Gee, and where did that magic number of 50% come from?
I thought you'd been saying it was everyone, but I'll have to revise that. It's only half of the human race.
Of course it's still for sale on line next year, it'll get another bump in sales, as people discover him it'll sell, all the same things that MIGHT happen in the "old fashioned way".
Oh and sneaky how you got the famous and rich bit in there.
Has it occurred to you that most bands, for example, end up OWING the label money unless the thing sells incredibly well? Didn't think so. So while you carry on about how he can afford to take the loss factor that one in.
So what you're actually saying is that he can't take advantage of an antiquated supply chain to the customer,slow release across different markets, re-releases until a lot of copies end up in a remainder bin.
Sure he could have ended up making more more quickly the ways you seem to approve of. He even says that in a far less condescending way. But I forget, you're the expert here not the comic and certainly not me. Nor does that rule out PPV or cable or syndication. I'm not even sure it diminishes the value there as there are a great many people who don't download movies, music or other forms of entertainment either because they can't be bothered, don't have internet connections or some such similar thing or they happen to think it's wrong.
And remember that this is a check in after 4 days and the video is still on sale. Nothing in the article indicates that it's over now or that it doesn't remain available for people to purchase.
Still, at the end of the day I suspect will end up with some hybrid of what this man's done here and what Radiohead and Trent Razor has done, many starting and indie bands do and something more akin to the traditional sales channels. What is irreparably gone, though is the recording industry's singular control over those channels. The same will be true for the motion picture industry which isn't just MPAA members.
None of that fits in with how you perceive it ought to be done so it MUST be just WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
The only one wrong here is you. The world's changing, the number of ways artists can release their works has changed and will continue to change no matter how much you dislike it.
To use in case his hand made custom rifle fails to fire.
Typical middle class English bunkum and pretension.
(I'm Canadian, by the way, stuck between the US and England when they get into this sort of discussion as ever on everything. Though the English middle class and those aspiring too it are often either amusing or intolerable. In this it's becoming intolerable.)
On full prisons on sheer numbers you're right though the UK is no slouch when it comes to packing prisons either, Then again, if China didn't quickly execute people for a wide range of offenses up to and including looking the wrong way at a party functionary they'd easily win that award.
Your screed gos on to criticize American gun culture, largely handgun culture. For what it's worth there are about 50 different sets of rules in the United States about who can legally purchase a handgun and whether or not they can carry one. (More if you total up cities that can have their own too.)
Coming from England which has a thriving custom hand and log gun industry that's a bit rich. And, even with relatively tight handgun ownership rules and registration still has one of the highest per capita possession of the things in the world.
Not all Americans love their handguns in the mad, passionate way you think they do. Most, in fact, loathe them. A small minority make most of the noise. But all agree, however that their Constitution is right on protecting the right to own them. Most of the discussion and argument is around the "a well regulated militia" bit.
And given the UK's recent record of shooting sprees I'd not point an accusing finger at the US when it comes to that. Or the relative safety of malls in the UK compared to the USA.
I'll agree with the high murder rate in the United States but like anywhere else it's rarely stranger murder. It's most often immediate family or friends and associates. Even in the UK. And while I'm on the topic of high murder rates; until the end of World War I it was England that had the highest murder rate in the world by handgun or any other means.
For what it's worth I feel safer in New York City than I do in London. I've never been mugged in the Big Apple. I wish I could say the same for London.
As for race relations and ethnic tensions I would advise you that England is hardly the place I'd look to for an example of good relations. Let me expand that to most of Europe as well. Just so you don't feel too, too picked on. At least Americans are struggling to get their relations better. The English seem to be getting much, much worse. (We Canadians are somewhere in the middle. Sometimes perhaps much worse because our racism is expressed quietly or silently though while denying it we act on it.)
Oh, and while I'm on that sort of thing have you lot solved your class problems and wars yet? Please let me know when you have.
"We in the UK are quite lacking in guns and the gun culture." Bull. Complete, smelly cow patties. Fail. Untrue. A lot of Englishmen want to kid themselves that they have no gun culture but you have a rick history of same. Remember, you're the lot that invented such "sports" as fox hunting and where the middle class still spends weekends skeet shooting so they can pretend they're upper class. I'd go on but it's likely pointless. Of course England has a gun culture, Scotland has a gun culture, Wales has a gun culture. Northern Ireland certainly does.
Oh, and as for numbers you Brits are swimming in firearms. A lot of them in finely crafted wood display cases but you're still swimming in them. Like most people you just ignore that detail because life has to go on, the mall must be visited and one occasionally has to walk down the street.
Oh, and Canada has at LEAST one gun culture. More than likely two. One for the big three metro areas and one for rural and semi rural areas. The other major cities seem split. BUT, like my relatives in England and Scotland we all know at least one person who legally owns at least one weapon and probably more people we know and where the subject just hasn't come up.
The only thing funnier than the English is their occasional burst of confused morality. To which I'd add, a close second are the outbursts of superiority and smugness from south of Hardians's Wall.
