I hate the music industry. If there's one industry that consistently manages to find ways to piss off its best customers, it's them.
Let's not forget, the music industry has already been caught fixing prices on CDs. It seems they have not learned their lesson, and are now trying to fix prices for digital downloads too.
If there's a surefire way to drive consumers back to file sharing, it's this.
It's interesting how the music and movie industries are trying to quietly push "fair use" out the window to its demise. It's shifting from buying the rights to a *title* to the rights for a *copy* of that title. Big difference.
We've always bought the rights to a copy of a title. The difference is our rights as owners of that copy are being curtailed more and more.
apple has a great pricing structure of 99 cents that makes the music industry more money per song than physical CDs did.
the music labels making music CDs incompatible with iPods is retarded on their part. they deserve consumers to be pissed off. if they wanted to include copy protection in audio cds, they should have actually gone to apple and offered tons of money to apple to license the fairplay technology.
besides that, ANY IDIOT CAN STOP THE COPY PROTECTION ON THESE NEW AUDIO CDS!! windows users just turn off autorun or hold shift! the copy protection DOESNT EVEN WORK ON LINUX, UNIX, OR MAC OS X!!
Pardon me in advance for what may be a somewhat rambling missive -- in sharp contrast to my usual terse, high-content postings to this joyous community. i.e., I'm in a great mood, although yes, I did spend Friday night up until right now, which, in my time-zone is nearly 6AM working my ass off. I am done now! Success success, hooray!
We live in strange times. I enjoy filling my mind with things that make me happy, or at worst make me happier even when I have to utilize my skills or tools to do things that bore the hell out of me. In other words: tarnishing my skillZ and toys, to emit ...work product. Blech. it happens. When the cash registers go ka-ching, I sell out. Shoot me and call me a grown up (no, please don't. That'd hurt!)
All of this is an exercise in futility. The RIAA can serve subpoenas until the heat death of the universe and install half-baked, crapware into art I wish to purchase and make use of how I see fit. But none of it will ever turn back time, and pull the information age back into the industrial age. It isn't that they're just sleazy and obnoxious, they are F*cking stupid.
Build a better mousetrap, someone will build a better mouse. The end.
In addition to that, their (the entertainment industry's) overall game-plan appears to be: try to alienate and enrage as many of your customers as humanly possible, so that instead of being your customers, they will arrive at the reasonable conclusion: F*ck this bullshit and fire up LimeWire or BitTorrent and feel not guilt, but vindication.
That Micro$oft paper referenced up there, with his DarkNets and secret hidden worlds, ain't bad. If you hop skip and jump through his hopes that suing half the planet might prove to be an effective deterrent to theft of content, um, I mean file sharing, he arrives at the startlingly sane (for an employee of Micro$oft) conclusion that annoying the shit out of your paying customers, will not prevent theft and increase profits, but rather, completely alienate them and they'll go steal it for free sans guilt.
This is completely skipping over people who just collect things for the sake of collecting them. I know people who actually have 30,000 songs on their machines, one who has 57,000. Nevermind how many of those this person would have purchased, how many has he actually LISTENED TO? Less than 1%. But he HAS THEM! Which I guess is the whole point.
The conclusion of that Micro$oft paper is very novel: try not to annoy the shit out of your customers and instead motivate them to purchase the product by adding value/cool features/neat things and give incentives instead of threats. Sounds dangerously close to being reasonable.
Another amusing thing has been the OS/X rip to generic iNtel boxes. Hackers will always explore, crack, and take things apart, because that's what hackers do. Neat tricks are fun. When I download those videos of OS/X booting and read the instructions I am filled with two thoughts/feelings.
My feeling is total glee and joy: OS/X is spreading! Good for them! Personally I don't think I'm going to be trading in my neaT seXxXed up ShinY shiny toys, for piles of beige crap anytime in the near future, but that loops back to that having money and being paid thing.
