You also have to keep in mind that most voters have a mix of concerns and this may not be the one that is the deciding factor for them. Among those who have traditionally been more liberal, there are concerns with the environment, health care, immigration, etc. Assuming that anti SOPA/PIPA folks will choose parties or candidates on that issue alone is not likely to be true across the board.
In the article comments, it is pointed out that although $100 million was pledged, that amount included projects where the goal was not met, and none of the pledges for those projects were collected.
Elsewhere in the comments, someone from Kickstarter said "84% of dollars pledged on Kickstarter are eventually collected," which seems to suggest that even though only 46% of projects are successful, they account for 84% of the total amount of money pledged. At any rate, it's more like $84 million actually passing through Kickstarter rather than $100 million.
I think Kickstarter is great, so I'm not pointing this out to suggest any problems. I just think it is useful to have an accurate understanding of the numbers.
Organizing is a good first step. But just expressing your opinions may not be enough. Here's a bit about how ALEC has actually been writing legislation and handing it to legislators to pass.
To get the attention of politicians, you are likely going to either need to pay them, or you'll need to mobilize enough voters (people who actually show up to vote) to show politicians that they will be voted out of office if they don't do what you suggest. This could be a decades' long process, but if you want to create a more entrepreneurial culture in the US, it's good to get working on it now.
Re: Re: Re: It's also shifts the skill set from making music to being a good relationship builder
(feels a bit like preying on the needy!)
It sounds that way, but what I meant is that there are already people spending money on whatever, so maybe it is easier to pitch to those who have already shown an interest in buying something rather than trying to convert a music listener into a money-paying fan. In terms of live performance, that's the principle behind a festival. Promoters know there's a group of people who will come to a festival for the festival experience. The acts from year to year are often secondary.
Similarly Esty targets people who want to buy homemade stuff, so if you are selling homemade stuff, that's where you set up a page.
Selling at your show is probably a more likely conversion point than selling online because if they have paid to get into your show, they are already paying fans.
Giving away a lot of free stuff in hopes to reach the small percentage who will then pay you money may turn out to be more inefficient than marketing yourself to a group that already spends money and then trying to convert them to becoming your fan/patron.
I'm just tossing this out to get people thinking about a different approach. People are doing that now with vinyl. Rather than just hoping to get current fans to buy your music in vinyl, you go after vinyl collectors and hope they will buy your release (even if they haven't been previous fans) because they like the look or collectibility of your vinyl release.
In other words, let's turn this around. Instead of going after fans and hoping to turn them into buyers, go after buyers and hope to turn them into fans. Direct marketers have done this for years by buying lists of people who have purchased products from similar companies. You're not just going after eyeballs (or in the case of music, ears), but going after demonstrated purchase history.
Re: It's also shifts the skill set from making music to being a good relationship builder
I'll toss out another thought. Maybe instead of targeting people who like music, musicians who want to make money should target people who will pay for relationships.
It's also shifts the skill set from making music to being a good relationship builder
Whenever I read these discussions, it makes me think about how some musicians I know are terrible at building relationships. I also know much loved musicians who aren't the world's most creative at music but are great relating to people.
So the dynamic can change, and the music may become secondary to the interaction. I'm not saying this is a negative. In fact, it opens doors to people who don't necessary excel at music, but have the interaction and paid friendship stuff down pat. I mean, if people like you and want to have you around, you can turn that into a business proposition. Or if having you around creates a community, you're valuable. (I was just listening to a promoter talk about the Grateful Dead. He said he could never get through an entire show of theirs, but the fans were great.)
In other words, making great music is always stressed, but may merely be a means to an end. If you can reach the end via other options, that works too.
Yes, there have been Utopian visions over the centuries, and most don't work as planned, but the Internet has changed the way people connect, so there may be new opportunities. Also, the concept of ownership is changing. People are discovering that if they have access, they don't necessarily need to own it. So they are sharing cars, sharing office and living spaces, doing mobile food trucks rather than leasing restaurant space, streaming music rather than buying it, and so on.
And as I mentioned in a different comment, we are learning just how little high finance is based on real money and assets these days. In other words, we're already living in a moneyless economy and all that we have done is to confer power to those who have more numbers in the computer system. As we begin to realize those numbers are not tied to any assets, our whole concept of money may begin to change.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
For those who want to explore new economic models, here's a place to start.
How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World – Interview with Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation founder.: "In my opinion, for-profit companies are inherently non-sustainable in their DNA, because they depend on scarcity, i.e. abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets; one particular pernicious practice is planned obsolescence. But a open design community has no such perverse incentives and will inherently design for sustainability. It will also design for inclusion, to allow others to add to the design; and finally, it will also conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing, that do not require financial and geographic centralisation."
Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
Even without money I think that the greedy and unscrupulous would still find a way to exploit the rest of us.