Curious, isn't it that the one red spot on the map, Bollywood, is more pirated that Hollywood is in it's worst nightmares and keeps on crankin' them out and making money at the same time.
One production centre seems to have adapted while the other hasn't.
Certainly Dodd isn't lying is he?
We couldn't mention making product no one wants could we? And demanding that people accept said product rather than investigating ways to adapt to the market?
Even without the Internet, even without the lies about how much piracy affects the RIAA, sales would have dropped in the past decade. Significantly.
The reason is simple enough, it's that Boomers have moved out of the record market en masse due to age, as much as anything and the generations coming up behind us are much smaller. Even if they had the disposable income we did, which they don't, they can't replace the boomers.
Most of the product is crap. This is as true now as it was in the 90s, which is what gave rise to things like Napster to begin with. When entire CDs are stuffed with filler the consumer isn't interested in the entire CD the are interested in one song, perhaps, from it. Unless they're diehard fans of the artist or band. The recording industry is certainly capable of providing this in consumer friendly ways but they absolutely refuse to. Things like Amazon and iTunes don't count because they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into those.
The reality is that when recording industry execs decide to control what will be recorded and what they'll release and when that the music itself suffers. That's a given which is proven over and over and over again.
On the other hand studies have indicated that piracy, such as it is, actually INCREASES sales.
So we're back to bad business practices and blame the customer attitudes. Worse, now, let's get the law changed to something so draconian that even if passed may not actually be enforceable, will be tied up for years just to determine constitutionality and many other unintended consequences that we can't see yet and is opposed by just about everyone but the recording and motion picture industries.
Lemme see. Refusal to acknowledge that the market itself is shrinking, producing poor product in forms people don't want and wouldn't buy anyway, a refusal to adapt in order to keep and perhaps expand their market to current marketplace realities, accusing their customers and potential customers of theft and various and sundry other bits of nastiness while praying for a return to the market conditions that allowed the industry itself to shrink to four or five conglomerates/labels when history has shown that the customers are better served by many small labels and better and more adventurous music results not to mention lower price points.
Great way to do business! I'm not defending piracy as such but it's hard to see any other solution that the market based one where people started sharing what they WERE and are interested in (singles) and to hell with the recording industry. But the market has spoken and loudly. Solution? Welfare for a pair of industries that can't or won't adapt to a changing market. Whoopie!
Meanwhile, as Mike and others have pointed out, the rest of the broader music industry is thriving. Disconnect?
Even if I accept this assertion, and I don't, these bills seek to support a very, very, very minor player in the IP field and one that hasn't contributed anything new to it in years, unless you want to count the Sony rootkit.
The tech sector has come out firmly against these bills and they rely far more heavily on IP than Hollywood does and contribute a few hundred orders of magnitude more to the GDP and to the job market than Hollywood does or can.
Creator unions and representatives are coming out against these bills and they are certainly far more creative in everything but dodgy accounting practices than the higher ups in Hollywood are.
If the intent is to protect intellectual property within the borders of the United States I'm certain they'll backfire and badly needlessly criminalizing people, imposing censorship and so on while doing less than nothing to stop what they claim to stop.
In the meantime they'll damage American competitiveness in the sense that some speech and sharing will be illegal in the USA while, ironically, be legal and open in, say, China who will move smartly forward in that area and outgrow the US.
That already seems to be happening, if one goes by patent registrations in that for the first time 2010 saw China, Japan, Brazil, India, Taiwan and, for heaven's sake, the home of tangled, cobwebbed bureaucracy, the EU accept more patent applications that the United States did. (Keeping in mind, as well, that patent rules in those countries tend to be lot tighter than in the United States.) (I'm relying on news reports for this so take it with a grain of salt.)
What that tells me is that the USA is already missing out on potential income and possibly real income in terms of goods and services.
All SOPA/PIPA will accomplish is to continue this decline while providing welfare assistance to a particular industry that contributes diddly squat to the US economy. And don't get me started on their "creativity".
No, he stole the synapses that created the thoughts in your brain and therefore didn't steal your Internetz but only a teeny bit of your brain and reproduced what came from them after implanting them in his brain.
You might be able to charge him for rental though.
Oh yeah, and the database needed to store all the data gathered to data mine the Internet would be enormous. Given that HTTP protocol is connect, exchange, drop then do it all again at the next click the number of connections and drops on the Web is massive. Beyond massive.
Even if they do write software to isolate suspicious transactions, at the end of the day it will still take human eyeballs to verify it all.
Of course, all it takes is to bust one 14 year old girl and one granny sharing thier own photos that are mistakenly identified as bearing an actionable copyright. Not that we haven't been down that road before. Of course it won't happen. Not in a million years! Ok, a million microseconds then.
Beyond the thought that "invisible source code" might be something as innocent as shrouded PHP scripting using the Zend engine I have no idea what that is. And all that does is make the source inaccessible to prevent copying unless it's encrypted which means the browser has to receive an encryption key so that it will actually run the code on the client side if that's what's intended.
