Other than the FBI's continued violation(s) of the US Constitution just how, exactly, do you misplace a GPS that's supposed to call home and tell you where it is?
Once upon a time there were ambulance chasers. As we got wiser, more civilized and more sophisticated the ambulance chaser has evolved into the legal IP troll. They hide under rocks, often in West Texas, and spring out of nowhere with the silliest demands not at all caring of the damage they do.
I also worked as a technician the past 35 years at a telco and watched not only the immense changes in technology that have made the Internet and the Web so widely available. It wouldn't be far from lying if I said the Web feels like it's a part of my right arm. Probably the source of a lot of my opposition to ACTA/SOPA/PIPA and other actions that would end up censoring and restricting the Web or the Internet as a whole.
Or you can swim in it, follow its currents and be surprised by it.
It recognizes what is most important, the freedom the Web has given us all, mere surfers, old internet technologies like IRC which is where I met my partner.
In many ways it's a manifesto. Perhaps not intended but then the best manifestos are the ones that are unintentional.
I can and do understand what the writer is talking about after being, for all practical purposes being a shut in in the three years since I broke my back. What the writer looks for and does on the web is what I look for and do now. For example I no longer find the need by some professions and governments to use paper and snail mail rather than secure web connections and email.
These are the people that will remake our world. I hope they do a better job than we Boomers did.
The fault there lays with the industry itself. They could have set up sites where people can easily find releases at reasonable prices. For example if you're burning your own CD or DVD or have to get new hardware to listen/see the release it would have to be at a slightly lower price than what Sneeje talks about in his post where the bricks and mortar, knowledgeable staff, relaxed atmosphere and so on are present.
That discount over Sneeje's store may not be as much as you think because people do value all those things over price, in many cases, and there's a tendency to linger creating more sales.
Keeping in mind, here, that what we're talking about is bits and bytes here not entirely physical goods in "the real world". In both cases, though, the industry makes what it would have while selling shiny plastic disks.
The industry chose to do neither. In music they had to get cornered by Steve Jobs before an iTunes existed. Not only that but he out bargained them when he got iTunes going.
Because the industry refused to do business on the web Napster came along in the days where most connections were still dial up. That inconvenience alone should illustrate that people weren't making the decision to "pirate" lightly when a download of one or two songs could take 20 minutes or so and be interrupted by a message waiting signal on the phone line. Napster provided what the industry would not.
To compete now, and the industry can if it chooses, it would have to ditch holy grails such as regional "rights", phased introduction and a few other marketing tools that worked well before the Web existed but are both irrelevant and annoying to customers now that the Web is here.
They can beat free, if they want. They have the branding that says we're the genuine article, would be less likely to be hiding root kits, viruses and other nasties that break out on pirate sites from time to time and customers would consider them more secure for that reason alone. They'd also need to stop expecting $20 US for the download of each CD which would allow piracy to continue as no one, in this day and age, is going to pay that. I have no idea the price the market would set but it isn't what is currently retail.
The industry has high profit margins already, buyers aren't about to tolerate higher ones where the good itself, the song, movie, tv show or whatever isin infinite supply because it's digital.
I could go on here but, in my mind, the industry didn't just miss the boat but they missed the whole damned fleet as it steamed on by
Should enough people and ICANN members make a big deal of this flop over and play dead attitude then perhaps they will actually take on an advocacy role as well as a roll that seems largely designed to add more TLDs in order to make them more money.
I'm not going to hold my breath about it though nor am I waiting for a sudden conversion experience on ICANN's part.
But it does help to participate in things like their upcoming public meeting in Costa Rica by taking part on line if not in person.
It would be the height of foolishness for the EU to have adopted their agreement with Australia as a standard and then allow the United States variations to that standard.
In Canada we've already suffered from the over-enthusiam of American authorities who wrongly deported a Canadian citizen to Syria where he was detained and tortured for a number of years while the security apparatus in the States and Canada denied any mistake before admitting one and our citizen came back home. We still have the problem of Canadians appearing on a no fly list on a Canadian airline (Air Canada) apparently based on the US no fly list who can still travel back and forth across the border with relative ease and fly on American carriers once in the United States.
