This seems like a bit of wishful thinking. The labels look like they are doing OK for now. Of course, the Titanic looked great up until the last hour or so.
IFPI will continue to demand more and more protection until saying "P2P" is a capital offense.
Of course, none of these laws are going to make people buy more music CD's. The lack of laws does allow IFPI to continue to justify its existence and give industry execs a scapegoat for running their businesses into the ground.
Sorry they are going down, but it is their own pricing model that did them in
I always wanted to get a Tivo. I still think they had one of the best devices out there, especially if you wanted to record from a variety of over-the-air and wired sources.
I never bought one because I could never stomach their pricing model for services. Their monthly fees were excessive; the same information could be legally obtained for a few dollars a year. Furthermore, they were selling viewing and search data which made it a profit center for the company, even if they hadn't sold subscriptions.
If they had charged more for the initial hardware and then had a low annual subscription fee I probably would have had a Tivo on every set in the house. As it was, the high monthly fee made me reluctant to buy even one.
I think this is another case where a content provider over estimates the price people are pay for their information. It's not that the information isn't valuable, it comes down to what customers are willing to pay.
There should be a public challenge process. Right now we have a situation where examiners loose their jobs if they don't meet quota. Even if examiners have time to check it, you can bet that the attorney for the patent holder will be on the phone with the examiner explaining it away. That would be time on the phone the examiner doesn't have. It is much faster to cave in on prior art than it is to deny the claim, and speed matters a lot to the examiners.
You could put a lot more responsibility for revealing prior art on the applicant. However, that might backfire. If you were not careful how you set it up, applicants would submit a list of everything since the invention of fire in their applications and bury the significant prior art amongst 34 boxes worth of material listing all possible relationships.
>>so instead of whining about it, why not submit some prior art examples and stop the patent?
There is plenty of evidence that would be nothing but wasting a postage stamp. Prior art is commonly ignored when it comes to patent approval. We don't have to look very far for an example. The original one-click patent had prior art. The main innovation seems to be coming up with the fancy name "one-click."
The patent office has issued not one but four patents on using a laser pointer to exercise a cat. And before laser pointers became common, they had issued a patent for exercising a cat with a flashlight. Prior art? What prior art?
I think the entire gaming industry just bought it self more than $11 million dollars worth of bad publicity.
These companies should man-up for their mistakes and pay. If they couldn't afford to pay the full $11 Meg, they should have at least made an offer of a gee-whiz amount (something more than $1500, certainly). Settling up for a million or even a hundred thousand would have been a good move from a PR standpoint.
There should be an industry insurance or bonding system that pays up for glitches like this. Everyone would pay in and agree to abide by certain quality control standards. Payments would stay pretty low as long as a company didn't have any claims, but once they did their premiums would go way up. That would create some incentives to avoid shortcuts that lead to glitches, and it would create some industry watchdog groups who have an interest in keeping quality high.
>>consider what the next wave is bringing. at some point, people will get tired of taking the risk of file sharing,
That did not happen with the first RIAA experiment. In fact, just the opposite as more people were willing to take the risk despite the lawsuits. The statement also ignores the upswing in things like encrypted services as more and more people figure out ways to get around enforcement campaigns.
The more likely result is that there is going to be a crack-down on extortion lawsuits. The mass filings are already starting to cause a backlash in the UK. In the US the situation will probably be rectified by the court system itself. All it will need to do is start enforcing existing rules that would prevent the filing of thousands of lawsuits in a giant bundle. The rules have been on the books for years but were rarely enforced by the courts because they were not abused. Now they are being abused, and it is causing the courts themselves problems.
But just for the sake of argument, let's assume AC's contention is right that people will suddenly decide that file sharing is too dangerous. Will that cause them to buy more CD's? I happen to think that music is essential, and that people will always need and want music (it may be in our biology). However, it is not essential to buy music from the major labels. I consider myself a heavy consumer of music, and I find plenty of legal sources for it. I have not bought a tract of music from a major label in several years, not even downloads of major label tracks from iTunes or other online sources. Part of the issue is just from not wanting to support the RIAA due to its behavior; the fact that a major label's name is attached to a tract means that I move on. There are plenty of other choices out there. I don't need to download illegal music, and I don't need to buy from RIAA companies.
