a ton of potential evidence, most of it will lead nowhere, it's useful to know that sooner rather than later.
Would that mean people could enrol in a cinema course at their local college and then legitimately download and archive movies because they are "not planning to make or sell" infringing movies and can claim that it is "research of an academic nature"?
This just highlights (and I suspect that's the purpose behind the claims) the extent to which overly restrictive copyright can stymie legitimate fair use. Twenty, or perhaps even ten years ago, nobody would have even considered this might fall foul of copyright, now with IP troll law firms buying up the rights to IP specifically so they can sue infringers, it's suddenly a real concern.
You can always think up ways to trick the system, but systems such as this are intended to catch out casual or amateur criminals, or to aid in compiling a reconstruction which may prompt a witness to come forward (if they put together a photo-fit they always want it to be as accurate as possible, and yes that can be down to which individual brand of trainers a criminal wore).
Whats really odd is that it took this long to come up with any kind of review policy document!
Well I guess the reason for that is primarily twofold. Firstly, it benefit Apple to grow the App store massively in a short space of time - if they'd rejected all those fart apps and similar early on, there'd likely be nowhere near the 250,000+ apps there are in there now. Secondly, I guess there's also the question of what the guidelines actually are. As has been said elsewhere, they've probably been largely making these up as they went along. Oh sure they would have had some foundation stones to build on, but really there was nothing exactly like the App store with anything like that kind of success before the iDevices came along. Who could have predicted in the early days exactly how people would use this service, and more importantly how people would develop for it? If they'd released this list on day 1 you could have undoubtedly expected several hundred revisions to it in the interim, that would have angered developers even more ("moving the goalposts"). Now they've had time to test the guidelines and ensure that they produce a desirable mix in terms of quality and quantity (although I'd still expect more finessing, but nothing on the same level).
Anybody want to take bets on how long it takes Apple to include an approval guideline that lets them reject apps that show unacceptably crappy performance on iOS hardware?
On a first skim through I'd say maybe it'll fall foul of these two:
2.1 Apps that crash will be rejected
13.2 Apps that rapidly drain the device's battery [...] will be rejected
It's true that the biggest pot stirrers in all of this are the media - they must just be hoping that this all explodes into violence, nothing like a good bit of civil unrest to get people watching the news again. If they'd just ignored this guy then those 50 people are the only ones who would ever have heard about this.
ISPs maybe, but I've never heard of a web host arguing for common carrier status - they're usually more than happy to pull the trigger on any content that strays outside their clearly defined terms and conditions (if anything, some of them are a little too hair trigger in this respect, opting for the CYA approach to take down requests over protecting their contracted customers from spurious claims).
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A "move to e-books" suggests a "move away from physical books". I didn't see where that was suggested at all. A library widening its offering to include both physical and electronic books actually means it's becoming more inclusive, not less so (especially if it enables people who wouldn't otherwise be able to use the service to do so, either by remote distribution, or removing the need to be able to get books back by a certain deadline). Okay they might buy a few less copies of each book in order to fund a few digital license instead, but on the other hand maybe digital copies will actually put more money back into the system, since they don't get damaged and need replacing over time like physical copies, and it's impossible to steal them. Ultimately if nobody reads the digital edition of a book a library will order more physical copies, and vice versa, it's not in their interests to have people not reading their books.
You're assuming that if the price dropped to near zero, the sales would grow inline with that, and if that were true then you'd be correct. The sad fact though is that even in the realm of physical books, a lot of books go unsold and end up pulped. These are books which have already been paid for, typeset, printed, distributed - bookshops could sell them for next to nothing and it would be better than the alternative where they need to get shipped again and then destroyed, but the issue is they just don't sell.
Outside the first few months of a books life, you have to be one of the established elite of authors for your books to shift in any numbers. For most authors you will make pocket change after the first run of hard and then paperbacks, and if you're writing to a minority or niche market the issue is further compounded.
Now we can distribute the books at virtually zero cost, but the initial costs in producing the book are still there and the big issue is that even if you reduce the cost to virtually nothing, you're unlikely to see many more sales. There will be a few edge cases but largely the people who read a lot are already at or near capacity, the people who read little won't be swayed unless the price drops massively, but to do that you kill your profit on the core market who would have bought at the higher price and you probably don't bring in enough eyeballs to make up anywhere near the difference.
For an author's perspective on some of this stuff, I find Charles Stross' blog quite useful (he's obviously ultimately interested in what's best for the author, but as a sci-fi writer and a massive geek he understands more about this new line of distribution than most, a lot of what he says about the drop in quality if you do away with editors and publishers, and the long tail issues when it comes to books really ring true).
