In fact, plenty of us said this years ago - give us music without DRM at the right price, make it easy to download and to move between devices and we'll choose it over "free" downloads. There were plenty of sceptics back then who said it was just the pirates' excuse, but digital downloading is now huge, to the point where the UK recently had its first digital download only number one in the charts, beating out phsyical media completely. If the labels had played ball earlier they might not have alienated so many people and could now be enjoying even more profits, but I suspect they know this and don't care because their long game is to bring DRM back and have it backed by laws this time.
I think you're right - the fact that I can easily buy DRM-free music from a number of online sources has made it a no brainer for me to buy what little music I consume these days. These were things RIAA actively fought against when first proposed. They can't understand how to make money from the internet, so people show them, forcibly place money at their feet and they complain. I have to admit, I buy so little music these days in no small part due to the RIAA's actions in the past (I have to really like a CD affiliated with their label, preferably with an artist who has spoken out about their practices - I wish I had more time to track down good indie stuff, I'd probably buy lots more music knowing my money wasn't going to the big labels), and the fact that I still consider digital downloads overpriced. If they'd not struggled against innovation these past ten years they could have had a massively more profitable business model, tons of customer goodwill and better deals for customers.
Because they are two different things, and the one (theft) carries negative connotations in most people's minds of having their property taken away while the other (infringing intellectual property rights) means nothing to most people. The fact that the RIAA go even further and equate the latter with piracy, a crime still viewed in terms of punishment meted out as one of the worst on the planet today means we should take every opportunity to point out how ridiculous their arguments are by referring to it as infringement of intellectual property rights. Imagine you wound up in court for speeding but the judge decided to sentence you as if you'd committed grand theft auto on the basis that "at the end of the day, you've still acted illegally". Damn right the distinction makes a different to the infringers if the damages are being assessed by people who are buying into the lie. The RIAA are using marketing FUD techniques to try and make the crime sound worse than it is - but if the very crime itself is as bad as they claim, they shouldn't need to use such techniques to make it sound worse, it should stand on its own merits. They're taking every opportunity to mislead people, so as tedious as we might think the distinction is, we should take every opportunity to set the record straight (no pun intended).
People seem to get far more riled up when government interferes, so we can always hope this will spark enough of the general public to complain that even government will see where the wind blows and reign it back in. Well, we can hope.
Additionally, even if RIAA were 100% successful in eliminating downloading, it wouldn't stop sharing. Everyone would just go back to the old fashioned way, except instead of passing around a tape which costs money, takes time to create and quickly degrades in quality with mutliple copies, they'll pass around digital copies which cost nothing, are almost instant and don't degrade. All they've achieved in that case is making it a hassle to share, they've done zero to stop sharing (and by pushing it back offline they'll make it almost impossible to track). This will probably result in a few more actual pirates, selling the first few copies at knock down prices, but after that it will be business as usual for sharers.
Oh I'm much more wary, but then I also have much more to lose than I did in the era of Napster and Kazaa. I now have a decent job and a home, and I bring in enough that I can buy my music without worrying, it's convenient (now enough stores have dropped DRM) and I don't have to worry about any consequences. However, people who are in the situation now that I was in then, students or recent university graduates with little responsibility might have a wholly different view. And the key thing to remember is they will be the people who should be buying music in 10 years, if the RIAA antagonises them too much right now, they might just kill off their future revenue stream (combine that with the fact that the first internet file sharers are now at the age where they care more about politics, both from a voting or a running for office perspective, and you end up in a few years with a public who don't want to pay and a political movement in favour of not punishing them). I don't think any wars are won just yet, but if I were the RIAA I'd be treading very carefully right now - the way I see it things can go either way very quickly for them.
I totally agree - in fact the vast majority of people who file share probably don't even think about the consequences. Getting caught is what happens to other people. Most people see sharing a file as no different to sharing a mix tape, they'd not even dream of a multi-million dollar lawsuit landing in their laps as a result. And the more stories we hear about how ineffective the lawsuits are, the less people will worry about being caught. The labels would do much better to work with their customers, ditch DRM, drop prices and give people good reasons to throw money their way instead of criminalising everyone. Look at it another way, the people paying for music today are in the 25+ age group, eventually those people lose interest the sales tail off. Traditionally the people who replace them as the music buyers are the ones who were previously sharing music for free - having spent ten years bashing those people over the head with the suehammer while holding prices unreasonably high (it costs about the same for a digital download as a physical CD, what?) and trying to force DRM on us, what incentive is RIAA giving them to give up piracy?