>>I think if a corporate trade secret was leaked by an individual harm would almost certainly be assumed.
There are several problems that would make even the leak of a trade secret claim hard to enforce.
1) To enforce a trade secret claim you usually have to demonstrate that you made reasonable efforts to keep the information secret. Putting unencrypted data out over an unsecured wifi connection would seem to be prima facia evidence that the company failed this test.
2) The data was picked up during a van driving by. It is likely that only some isolated packets are picked up. A chuck out of the middle of a document is most likely to be of limited usefulness.
3) If google just captured the data, dumped it on a hard drive, and never used the data then it would be hard to prove that any harm was done. Google didn't even realize that it had the data. Ironically, the damage would actually result from governments demanding that Google turn over the documents. Now a freedom of information type of request or a grandstanding politician could put it out in the public forums. Governments should have just asked Google to destroy the information. Of course, that ends the media gravy train for the politicians.
Last Monday was a major US holiday, so "weekend rules" probably applied. In other words, no new blogs are posted, but people can still comment.
I am guessing that you didn't notice until you sat down to write your monthly report about how many AC astroturf and FUD posts you made on your employer's behalf each day.
>>I think the answer is obvious. In an industry that is already being assailed from all sides, citizen journalists are one more problem.
I think this hits the nail on the head. When an industry or profession is threatened it is pretty common to look for external threats to blame. It doesn't really matter whether the thing being blamed is the actual problem, or even if it is a problem at all; when you are looking for a scapegoat the facts don't really matter as long as you whine loudly enough. Look at the recording industry that tries to blame its problems on piracy, when there the evidence suggests that what they call piracy may actually be helping the industry.
I think the slow lane should be named the "troll lane." It would be very popular among patent trolls.
Trolls would love it, and probably file more patents than they do now. For one thing, it is simple economics. It's cheaper, and with patent trolling volume matters. But the real plus is that patent trolls file obvious patents. Because the ideas tend to be overly broad and obvious, the slow lane only gives productive companies more time to develop products that can be claimed infringing and get them well established in the marketplace.
The only thing that might make the slow lane more attractive for patent trolling is if it came with a discount on plane tickets to East Texas.
Basically, content providers can dictate to Hulu what they can and can't do. Since they are content providers by definition they are a whole lot more concerned with what Hulu can't do. Basically, it is an other case where an industry doesn't want to "cannibalize" their established business, so they try to cut off innovation.
So far AppleTV has been a bit of a bust, but GoogleTV is going to be another attempt to open up the way people get their content. If they are successful the content providers may discover that their fear of cannibalizing has done nothing but open the door to allow GoogleTV to come in and scoop up a big chunk of the entertainment market. The market is out there and growing for Hulu-type services. The content providers have a choice -- they can try to capture that market now while they still have an advantage, or let someone else have it later. It will happen eventually, whether or not GoogleTV is successful.
I would be afraid that after buying the TV that Sony would decide to "upgrade" the firmware and take away the best features of the TV. They have done that kind of thing before, and now I am scared of any Sony product that connects to the Internet.
Sony's decision on the PS3 confirms my hesitation to buy any Sony product. These are the same people who decided that rookit DRM was a good idea.
I did buy a Sony TV a few years ago, but back then TV's were basically a dumb box. Now I see any Sony product that can be hooked up to the Internet as something that may someday be nerfed. They think that they still own the stuff you bought from them, and that by nerfing the product they will somehow increase their profits. I would call them clueless, but I don't think that word is strong enough to explain this stupid decision.
Any company could do this kind of thing, but Sony now has a strong track record firmly set in my mind now.
One other important difference is the physical, and therefore persistent, nature of the dictionary. The error may be corrected in all new dictionaries, but for decades there will still be physical copies being used for reference. There are essentially no outdated versions of Wikipedia.
One thing that the WSJ has going for it is that businesses pick up the tab for executives and major clients. In fact, in some sectors, your subscriptin is what says you have arrived. I doubt that many corporate expense accounts will cover the HCB.
The studios usually have a major advertising push right around the release of the movie. 28 days after the hype, it shows up on Netflix and no one notices.
