Having had the pleasure of working in the news biz when I was younger before I learned that I couldn't really earn much of a living from it and went on to something else I'd like to say something here.
There is no such thing as neutral journalism. Never has been, never will be.
Factual is another matter and in North America and western Europe most outlets content themselves with that, at least story by story. But neutral? Never.
Say you work in a newsroom where it's unanimously considered that the town council are a bunch of jerks. It's easy to write a factual story in such a way that the opinion comes through loud and clear or, where a reporter tries hard, to kinda hide it. At the same time human beings are full of opinions and how they view the world and most don't bother to hide it because that is buried deep in their being and that's what they write from even if the story is factual and contains no obvious opinions the reporter has. Most of us have learned to filter that out.
So I can read the National Post (in Canada) and admire the quality of the writing and reportage while filtering out the right of centre views of the paper and its staff. Then read the Victoria Times-Colonist and I filter out the left of centre bias that's built in to most of their factual stories and despair for the future of journalism because I find the quality of the writing and reportage to be so poor.
Where opinion shows, after the infamous "if it bleeds it leads", is the order the stories are presented in. What's top of the newscast on a private radio station may not be what's top of newscast on the CBC even if they are reading the same stories. The same applies to newspapers in the editor's choice of what does and doesn't land on the front page. Even if all the stories are factually correct.
In short we have a pretense of neutrality while we accept all the examples that plainly say the outlet isn't neutral at all and filter for that, too. Of course, from our own biases, ethics, opinions and world view.
They Libyans will end up there in time. It's in the interests of the "press" themselves there that they end up that way simply to sell themselves to a certain audience in the country. Much as media does in North America and Western Europe. In fact, from Leigh's piece that may be starting to happen already as the "press" experiments with things like self-censorship, public pressure and other influences as they line up with certain groups.
That the newly free "press" hasn't moved from advocacy to even a pretense of neutrality I'm not surprised as it's been very recently that the chains were taken off and the country changed beyond recognition of what was there before.
They're learning on the fly and, in the end, what they end up with will be something Libyans accept as responsible and accurate reporting (note that I didn't say unbiased or without opinion) so that they can have faith that what they read, see or hear is factually correct if nothing else.
It doesn't matter one whit what we think about what they end up with just as long as it isn't censored or controlled by their government. Put another way, that it's free.
By the way when I write "press" here I'm referring to all media forms, printed, radio, television and Web.
The hopeful part of this is that the frustration is occurring from one end of the political spectrum to the other. Now if we could get the professional politicians and their apologists (here and elsewhere) to understand that.
Where this falls on its face is that just who is an "accredited" musician, who decides what is an "approved" site and just who wants to jump through the hoops?
Your vision seems to be to be a .movies TLD that the MPAA and its partners and members run and only them. And undoubtedly .music would be run solely by the RIAA and its partners and members. For all practical purposes, then, TLDs that are nothing more than ad servers for the part of the "content" industry that the TLD might, just might, affect negatively.
Hardly a reliable brand or a good way to do branding.
All of what you want is already out there on the Web. There is no need to duplicate it except, as you are indicating, handing these TLDs to the "content" industry.
I can't think of an independent artist who would want any part of those TLDs under those circumstances. All you want to do is re-establish the gatekeeper position the "content" industry has enjoyed for better than a century. Collectively their brands aren't considered reliable or attractive anymore except in their dream worlds and yours.
What you say may, indeed, turn out to be the case. But I'm not sure that, where diagnostic tools are concerned, there would be much of a lag between the initial discovery by Firm A and independent discovery by Firm B. If Firm A charges more than the market wants to support then that provides the incentive for Firm B to do whatever research may be necessary. Or for Firm B to simply build on what Firm A is holding as a trade secret.
Then again what occurs in nature has long been held to be not patentable and all that the US Supreme Court has done is reaffirm that. Essentially nothing has changed except that the court has corrected a ruling by a lower court. If some biotech companies are dependent on patents on natural processes and known diagnostic routines then it's time they broke their addiction to patents or, for that matter, trade secrets.