That's my feeling. Cool! What a neat thing to do. My thought is... What has all of this demonstrated? That every linux dork in the world seems to secretly lust after OS/X, the ultimate irony being that downloading linux just to bootstrap OS/X is part of the whole installation. Linux, who the hell wants it littering up their desktop when you can have OS/X. Windoze, let's not even go there.
Hmmm... Perhaps in this brave new world Dvorak really is a brilliant journalist and sage-like entity filled with great wisdom, instead of a ranting idiot. Who can say.
Speaking of ranting I think I'm nearly done, I feel better now, thanks. Although in the global scheme of things DRM and the RIAA may be somewhat minor problems. I think the latest revisions to the USA Patriot act have stamped out ranting, along with whatever illusions of freedom I used to have.
"We will stamp out terrorism until no freedom remains!"
Ok, I think I've pushed all the emotional hot buttons I wanted to hit. I feel great. How was it for you?
Oh, to close my rant. I get paid for.... art. Mostly. Sometimes I compromise and produce EXACTLY what the client wants. What's it called, oh yes, vapid crap, hence I have money to buy stuff. My personal solution to all the DRM bullshit is to purchase anything I wish to experience/listen to/read/enjoy, in the belief that at least .5 cents of every $50 dollars I spend will actually go to the artist. Artists NEED drugs and Ferrari's and enriched environments to be creative. Middle management can drive rusted pinto's for all I f*cking care. THEY should be the ones getting the nickel. But oh well, that's the ever-present difference between what is and what should be.
After making my purchase... I do whatever the hell I want with it. It never seems to take longer than oh, say 5 minutes to find a solution and unlock the mousetrap.
Or if my patience fails me, I can always go steal back unprotected copies of what I just paid for on nearly any P2P network. File sharing and backups of my own data for real. Go figure, what're the odds.
God bless us all. But mostly those who are running the One True OS on seXxXed up shiny, pretty Apple hardware, completely filled with DRM-free media. The way God intended.
Gotta go turn in my neighbors for smoking cannabis now. I can smell it everywhere. Oh, wait, no... that's me. Nevermind. I do however, strongly suspect that SOMEONE within 100 yards of me is running a copy of WIndoze. Obviously this supports terrorism by being a spyware-infested, virus magent, pile of junk.
...... In other words: tarnishing my skillZ and toys, to emit ...work product. Blech. it happens. When the cash registers go ka-ching, I sell out. Shoot me and call me a grown up (no, please don't. That'd hurt!)......
brother, i hear ya. at 26 (27 soon-ish) i've turned back up to live with my parents, and sometimes i think they wonder about this broken shell that has wondered back to their doorsteps. but like you said, that's growing up.
one good thing i've done for my parents: found aud$6500 in my mum's pension account that no one had attempted to trace before.
fuck it. they provide food and shelter, i deliver some finance and (tons) of computer skillz.
i'm selling out to education, but at least its more meaningful, seeing a pretty young thing's eyes widen as i .... i mean, enlightening creative young minds
so far i've been avoiding any "boston public" type scenes and staying out of trouble
richardH, as long as you can keep the clients happy without destroying your soul, more power to ya. i would just caution to keep the sustainability in mind. i was never cut out to be a commercial designer. just not in my nature. gonna harness my different set of talents to full use. thanks for the inspiration.
brother, i hear ya. at 26 (27 soon-ish) i've turned back up to live with my parents, and sometimes i think they wonder about this broken shell that has wondered back to their doorsteps. but like you said, that's growing up.
one good thing i've done for my parents: found aud$6500 in my mum's pension account that no one had attempted to trace before.
fuck it. they provide food and shelter, i deliver some finance and (tons) of computer skillz.
