fishbane 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Peeling The Layers Off 'Piracy'

    fishbane ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2010 @ 07:47pm

    I think you might be correct

    I think we really, fatally, for the purposes of discussion, do not understand one another.

    In my world, when I don't pay Metallica, I don't pay Metallica. There is not a transaction, I don't have their particular flavor of noisy music, they don't have money. I think we can agree on at least this point, right?

    This is true, regardless of whether or not I partake of Demonoid, which as far as I can tell, at least many music industry insiders use of, nobody sends money to Metallica. If I were to go to Demonoid.com and download whatever noisy crap they produced this week, they would still make no money.

    Falling back on arguing about my hypothetical bike falls in to the same category of assuming that I'm somehow depriving someone else of their music enjoyment if I happen to enjoy music without tithing RIAA.

    Which is actually pretty funny - there was someone here talking about how if someone was deprived, that made lending fair. I wonder who might have said that.

  • On the post: Peeling The Layers Off 'Piracy'

    fishbane ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2010 @ 06:04pm

    OK

    I accept that you're honest. I don't believe you're correct, but you're honest.

    Can you cite anyone without a financial intrest in the outcome that supports the RealDVD outcome?

    I'm hardly being crazy by noting that copying music is the norm now. It is. That's simply reality. Again: if you have kids, ask them about thier thumb drives. If you don't, ask your neigbhors's kids.

    I have, in fact, done so.The kids these days. But that's exactly what they do. This is, in fact, a baseline change in what people consider moral behavoir. It doesn't matter that you don't like it: the next generation considers music a public good, "bits are bits".

    Those who wish to make money on music certainly have some thinking to do. But attempting to rest antiquated copyright notions on public perception when you can find "pirates" faster than you can count in public schools, well, that's the sort of stupid argument that I would expect a lawyer to make, but only for money.

    Talking about how the use of software "should" be used is about as useful as talking about videos of sex "should" be used. You're fighting economic pressure. There's a opportuniy for making money on doing so, but it doesn't last long, and getting a rep for attempting to hold back the tide against noting reality isn't a strong selling point, at least to me. Maybe some outfit like Focus on the Family needs a shill.

  • On the post: Peeling The Layers Off 'Piracy'

    fishbane ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2010 @ 01:33pm

    I think you are right.

    You are precisey right. You can pen story, and other can consume. I shouldn't have to pay for your musical stuff, or story, or what have you.

    In fact, I have not "consumed" any of the the Harry Potter stories. I have seen none of them. Please explain why I should pay money for your to produce wizard porn. Kthxby.

    I realize that response is a bit insulting, but, really, don't charge me for things I'm not consuming. And respond to the fact that I am not consuming it , rather than the fact that I'm telling you you're insulting me.

  • On the post: Peeling The Layers Off 'Piracy'

    fishbane ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2010 @ 08:50am

    Let me get this straight:

    You basically agree with her, but you dislike the fact that she is arguing that there is a sliding-scale of gray with regards to the morality copyright infringement?

    And this makes you hopping mad?

    Would you like to argue in the alternative that a 14 year old who is aware of the Pirate Bay is exactly as morally culpable as those shops in LA who retail $4 CDs on the street? (Note: it might be more now, I haven't had to be in LA in several years, thank goodness.)

  • On the post: Peeling The Layers Off 'Piracy'

    fishbane ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2010 @ 08:40am

    Additionally

    However, I'm not going to f*ck the artists by breaking laws and taking their music for free while we all figure it out. I have very little respect for those who do.

    This is worth unpacking.

    I, too, do not violate the copyright of artists who don't want me to. However, it is emphatically _not_ the case that I am "fucking the artists" if I were to do so.

    In order to see this, it helps to note that I am also not purchasing the music of the vast majority of those artists. From their income standpoint, it is completely revenue-neutral for me to either ignore them and for me to bit torrent their music. They make the same amount of money from me: zero. People can, and do, differ on the publicity value of voluntary distribution, but anyone with a modicum of interaction with reality has to see that Metallica derives no more money from me by my ignoring them than they would if I downloaded whatever their latest noise was.

    The argument, in fact, seems to be that if there were marginally more difficult to download that latest-noise, marginally more people would buy shiney disks. The problem with this assertion is that it is emperically testable, and has been repeatedly demonstrated to be false. And one of the things Mike is noting is that muscicians, who like playing music and enjoy celebrity, are finding alternate routes to getting it. It is still an extremely risky profession, to be sure, but whoring to an A&R guy appears to be no longer a required step in the process, which seems to be a huge part of why all this noise is generated: the AR types don't like that. But, you know: people still make money raising horses, even if it isn't quite as central to the economy any more. If you actually like doing A&R, you still have a role. You might just make less money doing it, and there will be fewer laquered poytails at small venues as a result.

