Slightly OT but it occurred to me a while ago that the X Factor/PopIdol/American Idol competitions are excellent examples of scarities associated with music.
I would imagine Cowell already makes large chunks of money from these programmes and (if he had a mind to) could easily make this the primary revenue stream and not worry about making money from the music.
Re: Re: Re: You make it it sound like they just keep the money and don't pay anyone. What a misleading post.
> heh-heh. Since I don't have a boss, I don't worry - but if I did, I wouldn't object to those charges if they fronted me a million up front to play with. It's all in the balance.
And if you had to spend all that money to create, promote and distribute the album (using the labels facilities sure, but with your money), leaving about 40k to share among your band, while the label takes their 4 million share of the proceeds and runs straight to the bank with it?
Would you still be going 'heh-heh' then, or would you have a bad taste in your mouth?
> Sentimental value. A genuine signed photo is worth much more than an exact replica purely because of sentimental reasons. Even if I could copy the signature exactly by hand, using the same photo and pen, anyone that knows it's a fake will think that it's worthless.
A single genuine phone would indeed usually be worth more than a single replica - no argument there. But what if you used a photocopier to make a million replicas?
I think you are confusing two different things here. The price of an item is composed of two different aspects - there's a "value judgement" against the item which determines how desirable it is, and a determination of how scarce the item is.
Let's see if a different example helps. Imagine if there were only one diamond and one lump of coal in the world. The diamond would (probably) command a higher price than the coal due to it's greater beauty.
However if diamonds were so plentiful you had to keep kicking them out of the way when you walked down the street, they would still be just as pretty, but they would be essentially worthless.
The key thing here is for an infinite good the effect of the unlimited availability completely swamps the initial value judgement - it doesn't matter how desirable it is the price always ends up at zero.
> If that was true, I could buy the Crystal Ball, re-post the articles almost instantly, and then all the value would be lost.
But it is true! You absolutely could repost the articles, that's what makes them infinite.
> I see the value being in that you're getting something from TechDirt.
Sorry I still don't see what you are getting that is in addition to the content. Unless you mean a "warm fuzzy feeling" in which case I think that's probably an infinite good as well ;-)
> It's sorta like getting a signed photo from an actor. The photograph on its own isn't worth much - you could probably print one off from the internet for free. Heck, you can probably get one from the internet with a signature included. The real value is that the actor was the one signing it.
The photo that the actor personally signed is scarce ... but the "signed" copy from the internet is infinite. The difference being that the former has a naturally limited supply, the latter does not.
> But he's not charging for an infinite good. He's charging for the value tacked onto that infinite good.
I'm not sure what you mean when you try to separate the value from the good like that.
Certainly Crystal Ball has value, but that doesn't make it scarce. Music has value, but isn't scarce.
"Access to content" is no different to "Distribution of content" particularly on the internet. It's irrelevant whether you choose to label to content imcomplete or in-progress - it's still infinite.
Access to the content creator on the other hand is indisputably scarce - but that's not what this is.
I should point out BTW that I have nothing against the Crystal Ball offer myself, it's perfectly OK as far as I'm concerned and I don't buy this first-class/second-class citizen idea. It's an infinite good (because it's just content) and as such it adds value if you purchase one of the other options, or if you just want to support Techdirt.
Nevertheless, I've thought about it some more and I maintain that what the Crystal Ball part of the experiment makes clear is that "access" can be an infinite good.
Clearly access is often a scarce good - Mike's offer to join some purchasers for a meal for example - there is only a limited number of people that can possibly fit in the restaurant while Mike is there!
In the case of the Crystal Ball - there is no limit to the number of participants and it costs nothing extra to provide the service to each additional member - that is the definition of an infinite good is it not?
The odd thing about the access offer is that in this particular case it's kind of both scarce and infinite.
What I mean is, it's scarce in the sense that you don't have to allow anyone to peek into your kitchen - but as soon you decide to do so, since this is a virtual/digital kitchen, there is no limit to the number of people that can peek.
I think the real point here is that there is no competition involved here, you don't get to negotiate the price so there is no pressure for the price to tend towards zero as would normally be the case for an infinite resource.
This would cease to be the case if one or more purchasers of Crystal Ball republished the content - then I would expect market forces to kick in and force Mike to either offer this service for free or else withdraw the service entirely.
> This assumption appears to be based on one's expectations and experiences with tangible goods
The issue here is that this assumption does not come out of a vacuum. The content owners consistently refer to a content transaction as a "purchase" by the consumer. The word "purchase" is normally associated with the transfer of ownership so it is not unreasonable that your average consumer believes it is being used in this sense, but that is not what happens with content.
The content owners make no effort to make it clear that this actually has more in common with a rental than a purchase, but then of course it is in their interest to avoid clarifying this point - they benefit greatly by charging for "purchases" when they are only supplying "rentals" - a level of misrepresentation that in another time and place would be tantamount to fraud!
