Actually "I could care less" is a perfectly valid idiom and in very common usage. No one ever said English had to make sense!
It's in same vein as saying to someone "yeah, tell me about it" when they relate to you a tale of woe - you actually mean "You don't need to tell me about it"!
Re: Re: Re: Even if "Take it for free!" was written in bold, red letters...
Absolutely, my comment was intended to point out what you need to do under the current system and should in no way be regarded as conferring my approval of said system ;-)
In fact I'm not sure there is any need for registration as such - how about if there were just some rules that say if you put a (c) on the front page/album cover/whatever then you've claimed copyright, otherwise it's PD?
OTOH an unenforceable law is no better than no law, so what say we just scrap the whole thing ;-)
Re: Even if "Take it for free!" was written in bold, red letters...
This is a reason I dislike Creative Commons. Not because it's trying to do something good, but it's doing it at the expense to believe copyright can't touch it.
I'm not sure what you mean by this - Creative Commons licenses are perfectly valid copyright licenses.
I agree with your general principle - if you want to give away your content, just putting "please take it" in a post somewhere doesn't really cut it - you really need a license linked to from every page so everyone knows where they stand - even if the license itself is no more complex than the WTFPL.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: So 'insiders' do work for techdirt
A shill or plant is a person who helps another person or organization to sell goods or services without disclosing that he or she has a close relationship with the seller. The shill pretends to have no association with the seller/group and gives onlookers the impression that he or she is an enthusiastic independent customer
Seriously dude, it's Wikipedia and the first result on Google. How does the person writing an article on Techdirt manage to do so whilst pretending to have no association with Techdirt? You're making no sense!
Several people have commented on whether bandwidth is limited or unlimited resource - all seem to be missing the key point. The question is not whether it is a limited resource - of course it is - the question is what is the nature of limit?
Bandwidth is fundamentally a matter of rate not quantity - if a network has a maximum throughput of, say, 1TB/sec and a thousand subscribers then each subscriber can have a 1GB/sec link. If it has ten thousand subscribers then each can have a 100MB/sec link and so on.
Tiers make perfect sense on the basis of connection speed - your ISP might offer a basic offering of 100MB/sec but if you want 1GB/sec you can have it for ten times as much - so you're paying for 10 subscribers worth of connection speed.
Now, I'm oversimplifying here since all networks oversubscribe to some extent as not all their subscribers will be constantly downloading at the maximum rate all at the same time. Oversubscription means you're sharing your connection speed with other people and causes you to experience a variable rate. If you have a 1GB/sec connection on a 1:50 ratio you have a maximum rate of 1GB/sec when you're the only one online out the 50 and a minimum rate of 20MB/sec (ouch!) when everyone is downloading at the same time. (In practice however, there is usually flexibility to spread the high-usage subscribers around the network so that no-one gets really slow connections for long, except where the network is under a lot a strain overall).
Tiers also make sense for contention ratios - pay more if you want a 1:20 ratio instead of 1:50. Perfectly reasonable.
Notice that download quantity has yet to make an appearance here. Quantities indirectly affect the average connection speed - if you're on a 1:50 ratio but everybody in your group only downloads email once a week then you can expect to nearly always get the maximum connection speed. As more people in your group do more online then your connection speed is more variable and is therefore lower on average.
Here's the clincher - when you're sold a connection it will always be on the basis of the maximum connection speed. It is not usually easy to even find out the contention ratio, much less the average rate you can expect. This means that you are already paying for a connection speed that you are almost certainly not getting most of the time. If your ISP is also charging for the amount you download, then they are effectively charging you twice for the same bytes!
"People will eventually come to accept that the US Constitution is an ancient out-dated document written by people with quaint, naive ideas that no longer apply to the corporate-led reality of the 21st century. Sure, some will complain, but once word gets around about how accident-prone such subversives tend to be ..."
You have to assume that the market would get flooded with copies very quickly and as a result the artist can only expect to sell just one original copy.
As a result he/she probably has to offer a very high initial price - maybe $10,000 - to make it worth the effort.
The problem is, no-one is going to pay an unknown artist $10,000 for anything - he is going to have to establish a reputation first. Assuming he doesn't opt for the traditional record contract, he is going to have to do this by giving away one or more albums for free before he can start selling under this Privateer system.
In practice that means that anyone wanting to use this system will be competing against all the free albums being produced by other up and coming artists. Something tells me that finding a buyer who is prepared to stump up 10K in this environment when they could just go and try another free album by a new artist instead is going to be a big ask.
What's the betting that when the details of the new proposal from the EU commission are revealed they will just happen to "clarify" that software is fully patentable in the EU?
Without respect, everyone will just move into your house, use your car without permission, and eat everything in your fridge. Oh yeah, they will shit on your sofa and kill your dog.
