Gee, I wonder if some time in the next 5 years I might see a digital re-release of Ferrante & Teichert albums I can legally purchase because of Mr. Brandvoid's comments? I've only been waiting for over 20 years for that to happen!
Of course, in the mean time I've already gotten every single song they ever recorded, all illegally downloaded because EMI (plus several other record label companies) very politely told me to get lost the multiple times I tried to purchase them. The original LP's were burned up in a fire, I didn't want to replace them that way, but I was left with no choice.
So, yeah, I'm one of those unhappy, unsatisfied, customers Mr. Brandvoid was referring to.
I've always wondered how many other people, like me, were in the same situation, it's gotta be millions!!!
The sales, according to the figures in Mikes blog, grossed $36,634.84. I don't know what type of royalties Amazon pays authors, but let's say it's 5%. At 5% the royalties owed to the author would be $1,831 and change. Now, for a measly $1,831, why does Amazon want to buy themselves this kind of bad publicity?
The only thing that people reading this are going to see and remember is that Amazon is purposefully ripping off an author. Things like this, like their deleting books from Kindles debacle, are not forgotten.
I can't fathom how presumably intelligent executives could be so stupid!!!
Well, I suppose by a literal reading of the contract Amazon may not feel obligated to reimburse the author, but it would be the moral, ethical thing to do.
Covering the same territory as AC in the 2nd comment, I could see Amazon's position if the mistake happened 30-40 times, or something like that in the low numbers, but 6,000 times!!! Uh huh, Amazon is being disingenuous at best.
Amazon's response does not say anything remotely good about their ethics!!!
If you're ever up in Seattle Mike you really owe it to yourself to go see the JPQ play live.
The first time you mentioned JPQ here I went to their web site because I love jazz, have lived in Seattle for years, and had never heard of them. Loved the free samples on the web site and bought the CD. When Jason let us know about his new project and its being set up on Kickstarter I kicked in some bucks for it. Later on in Dec he did a preview of his version of Nick Drake and it was great, listening to it live was a real kick. It had a pretty good turnout too. Met the quartet and they were all pretty cool dudes. Heh... Not to mention that all four of them were nice enough to put up with this old dude's probably stupid questions with a smile...
Listening to a CD is nice, but hearing it live and watching the players/audience really get into it is even better.
If it hadn't been for your mention of the JPQ on the blog, I would never have heard of them, or had the opportunity to make a contribution to the new upcoming CD. It was sort of nice knowing that in a very small way I was able to help make something happen that I love and could _never_ do myself. A big thanks to you for showing me the way to them....
Both your post, and that of Mike, cut to the core of the matter.
I'll give you a specific example of that.
I grew up in the late 40's and 50's listening to big band, pop, and early rock. As a fan of those genres over the years I built up a huge collection of LP's, almost 400 albums. A big part of that collection was all of Ferrante & Teichert's albums. After I retired from the service in 1983 I put most of my household possessions, including my music and book collections, into storage while going back to school and living on campus. Shortly after doing this the warehouse they were stored in burnt down to the ground destroying everything I owned. I quickly discovered that my LP's were mostly not replaceable as they were no longer available, either as LP's or (later) CD's. What was available was mostly "Best Hits' compilations, usually consisting of the same few songs repeated across the various titles. Such is life, and I accepted that at the time, because there were no other affordable options (such as paying $20 or more for a used and well scratched LP).
Fast forward a whole lot of years to when the Internet had become well established and digital versions of music were common place. I then made the rounds of the various record labels (phone calls, letters, email etc), specifically to buy replacements for my most favorite artists. Again, I use Ferrante & Teichert as an example. In a nutshell, I was told well here's the seven or so "Best Of" albums, take it or leave it. I.E. multiple copes of the same songs and, for all intents and purposes, none of the tunes "I" wanted. I was perfectly willing to buy replacements for my destroyed LP's, be it a CD or digital version, but the music labels weren't interested in making them available, especially as digital copies, because they were no longer main stream big dollar makers and people like me weren't a big enough market for them to care about. That last sentence, by the way, is pretty much exactly what I was told by the music label representative on the phone (if I remember correctly the company was BMI).
About two years ago, while doing a Google search on Ferrante & Teichert fan sites, back on about page 3 or so of the search I noticed a Bit Torrent link for one of their tunes. That was when I discovered that somebody had gone to the trouble of making high quality digitized copies of just about of all their album releases. Not too surprisingly, it wasn't done by a record label. As it was the _only_ way I could replace those tunes, I downloaded them all, which took a huge hunk of time. Since then, because I had no other option, I've done the same for just about all of the LP's I lost in that warehouse fire.
