This isn't even getting into the idiocy of comparing physical tangible goods to an access fee. While the basic Netflix account does not provide access to everything in the highest possible resolution, it does allow me to watch as many movies as I wish. The access fee is a fee for my having access to the basic Netflix library.
A better comparison is perhaps paying for a day's access to a park or a zoo. I have paid to be able to gain access to the place. I am not then told that I can only take 1,000 steps before I have to crawl on hands and knees or be physically removed from the park.
Claure's version of shit talking also needs some work. The featured T-Mobile tweets here come off as textbook trolling shit talking. Marcelo's tweet just comes off as an angry guy that didn't realize there was a 140 character limit.
And I think you'll agree if that if a court finds (1) Google "intentionally intercepted" data that was (2) not "readily accessible to the general public," they were in violation.
So... to rephrase..
And I think you'll agree if a court finds them guilty, they were guilty
And for the record, accepting your apology for confusing beacon packets and SSIDs, doesn't make me "see that [you] actually do have a very good understanding of the technology and what happened."
The whole problem with this situation is that people are flipping out even though:
1. The information collected is virtually useless, given the manner in which it was collected.
2. The information was pulled from open networks. Whether there were some networks that weren't broadcasting their SSID seems irrelevant to me. If you know how to setup your network to not broadcast the SSID and still run fine, then you know how to turn on WEP or WPA encryption. If it's open, it's open. End of story.
Separately, am I the only one that has a weird feeling about constantly comparing Google in this instance to Skyhook, and the linking to what are basically promotional materials? For someone claiming that people are simply following along with Google's PR, you kind of come off sounding like Skyhook PR. "Google doesn't care about your privacy, but we do!"
I personally have found out for myself that with the advent of RSS I'm not tied any more to any particular news source.
I definitely have to agree with this statement. I hardly even read the news anymore except for on my RSS reader on my phone. It's gotten to the point that, even if you have regular news on events or subjects that I care about, if your full articles aren't displayed with your RSS feed, I generally won't bother reading your site much.
So what is the best business model? In my opinion there ought be some form of consortium -- say 50 to a 100 sites -- that all join in, and that you can subscribe to for a nominal fee and have access to everything. A single-sign-on type of thing. That way the papers are going to get their money and the audience is going to get on-line news without suffering a loss of quality.
I think there would be too many problems with setting up a system like this.
1) I'm honestly not sure you could ever get enough newspapers, or news sites in general, to sign on to a deal like this. I think if I were the head of some news site, I would see this sort of system as signing my own death warrant. Not only would I still not be able to compete with free sites, but in a fairly short period of time, my site would be viewed as being somehow tied to any other site within that network, regardless of the content or quality of my site.
2) Getting people to sign up. You use the numbers 50-100 sites. I say that, given that each of those sites were among the 100-200 most frequently viewed news sites presently, then you may be able to convince people to sign up. But at this point, many people have become used to the idea of getting news how, when, and where they choose. Or to be more precise, getting the news how, when, and where it chooses them. Because as has been pointed out before, people don't go out and find the news anymore, the news finds them.
Now, if the same system could allow the users to maybe specify certain "tags" they are particularly interested in, and the system could automatically generate a custom RSS address for that user, that would update with all of the news articles with those particular tags... Well, that changes what the user is paying for. They would no longer be paying for the news, but paying for a customizeable, convenient news aggregating service. Then maybe add onto that some free multi-platform smartphone Apps (thinking Android, iPhone, WebOS, RIM), that can also act as an entry point to view those same articles, change your tag settings, and have access to reading and posting comments.. Toss in integration with Twitter and Facebook as some of the icing, and you may have a winner on that front.
3) Money. How much do you charge for a service like this? How do you convince people it's worth the money in the first place? And once that first member signs up, how do you split up their subscription? Would it be view-based or would it be a straight up percentage to all participants? I don't want to keep asking questions that I don't know the answer to, but if I were the head of a news site, these are the answers and assurances I would need. Because, as has been discussed here before, once a news site puts up a paywall and loses that reader-base, it's very hard to get it back.
I had some other points I wanted to discuss, like whether there would be licensing fees charged by each news site, with yearly contracts that could potentially have those fees go up every year (we know that's not out of the question) that could potentially doom a project like this to failure.
