No, violent video game purchases do not cause violent behaviors. Violent behaviors probably do cause violent video game purchases, which is backed up in part by this guy claiming to have gotten Modern Warfare 2 explicitly as a training tool. The people who campaign against violent video games have the cause-effect relationship messed up; they might as well say cancer causes cell phones, as in this XKCD: http://xkcd.com/925/.
There's a great XKCD about this too that I'm surprised no one has mentioned yet: http://xkcd.com/810/. While this is more about trolling than spamming, this is basically how the TechDirt comment system works. All comments are allowed (aside from blatant spam), but the obvious trolls are routinely mocked with facts and reality-based figures. Isn't that sort of crowdsourcing a lot better than being dependent on one person's judgment regarding what goes through and what doesn't?
Her name is "Hermione", which tells me that just like Hermione Granger, she fears and feels threatened by any hint of failure in Silicon Valley, and logically extends that to include frivolous startups. Her Boggart is probably one of her being wrong (just as Hermione Granger's Boggart is of her being told she has failed something).
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you treat your fans like crap, of course they'll move quickly to the next flavor of the week. If you actually CwF + RtB, those customers will actually stick around longer and have a better chance of becoming loyal to you.
I think this anonymous coward was being sarcastic (and was thus actually praising this work), based on the quote "reality failed to kick in BEFORE I panned what seems to be *fairly reasonable research*".
TLDR: ("you" does not mean you, techflaws.org; it means Rick Carnes)
1. P = MC = 0, even for music. Also, in long-run equilibrium in a market economy, there are no economic profits only normal profits.
2. Stop whining about songwriting creating your retirement fund. It won't, and it's time you stopped living in such a fantasy.
3. Stop calling your customers "thieves". It'll only serve to further piss them off and turn them away from you.
4. As a businessperson, it's your job to figure out how to make money from the music business when the marginal cost of producing a copy of a song is 0. If you can't, leave the music business/industry.
How's that? Then again, how hard is it to just copy/paste what I wrote into the comment box on that article?
Re: How soon until his bosses "restate" what he "meant"?
Exactly. What an odd couple: the forward-thinking Ericsson, and Sony, the target of many of Ericsson's arguments here. Then again, aren't they supposed to be splitting soon anyway?
Turns out that to sign into the Huffington Post comments, I would need to let it access my address book and stuff, and frankly, I'm not comfortable with that. So if anyone on this site already uses some account with the Huffington Post, I would greatly appreciate it if you could repost those rebuttals in the comments section of that article.
Anyway, I would love it if people (other than anonymous industry shills) could point out flaws in my argument so that I can further strengthen it. :)
"Marginal cost of reproduction applies to commodity goods not to music. Songs are not interchangeable units where a fan will be equally happy to download a Beatles song or Justin Beiber. Not to mention that even when the marginal cost of distribution approaches zero there are still high fixed costs to producing and promoting music. When a creator offers a work at a price that will cover fixed costs and produce a profit and the consumer finds that price appealing and purchases a market is then formed. The 'option' you talk about others exercising is theft. That 'option' is available in any sort of goods... cars, purses, watches... Anyone can become a thief. No business can set its prices at a level that competes with theft. Nor should they be forced to. Is that what you are advocating? Once again, your "Resistance is futile' argument doesn't fly... the current internet is simply the result of code.... Change the code and change the results. Not to mention the nearly total lack of response from law enforcement to date... but that is changing.Analogies with the drug war and an enormous stretch...You are totally incorrect about the origin of the compulsory license, It had nothing to do with radio.Take some time. Do some research. Learn about the music business works and how what rights create what revenue."
