If a song has been played on broadcast radio, with the listener not agreeing to any TOC's then surely the fact of what the lyrics are is then in the public domain.
If someone standing next to me hears the song and says "What did he just sing ?" am I in breach of the law to answer that question ? Or to charge for answering the question ? Or to hold up an advert while answering the question for free ?
What about if that conversation happens in an online forum ?
It's very short step from discussion forum to wiki site, surely.
For one thing, if they claim so many people bought at $15 because of the mistake, then word had got around and they (Dell)should have figured it out too. If they want the advantages that come with highly automated selling, they have to take some downsides.
Secondly, $15 is not unheard of for a special offer. In the UK we have seen special offers of £10 transatlantic flights (offered by a vacuum cleaner company, it all went rather badly actually).
So do you claim that everyone was supposed to know this was a mistake ?
Thirdly, if you claim Dell should have not had to honour it, where do you draw the line. Suppose the correct price was $500 and they accidentally advertised $495 ? Do they get to claw back $5 from everyone ?
What constitutes an accident ? Being able to find a scapegoat employee to parade in front of the press and claim it was mistake ?
I think the only argument for the Dell defence is the suggestion that everyone who bought KNEW it was a mistake. But I've seen Amazon claiming 93% discounts on some items in recent weeks. (I suspect they were inflating original alleged prices). Am I supposed to not buy because it might be a mistake ? What constitutes an obvious mistake ?
Perhaps if the site let me listen to their music (even a 20 second snippit) then they'd stand a chance of showing me it'd be worth parting with my cash.
I've been resding eBooks on my ancient PDA since about 2003.
With the Adobe Palm OS PDF viewer, lots of old out of copyright books in PDF form become very easy to access (planetpdf.com)
Hence I found myself reading a few Holmes stories recently. It works like this.
- Stumble into free book on net, download it
- Stick it on PDA for later
- Find yoursaelf somewhere isolated with nothing to do, start reading next available book on PDA
- Find that you like it, end up finishing it, even when back in the normal world.
Would I have gone out and bought my first Conan Doyle ? No. Would I now read another ? Yes.
Maybe even pay for a complete collection ? Possibly.
I think it's time that wise vendors started making a big fuss about the added value of an item that you buy and it is then "yours for life". So unlike a kindle book or an all you can eat subscription music service, this description applies to something that I buy and then it belongs to me to do as I wish with forever. Like (say) a paper book.
This phrase would be used only when certain reqts were met (like "Fair Trade"). If I bought something with this label on it I would be able to treat it entirely like a fully owned physical item. I could sell it to a friend (one copy only), lend it to a friend, use it any way I wanted to in the privacy of my own home, and even modify it and then sell it (single copy) to someone else.
So few things these days actucally conform to these simple rules (from ebooks, cellphone handsets, garage door openers) that it would be refreshing to see products that really did. I might even refuse to buy things that were not marked as such.
Every link I can find to their website seems to need a login.
Even the "contact us" page.
Google cache works, so I guess this login is a recent addition. Perhaps they were getting a stack of unwanted traffic, the price of making yourself so popular...
My contract said anything I invent while employed (even while sat in the bath) belonged to them. Once, frustrated that an idea of mine was not going to be pursued by them, I tried to have them agree to release it so I could pursue it in my spare time. They weren't exactly reluctant on principle - it was just that the paperwork to do so legally was too much effort.
If the teacher did it as part of the job then the school should own it. But if the school is paid for by the state then the state owns it. The school might even (with the "marketisation" of education) prefer that "competing" schools did not get access to these lesson plans but that really would be insane.
But if the schools were fiercely competitive private schools we'd fully expect these things to be kept secret, wouldn't we ?
What if the teacher instead claimed to have a separate evening job creating lesson plans for money and happened to use these products during the day too (at no cost to the school, which should be grateful, surely ?).
"Most British news monitoring agencies have already signed the terms, including Digital Media Services, Durrants, MediaGen, Precise Media, Press Data, PressIndex and the WPP-owned TNS Media Intelligence."