If we aren't going to have respect for some rights, why have them for any others?
Who decides which rights and laws you should respect? The government? The mega-corporations of the entertainment industry? Or you as an individual, and collectively as a society?
The reason why (most) people don't do the things you list above is not because of some vague notion of "respect". It's because they recognise implicitly that a society where people did such things is not a society that they would want to live in.
The same is not true at all when it comes to sharing and copying things. In fact the norm is for the exact opposite to be true. How many times have you borrowed a lawnmower or an electric drill or something from a friend or neighbour? If your neighbour happened to own an Acme Lawnmower Copying Machine - would it be wrong if he said "I can't lend you my lawnmower today, but why don't I run you up a copy?"
Sure, the lawnmower manufacturer might be put out by such a development. However if they're unwilling or unable to respond to the competition represented by Acme's fictional innovation, then that's *their* problem.
This might be true if the patents in question described actual useful innovations.
Unfortunately in these cases the "original inventors" are all two often lawyers themselves - who haven't invented anything at all, but who simply know the system well enough to craft carefully obfuscated patents that describe (or can later be claimed to describe) obvious broad concepts in various lucrative fields. They file these dozens at a time, knowing the overworked USPTO will let a least a few of them through - then use them to extort money from legitimate innovators.
As a UK citizen with a slight interest in politics, I'd like to point out that UK politicians do still have a lot of leeway. After all it would be difficult to figure out where to draw the line between outright lying and the sort of misrepresentation, wilful misinterpretation, innuendo and selective memory that is the stock in trade of politicians the world over!
What Woolas did, as I understand it, was to strongly suggest that his Lib-Dem opponent associated with Muslim terrorists and not just in an off-hand manner but in print in official election leaflets. The law he was convicted under is deliberately very narrow and specific and relates to attempts to skew public opinion by smearing opponent candidates' good character.
The key is the bit where it says "might make it easier to game".
No one knows if that's true or not, only that Google believes it. But their approach is essentially security by obscurity - which only really ensures that if someone does manage to game Google, they can stay under the radar more or less indefinitely.
On the other hand, if it is possible to produce a search engine algorithm that is impossible (or at least impractical) to game, then an open process, where everyone can see what's happening and suggest improvements to the algorithm, may be the best way to go about it.
Mount Sinai School of Medicine [...] were still able to get a patent and then license it to Genzyme.
I admit I don't know that much about patent licensing - but isn't it common practice to only give out an exclusive license in return for assurances that the licensee will be able to meet demand? If they're failing to do so, couldn't Mount Sinai withdraw their exclusivity and license out to other companies to make up the shortfall?
Other people have got in before me, but just to defend my corner ...
Yes, I know how an advance works and I understand the artist agreed to it (except where they were too naive to know what they were agreeing to, but if you swim with sharks you should expect to get bitten!).
My point is this is NOT a good deal for the artist, but it's a GREAT deal for the record company. It only works that way because there used to no other way to get a album made. That's not the case anymore.
I also accept that if in my example Simon drops the artist after the first album he "writes off" the $600,000. However he's not out of pocket, he's still made $1 million. The only time Simon loses money is if the artist sells less that 100,000 albums in which case he really does write off some of his investment. But then so would Peter so there's still no advantage there.
Really? In my experience, when you're dealing with fixed speed cameras (the majority as they don't require direct staffing and are so cheaper), everybody still speeds. They just slow down immediately before the camera's position then speed back up again afterwards.
The other thing is when you're going through an area with speed cameras what are you looking at?
Are you looking at the road, other vehicles pulling out of intersections, that young child just waiting to run out into road after her ball?
No, you're most probably looking at the speedometer. At least more than you should be.
I agree it's a good analogy. Let's expand upon it just so people can see how it works more clearly...
Imagine you're on "Dragon's Den" (you have that show in the US right?). Peter Jones wants to invest so he says "I'll give you $1 million, but I want 80% of the equity".
Now you use that million to make the album. It sells in the stores for $15 a pop, the retailer takes $5 and you get $10. You sell 200,000 albums so you make $2 million.
Peter has 80% equity so he gets his $1 million back along with $600,000 profit. You get $400,000 to spend on sex and drugs and all that.
Now imagine you go on American Idol instead. Simon Cowell gives you $1 million as an "advance". Just as before he expects 80% of the cut and you sell 200,000 albums and make $2 million.
Now Simon gets $1.6million and you get $400,000. EXCEPT Simon still wants his "advance" back. So you have to give him your $400,000 and you still owe him $600,000!
