Re: Re: Re: I have wondered about this with the music & movie industry
I told him DRM only annoys paying customers it does not prevent or even slow down piracy.
it's worse than that. DRM actually encourages piracy.
that means that the money you spend on DRM technology in order to protect your product is not only wasted on a technology that provides no such protection, but is invested in encouraging your paying customers to pirate your goods.
it's worse than taking one of your dollars and tearing it up, it's actually taking a dollar and handing it to the people that you think are stealing from you.
If there was more "carrot" maybe you might get the effect of "Oh, you know what? Now I come to try is again buying stuff is actually really easy and convenient - well worth the money."
i have never understood the whole anti-consumer thing.
you are in the business to make money, and you have a group of people who gave you money. it seems obvious that you should treat the people who gave you money with a lot more respect.
maybe they spent $100 to get some intern to write it, stuck $40 mil into the offshore accounts of the senior management and are waiting for the paper to go down in flames so they can retire in style. all the while they will be blaming "teh haxorz" for destroying an american institution.
Haven't we seen this 'dead cat bounce' before? People pull back, reconsider their options, and plunge ahead again.
sure, but is there a certain amount of "breakage" with each bounce?
with each shutdown and the community around each service fragments, does a certain percentage of that services users stop downloading?
what i am interested in is this:
1)just what is that percentage? is it large or small compared to the size of the user-base for the service that was shutdown?
if 50% of napster's users "went legit", and with each subsequent shutdown, another 50% of the remaining users from each resulting service also stopped file sharing, then maybe enforcement has had some positive effect, though the law of diminishing returns will probably come into play at some point.
however, if the percentage of users who start buying is only 5%-10%, maybe enforcement just isn't worth it at all.
2) does that percentage continue to buy long term?
this is the dead cat bounce you mention. is there a brief spike in music sales while the fragmented community settles in elsewhere, or does each shutdown actually create long term buyers?
again, if this batch of converts is only temporary, then shutting down services like limewire only creates a temporary boost in sales, so the legal costs of these shutdowns should be measured against the increase in sales over the duration of the spike to determine if the increase in sales is a net gain.
if it's not a net gain, again, then why bother?
if a small percentage of users convert (question 1) but they convert for a long time (question 2), maybe costs of these enforcement measures will pay off in time.
3) what are the buying habits of these new converts? do they use services like iTunes, or buy CD's the old fashioned way? or do they flock to foreign pay services of dubious legality? are the people responding to these surveys even aware of the difference?
if shutting down a service drives sales to iTunes and other "industry approved" outlets, then it's probably worth it to keep enforcing. this of course is assuming that the percentage of conversions from question 1 is high enough and/or the duration of the conversion from question 2 is long enough to make the increase in revenue justify the cost of the legal action.
Online piracy is a popular scapegoat of the music industry, which has suffered a 30% decline in global sales between 2004 to 2009, according to IFPI’s annual digital music report [PDF].
But given that only 9% of U.S. Internet users use P2P networks to download music illegally (that percentage does include those who obtain music through unauthorized online streaming services and download sites), one wonders whether that blame is merited.
does it mean that enforcement worked, or that enforcement was never the problem to begin with?
So, if music was a 70 billion a year industry and even 10% of that is lost (7 billion) don't you think someone should work on enforcement? After all, 7 billion is a huge amount of money. I mean, heck, Madoff is a massive crook, and only made off with net 18 billion or so over the entire time of his scam. Don't you think that 7 billion in a single year (or perhaps 50 - 100 billion since the days of Napster) is worth some effort?
and that right there is why all of the reports are clearly fake.
how can any business, of any kind, remain in business while operating at a loss of billions?
even if the recoding industry lost just 2 billion a year (the smallest number you can have and call it billions) and it's been 10 years since napster, how can there still be a business after losing $20 billion?
and yet the industry still exists. which leads me to believe that there is an exaggeration of some kind somewhere in the equation. either the amount lost (the billions) or its overall impact (the percentage lost) is a complete fabrication.