So if you subscribe to any of these, they have handed your details over to the NLA, presumably ?
Whether I bring it back aftre 4 hrs or 24 hrs I've probably only watched on once. DVD wear is the same. Kiosk has to dispense it the same number of times.
So I think their business model depends on hoping people DON'T return it after 4 hrs. If there is a business model...
Surely it is also possible that Amazon have pegged their max acceptable loss per book at $2. In which case if the publishers drop their price, Amazon might drop theirs to sell more ?
If I was hired to play a gig at a Ford employees function (paid by Ford) I should not be surprised if there was a clause saying "don't badmouth Ford".
Why is this surprising.
If the artist feels so negatively towards the Olympics that they feel this "gag order" is so unacceptable, perhaps they should maintain their artistic integrity entirely and choose not to perform for the VANOC at all.
I would wholeheartedly applaud the patenting of something really novel in software but I think we're all a bit irked when someone gets awarded a patent for (say) 1 click shopping.
Such a development is, I would have said, what can be expected when someone skilled in the art of software tried to improve a shopping site.
By all means award a trademark for "1 click shopping" as long as you don't stop others saying "you can buy stuff from my site with one click".
As with many things discussed in TD, it is a matter of degree. (Selling fake CD's bad, burning a copy for your own use in the car is fair use etc). Which means most "bad" outcomes come down to how well the parties fought to push the line in their preferred direction, and often how much the judge or deliberating body understood the issues.
Cheerleaders for each side of the argument will always hold up the straw men of the extremes (no patents = why invent, everything patented = total monopolies etc) but deep down we all know that what is needed in most cases is a sensible middle ground.
In manufacturing industry people generally get more protection by having a secret process noone can copy (that they have become really good at) than by relying on a public patent to protect it, especiallty if competing globally against countries with different IP laws.
Some things are simply harder to rip off. Someone might, for example, sell you a fake Office CD but noone is going to run a fake google apps site. Similarly, fake DVD's are widespread, but seeing a fake copy of a movie at the local movie theatre is unikely. Buying a fake copy of a U2 Album is possible, unwittingly going to a fake U2 stadium gig is not (though being sold a fake ticket is).
Assuming someone wanted to completely rip off googlemail, they'd have to do a lot of development work to construct the back end. They'd get the look and feel for free (just copy what google appear to do) and they might even copy the client side javascript without having to go through all the process of user feedback and testing google have done.
Even so, they'd probably be onto a loser. Even with outright copying, there'd still be a huge amount to do and the payback (with no brand or monetization in place) would be rubbish.
I guess my point is that moving to the cloud could make the idea of "under the hood" patents irrelevant.
On the downside, it would put all the focus onto more of the "business process" patents (like 1 click ordering), but the upside is that the small inventors can be protected without needing to resort to huge legal fees.
So to summarise, innovate your way round the NEED for patents, rather than having a business model that hopes a patent is enforcable.
You weren't apparently honored when Lily Allen copied it.
You give carte blanche permission up front for copiers of your work, then someone copies it, that should be fine.
Music industry (whether rightly or wrongly) gives no such permission, so it is fair that they bitch when someone copies it without their permission.
Lily Allen copies yours but bitches about people copying hers, that's not hypocritical.
Now, Lily Allen makes a mix tape without permission, that IS hypocritical, agreed.
But your original outpourings seemed to compare her stance on illegal music copying and her use of your article.
And that seems an unfair comparison.
In accusing Times of double standard, you say
"I'm saying it's bad that they said copying is evil AND THEN copied." but surely they are saying that copying WITHOUT PERMISSION is evil, where copying your work would be WITH permission. Not the same at all.
I guess Amazon aren't going to take on a 3rd party vendor who could not ship enough goods to satisfy their likely orders once publiscised globally. So in that respect certain types of minority goods will remain out of the mainstream promotion (and hence in the slow lane) due to being too small an operation.