The other possibility is that it's code that runs on the server and the client side never sees it during the code's execution. From what they describe it could be either or nothing at all. If that's what's happening they may be going to use the application to break into servers, something itself that's illegal but I guess this band of lawyers gets to excuse this because they're on the side of the "angels". At least in their minds.
Now data mining CAN be useful. Not will be useful as their site (a multi page advertisement in reality) as there are no guarantees. First you have to know what you're looking for. They claim they do though the sites they describe are usually those associated with harvesting credit card numbers, passwords, identity theft and that sort of thing in the sense that they set up look alike sites of of a bank and ask questions of the user no bank ever would. They may also have to do with the gray/black market for prescription drugs. They claim that by their software's analysis of the data mined the can create a collection of, frankly, unbelievable connections between owners, hosts, ISPs and other data to bring the offender to court.
The thing is this, found on a the About Us page.
"ROGUEFINDER™ Investigative Software is currently in active development by a team at RogueFinder LLC, located in New York City.
The impressive team includes experienced intellectual property attorneys, private investigators, software analysts and technical consultants. Each team member is involved in critically important elements of the software, including:.."
Whoops. The software isn't finished yet. But, hey, we're working on it.
Notably missing from the list are statistical analysts which one needs to do effective data mining as all data mining does is result in a stack of statistics which get tossed out of whack the moment something unexpected data comes along if you're relying on a collection of preset
rules.
They also claim the software is patent pending, along with the usual copyright and trade mark claims. While I won't, completely, dispute the last two the first seems unlikely as they would be relying on an aircraft carrier stuffed full of prior art to do what they claim to be able to do. (With unfinished software even!). As for copyright, there may be questions there too as some things cannot be subject to copyright. Things like facts, mathematical equations (aka algorithms) and many others that appear in software. The specific expression in that software is protected with copyright before someone tries to jump on me for that.
More than anything the site looks like an almost well written ad for vapourware stuffed with an over abunance of stock photos. If they're looking to tag those who send out spam with the Nigerian scam in them, fake bank notices about expired passwords and what have we it's gonna fail. If, for no other reason, that sites that those are run by organized crime, often Russian, who have far more resources available to them to counter this vapourware than this law firm has. And I can hear them laughing from here some 4000 miles away to the east as the crow flies. I can hear them tapping out software right now to counter what this software claims to do.
As for file sharing sites, the ones copyright purists want to target as SOPA and PIPA claim to do, virtually all of those are small operations with few, if any ads, collecting some support through donations and stuff. Not the kind of sites that are likely to be raking in money.
File lockers are both ad and subscription supported but their legitimate uses far outweigh any illegitimate uses. They do respond to takedown notices so they follow the letter and spirit of the DCMA as it is.
As I said, all they've done is warn the very people best equipped to counter them. And counter them they will while the law firm collects a hoped for ton of fees on games of whack a mole. I have yet to figure out how a New York based law firm can bring suit in Russia, Canada, France, the UK and so on when they're not members of the Bar in any of those countries. Unless, once again, the idea is to collect a liability award in the United States and whack the site owners if they're foolish enough to visit the U.S. at some point in the future under the name they used to register their site(s). Good luck there.
I'm not for a moment minimizing the threat of fake prescription drugs, the possibility of identity theft or other serious issues where organized crime would see a profit. Hell, I'll even concede that perhaps another fake Dior handbag might hurt someone, somewhere though we already know and have known for years that the majority of those come from Hong Kong.
File sharing by individuals it won't stop.
Still, if I was tasked with reviewing this software with an eye to using it I'd want to see real world data, test results, a complete and detailed description of the methodology and the complete source code. Until I got all of that not a penny would go their way.
Re: And Google has failed at times too! It's called experiment.
Ad Block works much better than NoScript for that sort of thing. But Google text ads can't be blocked that way because they form part of the HTML that's delivered to the browser from the site you're viewing. So that's pretty much impossible to block with hosts allowed and hosts denied which most people don't know how to use at all if effectively. Might be able to do it if you script something that identifies where links are going as a site comes in but it strikes me that's a total waste of time and energy.
There's also been the prediction of the death of internet banner advertising because it's intrustive, ugly, chews up clock cycles, leaves cookies all over machines and all of that stuff. It hasn't yet. In fact, if anything, banner ads are growing.
What's most interesting is the fact that the most intrusive, annoying, clock and memory consuming ads are on media sites and not much else.
In many cases ads are paid for by eyeballs as well as click troughs. If you're an advertiser you're willing to pay more for an ad on the NY Times given it's very high traffic outside the pay wall which results in more eyeballs and more clicks. Even better if you can geo-locate the browser and serve up ads that will attract users in that area.
Murdock's failures have little to do with advertising on the internet. It's his and his son's complete failure to understand the internet, the opportunities it brings and the risks and dangers. Like the RIAA and MPAA they're more interested in attempting to regain control of the supply chain where they dictated what came out and the customer be damned. Now it's the customer who has incredible power and they have to adapt fo that or die. Murdock's not adapting.
His son's meanwhile have been too busy hooking up illegal wire taps in England (a criminal act) it's not beyond the realm of possibility that they could be spending some time "at Her majesties pleasure" in an English jail, most of which make American jails, even maximum security ones, look like a country club holiday. The continuing apologies are running thin now.