> Again, he should have sued both - the forum provider being much more likely to cough up user data if they can get out of being the target of the lawsuit. Ask your lawyer friends (you seem to have many), it's the process where you sue everyone potentially involved and let them explain themselves out of the situation.
So what you're suggesting is that it's OK to get lawyers to "lean" on someone in order to pressure them into doing things they are not legally obliged to do?
Maybe that will get results in today's world - but do you *really* want to advocate that position?
Re: Re: I wonder about other aspects of the contract...
> People who just think labels are greedy and evil don't appreciate the very real costs involved in recording and promoting music.
No, people think they are greedy and evil because they typically charge all of those costs against the artist's advance/20% and run laughing to the bank with the other 80%
The fair and reasonable way to do it (IMO) is to take the costs out of the pot first, then share the *net* profits 50/50. I agree that we don't know if this is what Polyphonic is planning, but I've heard good things about Nettwerk.
> Give it a rest - she shares a single song with one person, and that person shares with a couple more, that share with a couple more... because remember, once you share, you can't control what else will happen - but you started it.
Seriously? OK, I can see the argument for liability WRT to the people she directly shared with - but by what logic does she become liable for what those people then did with the music (and what the people who share with them did as so on)?
What is this, some kind of crazy inverted pyramid scheme???
Suppose I'm a fashion designer and I suddenly have a fantastic new design idea ... Puff skirts ... in TARTAN!!!
(OK so it's good job I'm not really a fashion designer, but work with me here ;-)
In today's industry this is a perfectly legitimate new design and might even make me a fortune if I'm lucky.
If this new law is passed however I could be blocked from producing such a product by a big designer who already produces a puff skirt. They will argue that my design is too similar to their own product. Not only that they will probably argue something along the lines of their existing product line "naturally encapsulates" tartan designs. This will effectively allow them to actually steal my design under the guise of them preventing me from stealing theirs!
My point is this isn't a law that says "you can't copy my exact design". This is (or will likely become) a law purely designed to allow the big boys to trample all over the small designers.
> There is great security in knowing that when you have a problem you can turn to the manufacture and actually get support
Yes, there is. Which is why a major part of the open source business model relies on selling support contracts.
What's more the cool thing about open source is you don't have to rely on the manufacturer to provide a good support service, you can go to any one of a bunch of large companies or any number of smaller consultancy companies. This gives you a much better chance of getting the level of support your business needs, rather than be stuck with the sometimes abysmal excuse for support a manufacturer provides.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Let me get this straight
> you are just making blind assertions with no substantiation
That's quite rich coming from someone who believes God created the universe out of nothing!
> Darwin was wrong about a lot of things
So you keep saying, but so what if he got a few details wrong?
Evolution doesn't begin and end with Darwin's work and his basic premise is the foundation for a mountain of work, none of which you acknowledge.
> No matter what the evidence, evolution comes up with something to account for it
That's because when a theory matches the available evidence 99% of the time and just needs a tweak to account for something newly discovered, then that's perfectly reasonable.
If you want to falsify it you have find a flaw that shows the theory is *fundamentally* wrong in some way. At that point it helps if you have an alternative theory that explains all the evidence and avoids the same flaws. This is how General Relativity usurped Newton's Law of Gravity for example.
Such a theory will need to be a bit more reasonable than "God created everything in six days, because lots of people think so, and he planted all that fake evidence pointing to evolution because he moves in mysterious ways that man is not meant to comprehend".
I had a quick look at the patent and although I'm not a expert, it looks like this attempts to cover any transformation of a markup language style document, including where the transformation is used for display or printout.
The patent was filed in 1994, prior art seems to include NROFF format files which goes back at least to the earliest days of Unix (used in man pages among other things).
The Theory of Evolution makes *loads* of predictions, many of which have subsequently been supported by scientific evidence. You're just choosing to ignore a vast body of literature, because it doesn't fit in with what you prefer to believe.
I hope I never come across this journal in my local library, I might laugh so hard I'd have an aneurysm and die!
Of course if I'd been designed by an omnipotent, omniscient being there is no way I would be able to succumb to a fatal injury through such an innocent thing as laughter, is there?
Seriously, my favourite argument against Creationism is the one that says if God had designed humans she* wouldn't have done such a piss-poor job of it! Ask any doctor - there are literally dozens of "design flaws" in the human body.
* Because it annoys the hell out of fundamentalists if you refer to God as being female ;-)
On the post: Rather Than Waiting For Someone Else To Leak Your Music, Why Not Leak It Yourself?
X Factor
I would imagine Cowell already makes large chunks of money from these programmes and (if he had a mind to) could easily make this the primary revenue stream and not worry about making money from the music.