On the post: Another Court Rejects Idea That DMCA Requires Proactive Approach From Service Providers
Re: Re:
It's in same vein as saying to someone "yeah, tell me about it" when they relate to you a tale of woe - you actually mean "You don't need to tell me about it"!
On the post: Sometimes It's Better To Just Let People Copy Your Content Than Deal With Licensing
Re: Re: Re: Even if "Take it for free!" was written in bold, red letters...
In fact I'm not sure there is any need for registration as such - how about if there were just some rules that say if you put a (c) on the front page/album cover/whatever then you've claimed copyright, otherwise it's PD?
OTOH an unenforceable law is no better than no law, so what say we just scrap the whole thing ;-)
On the post: Sometimes It's Better To Just Let People Copy Your Content Than Deal With Licensing
Re: Even if "Take it for free!" was written in bold, red letters...
I'm not sure what you mean by this - Creative Commons licenses are perfectly valid copyright licenses.
I agree with your general principle - if you want to give away your content, just putting "please take it" in a post somewhere doesn't really cut it - you really need a license linked to from every page so everyone knows where they stand - even if the license itself is no more complex than the WTFPL.
On the post: Fantasy Island, Time Warner Style: You WANT To Pay More For Broadband
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: So 'insiders' do work for techdirt
Seriously dude, it's Wikipedia and the first result on Google. How does the person writing an article on Techdirt manage to do so whilst pretending to have no association with Techdirt? You're making no sense!
On the post: Fantasy Island, Time Warner Style: You WANT To Pay More For Broadband
Rate not quantity
Bandwidth is fundamentally a matter of rate not quantity - if a network has a maximum throughput of, say, 1TB/sec and a thousand subscribers then each subscriber can have a 1GB/sec link. If it has ten thousand subscribers then each can have a 100MB/sec link and so on.
Tiers make perfect sense on the basis of connection speed - your ISP might offer a basic offering of 100MB/sec but if you want 1GB/sec you can have it for ten times as much - so you're paying for 10 subscribers worth of connection speed.
Now, I'm oversimplifying here since all networks oversubscribe to some extent as not all their subscribers will be constantly downloading at the maximum rate all at the same time. Oversubscription means you're sharing your connection speed with other people and causes you to experience a variable rate. If you have a 1GB/sec connection on a 1:50 ratio you have a maximum rate of 1GB/sec when you're the only one online out the 50 and a minimum rate of 20MB/sec (ouch!) when everyone is downloading at the same time. (In practice however, there is usually flexibility to spread the high-usage subscribers around the network so that no-one gets really slow connections for long, except where the network is under a lot a strain overall).
Tiers also make sense for contention ratios - pay more if you want a 1:20 ratio instead of 1:50. Perfectly reasonable.
Notice that download quantity has yet to make an appearance here. Quantities indirectly affect the average connection speed - if you're on a 1:50 ratio but everybody in your group only downloads email once a week then you can expect to nearly always get the maximum connection speed. As more people in your group do more online then your connection speed is more variable and is therefore lower on average.
Here's the clincher - when you're sold a connection it will always be on the basis of the maximum connection speed. It is not usually easy to even find out the contention ratio, much less the average rate you can expect. This means that you are already paying for a connection speed that you are almost certainly not getting most of the time. If your ISP is also charging for the amount you download, then they are effectively charging you twice for the same bytes!
On the post: Fantasy Island, Time Warner Style: You WANT To Pay More For Broadband
How about ...
On the post: Rethinking Music Selling Incentives: Can A Pyramid Scheme Help Save Music Sales?
Gotta look at the bigger picture
As a result he/she probably has to offer a very high initial price - maybe $10,000 - to make it worth the effort.
The problem is, no-one is going to pay an unknown artist $10,000 for anything - he is going to have to establish a reputation first. Assuming he doesn't opt for the traditional record contract, he is going to have to do this by giving away one or more albums for free before he can start selling under this Privateer system.
In practice that means that anyone wanting to use this system will be competing against all the free albums being produced by other up and coming artists. Something tells me that finding a buyer who is prepared to stump up 10K in this environment when they could just go and try another free album by a new artist instead is going to be a big ask.
On the post: And Now Europe Feels The Need To Catch Up To China And The US In The Self-Destructive Patent Race
Software Patents
On the post: European Commission Sued By European Parliament Member Because Of ACTA Secrecy
Re: Re: Re: Re: Lawsuit vs ACTA
If we aren't going to have respect for some rights, why have them for any others?
Who decides which rights and laws you should respect? The government? The mega-corporations of the entertainment industry? Or you as an individual, and collectively as a society?
The reason why (most) people don't do the things you list above is not because of some vague notion of "respect". It's because they recognise implicitly that a society where people did such things is not a society that they would want to live in.