It's not just the permanence of access to data that American authorities want but what the maze of American security agencies will do with it once they have it even as they work at cross purposes, which they often do, and European citizens get to pay the price for it.
Ensuring security from terrorists is vital and something all nations and groups of nations must do. Just not at the cost of eroding the rights of the citizenry because some in the security apparatus just love the idea of tonnes of data they can have fishing expeditions into.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: IP Advocates == Spoiled Children
Even using your logic if Hollywood made it easier for people, all potential PAYING customers, to find and download at a reasonable price Hollywood would make a killing.
If you remember back far enough it took some time before video stores found the magic balance between rental prices and sales before they took off. In my area it was largely about $3 a day, blockbuster or not. Hollywood, or at least the video stores, found out quickly that encoding the tapes or DVDs so they couldn't be copied as broken as fast as they did it so artificial shortages never really occurred.
But people tolerated waiting till the movie they wanted came back in and they could rent it then.
Result. Lower in store prices. But the stores did better than survive and a few specialty places still do. Because Hollwood could sell more videos to the stores they made more too.
All on a technology that shortly before they had wanted banned.
The same thing would work on the web where there is no such thing as scarcity being that it's all bits and bytes. The market will settle on its own price, maybe not what Hollywood wants or thinks it's entitled to but money that will flow back to them without draconian, unenforceable laws.
Big Search, huh? Would that be Bing or Yahoo or, gosh, Google by any chance?
The thing is have you actually tried any of the stuff talked about here. Either on the Web or, heaven forbid, real life?
Are you an artist at all or just a blow hard?
Have you bothered to ask,oh, Bing, Yahoo or Google for an audit trail on their penny per click ads they scatter far and wide across the Web or are you just blowing so much smoke again? Have you or can you real annual reports?
And just what do you know about web artists? Or artists at all, for that matter.
Or have you just invented a demon called Big Search because Hollywood imagines there is such a thing and someone is probably making a slasher movie about it as I write this.
Bob, when you find and define this entity or demon known as Big Search, let us know. Keeping in mind that the job of any search engine is to actually index what is out there on the web, not to make moral, legal or other judgements of it. Just to index it so people can find things, the things they want. If you don't like that then I guess you'll have to tell us the rules you want in your fantasy web keeping in mind that Bing, Yahoo and Google aren't about to stop serving ads just for you.
Given all the core software that is employed in the Internet today is licensed under the GPL, LGPL, Apache or BSD licenses that sounds pretty open source to me.
Not to bother mentioning that from the start the code was shared, freely built on and innovated on even before any of those open sources licenses existed. Ok, so the Internet was largely developed before the TERM "open source" came about it was built in the same spirit and meritocracy that identifies open source.
RMS, though he's loud, arrogant and frequently annoying doesn't control anything but the evolution of the General Public License.
Last time I read the man he still doesn't like the term "open source" as his term is "free software", free as in to copy, add to. modify and release again under the SAME license, in his case the GPL. There are other open source licenses, you know, like that BSD and Apache licenses.
RMS is also rabidly opposed to software patents. So please point me to his monopoly.
you forgot business processes that preceded the rulings of that wonderful court in west Texas, patent ability of software over the objections of almost the entire industry which also amounts to patenting mathematical equations which is what almost all programs are.
The problem is that there are few boundaries left around what can and cannot be patented. The notion of non-obviousness, or that doesn't come from prior art and so on seems to have disappeared.
Until that reappears, if it ever does, the inflation in patents will continue.
Even though there were a record number of patent applications in the USA last year for the first time in recent history two countries had more applications in than the States (or even one) namely Japan and China. I'm not saying that they are necessarily more innovative just that the scope of what can and cannot be patented has become enormous. And there's something the just doesn't smell right about that.
Heaven forbid that they'd have given a thought to the creators of cultures in various parts of Africa. You know, the story tellers, writers, elders, indigenous film makers and the actual public...the real stakeholders in this discussion and what they might have to say.
Not to mention the crushing poverty of many parts of the African continent, not a little of it caused by European and North American meddling. (More recently Chinese.)