  • On the post: Peeling The Layers Off 'Piracy'

    fishbane ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2010 @ 08:26am

    Can't tell if you're trying to be being funny or not,

    ...But it isn't working.

    Stealing is illegal because it is economically inefficient, and doing so, if caught, has led to seriously liberty infringing repercussions since long before a bunch of proto-hippies codified a bunch of prior art into the book in question. Also notable is that non-christians also have codified law about theft, and that thiefs themselves dislike being stolen from - it is hardly as if devotion to Jesus is a prerequisite for disliking theft.

    Copyright infringment is illegal because a pile of lawyers made it so, and the best way to trace it backwards is to look at the Statute of Anne, which essentially turned a wanna-be cartel into an actual cartel by monarchic decree.

    See, this stuff is easy to talk about, if you talk about facts. Feel free to dispute my particular spin, so long as you adhere to facts.

  • On the post: Peeling The Layers Off 'Piracy'

    fishbane ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2010 @ 08:12am

    "Industry"

    I've also challenged the strength of the new models and examples you've put up so far because I haven't yet seen anything that is capable of supporting an industry effectively enough. See, there's your problem. It simply isn't the case that, because an industry existed in the past, it has to exist for all time. The industry is not the same thing as music. In fact, selling plastic disks to Walmart to sell to suburban kids is a historical oddity in the history of music, not the norm. Music is about musicians playing music for listeners who want to hear it, not lawyers lobbying Orin Hatch for a new handout. Really, the difference is pretty stark, if you look at it.

  • On the post: Peeling The Layers Off 'Piracy'

    fishbane ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2010 @ 07:47am

    Re: Copying and lending are different.

    The Nook includes a lending feature that allows owners of copyrighted eBooks to lend their books to friends, but the owner can't access the content while it is lent out. THAT is just like the real world. Um, this is so completely wrong that I'm laughing. In the real world, Bit Torrent exists. Things like Nook and Apple's FairPlay goofiness are attempts to walk back Big Copyright's attempt at maximalism to an intermediate point. In the real world, technology has changed the equasion. Denying reality might be a reasonable short-term strategy for making some money, if you're a lawyer harassing people for instance, but it doesn't change reality. Ask your kids, if you have them, what is on their thumb drives. I promise you it is "pirated" music. This is reality.

  • On the post: Too Little Too Late: Universal Music Finally Realizes That Maybe CDs Were Too Expensive

    fishbane ( profile ), 19 Mar, 2010 @ 09:44pm

    Can you illustrate that as a testable proposition?

    For instance, can you predict a price-point at which CDs would become preferable to consumers again?

    Just to stake out my own position, I think that if RIAA distributed CDs at about the price of production, I think people would happily accept them.

    Of course, that would require RIAA to actually promote artist's interests, and rethink how they do business.

  • On the post: Dan Bull Recaps How Home Taping Killed Music With His Latest Song

    fishbane ( profile ), 16 Mar, 2010 @ 12:18pm

    So...

    You apparently believe that music was invented after the RIAA was formed? Or maybe after the Statute of Anne?

  • On the post: Just As Netflix Gets In Trouble For Data Release, MySpace Begins Selling Data

    fishbane ( profile ), 16 Mar, 2010 @ 09:38am

    Down the drain

    If they own any patents, look for a lawsuit soon. They've lost in the market, and are losing their talent, and are now burning any residual goodwill they had for cash.

  • On the post: Microsoft Exec Calls For 'Driver's License For The Internet'

    fishbane ( profile ), 05 Feb, 2010 @ 01:49pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    Assuming one could actually stop this at "a little bit of education", which it wouldn't, why tie this to some sort of newly conceived ID? Because without that, you'd have no way of requiring it. As in, you need a mandated credential for the right to buy broadband, or use Wifi at a coffee shop or whatever, otherwise you can't exclude people who don't have it.

    Now, two things happen: that credential becomes valuable to people who want to do bad things, and you've turned an "Educational program" that either has to be so watered down it is useless or sufficiently intrusive that lots of people won't pass it and turned it into a black market. Honestly, you should care about that, even if you won't - using government programs to make new black markets is a bad, bad idea.

