I think that if someone comes up with a better case, the cablevision ruling will get overturned fairly easily. It isn't a question of the length of wire, but rather who controls the box used for storage.
When you record on your local PVR, you are the only one (plural household you) who can access the material. You have a copy (as if you had watched the show live) and that is yours to enjoy in fair use.
However, Cablevision's system was a shared DVR. Effectively, they only need to store one copy of the show (not one copy per user, one copy total) and share that copy with whoever wants it. Obviously, it isn't hard to go from a PVR to a video on demand system (let's say you select to record everything all the time forever).
So it isn't the wire, it's also the method used to record, who is actually doing the recording, etc.
The judges worked hard to make it legal, but they had to really come up with some twisted logic to get there. That sort of ruling is easily undone. The Supreme Court is probably waiting for a contradictory ruling in another circuit, so they have two sides to work from.
So if we're looking for big trends over the next ten years, how about we learn to stop listening to out of touch rockstars who insist they know stuff they are clearly uninformed about (or, rather, informed by a few biased and factually-challenged parties)?
Yup, let's follow the words of uninvolved webblog writers and disconnected professors.
Remember, those who can do, those who can't teach. :)
1) Sony is bad, they broke the reader and never fixed it.
2) DRM TAX!
3) She had to buy a new unit ONLY from Sony to be able to read her stuff.
You mention towards the end of the story that Sony did in fact finally repair it (which made the purchase of a new unit meaningless). If that was the thrust of the story, the rest would be meaningless.
She was not forced to buy specifically a Sony unit, as Sony now supports the E-pub format, a point you were careful NOT to make. She could have bought a cheaper reader from a competitior, example. She was not locked into Sony. Further, with the original unit repaired, the purchased unit may be meaningless. It isn't discussed in the story as to how Sony handled that part of the situation.
Finally, the question of the "DRM tax". Any time you buy a product with a specific format, you have committed yourself down a certain path. VHS vs BETA, Xbox vs PS, MAC vs PC. It isn't a tax, it's a choice. It is very early days in the e-reader marketplace, and right now we are looking at competing formats that are not entirely settled in yet. Don't confuse format with DRM. I am sure that some reader can or will be able to get books through Sony, Amazon, and other providers, each with their own DRM, without issue. Device locked content is a very unlikely concept, even in the very near term.
It is very likely that, in the long run, a DRM style system will exist on all commercial content. What is currently lacking is a cohesive system to allow end users to re-use their content over multiple platforms in a simple manner, while still assuring the content creator distribution control.
Sadly, you are so busy trying to damn DRM and mock it with the "DRM tax" concept, that you aren't thinking about the future, just how to get rid of the dreaded DRM.
Actually, to some extent it is true. If you hold a patent on some minor concept, which you use in your products, and another company owns a slightly older patent that might be stretched to cover the same thing, you have in many ways made yourself a target. They can look through the patent databases looking for similar, newer work, and use that as a basis of attack.
I have a feeling it is just someone at Cisco that totaled up their legal bills for fighting patent lawsuits, and their legal bills for researching and filing patents, and realized it would just be cheaper to fight (and occassionally pay) than anything.
Clearly, when you fight against a NPE, there is no mutually assured destruction of cross patents and the like, as the NPE has nothing to attack. Much of the "patent everything you can" is designed to fight other companies in your field who might sue you based on one of their patents, as you can pull the trigger back using one of yours. It is essentially a patent cold war.
I am a little surprised that Mike didn't pick up on this concept.
In Nina's case, it seems like a little bit of a re-write of history. Nina, correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think your original intention was to give the movie away for free, and that giving it away was only a defence mechanism against the copyright issues you faced, right?
Also, as someone else mentioned, the Time article suggests you are 55k to the good, yet all the stories that we have seen here pretty much have you crying the starving artist blues. Which one is right?
From the article, I can take only this: Plenty of people are making movies they are passionate about, but that have little hope of being commercially viable. Only through giving the product away and praying that people do something else (buy the proverbial t-shirt) do they have any hope of making their money back. In rare cases, it would appear to be a profitable enterprise.
