Ha. Good point. Maybe Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer was frozen in the first place because he couldn't protect the rights of the cave painters and they went out of business because of all the piracy.
Re: Re: The CD will outlast you, Mr Grainge, but not in the way you think
Isn't corporate PR fun?
Ah, how silly of me. I wasn't in the "What is is?" mode of thinking when I read his statement (as obviously he was when he said it). It's all so clear now! ;-)
The CD will outlast you, Mr Grainge, but not in the way you think
"I believe that the CD will out-survive me as a format," Mr. Grainge said in an interview.
Or maybe he realizes that it's already too late to save Universal Music and he'll be sacked in a few months just in time for the CD to die a bit later.
"If people can't be paid for their creativity, they're going to stop being creative."
Not that I can top the "Dubber Timms Drubbing", but the other item that reveals Timms' statement as utter falsehood is the simple fact that artwork was around long before people received formal payments. Cavemen didn't have lawyers to ensure that the copyrights on their cavepaintings were protected. Humans create art because it's part of what makes us human.
I do agree that the NYT needs to find something that will make them money in light of peoples' perception that they shouldn't have to pay for their product. However, I think they haven't found a solution yet because a lot of the obvious ideas just flat out don't work or have serious flaws. Case in point...
They could make their RSS feed part of the pay service.
Consumer: "Fine, I'll just go to a site that offers an RSS feed for free."
Offering customers instant updates, article previews, corrections, status updates, breaking news, and editorial columns. Becoming a member could afford people an opportunity to post comments to news stories and get discounts on their regular dead-tree format circulation.
For the things like breaking news, I think there's no way that they would/should put this behind the paywall. There's just too much emphasis on breaking a story in the news world. Can you image a scenario where the NYT breaks a huge story, but it's only available to paid subscribers? Every other news agency would jump all over the story and publish their own versions. And no one would know that it was the NYT that broke the story.
What I think the NYT might have a chance with it stuff that would be valuable to the hard core fan. Maybe the discounts to the physical newspaper. But they've tried stuff like that in the past -- newsroom tours and access to back archives -- and that didn't work either.
With the right connections, they could even offer special deals on tickets to shows and events, or even coupon codes for shopping online at other retailers.
Special promotions and coupons are just forms of advertising and no advertiser is going to want to lock up their ads behind a payway.
Right, but the problem facing the NY Times is that the psychological price that most people give to news is $0.00. In fact, this is nothing new. When you used to pay a quarter for a newspaper, that quarter was not paying for the newspaper. It was all of the ads in the newspaper that were subsidizing the newspaper. So, actually it was quite easy for people to go from "news is mostly free" to "news is free".
So, should the NY Times sell popsicles? The answer is...well, they need to sell something that is scarce. It's not a matter of the subjective opinion of Mike or any particular person on what the NYT should do. It's an objective observation that they need to do something given the current environment.
Very interesting letter from OK Go. If TD hasn't already commented in this, I think it'd be worth it.
"So the money that used to flow through the music business has slowed to a trickle, and every label, large or small, is scrambling to catch every last drop. You can't blame them; they need new shoes, just like everybody else. And musicians need them to survive so we can use them as banks. Even bands like us who do most of our own promotion still need them to write checks every once in a while."
Yes, yes, you can blame them. And no, no you don't need them as banks. Bands need a means to fund their studio work and a way to promote their music. But to assume that the recording industry is the only way to do this is just, well quite surprising from a band that has benefited so much from a non-traditional form of promotion.
They are only doing it wrong if it doesn't work. You don't know that yet.
Whether or not it works is only one factor in the equation. What about cost? What about good will? What about how much it would work? What EMI are doing is stomping out the grassroots effort only to replace it with astroturf. It's should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer that a grassroots effort that came about organicially from fans would be cheaper, more well-received, and far more effective than a manufactured effort by the record label.
So, literally speaking, yes..we won't know until we see the results. But do you honestly believe that an artificial campaign will work better than what OK GO experienced with their first viral video? That was a proven success. Why mes with it?
So, this is probably a clear case of it not being trademark infringement and the school (I assume) is not making or selling automobiles and the automobile maker is not running an educational facility.
If it were 20 or more years ago, I'd agree with you without any further debate. But today, public schools have become so much more commercialized. No, a public school is not selling trucks, but I think that trademark law includes aspects of sponsorship or perceived affiliation as well. Specifically, even a moron in a hurry wouldn't think that the school was selling Dodge vehicles just because of the logo. But...might not a reasonable person assume that there was some sponsorship of the school by Dodge or some official affiliation with the company? I think it's at least possible. And in that respect, there could be some consumer confusion which falls under the umbrella of trademark law.
