Chris, it's all find and dandy to say "competition is really this", but the reality is that there isn't enough money in most marketplaces to make that competition become a reality.
is that so? tell that to the people investing in clearwire.
The US has a simple problem: SIZE and DISTANCE.
i am not talking about wheezer, idaho. i am talking about metropolitan areas with light years of copper wire strung over them having their municipal fiber and wifi programs blocked by incumbent phone and cable companies.
All the great broadband centers (like Hong Kong, example) have nice high density living, where they don't have to build a new CO to handle 20 customers on a 10 mile rural route. They put in one CO, and have thousands of clients right there.
again, i am not talking about rural access. i am talking about big american cities on the east and west coasts where there are lots of apartment buildings, condo complexes, and brand new housing developments that can run new copper. in these "dense" populations the promise of fiber is now more than a decade old.
the telcos de-regulated in 1996 so they could raise funds to roll out modern networks. that's 13 years. 13 years of monopoly or duopoly pricing and where's the fiber? only in select parts of huge cities. the price of service has only gone up and up, so what happened to all that money? well, first we had to rebuild the old bell monopoly in the form of the AT&T and verizon duopoly...
The costs of your "real" competition would push your cable or DSL bill way past what you would consider acceptable, yet it would actually reflect the costs of providing and maintaining your service. Are you really willing to pay for what you are asking for?
right, the cost of letting a competitor into the market will raise prices?
you are saying that if the telco and cable companies stop giving money to u.s. politicians, our bills will go up? how does that make sense?
how exactly does it cost the incumbents to *stop* blocking municipal broadband? how exactly does it cost money to stop doing something?
Marketing works. Do you seriously think if I shut down Top 40 radio tomorrow and put all those songs for free on Myspace, with no Internet marketing (remember: marketing on the Internet is free according to the article), that they would be as popular as they are?
i think you have confused a few things.
promotion is not the same thing as marketing, just like social networking isn't the same thing as the internet.
marketing is way more than promotion: it concerns the product itself, the packaging, placement, and pricing as well as promotion. taking a product engineered for radio and sticking online, without revising it for the new medium would naturally be a failure. promotion online is free, distribution online is free. the rest of the marketing process... not so much.
mass market music is a great example. millions are invested making sure it appeals to a broad audience, so it gets downloaded en masse and there is no way to recoup all of the money invested. the problem isn't the fact that the music was downloaded -there is no way on earth to stop something from being downloaded- the problem is that you spent to much making and marketing it.
The Internet can emulate this model, but the "free" default (just stick it out there and pray it goes viral) is an utter crapshoot.
the internet isn't radio with a "buy" button. radio is a closed system controlled by a few players. this means that getting past the barrier of entry costs big bucks and the crap you put on it has to have the broadest possible appeal.
the internet is a whole new medium, with a whole new set of rules. because anyone can make anything, and publishing, distribution and promotion are essentially free, there are sub-cultures within sub-cultures that have media experts and sociologists alike scratching their heads. the old radio/TV model of limited access and controlled distribution just doesn't make sense anymore, therefore, your product doesn't make sense either. trying to apply the old formulas to this new medium is a waste of time and money.
Its worse than that. To give an example, "Kushiel's Avatar" has a "regular" price of $20.95 for a DRM-infested eBook. The paperback's been out for years and Amazon lists it as $7.99.
yeah, and?
all the publishers, even the cool ones like tor and baen, would rather we STFU and buy hard copies, just like the rcording industry would really like us to stop all this internet nonsense and go back to buying CD's.
If the gov really thinks your a threat there going to come knocking at some point which you've proven you've been spied on because they raided your house and hopefully your setup auto loads to the net.
you don't have to be a threat to be under surveillance. government employees with high-level security clearances are often under observation as a purely preventative measure.
Re: Re: Re: Of course you are being watched! This is news?
When a government has that power they will abuse it. Sure today they will use it to do good! But tomorrow you might say something they don't like and they then FIND a reason to make you a criminal.
it's not that. it's that administrations (and their priorities) change. that's all.
the folks at the helm today may be totally trustworthy and will only use this surveillance and the information gleaned from its use to prevent terrorism, but those people won't be around forever. what happens when a new administration uses it in support one side of a highly politicized or controversial issue?
