Posts by Finn Higgins
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attacks???
thats a bit of a misleading term.
no ones forcing you to watch movies or listen to music,
there's plenty of other viable things to do with your time, gardening or home renovation are popular I've heard.And that's about the worst argument I've ever heard in support of an industry. I mean, nobody's forcing you to deal with real estate agents either - that doesn't mean that their business practices are above reproach.
The music industry's collective problem is that it moved too slow, and when it did move it moved completely the wrong direction. While peer-to-peer technology was providing more and better access to entertainment the industry was trying to develop technologies that offered only more restrictions, worse compatibility and lower quality. And somehow the expectation was that people would want to pay for that. Legitimate customers have always been and still are the second-class citizens of digital music. How the hell do you market that as attractive? I'd feel screwed if I spent money on digital downloads, that's for sure. I still buy CDs - they're not really any more expensive, you get a physical product, they're DRM-free and lossless.
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If only we could apply the difficult to police criteria to other industries I'd be driving a better car and eating myself into an early grave.
But those other industries aren't comparable; they involve producing physical goods. A lost sale of a physical object is just a loss - if somebody has one and didn't pay for it then you've actually lost your investment in creating that object.
But when it comes to intellectual property the value of the property is actually partially determined by its cultural currency. For example, Microsoft would prefer a new developer to learn to program in their languages, on their free Express versions of Visual Studio than in Java/PHP/Ruby/Python/whatever using free tools like Eclipse or NetBeans. Either way they make no revenue on the sale, but it's still ultimately better for the value of their intellectual property for it to be popularly understood and used.
Ubiquity of intellectual property has value in and of itself, so matters are innately more blurry. Trying to apply the standards of value for physical goods to intellectual property is as unworkable as the opposite, which is really all your comment above illustrates.
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Robbery, I can't exactly take credit for it. It's an idea that quite a few people have discussed, but to me it seems the most rational and the most plausible in terms of implementation. It's much easier to issue individual customers with unique, cryptographically-verified identities and then track their sharing/downloading behavior in a centralised file-sharing network (ala Napster, which was easy to take down purely because it had to have everything pass through a central server) than it is to try to invent an unbreakable DRM scheme that doesn't piss people off.
You'd still have the issue of files shared on the "premium" network leaking onto the illegal/free ones, so that's where you start working with the major ISPs. ISPs have file sharing problems of their own, in that it generates a massive amount of traffic and many places outside NZ don't have data caps to stop people just running peer-to-peer software constantly.
If the industry plays the right game with the ISPs then they could help them resolve some of those bandwidth/technical issues while providing an incentive to the ISPs to help block copyright infringement going across their networks. From an ISP point of view it'd be nice to just nuke all the traffic in the first place; but they can't because a huge number of their customers have internet connections primarily to share music and video files. If you give them an incentive to reduce/eliminate illegal traffic while still profiting from the legal stuff (i.e: you pay the ISP as part of your distribution chain) then that helps them with their traffic woes while making illegal file sharing more practically difficult for consumers.
It's a bit of a killer for the whole "net neutrality" idea, and it certainly does come with some obvious downsides - if ISPs just start indiscriminately blocking file sharing content then we have to say bye-bye to the (very useful) ability to download big things like Linux DVD ISOs via BitTorrent. But if your file sharing network uses cryptographic hashing/signing of files to establish whether it is royalty-free or premium content then you could offer people like the Linux distros the opportunity to piggy-back on the legal network without paying for the traffic. That would remove one of the key arguments currently in favour of open file sharing networks - that they're actually useful for legal things.
An "approved" file sharing network with centralised tracking and allocation of file identities would also probably be a decent help in cutting back the rather shocking amount of unsavory content (child pornography etc) that is all over the illegal networks like eDonkey and BitTorrent.
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you're confusing private purchase with public broadcast.
C4, radio stations and cafes have all licensed the right to play music to you free to air.
When you buy a track or a disc it's for private ownership and use.No, you're misunderstanding me. I understand the distinction, I'm just asking you why the distinction is rational when the reality is that the digital download environment is currently identical to a public broadcast environment . People are buying CDs and then transferring the contents over the internet to other people. To manage this in a radio environment we have broadcast licenses. Why not just start offering a legal file-sharing license, coupled with an industry-supported file sharing network? Don't change people's behavior, just provide them with a more usable environment and introduce a revenue scheme to make their actions legal and affordable.