All of the above, of course, makes a firmer argument for a meeting at a secret location all the more probable as there are people in Africa who don't share the opinions of WIPO and the US Department of Commerce. Not to mention Hollywood.
I foresee a sign posted saying "riff-raff not invited".
Heaven and ACTA forbid that Africa might just come up with its own ideas of what intellectual property is and is not. We can't have that, can we?
And you, again, neglect the uncomfortable (for you) fact that humans have always come up with "content". And the equally uncomfortable detail that a subscription to HBO doesn't begin to cover production costs which are covered in other ways including advertising as well as the export and after markets.
Most piracy is about the after market. If there is a demand HBO is far better off serving it while they can charge a price that seems fair to both HBO and the potential customer.
You keep stating that if the "content" is too widely available then in short order there will be no "content" because it would be cannibalized. With respect I disagree. And I have some 6000 years of human creativity that we at least know about once writing was developed to prove that point.
We are creatures that like to tell each other stories for whatever reason. There are lots of them, by the way. "Content" will not vanish not will quality vanish.
What may vanish would be the gatekeeper culture that has risen up in the last couple of centuries and the control freak culture around it. Until now the producers have never had to satisfy a demand for stories at a reasonable price, in a reasonable time frame. Like you, they can't get it through there head that that kind of thing works.
In the end, of course, the customer is always supposed to be right. Those who will pay or the small number who won't though, are both forced into what you call piracy by the paranoia of gatekeepers that this will somehow lessen the value of their "content" rather than create more demand and enhance it.
Who knows, one day you and they may realize that. Until then we'll have long discussions about file sharing, piracy and the need for newer and ever more draconian laws. You enhance the value of "content" not one little bit by restricting access to it and increase it's value by making it widely and simply available.
I'll close by beating you over the head with the ghost of Henry Ford who proved that point. Even if you refuse to see it.
Of course this could have nothing to do with declining audiences for network tv and the accompanying decline in what networks and local stations can charge for advertising.
This trend was occurring long before wide spread "piracy". Where you are right is that "reality" shows are the cheapest to produce and many seem to attract larger audiences than drama or comedy does.
None of this means that the actual quality what comedy and drama is produced need decline just because there are fewer choices. If networks were actually interested in attracting an audience, even with a shorter season, they would do their best to ensure what makes it on air is the highest quality possible.
Also that if there is a demand for past season DVDs then get them out there as fast as possible. That doesn't have to mean before season 2 for season 1 begins or is well underway but while demand for season 1 is still there.
Given the short shelf life of many programs it only seems wise to strike while the iron's hot and not hold off in the hope of beging the next "Lost"
In theory a take down notice ought to work. But only after the person affected is notified and has a chance to respond. Not after the fact.
But that's not been enough for the copyright extremists out there who push for ever and ever more restrictive use of material under copyright while extending the term longer and longer into space and time. Naturally we hear about the people who created the material, who may have perfromed the material, who contributed to it on a movie or television shoot, who wrote the book the movie is based on and so it goes.
Funny thing is they always seem to be the last ones paid (if ever), royalties, residuals and other goodies while the corporate entities that actually have control of the copyright, rarely the creators themselves, gorge on what they see as a never ending feast. And heaven help anyone who wants to share so much as a vienna sausage of that feast.
Regrettably, copyright has moved far beyond it's original intent as outlined in the Statute of Anne and later picked up by the US Constitution as a short term incentive to provide for things like education and culture into something a patent troll would fall in lust with. And still, most of the creators never do get paid.
Add, now, to that, the development of programmed DCMA take down notice generators that, more often that not, will be mistaken, bug ridden ContentID and a raft of other ideas we once thought belonged in stories like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, The Handmaids Tale and many others of that genre.
Goodbye to freedom, liberty and free speech. Good bye to a world where issues can be discussed that the power elite would prefer weren't.
All triggered by a he-said-she-said DCMA takedown system that never bothers to as what she really does have to say till it's all gone.
On the post: FBI Turns Off About 3,000 GPS Devices Following Supreme Court Ruling
The humour that can be mined from this is huge!
