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.
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)
I can't do that with all computers. I try, but sometimes a problem with a system i am not familiar with (win 7 for example) i can only tell you to do the basics, reboot, run AV, etc.
most technologies have a shelf life, er go the skills necessary to use and support those technologies have a shelf life as well.
in the dark days i could work all sorts of magic on systems using a dos boot disk. all of that stuff is now a lost art.
today, knowing how to set up services and apps on mobile phones is only slightly less important to my job than knowing how to set up a server or a PC. if you had told me in 1999 that a significant portion of my job would be supporting mobile phones, i would have told you that you were crazy.
things change, and you have to change along with them.
Look, I not saying it's an organized attack on a marginalized group, all I'm saying is we need to be asking these questions and we need to keep asking until we get an answer. Look how the lawyers for the site and even the activist court just glossed over the parts about confusing the imbeciles and just went straight to what the case is actually about! What is that? Is that justice? Is that what you were brought up to believe in?
there was a march on washington. the morons in this country are organizing and taking to the streets:
The number of works coming from people who want/expect their works to be freely copied would remain constant, but in such a climate, one would eventually find that the signal to noise ratio would sink to practically unusable levels... the volume of quality works would simply be far too low for most people to easily find them or be notified of their existence amongst an overwhelming volume of tripe
and you think there isn't money to be made helping people find stuff they like? that's a salable scarcity called convenience.
that is just one of thousands of new scarcities that pop up from freely available content.
sure i can get anything i want whenever i want it right now, that shifts my focus from obtaining content to finding worthwhile content in an easy way.
now that i can snap my fingers and get any pop song i hear for free, my new music interests have shifted away from catchy, yet ultimately forgettable tunes, to things that interest me in a much more meaningful way. i would gladly pay for someone to find me "free" content that i had control over once it was mine.
this was supposed to be what the recording industry did: finding, investing in, and promoting talent, rather than demanding $20 a disc for auto-tuned excrement.
Would you prefer that they sold you 1Mbps at the same price, and gave it to you full?
if they were transparent about what they were selling, sure. we all know the over subscription model is how internet access works, so why not just level with us?
Marketing says that you want MORE bandwidth, even if it isn't possible at the price they are selling it at.
sure it's possible and at a significantly lower price. all you have to do is introduce some competition into the internet access market.
So you end up with the issue that marketing and reality don't match. They could cut your bandwidth in half, but then you wouldn't want to pay, because it wouldn't be 12Mbps. It's a marketing chicken and egg problem.
the chicken and egg problem is one of competition:
there is no competition, so prices are high and quality is low. there is no way to build out competing infrastructure without municipal/government subsidy, which the incumbents actively resist in order to protect their high prices and low quality.
how do i know that bandwidth lowers in price with competition? price out hosting or co-location services. in a colo you pay not for bandwidth (which starts at 10mbit up and down and goes up from there), but for total transfer, where every bit is accounted for. the per gigabyte price for data center transfer is *SIGNIFICANTLY* less than the residential rate.
this article raises some interesting points about bandwidth and competition (emphasis mine):
I’ve paid for bandwidth and worked at ISPs in many countries and one constant I’ve found is that increased competition directly translates into cheap bandwidth. In too many countries there is still not enough competition among ISPs. In the United States the number of ISPs a consumer may select further dwindled in the past decade.
All over the world you can see the same pattern. Countries with lots of competition among ISPs enjoy the cheapest and best internet service. The countries that are the worst off are the countries where 1 company controls all internet access. That was the case when I lived in India in 1998. Since then India opened itself up to competition and internet usage skyrocketed while bandwidth costs plummeted. Now India is basically on par with the USA for bandwidth costs. Much of Africa is still suffering under government controlled ISPs. The relatively modern country of South Africa has overpriced bandwidth for exactly this reason.