i'm selling out to education, but at least its more meaningful, seeing a pretty young thing's eyes widen as i .... i mean, enlightening creative young minds
so far i've been avoiding any "boston public" type scenes and staying out of trouble
richardH, as long as you can keep the clients happy without destroying your soul, more power to ya. i would just caution to keep the sustainability in mind. i was never cut out to be a commercial designer. just not in my nature. gonna harness my different set of talents to full use. thanks for the inspiration.
oh, back on topic, ah... screw on-topicness
Hello brother, good to read ya, I hear ya
Going to school is a cool thing, beats reality. That's always been my backup plan if everything was ever to crash and burn. I'm doing good, I just get burnt out sometimes knowing that the jobs that pay the most are inevitably utterly boring dreck that I have no interest in. The cool stuff never seems to pay much, but I guess struggling with that art and commerce paradigm which isn't exactly new to anybody except those of us who are experiencing it
By the way sorry for the post which was 90% off-topic, I had 'bout 5 tabs open reading threads here, the NY times, OS/X on Intel cracked and the RIAA on the topic of DRM. The end result was my rant
Peace, prosperity and sustainability.
Although in a very weird way I have noticed the latter variable (sustainability) appears doable, no matter the economic climate or the world going to hell, entertainment = escape and people want it, the money keeps going. I think the tough one is juggling all of it so you don't wind up sitting in rehab for half a year, which would be followed up by moving back into my parent's basement too Then, I think I'd go with plan B and get a Ph.D. or maybe 2, and exit school around age 40 8)
I don't think it's a secret that Apple makes little if any profit on the music they sell. Their profit comes from hardware sales. What I see happening is that Apple may pay the music companies more but keep the price of the music the same. They can 1: Eat the additional cost 2: Include the additional cost in the price of the hardware. With number 2, they can recoup some costs without the music buyers knowing...
We've always bought the rights to a copy of a title. The difference is our rights as owners of that copy are being curtailed more and more.
How can they legally curtail the right to a backup copy? it has long been considered fair to copy VHS or CDs or casssettes so the primary doesnt get warn out, scrached and so on (this is particularly true with little kids...would you want a 4-7 year old rummaging through your 200 DVD collection? NO but if the originals are in storage and he messes up a backup...no biggie)
Also it has long been considered fair (much to the shagrin of the industry) to transfer formats e.g. record->tape->CD->MP3 now if I do that I am an "evil pirate" the most sickening part is that they have bought off congress, so untill we the people buy them back, we are screwed.
Real pirates are never going to be stopped by these insain schemes, as we learned with CSS, there were pirated movies availible long before de-css, that was just the tool that allowed the honest to do honest things.
Many who would have never considered "breaking the law" will be driven to it if these insane systems get any worse.
In most of the world there is no such thing as 'fair use' copying 'rights' or transfer between formats. 'rights' in quotes as they aren't really rights at all, even in the USA.
Technically, here in the UK, ripping a CD to itunes is illegal as sound recordings are not covered under our 'Fair dealing' laws. Even if they were, the proportion of the recording allowed would be small and suitable only for reviews or criticism. That's also true for much of Europe, Canada, Asia.... Nobody at a personal non-commercial level pays any attention to the law however as it's obviously stupid, unenforceable and behind the technology.
It becomes enforceable however through DRM and that's how rights holders are seeking to enforce their rights. It could be argued that they are giving us MORE rights than currently exist as through DRM they are giving us the right to copy content which did not exist before. I can't say I'm too impressed with that amount of generosity from the music companies.
In most of the world there is no such thing as 'fair use' copying 'rights' or transfer between formats. 'rights' in quotes as they aren't really rights at all, even in the USA.
Technically, here in the UK, ripping a CD to itunes is illegal as sound recordings are not covered under our 'Fair dealing' laws. Even if they were, the proportion of the recording allowed would be small and suitable only for reviews or criticism. That's also true for much of Europe, Canada, Asia.... Nobody at a personal non-commercial level pays any attention to the law however as it's obviously stupid, unenforceable and behind the technology.