But for the Amazon recommendation engine as it applies to digital goods, it is not a zero sume game (who ever ran out of downlod stock ?). What I mean is, if Amazon recommends an unheard of indie band and people buy and like the album, it doesn't cannibalise Amazon's Britney Spears sales. They just sell more.
But of course it is self feeding - you have to be recommended in the first place to even get started.
But we all know Amazon (for example) "seed" these engines to get things moviong. There was a story when they first started selling clothes that people were getting recommendations like "people who read this book also liked these socks". It is in Amazon's interests to widen the public's taste, even if it means artificially nudging the envelope.
So is the writer claiming that recommendation engines narrow the field as an accidental consequence of their design or as part of a ClearChannel-esque deliberate policy ?
The benefit of Amazon being the recommender (rather than a radio station) is that
- they have no preference what you buy, they can make a buck off anything
- they aren't resource limited in their own discovery of what to recommend
- they are not linked to the labels
I think a true analysis will show that more new music gets discovered with these engines than without. The 30-50 demographic with all the cash do not frequent grungy record stores or listen to seriously avant garde radio stations, (IMHO) so they have to discover stuff somehow and this is as good a route as any.
Less appealing is something like Last.fm which (though excellent) may have a narrow focus if (as I believe) it is owned by major labels.
And even less appealing (to me) are the recommendations of my facebook friends. Take DVD rentals. I have rented DVD's on the recommendation of good friends and been seriously disappointed, but far less so with automated recommendations. Not all my friends have taste ;-)
I guess Amazon aren't going to take on a 3rd party vendor who could not ship enough goods to satisfy their likely orders once publiscised globally. So in that respect certain types of minority goods will remain out of the mainstream promotion (and hence in the slow lane) due to being too small an operation.
But for the Amazon recommendation engine as it applies to digital goods, it is not a zero sume game (who ever ran out of downlod stock ?). What I mean is, if Amazon recommends an unheard of indie band and people buy and like the album, it doesn't cannibalise Amazon's Britney Spears sales. They just sell more.
But of course it is self feeding - you have to be recommended in the first place to even get started.
But we all know Amazon (for example) "seed" these engines to get things moviong. There was a story when they first started selling clothes that people were getting recommendations like "people who read this book also liked these socks". It is in Amazon's interests to widen the public's taste, even if it means artificially nudging the envelope.
So is the writer claiming that recommendation engines narrow the field as an accidental consequence of their design or as part of a ClearChannel-esque deliberate policy ?
The benefit of Amazon being the recommender (rather than a radio station) is that
- they have no preference what you buy, they can make a buck off anything
- they aren't resource limited in their own discovery of what to recommend
- they are not linked to the labels
I think a true analysis will show that more new music gets discovered with these engines than without. The 30-50 demographic with all the cash do not frequent grungy record stores or listen to seriously avant garde radio stations, (IMHO) so they have to discover stuff somehow and this is as good a route as any.
Less appealing is something like Last.fm which (though excellent) may have a narrow focus if (as I believe) it is owned by major labels.
And even less appealing (to me) are the recommendations of my facebook friends. Take DVD rentals. I have rented DVD's on the recommendation of good friends and been seriously disappointed, but far less so with automated recommendations. Not all my friends have taste ;-)
I once read an analysis of the costs of offering broadband in a coffee shop.
The two biggest costs are
- billing people
- tech support
When it's free, people have fewer expectations and cannot really demand tech support.
With newspapers, a lot of people don't realise just how ad funded they already are. Often they will push to get their circulation to pass some magic number to be able to command better ad revenues (for example the $12 annual magazine subscriptions I used to see for Time or Newsweek).
Of course the Evening Standard may come to dominate the Tube's litter and hence may be forced to address that.
After the Kings Cross fire in which so many died, noone wants to see a build up of flammable litter stuffed out of sight by people too lazy to carry it home. Thanks to the IRA, (and arguably, latterly, Al Qaeda) there are no rubbish bins on the London underground.
When I was doing a road warrior job (01-05) my company decided we must all have an Amex card.