The Anti-Mike, if you are so against Mike, his opinions and his postings here on his site, then I invite you to leave.
Have you ever checked out Rush Limbaugh? He calls his fans dittoheads, as in they repeat what he says like parrots. They don't have original thoughts, they just nod and repeat what the master says.
Standing in a room full of people you agree with is the fast way to learn nothing. Writing comments on a website where you agree with everyone is a formula for becoming more stupid, not better informed.
My suggestion to you is to open your own eyes, and check out some of those websites that you would think are better for me, and learn from them. Engage them, discuss, and THINK. Expand yourself, don't shrink.
Monopolies in distribution are a double edged sword.
In theory, competition should lead to lower prices, and it often does. But competition also often leads to financial losses for one or more of the competitors, which in turn leads to either competitors leaving the marketplace or being merged together. Think Sirius and XM. It happens all the time. Without media ownership restrictions, some market places in the US would see all of their radio, TV, and newspapers controlled by a very few groups.
The reality is that sometimes a monopoly is the best financial arrangement that leads to the best market conditions: a stable market place.
Let's say Nina signs 5 different distribution agreements for a single country. The costs for each one (and the dilution of sales) means that the product cost to the consumer is likely higher, or the payout to the artist is distinctly lower. There is potential that a monopolistic market, where the competition is product versus product rather than supplier to supplier might actual lead to better market conditions for everyone involved.
How? The monoplistic distributor knows they will get 100% of the sales. Their costs are spread over more product, so their unit costs are lower. They can pay the artist more, they can charge a little less, and still make much more money than they would in a competitive situation.
Some would say this allows for significantly higher prices because of the monopoly, but it doesn't work out that way because there are many movies in the marketplace, which means there is competition, just in a different place. Nina's movie has to compete with other more commercial products. Thus the price is market dictated.
It's like anything. If you concentrate on a single point, you can see only monopoly. But it is a monopoly in a competitive system, which keeps it in check.
It's like Mike's infinite distribution theories. If you look at them closely you can make the mistake of thinking that music or movies are an "infinite" product. But when you step back a couple of paces, you realize that movies and music are in fact a VERY finite item, with only a limited amount of new music and new movies released each year. It's the reasons that supply and demand still applies, just on the larger scale rather than in the narrow zone of distribution.
It's the reason the public generally still values the product, and are mostly still willing to pay for it.
As the joke goes, it isn't paranoia if they are actually trying to get you.
If it is just a case of attempting to define new language, I never have a problem. For the most part, Mike doesn't use it to define terms just to make things easier to talk about, but to create negative spin where needed like this "DRM tax". Mike knows that only the government(s) can impose taxes, this isn't a tax. It's a normal cost of buying anything that is format restricted (like your VHS or Beta VCR, example, or having a car that uses only premium gas).
There is no DRM tax.
Further, the comments in this story also go to show how Mike missed some of the important stuff, like apparently that Sony has moved to an inter-operable format, EPUB. He also fails to mention that the Sony device does support things like PDF and other formats. With the Sony store being in epub format, she could have bought any epub reader to read her Sony stuff, which pretty much kills the idea of the DRM tax.
While the story mentions it, he didn't mention that Sony did fix her reader for free in the end. That too wouldn't play well in the whole deal, would it.
So in the end, Sony has moved to a more universal format, the woman got her reader fixed, and she isn't restricted to only Sony readers in the future.
Once you plow away the negative spin, there isn't much left here. There certainly isn't anyone paying a "DRM tax", now is there?
He isn't committing a war crime, he is just attempting to take a nasty slight at the idea of DRM and turn it into a "fact" where as it is just an opinion (and one with plenty of holes in it).
By linking back to other posts, and linking them as it they were fact rather than opinion, he creates the impression of fact. When he links to this story, he will say something like "we have shown where people are forced to pay DRM tax", completing the cycle that turns opinion (and a catchy scare term) into "techduh fact #317".
You have to go back and look over techdirt for the last couple of years to see how this is done, it is impressive. Heck, Mike's public presentations are predicated on it. The fast slide technique basically is similar in nature, toss so much stuff out there so fast, that nobody has any way to check it or argue with it. Slowed down without the flashy slides, there is much that is speculative, especially around the foundations of the ideas.