And what media parts rely on product made elsewhere obtained for free? Are you talking print or tv?
Or Internet? On that you're out of your mind. Cisco routers pretty much have the entire show at that end. Linux and BSD servers have the vast majority of internet servers, The dominant web and file sever presence is Apache with Micosoft second and Netscape a distant third. You have a point regarding hardware but even then for high efficency and high throughput servers the design and assembly is largely done in North America notably Silicon Valley, Boston and the Ottawa Valley and the Pacific North West from Tacoma in the south to Vancouver in the North. Most closed and open source software is written by the best people they can find find for the job as the internet has made location immaterial to what's eventually released.
I don't know where you get the idea that Google's text ads are all that obnoxious but fine you have a well known hate of for Google anway. But the largest distributor and sever of banner ads, the stuff than can be stopped by AdBlock and NoScript comes from a Microsoft owned company called doubleclick.
Thing is though that Internet advertising is increasing, not decreasing. So it must be working at some level or another. Even in display advertising it's actually getting better and more creative that anything on TV and less obtrusive that it was before.
Not that I like it. But I'm not at all sure that it's failing as badly as you think. And the Internet itself doesn't need monetizing it's sites that do. There are many ways to do that besides having annoying ads.
Reread SOPA carefully. It only takes one such complaint to shut it down.
As I run a church site, for example, that allows user content the parish, in theory could end up being accused of liability with a spurious complaint.
I've already had one DCMA takedown notice which got responded to with " please note that a .ca site is Canada and as we are not covered under the DCMA my first impulse was to ignore this. On further investigation the material you are complaining about has the copyright of The Anglican Church of Canada on it and being an Anglican parish we have every right to use it with the blanket permission of the National Church. Please do not waste my time any further and please do your research properly. I can show you how if you wish. We'd want a substantial donation for that. In Christ. John Wilson"
Maybe a bit snarky but it got the point across. Never heard another thing.
But I don't want to have to monitor constantly because some people seem to feel that Canadians have some "moral" need or obligation to follow US laws in our own country. Not that some Canadians are any better.
The moral is that it's not the big sites that will suffer because of the bills it's the smaller ones. The ones where interaction and creativity DO take place.
It's the places that don't employ lawyers and watch every twitch on their sites 24 hours a day that'll suffer and vanish cause they just give up.
But I guess that doesn't matter cause the bills will stop piracy, right? Or at least put a dent in it. So it's all worth it.
They won't of course, far from it. They're unlikely to put so much as a dent in it.
Remember to say hi to Santa Claus on the 24th. I'm sure you believe in him and the tooth fairy too.
Other than the fact that the maker of the app says the "license" is an obvious fake which is hard to print and is pretty much useless as a piece of fake ID.
Even if it wasn't I suspect that it would do less to bring on terrorists than to add a few hundred thousand candidates for shows like "Canada's Worst Drivers" on the roads than any real sort of security threats. (Watching shows like that makes me want to start one called "Canada's worst driving testers".)
Licenses on both sides of our borders are plasticized have built in RFID and other junk designed to replace passports to that Canadians and Americans can move back and forth across "the world's longest undefended border" with the ease we could before W got all concerned about false reports that the 9-11 bombers came into the USA on ferries that travel between Nova Scotia and Maine.
Made passport offices rich mind you and gave the respective federal governments a badly needed injection of cash.
To add to what's legal and torrented, let's just add 99% of GPL/Open Source software at some point in it's existence in some fashion from distributions down to single projects.
Oh heck. I forgot. GPL/Open Source is infringing and illegal cause SCO said it was and the court was wrong in slapping SCO down and bankrupting a valiant company fighting the good fight against infringement.
In aid of what? A judicial game of whack a mole? A judicial game that's questionable at best and illegal at worst?
So, Google, Yahoo, MS and every other search engine in the world should be shut down if they return so much as a questionable file on any web sit on the planet?
Any torrent site is automatically guilty? Next up will be ZIP, RAR, TAR-BZ and other compress file format that just might encoded is guilty?
You're the alleged law student. Have you ever heard of things like due process, unreasonable search and seizure and other things like that there or did you nap through those classes?
I guess you must have.
So let me enlighten you. In civil, common and criminal law a hearing is required before property can be seized. There has been no hearing where accuser had met accused (plaintiff vs defendant or whatever). But property, to wit, a business name and a server have been seized. Both are considered property under the law. Nor have criminal charges been laid.
Due process has not occurred yet you say "good riddance". Nice to see you want to take the authorities word for everything. Sounds like you're dusting off the Nuremberg defense, "We were just following orders!" Not valid then, not valid now.
On the post: Louis CK's 'Experiment' Brings In 110k Sales, $550k Gross, Over $200k Net... In Four Days
Re:
I thought you'd been saying it was everyone, but I'll have to revise that. It's only half of the human race.
Of course it's still for sale on line next year, it'll get another bump in sales, as people discover him it'll sell, all the same things that MIGHT happen in the "old fashioned way".