It becomes enforceable however through DRM and that's how rights holders are seeking to enforce their rights. It could be argued that they are giving us MORE rights than currently exist as through DRM they are giving us the right to copy content which did not exist before. I can't say I'm too impressed with that amount of generosity from the music companies.
\
ripping a CD to itunes is also illegal in australia but of course not really enforced.
the courts made a real example of some uni students though that had a music sharing thing going on what was possibly just a local uni intranet
they came down hard on these few kids, i think they might have been foreign students studying in australia or something.
remember way back when cd's came out, and everyone complained of the price, and they all promised it would go down as the format took hold.
I wouldn't know. The CD came out the same month I was born. Still, for 23 year old technology, it is damn expensive! I want 5.1 surround at 192k NOW! And, no, it is totally reasonable and possible to do this today.
The biggest problem for the **AA's is that they don't embrace new technology until they have to. When new technology equals or surpasses what they offer, you will see format changes to save space, and those new formats will be offered to others as a way of bragging.
MP3's could shrink songs to 1/10 their original size with fairly good quality and the RIAA ignored it. MPEG4/H264 can shrink a movie to 1/1000 the size with acceptable quality and the MPAA ignored it until now.
Finally, the MPAA is doing what I been saying for years: Use the latest CODEC (so it can't be compressed any more) and give the user honking-huge files that they wouldn't want to send over the internet. If you had a 1920x1080p video using H.264 with 7.1 surround at 192Khz for a whopping total of 23GB+, you would find that although many, many people would want to download it, they won't because they don't want to spend a week downloading the dang file!
Of course, they have to go and shoot themselves in the foot! Using new encryption is like dangling a carrot in front of a crazed foaming-at-the-nouth horse. Who knows how many hundreds of thousands of people will be trying to hack the system 24/7.
I still think $0.99 is too expensive and Apple shouldn't up their price. I have a spreadsheet of 96 songs that I really want on my computer. (Not available on iTunes) In the next cell, I have the price of the CD. So far, a handful of these songs totaled over $600. I don't have that kind of spare cash laying around.
right on, ebby. there's a conference on HDTV/video production where i'm living and the major satellite TV carrier for this region (Measat http://www.measat.com.my/ ) will be around. it's the mainstream service for hbo, axn, star world, cnn, etc, etc, etc...
but you know what these content providers and cable/sat carriers are like... outdated, behind the times, not in tune with whats going on, and fearful.
i'd like to gatecrash the conference somehow (limited 'complimentary' seats are available) so i can badger them about
1. when are they gonna move from mpeg2 to h.264
2. when are they gonna offer at least 720p HDTV
3. when are they gonna think about a better video-on-demand downloadable HDTV movies using h.264
4. when are they gonna open up their blackbox sat decoder to more openstandards and allow better interaction with apple/windows/linux based pcs
5. when are they gonna switch their audio-only sat channels from a radio-service to a podcast/on-demand/subscription model (included on in addition to the satelliteTV subscription)
heh. it's a big fucking wishlist isn't it?
apparently at the conference there are sessions on HD but like you said, they'll be sitting around patting themselves on the back, oh, look, we can do HD if we wanted to. Well, fucking do it already mate.
its weird, something isn't jiving. if somebody like apple *can't* get their foot in the door with the movie, cable and cellular providers, who DO these companies want to do business with? they can sit on their gold mine all the want and sue till the end of days, but as bandwidth increases eventually that one week will go to one day and one day to one hour. and then, maybe then, they'll be *begging* apple to set up an iTunes Video store, because they sure as hell don't have the vision, expertise, and core capabilities that apple has to pull such a thing off really successfully.
edit: it is also interesting to note that in developing countries a lot of main internet trunks have to go through bigger hubs such as the us japan taiwan etc. etc. so that limits peer-to-peer in developing countries, as a lot of hops have to be made to get the packets.
with increased bandwidth and internet infrastructure within developing countires, p2p within these countries will continue to increase and further "threaten" the dinosaur **AA's.
example: most days azureus is painful because i get only 5kb/sec average for most files. but right now 4400 is screaming into my hard disk at 20+kb/sec cause i can see i've got a fellow Malaysistani using MainLine bittorrent who's uploading to me. days of waiting for 4400 becomes hours just by having more nodes geographically closer to me.