No, what I want is for them to EITHER ALLOW anyone to build new infrastructure OR to allow anyone to compete on the existing infrastructure (which, btw, was built a LONG time ago and there was plenty of time to recoup investments). The governments don't allow either.
don't forget that the phone infrastructure was built with government subsidy. in most markets the cable infrastructure was too. that's why local cable companies are required to provide public access television. it's part of the agreement.
In most areas, you already have competition (and it's growing), typically from a phone company, a cable company, and now 3G wireless options.
BS. *IF* you are lucky enough to have access to broadband from both a cable company *AND* a phone company (good luck getting cable in an industrial zone) you are being served by a duopoly instead of a monopoly. that's not competition. that's replacing a dictator with a cartel.
real competition is having your choice of two telephone companies and two cable companies, or at least having access to a third option which is neither cable nor phone based.
3g wireless, with it's 5 gig caps and terms of service that specifically state that you cannot use it as a backup connection or replacement for broadband don't even register as competition. also, most wireless carriers are also in the residential broadband market and won't improve the service to the point of being competitive with it's wired broadband services.
It would be interesting to see the numbers on what percentage of the US population has access to at least ONE broadband source at this point, I suspect the numbers are quite a bit higher than most would expect.
Additionally, if major league was gone, the exhorbitant amounts of money spent on it could help fund far more baseball at the lower levels. I understand the natural desire to be bigger, but bigger isn't always better.
not to mention that bigger is less adaptable to change. sure, you get economies of scale and the like, but if the market changes, then the changes you make will have to be large scale as well, meaning slow and costly.
part of the problem with "major leagues" not changing with the times is that there is so much involved with changing a big institution. i would imagine that to many content types, it seems easier to change the market and punish consumers than it would be to change internally.
it's like changing the course of a ship: a battleship can't turn quickly, can't turn sharply, and can't turn often. attempting to do so could be disastrous. smaller ships can turn quick, sharp, and often and suffer far less when doing so.
also, if there is a large number of small ships, some can turn in a variety of directions while others maintain their present courses. if some of them sink there is less impact than the loss of a single large ship.
so while the loss of "major league" content production is inevitable it's not a bad thing, on the contrary, it's a very good thing. smaller, more specialized firms will emerge to deliver content that is more tailored to specific customer interests.
this trend is already apparent: since i can get news from anywhere, i choose to get my national news from british papers (the BBC, the telegraph, and the guardian) even though i am american and live in the US. i find that the british view of the US contains way less spin than CNN, fox news, or the new york times.
i am sure brits will tell you that the beeb and the others are just as corrupt as their american counterparts, but the difference is that british papers have fewer american advertisers, owe less to the american government, and therefore are more likely to be objective.
my favorite stewart vs. obama moment was when obama said he was insulted by the new yorker cartoon that depicted him and his wife as terrorists. stewart said it tied in to the previous flack over the prophet mohammed cartoon from the netherlands and the speculation that obama was a muslim extremist.
he (or his writers) summed it up perfectly by saying that making the statement undermined obama's postition because only islamic radicals get upset over cartoons.
One more for the record... I've never paid $1.30 for a song since iTunes opened but I (like you) did so constantly when CD's, cassettes and LP's were the media of choice.
no you didn't. you paid $15 for a CD with 12 tracks. 1-4 of which were decent and the remainder was absolute crap, moving the unit price of the tracks you wanted to somewhere between $4-$15 for a decent track.
compared to that, $1.30 is a steal. had DRM free tracks been available in 1999 for $1.30 each, perhaps things would have played out differently.
unfortunately, more than a decade has passed where music has been distributed freely, changing most consumers' minds about how much a track should cost.
this is the problem: the industry types see $1.30 per track as a tenfold reduction in cost. most consumers see $1.30 per track as a thousandfold increase in cost and will therefore keep doing what they have been doing for the last 10 years.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You can't legislate or bribe creativity
If you are drawing them from new, then you are a good copy artist, but not particularly original. Perhaps you should develop your own characters and work to create something truly new, rather than exceptionally derivative?
well, after proper due diligence to make sure you aren't infringing on anyone's copyright, vague patent, or running afoul of someone's overzealous trademark protection.
you'll probably want to assemble your legal team before you create anything, to make sure that your creative process doesn't overlap someone else.