Oh and sneaky how you got the famous and rich bit in there.
Has it occurred to you that most bands, for example, end up OWING the label money unless the thing sells incredibly well? Didn't think so. So while you carry on about how he can afford to take the loss factor that one in.
So what you're actually saying is that he can't take advantage of an antiquated supply chain to the customer,slow release across different markets, re-releases until a lot of copies end up in a remainder bin.
Sure he could have ended up making more more quickly the ways you seem to approve of. He even says that in a far less condescending way. But I forget, you're the expert here not the comic and certainly not me. Nor does that rule out PPV or cable or syndication. I'm not even sure it diminishes the value there as there are a great many people who don't download movies, music or other forms of entertainment either because they can't be bothered, don't have internet connections or some such similar thing or they happen to think it's wrong.
And remember that this is a check in after 4 days and the video is still on sale. Nothing in the article indicates that it's over now or that it doesn't remain available for people to purchase.
Still, at the end of the day I suspect will end up with some hybrid of what this man's done here and what Radiohead and Trent Razor has done, many starting and indie bands do and something more akin to the traditional sales channels. What is irreparably gone, though is the recording industry's singular control over those channels. The same will be true for the motion picture industry which isn't just MPAA members.
None of that fits in with how you perceive it ought to be done so it MUST be just WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
The only one wrong here is you. The world's changing, the number of ways artists can release their works has changed and will continue to change no matter how much you dislike it.
On the post: Tweeting Juror Leads To Retrial For Guy Convicted Of Murder
Re: Re: Re: Guns
Typical middle class English bunkum and pretension.
(I'm Canadian, by the way, stuck between the US and England when they get into this sort of discussion as ever on everything. Though the English middle class and those aspiring too it are often either amusing or intolerable. In this it's becoming intolerable.)
On the post: Tweeting Juror Leads To Retrial For Guy Convicted Of Murder
Re:
On full prisons on sheer numbers you're right though the UK is no slouch when it comes to packing prisons either, Then again, if China didn't quickly execute people for a wide range of offenses up to and including looking the wrong way at a party functionary they'd easily win that award.
Your screed gos on to criticize American gun culture, largely handgun culture. For what it's worth there are about 50 different sets of rules in the United States about who can legally purchase a handgun and whether or not they can carry one. (More if you total up cities that can have their own too.)
Coming from England which has a thriving custom hand and log gun industry that's a bit rich. And, even with relatively tight handgun ownership rules and registration still has one of the highest per capita possession of the things in the world.
Not all Americans love their handguns in the mad, passionate way you think they do. Most, in fact, loathe them. A small minority make most of the noise. But all agree, however that their Constitution is right on protecting the right to own them. Most of the discussion and argument is around the "a well regulated militia" bit.
And given the UK's recent record of shooting sprees I'd not point an accusing finger at the US when it comes to that. Or the relative safety of malls in the UK compared to the USA.
I'll agree with the high murder rate in the United States but like anywhere else it's rarely stranger murder. It's most often immediate family or friends and associates. Even in the UK. And while I'm on the topic of high murder rates; until the end of World War I it was England that had the highest murder rate in the world by handgun or any other means.
For what it's worth I feel safer in New York City than I do in London. I've never been mugged in the Big Apple. I wish I could say the same for London.
As for race relations and ethnic tensions I would advise you that England is hardly the place I'd look to for an example of good relations. Let me expand that to most of Europe as well. Just so you don't feel too, too picked on. At least Americans are struggling to get their relations better. The English seem to be getting much, much worse. (We Canadians are somewhere in the middle. Sometimes perhaps much worse because our racism is expressed quietly or silently though while denying it we act on it.)
Oh, and while I'm on that sort of thing have you lot solved your class problems and wars yet? Please let me know when you have.
"We in the UK are quite lacking in guns and the gun culture." Bull. Complete, smelly cow patties. Fail. Untrue. A lot of Englishmen want to kid themselves that they have no gun culture but you have a rick history of same. Remember, you're the lot that invented such "sports" as fox hunting and where the middle class still spends weekends skeet shooting so they can pretend they're upper class. I'd go on but it's likely pointless. Of course England has a gun culture, Scotland has a gun culture, Wales has a gun culture. Northern Ireland certainly does.
Oh, and as for numbers you Brits are swimming in firearms. A lot of them in finely crafted wood display cases but you're still swimming in them. Like most people you just ignore that detail because life has to go on, the mall must be visited and one occasionally has to walk down the street.
Oh, and Canada has at LEAST one gun culture. More than likely two. One for the big three metro areas and one for rural and semi rural areas. The other major cities seem split. BUT, like my relatives in England and Scotland we all know at least one person who legally owns at least one weapon and probably more people we know and where the subject just hasn't come up.
The only thing funnier than the English is their occasional burst of confused morality. To which I'd add, a close second are the outbursts of superiority and smugness from south of Hardians's Wall.
On the post: Chris Dodd Resorting To Outright Lying In A Desperate Attempt To Get SOPA Passed
One production centre seems to have adapted while the other hasn't.