But a lot of what Americans buy we don't really need. There are likely enough clothes circulating that as a country we could survive without more. There are so many unoccupied homes that if we moved in together, we might be able to provide housing for everyone who needs it without building more. If every piece of land was turned into a garden, we could do a better job of feeding ourselves.
Americans have gotten themselves in a fix by borrowing money they don't have to buy stuff they don't need. That's again what the sharable movement is all about. We don't have to be exploited if we adjust our lifestyles to fit reality.
The big problem I see is health care. You can greatly reduce your expenses by being healthy, but it is hard to operate on yourself if you need that. There's a level of expertise in health care that is hard to duplicate, though training more nurse practitioners and allowing them to practice would be one way to reduce costs.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
You can't own the land beneath you. It's common property.
There are some interesting property issues playing out in the energy wars. Traditionally conservatives have been in favor of property rights, and drilling for oil and gas. As it is turning out, those are clashing. In Colorado, people may own the land, but not the mineral rights, so they are finding that energy companies are drilling on their ranches or in their backyards and they have no say in the matter. In Nebraska, farmers are discovering that a Canadian company plans to laying a pipeline through their property. In Texas cities are discovering that water they wanted to use is going to energy companies instead.
Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
You know, I have been thinking about the concept of money lately. Gold is soaring, but it has never appealed to me as an investment because it doesn't have much usefulness other than to represent value. It's worth something because people decide it is worth something. It's not actually a survival good like food.
People did figure out that they could use money in place of gold and assign value to that. Money is as valuable as people say that it is.
On the hand, we are increasingly living in a world where people don't actually hold gold or money. They just transfer numbers from one computer to another. It's all kind of magic. So we could go back to a gold standard where we are limited by the amount of gold in the world. Or we could go the opposite direction and begin trading things in virtual terms. And that's what the sharable economy is developing into. Computers are facilitating more exchanges that don't involve money at all.
And when you look at the world of high finance, you see that people have been leveraging and using arbitrage to create a world where nothing is actually based on anything. It's a house of cards. We are sort of on the verge of realizing that those on Wall Street don't really control anything other than the physical objects they possess. Once hackers start making war on the financial system and illustrate that there's nothing really there, we may have some interesting repercussions. If the people don't hand over power to those who hold the finances, maybe those people will no longer have the same position in society.
What supporter of the Occupy Movement is going to buy a commercially sold product? If they want a t-shirt that says that, they are going to make it themselves or get it for free or trade from people at these sit-ins.
The trademark holders can try to sue everyone who makes an Occupy Wall St. merchandise maker, but there won't be any money for them to collect and it will give more visibility to the protest.
And I would think it would be hard for them to claim they were they were the first to use the trademark and therefore had any right to ownership.
Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
While it is hard to do, and there have been many failures along the way, I think either by choice or by necessity, people are going to find ways to survive with fewer transactions. The shareable movement, which embraces sharing, recycling, and downsizing, is find ways to have people lessen unnecessary and expensive consumption.
People are turning backyards and empty lots into vegetable gardens. Installed solar will reduce the need for big power plants. When you have lots of empty houses and lot of broke people, they either team up and share homes or the lived in abandoned ones as they can. Hike the price of gasoline high enough, and people look for cheaper ways to get around. As the cost of medical care continues to rise, people do without so the market for all those new medical inventions shrinks.
The past 30 years of US prosperity has largely been funded by consumer debt. Take that away and the economy will get down to basics pretty fast.
The food we eat today is GMO, just GMO the old fashioned way splicing, cross breeding, selective breeding, hybridization, how much different is direct genetic manipulation?
The reason it is relevant to Techdirt is the combination of GMOs and patents. The engineered plants spread and then the big ag companies want people to pay for growing those crops even when they didn't plant them.
It's this in a nutshell: "We're going to contaminate your crops and make you pay us because we did so."
Now, if you eliminate patents on GMOs, you reduce some of the financial incentives in creating them and then we can talk about whether it is good science or not.
Pay attention to the fight against GMO agriculture
I haven't followed whether Techdirt has been covering the issues involving GMO agriculture, but its opponents are gathering some great ammunition which can be used to fight patents in this area.
I don't weigh in very often on IP issues, but the idea that genes or stem cells might be patentable is a direction I don't want to see science go. I'm also wary of the situation with GMO foods where cross-pollination happens in nature and then farmers are asked to pay fees even when they don't want these GMO varieties contaminating their own crops.
I welcome more protestation against corporate control of nature.
I usually stay out of the IP debates, but this one is too good to pass up. If you are looking for a cause that impacts so many people that citizens/government might become aware of how far patent abuse can go, this seems to be it.
On the post: Are Democrats About To Lose An Entire Generation Of Voters By Pushing PIPA/SOPA Forward?
Re: Well...