Oh noes! Let's not make PDFs, let's not write anything in someone else's computer language! Batten down the hatches and lock the doors, otherwise you might get locked into a format.
The Mickey Mouse example is painful, mostly because Disney continues to use Mickey Mouse to this day. For me, there has to be an instances where a currently active character's works are protected for as long as that character continues to be used. There are new Mickey Mouse products coming out all the time.
Disney is very careful with their products, they create scarcities by not allowing all of their products on the market at the same time, and they are very careful about digitally remastering their work and releasing it in the latest formats each time. The public pretty much lines up to buy the stuff to this very day.
Disney is a very exceptional case because of how active they are with their content, with their characters, and with their entire suite of books, movies, and the like. Disney continues to work to build new theme parks, and the characters are an active part of the package.
Disney isn't a stale piece of celluloid rotting on the shelves, it's an active collection of characters and productions, lovingly retouched and remastered to the latest standards on a regular basis.
My feeling is that in the case of Disney, none of their products should be out of copyright, because they continue to work with them, and continue to tend their products well. Sadly, copyright law doesn't have any simple way to recognize the difference between moldy stuff ignored by a dead artist's heirs for 50 years, and disney's active use and reworking of their products. Until that gets fixed, there will always be a huge tension. In the end, Disney is doing a better job at preserving history than most others. Do you really want to discourage that?
On the post: Singapore Court Rules That Online DVR Is Infringing... While Noting How Copyright Law Isn't Really Set Up For This
When you record on your local PVR, you are the only one (plural household you) who can access the material. You have a copy (as if you had watched the show live) and that is yours to enjoy in fair use.
However, Cablevision's system was a shared DVR. Effectively, they only need to store one copy of the show (not one copy per user, one copy total) and share that copy with whoever wants it. Obviously, it isn't hard to go from a PVR to a video on demand system (let's say you select to record everything all the time forever).
So it isn't the wire, it's also the method used to record, who is actually doing the recording, etc.
The judges worked hard to make it legal, but they had to really come up with some twisted logic to get there. That sort of ruling is easily undone. The Supreme Court is probably waiting for a contradictory ruling in another circuit, so they have two sides to work from.
On the post: Bono: We Should Use China's Censorship As An Example Of How To Stop Piracy
Yup, let's follow the words of uninvolved webblog writers and disconnected professors.
Remember, those who can do, those who can't teach. :)
On the post: Despite Awful Customer Service, Woman Felt Forced To Buy Another Sony eBook Reader... Thanks To DRM
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Caught you Mike!
Your entire story hinges on three things:
1) Sony is bad, they broke the reader and never fixed it.
2) DRM TAX!
3) She had to buy a new unit ONLY from Sony to be able to read her stuff.
You mention towards the end of the story that Sony did in fact finally repair it (which made the purchase of a new unit meaningless). If that was the thrust of the story, the rest would be meaningless.
She was not forced to buy specifically a Sony unit, as Sony now supports the E-pub format, a point you were careful NOT to make. She could have bought a cheaper reader from a competitior, example. She was not locked into Sony. Further, with the original unit repaired, the purchased unit may be meaningless. It isn't discussed in the story as to how Sony handled that part of the situation.
Finally, the question of the "DRM tax". Any time you buy a product with a specific format, you have committed yourself down a certain path. VHS vs BETA, Xbox vs PS, MAC vs PC. It isn't a tax, it's a choice. It is very early days in the e-reader marketplace, and right now we are looking at competing formats that are not entirely settled in yet. Don't confuse format with DRM. I am sure that some reader can or will be able to get books through Sony, Amazon, and other providers, each with their own DRM, without issue. Device locked content is a very unlikely concept, even in the very near term.
It is very likely that, in the long run, a DRM style system will exist on all commercial content. What is currently lacking is a cohesive system to allow end users to re-use their content over multiple platforms in a simple manner, while still assuring the content creator distribution control.
Sadly, you are so busy trying to damn DRM and mock it with the "DRM tax" concept, that you aren't thinking about the future, just how to get rid of the dreaded DRM.
