Oh please. Everything Kim Dotcom has there was paid for with the profits from his skeezy business. It's one thing to defend some pimply teenager who's truly "sharing" content with his neighbor and it's another to fall in love with a 1%er who made it into the 1% by stealing from the artists.
(OOOOh. He used the "steal" word. Let's argue that point!)
He deserves to lose everything including his freedom. He took from artists-- many poor or middle-class-- and gave to himself.
Quit drinking yer Robin Hood kool aid and face the truth.
I'll tell you what scares investors: not getting a return on their investors. And I'll tell you what signals this danger: a bunch of loons believing in magical business models like giving everything away for free. This web site and the loons who hang out here are scaring away investment by insisting that somehow there is some magic way that this will pay off.
As far as I can tell, the only above-board solution has been a paywall. Yet everyone around here hates the idea of actually paying for something you consume.
Now there are some sites (who will go unnamed) that work sponsored content into the mix. Sometimes they add little labels in the lightest grey fonts. Those are pretty sleezy and I see it all of the time these days.
Only GOOG could believe that they could get something for nothing. Reporting stories takes time and energy. Yet they didn't want to kick back any of their revenues to support the reporters. For shame.
So I say, "Good riddance to Google News, Leeches All."
And quit quoting the EFF, another group funded by GOOG for moments just like this. They're just lapdogs who do what their master says.
This has nothing to do with linking. It has to do with quoting and repurposing facts without adding to the dialog.
I have no problem with the way that this blog uses extensive quotes from hard working reporters because it usually adds something to the debate. (Yes, it adds the wrong headed, muddled opinion, but that's your right.) GOOG adds nothing.
And why does GOOG continue to maintain that it makes nothing off of news. That's not what Marissa Mayer claimed.
Creating nicely formatted, edited and peer-reviewed work takes plenty of effort. Sure, the peer-reviewers are paid with early access, not money, but the rest of the staffs need cash. They're not supported by the institutions.
There are two choices for the research establishment: reader pays for editing or writer pays for editing. In the Nature model, the reader pays and the editors strive to make the readers happy because from them all subscription revenues flow.
But the wackjobs around here probably think that we should just make all of the journals free because, well, the commons is never trashed and Communism is still doing well around the world.
Alas, this means the writer will pay for the editing and presentation. That's bad for the writers-- who will need to hire editorial staff with overhead dollars-- and for the readers who won't get any benefit from editorial guidance because there won't be any. Every writer will automatically say, "Publish this paper, it's great." And if the writer is paying, the writer will get satisfaction.
The readers, though, will just get an unedited pile of mixed quality. But hey, they can say, "It's free!"
A crime that kills jobs for artists. You can blather on and on about sharing this or sharing that, but at the end of the day it's a crime.
And it can be a big crime. One person can easily supply more than a million copies of some movie, all the while pretending that he's only "sharing" them with close friends. If someone robs a million banks or hijacks a truck with a million DVDs on it, that's a serious crime.
IT should be treated seriously. Only in your warped, GOOG-apologizing mind is it anything but a crime. So don't be surprised when the police actually treat it that way. These folks deserve to be in jail.
From the beginning, the message has been simple: copyright is horrible and we need to explore other mechanisms. Well, this is one of those mechanisms. People can download forever and pretend that the content is free. Then they pay some monthly Netflix-like fee, but to the government. Sure, they have no choice, but let's not get too obsessed with that point. Everyone around here has been demonizing Hollywood and the "MaFIAAA" forever. Why are we going Tea Party and demonizing government?
Yah gotta pay for the artists somehow. You either pay them piecemeal and you let society pay in bulk. Personally I like having the people direct their dollars to their favorite artists instead of letting some bureaucracy, but I get shouted down around here when I suggest that copyright is pretty cool.
Well, suck it up TechDirt. This is your DREAM come true. You've been saying that innovative schemes like this are just around the corner. Well, they're here now. Why aren't you dancing??????