So, now "changing to match what customers want", I would have to guess that you are suggesting that the cable companies should drop their subscription model. Perhaps they could run on donations, or perhaps upsell people to dinner with a technician, perhaps selling limited edition "I met the cable company president" t-shirts, or perhaps autographed limited edition flat screen TVs that they could sell for double the price of normal.
uhh, internet access is non-scarce good. it cannot be produced for free (though it can be made significantly cheaper witht he right infrastructure) and there will always be demand for it.
if the cable companies are in trouble from piracy (they are not) then could spin off their content delivery business into another company and ramp up their internet infrastructure. in corporate speak it would be called "focusing on core competencies". this is a process that should have begun in the mid 1990's when people demanded high speed internet access. they didn't do it then and they never will because they cannot figure out how to get a monopoly.
this would open the gates for pure-play content providers to compete based on the quantity and quality of their content, but since there would be no monopoly, no cable company will do that.
Seriously, the only "change" they seem to need to make to meet what the customer wants is to give their product away for free, on demand, on any device, at any time, from anywhere, and at no cost. Sounds like a great plan, and as soon as you explain how they are going to pay for it...
yeah, no one is paying for cable. that's why comcast is reporting record income:
“The strength and resilience of our businesses combined with our continued emphasis on expenses and prudent capital management helped us achieve healthy operating and financial results in the third quarter,” Brian Roberts, Comcast’s chairman and CEO, said.
here is the breakdown: Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA,CMCSK) earned $944 million, or 33 cents per fully diluted share in the quarter, up from $771 million, or 26 cents per fully diluted share, in the third quarter of last year.
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Re: Re: (as chris)
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.
Re: Re: Re: (as chris)
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.
Re: Re: Re: "Too Expensive" (as chris)
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: (as chris)
http://imagechan.com/images/3ab3c8e9529a4ef08e7cf02a44d8b38d.gif
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You can't legislate or bribe creativity (as chris)
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.
Re: Master copy vs. individual copies (as chris)
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?
Re: (as chris)
I'd never buy a full price game if there's a preowned one going for a few quid less.. And NONE of my money then goes to the publisher.
queue digital delivery in 3... 2.. 1.
Re: Re: Adapting (as chris)
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.
Re: Re: Re: (as chris)
http://www.google.com/cse?cx=003849996876419856805:erhhdbygrma&ie=UTF-8&q=&sa=Search
oh noes!
Re: Re: Re: (as chris)
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.
Re: Re: Re: (as chris)
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)
Re: Re: On Off High Medium Low (as chris)
I can't do that with all computers. I try, but sometimes a problem with a system i am not familiar with (win 7 for example) i can only tell you to do the basics, reboot, run AV, etc.
most technologies have a shelf life, er go the skills necessary to use and support those technologies have a shelf life as well.
in the dark days i could work all sorts of magic on systems using a dos boot disk. all of that stuff is now a lost art.
today, knowing how to set up services and apps on mobile phones is only slightly less important to my job than knowing how to set up a server or a PC. if you had told me in 1999 that a significant portion of my job would be supporting mobile phones, i would have told you that you were crazy.
things change, and you have to change along with them.
Re: Just wanted you to know... (as chris)
that I read this entire story with "Take On Me" playing on loop in my head. Thanks to you, I'll be too distracted to get any work done today.
interior crocodile alligator will remove any song that is stuck in your head, guaranteed, or your money back.
Re: I can't stand by and let this happen (as chris)
Look, I not saying it's an organized attack on a marginalized group, all I'm saying is we need to be asking these questions and we need to keep asking until we get an answer. Look how the lawyers for the site and even the activist court just glossed over the parts about confusing the imbeciles and just went straight to what the case is actually about! What is that? Is that justice? Is that what you were brought up to believe in?
there was a march on washington. the morons in this country are organizing and taking to the streets:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nations_morons_march_on_washington
Re: Re: why bother? (as chris)
The number of works coming from people who want/expect their works to be freely copied would remain constant, but in such a climate, one would eventually find that the signal to noise ratio would sink to practically unusable levels... the volume of quality works would simply be far too low for most people to easily find them or be notified of their existence amongst an overwhelming volume of tripe
and you think there isn't money to be made helping people find stuff they like? that's a salable scarcity called convenience.
that is just one of thousands of new scarcities that pop up from freely available content.
sure i can get anything i want whenever i want it right now, that shifts my focus from obtaining content to finding worthwhile content in an easy way.
now that i can snap my fingers and get any pop song i hear for free, my new music interests have shifted away from catchy, yet ultimately forgettable tunes, to things that interest me in a much more meaningful way. i would gladly pay for someone to find me "free" content that i had control over once it was mine.
this was supposed to be what the recording industry did: finding, investing in, and promoting talent, rather than demanding $20 a disc for auto-tuned excrement.
comcast revenues are up (as chris)
http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2009/11/02/daily26.html
what exactly is this guy crying about?
