Largest social network in the Western world. It's been in all the papers.
295 karma · joined June 21, 2011
I don't really care if you don't like Techdirt, and by extension, the person who wrote this (that's me) and think that everything cranked out there is a pack of lies.
My issue with your claim here (beyond the fact that I'm about 95% certain you didn't even read the post) is that by saying "Techdirt fudges the facts," you're calling all the sources I quoted in the post liars, including the owner of the site that was taken down (Dale Porter/LendInk), who showed up in the comments to give his side of the story. His account syncs up remarkably with the narrative in the post.
So, you can hate on Techdirt if you must, but be careful about who else you're suffocating under your blanket statements.
Whose definition of "real"?
According to her, she uses software to edit her images, which some photographers would claim to debase real photography. Digital cameras debased real photography because people could snap thousands of photos to end up with a few keepers.
Everything "debases" something for someone whose objective stance is basically "the way I do things is the only correct way."
For instance: DJs complained for years with each format change and advancement debased the "purity" of vinyl. "Real" DJs didn't use CDs/mp3s/Ableton/etc.
The nostalgia here isn't limited to grainy Instamatic filters.
Yeah, that's the issue. Here's my pipe dream. Someone at one big studio/label/publishing house stands up and says "This is ridiculous" and begins a Sherman's March to Sea on the existing system and streamlines it using common sense and ass-kicking.
That's my dream. I wish they would, while they still have the money and power to make it happen. Of course, that still doesn't address the problem that the industry heads and the artists have very different ideas about what's equitable. So, that's another issue. The industry doesn't have a great track record on treating its artists fairly so in all likelihood any slash-and-burn revamp would likely heavily skew in favor of those at the top of the heap, much as it does today.
A very slim possibility exists that this revamp, though heavily skewed, would still end up being a net gain for most, if not all of the artists working within that system.
What gets me is that they have still have massive amounts of power and money and they're using it all to play a largely defensive battle. Being the last to market, so to speak, isn't going to help them take control of the future. I understand that you can't suddenly yank an ocean liner into a tight 90-degree turn, but you also can't avoid icebergs (to continue this awful metaphor) by waiting until it's tearing chunks out of the hull before making your move.
Setting it up so that only certain people can purchase your goods does nothing for the two parties most interested in each other: the customer and the artist.
You should plot a graph of your purchases and their subsequent decline. Every decline these days is written off to piracy while situations like yours and BRAT's (and thousands of others) are ignored or dismissed as outliers.
Over at Techdirt, a site I've been reading for a half-decade and contributing to for nearly a year, IP issues compose probably 80-90% of the posts. The reason I inserted that particular paragraph was to head off discussion centered around rehashing multi-national licensing nightmares and instead get some sort of explanation as to why this isn't being fixed faster.
Obviously, there is a multitude of systems already in place and extricating ourselves from this won't be easy and won't happen quickly. But rather than working to streamline these processes, representatives of content industries are spending a great deal of their time (and lobbying power) trying to do the impossible: stamp out piracy.
Most people don't need an excuse to pirate content, but situations like this push people who otherwise would have purchased something into finding an alternate route or doing without, neither of which will make the labels (or studios or whatever) happy.
There's a lot of numbers thrown around equating each torrent to a lost sale. Actual lost sales due to speed bumps and hurdles in the distribution are rarely discussed by the industry and when they are, they result in horrendous "solutions" like Ultraviolet or the "drive your DVD to the retailer in order to rip a copy to the cloud."
So, if I'm ignoring the "why" behind the situation (which I don't believe I am), it's because the point of the article was "Don't cry about piracy if you can't give me an option to buy."
We know the system is a tangled mess. We know there are many more middlemen than there needs to be. We (and every time I use "we," I'm speaking broadly from my experience as a writer/reader of Techdirt) don't believe ALL middlemen are useless. Many of them DO add value, but when you've got several middlemen guarding turf in several different locales, all hoping to carve a slice of a digital good, it leads to this. And knowing every detail of "how" and "why" a particular band can't sell a particular album via the internet to you simply because of where you live doesn't change the fact that it's frustrating for fans who want to support artists and, I would imagine, greatly frustrating for the artists themselves, who need all the paying fans they can get.
So, we can engage the real nature of the problem, but unless someone towards the top starts slicing away at the undergrowth surrounding worldwide distribution, not much will change.
There are some great comments here. I found yours to be very informative as well as the contributions from commieneko and Gfischer. Both raise very good points about this situation. In short, the systems in place can't adjust as quickly as the market does. (Or in some cases, won't.) But back to the point of my post: you (this would be the royal version, not you personally, Charles) really shouldn't be hollering about piracy when you're unable (and in some cases, unwilling) to let would-be paying customers give you their money.
(P.S. I don't really consider myself a journalist. I'm sure many, many people would agree with me.)
So... the economy is being held back by the lack of teens cruising the main drag?