Even better, just appoint a panel of people who do understand how technology works to advise you. Seriously, if I don't understand how something works, I ask someone. As the CEO of a huge label, I shouldn't need to be told this blatantly obvious fact. It wouldn't even have to cost a lot, I'm sure there are lots of people with really good ideas about how the industry should go who'd be willing to offer their services for free or next to nothing just to give us an eterntainment industry that doesn't suck.
If anything, I would hope this would be evidence for courts to throw out their claims on the basis that they're obviously spurious - for them to be spending so much and yet recovering so little, it's clear that the majority of the cases they're bringing have little merit. In reality it never works like that of course, money talks and $16m can shout a lot louder than most people.
Actually this is exactly what I look for on these kind of forums before I buy a phone. In this case there's plenty of anecdotal evidence from users posting about antenna issues, but it would be nice to see a more respected source before making a decision. Obviously this isn't really a problem in this case as the whole world now knows about the issue, but the point stands in general that a user posting with a semi-authorititive source to back them up is more persuasive than a user just posting their personal experience. The "tech support" part is meaningless - there are lots of threads there not asking or answering technical questions, but even if every issue was purely technical, for the reason just stated, I'd rather see someone with a back-up source ask the question than someone who, for all I know, might just have dropped their phone down the toilet.
The amount of usage it gets time wise doesn't accurately reflect the importance of that function. I spend most of my time with my phone browsing the internet and hardly ever use it for calls, if I had to choose between one or the other, I'd drop the internet in a heart beat. To me the phone absolutely must function as a phone when I need it, because the point I need it might be an emergency and I don't want to have to rely on emailing the emergency services for help. Similarly if I buy a burglar alarm, I don't care that it detects nothing for 99.99% of its entire life, that 0.01% is enough to justify its primary purpose being to detect burglars.
Why don't Apple bundle the case with the phone and charge $25 more, or even better, build the phone into the case? Because it would spoil the aesthetics of the phone. Like it or not a lot of people buy the iPhone for its stylish looks, if you're saying it's reasonable to suggest masking those looks with a case just to get it to function as a phone, you're not reflecting what the majority of customers want from the device, and I would guess this is exactly why CR didn't suggest it, it's a ridiculous workaround for an issue that should have been eliminated in QA testing.
It always astonishes me that, even in the midst of a discussion like this one which is proving massively divisive with people falling into at least three broad groups and several sub groups within those, people still allude to some kind of "groupthink".
Groupthink is a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas [Wikipedia]
Most days any two/. users won't even agree on the weather outside, let alone have some kind of hive mind consensus on any meaningful subject.
Surely the difference is that the user gets to choose what they read. The site gives the user the tools to self-censor, or not, it doesn't take that decision on our behalf.
One is a private entity, the other is the government of a country. Most notably, when people talk about bad censorship, it's almost invariably being carried out by governments, and this is probably why people seem to think that private entities carrying out censorship can't be censorship because it's not bad.
Well, actually you interpreted the term "no right to do X" to mean "no legal right to do X", when its actually an ambiguous turn of phrase which is as often used to mean "you are doing X without justification", as in if I say "You have no right to call that guy a jackhole", my intention would not be to suggest that you don't have the legal right as clearly you do, but that what you are saying is unfounded. We don't know what his actual meaning was, strictly legal or moral.
Censoring just means removing comment. It doesn't matter whether you do that for good reasons or bad reaons, or whether the comment was worthy or worthless, it's still censorship. Apple are absolutely, 100% entitled to censor comments made on their forum. I don't see why these two parts are even up for debate, the first is a standard definition of an English word which has been formed over hundreds of years of application, the latter is a clear statement of fact. The only debatable thing here is whether it was an intelligent thing to do in light of the fact that people tend to react badly to their negative comments about a company being buried by said company.
If they similarly delete duplicate threads about how great the iPhone is (and for all I know they do), then that's a valid argument. If not, you can understand why people would interprate this as censorship for the benefit of the company (even if it's actually nothing of the kind and they're closing threads full of unproductive, abusive language, this is all about managing people's perceptions) and not to make the forum easier to use.