The fact is, identical bits may not be identical under the law. Provenance - how the bits got there - matters. It may sound silly, it may be a distinction that will prove impossible to maintain in any meaningful way - but right now, it's there, and given that distinction, it's not surprising this case came out the way it did.
except that disk imaging is how every PC manufacturer (apple included) ships pre-installed software. disk imaging is also a common practice in the IT departments of large corporations. if imaging is illegal in this case, what does that say for the practice elsewhere? if the practice is legal elsewhere, why is it illegal in this case?
DRM is like armor, but as modern combat shows us it's easier to make a better bullet than there is to build a better armor.
your analogy implies that the protection scheme is somehow defeated with a superior force. cracking DRM doesn't work that way. a better analogy would be lockpicking, or key copying.
at the risk of sounding pointlessly academic, DRM circumvention in games is a matter of reverse engineering, not brute force. in most cases, it's not cryptanalysis (breaking encryption), it's getting the guts of a program with a valid key into a debugger, watching the game validate, and then figuring out how to either route around the validation step or generate keys that will satisfy the validation procedure.
keygens and cracked exe's are common techniques for circumventing DRM. the DRM code (the armor in your analogy) is completely intact in a cracked game, much like a lock that has been picked. the drm code just not called into play, either by a spoofed key that fools the validation check or a modified executable that skips the validation routine.
Actually, that's one of the problems I have with this concept. Say I want to make a movie. Fine. Now, how much do I need to tell you before you'll donate? Enough to spoil the film?
i agree, you couldn't make the matrix this way, so these guys are clearly wasting their time and need to stop immediately.
congratulations! you beat the internet. now everyone has to go back to buying CDs.
It's not reasonable to think that someone else logged in to create an alibi BECAUSE they were committing a crime?
from the post (emphasis mine): The police subpoenaed Facebook to get the actual location where the update came from (and said it corroborated some additional alibis)
On the post: FCC Doesn't Think The Lack Of Competition Is A Major Barrier To Broadband?
Re: Re: Re:
is that so? tell that to the people investing in clearwire.
The US has a simple problem: SIZE and DISTANCE.
i am not talking about wheezer, idaho. i am talking about metropolitan areas with light years of copper wire strung over them having their municipal fiber and wifi programs blocked by incumbent phone and cable companies.
All the great broadband centers (like Hong Kong, example) have nice high density living, where they don't have to build a new CO to handle 20 customers on a 10 mile rural route. They put in one CO, and have thousands of clients right there.
again, i am not talking about rural access. i am talking about big american cities on the east and west coasts where there are lots of apartment buildings, condo complexes, and brand new housing developments that can run new copper. in these "dense" populations the promise of fiber is now more than a decade old.
the telcos de-regulated in 1996 so they could raise funds to roll out modern networks. that's 13 years. 13 years of monopoly or duopoly pricing and where's the fiber? only in select parts of huge cities. the price of service has only gone up and up, so what happened to all that money? well, first we had to rebuild the old bell monopoly in the form of the AT&T and verizon duopoly...
The costs of your "real" competition would push your cable or DSL bill way past what you would consider acceptable, yet it would actually reflect the costs of providing and maintaining your service. Are you really willing to pay for what you are asking for?
right, the cost of letting a competitor into the market will raise prices?
you are saying that if the telco and cable companies stop giving money to u.s. politicians, our bills will go up? how does that make sense?
how exactly does it cost the incumbents to *stop* blocking municipal broadband? how exactly does it cost money to stop doing something?
please explain it to me as i am very curious.
On the post: Comparing File Sharing To Payola: Could Have Had That Promotion For Free
Re: Re: Re: Re: radio vs internet
i think you have confused a few things.
promotion is not the same thing as marketing, just like social networking isn't the same thing as the internet.
marketing is way more than promotion: it concerns the product itself, the packaging, placement, and pricing as well as promotion. taking a product engineered for radio and sticking online, without revising it for the new medium would naturally be a failure. promotion online is free, distribution online is free. the rest of the marketing process... not so much.
mass market music is a great example. millions are invested making sure it appeals to a broad audience, so it gets downloaded en masse and there is no way to recoup all of the money invested. the problem isn't the fact that the music was downloaded -there is no way on earth to stop something from being downloaded- the problem is that you spent to much making and marketing it.