On the post: Are Democrats About To Lose An Entire Generation Of Voters By Pushing PIPA/SOPA Forward?
Who picks the Supreme Court still matters
On the post: Kickstarter Helped Raise Nearly $100 Million In 2011... But There Are No New Business Models?
Follow along with the comments on the article.
Elsewhere in the comments, someone from Kickstarter said "84% of dollars pledged on Kickstarter are eventually collected," which seems to suggest that even though only 46% of projects are successful, they account for 84% of the total amount of money pledged. At any rate, it's more like $84 million actually passing through Kickstarter rather than $100 million.
I think Kickstarter is great, so I'm not pointing this out to suggest any problems. I just think it is useful to have an accurate understanding of the numbers.
On the post: The Engine Of Innovation Realizing It Can't Ignore DC Any More
Politicians respond to either money and/or votes
Ghostwriting the Law
To get the attention of politicians, you are likely going to either need to pay them, or you'll need to mobilize enough voters (people who actually show up to vote) to show politicians that they will be voted out of office if they don't do what you suggest. This could be a decades' long process, but if you want to create a more entrepreneurial culture in the US, it's good to get working on it now.
On the post: The Value Is In The Relationship, Not The MP3 File
Re: Re: Re: It's also shifts the skill set from making music to being a good relationship builder
It sounds that way, but what I meant is that there are already people spending money on whatever, so maybe it is easier to pitch to those who have already shown an interest in buying something rather than trying to convert a music listener into a money-paying fan. In terms of live performance, that's the principle behind a festival. Promoters know there's a group of people who will come to a festival for the festival experience. The acts from year to year are often secondary.
Similarly Esty targets people who want to buy homemade stuff, so if you are selling homemade stuff, that's where you set up a page.
Selling at your show is probably a more likely conversion point than selling online because if they have paid to get into your show, they are already paying fans.
Giving away a lot of free stuff in hopes to reach the small percentage who will then pay you money may turn out to be more inefficient than marketing yourself to a group that already spends money and then trying to convert them to becoming your fan/patron.
I'm just tossing this out to get people thinking about a different approach. People are doing that now with vinyl. Rather than just hoping to get current fans to buy your music in vinyl, you go after vinyl collectors and hope they will buy your release (even if they haven't been previous fans) because they like the look or collectibility of your vinyl release.
In other words, let's turn this around. Instead of going after fans and hoping to turn them into buyers, go after buyers and hope to turn them into fans. Direct marketers have done this for years by buying lists of people who have purchased products from similar companies. You're not just going after eyeballs (or in the case of music, ears), but going after demonstrated purchase history.
On the post: The Value Is In The Relationship, Not The MP3 File
Re: It's also shifts the skill set from making music to being a good relationship builder
On the post: The Value Is In The Relationship, Not The MP3 File
It's also shifts the skill set from making music to being a good relationship builder
So the dynamic can change, and the music may become secondary to the interaction. I'm not saying this is a negative. In fact, it opens doors to people who don't necessary excel at music, but have the interaction and paid friendship stuff down pat. I mean, if people like you and want to have you around, you can turn that into a business proposition. Or if having you around creates a community, you're valuable. (I was just listening to a promoter talk about the Grateful Dead. He said he could never get through an entire show of theirs, but the fans were great.)
In other words, making great music is always stressed, but may merely be a means to an end. If you can reach the end via other options, that works too.
On the post: The Revolution Will Not Be Infringed Upon: Long Island Couple Files To Trademark 'Occupy Wall St.'
Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
Yes, there have been Utopian visions over the centuries, and most don't work as planned, but the Internet has changed the way people connect, so there may be new opportunities. Also, the concept of ownership is changing. People are discovering that if they have access, they don't necessarily need to own it. So they are sharing cars, sharing office and living spaces, doing mobile food trucks rather than leasing restaurant space, streaming music rather than buying it, and so on.
And as I mentioned in a different comment, we are learning just how little high finance is based on real money and assets these days. In other words, we're already living in a moneyless economy and all that we have done is to confer power to those who have more numbers in the computer system. As we begin to realize those numbers are not tied to any assets, our whole concept of money may begin to change.
On the post: The Revolution Will Not Be Infringed Upon: Long Island Couple Files To Trademark 'Occupy Wall St.'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World – Interview with Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation founder.: "In my opinion, for-profit companies are inherently non-sustainable in their DNA, because they depend on scarcity, i.e. abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets; one particular pernicious practice is planned obsolescence. But a open design community has no such perverse incentives and will inherently design for sustainability. It will also design for inclusion, to allow others to add to the design; and finally, it will also conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing, that do not require financial and geographic centralisation."