If they service what they know at reasonable cost then the incentive for Firm B to reinvent their wheel will be far less than if they are perceived as charging too much.
Most don't remember it because it was popularly known as Compu$pend. ;-)
I sat out all the noise around AOL vs Prodigy/Compu$pend because both seriously limited my ability to get around on the Web unlike what I got from my ISP. As long as I was doing dialup at 48K I wanted to go where I wanted to go, not where they wanted me to go.
And yes, eventually the Telco's got DSL to work to the house over 1000 ft and the Cablecos got their high speed up and running, even if it slowed to a crawl between 4-7pm when everyone got home at first.
Even back then you could order tools and appliances and they'd get delivered. Even then there was a ton of file sharing going on though mostly text, short video clips and the odd song.
If the "content" industry had any sense at all they could see the present day coming. After all, even pre DSL days they'd send rushes from Vancouver to LA across T3's using the Web.
Back then the Web was something retail couldn't make head or tails of. They couldn't figure out that building a brick and mortar like mall site wouldn't work, though Lord knows they tried. They couldn't figure out why their intrusive ads didn't work or would lead to nasty letters to advertisers.
Almost all of retail eventually got it with a lot of stumbles along the way Google figured out how to serve ads without pissing people off. The rest of the advertising biz figured out the web isn't television and we don't have the same tolerance for animated dancing bears.
Amazon, bless or curse them, basically reinvented the mall for the web.
But the "content" industry just didn't get it and still hasn't. Instead of making music and film easy to get at prices people will pay they've hung onto outmoded ways of doing business and the times people could get things they felt ripped off by the prices.
It's not as much that people expect to get what they want at the click of a button as the market (people) expect vendors (the *AAs) adapt to how they want to shop rather than adopt to them. When it didn't happen it went underground. The market will get what the market wants. Pure and simple. Where there's a demand someone, somewhere will fill it.
To be honest I'm astonished that the "content" industry itself didn't fill the demand years ago. Instead they chose to fight the new marketplace. That's certainly their privilege but instead of effectively wiping out "piracy" years ago by supplying the demand they didn't. Now, I suspect, they've made so many enemies in that marketplace they can't sell into the market under their own name even IF they finally get it and the supply is there when someone wants to click the button to get a Tool record.
That's not entitlement, it's supply and demand and the way markets work. Yes, the artist(s) want to be paid. And so they should be. But instead of blaming people file sharing perhaps they should blame their labels. In fact that's who they ought to blame.
Instead some sound like old men who decry the better days when they were young and look back at something that never was. If Keenan wants to sell on line go for it. If he wants to make money then do it and if his label won't he should be jumping up and down screaming at them. Not longing for "the good old days".
Most often, and since software patents are often assigned to non practicing entities who use them as weapons when someone else has the idea and implements it it's waste of economic activity.
Or silly things like the "one click" patent for which there were mountain ranges of prior art only it seems the patent examiner either ignored it or was too ignorant to know.
Well, bands have always made money by gigging, selling t-shirts and, yes, stickers. They sure as hell don't get much, if any, from the labels.
As we've said if the labels would at least figure out that the market has changed and actually sell into it instead of holding on like grim death to a model that worked pre Web and complaining bitterly when the market wants to get the music, can't then gets it any way it can.
If you can't find depth or value out there these days it's not anyone's fault but your own. There's lots of it there.
I hate to remind you of the uncomfortable fact that many bands and individuals got rich in the 60s,70s and 80s churning out no-effort pop music. Go find an old K-Tel collection and you'll find it there, any genre you pick.
Most pop music never has had much in the way of lyrics with emotional or intellectual value particularly the latter as that's not the reason people listen to it or want to listen to it. Singers didn't have to sing back then either because producers would splice together a number of takes of the vocal tracks so it sounded like the singer actually hit all the notes right, pre AutoTune Autotune.
I'm not going to bow to your superior tastes in music and ability to judge it because I just don't care. People are connecting to music for some reason, usually emotional, and it that's not up to your standards too bad. That doesn't make them retards except somewhere in your mind.
Both you and Keenan remind me of the old men I listened to as kid who kept saying how hard they had it, walking to school up to their hips in snow, barefoot with only baloney sandwiches for lunch. They were full of crap then and the two of you are full of it now.