I agree if you're boycotting said company to make a point. However, as a consumer who has seen their customers get their fingers burned time and again, I feel safer not giving them my money until such time has passed without them repeating this behaviour that I feel I can trust them. In the case of both rootkits and Other OS these were instances of them hurting their legitimate customers after they've already given them their money. In the Other OS case, a long time after for some people who bought early. That plants the seed of doubt that, maybe they'll release a great bit of kit today, but what's to stop them crippling it remotely in the future? I'm not expecting them to change their behaviour through my not buying their products, I'm just protecting myself from their demonstrated modus operandi. If they do eventually start doing right by their customers I'll be happy to give them my money, I have owned very good Sony products in the distant past.
While I largely agree with the Sony sentiments - so long as there's no insistence that you use their device or their standards, I can still say they're doing something good here. It wouldn't convince me to buy their technology, but if I can buy someone else's e-reader and enjoy the benefits of Sony pushing for this then they might win back a couple of points of goodwill (they'd still have a hell of a long way to go to get me back as a customer, not that I'm on some kind of personal crusade, I just don't want to get stung by them so this works for me).
I suppose that depends if the digital copy counts as a sufficiently different work that it attaches its own copyright, and if it did, whether the person who transcribed it did it free of charge and offered their work up under a creative commons license or something. There's no reason a library couldn't digitise its own public domain works and give them out without restriction (although whether they'd do that is another matter - it's in their interest that you have short term loans that keep you coming back - if everyone who visited could download and walk away with several hundred books for free, they might lose a fair chunk of their losers and hence their funding).
Yes - DRM on things I have paid for and should own is always a bad thing. DRM on something someone else has paid for and owns and is loaning to me free of charge is not even in the same league. It'd be nice not to have it, but if having it means we get a free service with lots of benefits and no disadvantages over the current system, I'd struggle to say that's a bad thing (albeit any kind of DRM raises a feeling of unease).
In some ways it probably is a little better even than the current system. If I forget to take my book back or renew it, and they can remotely disable it without imposing a late fee, that's a net bonus to me (as someone who used to to this not infrequently when I was at university and couldn't always make it back to my local library). Additionally it opens up the possibility (and admittedly I don't know if they have any plans for this) of loaning library books over the air or via download on the internet, so I don't even need to go into my library - they could just fire me an email when the book's available, I click a link and get a file I can put on my device. Another bonus for the library user (it means I can get library books even when my working hours make physical access difficult). And finally, no more hunting for hours for a book which the system tells me is on a shelf but which is actually nowhere to be seen when I have no idea if it's just been moved or stolen, etc (although I guess things like RFID will help with this with physical books, but with digital books it's a complete non-issue).
Sony is made up of many different wings under one umbrella. The hardware department responsible for pushing the e-reader obviously think this is a good move, since it's likely to shift a few units (actually if I'm paying money for a book I like the physical copy, I can put it on my bookshelf, it's easier to read and hold, I don't care if I forget it on a train, etc - being able to get a free copy from the library makes these e-readers marginally more attractive to me), and they're probably allowed to do this right now because it doesn't step on any other department's toes. I can imagine if it was the walkman department suggesting libraries allow free music loans, they'd be shot down in short order by the music wing of the company. Still, I think it's positive and while I'd wish they didn't impose the artificial restriction, I can see the reason why they'd want to (if they didn't you could effectively keep the book forever, the library wouldn't mind renewing it every two weeks or whatever because they'd have unlimited copies).
You'd want it to record encrypted to a drive on the device (either instead of, or as well as streaming somewhere else), otherwise you'd have a lot of suspects "falling over" and hurting themselves when going through known wireless not-spots such as tunnels. It's ironic that the police would probably claim this infringed their privacy rights, even though they're public servants, meanwhile the public have their privacy rights infringed constantly in the name of fighting crime/terrorists.
I can't find the link now, but I saw a site a few months ago dedicated to allowing people to post their photos of destroyed speed cameras (apparently the favoured method is throwing an old tyre over them and setting it alight). And more recently a couple of councils have voted to remove speed cameras from their districts, believing the money spent on them can be better spent elsewhere. It's not a sea change just yet, but they're already largely disliked and, if some figures are to be believed, reasonable ineffective when you get to the point of blanket coverage (they can be highly effective but tend to work better when used sparingly on real accident hotspots).
They hardly cost the country billions, £37M is barely enough to put together a premier football team these days. In return I like the fact that we don't have a president - the power of the monarchy might only be theoretical these days but it's a reminder that parliament is not meant to be an absolute power, and the royals themselves contribute a lot in terms of bringing tourism (around £500m per year) and business investment to the country. I used to be anti-monarchy, and I'll admit I still like to grumble about them from time to time, and they do seem to enjoy making life difficult for themselves with contoversial public actions, but I've come around to thinking they probably are, on balance, good for the country.
Maybe I'm failing to see the bigger picture, but how does the question of whether a protest is controlled or uncontrolled have any bearing on whether it is hijacked by a splinter group with an agenda? Here in the UK we can now only have controlled assemblies by law, yet we still have riots, even as recently as last year with the G20 riots (where 350+ people were arrested). Use traffic flow or commerce or politically/religious/ethnic sensitivity or whatever other reason you can think of to justify laws controlling peaceful assembly, but don't use the fear of riots because we are living proof that riots happen regardless. On the other hand, when a million people turn up in the capital to protest an illegal war and the government presses on regardless, you can begin to understand why a frustrated handful of people think violence is the answer - after all, the government is setting the example.