The Internet can emulate this model, but the "free" default (just stick it out there and pray it goes viral) is an utter crapshoot.
the internet isn't radio with a "buy" button. radio is a closed system controlled by a few players. this means that getting past the barrier of entry costs big bucks and the crap you put on it has to have the broadest possible appeal.
the internet is a whole new medium, with a whole new set of rules. because anyone can make anything, and publishing, distribution and promotion are essentially free, there are sub-cultures within sub-cultures that have media experts and sociologists alike scratching their heads. the old radio/TV model of limited access and controlled distribution just doesn't make sense anymore, therefore, your product doesn't make sense either. trying to apply the old formulas to this new medium is a waste of time and money.
On the post: Could You Prove That The Government Was Watching You Illegally?
Re:
On the post: Publishers Getting The Wrong Message Over eBook Piracy
Re: Re: Who is the pirate
yeah, and?
all the publishers, even the cool ones like tor and baen, would rather we STFU and buy hard copies, just like the rcording industry would really like us to stop all this internet nonsense and go back to buying CD's.
On the post: Could You Prove That The Government Was Watching You Illegally?
Re:
On the post: Could You Prove That The Government Was Watching You Illegally?
Re: Time for a sting
you don't have to be a threat to be under surveillance. government employees with high-level security clearances are often under observation as a purely preventative measure.
On the post: Could You Prove That The Government Was Watching You Illegally?
Re: Re: Re: Of course you are being watched! This is news?
it's not that. it's that administrations (and their priorities) change. that's all.
the folks at the helm today may be totally trustworthy and will only use this surveillance and the information gleaned from its use to prevent terrorism, but those people won't be around forever. what happens when a new administration uses it in support one side of a highly politicized or controversial issue?
On the post: FCC Doesn't Think The Lack Of Competition Is A Major Barrier To Broadband?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
don't forget that the phone infrastructure was built with government subsidy. in most markets the cable infrastructure was too. that's why local cable companies are required to provide public access television. it's part of the agreement.
On the post: FCC Doesn't Think The Lack Of Competition Is A Major Barrier To Broadband?
Re:
or just plain illegal, as evidenced by the muni-fiber and muni-wifi programs that get their plugs pulled due to pressure from incumbent providers:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091030/0350266731.shtml
In most areas, you already have competition (and it's growing), typically from a phone company, a cable company, and now 3G wireless options.
BS. *IF* you are lucky enough to have access to broadband from both a cable company *AND* a phone company (good luck getting cable in an industrial zone) you are being served by a duopoly instead of a monopoly. that's not competition. that's replacing a dictator with a cartel.
real competition is having your choice of two telephone companies and two cable companies, or at least having access to a third option which is neither cable nor phone based.
3g wireless, with it's 5 gig caps and terms of service that specifically state that you cannot use it as a backup connection or replacement for broadband don't even register as competition. also, most wireless carriers are also in the residential broadband market and won't improve the service to the point of being competitive with it's wired broadband services.
It would be interesting to see the numbers on what percentage of the US population has access to at least ONE broadband source at this point, I suspect the numbers are quite a bit higher than most would expect.
i would like to see the numbers as well. i suspect they are lower, since the FCC currently uses data that's wrong:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060508/1839210.shtml
and that data is wrong because it was provided by the telcos who don't want any competition:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080717/1713101713.shtml
On the post: There Are Lots Of Ways To Fund Journalism
Re: Re:
not to mention that bigger is less adaptable to change. sure, you get economies of scale and the like, but if the market changes, then the changes you make will have to be large scale as well, meaning slow and costly.
part of the problem with "major leagues" not changing with the times is that there is so much involved with changing a big institution. i would imagine that to many content types, it seems easier to change the market and punish consumers than it would be to change internally.
it's like changing the course of a ship: a battleship can't turn quickly, can't turn sharply, and can't turn often. attempting to do so could be disastrous. smaller ships can turn quick, sharp, and often and suffer far less when doing so.