But now my mind is racing about how awesome a system like I described in #2 could be. They could even set it up so that the users could, to a degree, crowdsource the tags on each news article, where if a percentage of the readers all suggested a particular tag, it would automatically be added right in with the tags defined by the author. You would also need to have a way to specifically ignore certain sources, preferably with your own personal input going directly to any source you ignore, to let them know what they're doing wrong..
I suppose after putting this in place and seeing the resulting increase in simple links to the same relevant videos, they will start demanding money for those links as well.
In the market of mobile phones, I have to say that the "Open" to be surpassing Apple's "Closed" is most likely to be the Android mobile OS. While it is obvious that adoption of Android phones has been slow in the US, it is picking up momentum all around the world, with something like 15+ Android phones being released by the end of the year. And some of these phones show a nice improvement in the form of hardware.
Already, I would count my T-Mobile G1 as the iPhone's equal, but when customers on other networks are introduced to a wider variety of Android phones, an interesting and game-changing thing will likely occur - and this is mostly what Mike is talking about here.
Developers will change sides.
When it comes down to it, ignoring the quality of the apps themselves, the app store is nothing without developers. Right now, those iPhone developers are getting more and more of a bad taste from the general closed system that is the iPhone app store, but they stay there because that is where the customers are.
That will change.
Once there are more mobile users on more networks using phones - and netbooks, let's not forget those - running the Android OS, many of those developers will choose to spend their time working on apps that will actually make it to their respective market.
At this point, I believe that even if Apple makes their development more open, it's still only a matter of time.
I still find it interesting that you guys cannot see the difference between selling a CD (a scarcity) and distributing music online. After a great enough distribution online, the cost per item of distribution hits near-to-zero, making it into an infinite good.
It wouldn't make any sense for them to give away their CDs for free, because it costs them considerably more to produce each individual CD than it does to distribute the same information online.
Of course, live performances are also not an infinite good, as you seem to think, because the band's time is equivalent to money. That's why you don't see them performing all of their live shows for free - that would simply be idiotic. In the example you've provided, they were selling one scarce good (the CD), and offering another scarce good (the simple one-song live performance) to give the customer a reason to buy.
Even a small live performance to go along with your CD purchase would certainly make them more willing to buy, and in that sense, you have done nothing but prove that going along with Mike's suggestions (giving a reason to buy, connecting with fans) work and work well.
that is certainly some interesting information, but im not sure of its relevance. these arent ads selling hitmen, and its no victim that is threatening legal action. this is a supposed moral debate.
having read the links to the craigslist blog, its good to see them standing up and deciding they have had enough of the targeted aggression from mchenry and other AGs.
Oh, and on the "news is free" kick. News, once gathered, edited, etc. might be very cheap to re-distribute electronically, it's not free to produce in the first place. Somehow, somebody has to get out of bed and gather and edit it. Maybe somehow magically a corps of volunteers will do it for free, but somehow I doubt it. Shills for special interests will easily outgun anybody who has to find some other way to pay the rent. Whoever pays the fiddler calls the tune, and I'd at least like a shot at calling the tune.
It seems to me like you are now getting back to the same argument provided by the music industry. Nobody is saying that nobody can or should make money off of the news. What we are saying, and the people at TechDirt have been saying, is that the newspapers are confusing where the true value is. The content iself does hold some value, yes, but that content can be obtained many places on the internet for free - this is how things are and will likely continue to be, so it only makes sense to make plans with that in mind.
What adds value that cannot be copied recreated elsewhere is your community. The people commenting on, sharing, and ultimately giving direction for your articles. In part, this has always been the real value of news sites, it is only growing every day. In the past, the goal has been to monetize that community through selling ad space. News sites can continue to do this, but if they say that it is not enough, then they need to find another way to monetize what is truly of value - their community.
If you put up your content behind a paywall, then your community growth halts, stabilizes, and stagnates. An audience that is not growing is of no real interest to advertisers. If you leave your content open and viewable to all, and work on finding ways to further connect with that community, then you will see that audience grow, diversify, and ultimately add very valuable commentary to your articles.
An active, participating community is more valuable than your own writers' opinions on the events that are occurring around the world. As a friendly reminder: you don't MAKE the news, you just write about it.