On the post: WaPo's Kaplan Scolded For Demanding $300 From Student Trying To Sell One Of Its Books On eBay
Re: Re: DAAAAUUMMMMM
On the post: NSA Power Grab: New Legislation Would Give It Broad Powers To Spy On 'Critical' Private Networks
Re: Re:
On the post: 'We, The Web Kids': Manifesto For An Anti-ACTA Generation
Re: Not Just The Youngins
I also worked as a technician the past 35 years at a telco and watched not only the immense changes in technology that have made the Internet and the Web so widely available. It wouldn't be far from lying if I said the Web feels like it's a part of my right arm. Probably the source of a lot of my opposition to ACTA/SOPA/PIPA and other actions that would end up censoring and restricting the Web or the Internet as a whole.
On the post: 'We, The Web Kids': Manifesto For An Anti-ACTA Generation
Re: Re:
It recognizes what is most important, the freedom the Web has given us all, mere surfers, old internet technologies like IRC which is where I met my partner.
In many ways it's a manifesto. Perhaps not intended but then the best manifestos are the ones that are unintentional.
I can and do understand what the writer is talking about after being, for all practical purposes being a shut in in the three years since I broke my back. What the writer looks for and does on the web is what I look for and do now. For example I no longer find the need by some professions and governments to use paper and snail mail rather than secure web connections and email.
These are the people that will remake our world. I hope they do a better job than we Boomers did.
On the post: Yes, Online And Offline Rules Are Different... Because Online And Offline Are Different
Re: Re: Re: Re: The CD analogy should be...
That discount over Sneeje's store may not be as much as you think because people do value all those things over price, in many cases, and there's a tendency to linger creating more sales.
Keeping in mind, here, that what we're talking about is bits and bytes here not entirely physical goods in "the real world". In both cases, though, the industry makes what it would have while selling shiny plastic disks.
The industry chose to do neither. In music they had to get cornered by Steve Jobs before an iTunes existed. Not only that but he out bargained them when he got iTunes going.
Because the industry refused to do business on the web Napster came along in the days where most connections were still dial up. That inconvenience alone should illustrate that people weren't making the decision to "pirate" lightly when a download of one or two songs could take 20 minutes or so and be interrupted by a message waiting signal on the phone line. Napster provided what the industry would not.
To compete now, and the industry can if it chooses, it would have to ditch holy grails such as regional "rights", phased introduction and a few other marketing tools that worked well before the Web existed but are both irrelevant and annoying to customers now that the Web is here.
They can beat free, if they want. They have the branding that says we're the genuine article, would be less likely to be hiding root kits, viruses and other nasties that break out on pirate sites from time to time and customers would consider them more secure for that reason alone. They'd also need to stop expecting $20 US for the download of each CD which would allow piracy to continue as no one, in this day and age, is going to pay that. I have no idea the price the market would set but it isn't what is currently retail.
The industry has high profit margins already, buyers aren't about to tolerate higher ones where the good itself, the song, movie, tv show or whatever isin infinite supply because it's digital.
I could go on here but, in my mind, the industry didn't just miss the boat but they missed the whole damned fleet as it steamed on by
On the post: Why Isn't ICANN Speaking Out Against ICE/DOJ Domain Seizures?
ICANN's silence and people's upset
I'm not going to hold my breath about it though nor am I waiting for a sudden conversion experience on ICANN's part.
But it does help to participate in things like their upcoming public meeting in Costa Rica by taking part on line if not in person.
http://costarica43.icann.org
On the post: EU Parliament Urged To Reject Agreement With The US To Hand Over Passenger Data
In Canada we've already suffered from the over-enthusiam of American authorities who wrongly deported a Canadian citizen to Syria where he was detained and tortured for a number of years while the security apparatus in the States and Canada denied any mistake before admitting one and our citizen came back home. We still have the problem of Canadians appearing on a no fly list on a Canadian airline (Air Canada) apparently based on the US no fly list who can still travel back and forth across the border with relative ease and fly on American carriers once in the United States.
It's not just the permanence of access to data that American authorities want but what the maze of American security agencies will do with it once they have it even as they work at cross purposes, which they often do, and European citizens get to pay the price for it.
Ensuring security from terrorists is vital and something all nations and groups of nations must do. Just not at the cost of eroding the rights of the citizenry because some in the security apparatus just love the idea of tonnes of data they can have fishing expeditions into.