Please. All it takes is one look at YouTube to understand how GOOG feels about piracy. The artists have three choices:
1) Get short changed on the ad revenues by partnering with the big company that's given them a deal they can't refuse. 2) File endless DMCA requests because GOOG can't seem to use their cool automation to stop people from uploading the same clip again and again 3) Ignore them.
Notice that none of the options actually include sharing many revenues with the people who did the work.
Imagine if GOOG used the same tools to police YouTube as it does to stop scammers from using the Google Compute Engine. On that platform, they want to double check your real identity and so they insist on linking your account to a cell phone which, not surprisingly, tracks your every movement. They're not going to let idiots have free rein on their computing platform.
But when the idiots are uploading content and making money for GOOG, there are zero impediments. And if we file jump through all of the hoops to file a DMCA request, the piracy appears again. They brag again and again about using their content ID system to pay a fraction of the ad revenue, but somehow they can't use that same system to file DMCA notices automatically.
Now-- all you file "sharing" suckers out there -- be prepared for a change. As GOOG starts to get more revenue out of Play, they're slowly going to start seeing the piracy as a net loser. When that happens, I'm hoping that GOOG will finally start seeing the light and building real partnerships with the hard working artists who create the content that fuels their revenues. But I may be overly optimistic. That revenue at Play may never come along.
You were screwed in the process of buying 500 vinyls? How? Did you know the price before you purchased it? I bet you probably even heard the music before buying. How were you screwed?
If you didn't like the music, you could have recorded your own. Or simply purchased things from the cutout bin. But you didn't, did you. You weren't screwed.
Perhaps you like to believe that you were screwed because the record companies only gave, say, 15% to the artists. People love to latch onto that small number while forgetting just how much work it is to publish anything. It took the hard work of thousands of people in the recording companies to bring to you that vinyl you purchased. They need to be paid too.
So you could have bought a cassette tape from some folk singer at a concert but you chose to spend your money willingly for a record album from a major company. You got what you expected: expensively produced music that was artfully packaged and distributed. I don't know why you think you were screwed.
It's amazing how the pirate sleezeballs gin up this woe-is-me attitude among the music lovers in order to convince them that it's better to give their money to the pirates.
How much did you give Kim Dotcom? Or one of the other fake services on the web?
See the table above. And of course there's no source that proves the causation without a reasonable doubt. If there were, GOOG would be in jail.
But all it takes is five seconds on YouTube to convince anyone with a brain that it's evolved into one huge jukebox that destroys the need for people to purchase music. Only a fool can't see the effect.
But I'm guessing you're one of the loons who's not going to feel guilty and cling to any rationalization that maybe, just maybe, the band really authorized that upload. Yeah.
And you can choose whether you like the word "stolen" or "destroyed" better. If people are taking something for free and not paying for it, both fit. But I'm sure you've got some wackjob rationalization about how you're really giving people publicity or something like that.
There are tens of thousands of artists who used to make a living in the recording industry and now they can't. But GOOG is getting a big, fat cut of the revenues that used to go to the artists.
Yah gotta love the loons around this joint. The recording industry alone used to gather well above $20b a year in sales in the early part of the 2000s. Now it's down around $15b a year. Even if GOOG is only responsible for 20% a year of that collapse, they're still destroying on more revenue in ONE year than GOOG has generated in ALL of those years.
And let's talk about fairness. GOOG is pocketing a pretty penny by keeping a share of that ad revenue. What a way to cut yourself into the business. The recording company didn't ask to be partners with GOOG. GOOG just muscled its way in with their army of pirate ants. So the recording companies can either fight a long battle with the pirates in court go along and let GOOG profit off their hard work.
If I poke around YouTube I see a gazillion videos uploaded by "fans". It's easy to find almost every song you want up there. But only a small fraction are enrolled in this ContentID. GOOG is still getting rich off of piracy. They're still not paying the pirate ants at all (suckers!) and kicking back very little to the artists.
So that's why no one is celebrating. It's like a thief came along and took a $20 bill from your wallet and replaced it with a $1. Then the thief kept saying, "Why do you keep talking about how I took the $20. Can't you just focus on the $1 I gave you? Come on. Don't be so negative."