"The ITU is one of those international organizations that does not have to answer to anybody in particular. None of its decision makers have to stand for reelection. None of the leaders have much to fear from any web-based protest."
"Wise assessment of copyright policy should have nothing to do with how you feel about the person or entity who holds the right at any particular time, because copyright policy is not about identifying wonderful and meritorious people and ensuring—certainly not as an end in itself, anyway—that their income is proportioned to their intrinsic moral desert—or lack thereof. We are all the massive beneficiaries of millennia of accumulated human scientific knowledge and cultural output, and not one of us did anything do deserve a jot of it. We’re all just extremely lucky not to have been born cavemen. The greatest creative genius alive would be hard pressed to create a smiley faced smeared in dung on a tree trunk without that huge and completely undeserved inheritance.
So banish the word “deserve” from your mind when you think about copyright. Nobody “deserves” a goddamn thing. (I say this, for what it’s worth, as someone who makes his living entirely through the production of “intellectual property.”) The only—the only—relevant question is whether a marginal restriction on the general ability to use information incentivizes enough additional information production over the long run to justify denying that marginal use to every other human being on the planet, whether for simple consumption or further creation."
"It says here that Wordpress hosts 70 million blogs worldwide, which I find hard to believe. If Wordpress is this big, I'd have heard of it. And this Reddit? It's what... some sort of alien game thing?"
So quick to legislate something they profoundly (and proudly) misunderstand.
"The reality is that once I had posted the emails I didn’t have the power anymore. The Internet had it now and nothing I said or did was going to change that."
Everything he says is true, BUT... he posted the email addresses. Claiming that it's out of his hands (and implicitly NOT HIS FAULT what happens now) is like handing a bunch of firebugs some gasoline and strike-anywhere matches and claiming you're powerless to prevent the ensuing Devil's Night reenactment.
Those email addresses would have been dug up via the internet by enterprising individuals sooner or later. It seems a bit smug to revel in the very destruction you laid the groundwork for.
Other than that, I am all for exposure of hideous customer service/PR entities. This is precisely why anyone in these fields, in this day and age, should be doing everything they can to take care of their paying customers. You sure as hell don't want the loosely confederated wrath of the internet turned against you.
Most of the talk from supporters plays up the "counterfeit" angle, dragging in firemen, soldiers, etc. as examples of who could be harmed by these knockoffs, but all of the push is coming from groups who want to shut down piracy at the expense of the internet and who have nothing physical to protect. It's an ugly bait-and-switch. Fortunately, this dodge no longer seems to be working.
So I just took a screenshot and forwarded it to the more religious of our representatives as proof that SOPA is indeed evil.
Two reasons:
1. The major labels, like most of the big content producers, are extremely interested in short term gains, even if it means losses down the road. As long as something is still "down the road," it won't affect this year s/quarter's/month's profitability.
Take a look at Hulu. It's a shadow of its former self. It used to be a solid site with great content, but those controlling the content have decided it's not making enough money fast enough. The fix? Remove content. Move it around. Chop it up. Stagger releases randomly. Put X season on Hulu but have Y season exist only as a selection of clips or have it go missing entirely.
See also: Netflix. Because the major studios are unwilling to trade DVD dollars for digital dimes, they've gone about pricing themselves out of the market. Netflix is also a "piracy killer," but the studios are too concerned with getting the money up front to pay attention to how much content is being leaked out the back.
The studios also seem to think that people will follow them to their own sites or digital offerings, but the content they offer is generally crippled by DRM or requires the installation of proprietary software or another set of logins and passwords and people in general just do not have an interest in setting up yet another account just to watch a couple of Lost episodes.
2. Even though everything mentioned is a "piracy killer," the simple fact is that, for many people, the service (Spotify, Netflix, etc.) becomes the end product. The services don't lead towards more sales of other physical or digital goods. This doesn't fit into the major labels'/studios' plans at all. They want to sell more of their stuff, not necessarily collect royalties from someone else's service.
So, if they manage to drain Spotify completely or at least force it to give up its US operations, it won't hurt them much. By that point, another service will come along and they can pile on and bleed it dry as well. The plan, I suppose, is to keep riding these little income spikes until it's 1994 again, or something.
They must still harbor the belief that, once the other options dry up, people will head back to the brick-and-mortar and purchase content in physical forms that carry much higher profit margins.
"We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content. Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/opinion/03bono.html?hp=...
It seemed to me that she was hoping that pirates would spread the app to other platforms, rather than just assuming they will.
I still think there is a bit of, not necessarily resentment, but a bit of annoyance at the upstart US, which comes across to most other countries as "unrefined." I think the major difference between Americans and Brits is that the US doesn't have centuries of history behind it. It's still very much a "young" nation in the overall scheme of things and shows its age quite often. (See also: the other comment I made.)
BTW: Your youtube link is kill.