(For those of you unfamiliar, this looks like a credit card but less merchants will accept it and you have to pay it off every month, rather than sustain a balance. )
The chaps in the sales team I supported hated it (as did I) because you'd buy a flight 3 weeks in advance to get a good deal then would have to pay the Amex bill before even flying and getting a ticket you could use to claim it back from the company.
Hence you were frequently carrying thousands of the company's cash flow for them.
Another mandatory thing was the Hertz Gold membership. Complementary 1st year then $50 thereafter (though the latter was not hugely publicised). All on the company Amex, mostly out of my hands. Set up by the company travel bods.
(Again the chaps hated it because Enterprise was cheaper and better customer service. Even Hertz was cheaper for same car through Orbitz than through the Gold membership via approved company travel arranger - go figure).
Anyway, I eventually left the company, and one of my final acts was to close the Amex account. All balances were settled (they actually owed me, curiously) and the card was cut up.
The next year Hertz tried to bill me $50. (Company travel chaps were supposed to have cancelled this, but hey).
When Hertz went to Amex, quoting a no longer valid card number, Amex paid up, reopened my account, and charged it to my account. As they only had my old address (Seattle) and I was in the UK now, it took me quite a while to find this out. By which point further financial penalties had accrued.
I tried to point out that when I closed the account they were no longer authorised to pay people in my name.
They said if I had a pre-existing agreement with Hertz they had to honour it. I said "who else has pre-existing agreements who might take money from me", and they said "how should we know ?", then I said "How did Hertz prove to you that they have a pre-existing agreement with me ?" and they said "they don't have to, you have to prove otherwise".
I said "how long do I have to live in fear that someone will bill be out of the blue and you'll pay them in my name, since closing the account is obviously no use". they said "forever".
We came to an agreement in the end. They did not actually have a clue where I lived (even which country) and would piss away at least the due balance trying to find me. They persuaded Hertz to stand down and cancelled the penalty charges. Or maybe I got the $50 from my old company. I forget now, it was a few years back.
My point ?
The Hertz account for our company was huge (a very big company you'd have heard of). To this day I don't think the company saved a penny over normal rental car booking, and obviously paid out $50 per year per travelling employee. But some people did get their cars a bit quicker. (But hey, we all know Hertz deliberatly make the non Gold class pickup process needlessly longer just to make you upgrade, don't they ? I mean if their computer can check in Gold in 5 seconds, what can REALLY take 15 minutes for plebs class ?)
Everyone at the coal face knew this corporate deal was idiotic.
The Amex probably stopped us getting the best rates in some hotels (even stopped us getting some hotels altogether).
But these deals are done very high up, aren't they ?
And why should Hertz care about beating Enterprise at customer service when they can lock up 10,000 new accounts on the golf course ?
In the early days the xBox was a loss leader for the games and there was a big fuss when some people figured out how to hack it and make an extremely good value linux box out of the hardware.
Just like the Virgin phone handsets in the earlier TD post, there seems to me to be a problem with the overall contract in this case.
Conmpanies should come clean and say "you don't own this hardware - you have it on permenant loan and you own a right to use it in a certain way" (a bit like most commercial software if you read the small print).
Then they can legally control what you can and can't do with it. In this case, by all means run a loss leader and force people to play by your rules to get back the revenue.
But of course they'd lose sales. Someone who pays £200+ for a piece of electronics expects to own it. On the other hand if they want to sell you hardware they should let you own it completely.
I guess what I'm saying is that anyone who offers customers a loss leader on hardware should do so "at their own risk".
It does appear, however, that the law is not what is in play here but what they can actually stop you doing. So even if it is illegal to play on a modded box in your own home offline there is no way they can stop you. But on the Live service they can. And they can choose to disconnect or block people as they see fit.
In all issues of copyright (compare MS Office and an MP3 ripped from a CD) the realistic extent of the law is defined entirely by what is actually technically possible to enforce, not by morality or even necessarily common sense.
On the post: Music Publishers Force Another Lyric Site Offline
Aren't the lyrics public domain information ?