Nope. Marginal cost issues apply to music too. Why shouldn't they? Oh, because it's 0? Too bad. You need to be smart enough to figure out how to tie your music with an alternative business model that's more likely to win you revenue, and better yet, fans, or else you're not cut out for this business. No, the Beatles and Justin Bieber are not totally interchangeable (except in a few people's minds, I guess), but neither are apples and funnel cakes. What's your point? Oh right, you have none. And the price should never be covering the fixed costs - only the marginal costs. Now, if you're in an emerging market, then you're more likely to be able to make an economic profit, but if you're in an established market like the music industry, you're going to have to bring your prices down to meet the rest of the market. And if that means you're operating at a loss, you're going to have to either figure out a better business model to bring in new revenues from actual scarce goods, or you're going to have to live with that loss. This is true of any industry (though those industries have the benefit of being able to figure out more efficient and less costly production methods and stuff like that, which can't be applied to an already infinite, nonscarce good like digital music files). And what code? That makes no sense at all. Change the code, and you piss people off, and you're going to be worse off. And law enforcement has been overzealous in responding, if anything, what with the totally baseless ICE domain name seizures at the behest of the RIAA/MPAA (and almost all of those sites were totally legal to begin with, and some of them were even official music sites sponsored by the RIAA). Oh, and the compulsory license thing did come from radio. Read "Selling Radio" by Susan Smulyan (among other things). So why don't you do your research - oh right, all the facts will come out against your totally shill-full argument.
Ah, that felt good. I can sleep a little easier tonight.
"OK.. 1. Songwriters are NOT getting rich on one song. We can have a song on a platinum album and still not make it above the US poverty line for the year. 2. Songwriters do not tour or play live. We write the songs for the artists who tour and play live... No one ever told you that the artists don't really write their own songs. 3. No one wants to pay for ANYTHING... but the law requires it. Just because you can steal it doesn't make you smart. It makes you a thief. 4. The idea of charging people more than it costs to produce a product is called making a profit. Profit is a good thing. It incentivizes people to continue producing the product. That is why the Art. I sec. 8 of the Constitution established royalties for creators. 5. Do I think a song is worth a dollar? Well, if you fell in love to it... If they sang it at your wedding... if you cried over it when you divorced... I think it added way more than one buck's worth of value to your life... WAY more than that 4 dollar cup of coffee you had at Starbucks today. 6. I don't work for Sony/BMG I am a self-employed small businessman. No health benefits. No pension.. No retirement fund. My songs are supposed to be my retirement. But thieves stole them."
1. Then you need to find a second job or something to actually support your lifestyle and passions. If you think you can get by through simply writing songs (and yet you complain about living below the poverty line just through songwriting), you're sorely misguided. 2. The previous point still stands. 3. No, people DO want to pay for stuff. They just don't want to pay nearly as much as you're asking, and they want it to be more readily accessible as opposed to being totally locked up. And no, the law doesn't actually require payment for everything. I use Google every day, yet I don't pay a cent (directly) to Google. 4. That's an economic profit. As suppliers make economic profits, more suppliers (i.e. singers, songwriters) will come into the market and undercut your higher prices. If you want to compete, you'll have to bring your prices down to that level too. In the long run in a free market, there are no economic profits; there is only a normal profit, in which the price exactly equals the marginal cost. Yet businesses continue to operate. Maybe you're just being whiny. Oh, and Article I Section 8 secures for limited times the exclusive right of production to reach the end goal of promoting the progress. It says NOTHING about revenue, royalties, et cetera. 5. I agree that I'd be willing to pay more for a song that meant more to me in my life. But you can't force such willingness from everyone; that's not how the market works. If they don't like your songs' prices, they'll find a cheaper product that's a reasonable substitute, until you bring down your prices likewise. 6. No, your songs aren't supposed to be your retirement. You certainly have the right to try to make money from your business. But you don't have the right to make money from your business automatically; that's not how a capitalistic free market works. If you find songwriting isn't bringing home enough bacon, once again, find another income source instead of crying rivers online, where few people are likely to be sympathetic to a failed business model.
So there's a commenter on that post named Rick Carnes who is supposedly a Huffington Post blogger, and he has put out some of the most misinformed tripe I've seen in a comments section on this sort of article; it's on the same level as some of the Anonymous Coward posts here. I've put together a line-by-line rebuttal which I hope to post (but may feel too lazy in the end, I don't know) there, and I'd like to post it here too.