The one common denominator in all of this, is that virtually none of the music I replaced was available for purchase by the record labels. To replace what I lost I literally had no other option other than to 'pirate' the music. I wanted to give the record labels my money, hell, I was practically begging them to take it, but they gave me no way to do that. So, I became a 'music' pirate in the process, and have not one iota of guilt about it. I tried to be 'honest' about it, and the record labels basically laughed at me.
Is there a market for older music releases, like I was unsuccessfully trying to buy? You bet there is! If you don't believe this, do some quick searches on Google, Amazon, or Ebay. Are the record labels making even minimal attempts at servicing that market? Hell no, not even when the cost of creating digitized copies of the music is virtually pennies compared to the ROI!
The labels lost sight of their market, it changed on them and they didn't have the wit to see it. Which pretty much gives you a snapshot of why record labels are bleeding profits right and left. It has nothing at all to do with 'piracy', and everything to do with not being able to recognize profit making opportunities when they're staring them in the face.
In a nutshell, basic marketing (kindergarten version), if you don't offer what your market wants, at a price it's willing to pay, that market will eat you alive.
Heh... Somehow I don't see the judge in the case reacting very well to this situation, and especially not well to the 'tone' of his letter to the court dropping the cases.
It sort of sounds like a prime example of 'Legal Mistakes 101', how to piss off the judicial system.
I wonder if he slept through that part of his education!!!
I certainly hope, with regard to the likely steps the EFF and Public Citizen take to have the court chastise Mr. Stone, that there is a followup to this. Somehow I don't see the Judge being very forgiving about Mr. Stones casual approach to judicial ethics.
It certainly sounds like Mick Haig Productions tried to "cheap out" on their legal representation and got what they paid for. It would also seem Mr. Stone took his 'training wheels' off before he was ready to play with the 'Big Boys'.
Other than that, after reading this article and the contents of the 'problems' link, I do not foresee Mr. Stone as having a very rewarding and/or lucrative legal career. He seems to be more than a little ethically 'challenged'.
Gads... I can't think of anything Comcast can screw up so bad as to make me want to switch my phone service, or any other service, back to Qwest.
Qwest is the only utility I've ever used (and that covers 50 years), whose service was so bad, whose executives so blatantly lied, and thoroughly made me so angry that for a while I actually entertained the notion of applying a baseball bat to a random senior executive or member of the board of directors. While it was a very entertaining thought, common sense did finally prevail. Even PG&E, though God knows they tried hard, wasn't as bad as Qwest.
Well, to be honest, you only think you're getting 20Mbps service. I say this because I've been paying Comcast for that level of service, but in point of fact I've been extremely lucky the last seven months to get even 8Mpbs.
Why do I know this? Well, after finally noticing that my average speed was much slower than 20Mbps, I spent 3 months doing hourly speed tests tracking my actual average speed. It turned out my average speed was in the range of 7.5-8Mbps. A major portion of the problem was the modem Comcast had installed. The standard Arris modem was just not capable of adequately handling 20Mbps speed. After complaining about this to tech support last week I finally got a tech (who actually knew her job, or cared about it), that installed an upgraded version of the Arris modem which resulted in noticeably faster download speeds.
Unfortunately, whether or not you can get this upgraded modem depends VERY much on just how good your Comcast tech repairman really is. I can tell you that ping speeds, at sites I regularly test at, have gone over the last week from an average of 150-200ms to 20-40ms, which is quite a significant improvement. I'm still testing to see what that improvement translates to in terms of Mbps speed.
So, as a note to Comcast subscribers, if you're paying for the higher level speed packages (16-20Mbps) and having speed problems, make sure Comcast installs a modem capable of actually handling those speeds.
I should mention that I'm rather lucky in that almost all the other people on my node are extremely light Internet users. The node consists of a series of close together senior housing apartment complexes whose tenants pretty much only watch TV. So, problems of maximum node Internet use are virtually non-existent, which pretty much means any problems with speed are solely due to Comcast hardware problems.
Your comment is pretty much spot on, except for "if you don't trust your doctor, you probably shouldn't have gone there in the first place".
That comment is forgetting that for a great many people, economics and/or their HMO's dictate that control over which doctor they see can, and frequently does, vary from minimal to totally outside of their control.
This TechDirt article does lightly touch upon something that is frequently quite aggravating, namely doctors that have a range of attitude from a "poor bedside manner" to downright "need their ass kicked" arrogant jerks. By my experience, sad to say, the field as a whole suffers from a rather high proportion of undeserved self-inflated egos.