If someone standing next to me hears the song and says "What did he just sing ?" am I in breach of the law to answer that question ? Or to charge for answering the question ? Or to hold up an advert while answering the question for free ?
What about if that conversation happens in an online forum ?
It's very short step from discussion forum to wiki site, surely.
We need judges with more backbone...
On the post: Guy Buys $3 Billion CD-ROM
Why shouldn't Dell honour the price ??
Secondly, $15 is not unheard of for a special offer. In the UK we have seen special offers of £10 transatlantic flights (offered by a vacuum cleaner company, it all went rather badly actually).
So do you claim that everyone was supposed to know this was a mistake ?
Thirdly, if you claim Dell should have not had to honour it, where do you draw the line. Suppose the correct price was $500 and they accidentally advertised $495 ? Do they get to claw back $5 from everyone ?
What constitutes an accident ? Being able to find a scapegoat employee to parade in front of the press and claim it was mistake ?
I think the only argument for the Dell defence is the suggestion that everyone who bought KNEW it was a mistake. But I've seen Amazon claiming 93% discounts on some items in recent weeks. (I suspect they were inflating original alleged prices). Am I supposed to not buy because it might be a mistake ? What constitutes an obvious mistake ?
On the post: Yet Another Attempt At Ad Supported Music
Re: Get "We the Kings"- album
On the post: Elementary My Dear Watson....It's Called The Public Domain... Or Is It?
The mysterious case of the free eBook
With the Adobe Palm OS PDF viewer, lots of old out of copyright books in PDF form become very easy to access (planetpdf.com)
Hence I found myself reading a few Holmes stories recently. It works like this.
- Stumble into free book on net, download it
- Stick it on PDA for later
- Find yoursaelf somewhere isolated with nothing to do, start reading next available book on PDA
- Find that you like it, end up finishing it, even when back in the normal world.
Would I have gone out and bought my first Conan Doyle ? No. Would I now read another ? Yes.
Maybe even pay for a complete collection ? Possibly.
On the post: Oh Look, People Are Already Looking At Expanding How Selectable Output Control Will Be Abused
New concept - Yours for life
This phrase would be used only when certain reqts were met (like "Fair Trade"). If I bought something with this label on it I would be able to treat it entirely like a fully owned physical item. I could sell it to a friend (one copy only), lend it to a friend, use it any way I wanted to in the privacy of my own home, and even modify it and then sell it (single copy) to someone else.
So few things these days actucally conform to these simple rules (from ebooks, cellphone handsets, garage door openers) that it would be refreshing to see products that really did. I might even refuse to buy things that were not marked as such.
On the post: UK Charities Find Out They Need To Pay Yet Another Music Royalty
Strange folk, these PPL
Even the "contact us" page.
Google cache works, so I guess this login is a recent addition. Perhaps they were getting a stack of unwanted traffic, the price of making yourself so popular...
On the post: Another Battle: Can Teachers Sell Lesson Plans?
Employer owns it
My contract said anything I invent while employed (even while sat in the bath) belonged to them. Once, frustrated that an idea of mine was not going to be pursued by them, I tried to have them agree to release it so I could pursue it in my spare time. They weren't exactly reluctant on principle - it was just that the paperwork to do so legally was too much effort.
If the teacher did it as part of the job then the school should own it. But if the school is paid for by the state then the state owns it. The school might even (with the "marketisation" of education) prefer that "competing" schools did not get access to these lesson plans but that really would be insane.
But if the schools were fiercely competitive private schools we'd fully expect these things to be kept secret, wouldn't we ?
What if the teacher instead claimed to have a separate evening job creating lesson plans for money and happened to use these products during the day too (at no cost to the school, which should be grateful, surely ?).
On the post: UK Aggregator NewsNow Dumps Newspapers After They Demand Payment To Link To Stories
"Most British news monitoring agencies have already signed the terms, including Digital Media Services, Durrants, MediaGen, Precise Media, Press Data, PressIndex and the WPP-owned TNS Media Intelligence."