That is happening slowly but surely. Some newspapers are going out of business. All of the good ones are putting up paywalls. I never look to news.google.com any more. Alas, others do and that's the problem.
But Google refuses to negotiate. They think they have a right to take everyone's content and give back a click or three. That's just not sustainable. Murdoch's pain should be a warning to Google that Google is about to become irrelevant.
Just how does Google pay for all of the hard work done by the content creators? You make it seem like tossing them a click-through is a wonderful gift. Wrongo. In an advertising-dominated world, Google takes all of the gravy and tosses a few drops to the people below them.
If the newspapers commanded higher ad rates, it all might work but they don't. So Google gets 90% of the ad revenue and 10% slips through the cracks to the people who do the work. The robots at Google rake in the billions for the few who work there and the people who create the content that drives Google get pennies.
Quit shilling for billionaires. Start caring about the people who create the content that forms the backbone of the web.
As GOOG becomes more and more of a content company, as YouTube becomes more and more of a TV network, as GOOG sees fast response as a foundation for a search engine, GOOG is going to change its mind. And that means the EFF will follow. GOOG was a big believer in net neutrality at the beginning because it was the basis of their profits. Now they're morphing as they realize that maybe, just maybe, net neutrality hurts them.
Sorry leeching losers, but you can't have both. If you want the content for free, that will DESTROY the chance you'll ever have of working as a writer, artist, musician, set designer, cinematographer or any of a hundred other attractive careers. It's back to being a maid or cleaning out the hog pens.
You can't have it both ways. If you want society to support great jobs that reward creativity, you've got to support property rights for those artists.
But you would rather work cleaning the gutters, I guess.
Well, you go to work on that plan to use the airwaves for non-commercial fare. How are your PBS stations doing these days? And gosh, they're SOOO non-commercial with their licensed Seasame Street and Downtown Abbey swag for sale everywhere.
Face it. Commerce is just another form of how people interact. And the places that claim they're "non-commercial" are just faking it because they take home salaries, often big ones.
Gosh, you don't understand "ad hominem" do you? If I call you a "moron" or a "trisomic idiot", that's ad hominem. If I just compare it to all of the other lame rationalizations around here, that's just an analogy.
Everyone around here is always saying bizarro things like, "That's just like a library" or "that's just like reading a newspaper over someone's shoulder." So why can't the Supreme Court use the same structure to toss Aereo into the trash can where it belongs.
It was never a serious startup, just a weird legal hack to get some leverage in retransmission negotiations. It was never a viable or useful technology. Why create a bazillion antenna just to get around some impediment.
So let's celebrate that the Supreme Court called a duck a duck. It was just a cheap, stupid trick that didn't add to the world at all.
Oh please. Mike and everyone at this site misuses CENSORSHIP all of the time. Why can't everyone else? If someone loser can't torrent something for free, everyone around here immediately cries, "CENSORSHIP". Sure, said loser could just go to Amazon and pay money for the same content, but no one around here cares. If you can't get it for free, someone is being CENSORED.
And that's what GOOG's doing. But I'm beginning to love this. As GOOG turns into a content company, it's going to start to love copyright again. And then MIke will need to change his tune. Suddenly copyright trolling will become beautiful again, once the unevil people at GOOG start doing it.
Now if only they would protect the artists' work with the same fervor
Oh please. Everything Kim Dotcom has there was paid for with the profits from his skeezy business. It's one thing to defend some pimply teenager who's truly "sharing" content with his neighbor and it's another to fall in love with a 1%er who made it into the 1% by stealing from the artists.
(OOOOh. He used the "steal" word. Let's argue that point!)
He deserves to lose everything including his freedom. He took from artists-- many poor or middle-class-- and gave to himself.
Quit drinking yer Robin Hood kool aid and face the truth.
Nah-- it's the piracy and the pirate apologists who hang out here
I'll tell you what scares investors: not getting a return on their investors. And I'll tell you what signals this danger: a bunch of loons believing in magical business models like giving everything away for free. This web site and the loons who hang out here are scaring away investment by insisting that somehow there is some magic way that this will pay off.