To say that it is held up in fact isn't true, unless you can cite it or have some valid statistics to show it.
Mulligan's "discovery" doesn't count as valid statistics. It's a start but not much else. And not all file lockers are Hotfile. Or, even, Megaupload though there's still not much evidence one way or another about that.
If we're going to move to so-called cloud computing then file lockers are going to be a reality. I'm not going to store files on line if Mulligan's notion of an ISP assuming guilt before innocence for anyone and any locker. I'm not even talking about illegal content, I'm talking about ANY content be it a silly document of a story I'm trying to write, to a song I'm trying to put together or whatever. Or my accounts. Not that I'm planning any of that soon but if Mulligan's view becomes the majority view among ISPs then I won't because I don't want them peeking at every upload and download I make.
I'm not even sure that if I did what Mulligan did that I'd even want 90% of what he found. The missing piece is is this stuff being downloaded and how often.
So we're dealing with speculation here which you're parading as fact.
The restrictions on non-Canadian content came about in the late 60s and early 70s and even then, for radio, it amounts to radio stations playing something like a minimum of 25% Cancon, as we call it here. Canadian musicians are doing so well globally now that while it was hard to fill that quota when Cancon started now it's hard not to or keep down to the minimum. TV does the same and while the private networks still complain about how much it costs them to produce shows the CBC is 100% Cancon now. Well, supposed to be by their own PR statements. The private networks are getting much better at the programs they produce now and while it's still expensive, they're no longer pale imitations of American shows and sell well overseas.
If what you're complaining about is the imposition of the Canadian channel over the American one on cable when they're on at the same time that's always been boneheaded and stupid. About they only thing different we see are the ads and only some of those.
Anyway, it's not that non-Canadian material is never heard on broadcast and cable, it doesn't even have to be the majority of what's broadcast. In music it's really not needed now and for television, well, who knows when we'll grow up enough to make good English tv programming because we do make excellent French tv programming that sells world wide.
And no, it's not the creators of American. French or British TV, music and radio who are doing something wrong. For English Canada it's our deep seated inferiority complex that leads us to say we can't do as well and the Yanks, Brits, and Aussies. In French Canada which isn't just Quebec, they don't seem to have that in comparison with France and they've done wonderfully.
The incredibly stupid thing about the windowing and agreements they make is that often, in places near or virtually on the US border up here in Canada can pick up broadcasts we're NOT allowed to see on line because of some agreement with a Canadian cable network.
It's as if the "content" industry hasn't figured out that the Web changed regional markets to global ones. Not just for English speakers but for just about any major linguistic group you can think of.
Punjabi speakers want Bollywood in North America and the UK. Chinese speakers pretty much globally. The same applies to Spanish and Russian speakers. And that's just the beginning of the list.
National laws have little bearing when the market is global unless you want to sell shiny plastic disks. Windowing is old school marketing and was starting to die in the motion picture industry before the Web became what it is. Hollywood would launch movies in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver first but the first, even before the Web, was often less than a fortnight and I doubt the difference was any different in the States. So the so-called secondary markets like Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Halifax etc got the hit films very quickly after the big three.
They're hanging on to relics of the past, a past that will never, ever return. The more they hang onto those relics the more they, the "content" business itself, encourages piracy because the market will get what the market wants. One way or another.
What's bonkers is that the "content" industry has been able to make up any figures they've wanted to prove "losses" their profits say aren't happening. Certainly the amounts they toss into lobbying and pay their CEOs and other executives say aren't happening.
They use the creative accounting they use not to pay artists their residuals/royalties and so on to come up with their numbers on "piracy" and they're believed.
I was thinking that myself though I can't help but wonder just how quickly the pricing on these devices will drop in price over the next few years particularly as more end user/home kits become available.
That said, along with Mike, I wonder what the IP extremists and companies will do when these kits become more popular and available and the price of 3D printers decline.
Just think of all the "piracy" that's going to occur!!!