So if you subscribe to any of these, they have handed your details over to the NLA, presumably ?
On the post: Is An Ebook 'In Book Form'? Question Means Everything For Authors Trying To Get New Ebook Publishers
Founding fathers
What, like the constitution and automatic weapons ?
On the post: Understanding The Decline And Fall Of The Major Record Labels
It's simple
In fact the artists themselves are the prumary thing of value. The recordings are just manifestations of that value.
Everything else seems to follow from that misunderstanding.
On the post: If Hollywood Is Upset About $1/Day Movie Rentals, How Do They Feel About 6 Cents Per Hour Rentals?
Costs depend on number of views
So I think their business model depends on hoping people DON'T return it after 4 hrs. If there is a business model...
On the post: This Is What's Wrong With eBooks: Amazon Loses $2 On Every eBook Sold
Re: Re: Re: Hey, wait a minute
On the post: Vancouver Olympics Silences Indie Rock Acts With Contractual Gag Order
Is this really unusual ?
Why is this surprising.
If the artist feels so negatively towards the Olympics that they feel this "gag order" is so unacceptable, perhaps they should maintain their artistic integrity entirely and choose not to perform for the VANOC at all.
On the post: Defense Of Software Patents Actually Raises Questions About All Computer Patents
Surely it's about obviousness
Such a development is, I would have said, what can be expected when someone skilled in the art of software tried to improve a shopping site.
By all means award a trademark for "1 click shopping" as long as you don't stop others saying "you can buy stuff from my site with one click".
As with many things discussed in TD, it is a matter of degree. (Selling fake CD's bad, burning a copy for your own use in the car is fair use etc). Which means most "bad" outcomes come down to how well the parties fought to push the line in their preferred direction, and often how much the judge or deliberating body understood the issues.
Cheerleaders for each side of the argument will always hold up the straw men of the extremes (no patents = why invent, everything patented = total monopolies etc) but deep down we all know that what is needed in most cases is a sensible middle ground.
In manufacturing industry people generally get more protection by having a secret process noone can copy (that they have become really good at) than by relying on a public patent to protect it, especiallty if competing globally against countries with different IP laws.
Some things are simply harder to rip off. Someone might, for example, sell you a fake Office CD but noone is going to run a fake google apps site. Similarly, fake DVD's are widespread, but seeing a fake copy of a movie at the local movie theatre is unikely. Buying a fake copy of a U2 Album is possible, unwittingly going to a fake U2 stadium gig is not (though being sold a fake ticket is).
Assuming someone wanted to completely rip off googlemail, they'd have to do a lot of development work to construct the back end. They'd get the look and feel for free (just copy what google appear to do) and they might even copy the client side javascript without having to go through all the process of user feedback and testing google have done.
Even so, they'd probably be onto a loser. Even with outright copying, there'd still be a huge amount to do and the payback (with no brand or monetization in place) would be rubbish.
I guess my point is that moving to the cloud could make the idea of "under the hood" patents irrelevant.
On the downside, it would put all the focus onto more of the "business process" patents (like 1 click ordering), but the upside is that the small inventors can be protected without needing to resort to huge legal fees.
So to summarise, innovate your way round the NEED for patents, rather than having a business model that hopes a patent is enforcable.
On the post: Murdoch's The Times Accused Of Blatant Copying, Just As It Tells The World You Should Pay For News
"I'd be honored" ??
You give carte blanche permission up front for copiers of your work, then someone copies it, that should be fine.
Music industry (whether rightly or wrongly) gives no such permission, so it is fair that they bitch when someone copies it without their permission.
Lily Allen copies yours but bitches about people copying hers, that's not hypocritical.
Now, Lily Allen makes a mix tape without permission, that IS hypocritical, agreed.
But your original outpourings seemed to compare her stance on illegal music copying and her use of your article.
And that seems an unfair comparison.
In accusing Times of double standard, you say
"I'm saying it's bad that they said copying is evil AND THEN copied." but surely they are saying that copying WITHOUT PERMISSION is evil, where copying your work would be WITH permission. Not the same at all.