also, if there is a large number of small ships, some can turn in a variety of directions while others maintain their present courses. if some of them sink there is less impact than the loss of a single large ship.
so while the loss of "major league" content production is inevitable it's not a bad thing, on the contrary, it's a very good thing. smaller, more specialized firms will emerge to deliver content that is more tailored to specific customer interests.
this trend is already apparent: since i can get news from anywhere, i choose to get my national news from british papers (the BBC, the telegraph, and the guardian) even though i am american and live in the US. i find that the british view of the US contains way less spin than CNN, fox news, or the new york times.
i am sure brits will tell you that the beeb and the others are just as corrupt as their american counterparts, but the difference is that british papers have fewer american advertisers, owe less to the american government, and therefore are more likely to be objective.
On the post: What Does It Say When A Comedy Show Does More Fact Checking Than News Programs?
Re: Re: Re:
he (or his writers) summed it up perfectly by saying that making the statement undermined obama's postition because only islamic radicals get upset over cartoons.
On the post: Recording Industry Making It Impossible For Any Legit Online Music Service To Survive Without Being Too Expensive
Re: Re: Re: "Too Expensive"
no you didn't. you paid $15 for a CD with 12 tracks. 1-4 of which were decent and the remainder was absolute crap, moving the unit price of the tracks you wanted to somewhere between $4-$15 for a decent track.
compared to that, $1.30 is a steal. had DRM free tracks been available in 1999 for $1.30 each, perhaps things would have played out differently.
unfortunately, more than a decade has passed where music has been distributed freely, changing most consumers' minds about how much a track should cost.
this is the problem: the industry types see $1.30 per track as a tenfold reduction in cost. most consumers see $1.30 per track as a thousandfold increase in cost and will therefore keep doing what they have been doing for the last 10 years.
On the post: Mariah Carey Showing How The New Music Business Model Works For Megastars
Re: Re:
On the post: New Economics Paper Explains How Shorter Copyright Stimulates More Music
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You can't legislate or bribe creativity
well, after proper due diligence to make sure you aren't infringing on anyone's copyright, vague patent, or running afoul of someone's overzealous trademark protection.
you'll probably want to assemble your legal team before you create anything, to make sure that your creative process doesn't overlap someone else.
On the post: Psystar Loses Big To Apple
Re: Master copy vs. individual copies
except that disk imaging is how every PC manufacturer (apple included) ships pre-installed software. disk imaging is also a common practice in the IT departments of large corporations. if imaging is illegal in this case, what does that say for the practice elsewhere? if the practice is legal elsewhere, why is it illegal in this case?
On the post: Video Game Developers Say That Piracy Really Isn't A Big Threat To Business
Re:
queue digital delivery in 3... 2.. 1.
On the post: Video Game Developers Say That Piracy Really Isn't A Big Threat To Business
Re: Re: Adapting
your analogy implies that the protection scheme is somehow defeated with a superior force. cracking DRM doesn't work that way. a better analogy would be lockpicking, or key copying.
at the risk of sounding pointlessly academic, DRM circumvention in games is a matter of reverse engineering, not brute force. in most cases, it's not cryptanalysis (breaking encryption), it's getting the guts of a program with a valid key into a debugger, watching the game validate, and then figuring out how to either route around the validation step or generate keys that will satisfy the validation procedure.
keygens and cracked exe's are common techniques for circumventing DRM. the DRM code (the armor in your analogy) is completely intact in a cracked game, much like a lock that has been picked. the drm code just not called into play, either by a spoofed key that fools the validation check or a modified executable that skips the validation routine.
On the post: Would Google Be Liable Under The Pirate Bay Ruling?
Re: Re: Re:
oh noes!
On the post: Star Wreck Filmmakers Experiment With Iron Sky
Re: Re: Re:
i agree, you couldn't make the matrix this way, so these guys are clearly wasting their time and need to stop immediately.
congratulations! you beat the internet. now everyone has to go back to buying CDs.
On the post: Facebook As Your Alibi
Re: Re: Re:
from the post (emphasis mine):
The police subpoenaed Facebook to get the actual location where the update came from (and said it corroborated some additional alibis)
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