As far as I can tell, the only above-board solution has been a paywall. Yet everyone around here hates the idea of actually paying for something you consume.
Now there are some sites (who will go unnamed) that work sponsored content into the mix. Sometimes they add little labels in the lightest grey fonts. Those are pretty sleezy and I see it all of the time these days.
Typical GOOG apology-- you don't get something for nothing
Only GOOG could believe that they could get something for nothing. Reporting stories takes time and energy. Yet they didn't want to kick back any of their revenues to support the reporters. For shame.
So I say, "Good riddance to Google News, Leeches All."
And quit quoting the EFF, another group funded by GOOG for moments just like this. They're just lapdogs who do what their master says.
This has nothing to do with linking. It has to do with quoting and repurposing facts without adding to the dialog.
I have no problem with the way that this blog uses extensive quotes from hard working reporters because it usually adds something to the debate. (Yes, it adds the wrong headed, muddled opinion, but that's your right.) GOOG adds nothing.
And why does GOOG continue to maintain that it makes nothing off of news. That's not what Marissa Mayer claimed.
http://fortune.com/2008/07/22/whats-google-news-worth-100-million/
Anti-research? Nope. It's very pro-reseach
Creating nicely formatted, edited and peer-reviewed work takes plenty of effort. Sure, the peer-reviewers are paid with early access, not money, but the rest of the staffs need cash. They're not supported by the institutions.
There are two choices for the research establishment: reader pays for editing or writer pays for editing. In the Nature model, the reader pays and the editors strive to make the readers happy because from them all subscription revenues flow.
But the wackjobs around here probably think that we should just make all of the journals free because, well, the commons is never trashed and Communism is still doing well around the world.
Alas, this means the writer will pay for the editing and presentation. That's bad for the writers-- who will need to hire editorial staff with overhead dollars-- and for the readers who won't get any benefit from editorial guidance because there won't be any. Every writer will automatically say, "Publish this paper, it's great." And if the writer is paying, the writer will get satisfaction.
The readers, though, will just get an unedited pile of mixed quality. But hey, they can say, "It's free!"
Hey-- infringement is a crime
A crime that kills jobs for artists. You can blather on and on about sharing this or sharing that, but at the end of the day it's a crime.
And it can be a big crime. One person can easily supply more than a million copies of some movie, all the while pretending that he's only "sharing" them with close friends. If someone robs a million banks or hijacks a truck with a million DVDs on it, that's a serious crime.
IT should be treated seriously. Only in your warped, GOOG-apologizing mind is it anything but a crime. So don't be surprised when the police actually treat it that way. These folks deserve to be in jail.
Don't get your hopes up...
The New Yorker is run by artists and eventually they realize the errors in their ways.
Here's a piece that celebrates the artists and hates on cheap, online freeloaders like the ones that hang out here.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/photographers-can-protect-work
Why Isn't TechDirt Celebrating This?
From the beginning, the message has been simple: copyright is horrible and we need to explore other mechanisms. Well, this is one of those mechanisms. People can download forever and pretend that the content is free. Then they pay some monthly Netflix-like fee, but to the government. Sure, they have no choice, but let's not get too obsessed with that point. Everyone around here has been demonizing Hollywood and the "MaFIAAA" forever. Why are we going Tea Party and demonizing government?
Yah gotta pay for the artists somehow. You either pay them piecemeal and you let society pay in bulk. Personally I like having the people direct their dollars to their favorite artists instead of letting some bureaucracy, but I get shouted down around here when I suggest that copyright is pretty cool.
Well, suck it up TechDirt. This is your DREAM come true. You've been saying that innovative schemes like this are just around the corner. Well, they're here now. Why aren't you dancing??????
Bull
Please. All it takes is one look at YouTube to understand how GOOG feels about piracy. The artists have three choices:
1) Get short changed on the ad revenues by partnering with the big company that's given them a deal they can't refuse.
2) File endless DMCA requests because GOOG can't seem to use their cool automation to stop people from uploading the same clip again and again
3) Ignore them.
Notice that none of the options actually include sharing many revenues with the people who did the work.