On the post: Fear-Induced Foolishness: Entertainment Industry Thinks Controls On New TLDs Will Actually Impact Piracy
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Free For The First Time In Decades, Libyan Media Struggles To Define Itself
There is no such thing as neutral journalism. Never has been, never will be.
Factual is another matter and in North America and western Europe most outlets content themselves with that, at least story by story. But neutral? Never.
Say you work in a newsroom where it's unanimously considered that the town council are a bunch of jerks. It's easy to write a factual story in such a way that the opinion comes through loud and clear or, where a reporter tries hard, to kinda hide it. At the same time human beings are full of opinions and how they view the world and most don't bother to hide it because that is buried deep in their being and that's what they write from even if the story is factual and contains no obvious opinions the reporter has. Most of us have learned to filter that out.
So I can read the National Post (in Canada) and admire the quality of the writing and reportage while filtering out the right of centre views of the paper and its staff. Then read the Victoria Times-Colonist and I filter out the left of centre bias that's built in to most of their factual stories and despair for the future of journalism because I find the quality of the writing and reportage to be so poor.
Where opinion shows, after the infamous "if it bleeds it leads", is the order the stories are presented in. What's top of the newscast on a private radio station may not be what's top of newscast on the CBC even if they are reading the same stories. The same applies to newspapers in the editor's choice of what does and doesn't land on the front page. Even if all the stories are factually correct.
In short we have a pretense of neutrality while we accept all the examples that plainly say the outlet isn't neutral at all and filter for that, too. Of course, from our own biases, ethics, opinions and world view.
They Libyans will end up there in time. It's in the interests of the "press" themselves there that they end up that way simply to sell themselves to a certain audience in the country. Much as media does in North America and Western Europe. In fact, from Leigh's piece that may be starting to happen already as the "press" experiments with things like self-censorship, public pressure and other influences as they line up with certain groups.
That the newly free "press" hasn't moved from advocacy to even a pretense of neutrality I'm not surprised as it's been very recently that the chains were taken off and the country changed beyond recognition of what was there before.
They're learning on the fly and, in the end, what they end up with will be something Libyans accept as responsible and accurate reporting (note that I didn't say unbiased or without opinion) so that they can have faith that what they read, see or hear is factually correct if nothing else.
It doesn't matter one whit what we think about what they end up with just as long as it isn't censored or controlled by their government. Put another way, that it's free.
By the way when I write "press" here I'm referring to all media forms, printed, radio, television and Web.
On the post: German Gov't Uses Anger Over Lack Of ACTA Transparency To Justify Further Lack Of Transparency
Re:
"Meet the new boss!
Same as the old boss!"
On the post: German Gov't Uses Anger Over Lack Of ACTA Transparency To Justify Further Lack Of Transparency
Re:
On the post: Fear-Induced Foolishness: Entertainment Industry Thinks Controls On New TLDs Will Actually Impact Piracy
Re: Re:
On the post: Fear-Induced Foolishness: Entertainment Industry Thinks Controls On New TLDs Will Actually Impact Piracy
Re:
Your vision seems to be to be a .movies TLD that the MPAA and its partners and members run and only them. And undoubtedly .music would be run solely by the RIAA and its partners and members. For all practical purposes, then, TLDs that are nothing more than ad servers for the part of the "content" industry that the TLD might, just might, affect negatively.
Hardly a reliable brand or a good way to do branding.
All of what you want is already out there on the Web. There is no need to duplicate it except, as you are indicating, handing these TLDs to the "content" industry.
I can't think of an independent artist who would want any part of those TLDs under those circumstances. All you want to do is re-establish the gatekeeper position the "content" industry has enjoyed for better than a century. Collectively their brands aren't considered reliable or attractive anymore except in their dream worlds and yours.
On the post: Huge Ruling: Court Rejects Medical Diagnostic Patent
Re:
Then again what occurs in nature has long been held to be not patentable and all that the US Supreme Court has done is reaffirm that. Essentially nothing has changed except that the court has corrected a ruling by a lower court. If some biotech companies are dependent on patents on natural processes and known diagnostic routines then it's time they broke their addiction to patents or, for that matter, trade secrets.