The same is not true at all when it comes to sharing and copying things. In fact the norm is for the exact opposite to be true. How many times have you borrowed a lawnmower or an electric drill or something from a friend or neighbour? If your neighbour happened to own an Acme Lawnmower Copying Machine - would it be wrong if he said "I can't lend you my lawnmower today, but why don't I run you up a copy?"
Sure, the lawnmower manufacturer might be put out by such a development. However if they're unwilling or unable to respond to the competition represented by Acme's fictional innovation, then that's *their* problem.
On the post: More Patents That Have Touched Both Intellectual Ventures And Ocean Tomo Showing Up In Lawsuits
Re:
Unfortunately in these cases the "original inventors" are all two often lawyers themselves - who haven't invented anything at all, but who simply know the system well enough to craft carefully obfuscated patents that describe (or can later be claimed to describe) obvious broad concepts in various lucrative fields. They file these dozens at a time, knowing the overworked USPTO will let a least a few of them through - then use them to extort money from legitimate innovators.
On the post: US Investigators Can't Find Any Direct Connection Between Manning And Assange
Re: Re:
That can't be a coincidence surely?
On the post: UK Politician Tossed Out Of Parliament For Lying About Opponent During Election
Lying Politicians
What Woolas did, as I understand it, was to strongly suggest that his Lib-Dem opponent associated with Muslim terrorists and not just in an off-hand manner but in print in official election leaflets. The law he was convicted under is deliberately very narrow and specific and relates to attempts to skew public opinion by smearing opponent candidates' good character.
On the post: Is Google's Closed Nature Its Achilles Heel?
Re: How does this make sense?
No one knows if that's true or not, only that Google believes it. But their approach is essentially security by obscurity - which only really ensures that if someone does manage to game Google, they can stay under the radar more or less indefinitely.
On the other hand, if it is possible to produce a search engine algorithm that is impossible (or at least impractical) to game, then an open process, where everyone can see what's happening and suggest improvements to the algorithm, may be the best way to go about it.
On the post: Is Paul Allen's Patent Madness Really An Attempt To Show The Madness Of Patents?
Re: Just a warning to Apple and the others
On the post: Patents Getting In The Way Of Saving Lives; Fabry Disease Sufferers Petition US Gov't To Step In
I admit I don't know that much about patent licensing - but isn't it common practice to only give out an exclusive license in return for assurances that the licensee will be able to meet demand? If they're failing to do so, couldn't Mount Sinai withdraw their exclusivity and license out to other companies to make up the shortfall?
On the post: A Million Dollar Record Deal Is Probably Not What You Think It Is
Re: Re: Re:
Yes, I know how an advance works and I understand the artist agreed to it (except where they were too naive to know what they were agreeing to, but if you swim with sharks you should expect to get bitten!).
My point is this is NOT a good deal for the artist, but it's a GREAT deal for the record company. It only works that way because there used to no other way to get a album made. That's not the case anymore.
I also accept that if in my example Simon drops the artist after the first album he "writes off" the $600,000. However he's not out of pocket, he's still made $1 million. The only time Simon loses money is if the artist sells less that 100,000 albums in which case he really does write off some of his investment. But then so would Peter so there's still no advantage there.
On the post: The Beginning Of The End For Speed Cameras In The UK?
Re: Re: They work ok here.., in Oz
The other thing is when you're going through an area with speed cameras what are you looking at?
Are you looking at the road, other vehicles pulling out of intersections, that young child just waiting to run out into road after her ball?
No, you're most probably looking at the speedometer. At least more than you should be.
On the post: A Million Dollar Record Deal Is Probably Not What You Think It Is
Re:
Imagine you're on "Dragon's Den" (you have that show in the US right?). Peter Jones wants to invest so he says "I'll give you $1 million, but I want 80% of the equity".
Now you use that million to make the album. It sells in the stores for $15 a pop, the retailer takes $5 and you get $10. You sell 200,000 albums so you make $2 million.
Peter has 80% equity so he gets his $1 million back along with $600,000 profit. You get $400,000 to spend on sex and drugs and all that.
Now imagine you go on American Idol instead. Simon Cowell gives you $1 million as an "advance". Just as before he expects 80% of the cut and you sell 200,000 albums and make $2 million.
Now Simon gets $1.6million and you get $400,000. EXCEPT Simon still wants his "advance" back. So you have to give him your $400,000 and you still owe him $600,000!
On the post: Putting Press Releases Online? Patented! Lots Of Small Companies Sued
Re: New rule
That should put a stop to them just rubber-stamping this crap through.
On the post: Composer Jason Robert Brown Still Standing By His Position That Kids Sharing His Music Are Immoral
Re: Re: Re: Re:
So if copyright law as it stands fails to promote the progress then it is unconstitutional.
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