Comments
Let's not forget, the music industry has already been caught fixing prices on CDs. It seems they have not learned their lesson, and are now trying to fix prices for digital downloads too.
If there's a surefire way to drive consumers back to file sharing, it's this.
Originally posted by CosmoNut
It's interesting how the music and movie industries are trying to quietly push "fair use" out the window to its demise. It's shifting from buying the rights to a *title* to the rights for a *copy* of that title. Big difference.
We've always bought the rights to a copy of a title. The difference is our rights as owners of that copy are being curtailed more and more.
Originally posted by akhomerun
this entire thing is the music industry's fault
apple has a great pricing structure of 99 cents that makes the music industry more money per song than physical CDs did.
the music labels making music CDs incompatible with iPods is retarded on their part. they deserve consumers to be pissed off. if they wanted to include copy protection in audio cds, they should have actually gone to apple and offered tons of money to apple to license the fairplay technology.
besides that, ANY IDIOT CAN STOP THE COPY PROTECTION ON THESE NEW AUDIO CDS!! windows users just turn off autorun or hold shift! the copy protection DOESNT EVEN WORK ON LINUX, UNIX, OR MAC OS X!!
Pardon me in advance for what may be a somewhat rambling missive -- in sharp contrast to my usual terse, high-content postings to this joyous community. i.e., I'm in a great mood, although yes, I did spend Friday night up until right now, which, in my time-zone is nearly 6AM working my ass off. I am done now! Success success, hooray!
We live in strange times. I enjoy filling my mind with things that make me happy, or at worst make me happier even when I have to utilize my skills or tools to do things that bore the hell out of me. In other words: tarnishing my skillZ and toys, to emit ...work product. Blech. it happens. When the cash registers go ka-ching, I sell out. Shoot me and call me a grown up (no, please don't. That'd hurt!)
All of this is an exercise in futility. The RIAA can serve subpoenas until the heat death of the universe and install half-baked, crapware into art I wish to purchase and make use of how I see fit. But none of it will ever turn back time, and pull the information age back into the industrial age. It isn't that they're just sleazy and obnoxious, they are F*cking stupid.
Build a better mousetrap, someone will build a better mouse. The end.
In addition to that, their (the entertainment industry's) overall game-plan appears to be: try to alienate and enrage as many of your customers as humanly possible, so that instead of being your customers, they will arrive at the reasonable conclusion: F*ck this bullshit and fire up LimeWire or BitTorrent and feel not guilt, but vindication.
That Micro$oft paper referenced up there, with his DarkNets and secret hidden worlds, ain't bad. If you hop skip and jump through his hopes that suing half the planet might prove to be an effective deterrent to theft of content, um, I mean file sharing, he arrives at the startlingly sane (for an employee of Micro$oft) conclusion that annoying the shit out of your paying customers, will not prevent theft and increase profits, but rather, completely alienate them and they'll go steal it for free sans guilt.
This is completely skipping over people who just collect things for the sake of collecting them. I know people who actually have 30,000 songs on their machines, one who has 57,000. Nevermind how many of those this person would have purchased, how many has he actually LISTENED TO? Less than 1%. But he HAS THEM! Which I guess is the whole point.
The conclusion of that Micro$oft paper is very novel: try not to annoy the shit out of your customers and instead motivate them to purchase the product by adding value/cool features/neat things and give incentives instead of threats. Sounds dangerously close to being reasonable.