On the post: Winner Takes All, Long Tails And The Fractilization Of Culture
Minimum scale
But for the Amazon recommendation engine as it applies to digital goods, it is not a zero sume game (who ever ran out of downlod stock ?). What I mean is, if Amazon recommends an unheard of indie band and people buy and like the album, it doesn't cannibalise Amazon's Britney Spears sales. They just sell more.
But of course it is self feeding - you have to be recommended in the first place to even get started.
But we all know Amazon (for example) "seed" these engines to get things moviong. There was a story when they first started selling clothes that people were getting recommendations like "people who read this book also liked these socks". It is in Amazon's interests to widen the public's taste, even if it means artificially nudging the envelope.
So is the writer claiming that recommendation engines narrow the field as an accidental consequence of their design or as part of a ClearChannel-esque deliberate policy ?
The benefit of Amazon being the recommender (rather than a radio station) is that
- they have no preference what you buy, they can make a buck off anything
- they aren't resource limited in their own discovery of what to recommend
- they are not linked to the labels
I think a true analysis will show that more new music gets discovered with these engines than without. The 30-50 demographic with all the cash do not frequent grungy record stores or listen to seriously avant garde radio stations, (IMHO) so they have to discover stuff somehow and this is as good a route as any.
Less appealing is something like Last.fm which (though excellent) may have a narrow focus if (as I believe) it is owned by major labels.
And even less appealing (to me) are the recommendations of my facebook friends. Take DVD rentals. I have rented DVD's on the recommendation of good friends and been seriously disappointed, but far less so with automated recommendations. Not all my friends have taste ;-)
On the post: Winner Takes All, Long Tails And The Fractilization Of Culture
Minimum scale
But for the Amazon recommendation engine as it applies to digital goods, it is not a zero sume game (who ever ran out of downlod stock ?). What I mean is, if Amazon recommends an unheard of indie band and people buy and like the album, it doesn't cannibalise Amazon's Britney Spears sales. They just sell more.
But of course it is self feeding - you have to be recommended in the first place to even get started.
But we all know Amazon (for example) "seed" these engines to get things moviong. There was a story when they first started selling clothes that people were getting recommendations like "people who read this book also liked these socks". It is in Amazon's interests to widen the public's taste, even if it means artificially nudging the envelope.
So is the writer claiming that recommendation engines narrow the field as an accidental consequence of their design or as part of a ClearChannel-esque deliberate policy ?
The benefit of Amazon being the recommender (rather than a radio station) is that
- they have no preference what you buy, they can make a buck off anything
- they aren't resource limited in their own discovery of what to recommend
- they are not linked to the labels
I think a true analysis will show that more new music gets discovered with these engines than without. The 30-50 demographic with all the cash do not frequent grungy record stores or listen to seriously avant garde radio stations, (IMHO) so they have to discover stuff somehow and this is as good a route as any.
Less appealing is something like Last.fm which (though excellent) may have a narrow focus if (as I believe) it is owned by major labels.
And even less appealing (to me) are the recommendations of my facebook friends. Take DVD rentals. I have rented DVD's on the recommendation of good friends and been seriously disappointed, but far less so with automated recommendations. Not all my friends have taste ;-)
On the post: In Going Free, London Evening Standard Doubles Circulation While Slashing Costs
Same with broadband
The two biggest costs are
- billing people
- tech support
When it's free, people have fewer expectations and cannot really demand tech support.
With newspapers, a lot of people don't realise just how ad funded they already are. Often they will push to get their circulation to pass some magic number to be able to command better ad revenues (for example the $12 annual magazine subscriptions I used to see for Time or Newsweek).
Of course the Evening Standard may come to dominate the Tube's litter and hence may be forced to address that.
After the Kings Cross fire in which so many died, noone wants to see a build up of flammable litter stuffed out of sight by people too lazy to carry it home. Thanks to the IRA, (and arguably, latterly, Al Qaeda) there are no rubbish bins on the London underground.