This is one of the reasons why over the last 40-50 years, for many people, the medical profession as a whole has lost the automatic respect it once had. Over the last forty years or so I've talked with more than a few people who rate doctors on about the same level as mechanics, only better paid. That pretty much illustrates the level of respect to which the profession has now sunk, and the profession has only itself to blame. On the brighter side, it does seem that at least some parts of the profession have recognized this situation and, at least minimally, are beginning to consider how to remedy it.
The sad thing about that picture is that some DVD's over the last several years have been exactly that bad.
Over the last several years I've built up collection of about 1,000 DVD's, mostly re-releases of old 1950's and 1960's movies (every John Wayne movie for example), but also a whole lot of new movies. After a while I got extremely pissed off at DVD's I bought that matched the profile shown by that picture.
When I buy a DVD that's pretty much like the one described in that picture, I create/burn 10 edited copies, CD/DVD labels, and package them. Just so know, copying/editing a DVD is ridiculously simple. Then I give them away to whoever wants the movie. I've been doing that for about 3 years now.
Does it cost the movie companies money, you bet, that's the whole purpose of the exercise even if it is penny ante. My business partner and I, before we retired, used to call this type of thing an asshole tax, applied when we had to put up with jerks.
Is giving the copies away illegal, oh hell yes (making copies of your legally purchased DVD's is NOT illegal, the DCMA does NOT trump that right, I do carry it to an extreme though). Do I give a good damn if it's illegal, not one little bit.
I'm sure this will seriously offend some of the apologists here but, again, I don't give a good damn if it does. It'll probably help keep their noses bent out of shape.
(untitled comment)
Gee, I wonder if some time in the next 5 years I might see a digital re-release of Ferrante & Teichert albums I can legally purchase because of Mr. Brandvoid's comments? I've only been waiting for over 20 years for that to happen!
Of course, in the mean time I've already gotten every single song they ever recorded, all illegally downloaded because EMI (plus several other record label companies) very politely told me to get lost the multiple times I tried to purchase them. The original LP's were burned up in a fire, I didn't want to replace them that way, but I was left with no choice.
So, yeah, I'm one of those unhappy, unsatisfied, customers Mr. Brandvoid was referring to.
I've always wondered how many other people, like me, were in the same situation, it's gotta be millions!!!
Amazon screws up twice in one go!!!
Just as an addendum to my above comment....
The sales, according to the figures in Mikes blog, grossed $36,634.84. I don't know what type of royalties Amazon pays authors, but let's say it's 5%. At 5% the royalties owed to the author would be $1,831 and change. Now, for a measly $1,831, why does Amazon want to buy themselves this kind of bad publicity?
The only thing that people reading this are going to see and remember is that Amazon is purposefully ripping off an author. Things like this, like their deleting books from Kindles debacle, are not forgotten.
I can't fathom how presumably intelligent executives could be so stupid!!!
Amazon screws up twice in one go!!!
Well, I suppose by a literal reading of the contract Amazon may not feel obligated to reimburse the author, but it would be the moral, ethical thing to do.
Covering the same territory as AC in the 2nd comment, I could see Amazon's position if the mistake happened 30-40 times, or something like that in the low numbers, but 6,000 times!!! Uh huh, Amazon is being disingenuous at best.
Amazon's response does not say anything remotely good about their ethics!!!
(untitled comment)
Dang... Don't you ever go to bed Mike!!!
(untitled comment)
It seems to me that the appropriate reply from Zite to the letters signatories should be:
Dear Sir or Madam,
Kiss my ass. Have a good day.
Sincerely,
Unfortunately, in the real world, the response from Zite will probably waste 3 pages of legalese speak to say exactly the same thing.
(untitled comment)
If you're ever up in Seattle Mike you really owe it to yourself to go see the JPQ play live.
The first time you mentioned JPQ here I went to their web site because I love jazz, have lived in Seattle for years, and had never heard of them. Loved the free samples on the web site and bought the CD. When Jason let us know about his new project and its being set up on Kickstarter I kicked in some bucks for it. Later on in Dec he did a preview of his version of Nick Drake and it was great, listening to it live was a real kick. It had a pretty good turnout too. Met the quartet and they were all pretty cool dudes. Heh... Not to mention that all four of them were nice enough to put up with this old dude's probably stupid questions with a smile...
Listening to a CD is nice, but hearing it live and watching the players/audience really get into it is even better.