The idea isn't to sell Explorer, it is to ensure that the OS and Office continue to sell. Giving away Explorer got Microsoft in trouble because it was protecting other products, much the same could be said about Android, that they give it away to protect Adwords.
the difference is that so far google hasn't threatened anyone the way that microsoft threatened apple and so far google hasn't colluded with anyone the way that microsoft did with AOL.
in the apple case, it was that apple needed to ship IE3 and not netscape, or MS would stop making office for the apple.
in the AOL case, MS would put an icon on every windows desktop to sign up for AOL's service, if AOL's browser integrated with IE instead of netscape.
of course, that's all ancient history since modern macs ship with safari, and aol eventually bought netscape. also, broadband basically turned aol into a web portal like yahoo.
Re: Re: Re: Even if "Take it for free!" was written in bold, red letters...
I've not seen a business run word of mouth in a long time. Saying "Sure, we'll have that for you by Friday." means nothing until the Friday arrives and the item is in hand.
Guess what happens when it's not.
i think you are confusing "word of mouth" with "giving your word".
"word of mouth" is what other people say about you to other people. giving someone your word is a promise to do what you said you would do.
I like the lack of immediacy inherent in texting, at least as far as our usage goes, and the forced conciseness makes getting to the point mandatory.
my 15 year old daughter and 20 year old nephew have yet to catch on to this fact. they seem to have IM and SMS ass backwards, as i get texts like "hey dad" and "sup" from them on a regular basis.
it took me a few years, but i finally broke my mother from calling me to see if i got her email.
If I'm listening to music in my car, watching TV/movie at home, at work, hanging out with a group of friends...if I'm on the phone, I have to be on the phone. If I'm doing something else, the person on the other end of the convo will know that I'm distracted.
i agree that the phone can take up concentration that could be better used elsewhere, but not all the time.
it really depends on the task you are doing and the telephone call.
an example of the type of task would be driving. assuming that you aren't juggling the handset and the stick shift while parallel parking, you can drive and talk at the same time with little incident. my wife and i talk on the phone a lot, mostly while she is driving somewhere for work, which she does a lot.
an example of the type of conversation would be routine calls. i used to work in tech support and after a couple of months i would do everything on autopilot while day dreaming or surfing the web. on several occasions i would "wake up" during a call and realize i had been on the phone with someone for 10 minutes and i had no idea what i was talking to them about. i would have to look at my notes in the ticketing system to figure out what we had been doing since there was no way to go "back to sleep" and pick up where i left off.
Texting, email, IM, FB, et all...allow me to do other things while engaging in some interaction with you.
my complaint about texting when i am working (or gaming) is that it seems stupid to text on my phone when i am sitting in front of a computer. the screen and keyboard are so small that they take up all of my concentration for that short time it takes to make a reply.
don't get me wrong, i love that small device when it's in my pocket and i am out and about. however, when i am seated in front of 3 screens at 1080p and an ergonomic 104 key keyboard, i feel dumb reaching into my pocket to squint at my mobile.
for calls i have an elaborate rube goldberg system of voip trunks and forwards to answer calls on my computer, but i have yet to conquer SMS in a similarly reliable fashion.
politicos have never been the type to allow reason and fact to interfere with their eagerness to pander to the loudest and dumbest parts of their constituency.
agreed, but that assertion could be living on borrowed time.
the cocktail of high energy costs and high unemployment could be the one-two punch that knocks america out of its political stupor. or it could already be too late.
Naval Nuclear programs [...]are not operated on atomics because it is Cheaper then diesel (for example), but because it allows an incredible increase in power, speed and operating range
fossil fuels cost less than atomics right now, but that may not always be the case, especially if the peak oil theorists and the sustainability types end up being right.
There are certainly economies in scale with larger plants (which are oriented around a cluster of divided reactors anyhow) that would be difficult to reach.
economies of scale are great, especially when you measure economy based solely on watt hours of output per dollar spent, but there might be more important issues going forward like:
fault tolerance - what happens to the power grid when there's a problem with the only plant in the region?
adaptability - how much does it cost to build up, run and decomission a large centralized plant? how much will it cost to upgrade or downgrade that plant's capabilities once it is operating? what happens when new technologies become available to make the plant safer or more efficient?
time to market - can we afford to raise the billions it will require for a single large plant? can we afford to wait the decade or two necessary to bring something like that online?
also, in colder regions (like the north eastern US where solar doesn't work so well) waste heat could be recycled to offset heating needs.