On the post: Crackdown On Loyalty Program Scams Shows How Ridiculously Successful They Were
I got caught by Amex / Hertz tag team
(For those of you unfamiliar, this looks like a credit card but less merchants will accept it and you have to pay it off every month, rather than sustain a balance. )
The chaps in the sales team I supported hated it (as did I) because you'd buy a flight 3 weeks in advance to get a good deal then would have to pay the Amex bill before even flying and getting a ticket you could use to claim it back from the company.
Hence you were frequently carrying thousands of the company's cash flow for them.
Another mandatory thing was the Hertz Gold membership. Complementary 1st year then $50 thereafter (though the latter was not hugely publicised). All on the company Amex, mostly out of my hands. Set up by the company travel bods.
(Again the chaps hated it because Enterprise was cheaper and better customer service. Even Hertz was cheaper for same car through Orbitz than through the Gold membership via approved company travel arranger - go figure).
Anyway, I eventually left the company, and one of my final acts was to close the Amex account. All balances were settled (they actually owed me, curiously) and the card was cut up.
The next year Hertz tried to bill me $50. (Company travel chaps were supposed to have cancelled this, but hey).
When Hertz went to Amex, quoting a no longer valid card number, Amex paid up, reopened my account, and charged it to my account. As they only had my old address (Seattle) and I was in the UK now, it took me quite a while to find this out. By which point further financial penalties had accrued.
I tried to point out that when I closed the account they were no longer authorised to pay people in my name.
They said if I had a pre-existing agreement with Hertz they had to honour it. I said "who else has pre-existing agreements who might take money from me", and they said "how should we know ?", then I said "How did Hertz prove to you that they have a pre-existing agreement with me ?" and they said "they don't have to, you have to prove otherwise".
I said "how long do I have to live in fear that someone will bill be out of the blue and you'll pay them in my name, since closing the account is obviously no use". they said "forever".
We came to an agreement in the end. They did not actually have a clue where I lived (even which country) and would piss away at least the due balance trying to find me. They persuaded Hertz to stand down and cancelled the penalty charges. Or maybe I got the $50 from my old company. I forget now, it was a few years back.
My point ?
The Hertz account for our company was huge (a very big company you'd have heard of). To this day I don't think the company saved a penny over normal rental car booking, and obviously paid out $50 per year per travelling employee. But some people did get their cars a bit quicker. (But hey, we all know Hertz deliberatly make the non Gold class pickup process needlessly longer just to make you upgrade, don't they ? I mean if their computer can check in Gold in 5 seconds, what can REALLY take 15 minutes for plebs class ?)
Everyone at the coal face knew this corporate deal was idiotic.
The Amex probably stopped us getting the best rates in some hotels (even stopped us getting some hotels altogether).
But these deals are done very high up, aren't they ?
And why should Hertz care about beating Enterprise at customer service when they can lock up 10,000 new accounts on the golf course ?
On the post: UK Again Says That Mod Chipping Isn't Legal
Do I own my xBox ?
Just like the Virgin phone handsets in the earlier TD post, there seems to me to be a problem with the overall contract in this case.
Conmpanies should come clean and say "you don't own this hardware - you have it on permenant loan and you own a right to use it in a certain way" (a bit like most commercial software if you read the small print).
Then they can legally control what you can and can't do with it. In this case, by all means run a loss leader and force people to play by your rules to get back the revenue.
But of course they'd lose sales. Someone who pays £200+ for a piece of electronics expects to own it. On the other hand if they want to sell you hardware they should let you own it completely.
I guess what I'm saying is that anyone who offers customers a loss leader on hardware should do so "at their own risk".
It does appear, however, that the law is not what is in play here but what they can actually stop you doing. So even if it is illegal to play on a modded box in your own home offline there is no way they can stop you. But on the Live service they can. And they can choose to disconnect or block people as they see fit.
In all issues of copyright (compare MS Office and an MP3 ripped from a CD) the realistic extent of the law is defined entirely by what is actually technically possible to enforce, not by morality or even necessarily common sense.
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