"Get the facts... the loss from piracy is in the billions each year. "
[citation needed - that too, a citation from a REAL, independent study, not from an RIAA/MPAA-funded study]
"This is absolutely wrong... Read the bill, not propaganda." [in reference to the PROTECT IP Act]
THAT is absolutely wrong. Read the bill, not RIAA/MPAA-funded propaganda (which sadly resulted in the creation of that bill, in a way).
"In order to have a sustainable content creation eco-system you can't lower the price of the product below the price of creating the product. Beyond that, what are the ethics involved in allowing thieves to set the value of content? As a professional songwriter who has the price of the sale of my work set by the US Government via the Compulsory Mechanical license, and as a citizen who pays taxes on the earnings from my work, I expect the Government to protect my property by law and by enforcement. The "Simple Economics of Piracy" are this: Without property rights the fair value of goods cannot be established in the market place. So don't lecture creators about pricing until Intellectual property rights are enforced.Your argument is moot. "
It is true that in a market economy, you can't lower the price of the product below the price of creating the product. The problem is, the price of creating the product is actually the marginal cost of creating an extra copy of the product, not the fixed cost of producing the initial product. The marginal cost is essentially 0, so the price should be 0. It's up to you to figure out how to make money from related items in a market economy; if you say that you depend on an artificially inflated price set by the government to make money, frankly, you don't belong in a market economy. Also, you're putting two totally unrelated things together in the hopes that people will believe you: property protections and fair value for a product. As evidenced by the other sane comments, this won't work.
This actually reminds me of something I read somewhere recently (either in the Washington Post or in TIME magazine) which said that by late last decade, the Tories in the UK had drifted so far to the right that they needed David Cameron to become relevant again, and I would say that by US standards, for a Tory, David Cameron is left-of-center. Similarly, these Righthaven lawsuits have pushed the debate over copyright so far in favor of copyright maximalism that these verdicts have effectively brought the debate to the other side by actually expanding fair use.
So I actually wrote a paper about this sort of stuff for a class I took last semester about the history of technology in America. The basic premise is just to chronicle how the manufacturers of three modern technologies (compared to one old one) that have become the basis for huge innovation ecosystems (the Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft XBOX 360 Kinect, and Arduino, compared to the Ford Model T) have reacted to such third-party innovation. I had to look up a whole bunch of news articles for this, many of which were linked at TechDirt, but it's pretty clear that the Kinect and Arduino are the winners over the PlayStation 3, because Microsoft and Arduino encourage hacking (well, Microsoft initially didn't, but it realized the error of its ways), while Sony sues and silences hackers. If anyone's interested, I might be able to upload it for TechDirt viewing. :D
I'm not a serious content creator, by any means, so I'm not an expert at all on this. That said, I may have an idea regarding where to draw the line between appropriate attribution and attribution ad absurdum:
Treat every clip, work, or sample like a "black box". Attribute that sample to the foremost person (or, as in many cases, people) responsible for its existence. If it's something like a particular recording of a Beethoven symphony, attribute the conductor of that orchestra featured in that recording. That should be sufficient, because implicit in that attribution are the names of the other people involved in the work's existence; if someone was curious enough to further investigate, those people's names would show up in the credits for that particular work. So to summarize, attribute the one or two foremost people responsible for the "black box".
Oh, and I really liked the video! :D
Unfortunately, my family is pretty deeply entrenched with Sony, so it's probably futile for me to ask them to consider something like Samsung (they've considered Korean products inferior thanks to crappy Samsung & Hyundai products in the 1980s). That said, when I get around to buying these things, I will definitely be buying from companies like Samsung and HTC, NOT Sony.
On the post: And Here Comes The Video Game Backlash Due To The Norway Tragedy
Cause-Effect Relationship is Backwards
On the post: If Your Comment Section Is Awesome, It's Your Community's Fault
From XKCD
On the post: Associated Press Carelessness Reaches Boiling Point
Re: Math, eh...
(YEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!)
On the post: One More Time, With Feeling: Winklevii Lose Yet Again
If at first you don't succeed
On the post: Yes, Silicon Valley Is Filled With Trivial Startups... And That's A Good Thing
On the post: Managing IP Magazine Recognizes That Those Who Are Critical Of Intellectual Property Are Important To The Conversation
Re: Stakeholders versus Beneficiaries
On the post: Incubus Promotes New Album With Misguided Anti-Piracy 8-Bit Video Game?
Re: "Pirates Aren't Fans"
On the post: Marketing Music Through Non-Linear Communication: Accepting The Full Reality Of The Digital Age
Re: Re:
On the post: Why Piracy Happens: Because No One In Mexico Thinks Tron Legacy Is Worth Paying $136
Re: Re: OK I Lied
1. P = MC = 0, even for music. Also, in long-run equilibrium in a market economy, there are no economic profits only normal profits.
2. Stop whining about songwriting creating your retirement fund. It won't, and it's time you stopped living in such a fantasy.
3. Stop calling your customers "thieves". It'll only serve to further piss them off and turn them away from you.
4. As a businessperson, it's your job to figure out how to make money from the music business when the marginal cost of producing a copy of a song is 0. If you can't, leave the music business/industry.
How's that? Then again, how hard is it to just copy/paste what I wrote into the comment box on that article?
On the post: Ericsson Recognizes That 'Piracy' Isn't The Problem, But A Symptom Of Failed Business Models
Re: How soon until his bosses "restate" what he "meant"?
On the post: Why Piracy Happens: Because No One In Mexico Thinks Tron Legacy Is Worth Paying $136
OK I Lied
Anyway, I would love it if people (other than anonymous industry shills) could point out flaws in my argument so that I can further strengthen it. :)
On the post: Why Piracy Happens: Because No One In Mexico Thinks Tron Legacy Is Worth Paying $136
Part 3 of rebuttal to Rick Carnes
Nope. Marginal cost issues apply to music too. Why shouldn't they? Oh, because it's 0? Too bad. You need to be smart enough to figure out how to tie your music with an alternative business model that's more likely to win you revenue, and better yet, fans, or else you're not cut out for this business. No, the Beatles and Justin Bieber are not totally interchangeable (except in a few people's minds, I guess), but neither are apples and funnel cakes. What's your point? Oh right, you have none. And the price should never be covering the fixed costs - only the marginal costs. Now, if you're in an emerging market, then you're more likely to be able to make an economic profit, but if you're in an established market like the music industry, you're going to have to bring your prices down to meet the rest of the market. And if that means you're operating at a loss, you're going to have to either figure out a better business model to bring in new revenues from actual scarce goods, or you're going to have to live with that loss. This is true of any industry (though those industries have the benefit of being able to figure out more efficient and less costly production methods and stuff like that, which can't be applied to an already infinite, nonscarce good like digital music files). And what code? That makes no sense at all. Change the code, and you piss people off, and you're going to be worse off. And law enforcement has been overzealous in responding, if anything, what with the totally baseless ICE domain name seizures at the behest of the RIAA/MPAA (and almost all of those sites were totally legal to begin with, and some of them were even official music sites sponsored by the RIAA). Oh, and the compulsory license thing did come from radio. Read "Selling Radio" by Susan Smulyan (among other things). So why don't you do your research - oh right, all the facts will come out against your totally shill-full argument.
Ah, that felt good. I can sleep a little easier tonight.