On the post: Project EquillibRIAA: Putting Joel Tenenbaum In Touch With The Musicians In Question
Re: Re: Re: You make it it sound like they just keep the money and don't pay anyone. What a misleading post.
And if you had to spend all that money to create, promote and distribute the album (using the labels facilities sure, but with your money), leaving about 40k to share among your band, while the label takes their 4 million share of the proceeds and runs straight to the bank with it?
Would you still be going 'heh-heh' then, or would you have a bad taste in your mouth?
On the post: Is The NY Times Looking To CwF + RtB?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
A single genuine phone would indeed usually be worth more than a single replica - no argument there. But what if you used a photocopier to make a million replicas?
I think you are confusing two different things here. The price of an item is composed of two different aspects - there's a "value judgement" against the item which determines how desirable it is, and a determination of how scarce the item is.
Let's see if a different example helps. Imagine if there were only one diamond and one lump of coal in the world. The diamond would (probably) command a higher price than the coal due to it's greater beauty.
However if diamonds were so plentiful you had to keep kicking them out of the way when you walked down the street, they would still be just as pretty, but they would be essentially worthless.
The key thing here is for an infinite good the effect of the unlimited availability completely swamps the initial value judgement - it doesn't matter how desirable it is the price always ends up at zero.
On the post: Is The NY Times Looking To CwF + RtB?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
But it is true! You absolutely could repost the articles, that's what makes them infinite.
> I see the value being in that you're getting something from TechDirt.
Sorry I still don't see what you are getting that is in addition to the content. Unless you mean a "warm fuzzy feeling" in which case I think that's probably an infinite good as well ;-)
> It's sorta like getting a signed photo from an actor. The photograph on its own isn't worth much - you could probably print one off from the internet for free. Heck, you can probably get one from the internet with a signature included. The real value is that the actor was the one signing it.
The photo that the actor personally signed is scarce ... but the "signed" copy from the internet is infinite. The difference being that the former has a naturally limited supply, the latter does not.
On the post: Is The NY Times Looking To CwF + RtB?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm not sure what you mean when you try to separate the value from the good like that.
Certainly Crystal Ball has value, but that doesn't make it scarce. Music has value, but isn't scarce.
"Access to content" is no different to "Distribution of content" particularly on the internet. It's irrelevant whether you choose to label to content imcomplete or in-progress - it's still infinite.
Access to the content creator on the other hand is indisputably scarce - but that's not what this is.
I should point out BTW that I have nothing against the Crystal Ball offer myself, it's perfectly OK as far as I'm concerned and I don't buy this first-class/second-class citizen idea. It's an infinite good (because it's just content) and as such it adds value if you purchase one of the other options, or if you just want to support Techdirt.
On the post: Is The NY Times Looking To CwF + RtB?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Nevertheless, I've thought about it some more and I maintain that what the Crystal Ball part of the experiment makes clear is that "access" can be an infinite good.
Clearly access is often a scarce good - Mike's offer to join some purchasers for a meal for example - there is only a limited number of people that can possibly fit in the restaurant while Mike is there!
In the case of the Crystal Ball - there is no limit to the number of participants and it costs nothing extra to provide the service to each additional member - that is the definition of an infinite good is it not?
On the post: Is The NY Times Looking To CwF + RtB?
Re: Re: Re:
What I mean is, it's scarce in the sense that you don't have to allow anyone to peek into your kitchen - but as soon you decide to do so, since this is a virtual/digital kitchen, there is no limit to the number of people that can peek.
I think the real point here is that there is no competition involved here, you don't get to negotiate the price so there is no pressure for the price to tend towards zero as would normally be the case for an infinite resource.
This would cease to be the case if one or more purchasers of Crystal Ball republished the content - then I would expect market forces to kick in and force Mike to either offer this service for free or else withdraw the service entirely.
On the post: How Copyright Can Be Viewed As Anti-Property
Re:
The issue here is that this assumption does not come out of a vacuum. The content owners consistently refer to a content transaction as a "purchase" by the consumer. The word "purchase" is normally associated with the transfer of ownership so it is not unreasonable that your average consumer believes it is being used in this sense, but that is not what happens with content.
The content owners make no effort to make it clear that this actually has more in common with a rental than a purchase, but then of course it is in their interest to avoid clarifying this point - they benefit greatly by charging for "purchases" when they are only supplying "rentals" - a level of misrepresentation that in another time and place would be tantamount to fraud!
On the post: Filmmaker Sues Websites After Commenters Cost Him A Job
Re: Re: Re: Re: Hrmm
So what you're suggesting is that it's OK to get lawyers to "lean" on someone in order to pressure them into doing things they are not legally obliged to do?
Maybe that will get results in today's world - but do you *really* want to advocate that position?