On the post: The Revolution Will Not Be Infringed Upon: Long Island Couple Files To Trademark 'Occupy Wall St.'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
But a lot of what Americans buy we don't really need. There are likely enough clothes circulating that as a country we could survive without more. There are so many unoccupied homes that if we moved in together, we might be able to provide housing for everyone who needs it without building more. If every piece of land was turned into a garden, we could do a better job of feeding ourselves.
Americans have gotten themselves in a fix by borrowing money they don't have to buy stuff they don't need. That's again what the sharable movement is all about. We don't have to be exploited if we adjust our lifestyles to fit reality.
The big problem I see is health care. You can greatly reduce your expenses by being healthy, but it is hard to operate on yourself if you need that. There's a level of expertise in health care that is hard to duplicate, though training more nurse practitioners and allowing them to practice would be one way to reduce costs.
On the post: The Revolution Will Not Be Infringed Upon: Long Island Couple Files To Trademark 'Occupy Wall St.'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
There are some interesting property issues playing out in the energy wars. Traditionally conservatives have been in favor of property rights, and drilling for oil and gas. As it is turning out, those are clashing. In Colorado, people may own the land, but not the mineral rights, so they are finding that energy companies are drilling on their ranches or in their backyards and they have no say in the matter. In Nebraska, farmers are discovering that a Canadian company plans to laying a pipeline through their property. In Texas cities are discovering that water they wanted to use is going to energy companies instead.
On the post: The Revolution Will Not Be Infringed Upon: Long Island Couple Files To Trademark 'Occupy Wall St.'
Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
People did figure out that they could use money in place of gold and assign value to that. Money is as valuable as people say that it is.
On the hand, we are increasingly living in a world where people don't actually hold gold or money. They just transfer numbers from one computer to another. It's all kind of magic. So we could go back to a gold standard where we are limited by the amount of gold in the world. Or we could go the opposite direction and begin trading things in virtual terms. And that's what the sharable economy is developing into. Computers are facilitating more exchanges that don't involve money at all.
And when you look at the world of high finance, you see that people have been leveraging and using arbitrage to create a world where nothing is actually based on anything. It's a house of cards. We are sort of on the verge of realizing that those on Wall Street don't really control anything other than the physical objects they possess. Once hackers start making war on the financial system and illustrate that there's nothing really there, we may have some interesting repercussions. If the people don't hand over power to those who hold the finances, maybe those people will no longer have the same position in society.
On the post: The Revolution Will Not Be Infringed Upon: Long Island Couple Files To Trademark 'Occupy Wall St.'
There's hardly a market for these goods
The trademark holders can try to sue everyone who makes an Occupy Wall St. merchandise maker, but there won't be any money for them to collect and it will give more visibility to the protest.
And I would think it would be hard for them to claim they were they were the first to use the trademark and therefore had any right to ownership.
On the post: The Revolution Will Not Be Infringed Upon: Long Island Couple Files To Trademark 'Occupy Wall St.'
Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
People are turning backyards and empty lots into vegetable gardens. Installed solar will reduce the need for big power plants. When you have lots of empty houses and lot of broke people, they either team up and share homes or the lived in abandoned ones as they can. Hike the price of gasoline high enough, and people look for cheaper ways to get around. As the cost of medical care continues to rise, people do without so the market for all those new medical inventions shrinks.
The past 30 years of US prosperity has largely been funded by consumer debt. Take that away and the economy will get down to basics pretty fast.
On the post: Dailydirt: GMO Food -- You Are What You Eat?
Re:
The reason it is relevant to Techdirt is the combination of GMOs and patents. The engineered plants spread and then the big ag companies want people to pay for growing those crops even when they didn't plant them.
It's this in a nutshell: "We're going to contaminate your crops and make you pay us because we did so."
Now, if you eliminate patents on GMOs, you reduce some of the financial incentives in creating them and then we can talk about whether it is good science or not.
On the post: Europe Says Stem Cells Are Not Patentable; Confused Scientists Freak Out
Pay attention to the fight against GMO agriculture
Activist Post: Roundup Ready Alfalfa Damages U.S. Seed Industry: There is no wonder that the rest of the world does not want RR alfalfa seed and have prohibited the import of any alfalfa seed contaminated with even a trace of the RR gene.
On the post: Europe Says Stem Cells Are Not Patentable; Confused Scientists Freak Out
Good.
I welcome more protestation against corporate control of nature.
On the post: Patent Troll Says Anyone Using WiFi Infringes; Won't Sue Individuals 'At This Stage'
Might be the perfect wakeup call
On the post: More Evidence That If You Give People A Reason To Buy, They'll Spend More
Re: Entertainment spending
What People Actually Spend on Entertainment & Music... - Digital Music News
On the post: More Evidence That If You Give People A Reason To Buy, They'll Spend More
Entertainment spending
Spending Less on Entertainment and Charity - NYTimes.com: Percentage-wise, the biggest spending decline was in entertainment, which fell 7 percent last year, to $2,504 a household.
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