Imagine if GOOG used the same tools to police YouTube as it does to stop scammers from using the Google Compute Engine. On that platform, they want to double check your real identity and so they insist on linking your account to a cell phone which, not surprisingly, tracks your every movement. They're not going to let idiots have free rein on their computing platform.
But when the idiots are uploading content and making money for GOOG, there are zero impediments. And if we file jump through all of the hoops to file a DMCA request, the piracy appears again. They brag again and again about using their content ID system to pay a fraction of the ad revenue, but somehow they can't use that same system to file DMCA notices automatically.
Now-- all you file "sharing" suckers out there -- be prepared for a change. As GOOG starts to get more revenue out of Play, they're slowly going to start seeing the piracy as a net loser. When that happens, I'm hoping that GOOG will finally start seeing the light and building real partnerships with the hard working artists who create the content that fuels their revenues. But I may be overly optimistic. That revenue at Play may never come along.
Re: Re: They destroyed $10-20 billion and gave back $1b
You were screwed in the process of buying 500 vinyls? How? Did you know the price before you purchased it? I bet you probably even heard the music before buying. How were you screwed?
If you didn't like the music, you could have recorded your own. Or simply purchased things from the cutout bin. But you didn't, did you. You weren't screwed.
Perhaps you like to believe that you were screwed because the record companies only gave, say, 15% to the artists. People love to latch onto that small number while forgetting just how much work it is to publish anything. It took the hard work of thousands of people in the recording companies to bring to you that vinyl you purchased. They need to be paid too.
So you could have bought a cassette tape from some folk singer at a concert but you chose to spend your money willingly for a record album from a major company. You got what you expected: expensively produced music that was artfully packaged and distributed. I don't know why you think you were screwed.
It's amazing how the pirate sleezeballs gin up this woe-is-me attitude among the music lovers in order to convince them that it's better to give their money to the pirates.
How much did you give Kim Dotcom? Or one of the other fake services on the web?
Re: Re: They destroyed $10-20 billion and gave back $1b
See the table above. And of course there's no source that proves the causation without a reasonable doubt. If there were, GOOG would be in jail.
But all it takes is five seconds on YouTube to convince anyone with a brain that it's evolved into one huge jukebox that destroys the need for people to purchase music. Only a fool can't see the effect.
But I'm guessing you're one of the loons who's not going to feel guilty and cling to any rationalization that maybe, just maybe, the band really authorized that upload. Yeah.
Re: Re: They destroyed $10-20 billion and gave back $1b
Sorry bub, but it's not a wild conjecture. Your rejection is the wild conjecture. It's straight from the IFPI.
Year Revenue Change Notes
2005 $20.7 billion -3%
2006 $19.6 billion -5%
2007 $18.8 billion -4%
2008 $18.4 billion -8%
2009 $17.4 billion -5%
2010 $16.8 billion -8.4%
2011 $16.2 billion -3%
2012 $16.5 billion +0.3%
And you can choose whether you like the word "stolen" or "destroyed" better. If people are taking something for free and not paying for it, both fit. But I'm sure you've got some wackjob rationalization about how you're really giving people publicity or something like that.
There are tens of thousands of artists who used to make a living in the recording industry and now they can't. But GOOG is getting a big, fat cut of the revenues that used to go to the artists.
They destroyed $10-20 billion and gave back $1b
Yah gotta love the loons around this joint. The recording industry alone used to gather well above $20b a year in sales in the early part of the 2000s. Now it's down around $15b a year. Even if GOOG is only responsible for 20% a year of that collapse, they're still destroying on more revenue in ONE year than GOOG has generated in ALL of those years.
And let's talk about fairness. GOOG is pocketing a pretty penny by keeping a share of that ad revenue. What a way to cut yourself into the business. The recording company didn't ask to be partners with GOOG. GOOG just muscled its way in with their army of pirate ants. So the recording companies can either fight a long battle with the pirates in court go along and let GOOG profit off their hard work.
If I poke around YouTube I see a gazillion videos uploaded by "fans". It's easy to find almost every song you want up there. But only a small fraction are enrolled in this ContentID. GOOG is still getting rich off of piracy. They're still not paying the pirate ants at all (suckers!) and kicking back very little to the artists.