On the post: Who Cares If Piracy Is 'Wrong' If Stopping It Is Impossible And Innovating Provides Better Solutions?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: IP Advocates == Spoiled Children
If you remember back far enough it took some time before video stores found the magic balance between rental prices and sales before they took off. In my area it was largely about $3 a day, blockbuster or not. Hollywood, or at least the video stores, found out quickly that encoding the tapes or DVDs so they couldn't be copied as broken as fast as they did it so artificial shortages never really occurred.
But people tolerated waiting till the movie they wanted came back in and they could rent it then.
Result. Lower in store prices. But the stores did better than survive and a few specialty places still do. Because Hollwood could sell more videos to the stores they made more too.
All on a technology that shortly before they had wanted banned.
The same thing would work on the web where there is no such thing as scarcity being that it's all bits and bytes. The market will settle on its own price, maybe not what Hollywood wants or thinks it's entitled to but money that will flow back to them without draconian, unenforceable laws.
On the post: Big Bank CEO Who Makes $23 Million Says Press Should Stop Focusing On Bank Compensation... Because Reporters Are Overpaid?
t's unlikely to get those "second-rate" reporters to drop the issue
Dimon just painted a large three circle roundel on his back. Journalism's version of the Streisand effect. ;-)
On the post: If Major Labels Are All About Helping Artists, Why Do We Keep Seeing Artists Calling Out Their Labels For Screwing Them?
Re: Talk about a straw man
The thing is have you actually tried any of the stuff talked about here. Either on the Web or, heaven forbid, real life?
Are you an artist at all or just a blow hard?
Have you bothered to ask,oh, Bing, Yahoo or Google for an audit trail on their penny per click ads they scatter far and wide across the Web or are you just blowing so much smoke again? Have you or can you real annual reports?
And just what do you know about web artists? Or artists at all, for that matter.
Or have you just invented a demon called Big Search because Hollywood imagines there is such a thing and someone is probably making a slasher movie about it as I write this.
Bob, when you find and define this entity or demon known as Big Search, let us know. Keeping in mind that the job of any search engine is to actually index what is out there on the web, not to make moral, legal or other judgements of it. Just to index it so people can find things, the things they want. If you don't like that then I guess you'll have to tell us the rules you want in your fantasy web keeping in mind that Bing, Yahoo and Google aren't about to stop serving ads just for you.
On the post: You Don't Need A Mythical Club Membership To Call Yahoo's Patent Threat Against Facebook Desperate
Re: Re: Re: Considering that I am a "Silicon Valley blogger"
I'd forgotten what complete and total delusion sounded like! Now I know again!
On the post: You Don't Need A Mythical Club Membership To Call Yahoo's Patent Threat Against Facebook Desperate
Re: Re: Re:
Given all the core software that is employed in the Internet today is licensed under the GPL, LGPL, Apache or BSD licenses that sounds pretty open source to me.
Not to bother mentioning that from the start the code was shared, freely built on and innovated on even before any of those open sources licenses existed. Ok, so the Internet was largely developed before the TERM "open source" came about it was built in the same spirit and meritocracy that identifies open source.
On the post: You Don't Need A Mythical Club Membership To Call Yahoo's Patent Threat Against Facebook Desperate
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Last time I read the man he still doesn't like the term "open source" as his term is "free software", free as in to copy, add to. modify and release again under the SAME license, in his case the GPL. There are other open source licenses, you know, like that BSD and Apache licenses.
RMS is also rabidly opposed to software patents. So please point me to his monopoly.
On the post: How The Patent System Is Rigged To Only Expand What's Patentable
Re: Re: Lol, again.
The problem is that there are few boundaries left around what can and cannot be patented. The notion of non-obviousness, or that doesn't come from prior art and so on seems to have disappeared.
Until that reappears, if it ever does, the inflation in patents will continue.
Even though there were a record number of patent applications in the USA last year for the first time in recent history two countries had more applications in than the States (or even one) namely Japan and China. I'm not saying that they are necessarily more innovative just that the scope of what can and cannot be patented has become enormous. And there's something the just doesn't smell right about that.