If they service what they know at reasonable cost then the incentive for Firm B to reinvent their wheel will be far less than if they are perceived as charging too much.
On the post: Tool Singer Defends His Lawn: Decries Our Entitled, Uncreative Society
Re:
I sat out all the noise around AOL vs Prodigy/Compu$pend because both seriously limited my ability to get around on the Web unlike what I got from my ISP. As long as I was doing dialup at 48K I wanted to go where I wanted to go, not where they wanted me to go.
And yes, eventually the Telco's got DSL to work to the house over 1000 ft and the Cablecos got their high speed up and running, even if it slowed to a crawl between 4-7pm when everyone got home at first.
Even back then you could order tools and appliances and they'd get delivered. Even then there was a ton of file sharing going on though mostly text, short video clips and the odd song.
If the "content" industry had any sense at all they could see the present day coming. After all, even pre DSL days they'd send rushes from Vancouver to LA across T3's using the Web.
Back then the Web was something retail couldn't make head or tails of. They couldn't figure out that building a brick and mortar like mall site wouldn't work, though Lord knows they tried. They couldn't figure out why their intrusive ads didn't work or would lead to nasty letters to advertisers.
Almost all of retail eventually got it with a lot of stumbles along the way Google figured out how to serve ads without pissing people off. The rest of the advertising biz figured out the web isn't television and we don't have the same tolerance for animated dancing bears.
Amazon, bless or curse them, basically reinvented the mall for the web.
But the "content" industry just didn't get it and still hasn't. Instead of making music and film easy to get at prices people will pay they've hung onto outmoded ways of doing business and the times people could get things they felt ripped off by the prices.
It's not as much that people expect to get what they want at the click of a button as the market (people) expect vendors (the *AAs) adapt to how they want to shop rather than adopt to them. When it didn't happen it went underground. The market will get what the market wants. Pure and simple. Where there's a demand someone, somewhere will fill it.
To be honest I'm astonished that the "content" industry itself didn't fill the demand years ago. Instead they chose to fight the new marketplace. That's certainly their privilege but instead of effectively wiping out "piracy" years ago by supplying the demand they didn't. Now, I suspect, they've made so many enemies in that marketplace they can't sell into the market under their own name even IF they finally get it and the supply is there when someone wants to click the button to get a Tool record.
That's not entitlement, it's supply and demand and the way markets work. Yes, the artist(s) want to be paid. And so they should be. But instead of blaming people file sharing perhaps they should blame their labels. In fact that's who they ought to blame.
Instead some sound like old men who decry the better days when they were young and look back at something that never was. If Keenan wants to sell on line go for it. If he wants to make money then do it and if his label won't he should be jumping up and down screaming at them. Not longing for "the good old days".
On the post: Just Because Companies Can Design Around Patents Doesn't Mean There's No Impact For Consumers
Re: Innovation vs Invension
Or silly things like the "one click" patent for which there were mountain ranges of prior art only it seems the patent examiner either ignored it or was too ignorant to know.
On the post: Tool Singer Defends His Lawn: Decries Our Entitled, Uncreative Society
Re: true...
As we've said if the labels would at least figure out that the market has changed and actually sell into it instead of holding on like grim death to a model that worked pre Web and complaining bitterly when the market wants to get the music, can't then gets it any way it can.
If you can't find depth or value out there these days it's not anyone's fault but your own. There's lots of it there.
On the post: Tool Singer Defends His Lawn: Decries Our Entitled, Uncreative Society
Re: Creativity
Most pop music never has had much in the way of lyrics with emotional or intellectual value particularly the latter as that's not the reason people listen to it or want to listen to it. Singers didn't have to sing back then either because producers would splice together a number of takes of the vocal tracks so it sounded like the singer actually hit all the notes right, pre AutoTune Autotune.
I'm not going to bow to your superior tastes in music and ability to judge it because I just don't care. People are connecting to music for some reason, usually emotional, and it that's not up to your standards too bad. That doesn't make them retards except somewhere in your mind.
Both you and Keenan remind me of the old men I listened to as kid who kept saying how hard they had it, walking to school up to their hips in snow, barefoot with only baloney sandwiches for lunch. They were full of crap then and the two of you are full of it now.