Another amusing thing has been the OS/X rip to generic iNtel boxes. Hackers will always explore, crack, and take things apart, because that's what hackers do. Neat tricks are fun. When I download those videos of OS/X booting and read the instructions I am filled with two thoughts/feelings.
My feeling is total glee and joy: OS/X is spreading! Good for them! Personally I don't think I'm going to be trading in my neaT seXxXed up ShinY shiny toys, for piles of beige crap anytime in the near future, but that loops back to that having money and being paid thing.
That's my feeling. Cool! What a neat thing to do. My thought is... What has all of this demonstrated? That every linux dork in the world seems to secretly lust after OS/X, the ultimate irony being that downloading linux just to bootstrap OS/X is part of the whole installation. Linux, who the hell wants it littering up their desktop when you can have OS/X. Windoze, let's not even go there.
Hmmm... Perhaps in this brave new world Dvorak really is a brilliant journalist and sage-like entity filled with great wisdom, instead of a ranting idiot. Who can say.
Speaking of ranting I think I'm nearly done, I feel better now, thanks. Although in the global scheme of things DRM and the RIAA may be somewhat minor problems. I think the latest revisions to the USA Patriot act have stamped out ranting, along with whatever illusions of freedom I used to have.
"We will stamp out terrorism until no freedom remains!"
Ok, I think I've pushed all the emotional hot buttons I wanted to hit. I feel great. How was it for you?
Oh, to close my rant. I get paid for.... art. Mostly. Sometimes I compromise and produce EXACTLY what the client wants. What's it called, oh yes, vapid crap, hence I have money to buy stuff. My personal solution to all the DRM bullshit is to purchase anything I wish to experience/listen to/read/enjoy, in the belief that at least .5 cents of every $50 dollars I spend will actually go to the artist. Artists NEED drugs and Ferrari's and enriched environments to be creative. Middle management can drive rusted pinto's for all I f*cking care. THEY should be the ones getting the nickel. But oh well, that's the ever-present difference between what is and what should be.
After making my purchase... I do whatever the hell I want with it. It never seems to take longer than oh, say 5 minutes to find a solution and unlock the mousetrap.
Or if my patience fails me, I can always go steal back unprotected copies of what I just paid for on nearly any P2P network. File sharing and backups of my own data for real. Go figure, what're the odds.
God bless us all. But mostly those who are running the One True OS on seXxXed up shiny, pretty Apple hardware, completely filled with DRM-free media. The way God intended.
Gotta go turn in my neighbors for smoking cannabis now. I can smell it everywhere. Oh, wait, no... that's me. Nevermind. I do however, strongly suspect that SOMEONE within 100 yards of me is running a copy of WIndoze. Obviously this supports terrorism by being a spyware-infested, virus magent, pile of junk.
Originally posted by RichardH
...... In other words: tarnishing my skillZ and toys, to emit ...work product. Blech. it happens. When the cash registers go ka-ching, I sell out. Shoot me and call me a grown up (no, please don't. That'd hurt!)......
brother, i hear ya. at 26 (27 soon-ish) i've turned back up to live with my parents, and sometimes i think they wonder about this broken shell that has wondered back to their doorsteps. but like you said, that's growing up.
one good thing i've done for my parents: found aud$6500 in my mum's pension account that no one had attempted to trace before.
fuck it. they provide food and shelter, i deliver some finance and (tons) of computer skillz.
i'm selling out to education, but at least its more meaningful, seeing a pretty young thing's eyes widen as i .... i mean, enlightening creative young minds
so far i've been avoiding any "boston public" type scenes and staying out of trouble
richardH, as long as you can keep the clients happy without destroying your soul, more power to ya. i would just caution to keep the sustainability in mind. i was never cut out to be a commercial designer. just not in my nature. gonna harness my different set of talents to full use. thanks for the inspiration.
oh, back on topic, ah... screw on-topicness
Originally posted by sunilraman
brother, i hear ya. at 26 (27 soon-ish) i've turned back up to live with my parents, and sometimes i think they wonder about this broken shell that has wondered back to their doorsteps. but like you said, that's growing up.