If it hadn't been for your mention of the JPQ on the blog, I would never have heard of them, or had the opportunity to make a contribution to the new upcoming CD. It was sort of nice knowing that in a very small way I was able to help make something happen that I love and could _never_ do myself. A big thanks to you for showing me the way to them....
I'm also looking forward to the release party. ;)
(untitled comment)
As much of a slimeball that Evan Stone undoubtedly is, one would hope you wrote that with tongue firmly in cheek.
Re: Re: Re:
Both your post, and that of Mike, cut to the core of the matter.
I'll give you a specific example of that.
I grew up in the late 40's and 50's listening to big band, pop, and early rock. As a fan of those genres over the years I built up a huge collection of LP's, almost 400 albums. A big part of that collection was all of Ferrante & Teichert's albums. After I retired from the service in 1983 I put most of my household possessions, including my music and book collections, into storage while going back to school and living on campus. Shortly after doing this the warehouse they were stored in burnt down to the ground destroying everything I owned. I quickly discovered that my LP's were mostly not replaceable as they were no longer available, either as LP's or (later) CD's. What was available was mostly "Best Hits' compilations, usually consisting of the same few songs repeated across the various titles. Such is life, and I accepted that at the time, because there were no other affordable options (such as paying $20 or more for a used and well scratched LP).
Fast forward a whole lot of years to when the Internet had become well established and digital versions of music were common place. I then made the rounds of the various record labels (phone calls, letters, email etc), specifically to buy replacements for my most favorite artists. Again, I use Ferrante & Teichert as an example. In a nutshell, I was told well here's the seven or so "Best Of" albums, take it or leave it. I.E. multiple copes of the same songs and, for all intents and purposes, none of the tunes "I" wanted. I was perfectly willing to buy replacements for my destroyed LP's, be it a CD or digital version, but the music labels weren't interested in making them available, especially as digital copies, because they were no longer main stream big dollar makers and people like me weren't a big enough market for them to care about. That last sentence, by the way, is pretty much exactly what I was told by the music label representative on the phone (if I remember correctly the company was BMI).
About two years ago, while doing a Google search on Ferrante & Teichert fan sites, back on about page 3 or so of the search I noticed a Bit Torrent link for one of their tunes. That was when I discovered that somebody had gone to the trouble of making high quality digitized copies of just about of all their album releases. Not too surprisingly, it wasn't done by a record label. As it was the _only_ way I could replace those tunes, I downloaded them all, which took a huge hunk of time. Since then, because I had no other option, I've done the same for just about all of the LP's I lost in that warehouse fire.
The one common denominator in all of this, is that virtually none of the music I replaced was available for purchase by the record labels. To replace what I lost I literally had no other option other than to 'pirate' the music. I wanted to give the record labels my money, hell, I was practically begging them to take it, but they gave me no way to do that. So, I became a 'music' pirate in the process, and have not one iota of guilt about it. I tried to be 'honest' about it, and the record labels basically laughed at me.
Is there a market for older music releases, like I was unsuccessfully trying to buy? You bet there is! If you don't believe this, do some quick searches on Google, Amazon, or Ebay. Are the record labels making even minimal attempts at servicing that market? Hell no, not even when the cost of creating digitized copies of the music is virtually pennies compared to the ROI!
The labels lost sight of their market, it changed on them and they didn't have the wit to see it. Which pretty much gives you a snapshot of why record labels are bleeding profits right and left. It has nothing at all to do with 'piracy', and everything to do with not being able to recognize profit making opportunities when they're staring them in the face.
In a nutshell, basic marketing (kindergarten version), if you don't offer what your market wants, at a price it's willing to pay, that market will eat you alive.
Re:
Heh... Somehow I don't see the judge in the case reacting very well to this situation, and especially not well to the 'tone' of his letter to the court dropping the cases.
It sort of sounds like a prime example of 'Legal Mistakes 101', how to piss off the judicial system.
I wonder if he slept through that part of his education!!!
Legal Shenanigans
I certainly hope, with regard to the likely steps the EFF and Public Citizen take to have the court chastise Mr. Stone, that there is a followup to this. Somehow I don't see the Judge being very forgiving about Mr. Stones casual approach to judicial ethics.
It certainly sounds like Mick Haig Productions tried to "cheap out" on their legal representation and got what they paid for. It would also seem Mr. Stone took his 'training wheels' off before he was ready to play with the 'Big Boys'.
Other than that, after reading this article and the contents of the 'problems' link, I do not foresee Mr. Stone as having a very rewarding and/or lucrative legal career. He seems to be more than a little ethically 'challenged'.