On the post: Radiohead Manager, Nettwerk Launch New Label: Artists Get To Keep Their Copyright
Re: Re: I wonder about other aspects of the contract...
No, people think they are greedy and evil because they typically charge all of those costs against the artist's advance/20% and run laughing to the bank with the other 80%
The fair and reasonable way to do it (IMO) is to take the costs out of the pot first, then share the *net* profits 50/50. I agree that we don't know if this is what Polyphonic is planning, but I've heard good things about Nettwerk.
On the post: The Myth Of Original Creators
Re:
On the post: Jammie Thomas Ordered To Pay $1.92 Million
Re: Re:
Seriously? OK, I can see the argument for liability WRT to the people she directly shared with - but by what logic does she become liable for what those people then did with the music (and what the people who share with them did as so on)?
What is this, some kind of crazy inverted pyramid scheme???
On the post: JK Rowling Accused Of Plagiarizing Harry Potter... Yet Again
Re:
Tut tut, I believe you've just infringed "Frak" a little known video game from the 1980's on the BBC Micro.
So when you've finished writing that check to the creators of BSG ...
;-)
On the post: Fashion Designers Realizing New Fashion Copyright Would Cause Serious Harm To Business
Re: Re: Re:
Suppose I'm a fashion designer and I suddenly have a fantastic new design idea ... Puff skirts ... in TARTAN!!!
(OK so it's good job I'm not really a fashion designer, but work with me here ;-)
In today's industry this is a perfectly legitimate new design and might even make me a fortune if I'm lucky.
If this new law is passed however I could be blocked from producing such a product by a big designer who already produces a puff skirt. They will argue that my design is too similar to their own product. Not only that they will probably argue something along the lines of their existing product line "naturally encapsulates" tartan designs. This will effectively allow them to actually steal my design under the guise of them preventing me from stealing theirs!
My point is this isn't a law that says "you can't copy my exact design". This is (or will likely become) a law purely designed to allow the big boys to trample all over the small designers.
On the post: Is The BSA Purposely Promoting Open Source Alternatives?
Re:
Yes, there is. Which is why a major part of the open source business model relies on selling support contracts.
What's more the cool thing about open source is you don't have to rely on the manufacturer to provide a good support service, you can go to any one of a bunch of large companies or any number of smaller consultancy companies. This gives you a much better chance of getting the level of support your business needs, rather than be stuck with the sometimes abysmal excuse for support a manufacturer provides.
On the post: New Law In Korea Means Google Bans The Uploading Of Music On Any Blog
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Let me get this straight
That's quite rich coming from someone who believes God created the universe out of nothing!
> Darwin was wrong about a lot of things
So you keep saying, but so what if he got a few details wrong?
Evolution doesn't begin and end with Darwin's work and his basic premise is the foundation for a mountain of work, none of which you acknowledge.
> he predicted gradualism
No he didn't - On The Origin Of Species never makes such an assertion. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyletic_gradualism
> No matter what the evidence, evolution comes up with something to account for it
That's because when a theory matches the available evidence 99% of the time and just needs a tweak to account for something newly discovered, then that's perfectly reasonable.
If you want to falsify it you have find a flaw that shows the theory is *fundamentally* wrong in some way. At that point it helps if you have an alternative theory that explains all the evidence and avoids the same flaws. This is how General Relativity usurped Newton's Law of Gravity for example.
Such a theory will need to be a bit more reasonable than "God created everything in six days, because lots of people think so, and he planted all that fake evidence pointing to evolution because he moves in mysterious ways that man is not meant to comprehend".
On the post: Study Says Listening To Sports While Driving Is Dangerous, So Let's Ban That, Too
Roadside Fine
Dangerous Driving is a serious offence involving arrest, charges and court fines and/or jail time.
Driving while using a Mobile Phone is, I think, usually treated as a relatively minor offence and handled with a roadside fine.
On the post: Wait, Editing An XML Document Is Patented And Worth $98 Per Application?
Prior Art goes back to the 60's
The patent was filed in 1994, prior art seems to include NROFF format files which goes back at least to the earliest days of Unix (used in man pages among other things).
On the post: New Law In Korea Means Google Bans The Uploading Of Music On Any Blog
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Let me get this straight
On the post: New Law In Korea Means Google Bans The Uploading Of Music On Any Blog
Re: Re: Re: Re: Let me get this straight
Of course if I'd been designed by an omnipotent, omniscient being there is no way I would be able to succumb to a fatal injury through such an innocent thing as laughter, is there?
Seriously, my favourite argument against Creationism is the one that says if God had designed humans she* wouldn't have done such a piss-poor job of it! Ask any doctor - there are literally dozens of "design flaws" in the human body.
* Because it annoys the hell out of fundamentalists if you refer to God as being female ;-)
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