On the post: Why Piracy Happens: Because No One In Mexico Thinks Tron Legacy Is Worth Paying $136
Part 2 of rebuttal to Rick Carnes
1. Then you need to find a second job or something to actually support your lifestyle and passions. If you think you can get by through simply writing songs (and yet you complain about living below the poverty line just through songwriting), you're sorely misguided. 2. The previous point still stands. 3. No, people DO want to pay for stuff. They just don't want to pay nearly as much as you're asking, and they want it to be more readily accessible as opposed to being totally locked up. And no, the law doesn't actually require payment for everything. I use Google every day, yet I don't pay a cent (directly) to Google. 4. That's an economic profit. As suppliers make economic profits, more suppliers (i.e. singers, songwriters) will come into the market and undercut your higher prices. If you want to compete, you'll have to bring your prices down to that level too. In the long run in a free market, there are no economic profits; there is only a normal profit, in which the price exactly equals the marginal cost. Yet businesses continue to operate. Maybe you're just being whiny. Oh, and Article I Section 8 secures for limited times the exclusive right of production to reach the end goal of promoting the progress. It says NOTHING about revenue, royalties, et cetera. 5. I agree that I'd be willing to pay more for a song that meant more to me in my life. But you can't force such willingness from everyone; that's not how the market works. If they don't like your songs' prices, they'll find a cheaper product that's a reasonable substitute, until you bring down your prices likewise. 6. No, your songs aren't supposed to be your retirement. You certainly have the right to try to make money from your business. But you don't have the right to make money from your business automatically; that's not how a capitalistic free market works. If you find songwriting isn't bringing home enough bacon, once again, find another income source instead of crying rivers online, where few people are likely to be sympathetic to a failed business model.
(This was part 2. Part 3 is coming right up.)
On the post: Why Piracy Happens: Because No One In Mexico Thinks Tron Legacy Is Worth Paying $136
Part 1 of rebuttal to Rick Carnes
"Get the facts... the loss from piracy is in the billions each year. "
[citation needed - that too, a citation from a REAL, independent study, not from an RIAA/MPAA-funded study]
"This is absolutely wrong... Read the bill, not propaganda." [in reference to the PROTECT IP Act]
THAT is absolutely wrong. Read the bill, not RIAA/MPAA-funded propaganda (which sadly resulted in the creation of that bill, in a way).
"In order to have a sustainable content creation eco-system you can't lower the price of the product below the price of creating the product. Beyond that, what are the ethics involved in allowing thieves to set the value of content? As a professional songwriter who has the price of the sale of my work set by the US Government via the Compulsory Mechanical license, and as a citizen who pays taxes on the earnings from my work, I expect the Government to protect my property by law and by enforcement. The "Simple Economics of Piracy" are this: Without property rights the fair value of goods cannot be established in the market place. So don't lecture creators about pricing until Intellectual property rights are enforced.Your argument is moot. "
It is true that in a market economy, you can't lower the price of the product below the price of creating the product. The problem is, the price of creating the product is actually the marginal cost of creating an extra copy of the product, not the fixed cost of producing the initial product. The marginal cost is essentially 0, so the price should be 0. It's up to you to figure out how to make money from related items in a market economy; if you say that you depend on an artificially inflated price set by the government to make money, frankly, you don't belong in a market economy. Also, you're putting two totally unrelated things together in the hopes that people will believe you: property protections and fair value for a product. As evidenced by the other sane comments, this won't work.
(This was part 1. Part 2 is coming right up.)
On the post: Righthaven Helping To Establish A Much More Expansive View Of Fair Use In Copying Newspaper Articles
On the post: Sony CEO: We Were Hacked By Freetards Who Just Want Everything Free
On the post: Is Copyright Needed To Stop Plagiarism?
Black box
Treat every clip, work, or sample like a "black box". Attribute that sample to the foremost person (or, as in many cases, people) responsible for its existence. If it's something like a particular recording of a Beethoven symphony, attribute the conductor of that orchestra featured in that recording. That should be sufficient, because implicit in that attribution are the names of the other people involved in the work's existence; if someone was curious enough to further investigate, those people's names would show up in the credits for that particular work. So to summarize, attribute the one or two foremost people responsible for the "black box".
Oh, and I really liked the video! :D
On the post: Infamous Rebecca Black YouTube Video 'Friday' Taken Down Over Copyright Issue?
On the post: ICE Declares 'Mission Accomplished' On Domain Seizures
On the post: While Sony Sues Modders, Samsung Sends Them Devices To Mod Faster
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