If we accept that the current situation is closer to unlicensed broadcasting than a transactional model then what are our revenue options? The whole DRM model is stupid, because it's trying to sell people a worse service than they're used to getting for free. Plus it's trying to change people's established behavior in how they relate to music: not only are you trying to stop people sharing files you're also trying to stop them sharing music, full stop. A big part of the reason so many people own CD and DVD writers is to copy entertainment media. Before those existed, the same people owned cassette decks that could copy CDs, LPs and other cassettes. Copying and sharing is how most people alive have grown up relating to music; you're backing a scheme that is both inherently technically flawed and offers nothing to consumers. How on earth do you expect that to ever succeed?
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Ooh, two in a row...
I would suggest the idea DRM was one that knows it is playing for the original purchaser and knows so without any interaction with the client (purchaser).
Would that actually be ideal? Let's apply your ideal model to the music industry as a whole. Magically, nobody is able to listen to any music unless they've already paid for it. You can listen to the radio, but unless you've licensed a track already you just get dead air. You can put the TV on, but C4 is scrambled unless you've paid for the specific video that is screening. Your mate can listen to his music all he wants, but if he tries to lend it to you so you can listen to it then it won't play. Music in cafes and bars disappears, because individual people haven't paid to hear it.
All of a sudden, music vanishes from popular culture. Why? Because music is a social activity which people enjoy sharing and bonding with as groups. Just look at all the "Emo kids" or "punk kids" or any other popular music/image combo throughout the history of pop music. Do you really think that these kids get into music by... uh.. their mate saying "buy this track" and them going to buy it? No, it develops into an identity through sharing and group dynamics.
I don't see why you'd want to be a strict believer in user-pays for one aspect of music (digital downloads) when there are already a number of situations where it has been accepted that public visibility and availability is a massive net benefit to the music industry. That's not to say that we shouldn't be paying, but why are you so fervent about the model being one of strict buy-to-listen? It doesn't accurately reflect how people like to develop their musical tastes at all.
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Finally - Can anyone explain to me (justify ?) why some NZ artists on independent labels charge nearly $2 per track for MP3 downloads ?
Because they're filthy capitalists who're raking it in at the expense of the public?
(Or perhaps because music is a woefully-underpaid activity in which few people ever break even, let alone make any money? FFS, you're asking why a song should cost 2/3rds of the price of a coffee...)
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I'm anti-DRM solely for the reason that it doesn't work, and short of major changes to the way that consumer PCs work it isn't going to. Putting it simply, DRM is a shonky idea purely because it's a confused one: cryptography is perfectly functional for preventing unauthorised people from being able to access the content of a message. But DRM is rather unclear about who is authorised - is the person buying the music authorised to get at the unencrypted bits of data? They have to be at some point, or it ain't coming out of their sound card. Short of a completely cryptographically secured platform all the way down to the sound card hardware there's no way you can ultimately stop people making digital copies of something that'll play on your PC. You just make a driver that spits the bits back into a file, ala the PDF "printer" drivers that people are used to using to get PDF files out of Word.
And hell, even if you stop people making digital copies... well... people got by fine with dubbing tapes for years. One trip through the analogue hole and bye-bye goes any crypto and you can pass it around all you like.
Quite simply, ever since PCs started being sold as "multimedia" PCs and came with CD burners people have expected to be able to copy music with them - it's a factor in why everybody has one, being honest about it. Before the computer would do it, the stereo would and people bought lots of those instead. Copying music is a cultural expectation and has been for generations, it's just got much easier to distribute the copies since the advent of the internet. Unfortunately, illegal distribution got the market share first and became the "killer app" the industry had missed: immediate, available, searchable access to back-catalogue music. And they're still playing catch-up against a market with many, many customers who're now used to not paying for downloads and getting DRM-free (and increasingly, lossless-encoded)
music out the back of it. Why should people pay for an inferior service to what the illegal options are putting out there and ultimately the odds of being caught are miniscule? That's always been the failure of the DRM model.But with that said, Simon's right: if you like music then you probably like some people who wouldn't get rich-man patronage, or other people who wouldn't have existed without those people's influence. Patronage enabled a comparatively stagnant class-divided musical culture that moved at a snails-pace compared to the extremely eclectic and rapid development that has happened since the advent of recorded popular music in the 20th century. Copyright and the ability to pay people for doing a good job of recording performances has made so many new kinds of music possible. Pick any contemporary instrument and you'll see techniques and concepts being used every day in popular music that only became possible because of recording. Live music is great, but it's not the be-all and end-all of musical experience or expression.