In the end, it is saying "those who steal from you or misuse your products aren't bad, you are bad because you were too stupid to give it away for free already".
There is a key difference between what you're saying above and what Mike actually says. Mike doesn't say that illegal downloads/copyright infringers/etc are not "bad" of what they're doing is not illegal. What he does say is that the subjective issue of the morality of their actions are irrelevent to the issue of making money. You're falling into the trap of getting focused on whether a certain behavior infringes on the rights of a company, when the goal of a company should be to make money, not to protect every one of their rights. Would you rather invest in a company that did the "right" thing and squandered all of its assets chasing down "thieves" or one that embraced the current business environment and found out a way to make money in it?
The least the school could have done was put "Dodge" under the logo.
"Dodge" is a verb, so in order to come up with a team name, you have to change it to a noun. How about Dodgers? No one would have a problem with that, right?
But that's precisely why the story about the French governemnt agency was so newsworthy. Yes, anyone can tell that the two ram logos are the same. But the irony in the French government story came because the French government wants to hold other people accountable for aspects of the law that only a copyright lawyer would be familiar with, but not themselves. So, no, most people don't know the difference between different fonts or are even aware that there could be copyright issues. But the very government that is saying that everyone should know didn't know themselves.
The blip that Mike referred to is the total effect of illegal movie downloads on Blockbuster business. I think this is accurate because the large majority of movies that a person downloaded illegally would not have been rented, from Blockbuster, Netflix, or anyone else. So, while illegal downloading of movies may indeed be "rampant", the issues facing Blockbuster that caused the most problems -- Redbox, Netflix, etc. -- overshadowed the effect of illegal downloading.
Again, I don't see any inconsistancy or evidence of bias here.
"Rampant" and "blip" are not mutually exclusive. You can have a very large number of illegal movie downloads ("rampant"), but they can still be a relatively small part of the entire movie industry and its sales ("blip"). You may disagree on the size of the impact of illegal downloads, but taken at face value, the original statement is consistant.
So wait, are you saying that there is almost no downloading of movies online?
In a way, I respect that you present an opposing viewpoint to the TechDirt comments, but I have to agree with IronMask on this one. How you can go from "blip" to "almost no downloading of movies" is beyond me. It's either a fundamental misunderstanding of the term "blip" or an intentional misreading.
I'd disagree with this. The reason they are struggling is because they've spent so long getting good at telling people what they should want, and hitting a low enough common denominator that the people who were dissatisfied didn't seem to matter.
I think we're essentially on the same page. But there is one key difference. I think you'd say that the recording industry has not been giving "the people" what they want. I think that they have been. Look at the popularity of Brittany Spears and her ilk. Maybe people are buying her music because they don't have a choice, but if it's just that why do people celebrate its banality as much as they do? They don't begrudgingly accept the publum being fed to them by the recording industry; they embrace it.
They've failed because they spent so much time freaking out about the "free" aspect about it and trying to protect their now-undermined models, they didn't notice that customers were telling them what they actually wanted.
Again, I think we're mostly in agreement. However, I think that up until recently, what "the people" wanted and what the industry thought that they wanted were mostly the same thing. The Internet not only changed people's attitude about how they wanted to access and consume music, but the quality of the music. People realizing that there is actually good music out there, that's the real revolution.
"The problem with always giving the people what they want is that you become blind to when they want something different."
To me, this summarizes the common problem of the recording industry and the publishing industry. They built up an infrastructure that was very very good at delivering the lowest common denominator that appealed to the most people. But the very kind of organization that is optimized to do this well isn't in a position to either actually see a dramatic change in their market or to properly react to it. It's nice and warm in the cocoon, so why take the risk of turning into a butterfly?
They appeared to smirk through their interviews, as if they knew what they were saying was ridiculous, and the whole thing was all about getting as much money as possible, rather than having anything to do with fairness or creating art.
The lawyers were bad enough. After all, a lawyer's job in most cases it about getting as much money as possible. What really drove me nuts was the guy that sounded like he was some kind of record producer who equated sampling with unoriginal copying. If anyone can do it, as he claimed, why isn't everyone doing it? The simple answer is that many people try and few actually produce an end product that people want to here. Do I think that MC Hammer and Sean Combs are the most original artists out there? No, but they made something that had a good beat and was easy to dance too. And that counts for a lot.
It does seem like the issue of evidence admissibility is a showstopper. You can make a case that people are savvy enough now to read between the lines in a biased story in a newspaper article about the case, but in terms of people getting online and reading about inadmissible evidence, the whole issue gets much more complicated. What are you going to do? Totally sequester a jury for the entirety of the case because it's just too tempting not to look up the details when everything is at your fingertips? That's just not practical. At some point, you're going to have to rely on people to be responsible and not look up this information.