It will not completely take that away, but it will remove its usefulness. If you send a link to 10 of your friends to an article that they have to pay just to read, how many would? Then consider how easily those same 10 friends could find the same information on a different, free site. Now how many would pay for it?
You will, in the end, feel as though the value of what you paid for is diminished as your ten friends tell you about how they just went to another site and read it for free.
Then, in essence, by alerting your friends to the event or information that you had just read, you will have helped other sites in bringing in more traffic to help with ad revenue, while the site you originally visited has earned only one sale off of it.
That's assuming that you would even send your friends a link to a news site using micropayments. Personally, I would never send such a link to my friends, as I wouldn't want them to pay for something that I know they can get for free elsewhere.
My reasoning here could be wrong, this is simply how I look at it.
Andrew, I'm afraid that I must have missed your point. You say that the commenting and interaction doesnt add value to you, but you find your value in other peoples' comments. That is still a part of the interaction, even if it is not yours. Content behind a paywall will not receive as many comments as that which is open and free, because the number of paying readers will not equal the current number of non-paying readers. So the value will ultimately be diminished.
You then state that you make comments in order to guide the authors toward content that you are interested in - possibly one of the finest uses of comments since, when looked at as a whole, they will ultimately work to keep the author on point and relevant in their future posts. If you have to pay per individual article, only to then need to make comments to get the authors to even write about anything you are interested in... I know it wouldnt take me too many purchases to get tired of that cycle.
That is even assuming that the people setting up paywalls are also people that understand the value of comments and interaction, and keep that part of the system. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if after setting up a micropayment system, the comment systems were completely removed. But that is purely speculation on my part.
What does the term "privacy pirates" even mean? Do they mean that in the copyright sense? Not sure you can pirate another person's privacy.. Or maybe they mean it in the sense that the critics are attacking their ships at sea. Privately.
Has the term "pirate" simply come to be that readily used as an attack on a person's legitimacy, such that the actual meaning of the word holds no signifigance? Sad.
I was honestly surprised to see peoples' comments on here kind of pointing to the fact that not everyone realized that these were NIN's own recordings they were releasing. Interesting.
NIN has always been all about revolutionizing the idea of a concert, and have continuously outdone themselves with each tour. A major part of this has always been some kind of video release to show performances from their shows. Since their DVD release of And All That Could Have Been, their tour footage has been top-notch. I believe their HD-DVD release of Beside You In Time won several awards for best HD-DVD.
He definitely takes things beyond just simple marketing. He goes out of his way to do things for his fans that simply aren't done in the music industry, and this is just another prime example of that.
I have never understood the concept of shunning any band just because they managed to make it big. I mean, isn't that more or less the goal? Nobody gets into any business so they can stay broke all of the time. With NIN, at least you know you're fully getting your money's worth. He has taken the money he has made over the past two decades and continuously spends it in ways to further interact the fans, to make his live performances better, and to ultimately immerse you in his art.
So in a way, you're right. NIN has stopped being a band. They're so much more than that now.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Joshua Jones.
Tangible Goods Versus Access Fee
This isn't even getting into the idiocy of comparing physical tangible goods to an access fee. While the basic Netflix account does not provide access to everything in the highest possible resolution, it does allow me to watch as many movies as I wish. The access fee is a fee for my having access to the basic Netflix library.
A better comparison is perhaps paying for a day's access to a park or a zoo. I have paid to be able to gain access to the place. I am not then told that I can only take 1,000 steps before I have to crawl on hands and knees or be physically removed from the park.
Claure's Shit Talking
Claure's version of shit talking also needs some work. The featured T-Mobile tweets here come off as textbook trolling shit talking. Marcelo's tweet just comes off as an angry guy that didn't realize there was a 140 character limit.
guys guys guys hold on
It was just a typo. When they say piracy, they mean "crime of all sorts."
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Intent of what exactly?
So... to rephrase..
And for the record, accepting your apology for confusing beacon packets and SSIDs, doesn't make me "see that [you] actually do have a very good understanding of the technology and what happened."
The whole problem with this situation is that people are flipping out even though:
Separately, am I the only one that has a weird feeling about constantly comparing Google in this instance to Skyhook, and the linking to what are basically promotional materials? For someone claiming that people are simply following along with Google's PR, you kind of come off sounding like Skyhook PR. "Google doesn't care about your privacy, but we do!"