Not to mention that the law against assembly without permission only punishes law-abiding citizens. If a bunch of people want to gather together to illegally riot, they're not going to be put off by a law telling them they can't do it, since what they're planning is a worse crime anyway, and as we've seen in the past, even when there is permission granted to peacefully protest, this can be hijacked by rioters with an agenda, so the whole reasoning behind the law is flawed. This law is aimed at limiting peaceful protests, not preventing violent ones. There might be some validity to that (for instance, if you know a town centre is going to be gridlocked you might want to arrange traffic police to help, or set up diversions) but really sufficient notice should be the requirement, i.e. we tell the authorities a march is going to happen on this date, and they have the choice to deploy police to help or not but they should not have the right to just outlaw the gathering.
The difference is that they are compiling data and keeping it on record for the possibility of future crime - that's a lot different to collecting evidence in an ongoing investigation.
Well the big shoe companies would probably just cooperate with the police, but assuming the photographer owns the IP (and the shoe company only the rights to use the image in a specific manner that doesn't include building a police database), what's the betting that IP troll lawyers are already firing off emails to solicit the business of shoe photographers, or just outright offering them cash for the IP rights?
The company where I work has previously had to buy stock photography of just about everything imaginable, yes including shoes, for use in campaigns - or did you imagine professional photographers work for free?
The point is the police are active in pursuing people who are guilty of the same "crime" of infringing other people's IP rights that it appears they themselves are committing. We either accept that it's a police matter, in which case I hope we see some investigations, confiscated equipment and potentially further action against individuals within the police force, or the police admit that going after IP infringers who are not seeking to profit through sale the content they acquire is actually not in their remit, or the police/government explain what legal exemption applies to place the police above the rule of law.
This raises the point that often knowing which lines of enquiry not to pursue is important. If the type of shoe is worn by a significant number of people in the area, it's a waste of resources to send out officers to find out who has been buying said shoe, or to go door to door asking about this piece of evidence. If, on the other hand, it turns out the shoe is imported and quite rare it's probably worth throwing some resource at following up the lead. In most crimes, the police have to sift through a ton of potential evidence, most of it will lead nowhere, it's useful to know that sooner rather than later.
Would that mean people could enrol in a cinema course at their local college and then legitimately download and archive movies because they are "not planning to make or sell" infringing movies and can claim that it is "research of an academic nature"?
This just highlights (and I suspect that's the purpose behind the claims) the extent to which overly restrictive copyright can stymie legitimate fair use. Twenty, or perhaps even ten years ago, nobody would have even considered this might fall foul of copyright, now with IP troll law firms buying up the rights to IP specifically so they can sue infringers, it's suddenly a real concern.
You can always think up ways to trick the system, but systems such as this are intended to catch out casual or amateur criminals, or to aid in compiling a reconstruction which may prompt a witness to come forward (if they put together a photo-fit they always want it to be as accurate as possible, and yes that can be down to which individual brand of trainers a criminal wore).
Whats really odd is that it took this long to come up with any kind of review policy document!
Well I guess the reason for that is primarily twofold. Firstly, it benefit Apple to grow the App store massively in a short space of time - if they'd rejected all those fart apps and similar early on, there'd likely be nowhere near the 250,000+ apps there are in there now. Secondly, I guess there's also the question of what the guidelines actually are. As has been said elsewhere, they've probably been largely making these up as they went along. Oh sure they would have had some foundation stones to build on, but really there was nothing exactly like the App store with anything like that kind of success before the iDevices came along. Who could have predicted in the early days exactly how people would use this service, and more importantly how people would develop for it? If they'd released this list on day 1 you could have undoubtedly expected several hundred revisions to it in the interim, that would have angered developers even more ("moving the goalposts"). Now they've had time to test the guidelines and ensure that they produce a desirable mix in terms of quality and quantity (although I'd still expect more finessing, but nothing on the same level).
Flash on Android is what now? It works fine for me (well, as fine as Flash can, which is to say slow and buggy but no different to on my desktop).
Anybody want to take bets on how long it takes Apple to include an approval guideline that lets them reject apps that show unacceptably crappy performance on iOS hardware?
On a first skim through I'd say maybe it'll fall foul of these two:
It's true that the biggest pot stirrers in all of this are the media - they must just be hoping that this all explodes into violence, nothing like a good bit of civil unrest to get people watching the news again. If they'd just ignored this guy then those 50 people are the only ones who would ever have heard about this.
ISPs maybe, but I've never heard of a web host arguing for common carrier status - they're usually more than happy to pull the trigger on any content that strays outside their clearly defined terms and conditions (if anything, some of them are a little too hair trigger in this respect, opting for the CYA approach to take down requests over protecting their contracted customers from spurious claims).