On the post: Cisco Realizes It's A Waste Of Time To Focus On Patent Quantity
Re:
I have a feeling it is just someone at Cisco that totaled up their legal bills for fighting patent lawsuits, and their legal bills for researching and filing patents, and realized it would just be cheaper to fight (and occassionally pay) than anything.
Clearly, when you fight against a NPE, there is no mutually assured destruction of cross patents and the like, as the NPE has nothing to attack. Much of the "patent everything you can" is designed to fight other companies in your field who might sue you based on one of their patents, as you can pull the trigger back using one of yours. It is essentially a patent cold war.
I am a little surprised that Mike didn't pick up on this concept.
On the post: More Indie Movie Makers Realizing The Benefits Of Releasing Movies Free Online
Also, as someone else mentioned, the Time article suggests you are 55k to the good, yet all the stories that we have seen here pretty much have you crying the starving artist blues. Which one is right?
From the article, I can take only this: Plenty of people are making movies they are passionate about, but that have little hope of being commercially viable. Only through giving the product away and praying that people do something else (buy the proverbial t-shirt) do they have any hope of making their money back. In rare cases, it would appear to be a profitable enterprise.
On the post: Despite Awful Customer Service, Woman Felt Forced To Buy Another Sony eBook Reader... Thanks To DRM
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Caught you Mike!
Have you ever checked out Rush Limbaugh? He calls his fans dittoheads, as in they repeat what he says like parrots. They don't have original thoughts, they just nod and repeat what the master says.
Standing in a room full of people you agree with is the fast way to learn nothing. Writing comments on a website where you agree with everyone is a formula for becoming more stupid, not better informed.
My suggestion to you is to open your own eyes, and check out some of those websites that you would think are better for me, and learn from them. Engage them, discuss, and THINK. Expand yourself, don't shrink.
On the post: A Look Back At Major Label Online Strategies A Decade Ago
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Fail. At least the holidays are over and you will have to head back to high school, so you won't be polluting the site on school nights.
On the post: The Problem Isn't Middlemen, It's Monopolies
Re: values
In theory, competition should lead to lower prices, and it often does. But competition also often leads to financial losses for one or more of the competitors, which in turn leads to either competitors leaving the marketplace or being merged together. Think Sirius and XM. It happens all the time. Without media ownership restrictions, some market places in the US would see all of their radio, TV, and newspapers controlled by a very few groups.
The reality is that sometimes a monopoly is the best financial arrangement that leads to the best market conditions: a stable market place.
Let's say Nina signs 5 different distribution agreements for a single country. The costs for each one (and the dilution of sales) means that the product cost to the consumer is likely higher, or the payout to the artist is distinctly lower. There is potential that a monopolistic market, where the competition is product versus product rather than supplier to supplier might actual lead to better market conditions for everyone involved.
How? The monoplistic distributor knows they will get 100% of the sales. Their costs are spread over more product, so their unit costs are lower. They can pay the artist more, they can charge a little less, and still make much more money than they would in a competitive situation.
Some would say this allows for significantly higher prices because of the monopoly, but it doesn't work out that way because there are many movies in the marketplace, which means there is competition, just in a different place. Nina's movie has to compete with other more commercial products. Thus the price is market dictated.
It's like anything. If you concentrate on a single point, you can see only monopoly. But it is a monopoly in a competitive system, which keeps it in check.
It's like Mike's infinite distribution theories. If you look at them closely you can make the mistake of thinking that music or movies are an "infinite" product. But when you step back a couple of paces, you realize that movies and music are in fact a VERY finite item, with only a limited amount of new music and new movies released each year. It's the reasons that supply and demand still applies, just on the larger scale rather than in the narrow zone of distribution.
It's the reason the public generally still values the product, and are mostly still willing to pay for it.
On the post: Despite Awful Customer Service, Woman Felt Forced To Buy Another Sony eBook Reader... Thanks To DRM
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Caught you Mike!