Maybe today a stern command from the judge just isn't enough. Maybe you'd actually have to explain to people why it's a bad idea to look up information about the case. It seems silly, but maybe a little civics lesson would help.
On the post: Digital Britain Minister Insists No One Is Creative If They Don't Earn Money
Re: Re: Art precedes payments
On the post: Universal Music Gets A New CEO... Who Thinks CDs Are The Future
Re: Re: The CD will outlast you, Mr Grainge, but not in the way you think
Ah, how silly of me. I wasn't in the "What is is?" mode of thinking when I read his statement (as obviously he was when he said it). It's all so clear now! ;-)
On the post: Universal Music Gets A New CEO... Who Thinks CDs Are The Future
The CD will outlast you, Mr Grainge, but not in the way you think
Or maybe he realizes that it's already too late to save Universal Music and he'll be sacked in a few months just in time for the CD to die a bit later.
On the post: Digital Britain Minister Insists No One Is Creative If They Don't Earn Money
Art precedes payments
Not that I can top the "Dubber Timms Drubbing", but the other item that reveals Timms' statement as utter falsehood is the simple fact that artwork was around long before people received formal payments. Cavemen didn't have lawyers to ensure that the copyrights on their cavepaintings were protected. Humans create art because it's part of what makes us human.
On the post: Behavioral Economist Dan Ariely Explains The Problem With The NY Times Paywall
Re:
They could make their RSS feed part of the pay service.
Consumer: "Fine, I'll just go to a site that offers an RSS feed for free."
Offering customers instant updates, article previews, corrections, status updates, breaking news, and editorial columns. Becoming a member could afford people an opportunity to post comments to news stories and get discounts on their regular dead-tree format circulation.
For the things like breaking news, I think there's no way that they would/should put this behind the paywall. There's just too much emphasis on breaking a story in the news world. Can you image a scenario where the NYT breaks a huge story, but it's only available to paid subscribers? Every other news agency would jump all over the story and publish their own versions. And no one would know that it was the NYT that broke the story.
What I think the NYT might have a chance with it stuff that would be valuable to the hard core fan. Maybe the discounts to the physical newspaper. But they've tried stuff like that in the past -- newsroom tours and access to back archives -- and that didn't work either.
With the right connections, they could even offer special deals on tickets to shows and events, or even coupon codes for shopping online at other retailers.
Special promotions and coupons are just forms of advertising and no advertiser is going to want to lock up their ads behind a payway.
On the post: Behavioral Economist Dan Ariely Explains The Problem With The NY Times Paywall
Re: What could be offered
Right, but the problem facing the NY Times is that the psychological price that most people give to news is $0.00. In fact, this is nothing new. When you used to pay a quarter for a newspaper, that quarter was not paying for the newspaper. It was all of the ads in the newspaper that were subsidizing the newspaper. So, actually it was quite easy for people to go from "news is mostly free" to "news is free".
So, should the NY Times sell popsicles? The answer is...well, they need to sell something that is scarce. It's not a matter of the subjective opinion of Mike or any particular person on what the NYT should do. It's an objective observation that they need to do something given the current environment.
On the post: EMI Tries Fake Word Of Mouth Campaign To Promote Ok Go
Re:
"So the money that used to flow through the music business has slowed to a trickle, and every label, large or small, is scrambling to catch every last drop. You can't blame them; they need new shoes, just like everybody else. And musicians need them to survive so we can use them as banks. Even bands like us who do most of our own promotion still need them to write checks every once in a while."
Yes, yes, you can blame them. And no, no you don't need them as banks. Bands need a means to fund their studio work and a way to promote their music. But to assume that the recording industry is the only way to do this is just, well quite surprising from a band that has benefited so much from a non-traditional form of promotion.
On the post: EMI Tries Fake Word Of Mouth Campaign To Promote Ok Go
Whether or not it works is only one factor in the equation. What about cost? What about good will? What about how much it would work? What EMI are doing is stomping out the grassroots effort only to replace it with astroturf. It's should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer that a grassroots effort that came about organicially from fans would be cheaper, more well-received, and far more effective than a manufactured effort by the record label.
So, literally speaking, yes..we won't know until we see the results. But do you honestly believe that an artificial campaign will work better than what OK GO experienced with their first viral video? That was a proven success. Why mes with it?
On the post: Would A Moron In A Hurry Be Confused By The Difference Between A High School And A Pickup Truck?
Re: Re: Copyright laws are funny things...