    The second thing you've done is created a hook to hang lots of other ideas on. Sexting kids? Take their license away! Have a problem with libel, shady stock advice, or people pissing on religions? Now there's a hook to hang a law to require message boards to collect "license numbers". It doesn't solve the problem (see the new black market, above), but it is a nightmare for speech. Don't say it won't happen - driver's licenses started out as a registration tax, and now indicate organ donation status and are a way to encourage people to register to vote. Why organ donation voting? Because licenses are easy choke points on which to hang lots of other things, similar or not.

    Again, you're really not thinking this through.

  • On the post: Microsoft Exec Calls For 'Driver's License For The Internet'

    fishbane ( profile ), 05 Feb, 2010 @ 09:47am

    Re:

    I think you need to read the part of Mike's post over again where he said "These are the kind of ideas people have when they haven't bothered to think through the consequences of what they're saying."

    If you think people buying and selling credit card numbers online is a problem, imagine the market you'll be creating out of whole cloth for forged or stolen "internet driver's licenses"! Don't tell me this won't be a problem - we can't stop forged real driver's licenses _now_, and the first things that sort of looked like what we now call driver's licenses came into being over 100 years ago.

    And that's only one implication.

  • On the post: Book Publishing Industry Just Now Realizing That Change Is Turbulent?

    fishbane ( profile ), 04 Feb, 2010 @ 09:06pm

    Re: Not about Kindles, it's about control

    I don't believe that Amazon is selling ebooks as a loss-leader for Kindles.

    If it isn't true, then there's some serious misinformaiton afoot, and Amazon hasn't denied it.

    There's a really great article comparing this story to music over here.

    I think TNH probably is right, and I also think Mike is right about the economics. And I don't see how authors work out self-promotion as well as musicians a la Amanda Palmer - some surely will, but rather a lot of them are simply constitutionally much different sorts of artists.

  • On the post: European Rights Holders Drastically Increase Borderline Extortion Pre-Settlement Letters

    fishbane ( profile ), 12 Jan, 2010 @ 06:55am

    Re:

    How long do you think it would take for a mere mortal to be turned into a smoking crater if they sent a "pre-settlement letter" to the execs of DigiProtect for harassment and emotional suffering (or whatever the German equivalents may be), and then sold off the "rights" to collections agencies?

  • On the post: Why Does Microsoft Limit Netbooks?

    fishbane ( profile ), 06 Jan, 2010 @ 07:24am

    but Microsoft machines have since taken over the market.

    Doesn't this answer the question? Public companies overvalue the next quarter's results at the expense of two years from now. By keeping artificial pressure on the capabilities of cheap machines, they can continue to partially hide the absurd Microsoft tax on machines that don't suck.

    QED.

  • On the post: Lessons Learned From DARPA Balloon Challenge

    fishbane ( profile ), 09 Dec, 2009 @ 10:36pm

    Shouldn't the lesson be,

    Pyramid schemes are actually good for something afterall?

  • On the post: Yes, We Can Write Our Opinions Without Contacting The Company We're Writing About First

    fishbane ( profile ), 03 Dec, 2009 @ 02:22pm

    Re: Re: What publicists don't know

    I'm glad you're good with your opinion. However, you're also wrong.

    I don't know what Mike claims as far as being a journalist (I can guess, but I'll refrain from doing so here), but I'll say that I'm a journalist. I've only been professionally published a couple of times, and don't earn my main income as a talking head, but trying to distinguish, somehow, between who is and who isn't is attempting to shut people up, especially when tied to talk about "rights and privileges".

    If you want people to shut up, say so. A free country, and all that. And I'll retain my right to call you a promoter of tyranny.

  • On the post: But Wait, Wasn't Muni-Fiber Supposed To Take Away Incentive For Private Fiber?

    fishbane ( profile ), 03 Nov, 2009 @ 07:38am

    Re: Re: It's perfectly fair, they just don't want to

    We actually have an empiric test of the theory here. If this were so completely unfair, then one would expect TDS to make an economically correct assessment and choose not to compete in that market. (Isn't that what we usually hear - that government will crowd out private investment?)

    It turns out that this did not happen.

    I think it is useful to remember that, especially at a local level, "teh government" is made of people. Telcos, more so than many other industries, are rather good at recognizing that and creating rules under which they thrive. Bitching about it and then essentially shooting their own argument in the head is absolutely their right, but I can't summon up much sympathy.

  • On the post: Do Libraries Need Permission To Lend Out Ebooks?

    fishbane ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2009 @ 10:46am

    Re: Selling multiple copies to the libraries

    But that is silly. It is an attempt to replicate the limitations of physical books for no reason other than "that's the way things used to work". It isn't that different from the laws we all laugh about now that required cars to move no faster than horses.

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