On the post: Bad Idea: Internet Service Providers Should Assume Most Digital Locker Content Is 'Illegal'
Re:
Mulligan's "discovery" doesn't count as valid statistics. It's a start but not much else. And not all file lockers are Hotfile. Or, even, Megaupload though there's still not much evidence one way or another about that.
If we're going to move to so-called cloud computing then file lockers are going to be a reality. I'm not going to store files on line if Mulligan's notion of an ISP assuming guilt before innocence for anyone and any locker. I'm not even talking about illegal content, I'm talking about ANY content be it a silly document of a story I'm trying to write, to a song I'm trying to put together or whatever. Or my accounts. Not that I'm planning any of that soon but if Mulligan's view becomes the majority view among ISPs then I won't because I don't want them peeking at every upload and download I make.
I'm not even sure that if I did what Mulligan did that I'd even want 90% of what he found. The missing piece is is this stuff being downloaded and how often.
So we're dealing with speculation here which you're parading as fact.
On the post: Why Do The Labels Continue To Insist That 'Your Money Is No Good Here?'
Re:
If what you're complaining about is the imposition of the Canadian channel over the American one on cable when they're on at the same time that's always been boneheaded and stupid. About they only thing different we see are the ads and only some of those.
Anyway, it's not that non-Canadian material is never heard on broadcast and cable, it doesn't even have to be the majority of what's broadcast. In music it's really not needed now and for television, well, who knows when we'll grow up enough to make good English tv programming because we do make excellent French tv programming that sells world wide.
And no, it's not the creators of American. French or British TV, music and radio who are doing something wrong. For English Canada it's our deep seated inferiority complex that leads us to say we can't do as well and the Yanks, Brits, and Aussies. In French Canada which isn't just Quebec, they don't seem to have that in comparison with France and they've done wonderfully.
On the post: Why Do The Labels Continue To Insist That 'Your Money Is No Good Here?'
Re:
It's as if the "content" industry hasn't figured out that the Web changed regional markets to global ones. Not just for English speakers but for just about any major linguistic group you can think of.
Punjabi speakers want Bollywood in North America and the UK. Chinese speakers pretty much globally. The same applies to Spanish and Russian speakers. And that's just the beginning of the list.
National laws have little bearing when the market is global unless you want to sell shiny plastic disks. Windowing is old school marketing and was starting to die in the motion picture industry before the Web became what it is. Hollywood would launch movies in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver first but the first, even before the Web, was often less than a fortnight and I doubt the difference was any different in the States. So the so-called secondary markets like Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Halifax etc got the hit films very quickly after the big three.
They're hanging on to relics of the past, a past that will never, ever return. The more they hang onto those relics the more they, the "content" business itself, encourages piracy because the market will get what the market wants. One way or another.
On the post: UK Copyright Industries Suddenly Become Fans Of Evidence-Based Policy Making
Re: Re:
On the post: UK Copyright Industries Suddenly Become Fans Of Evidence-Based Policy Making
They use the creative accounting they use not to pay artists their residuals/royalties and so on to come up with their numbers on "piracy" and they're believed.
Now THAT'S truly bonkers.
On the post: The Pirate Bay Claims It's Going To Host The Site Via Drones Flying Over International Waters
Re: Re: Re:
The introduction of commercial radio in the UK came later.
And it is a classic example that other "content" businesses should learn from. :)
On the post: Free 3D-Printable Kit To Connect Different Toy Construction Sets Released -- But Partially Blocked Due To Patents
Re:
That said, along with Mike, I wonder what the IP extremists and companies will do when these kits become more popular and available and the price of 3D printers decline.
Just think of all the "piracy" that's going to occur!!!
On the post: Procedural Error By Law Enforcement Means Restraining Order On Kim Dotcom 'Null And Void'
Re: Re: Re: Re: so what happens to all the "evidence" that was illegally seized
The artists likely make more money off the first choice. :-)
On the post: :-( Samsung, Research In Motion Sued For Making It Easy To Use Emoticons
Re: Re: You have GOT to be kidding!
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