Re: Re: Re: (as chris)
Would you prefer that they sold you 1Mbps at the same price, and gave it to you full?
if they were transparent about what they were selling, sure. we all know the over subscription model is how internet access works, so why not just level with us?
Marketing says that you want MORE bandwidth, even if it isn't possible at the price they are selling it at.
sure it's possible and at a significantly lower price. all you have to do is introduce some competition into the internet access market.
So you end up with the issue that marketing and reality don't match. They could cut your bandwidth in half, but then you wouldn't want to pay, because it wouldn't be 12Mbps. It's a marketing chicken and egg problem.
the chicken and egg problem is one of competition:
there is no competition, so prices are high and quality is low. there is no way to build out competing infrastructure without municipal/government subsidy, which the incumbents actively resist in order to protect their high prices and low quality.
how do i know that bandwidth lowers in price with competition? price out hosting or co-location services. in a colo you pay not for bandwidth (which starts at 10mbit up and down and goes up from there), but for total transfer, where every bit is accounted for. the per gigabyte price for data center transfer is *SIGNIFICANTLY* less than the residential rate.
this article raises some interesting points about bandwidth and competition (emphasis mine):
I’ve paid for bandwidth and worked at ISPs in many countries and one constant I’ve found is that increased competition directly translates into cheap bandwidth. In too many countries there is still not enough competition among ISPs. In the United States the number of ISPs a consumer may select further dwindled in the past decade.
All over the world you can see the same pattern. Countries with lots of competition among ISPs enjoy the cheapest and best internet service. The countries that are the worst off are the countries where 1 company controls all internet access. That was the case when I lived in India in 1998. Since then India opened itself up to competition and internet usage skyrocketed while bandwidth costs plummeted. Now India is basically on par with the USA for bandwidth costs. Much of Africa is still suffering under government controlled ISPs. The relatively modern country of South Africa has overpriced bandwidth for exactly this reason.
Re: (as chris)
So, now "changing to match what customers want", I would have to guess that you are suggesting that the cable companies should drop their subscription model. Perhaps they could run on donations, or perhaps upsell people to dinner with a technician, perhaps selling limited edition "I met the cable company president" t-shirts, or perhaps autographed limited edition flat screen TVs that they could sell for double the price of normal.
uhh, internet access is non-scarce good. it cannot be produced for free (though it can be made significantly cheaper witht he right infrastructure) and there will always be demand for it.
if the cable companies are in trouble from piracy (they are not) then could spin off their content delivery business into another company and ramp up their internet infrastructure. in corporate speak it would be called "focusing on core competencies". this is a process that should have begun in the mid 1990's when people demanded high speed internet access. they didn't do it then and they never will because they cannot figure out how to get a monopoly.
this would open the gates for pure-play content providers to compete based on the quantity and quality of their content, but since there would be no monopoly, no cable company will do that.
Re: (as chris)
Seriously, the only "change" they seem to need to make to meet what the customer wants is to give their product away for free, on demand, on any device, at any time, from anywhere, and at no cost. Sounds like a great plan, and as soon as you explain how they are going to pay for it...
yeah, no one is paying for cable. that's why comcast is reporting record income:
http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2009/11/02/daily26.html
how'd they do it? by being a smart business:
“The strength and resilience of our businesses combined with our continued emphasis on expenses and prudent capital management helped us achieve healthy operating and financial results in the third quarter,” Brian Roberts, Comcast’s chairman and CEO, said.
here is the breakdown:
Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA,CMCSK) earned $944 million, or 33 cents per fully diluted share in the quarter, up from $771 million, or 26 cents per fully diluted share, in the third quarter of last year.
Re: Re: Re: (as chris)
Without your own internet connection, let's just say it would be very inconvenient for you to download.
inconvenient, but not impossible.
that's the point of all of this: you cannot stop file sharing. you can only temporarily inconvenience it.