-a few large reactors will require less shipments of radioactive materials (both new materials in and 'spent' materials out), easier to secure and watch.
-same note for things like grounds security (a plant twice as big is not necessarily twice as manpower intensive to guard, while a tiny plant will still require at least a certain amount)
again, let's see how well that idea holds up in the face of skyrocketing energy costs and unemployment.
what politico, on the right or the left, isn't in favor of creating blue collar jobs for joe sixpack AND stabilizing his utility costs?
guarding/transporting nuclear plants and materials sounds like a great job for either a republican privatized contractor, or for a democratic union.
or both so they can have a competition to settle the argument once and for all.
it's a partial revolution:
around the world, some journalists are looking into their pants - and finding something wonderful.
their balls. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/20/
How is it that an industry that makes billions and claims they are loosing trillions still pays next to no taxes into the system that is always being perverted to suit them?
you know what's cooler than making billions of dollars? making trillions of dollars.
Section 103 (17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1)) of the DMCA states:
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
but does it mean that the technological measure has to be effective? as in, does the measure have to succeed in preventing access?
or does the measure just have to mean to have the effect of preventing access? as in, my poorly written program want meant to have the effect of preventing access, even though it fails to do so.
i'll bet a lawyer for the NYT will insist on the latter.
On the post: Greek Site That Links To Legal Videos By Rightsholders... Sued For Infringement
problem?
On the post: Why Didn't Media Companies Create Their Own Zite?
Re: Re: Re: I have wondered about this with the music & movie industry
it's worse than that. DRM actually encourages piracy.
that means that the money you spend on DRM technology in order to protect your product is not only wasted on a technology that provides no such protection, but is invested in encouraging your paying customers to pirate your goods.
it's worse than taking one of your dollars and tearing it up, it's actually taking a dollar and handing it to the people that you think are stealing from you.
On the post: TSA Boss: Naked Scanners Are Great At Stopping The Last Attack; Don't Ask About The Next One
Re: Naked and handcuffed
that sort of reactive thinking is the problem.
a plane that doesn't fly can't be hijacked. not only will that stop the next attack, but all other attacks that follow.
and it's a documented fact that terrorists never target any other mode of transportation.
once there is no air travel, all terrorist will immediately renounce terrorism and seek gainful employment in the food service industry.
On the post: UK Advertising Board Says CD Jukebox With Hard Drive Can't Advertise That It Copies Music, Since That's Infringement
makes perfect sense to me
google's cache feature is basically a copy of popular websites. but since google doesn't say that it is, it's totally legal.
On the post: Did Limewire Shutdown Increase Music Sales?
Re: Re: Re: Boing
i have never understood the whole anti-consumer thing.
you are in the business to make money, and you have a group of people who gave you money. it seems obvious that you should treat the people who gave you money with a lot more respect.
On the post: The Emperor's New Paywall
Re: 40 Mill!
they said they spent that much on it.
maybe they spent $100 to get some intern to write it, stuck $40 mil into the offshore accounts of the senior management and are waiting for the paper to go down in flames so they can retire in style. all the while they will be blaming "teh haxorz" for destroying an american institution.
On the post: Did Limewire Shutdown Increase Music Sales?
Re: Boing
sure, but is there a certain amount of "breakage" with each bounce?
with each shutdown and the community around each service fragments, does a certain percentage of that services users stop downloading?
what i am interested in is this:
1)just what is that percentage? is it large or small compared to the size of the user-base for the service that was shutdown?
if 50% of napster's users "went legit", and with each subsequent shutdown, another 50% of the remaining users from each resulting service also stopped file sharing, then maybe enforcement has had some positive effect, though the law of diminishing returns will probably come into play at some point.
however, if the percentage of users who start buying is only 5%-10%, maybe enforcement just isn't worth it at all.
2) does that percentage continue to buy long term?
this is the dead cat bounce you mention. is there a brief spike in music sales while the fragmented community settles in elsewhere, or does each shutdown actually create long term buyers?
again, if this batch of converts is only temporary, then shutting down services like limewire only creates a temporary boost in sales, so the legal costs of these shutdowns should be measured against the increase in sales over the duration of the spike to determine if the increase in sales is a net gain.
if it's not a net gain, again, then why bother?
if a small percentage of users convert (question 1) but they convert for a long time (question 2), maybe costs of these enforcement measures will pay off in time.