Certainly Dodd isn't lying is he?
On the post: RIAA Boss Tries To Defend SOPA & PIPA To The NY Times
Re: Re: Re:
We couldn't mention making product no one wants could we? And demanding that people accept said product rather than investigating ways to adapt to the market?
Even without the Internet, even without the lies about how much piracy affects the RIAA, sales would have dropped in the past decade. Significantly.
The reason is simple enough, it's that Boomers have moved out of the record market en masse due to age, as much as anything and the generations coming up behind us are much smaller. Even if they had the disposable income we did, which they don't, they can't replace the boomers.
Most of the product is crap. This is as true now as it was in the 90s, which is what gave rise to things like Napster to begin with. When entire CDs are stuffed with filler the consumer isn't interested in the entire CD the are interested in one song, perhaps, from it. Unless they're diehard fans of the artist or band. The recording industry is certainly capable of providing this in consumer friendly ways but they absolutely refuse to. Things like Amazon and iTunes don't count because they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into those.
The reality is that when recording industry execs decide to control what will be recorded and what they'll release and when that the music itself suffers. That's a given which is proven over and over and over again.
On the other hand studies have indicated that piracy, such as it is, actually INCREASES sales.
So we're back to bad business practices and blame the customer attitudes. Worse, now, let's get the law changed to something so draconian that even if passed may not actually be enforceable, will be tied up for years just to determine constitutionality and many other unintended consequences that we can't see yet and is opposed by just about everyone but the recording and motion picture industries.
Lemme see. Refusal to acknowledge that the market itself is shrinking, producing poor product in forms people don't want and wouldn't buy anyway, a refusal to adapt in order to keep and perhaps expand their market to current marketplace realities, accusing their customers and potential customers of theft and various and sundry other bits of nastiness while praying for a return to the market conditions that allowed the industry itself to shrink to four or five conglomerates/labels when history has shown that the customers are better served by many small labels and better and more adventurous music results not to mention lower price points.
Great way to do business! I'm not defending piracy as such but it's hard to see any other solution that the market based one where people started sharing what they WERE and are interested in (singles) and to hell with the recording industry. But the market has spoken and loudly. Solution? Welfare for a pair of industries that can't or won't adapt to a changing market. Whoopie!
Meanwhile, as Mike and others have pointed out, the rest of the broader music industry is thriving. Disconnect?
On the post: Musicians' Manager Says SOPA & PIPA Are Not What Musicians Need
On the post: Writers Guild Realizing That SOPA Goes Too Far; Union Support For Censoring The Internet Begins To Crack
Re: Re: What are the odds SOPA gets through?
Even if I accept this assertion, and I don't, these bills seek to support a very, very, very minor player in the IP field and one that hasn't contributed anything new to it in years, unless you want to count the Sony rootkit.
The tech sector has come out firmly against these bills and they rely far more heavily on IP than Hollywood does and contribute a few hundred orders of magnitude more to the GDP and to the job market than Hollywood does or can.
Creator unions and representatives are coming out against these bills and they are certainly far more creative in everything but dodgy accounting practices than the higher ups in Hollywood are.
If the intent is to protect intellectual property within the borders of the United States I'm certain they'll backfire and badly needlessly criminalizing people, imposing censorship and so on while doing less than nothing to stop what they claim to stop.
In the meantime they'll damage American competitiveness in the sense that some speech and sharing will be illegal in the USA while, ironically, be legal and open in, say, China who will move smartly forward in that area and outgrow the US.
That already seems to be happening, if one goes by patent registrations in that for the first time 2010 saw China, Japan, Brazil, India, Taiwan and, for heaven's sake, the home of tangled, cobwebbed bureaucracy, the EU accept more patent applications that the United States did. (Keeping in mind, as well, that patent rules in those countries tend to be lot tighter than in the United States.) (I'm relying on news reports for this so take it with a grain of salt.)
What that tells me is that the USA is already missing out on potential income and possibly real income in terms of goods and services.
All SOPA/PIPA will accomplish is to continue this decline while providing welfare assistance to a particular industry that contributes diddly squat to the US economy. And don't get me started on their "creativity".
On the post: Max Mosley Sues Google For Unflattering Search Results -- Creating Even More Unflattering Search Results
On the post: Max Mosley Sues Google For Unflattering Search Results -- Creating Even More Unflattering Search Results
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You might be able to charge him for rental though.
On the post: Company Claims Its Software Can Magically Identify 'Rogue Sites'
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Even if they do write software to isolate suspicious transactions, at the end of the day it will still take human eyeballs to verify it all.
Of course, all it takes is to bust one 14 year old girl and one granny sharing thier own photos that are mistakenly identified as bearing an actionable copyright. Not that we haven't been down that road before. Of course it won't happen. Not in a million years! Ok, a million microseconds then.
On the post: Company Claims Its Software Can Magically Identify 'Rogue Sites'
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On the post: Company Claims Its Software Can Magically Identify 'Rogue Sites'
The other possibility is that it's code that runs on the server and the client side never sees it during the code's execution. From what they describe it could be either or nothing at all. If that's what's happening they may be going to use the application to break into servers, something itself that's illegal but I guess this band of lawyers gets to excuse this because they're on the side of the "angels". At least in their minds.