So that's why no one is celebrating. It's like a thief came along and took a $20 bill from your wallet and replaced it with a $1. Then the thief kept saying, "Why do you keep talking about how I took the $20. Can't you just focus on the $1 I gave you? Come on. Don't be so negative."
Re: Re: But GOOG is still a pirate haven dedicated to taking from content producers
That is happening slowly but surely. Some newspapers are going out of business. All of the good ones are putting up paywalls. I never look to news.google.com any more. Alas, others do and that's the problem.
But Google refuses to negotiate. They think they have a right to take everyone's content and give back a click or three. That's just not sustainable. Murdoch's pain should be a warning to Google that Google is about to become irrelevant.
But GOOG is still a pirate haven dedicated to taking from content producers
Just how does Google pay for all of the hard work done by the content creators? You make it seem like tossing them a click-through is a wonderful gift. Wrongo. In an advertising-dominated world, Google takes all of the gravy and tosses a few drops to the people below them.
If the newspapers commanded higher ad rates, it all might work but they don't. So Google gets 90% of the ad revenue and 10% slips through the cracks to the people who do the work. The robots at Google rake in the billions for the few who work there and the people who create the content that drives Google get pennies.
Quit shilling for billionaires. Start caring about the people who create the content that forms the backbone of the web.
Well, yes. GOOG has changed its opinion
As GOOG becomes more and more of a content company, as YouTube becomes more and more of a TV network, as GOOG sees fast response as a foundation for a search engine, GOOG is going to change its mind. And that means the EFF will follow. GOOG was a big believer in net neutrality at the beginning because it was the basis of their profits. Now they're morphing as they realize that maybe, just maybe, net neutrality hurts them.
And the morons also want jobs working as writers, actors or artists
Sorry leeching losers, but you can't have both. If you want the content for free, that will DESTROY the chance you'll ever have of working as a writer, artist, musician, set designer, cinematographer or any of a hundred other attractive careers. It's back to being a maid or cleaning out the hog pens.
You can't have it both ways. If you want society to support great jobs that reward creativity, you've got to support property rights for those artists.
But you would rather work cleaning the gutters, I guess.
Re: Re: Everyone around here uses the duck analogy for everything
Well, you go to work on that plan to use the airwaves for non-commercial fare. How are your PBS stations doing these days? And gosh, they're SOOO non-commercial with their licensed Seasame Street and Downtown Abbey swag for sale everywhere.
Face it. Commerce is just another form of how people interact. And the places that claim they're "non-commercial" are just faking it because they take home salaries, often big ones.
Re: Re: Everyone around here uses the duck analogy for everything
Gosh, you don't understand "ad hominem" do you? If I call you a "moron" or a "trisomic idiot", that's ad hominem. If I just compare it to all of the other lame rationalizations around here, that's just an analogy.
Everyone around here uses the duck analogy for everything
Everyone around here is always saying bizarro things like, "That's just like a library" or "that's just like reading a newspaper over someone's shoulder." So why can't the Supreme Court use the same structure to toss Aereo into the trash can where it belongs.
It was never a serious startup, just a weird legal hack to get some leverage in retransmission negotiations. It was never a viable or useful technology. Why create a bazillion antenna just to get around some impediment.
So let's celebrate that the Supreme Court called a duck a duck. It was just a cheap, stupid trick that didn't add to the world at all.
Re: Re: Re: Re: More apologies and misdirection to protect GOOG
Oh please. Mike and everyone at this site misuses CENSORSHIP all of the time. Why can't everyone else? If someone loser can't torrent something for free, everyone around here immediately cries, "CENSORSHIP". Sure, said loser could just go to Amazon and pay money for the same content, but no one around here cares. If you can't get it for free, someone is being CENSORED.
And that's what GOOG's doing. But I'm beginning to love this. As GOOG turns into a content company, it's going to start to love copyright again. And then MIke will need to change his tune. Suddenly copyright trolling will become beautiful again, once the unevil people at GOOG start doing it.