3) what are the buying habits of these new converts? do they use services like iTunes, or buy CD's the old fashioned way? or do they flock to foreign pay services of dubious legality? are the people responding to these surveys even aware of the difference?
if shutting down a service drives sales to iTunes and other "industry approved" outlets, then it's probably worth it to keep enforcing. this of course is assuming that the percentage of conversions from question 1 is high enough and/or the duration of the conversion from question 2 is long enough to make the increase in revenue justify the cost of the legal action.
On the post: What Have We Learned: Greater IP Enforcement Doesn't Work... Yet That's What Governments Want To Give
Re:
http://mashable.com/2011/03/25/internet-music-piracy-study/?hpt=Sbin
from your article:
Online piracy is a popular scapegoat of the music industry, which has suffered a 30% decline in global sales between 2004 to 2009, according to IFPI’s annual digital music report [PDF].
But given that only 9% of U.S. Internet users use P2P networks to download music illegally (that percentage does include those who obtain music through unauthorized online streaming services and download sites), one wonders whether that blame is merited.
does it mean that enforcement worked, or that enforcement was never the problem to begin with?
On the post: What Have We Learned: Greater IP Enforcement Doesn't Work... Yet That's What Governments Want To Give
Re: Re: Re:
and that right there is why all of the reports are clearly fake.
how can any business, of any kind, remain in business while operating at a loss of billions?
even if the recoding industry lost just 2 billion a year (the smallest number you can have and call it billions) and it's been 10 years since napster, how can there still be a business after losing $20 billion?
and yet the industry still exists. which leads me to believe that there is an exaggeration of some kind somewhere in the equation. either the amount lost (the billions) or its overall impact (the percentage lost) is a complete fabrication.
something just doesn't add up.
On the post: Android, Economic Moats, And How Zero Marginal Cost Defenses Can Also Be Great Offenses
Re:
the difference is that so far google hasn't threatened anyone the way that microsoft threatened apple and so far google hasn't colluded with anyone the way that microsoft did with AOL.
in the apple case, it was that apple needed to ship IE3 and not netscape, or MS would stop making office for the apple.
in the AOL case, MS would put an icon on every windows desktop to sign up for AOL's service, if AOL's browser integrated with IE instead of netscape.
of course, that's all ancient history since modern macs ship with safari, and aol eventually bought netscape. also, broadband basically turned aol into a web portal like yahoo.
On the post: Sometimes It's Better To Just Let People Copy Your Content Than Deal With Licensing
Re: Re: Re: Even if "Take it for free!" was written in bold, red letters...
Guess what happens when it's not.
i think you are confusing "word of mouth" with "giving your word".
"word of mouth" is what other people say about you to other people. giving someone your word is a promise to do what you said you would do.
On the post: Phone Calls Are So Last Century
Re: Re: Male?
my 15 year old daughter and 20 year old nephew have yet to catch on to this fact. they seem to have IM and SMS ass backwards, as i get texts like "hey dad" and "sup" from them on a regular basis.
it took me a few years, but i finally broke my mother from calling me to see if i got her email.
On the post: Phone Calls Are So Last Century
Re: Can you hear me now?
i agree that the phone can take up concentration that could be better used elsewhere, but not all the time.
it really depends on the task you are doing and the telephone call.
an example of the type of task would be driving. assuming that you aren't juggling the handset and the stick shift while parallel parking, you can drive and talk at the same time with little incident. my wife and i talk on the phone a lot, mostly while she is driving somewhere for work, which she does a lot.
an example of the type of conversation would be routine calls. i used to work in tech support and after a couple of months i would do everything on autopilot while day dreaming or surfing the web. on several occasions i would "wake up" during a call and realize i had been on the phone with someone for 10 minutes and i had no idea what i was talking to them about. i would have to look at my notes in the ticketing system to figure out what we had been doing since there was no way to go "back to sleep" and pick up where i left off.