Now data mining CAN be useful. Not will be useful as their site (a multi page advertisement in reality) as there are no guarantees. First you have to know what you're looking for. They claim they do though the sites they describe are usually those associated with harvesting credit card numbers, passwords, identity theft and that sort of thing in the sense that they set up look alike sites of of a bank and ask questions of the user no bank ever would. They may also have to do with the gray/black market for prescription drugs. They claim that by their software's analysis of the data mined the can create a collection of, frankly, unbelievable connections between owners, hosts, ISPs and other data to bring the offender to court.
The thing is this, found on a the About Us page.
"ROGUEFINDER™ Investigative Software is currently in active development by a team at RogueFinder LLC, located in New York City.
The impressive team includes experienced intellectual property attorneys, private investigators, software analysts and technical consultants. Each team member is involved in critically important elements of the software, including:.."
Whoops. The software isn't finished yet. But, hey, we're working on it.
Notably missing from the list are statistical analysts which one needs to do effective data mining as all data mining does is result in a stack of statistics which get tossed out of whack the moment something unexpected data comes along if you're relying on a collection of preset
rules.
They also claim the software is patent pending, along with the usual copyright and trade mark claims. While I won't, completely, dispute the last two the first seems unlikely as they would be relying on an aircraft carrier stuffed full of prior art to do what they claim to be able to do. (With unfinished software even!). As for copyright, there may be questions there too as some things cannot be subject to copyright. Things like facts, mathematical equations (aka algorithms) and many others that appear in software. The specific expression in that software is protected with copyright before someone tries to jump on me for that.
More than anything the site looks like an almost well written ad for vapourware stuffed with an over abunance of stock photos. If they're looking to tag those who send out spam with the Nigerian scam in them, fake bank notices about expired passwords and what have we it's gonna fail. If, for no other reason, that sites that those are run by organized crime, often Russian, who have far more resources available to them to counter this vapourware than this law firm has. And I can hear them laughing from here some 4000 miles away to the east as the crow flies. I can hear them tapping out software right now to counter what this software claims to do.
As for file sharing sites, the ones copyright purists want to target as SOPA and PIPA claim to do, virtually all of those are small operations with few, if any ads, collecting some support through donations and stuff. Not the kind of sites that are likely to be raking in money.
File lockers are both ad and subscription supported but their legitimate uses far outweigh any illegitimate uses. They do respond to takedown notices so they follow the letter and spirit of the DCMA as it is.
As I said, all they've done is warn the very people best equipped to counter them. And counter them they will while the law firm collects a hoped for ton of fees on games of whack a mole. I have yet to figure out how a New York based law firm can bring suit in Russia, Canada, France, the UK and so on when they're not members of the Bar in any of those countries. Unless, once again, the idea is to collect a liability award in the United States and whack the site owners if they're foolish enough to visit the U.S. at some point in the future under the name they used to register their site(s). Good luck there.
I'm not for a moment minimizing the threat of fake prescription drugs, the possibility of identity theft or other serious issues where organized crime would see a profit. Hell, I'll even concede that perhaps another fake Dior handbag might hurt someone, somewhere though we already know and have known for years that the majority of those come from Hong Kong.
File sharing by individuals it won't stop.
Still, if I was tasked with reviewing this software with an eye to using it I'd want to see real world data, test results, a complete and detailed description of the methodology and the complete source code. Until I got all of that not a penny would go their way.
Something about this stinks. Badly.
On the post: Rupert Murdoch Personally Lobbies Congress For SOPA And PROTECT IP
Re: And Google has failed at times too! It's called experiment.
There's also been the prediction of the death of internet banner advertising because it's intrustive, ugly, chews up clock cycles, leaves cookies all over machines and all of that stuff. It hasn't yet. In fact, if anything, banner ads are growing.
What's most interesting is the fact that the most intrusive, annoying, clock and memory consuming ads are on media sites and not much else.
In many cases ads are paid for by eyeballs as well as click troughs. If you're an advertiser you're willing to pay more for an ad on the NY Times given it's very high traffic outside the pay wall which results in more eyeballs and more clicks. Even better if you can geo-locate the browser and serve up ads that will attract users in that area.
Murdock's failures have little to do with advertising on the internet. It's his and his son's complete failure to understand the internet, the opportunities it brings and the risks and dangers. Like the RIAA and MPAA they're more interested in attempting to regain control of the supply chain where they dictated what came out and the customer be damned. Now it's the customer who has incredible power and they have to adapt fo that or die. Murdock's not adapting.
His son's meanwhile have been too busy hooking up illegal wire taps in England (a criminal act) it's not beyond the realm of possibility that they could be spending some time "at Her majesties pleasure" in an English jail, most of which make American jails, even maximum security ones, look like a country club holiday. The continuing apologies are running thin now.
And what media parts rely on product made elsewhere obtained for free? Are you talking print or tv?