Duplicate threads are always going to exist (hello,/.), and while I share broadly the same opinion as you (of Apple as a company, but also of their right to clean up their forum) I certainly recognise that, in sensitive areas, it's wise to emply some tact or face potential backlash from users. There are many better ways to handle this, hell, if they're getting so many duplicate threads that it's becoming an issue, start a new forum specifically for that topic and just move all related threads to it. No need to close anything, people get to air their grievances without feeling they're being "censored". From a PR perspective there are many better ways to handle this than just deleting threads.
Of course it's censorship. That's not to say all censorship is bad, there are many cases where society accepts it is necessary (movie ratings, the watershed on TV, ratings on adult magazines are all censorship deemed to be largely for the good of society). When it's a privately owned site, the owners can censor whatever they like, or instigate a moderation system to allow users to do the same. Again, if that's the will of the owners or the community, that's fine (there are plenty of un-moderated sites out there, or you can start your own, etc). What companies have to realise is that the internet exposes shenanigans such as deleting critical threads or trying to censor discussions, and while that's perfectly acceptable if they own the forum, they shouldn't be surprised when they suffer backlash from their users. Being legally right isn't always the same as just being right.
Because, regardless of why they closed the threads, it leads to speculation and stories like this. And then you get cyclical speculation, people saying if they were willing to risk this kind of bad publicity by closing the threads, there must have been something really bad in them. A lot of companies are only just beginning to come to terms with the power the internet gives to users, but I would expect any company in the IT sector to realise why this self-defeating practice is potentially a bad idea (as opposed to, as others have suggested, just closing the threads with a valid reason, and if that's duplication then link the threads to the main thread to make it clear you're not hiding anything).
What difference does that make - is it worse if the tool is in dispute soon after the establishment accepts it? I would have thought entrenchment would be a much bigger issue, especially having worked with some governmental bodies and seeing how incredibly reliant they are on the likes of MS.
Whether they'd do that, when Zuckerber is already the public face of Facebook and therefore a good target for bashing to deflect any bad feeling from the true owners is another matter. I could easily see a big IT corp picking this up and keeping Z. around (on a nice fat salary or share options) to take any flak over privacy concerns, etc. - he's the ready-made scapegoat.
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In fact, plenty of us said this years ago - give us music without DRM at the right price, make it easy to download and to move between devices and we'll choose it over "free" downloads. There were plenty of sceptics back then who said it was just the pirates' excuse, but digital downloading is now huge, to the point where the UK recently had its first digital download only number one in the charts, beating out phsyical media completely. If the labels had played ball earlier they might not have alienated so many people and could now be enjoying even more profits, but I suspect they know this and don't care because their long game is to bring DRM back and have it backed by laws this time.
I think you're right - the fact that I can easily buy DRM-free music from a number of online sources has made it a no brainer for me to buy what little music I consume these days. These were things RIAA actively fought against when first proposed. They can't understand how to make money from the internet, so people show them, forcibly place money at their feet and they complain. I have to admit, I buy so little music these days in no small part due to the RIAA's actions in the past (I have to really like a CD affiliated with their label, preferably with an artist who has spoken out about their practices - I wish I had more time to track down good indie stuff, I'd probably buy lots more music knowing my money wasn't going to the big labels), and the fact that I still consider digital downloads overpriced. If they'd not struggled against innovation these past ten years they could have had a massively more profitable business model, tons of customer goodwill and better deals for customers.
Because they are two different things, and the one (theft) carries negative connotations in most people's minds of having their property taken away while the other (infringing intellectual property rights) means nothing to most people. The fact that the RIAA go even further and equate the latter with piracy, a crime still viewed in terms of punishment meted out as one of the worst on the planet today means we should take every opportunity to point out how ridiculous their arguments are by referring to it as infringement of intellectual property rights. Imagine you wound up in court for speeding but the judge decided to sentence you as if you'd committed grand theft auto on the basis that "at the end of the day, you've still acted illegally". Damn right the distinction makes a different to the infringers if the damages are being assessed by people who are buying into the lie. The RIAA are using marketing FUD techniques to try and make the crime sound worse than it is - but if the very crime itself is as bad as they claim, they shouldn't need to use such techniques to make it sound worse, it should stand on its own merits. They're taking every opportunity to mislead people, so as tedious as we might think the distinction is, we should take every opportunity to set the record straight (no pun intended).
People seem to get far more riled up when government interferes, so we can always hope this will spark enough of the general public to complain that even government will see where the wind blows and reign it back in. Well, we can hope.