If we're going to pay people for making good things and we accept that the PC platform as we know it isn't about to get locked down end-to-end in a hurry (and therefore DRM can never be anything other than a complicated waste of time) then there only seems to be only remaining option: compulsory bulk licensing, and everybody paying for their downloads as part of the cost of being connected to the internet. It works for radio, it works for public use of music in venues like cafes and clubs. I think ultimately we're going to have to accept that the internet has turned into another "public space" for music and bulk license it the same way, then musicians can get back to getting paid and people can keep downloading all they damn well like...
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The first two pages are largely a rhapsody about being fed thin strips of lardo -- the fatty back of a pig -- specially cured by Mario himself and taken from a very fat pig that had spent the last months of its life eating apples, walnuts and cream. The instruction was to let the fat dissolve on their tongues to fully savour the flavours.
That all sounded really appealing until I realised you were talking about scoffing down lard. That's enough to nearly make me retch, and I'm from yorkshire for feck's sake!
(And, it's worth mentioning, vegetarian. So I suppose that disqualifies me - but eating lard is still totally rank, sehriusly!)
Oh, and:
>Sure we have one up on the Vegan's ...
Doesn't everyone?
Better watch that kind of talk, 8 Foot Sativa might get you...
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I think what I'm trying to say is that I find I have more in common with people who've had the same experiences than me than those who share the same tick-boxes. I'm also wary of the way demographic trends lead to over-simplications
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But I also have a fundamental obligation not to drag my family's private issues out in public.That's a killer post, and it collides with something that's kept me away from many PA discussions and lead me to post in frustration in others: the tendency to talk in symbols, seemingly because real individuals get complicated and confusing real quick. But it amazes me how quickly talking in distinctly non-human abstractions can get really disconnected from reality.
I definitely lurk this place a lot more than I would otherwise because of that particular quirk of political discourse, because I'm really quite repulsed with the idea that every word one speaks is somehow supposed to be representative of demographics: you're either speaking on behalf of a demographic or your speech is implicitly assigning you to one. Yuck.
It's a very tiring environment in which to discuss anything, and I certainly lurk this place a lot more and post a lot less (as a white male no less) purely because every post I write here feels like it needs to be considerably more unassailable than if it was written elsewhere, in forums more focused on discussing issues than details of the person making a particular point. That's not a critique of PA, where such things are at least civil, more of how people approach discussion of politics as a whole. It's a real turn off how issues have to be reduced to a level of simplicity approximating a cheap comic book in order to gain momentum. I'm consistently weirded out, for example, by blogs like Maia's (or basically any libertarian blog - pick your own) where absolutist simplicity rules the roost and the idea that real individuals and situations exist as an intersection of a near-infinite number of abstract political points vanishes into the ether.
I think your Speaker post sidestepped that very keenly, and I reckon that's a real badge of merit. Keep writing!
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So from these responses so far my sense is that now that the immediate "crisis" regarding "terrorism" has subsided in people's minds abit, you are considering the possibility that the police action was a bit excessive and that there might be valid complaints. So maybe the vehemence against at that stage was a product of feeling threatened?
Or perhaps it was a product of your imagination, projected on people who were instead responding to ludicrous claims that Ruatoki was purely motivated by racial hatred, an calculated attempt to drum up support for the TSA amendment bill, representative of a police state etc? While the people making these claims were trying to paint those arrested as pure and innocent victims of random state violence?
I don't recall anybody in the other thread arguing that the police actions at Ruatoki were not to be questioned. If you actually go back and read what people have been saying on the topic then you'll find that Russell has most certainly been questioning them since the beginning, rather than this being the 180-degree turn you're seemingly claiming.
But I do recall plenty of people arguing that if you want to go waving guns around and talking big about killing cops then you probably shouldn't be too affronted when the armed offenders squad shows up and is very paranoid about anybody and everybody in the area. I'm still happy to stand by that, while we're discussing everybody's actions and how reasonable they were.
I think most of the vehemence you encountered was a response to your wish to only condemn the actions of the police in these sorry events, and to characterise them as some kind of unprovoked agents of death, rape and pillage at Ruatoki.