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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
10/07/09
Like the US was in 1812.
Or the Poles, Czechs, Austrians and well, everyone the Russians annexed.
And wow - big talk for a country that didn't even get IN WWII until it was almost over. We Canadians were in it in 1939. We lost almost half our adult male population in it.
You pansies whine about 9/11 - but the Brits were experiencing that EVERY FRAKING DAY OF THE BLITZ.
WWII was a difficult, complex war with all sorts of back channel issues. To simplify it like that is the height of arrogance and insensitivity - it's beyond childish.
Grow up.
PS: I lost an uncle defending France - and both of my parents fought in WWII - and my mother was captured by the Germans and spent the last part of it in a concentration camp. She moved to France after the war... So yeah, it is a little personal to me.
10/07/09
10/07/09
Not with mayo though...
10/07/09
The US surrendered in 1812? News to me.
10/08/09
10/16/09
I apologise publically for the "grow up" comment.
That was inappropriate. I hope you understand that my connection to the subject is a bit more than the regular person's. Still I should not let it get me that riled. #microsoft
10/07/09
10/07/09
10/07/09
10/07/09
10/07/09
10/07/09
How un-american.
06/07/09
Plus it matches his downer mood as well.
06/07/09
06/07/09
06/07/09
04/09/09
It's like bitter poison.
04/09/09
Had the heavy hitters of the music industry caught on to the fact that people will pay even with little to no restrictions on the product, they may have fared far better than they do now. Piracy will always exist no matter what they do. The only way to counter losses is to treat your customers better and stop fucking with them with crazy digital management protections.
04/09/09
The music industry was trying to prevent its investment in the distribution infrastructure (Which they had been steadily gobbling up.) and hadn't finished paying off those debts when mp3s and pirating struck.
04/09/09
[i.gizmodo.com]
I'm holdin' the line... My library is painstakingly ripped with error correction into Apple Lossless and anally-retentively tagged ("what!!! shows up as "and the Innocent Criminals" here and "& the Innocent Criminals" there... must fix that...")
04/09/09
If there were no strictly enforced piracy laws, then yes, the music industry would be hurt. In China, for instance, you can walk into a mall and there will be stores that sell only pirated music CDs. There are Chinese language websites on which you can download all sorts of pirated material. The only thing keeping piracy from getting this rampant in the US is the legal system.
Of course, there should be a limit to the authority of copyright-enforcing authorities. Monitoring internet traffic is obviously over the line, but they need to exert some kind of legal pressure, in addition to making good products, having good customer service, etc.
04/09/09
04/09/09
Pretty much one of these days I will need to go back and re-rip it all now that HD space is so damn cheap.
04/09/09
Over 90% of music downloads are illegal. The flaws are not sufficiently fatal to kill it. In fact, it's the opposite - the convenience and fact that it's free far outweigh all the other finer points that turn out to be inconsequential for most people.
"Had the heavy hitters of the music industry caught on to the fact that people will pay even with little to no restrictions on the product, they may have fared far better than they do now. Piracy will always exist no matter what they do. The only way to counter losses is to treat your customers better and stop fucking with them with crazy digital management protections."
Because the RIAA are such douches and record labels are such dinosaurs, that's a popular position. But I don't think it's true. If you flood a market with free products that most people consider good enough, and make it easy to obtain them, all the things you mention, as much as we agree about the truth behind them, become inconsequential.
For example, take Trent Reznor's experiment with Saul Williams. If anyone has the respect of his fans, it's Mr. Anti-Establishment-Fuck-The-Labels-Fuck-... Trent Reznor. When he released Saul Williams' "Niggy Stardust" and offered fans two options, free, or pay a modest amount for a higher quality audio file, with money going directly to the artists and not to subsidize a bloated A&R department in a corporate record label, almost everyone chose free. Only a tiny percentage paid for the high quality audio version that would support the artists. (Which pissed him off.)
Whether its Trent Reznor or a luddite label, the option of FREE is so compelling it steamrolls everything else, and the stats bear that out.
People pirate because they can.
A small group argues that industry douchebaggery drives them to pirate. But take away the industry douchebags, with music just as easy and convenient to steal, and people will still steal it. Without a douchebag in sight. What goes through the mind of the pirate before downloading... "I want this song... here it is... click." Not "yeah... I'd really prefer to pay .99 for this, except as a conscientious objector to the media behemoth, I am reluctantly forced to make this a 1-way transaction."
Imagine if computers could be downloaded free from the net. Imagine the douchebags that would attempt to block it. Imagine the arguments about why were it not for the douchebags, computer pirates would happily pay for that which could be gotten more easily for free.
04/09/09
04/09/09
It's somehow easy for people to understand that the Dark Knight costs $100 million bucks or whatever to make, so they have to make big box office to recoup production costs before they make a profit. If everyone got to see it for free, it wouldn't exist, or the next one wouldn't exist, because there would be no way to finance production.
If an album costs.... $25,000 to make, and a million people wind up with it on their iPods, so it's obviously popular, but they aren't willing to pay more than 0 to .10 for it, it can't support its own weight, it can recoup its costs, let alone generate profit.
Therefore, from a market perspective, if people genuinely don't want to pay for music production costs and beer for the band, if the demand isn't sufficient to justify paying for it, then the supply will dry up. Oddly, with music, demand couldn't be greater. People love their musics. They just don't want to pay for it.
04/09/09
Bonjour you cheese-eating surrender monkies!
04/09/09
04/09/09
just because you sound like stephen hawking, don't mean you get the ladies like stephen hawking.
04/09/09
or new and improved Stephen?
04/09/09
04/09/09
Bad that pirates are killing the music industry. :(
04/09/09
04/09/09
But they are powerless in the face of file sharing. They're like sandcastles getting knocked down by a tidal wave, not killing the music industry as much as getting killed by it.
04/09/09
But you forget that's the artist who takes the downfall first!
And no, not every artist makes as much money as Jay Z and p.Diddy (who btw own several companies besides the music labels).
Just imagine you could download hardware. No one would ever buy anything following your logic. Car companies are greedy too. So are computer manufacturers, electronic companies, food companies, telecommunication companies with their billion $ worth of infrastructure.
Also, hospitals are too expensive, the pharmaceutical industry probably leads the field of greediness along with the oil industry.
The fact is, stealing is always better than paying for something.
How often did you try to fix your car before have to pay several hundreds of dollars to a mechanic?
I am pretty sure you like to get paid for your money, don't you? And how would you feel losing your job because your greedy boss charges customers too much to drive around in a Bentley? You see, it's not easy to punish the guilty people since it's always the poor worker that gets f*cked!
So next time you download a music track for free think of the artist that worked months with no income (probably with no support from his/her family.
He would have made probably around $0.16 on that song for $0.99. For someone selling 1 Mio. copies it's not bad but for an artist selling 30k it's almost impossible to survive.
04/09/09
I'm a musician!
04/09/09
04/09/09