Re: Re: Big Difference by vicson5
I personally have found out for myself that with the advent of RSS I'm not tied any more to any particular news source.
I definitely have to agree with this statement. I hardly even read the news anymore except for on my RSS reader on my phone. It's gotten to the point that, even if you have regular news on events or subjects that I care about, if your full articles aren't displayed with your RSS feed, I generally won't bother reading your site much.
So what is the best business model? In my opinion there ought be some form of consortium -- say 50 to a 100 sites -- that all join in, and that you can subscribe to for a nominal fee and have access to everything. A single-sign-on type of thing. That way the papers are going to get their money and the audience is going to get on-line news without suffering a loss of quality.
I think there would be too many problems with setting up a system like this.
I had some other points I wanted to discuss, like whether there would be licensing fees charged by each news site, with yearly contracts that could potentially have those fees go up every year (we know that's not out of the question) that could potentially doom a project like this to failure.
But now my mind is racing about how awesome a system like I described in #2 could be. They could even set it up so that the users could, to a degree, crowdsource the tags on each news article, where if a percentage of the readers all suggested a particular tag, it would automatically be added right in with the tags defined by the author. You would also need to have a way to specifically ignore certain sources, preferably with your own personal input going directly to any source you ignore, to let them know what they're doing wrong..
Okay, I'm done for now.
What's next?
I suppose after putting this in place and seeing the resulting increase in simple links to the same relevant videos, they will start demanding money for those links as well.
Android FTW
In the market of mobile phones, I have to say that the "Open" to be surpassing Apple's "Closed" is most likely to be the Android mobile OS. While it is obvious that adoption of Android phones has been slow in the US, it is picking up momentum all around the world, with something like 15+ Android phones being released by the end of the year. And some of these phones show a nice improvement in the form of hardware.
Already, I would count my T-Mobile G1 as the iPhone's equal, but when customers on other networks are introduced to a wider variety of Android phones, an interesting and game-changing thing will likely occur - and this is mostly what Mike is talking about here.
Developers will change sides.
When it comes down to it, ignoring the quality of the apps themselves, the app store is nothing without developers. Right now, those iPhone developers are getting more and more of a bad taste from the general closed system that is the iPhone app store, but they stay there because that is where the customers are.
That will change.
Once there are more mobile users on more networks using phones - and netbooks, let's not forget those - running the Android OS, many of those developers will choose to spend their time working on apps that will actually make it to their respective market.
At this point, I believe that even if Apple makes their development more open, it's still only a matter of time.
Re: Ooops, Mikey stubbed his toe again.
I still find it interesting that you guys cannot see the difference between selling a CD (a scarcity) and distributing music online. After a great enough distribution online, the cost per item of distribution hits near-to-zero, making it into an infinite good.
It wouldn't make any sense for them to give away their CDs for free, because it costs them considerably more to produce each individual CD than it does to distribute the same information online.
Of course, live performances are also not an infinite good, as you seem to think, because the band's time is equivalent to money. That's why you don't see them performing all of their live shows for free - that would simply be idiotic. In the example you've provided, they were selling one scarce good (the CD), and offering another scarce good (the simple one-song live performance) to give the customer a reason to buy.
Even a small live performance to go along with your CD purchase would certainly make them more willing to buy, and in that sense, you have done nothing but prove that going along with Mike's suggestions (giving a reason to buy, connecting with fans) work and work well.
Guess Mike's not as clumsy as you thought.
Re: All goes back to guns for hire...
that is certainly some interesting information, but im not sure of its relevance. these arent ads selling hitmen, and its no victim that is threatening legal action. this is a supposed moral debate.
having read the links to the craigslist blog, its good to see them standing up and deciding they have had enough of the targeted aggression from mchenry and other AGs.
Re:
finally, an ISP i can respect.