If it is just a case of attempting to define new language, I never have a problem. For the most part, Mike doesn't use it to define terms just to make things easier to talk about, but to create negative spin where needed like this "DRM tax". Mike knows that only the government(s) can impose taxes, this isn't a tax. It's a normal cost of buying anything that is format restricted (like your VHS or Beta VCR, example, or having a car that uses only premium gas).
There is no DRM tax.
Further, the comments in this story also go to show how Mike missed some of the important stuff, like apparently that Sony has moved to an inter-operable format, EPUB. He also fails to mention that the Sony device does support things like PDF and other formats. With the Sony store being in epub format, she could have bought any epub reader to read her Sony stuff, which pretty much kills the idea of the DRM tax.
While the story mentions it, he didn't mention that Sony did fix her reader for free in the end. That too wouldn't play well in the whole deal, would it.
So in the end, Sony has moved to a more universal format, the woman got her reader fixed, and she isn't restricted to only Sony readers in the future.
Once you plow away the negative spin, there isn't much left here. There certainly isn't anyone paying a "DRM tax", now is there?
On the post: Despite Awful Customer Service, Woman Felt Forced To Buy Another Sony eBook Reader... Thanks To DRM
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Caught you Mike!
By linking back to other posts, and linking them as it they were fact rather than opinion, he creates the impression of fact. When he links to this story, he will say something like "we have shown where people are forced to pay DRM tax", completing the cycle that turns opinion (and a catchy scare term) into "techduh fact #317".
You have to go back and look over techdirt for the last couple of years to see how this is done, it is impressive. Heck, Mike's public presentations are predicated on it. The fast slide technique basically is similar in nature, toss so much stuff out there so fast, that nobody has any way to check it or argue with it. Slowed down without the flashy slides, there is much that is speculative, especially around the foundations of the ideas.
On the post: Despite Awful Customer Service, Woman Felt Forced To Buy Another Sony eBook Reader... Thanks To DRM
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Caught you Mike!
Talk about trolling... sheesh!
On the post: The Problem Isn't Middlemen, It's Monopolies
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Creativity, Innovation And Happiness
Re: Re: Happy New Year
Is that better?
On the post: Tomorrow Is National Book Burning Day; Thank Your Friendly Entertainment Industry Lobbyists
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Who Says Data Centers Aren't Cool?
Re: Re:
On the post: Who Says Data Centers Aren't Cool?
Re: Re:
On the post: Tomorrow Is National Book Burning Day; Thank Your Friendly Entertainment Industry Lobbyists
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:Anti-mike
Disney is very careful with their products, they create scarcities by not allowing all of their products on the market at the same time, and they are very careful about digitally remastering their work and releasing it in the latest formats each time. The public pretty much lines up to buy the stuff to this very day.
Disney is a very exceptional case because of how active they are with their content, with their characters, and with their entire suite of books, movies, and the like. Disney continues to work to build new theme parks, and the characters are an active part of the package.
Disney isn't a stale piece of celluloid rotting on the shelves, it's an active collection of characters and productions, lovingly retouched and remastered to the latest standards on a regular basis.
My feeling is that in the case of Disney, none of their products should be out of copyright, because they continue to work with them, and continue to tend their products well. Sadly, copyright law doesn't have any simple way to recognize the difference between moldy stuff ignored by a dead artist's heirs for 50 years, and disney's active use and reworking of their products. Until that gets fixed, there will always be a huge tension. In the end, Disney is doing a better job at preserving history than most others. Do you really want to discourage that?
On the post: Calculating The DRM Tax On A Kindle
Re: Re: Amazon E-books accessible by account not just by device
1-0 Kindle
If you have a bag full of books, and you lose it, you can't get them back.
2-0 Kindle
Your house catches fire, and all your books are lost. Insurance gives you money to replace your kindle.
3-0 Kindle
we could go on, but I think you get the point. There are pluses and minuses to everything.
On the post: The Problem Isn't Middlemen, It's Monopolies
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The story isn't structured to raise that point, it's to show how evil monopolies are. But she buries the concepts of how they are created.
She created her own monopoly hell, and that is key. You would think that an "insight expert" wouldn't do something so silly.
On the post: A Look Back At Major Label Online Strategies A Decade Ago
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Carry on, anonymous troll.
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