Additionally, even if RIAA were 100% successful in eliminating downloading, it wouldn't stop sharing. Everyone would just go back to the old fashioned way, except instead of passing around a tape which costs money, takes time to create and quickly degrades in quality with mutliple copies, they'll pass around digital copies which cost nothing, are almost instant and don't degrade. All they've achieved in that case is making it a hassle to share, they've done zero to stop sharing (and by pushing it back offline they'll make it almost impossible to track). This will probably result in a few more actual pirates, selling the first few copies at knock down prices, but after that it will be business as usual for sharers.
Oh I'm much more wary, but then I also have much more to lose than I did in the era of Napster and Kazaa. I now have a decent job and a home, and I bring in enough that I can buy my music without worrying, it's convenient (now enough stores have dropped DRM) and I don't have to worry about any consequences. However, people who are in the situation now that I was in then, students or recent university graduates with little responsibility might have a wholly different view. And the key thing to remember is they will be the people who should be buying music in 10 years, if the RIAA antagonises them too much right now, they might just kill off their future revenue stream (combine that with the fact that the first internet file sharers are now at the age where they care more about politics, both from a voting or a running for office perspective, and you end up in a few years with a public who don't want to pay and a political movement in favour of not punishing them). I don't think any wars are won just yet, but if I were the RIAA I'd be treading very carefully right now - the way I see it things can go either way very quickly for them.
I totally agree - in fact the vast majority of people who file share probably don't even think about the consequences. Getting caught is what happens to other people. Most people see sharing a file as no different to sharing a mix tape, they'd not even dream of a multi-million dollar lawsuit landing in their laps as a result. And the more stories we hear about how ineffective the lawsuits are, the less people will worry about being caught. The labels would do much better to work with their customers, ditch DRM, drop prices and give people good reasons to throw money their way instead of criminalising everyone. Look at it another way, the people paying for music today are in the 25+ age group, eventually those people lose interest the sales tail off. Traditionally the people who replace them as the music buyers are the ones who were previously sharing music for free - having spent ten years bashing those people over the head with the suehammer while holding prices unreasonably high (it costs about the same for a digital download as a physical CD, what?) and trying to force DRM on us, what incentive is RIAA giving them to give up piracy?
Even better, just appoint a panel of people who do understand how technology works to advise you. Seriously, if I don't understand how something works, I ask someone. As the CEO of a huge label, I shouldn't need to be told this blatantly obvious fact. It wouldn't even have to cost a lot, I'm sure there are lots of people with really good ideas about how the industry should go who'd be willing to offer their services for free or next to nothing just to give us an eterntainment industry that doesn't suck.
If anything, I would hope this would be evidence for courts to throw out their claims on the basis that they're obviously spurious - for them to be spending so much and yet recovering so little, it's clear that the majority of the cases they're bringing have little merit. In reality it never works like that of course, money talks and $16m can shout a lot louder than most people.
Which goes some way towards explaining why the labels just don't get it...
You could always offset the cost by downloading free music to the same amount :)
Actually this is exactly what I look for on these kind of forums before I buy a phone. In this case there's plenty of anecdotal evidence from users posting about antenna issues, but it would be nice to see a more respected source before making a decision. Obviously this isn't really a problem in this case as the whole world now knows about the issue, but the point stands in general that a user posting with a semi-authorititive source to back them up is more persuasive than a user just posting their personal experience. The "tech support" part is meaningless - there are lots of threads there not asking or answering technical questions, but even if every issue was purely technical, for the reason just stated, I'd rather see someone with a back-up source ask the question than someone who, for all I know, might just have dropped their phone down the toilet.
The amount of usage it gets time wise doesn't accurately reflect the importance of that function. I spend most of my time with my phone browsing the internet and hardly ever use it for calls, if I had to choose between one or the other, I'd drop the internet in a heart beat. To me the phone absolutely must function as a phone when I need it, because the point I need it might be an emergency and I don't want to have to rely on emailing the emergency services for help. Similarly if I buy a burglar alarm, I don't care that it detects nothing for 99.99% of its entire life, that 0.01% is enough to justify its primary purpose being to detect burglars.