one good thing i've done for my parents: found aud$6500 in my mum's pension account that no one had attempted to trace before.
fuck it. they provide food and shelter, i deliver some finance and (tons) of computer skillz.
i'm selling out to education, but at least its more meaningful, seeing a pretty young thing's eyes widen as i .... i mean, enlightening creative young minds
so far i've been avoiding any "boston public" type scenes and staying out of trouble
richardH, as long as you can keep the clients happy without destroying your soul, more power to ya. i would just caution to keep the sustainability in mind. i was never cut out to be a commercial designer. just not in my nature. gonna harness my different set of talents to full use. thanks for the inspiration.
oh, back on topic, ah... screw on-topicness
Hello brother, good to read ya, I hear ya
Going to school is a cool thing, beats reality. That's always been my backup plan if everything was ever to crash and burn. I'm doing good, I just get burnt out sometimes knowing that the jobs that pay the most are inevitably utterly boring dreck that I have no interest in. The cool stuff never seems to pay much, but I guess struggling with that art and commerce paradigm which isn't exactly new to anybody except those of us who are experiencing it
By the way sorry for the post which was 90% off-topic, I had 'bout 5 tabs open reading threads here, the NY times, OS/X on Intel cracked and the RIAA on the topic of DRM. The end result was my rant
Peace, prosperity and sustainability.
Although in a very weird way I have noticed the latter variable (sustainability) appears doable, no matter the economic climate or the world going to hell, entertainment = escape and people want it, the money keeps going. I think the tough one is juggling all of it so you don't wind up sitting in rehab for half a year, which would be followed up by moving back into my parent's basement too
Originally posted by UnnDunn
We've always bought the rights to a copy of a title. The difference is our rights as owners of that copy are being curtailed more and more.
How can they legally curtail the right to a backup copy? it has long been considered fair to copy VHS or CDs or casssettes so the primary doesnt get warn out, scrached and so on (this is particularly true with little kids...would you want a 4-7 year old rummaging through your 200 DVD collection? NO but if the originals are in storage and he messes up a backup...no biggie)
Also it has long been considered fair (much to the shagrin of the industry) to transfer formats e.g. record->tape->CD->MP3 now if I do that I am an "evil pirate" the most sickening part is that they have bought off congress, so untill we the people buy them back, we are screwed.
Real pirates are never going to be stopped by these insain schemes, as we learned with CSS, there were pirated movies availible long before de-css, that was just the tool that allowed the honest to do honest things.
Many who would have never considered "breaking the law" will be driven to it if these insane systems get any worse.
Technically, here in the UK, ripping a CD to itunes is illegal as sound recordings are not covered under our 'Fair dealing' laws. Even if they were, the proportion of the recording allowed would be small and suitable only for reviews or criticism. That's also true for much of Europe, Canada, Asia.... Nobody at a personal non-commercial level pays any attention to the law however as it's obviously stupid, unenforceable and behind the technology.
It becomes enforceable however through DRM and that's how rights holders are seeking to enforce their rights. It could be argued that they are giving us MORE rights than currently exist as through DRM they are giving us the right to copy content which did not exist before. I can't say I'm too impressed with that amount of generosity from the music companies.
Originally posted by ThinkingDifferent
I don't think it's a secret that Apple makes little if any profit on the music they sell. Their profit comes from hardware sales.
iTunes Music Store makes quite a bit of money from music sales and it's revenue is predicted to increase to approx 5% of Apple's revenue next year.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08...e_itunes_2006/
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/new...evenue-in-2006
Even if the margins are slim, that's a lot of money generated by iTunes.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
In most of the world there is no such thing as 'fair use' copying 'rights' or transfer between formats. 'rights' in quotes as they aren't really rights at all, even in the USA.