On the post: Judge Wants To 'Friend' Witnesses On Facebook To Resolve Fight Over Photos
Good luck with that
On the post: Radiohead's Thom Yorke Predicts Record Labels Have Months, Not Years, Left To Live
Wishful thinking
On the post: IFPI Complains That Canada's New Copyright Bill Not Draconian Enough
P2P still isn't a capital crime
Of course, none of these laws are going to make people buy more music CD's. The lack of laws does allow IFPI to continue to justify its existence and give industry execs a scapegoat for running their businesses into the ground.
On the post: TiVo's 'Big Win' Over Dish On Patents Looking Less And Less Solid, As Patent Office Rejects Patent Claims
Sorry they are going down, but it is their own pricing model that did them in
I never bought one because I could never stomach their pricing model for services. Their monthly fees were excessive; the same information could be legally obtained for a few dollars a year. Furthermore, they were selling viewing and search data which made it a profit center for the company, even if they hadn't sold subscriptions.
If they had charged more for the initial hardware and then had a low annual subscription fee I probably would have had a Tivo on every set in the house. As it was, the high monthly fee made me reluctant to buy even one.
I think this is another case where a content provider over estimates the price people are pay for their information. It's not that the information isn't valuable, it comes down to what customers are willing to pay.
On the post: Amazon Looking To Patent One-Nod Ordering?
Re: Re:
Knock off software and business model patents would be a start.
On the post: Amazon Looking To Patent One-Nod Ordering?
Re: Re: Re:
You could put a lot more responsibility for revealing prior art on the applicant. However, that might backfire. If you were not careful how you set it up, applicants would submit a list of everything since the invention of fire in their applications and bury the significant prior art amongst 34 boxes worth of material listing all possible relationships.
On the post: Amazon Looking To Patent One-Nod Ordering?
Re:
There is plenty of evidence that would be nothing but wasting a postage stamp. Prior art is commonly ignored when it comes to patent approval. We don't have to look very far for an example. The original one-click patent had prior art. The main innovation seems to be coming up with the fancy name "one-click."
The patent office has issued not one but four patents on using a laser pointer to exercise a cat. And before laser pointers became common, they had issued a patent for exercising a cat with a flashlight. Prior art? What prior art?
On the post: More Casinos Succeeding With The 'That Jackpot You Won Was Really A Computer Glitch' Claim
More than $11 million worth of bad publicity
These companies should man-up for their mistakes and pay. If they couldn't afford to pay the full $11 Meg, they should have at least made an offer of a gee-whiz amount (something more than $1500, certainly). Settling up for a million or even a hundred thousand would have been a good move from a PR standpoint.
There should be an industry insurance or bonding system that pays up for glitches like this. Everyone would pay in and agree to abide by certain quality control standards. Payments would stay pretty low as long as a company didn't have any claims, but once they did their premiums would go way up. That would create some incentives to avoid shortcuts that lead to glitches, and it would create some industry watchdog groups who have an interest in keeping quality high.
On the post: Defining Success: Were The RIAA's Lawsuits A Success Or Not?
Re:
That did not happen with the first RIAA experiment. In fact, just the opposite as more people were willing to take the risk despite the lawsuits. The statement also ignores the upswing in things like encrypted services as more and more people figure out ways to get around enforcement campaigns.
The more likely result is that there is going to be a crack-down on extortion lawsuits. The mass filings are already starting to cause a backlash in the UK. In the US the situation will probably be rectified by the court system itself. All it will need to do is start enforcing existing rules that would prevent the filing of thousands of lawsuits in a giant bundle. The rules have been on the books for years but were rarely enforced by the courts because they were not abused. Now they are being abused, and it is causing the courts themselves problems.
But just for the sake of argument, let's assume AC's contention is right that people will suddenly decide that file sharing is too dangerous. Will that cause them to buy more CD's? I happen to think that music is essential, and that people will always need and want music (it may be in our biology). However, it is not essential to buy music from the major labels. I consider myself a heavy consumer of music, and I find plenty of legal sources for it. I have not bought a tract of music from a major label in several years, not even downloads of major label tracks from iTunes or other online sources. Part of the issue is just from not wanting to support the RIAA due to its behavior; the fact that a major label's name is attached to a tract means that I move on. There are plenty of other choices out there. I don't need to download illegal music, and I don't need to buy from RIAA companies.