If it were 20 or more years ago, I'd agree with you without any further debate. But today, public schools have become so much more commercialized. No, a public school is not selling trucks, but I think that trademark law includes aspects of sponsorship or perceived affiliation as well. Specifically, even a moron in a hurry wouldn't think that the school was selling Dodge vehicles just because of the logo. But...might not a reasonable person assume that there was some sponsorship of the school by Dodge or some official affiliation with the company? I think it's at least possible. And in that respect, there could be some consumer confusion which falls under the umbrella of trademark law.
On the post: Would A Moron In A Hurry Be Confused By The Difference Between A High School And A Pickup Truck?
Re: Re: Re: Missd the train again
There is a key difference between what you're saying above and what Mike actually says. Mike doesn't say that illegal downloads/copyright infringers/etc are not "bad" of what they're doing is not illegal. What he does say is that the subjective issue of the morality of their actions are irrelevent to the issue of making money. You're falling into the trap of getting focused on whether a certain behavior infringes on the rights of a company, when the goal of a company should be to make money, not to protect every one of their rights. Would you rather invest in a company that did the "right" thing and squandered all of its assets chasing down "thieves" or one that embraced the current business environment and found out a way to make money in it?
On the post: Would A Moron In A Hurry Be Confused By The Difference Between A High School And A Pickup Truck?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Would A Moron In A Hurry Be Confused By The Difference Between A High School And A Pickup Truck?
Re: Re:
"Dodge" is a verb, so in order to come up with a team name, you have to change it to a noun. How about Dodgers? No one would have a problem with that, right?
On the post: Would A Moron In A Hurry Be Confused By The Difference Between A High School And A Pickup Truck?
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Blockbuster Blames 'Piracy' Rather Than Bad Strategy For Bankruptcy In Portugal
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Again, I don't see any inconsistancy or evidence of bias here.
On the post: Blockbuster Blames 'Piracy' Rather Than Bad Strategy For Bankruptcy In Portugal
Re: Re:
On the post: Blockbuster Blames 'Piracy' Rather Than Bad Strategy For Bankruptcy In Portugal
Re:
In a way, I respect that you present an opposing viewpoint to the TechDirt comments, but I have to agree with IronMask on this one. How you can go from "blip" to "almost no downloading of movies" is beyond me. It's either a fundamental misunderstanding of the term "blip" or an intentional misreading.
On the post: Former Music Exec Tells Book Publishers They're Acting Just Like The Recording Industry 10 Years Ago
Re: Re: Cocoon
I think we're essentially on the same page. But there is one key difference. I think you'd say that the recording industry has not been giving "the people" what they want. I think that they have been. Look at the popularity of Brittany Spears and her ilk. Maybe people are buying her music because they don't have a choice, but if it's just that why do people celebrate its banality as much as they do? They don't begrudgingly accept the publum being fed to them by the recording industry; they embrace it.
They've failed because they spent so much time freaking out about the "free" aspect about it and trying to protect their now-undermined models, they didn't notice that customers were telling them what they actually wanted.
Again, I think we're mostly in agreement. However, I think that up until recently, what "the people" wanted and what the industry thought that they wanted were mostly the same thing. The Internet not only changed people's attitude about how they wanted to access and consume music, but the quality of the music. People realizing that there is actually good music out there, that's the real revolution.
On the post: Former Music Exec Tells Book Publishers They're Acting Just Like The Recording Industry 10 Years Ago
Cocoon
To me, this summarizes the common problem of the recording industry and the publishing industry. They built up an infrastructure that was very very good at delivering the lowest common denominator that appealed to the most people. But the very kind of organization that is optimized to do this well isn't in a position to either actually see a dramatic change in their market or to properly react to it. It's nice and warm in the cocoon, so why take the risk of turning into a butterfly?
On the post: Remix Culture Is About The Culture As Much As The Remix
All art is infringement
The lawyers were bad enough. After all, a lawyer's job in most cases it about getting as much money as possible. What really drove me nuts was the guy that sounded like he was some kind of record producer who equated sampling with unoriginal copying. If anyone can do it, as he claimed, why isn't everyone doing it? The simple answer is that many people try and few actually produce an end product that people want to here. Do I think that MC Hammer and Sean Combs are the most original artists out there? No, but they made something that had a good beat and was easy to dance too. And that counts for a lot.
On the post: Why Shouldn't Jurors Be Able To Use Technology To Do More Research?
Re: Evidence admissibility
Maybe today a stern command from the judge just isn't enough. Maybe you'd actually have to explain to people why it's a bad idea to look up information about the case. It seems silly, but maybe a little civics lesson would help.
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