On the post: Commerce Department Postpones 'Africa IP Forum' After People Point Out How One-Sided It Is
Not to mention the crushing poverty of many parts of the African continent, not a little of it caused by European and North American meddling. (More recently Chinese.)
All of the above, of course, makes a firmer argument for a meeting at a secret location all the more probable as there are people in Africa who don't share the opinions of WIPO and the US Department of Commerce. Not to mention Hollywood.
I foresee a sign posted saying "riff-raff not invited".
Heaven and ACTA forbid that Africa might just come up with its own ideas of what intellectual property is and is not. We can't have that, can we?
On the post: Would You Rather Be 'Right' Or Realistic?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Most piracy is about the after market. If there is a demand HBO is far better off serving it while they can charge a price that seems fair to both HBO and the potential customer.
You keep stating that if the "content" is too widely available then in short order there will be no "content" because it would be cannibalized. With respect I disagree. And I have some 6000 years of human creativity that we at least know about once writing was developed to prove that point.
We are creatures that like to tell each other stories for whatever reason. There are lots of them, by the way. "Content" will not vanish not will quality vanish.
What may vanish would be the gatekeeper culture that has risen up in the last couple of centuries and the control freak culture around it. Until now the producers have never had to satisfy a demand for stories at a reasonable price, in a reasonable time frame. Like you, they can't get it through there head that that kind of thing works.
In the end, of course, the customer is always supposed to be right. Those who will pay or the small number who won't though, are both forced into what you call piracy by the paranoia of gatekeepers that this will somehow lessen the value of their "content" rather than create more demand and enhance it.
Who knows, one day you and they may realize that. Until then we'll have long discussions about file sharing, piracy and the need for newer and ever more draconian laws. You enhance the value of "content" not one little bit by restricting access to it and increase it's value by making it widely and simply available.
I'll close by beating you over the head with the ghost of Henry Ford who proved that point. Even if you refuse to see it.
On the post: Would You Rather Be 'Right' Or Realistic?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
This trend was occurring long before wide spread "piracy". Where you are right is that "reality" shows are the cheapest to produce and many seem to attract larger audiences than drama or comedy does.
None of this means that the actual quality what comedy and drama is produced need decline just because there are fewer choices. If networks were actually interested in attracting an audience, even with a shorter season, they would do their best to ensure what makes it on air is the highest quality possible.
Also that if there is a demand for past season DVDs then get them out there as fast as possible. That doesn't have to mean before season 2 for season 1 begins or is well underway but while demand for season 1 is still there.
Given the short shelf life of many programs it only seems wise to strike while the iron's hot and not hold off in the hope of beging the next "Lost"
On the post: Company That Issued Bogus Takedown Says It Was All A Mistake, Apologizes
But that's not been enough for the copyright extremists out there who push for ever and ever more restrictive use of material under copyright while extending the term longer and longer into space and time. Naturally we hear about the people who created the material, who may have perfromed the material, who contributed to it on a movie or television shoot, who wrote the book the movie is based on and so it goes.
Funny thing is they always seem to be the last ones paid (if ever), royalties, residuals and other goodies while the corporate entities that actually have control of the copyright, rarely the creators themselves, gorge on what they see as a never ending feast. And heaven help anyone who wants to share so much as a vienna sausage of that feast.
Regrettably, copyright has moved far beyond it's original intent as outlined in the Statute of Anne and later picked up by the US Constitution as a short term incentive to provide for things like education and culture into something a patent troll would fall in lust with. And still, most of the creators never do get paid.
Add, now, to that, the development of programmed DCMA take down notice generators that, more often that not, will be mistaken, bug ridden ContentID and a raft of other ideas we once thought belonged in stories like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, The Handmaids Tale and many others of that genre.
Goodbye to freedom, liberty and free speech. Good bye to a world where issues can be discussed that the power elite would prefer weren't.
All triggered by a he-said-she-said DCMA takedown system that never bothers to as what she really does have to say till it's all gone.
On the post: The Things You Learn When You Send A Freedom Of Information Act Request About What The Gov't Knows About You
Re: Re: Re: Gotta look at this from the point of the FBI Agents
Often it's complete idiots.
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