On the post: Once Again, Court Says If There's No Real Harm, There's No Legal Recourse For Privacy Breach
Re:
There are several problems that would make even the leak of a trade secret claim hard to enforce.
1) To enforce a trade secret claim you usually have to demonstrate that you made reasonable efforts to keep the information secret. Putting unencrypted data out over an unsecured wifi connection would seem to be prima facia evidence that the company failed this test.
2) The data was picked up during a van driving by. It is likely that only some isolated packets are picked up. A chuck out of the middle of a document is most likely to be of limited usefulness.
3) If google just captured the data, dumped it on a hard drive, and never used the data then it would be hard to prove that any harm was done. Google didn't even realize that it had the data. Ironically, the damage would actually result from governments demanding that Google turn over the documents. Now a freedom of information type of request or a grandstanding politician could put it out in the public forums. Governments should have just asked Google to destroy the information. Of course, that ends the media gravy train for the politicians.
On the post: Once Again, Court Says If There's No Real Harm, There's No Legal Recourse For Privacy Breach
Re:
I am guessing that you didn't notice until you sat down to write your monthly report about how many AC astroturf and FUD posts you made on your employer's behalf each day.
On the post: If Astronomers Can Happily Share The Business With Amateurs, Why Do Some Journalists Get So Upset?
Re: Really?
I think this hits the nail on the head. When an industry or profession is threatened it is pretty common to look for external threats to blame. It doesn't really matter whether the thing being blamed is the actual problem, or even if it is a problem at all; when you are looking for a scapegoat the facts don't really matter as long as you whine loudly enough. Look at the recording industry that tries to blame its problems on piracy, when there the evidence suggests that what they call piracy may actually be helping the industry.
On the post: Patent Office Proposes Speed Lane (And Slow Lane) For Patents; Treating The Symptom, Not The Disease
Fast lane, Medium Lane, and Troll Lane
Trolls would love it, and probably file more patents than they do now. For one thing, it is simple economics. It's cheaper, and with patent trolling volume matters. But the real plus is that patent trolls file obvious patents. Because the ideas tend to be overly broad and obvious, the slow lane only gives productive companies more time to develop products that can be claimed infringing and get them well established in the marketplace.
The only thing that might make the slow lane more attractive for patent trolling is if it came with a discount on plane tickets to East Texas.
On the post: How Depressing Must Your Job Be If Its Focus Is On Breaking What The Technology Allows
Opening the door to GoogleTV
So far AppleTV has been a bit of a bust, but GoogleTV is going to be another attempt to open up the way people get their content. If they are successful the content providers may discover that their fear of cannibalizing has done nothing but open the door to allow GoogleTV to come in and scoop up a big chunk of the entertainment market. The market is out there and growing for Hulu-type services. The content providers have a choice -- they can try to capture that market now while they still have an advantage, or let someone else have it later. It will happen eventually, whether or not GoogleTV is successful.
On the post: Joe Konrath Explains Why Authors Shouldn't Fear File Sharing
addendum
On the post: Has Sony Finally Realized That Open Platforms Are Good?
why I won't buy it.
On the post: Air Force PS3 Supercomputer Screwed By Sony Killing Off Linux Support
Don't nerf me, bro!
I did buy a Sony TV a few years ago, but back then TV's were basically a dumb box. Now I see any Sony product that can be hooked up to the Internet as something that may someday be nerfed. They think that they still own the stuff you bought from them, and that by nerfing the product they will somehow increase their profits. I would call them clueless, but I don't think that word is strong enough to explain this stupid decision.
Any company could do this kind of thing, but Sony now has a strong track record firmly set in my mind now.
On the post: Century-Old Dictionary Error Shows That 'Professionally' Edited Reference Books Make Errors Too
Longevity
On the post: How Engaging Is An Open Public Discussion If It Costs $20 To Enter?
On the post: DirecTV Pays Studios To Help Confuse Customers Further
Timing
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