Technically, here in the UK, ripping a CD to itunes is illegal as sound recordings are not covered under our 'Fair dealing' laws. Even if they were, the proportion of the recording allowed would be small and suitable only for reviews or criticism. That's also true for much of Europe, Canada, Asia.... Nobody at a personal non-commercial level pays any attention to the law however as it's obviously stupid, unenforceable and behind the technology.
It becomes enforceable however through DRM and that's how rights holders are seeking to enforce their rights. It could be argued that they are giving us MORE rights than currently exist as through DRM they are giving us the right to copy content which did not exist before. I can't say I'm too impressed with that amount of generosity from the music companies.
ripping a CD to itunes is also illegal in australia
the courts made a real example of some uni students though that had a music sharing thing going on what was possibly just a local uni intranet
they came down hard on these few kids, i think they might have been foreign students studying in australia or something.
Originally posted by rok
remember way back when cd's came out, and everyone complained of the price, and they all promised it would go down as the format took hold.
I wouldn't know. The CD came out the same month I was born. Still, for 23 year old technology, it is damn expensive! I want 5.1 surround at 192k NOW! And, no, it is totally reasonable and possible to do this today.
The biggest problem for the **AA's is that they don't embrace new technology until they have to. When new technology equals or surpasses what they offer, you will see format changes to save space, and those new formats will be offered to others as a way of bragging.
MP3's could shrink songs to 1/10 their original size with fairly good quality and the RIAA ignored it. MPEG4/H264 can shrink a movie to 1/1000 the size with acceptable quality and the MPAA ignored it until now.
Finally, the MPAA is doing what I been saying for years: Use the latest CODEC (so it can't be compressed any more) and give the user honking-huge files that they wouldn't want to send over the internet. If you had a 1920x1080p video using H.264 with 7.1 surround at 192Khz for a whopping total of 23GB+, you would find that although many, many people would want to download it, they won't because they don't want to spend a week downloading the dang file!
Of course, they have to go and shoot themselves in the foot! Using new encryption is like dangling a carrot in front of a crazed foaming-at-the-nouth horse. Who knows how many hundreds of thousands of people will be trying to hack the system 24/7.
I still think $0.99 is too expensive and Apple shouldn't up their price. I have a spreadsheet of 96 songs that I really want on my computer. (Not available on iTunes) In the next cell, I have the price of the CD. So far, a handful of these songs totaled over $600. I don't have that kind of spare cash laying around.
but you know what these content providers and cable/sat carriers are like... outdated, behind the times, not in tune with whats going on, and fearful.
i'd like to gatecrash the conference somehow (limited 'complimentary' seats are available) so i can badger them about
1. when are they gonna move from mpeg2 to h.264
2. when are they gonna offer at least 720p HDTV
3. when are they gonna think about a better video-on-demand downloadable HDTV movies using h.264
4. when are they gonna open up their blackbox sat decoder to more openstandards and allow better interaction with apple/windows/linux based pcs
5. when are they gonna switch their audio-only sat channels from a radio-service to a podcast/on-demand/subscription model (included on in addition to the satelliteTV subscription)
heh.
apparently at the conference there are sessions on HD but like you said, they'll be sitting around patting themselves on the back, oh, look, we can do HD if we wanted to. Well, fucking do it already mate.
edit: it is also interesting to note that in developing countries a lot of main internet trunks have to go through bigger hubs such as the us japan taiwan etc. etc. so that limits peer-to-peer in developing countries, as a lot of hops have to be made to get the packets.
with increased bandwidth and internet infrastructure within developing countires, p2p within these countries will continue to increase and further "threaten" the dinosaur **AA's.
example: most days azureus is painful because i get only 5kb/sec average for most files. but right now 4400 is screaming into my hard disk at 20+kb/sec cause i can see i've got a fellow Malaysistani using MainLine bittorrent who's uploading to me. days of waiting for 4400 becomes hours just by having more nodes geographically closer to me.