Re: Comcast not bad around here
Gads... I can't think of anything Comcast can screw up so bad as to make me want to switch my phone service, or any other service, back to Qwest.
Qwest is the only utility I've ever used (and that covers 50 years), whose service was so bad, whose executives so blatantly lied, and thoroughly made me so angry that for a while I actually entertained the notion of applying a baseball bat to a random senior executive or member of the board of directors. While it was a very entertaining thought, common sense did finally prevail. Even PG&E, though God knows they tried hard, wasn't as bad as Qwest.
Re: Aye
Well, to be honest, you only think you're getting 20Mbps service. I say this because I've been paying Comcast for that level of service, but in point of fact I've been extremely lucky the last seven months to get even 8Mpbs.
Why do I know this? Well, after finally noticing that my average speed was much slower than 20Mbps, I spent 3 months doing hourly speed tests tracking my actual average speed. It turned out my average speed was in the range of 7.5-8Mbps. A major portion of the problem was the modem Comcast had installed. The standard Arris modem was just not capable of adequately handling 20Mbps speed. After complaining about this to tech support last week I finally got a tech (who actually knew her job, or cared about it), that installed an upgraded version of the Arris modem which resulted in noticeably faster download speeds.
Unfortunately, whether or not you can get this upgraded modem depends VERY much on just how good your Comcast tech repairman really is. I can tell you that ping speeds, at sites I regularly test at, have gone over the last week from an average of 150-200ms to 20-40ms, which is quite a significant improvement. I'm still testing to see what that improvement translates to in terms of Mbps speed.
So, as a note to Comcast subscribers, if you're paying for the higher level speed packages (16-20Mbps) and having speed problems, make sure Comcast installs a modem capable of actually handling those speeds.
I should mention that I'm rather lucky in that almost all the other people on my node are extremely light Internet users. The node consists of a series of close together senior housing apartment complexes whose tenants pretty much only watch TV. So, problems of maximum node Internet use are virtually non-existent, which pretty much means any problems with speed are solely due to Comcast hardware problems.
(untitled comment)
I don't know who 'Anonymous Coward' replier #2 is, but I suspect he/she doesn't get out much in the 'real' world!!!
Re:
Your comment is pretty much spot on, except for "if you don't trust your doctor, you probably shouldn't have gone there in the first place".
That comment is forgetting that for a great many people, economics and/or their HMO's dictate that control over which doctor they see can, and frequently does, vary from minimal to totally outside of their control.
This TechDirt article does lightly touch upon something that is frequently quite aggravating, namely doctors that have a range of attitude from a "poor bedside manner" to downright "need their ass kicked" arrogant jerks. By my experience, sad to say, the field as a whole suffers from a rather high proportion of undeserved self-inflated egos.
This is one of the reasons why over the last 40-50 years, for many people, the medical profession as a whole has lost the automatic respect it once had. Over the last forty years or so I've talked with more than a few people who rate doctors on about the same level as mechanics, only better paid. That pretty much illustrates the level of respect to which the profession has now sunk, and the profession has only itself to blame. On the brighter side, it does seem that at least some parts of the profession have recognized this situation and, at least minimally, are beginning to consider how to remedy it.
Pain in the Ass DVD's
The sad thing about that picture is that some DVD's over the last several years have been exactly that bad.
Over the last several years I've built up collection of about 1,000 DVD's, mostly re-releases of old 1950's and 1960's movies (every John Wayne movie for example), but also a whole lot of new movies. After a while I got extremely pissed off at DVD's I bought that matched the profile shown by that picture.
When I buy a DVD that's pretty much like the one described in that picture, I create/burn 10 edited copies, CD/DVD labels, and package them. Just so know, copying/editing a DVD is ridiculously simple. Then I give them away to whoever wants the movie. I've been doing that for about 3 years now.
Does it cost the movie companies money, you bet, that's the whole purpose of the exercise even if it is penny ante. My business partner and I, before we retired, used to call this type of thing an asshole tax, applied when we had to put up with jerks.
Is giving the copies away illegal, oh hell yes (making copies of your legally purchased DVD's is NOT illegal, the DCMA does NOT trump that right, I do carry it to an extreme though). Do I give a good damn if it's illegal, not one little bit.
I'm sure this will seriously offend some of the apologists here but, again, I don't give a good damn if it does. It'll probably help keep their noses bent out of shape.
Re: I got your link...
I found TechDirt the same way "some old guy" did.
Found it, loved it, been following it and getting the daily email ever since.
I've looked at a lot of blogs, but as far as I'm concerned TechDirt is the best of the bunch.