Texting, email, IM, FB, et all...allow me to do other things while engaging in some interaction with you.
my complaint about texting when i am working (or gaming) is that it seems stupid to text on my phone when i am sitting in front of a computer. the screen and keyboard are so small that they take up all of my concentration for that short time it takes to make a reply.
don't get me wrong, i love that small device when it's in my pocket and i am out and about. however, when i am seated in front of 3 screens at 1080p and an ergonomic 104 key keyboard, i feel dumb reaching into my pocket to squint at my mobile.
for calls i have an elaborate rube goldberg system of voip trunks and forwards to answer calls on my computer, but i have yet to conquer SMS in a similarly reliable fashion.
On the post: DailyDirt: If Only We Had A 'Mr. Fusion' Generator Handy...
Re: Re: Re: Re: why not use a distributed model?
agreed, but that assertion could be living on borrowed time.
the cocktail of high energy costs and high unemployment could be the one-two punch that knocks america out of its political stupor. or it could already be too late.
Naval Nuclear programs [...]are not operated on atomics because it is Cheaper then diesel (for example), but because it allows an incredible increase in power, speed and operating range
fossil fuels cost less than atomics right now, but that may not always be the case, especially if the peak oil theorists and the sustainability types end up being right.
There are certainly economies in scale with larger plants (which are oriented around a cluster of divided reactors anyhow) that would be difficult to reach.
economies of scale are great, especially when you measure economy based solely on watt hours of output per dollar spent, but there might be more important issues going forward like:
fault tolerance - what happens to the power grid when there's a problem with the only plant in the region?
adaptability - how much does it cost to build up, run and decomission a large centralized plant? how much will it cost to upgrade or downgrade that plant's capabilities once it is operating? what happens when new technologies become available to make the plant safer or more efficient?
time to market - can we afford to raise the billions it will require for a single large plant? can we afford to wait the decade or two necessary to bring something like that online?
also, in colder regions (like the north eastern US where solar doesn't work so well) waste heat could be recycled to offset heating needs.
-a few large reactors will require less shipments of radioactive materials (both new materials in and 'spent' materials out), easier to secure and watch.
-same note for things like grounds security (a plant twice as big is not necessarily twice as manpower intensive to guard, while a tiny plant will still require at least a certain amount)
again, let's see how well that idea holds up in the face of skyrocketing energy costs and unemployment.
what politico, on the right or the left, isn't in favor of creating blue collar jobs for joe sixpack AND stabilizing his utility costs?
guarding/transporting nuclear plants and materials sounds like a great job for either a republican privatized contractor, or for a democratic union.
or both so they can have a competition to settle the argument once and for all.
On the post: Some In The Press Realizing That Copyright Industry Claims Of 'Losses' From 'Piracy' Are Bunk
Re: Wow
in other news: water is wet, the sky is blue, size matters, and bears do in fact shit in the woods.
On the post: Some In The Press Realizing That Copyright Industry Claims Of 'Losses' From 'Piracy' Are Bunk
Re: Pulitzer worthy?
around the world, some journalists are looking into their pants - and finding something wonderful.
their balls.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/20/
On the post: Defending The Indefensible: Lawyers Who Love Loopholes Ignoring Serious Constitutional Issues In Domain Seizures
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
jesus christ! don't even say that out loud. someone might hear that and ICE will go seizure happy again.
On the post: Defending The Indefensible: Lawyers Who Love Loopholes Ignoring Serious Constitutional Issues In Domain Seizures
Re:
you know what's cooler than making billions of dollars? making trillions of dollars.
On the post: Am I Violating The DMCA By Visiting The NYTimes With NoScript Enabled?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Its not a circumvention device
it's totally a circumvention device. and if you club someone to death with it, it becomes a murder weapon.
where's your god now?
On the post: Am I Violating The DMCA By Visiting The NYTimes With NoScript Enabled?
Re:
according to this:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Anti-circumvention
Section 103 (17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1)) of the DMCA states:
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
but does it mean that the technological measure has to be effective? as in, does the measure have to succeed in preventing access?
or does the measure just have to mean to have the effect of preventing access? as in, my poorly written program want meant to have the effect of preventing access, even though it fails to do so.
i'll bet a lawyer for the NYT will insist on the latter.
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