Re: Re: Re: Need a mechanism
Oh, and on the "news is free" kick. News, once gathered, edited, etc. might be very cheap to re-distribute electronically, it's not free to produce in the first place. Somehow, somebody has to get out of bed and gather and edit it. Maybe somehow magically a corps of volunteers will do it for free, but somehow I doubt it. Shills for special interests will easily outgun anybody who has to find some other way to pay the rent. Whoever pays the fiddler calls the tune, and I'd at least like a shot at calling the tune. It seems to me like you are now getting back to the same argument provided by the music industry. Nobody is saying that nobody can or should make money off of the news. What we are saying, and the people at TechDirt have been saying, is that the newspapers are confusing where the true value is. The content iself does hold some value, yes, but that content can be obtained many places on the internet for free - this is how things are and will likely continue to be, so it only makes sense to make plans with that in mind. What adds value that cannot be copied recreated elsewhere is your community. The people commenting on, sharing, and ultimately giving direction for your articles. In part, this has always been the real value of news sites, it is only growing every day. In the past, the goal has been to monetize that community through selling ad space. News sites can continue to do this, but if they say that it is not enough, then they need to find another way to monetize what is truly of value - their community. If you put up your content behind a paywall, then your community growth halts, stabilizes, and stagnates. An audience that is not growing is of no real interest to advertisers. If you leave your content open and viewable to all, and work on finding ways to further connect with that community, then you will see that audience grow, diversify, and ultimately add very valuable commentary to your articles. An active, participating community is more valuable than your own writers' opinions on the events that are occurring around the world. As a friendly reminder: you don't MAKE the news, you just write about it.
Re: Anonymous Coward
It will not completely take that away, but it will remove its usefulness. If you send a link to 10 of your friends to an article that they have to pay just to read, how many would? Then consider how easily those same 10 friends could find the same information on a different, free site. Now how many would pay for it?
You will, in the end, feel as though the value of what you paid for is diminished as your ten friends tell you about how they just went to another site and read it for free.
Then, in essence, by alerting your friends to the event or information that you had just read, you will have helped other sites in bringing in more traffic to help with ad revenue, while the site you originally visited has earned only one sale off of it.
That's assuming that you would even send your friends a link to a news site using micropayments. Personally, I would never send such a link to my friends, as I wouldn't want them to pay for something that I know they can get for free elsewhere.
My reasoning here could be wrong, this is simply how I look at it.
Re: What a great idea
Andrew, I'm afraid that I must have missed your point. You say that the commenting and interaction doesnt add value to you, but you find your value in other peoples' comments. That is still a part of the interaction, even if it is not yours. Content behind a paywall will not receive as many comments as that which is open and free, because the number of paying readers will not equal the current number of non-paying readers. So the value will ultimately be diminished.
You then state that you make comments in order to guide the authors toward content that you are interested in - possibly one of the finest uses of comments since, when looked at as a whole, they will ultimately work to keep the author on point and relevant in their future posts. If you have to pay per individual article, only to then need to make comments to get the authors to even write about anything you are interested in... I know it wouldnt take me too many purchases to get tired of that cycle.
That is even assuming that the people setting up paywalls are also people that understand the value of comments and interaction, and keep that part of the system. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if after setting up a micropayment system, the comment systems were completely removed. But that is purely speculation on my part.
privacy pirates
What does the term "privacy pirates" even mean? Do they mean that in the copyright sense? Not sure you can pirate another person's privacy.. Or maybe they mean it in the sense that the critics are attacking their ships at sea. Privately.
Has the term "pirate" simply come to be that readily used as an attack on a person's legitimacy, such that the actual meaning of the word holds no signifigance? Sad.
Re:
I was honestly surprised to see peoples' comments on here kind of pointing to the fact that not everyone realized that these were NIN's own recordings they were releasing. Interesting.
NIN has always been all about revolutionizing the idea of a concert, and have continuously outdone themselves with each tour. A major part of this has always been some kind of video release to show performances from their shows. Since their DVD release of And All That Could Have Been, their tour footage has been top-notch. I believe their HD-DVD release of Beside You In Time won several awards for best HD-DVD.
He definitely takes things beyond just simple marketing. He goes out of his way to do things for his fans that simply aren't done in the music industry, and this is just another prime example of that.
I have never understood the concept of shunning any band just because they managed to make it big. I mean, isn't that more or less the goal? Nobody gets into any business so they can stay broke all of the time. With NIN, at least you know you're fully getting your money's worth. He has taken the money he has made over the past two decades and continuously spends it in ways to further interact the fans, to make his live performances better, and to ultimately immerse you in his art.
So in a way, you're right. NIN has stopped being a band. They're so much more than that now.