Or Internet? On that you're out of your mind. Cisco routers pretty much have the entire show at that end. Linux and BSD servers have the vast majority of internet servers, The dominant web and file sever presence is Apache with Micosoft second and Netscape a distant third. You have a point regarding hardware but even then for high efficency and high throughput servers the design and assembly is largely done in North America notably Silicon Valley, Boston and the Ottawa Valley and the Pacific North West from Tacoma in the south to Vancouver in the North. Most closed and open source software is written by the best people they can find find for the job as the internet has made location immaterial to what's eventually released.
I don't know where you get the idea that Google's text ads are all that obnoxious but fine you have a well known hate of for Google anway. But the largest distributor and sever of banner ads, the stuff than can be stopped by AdBlock and NoScript comes from a Microsoft owned company called doubleclick.
Thing is though that Internet advertising is increasing, not decreasing. So it must be working at some level or another. Even in display advertising it's actually getting better and more creative that anything on TV and less obtrusive that it was before.
Not that I like it. But I'm not at all sure that it's failing as badly as you think. And the Internet itself doesn't need monetizing it's sites that do. There are many ways to do that besides having annoying ads.
On the post: Rupert Murdoch Personally Lobbies Congress For SOPA And PROTECT IP
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As I run a church site, for example, that allows user content the parish, in theory could end up being accused of liability with a spurious complaint.
I've already had one DCMA takedown notice which got responded to with " please note that a .ca site is Canada and as we are not covered under the DCMA my first impulse was to ignore this. On further investigation the material you are complaining about has the copyright of The Anglican Church of Canada on it and being an Anglican parish we have every right to use it with the blanket permission of the National Church. Please do not waste my time any further and please do your research properly. I can show you how if you wish. We'd want a substantial donation for that. In Christ. John Wilson"
Maybe a bit snarky but it got the point across. Never heard another thing.
But I don't want to have to monitor constantly because some people seem to feel that Canadians have some "moral" need or obligation to follow US laws in our own country. Not that some Canadians are any better.
The moral is that it's not the big sites that will suffer because of the bills it's the smaller ones. The ones where interaction and creativity DO take place.
It's the places that don't employ lawyers and watch every twitch on their sites 24 hours a day that'll suffer and vanish cause they just give up.
But I guess that doesn't matter cause the bills will stop piracy, right? Or at least put a dent in it. So it's all worth it.
They won't of course, far from it. They're unlikely to put so much as a dent in it.
Remember to say hi to Santa Claus on the 24th. I'm sure you believe in him and the tooth fairy too.
On the post: Senator Briefly Brings Fake Driver's License App To The Public Eye Before Having It 'Taken 'Round Back And Shot'
Even if it wasn't I suspect that it would do less to bring on terrorists than to add a few hundred thousand candidates for shows like "Canada's Worst Drivers" on the roads than any real sort of security threats. (Watching shows like that makes me want to start one called "Canada's worst driving testers".)
Licenses on both sides of our borders are plasticized have built in RFID and other junk designed to replace passports to that Canadians and Americans can move back and forth across "the world's longest undefended border" with the ease we could before W got all concerned about false reports that the 9-11 bombers came into the USA on ferries that travel between Nova Scotia and Maine.
Made passport offices rich mind you and gave the respective federal governments a badly needed injection of cash.
On the post: Justice Department Hanging Onto Torrent-Finder Because It Doesn't Like How Search Engines Work
Re: flawed
Oh heck. I forgot. GPL/Open Source is infringing and illegal cause SCO said it was and the court was wrong in slapping SCO down and bankrupting a valiant company fighting the good fight against infringement.
I'm soooooooo bad.
On the post: Justice Department Hanging Onto Torrent-Finder Because It Doesn't Like How Search Engines Work
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So, Google, Yahoo, MS and every other search engine in the world should be shut down if they return so much as a questionable file on any web sit on the planet?
Any torrent site is automatically guilty? Next up will be ZIP, RAR, TAR-BZ and other compress file format that just might encoded is guilty?
You're the alleged law student. Have you ever heard of things like due process, unreasonable search and seizure and other things like that there or did you nap through those classes?
I guess you must have.
So let me enlighten you. In civil, common and criminal law a hearing is required before property can be seized. There has been no hearing where accuser had met accused (plaintiff vs defendant or whatever). But property, to wit, a business name and a server have been seized. Both are considered property under the law. Nor have criminal charges been laid.
Due process has not occurred yet you say "good riddance". Nice to see you want to take the authorities word for everything. Sounds like you're dusting off the Nuremberg defense, "We were just following orders!" Not valid then, not valid now.
On the post: Justice Department Hanging Onto Torrent-Finder Because It Doesn't Like How Search Engines Work
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Probably Fidonet.
On the post: Justice Department Hanging Onto Torrent-Finder Because It Doesn't Like How Search Engines Work
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Not faith, facts. You are the one making the accusation so you bear the burden of proof, AC, old lad.
On the post: Justice Department Hanging Onto Torrent-Finder Because It Doesn't Like How Search Engines Work
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Gotcha!
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