Why don't Apple bundle the case with the phone and charge $25 more, or even better, build the phone into the case? Because it would spoil the aesthetics of the phone. Like it or not a lot of people buy the iPhone for its stylish looks, if you're saying it's reasonable to suggest masking those looks with a case just to get it to function as a phone, you're not reflecting what the majority of customers want from the device, and I would guess this is exactly why CR didn't suggest it, it's a ridiculous workaround for an issue that should have been eliminated in QA testing.
It always astonishes me that, even in the midst of a discussion like this one which is proving massively divisive with people falling into at least three broad groups and several sub groups within those, people still allude to some kind of "groupthink".
Groupthink is a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas [Wikipedia]
Most days any two /. users won't even agree on the weather outside, let alone have some kind of hive mind consensus on any meaningful subject.
Surely the difference is that the user gets to choose what they read. The site gives the user the tools to self-censor, or not, it doesn't take that decision on our behalf.
One is a private entity, the other is the government of a country. Most notably, when people talk about bad censorship, it's almost invariably being carried out by governments, and this is probably why people seem to think that private entities carrying out censorship can't be censorship because it's not bad.
Well, actually you interpreted the term "no right to do X" to mean "no legal right to do X", when its actually an ambiguous turn of phrase which is as often used to mean "you are doing X without justification", as in if I say "You have no right to call that guy a jackhole", my intention would not be to suggest that you don't have the legal right as clearly you do, but that what you are saying is unfounded. We don't know what his actual meaning was, strictly legal or moral.
Censoring just means removing comment. It doesn't matter whether you do that for good reasons or bad reaons, or whether the comment was worthy or worthless, it's still censorship. Apple are absolutely, 100% entitled to censor comments made on their forum. I don't see why these two parts are even up for debate, the first is a standard definition of an English word which has been formed over hundreds of years of application, the latter is a clear statement of fact. The only debatable thing here is whether it was an intelligent thing to do in light of the fact that people tend to react badly to their negative comments about a company being buried by said company.
If they similarly delete duplicate threads about how great the iPhone is (and for all I know they do), then that's a valid argument. If not, you can understand why people would interprate this as censorship for the benefit of the company (even if it's actually nothing of the kind and they're closing threads full of unproductive, abusive language, this is all about managing people's perceptions) and not to make the forum easier to use.
Duplicate threads are always going to exist (hello, /.), and while I share broadly the same opinion as you (of Apple as a company, but also of their right to clean up their forum) I certainly recognise that, in sensitive areas, it's wise to emply some tact or face potential backlash from users. There are many better ways to handle this, hell, if they're getting so many duplicate threads that it's becoming an issue, start a new forum specifically for that topic and just move all related threads to it. No need to close anything, people get to air their grievances without feeling they're being "censored". From a PR perspective there are many better ways to handle this than just deleting threads.
Of course it's censorship. That's not to say all censorship is bad, there are many cases where society accepts it is necessary (movie ratings, the watershed on TV, ratings on adult magazines are all censorship deemed to be largely for the good of society). When it's a privately owned site, the owners can censor whatever they like, or instigate a moderation system to allow users to do the same. Again, if that's the will of the owners or the community, that's fine (there are plenty of un-moderated sites out there, or you can start your own, etc). What companies have to realise is that the internet exposes shenanigans such as deleting critical threads or trying to censor discussions, and while that's perfectly acceptable if they own the forum, they shouldn't be surprised when they suffer backlash from their users. Being legally right isn't always the same as just being right.
Because, regardless of why they closed the threads, it leads to speculation and stories like this. And then you get cyclical speculation, people saying if they were willing to risk this kind of bad publicity by closing the threads, there must have been something really bad in them. A lot of companies are only just beginning to come to terms with the power the internet gives to users, but I would expect any company in the IT sector to realise why this self-defeating practice is potentially a bad idea (as opposed to, as others have suggested, just closing the threads with a valid reason, and if that's duplication then link the threads to the main thread to make it clear you're not hiding anything).
What difference does that make - is it worse if the tool is in dispute soon after the establishment accepts it? I would have thought entrenchment would be a much bigger issue, especially having worked with some governmental bodies and seeing how incredibly reliant they are on the likes of MS.
Whether they'd do that, when Zuckerber is already the public face of Facebook and therefore a good target for bashing to deflect any bad feeling from the true owners is another matter. I could easily see a big IT corp picking this up and keeping Z. around (on a nice fat salary or share options) to take any flak over privacy concerns, etc. - he's the ready-made scapegoat.