The summary of the situation is incomplete: Games Workshop didn't just say all player-made aides for their games had to be removed from the site, they ordered the site to be altered so that no files could be added to those games in the future.
They have been informed this will take a while, because there is currently no support in the backend for making a particular company a special case: one of the points of BGG (nee GeekDo) is to pool the excitement and expertise of fans, and no company has been (forgive me) apocalyptically stupid as to request that made impossible.
For their next trick, maybe they'll try to shut down all third party forums that discuss their games. That's sure to drive sales up!
So your solution is to have "some measure" as part of a "well designed machine"? Forgive my flagging confidence.
The system as proposed enables no more vote-selling than do portable cameras (or pork barrel spending, for that matter). Seriously, being able to verify that your vote was cast the way you wanted means the system "must be discarded immediately"? I'm happy to hold voting systems to a high ideal standard, but they only need to be so good before they're better than what's currently in use. Good on Takoma Park for preferring an provably unhackable system (ie, mathematically impossible to both correctly report everyone's ballots and falsely report the total vote) over the proven insecure Diebold system.
Helprin isn't that difficult to figure out (and that's no knock against him, since few folks who make a living publishing their opinions are). He wants to be Truman Capote. He wants to be feted and hailed for his command of a good quote and his facility with language. Thus, everything that makes it obvious that people who are not as good as him on his that scale of values are more broadly celebrated, is to be short down with all the venom he can muster, so people can see what a wit and raconteur he is.
I actually sympathize greatly with him: this is his way of fighting off the undermining of his lifestyle. But we can all see that it's misguided: techdirt commenters aren't trying to make him be wrong through the force of our ignorance and rudeness, any more than he can possible make us be wrong through force of savage wit.
It reminds me of Jim Craig being accused of "killing" the newspaper, whether from ignorance or spite (greed's ruled out, since he leaves millions of dollars in ad revenue on the table every year). But no one's guilty of that murder; the world is just turning away from the business model that sustained newspapers. That hurts the people who have spent significant portions of their lives being so sustained, and their grief at this loss has been loud and long.
We should expect that, and forgive them for it; before this new better thing came along, "old media" gave a lot of joy and did a lot of good. Getting over the loss and working through the grief is going to be harder for some than others : Helprin's on Anger, and may never leave it, whereas those he sees as his enemies are mostly well past Acceptance. I'm glad that Techdirt is keeping us abreast of this saga, but spending too many electrons mocking the guy seems a bit too much like bear-baiting to me. It's not even elitism, just pointlessly cruel.
In these kinds of cases, the optimum settlement is one where the plaintiffs have received the highest award they possibly could have. They will keep "renegotiating" as many times as they are permitted, until they reach that limit.
"If this works, it will only be because [THE SMASHING PUMPKINS] are [ALREADY POPULAR]. A band that was instead [NOT YET POPULAR] could not replicate [THE SMASHING PUMPKINS]'s success. If, on the other hand, the results turn out discouraging, then obviously that acts as a general proof for all bands that the model doesn't work."
I'm with Charlie Stross on this one: copyright reform would be very difficult, much more so than just constructing a parallel, protected ecosystem of culture and escaping into it. I think Creative Commons is certainly the best attempt at that so far.
There are infinite musical combinations only for certain restrictive values of "musical." Many combinations of tonal noise are effectively unusable. And human music is, sadly, quite bounded by finite human upper and lower limits on frequency, volume, and speed. And that's all without limiting yourself to entirely unique songs that at no point repeat any two second or longer segment from any other song.
On the discussion in general, there's nothing that says the various businesses of:
Producing music
Promoting music
Distributing music
...all have to be done by the same people. If someone invented some kind of crazy super-cheap "publish it yourself and everyone in the world can see it" platform (perhaps it could be called the "Internet"), then distribution would go away, but that wouldn't stop the other facets (and forgive me if I'm missing any) from continuing to deliver value and make money.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Nick Novitski.
Re: There ought to be a law
Don't joke, the people drafting ACTA might hear you.
The summary of the situation is incomplete: Games Workshop didn't just say all player-made aides for their games had to be removed from the site, they ordered the site to be altered so that no files could be added to those games in the future.
They have been informed this will take a while, because there is currently no support in the backend for making a particular company a special case: one of the points of BGG (nee GeekDo) is to pool the excitement and expertise of fans, and no company has been (forgive me) apocalyptically stupid as to request that made impossible.
For their next trick, maybe they'll try to shut down all third party forums that discuss their games. That's sure to drive sales up!
Discussion of this subject is incomplete without mentioning the hilarious misnomer: "freemunists."
Re: Here's the solution
So your solution is to have "some measure" as part of a "well designed machine"? Forgive my flagging confidence.
The system as proposed enables no more vote-selling than do portable cameras (or pork barrel spending, for that matter). Seriously, being able to verify that your vote was cast the way you wanted means the system "must be discarded immediately"? I'm happy to hold voting systems to a high ideal standard, but they only need to be so good before they're better than what's currently in use. Good on Takoma Park for preferring an provably unhackable system (ie, mathematically impossible to both correctly report everyone's ballots and falsely report the total vote) over the proven insecure Diebold system.
Whoops
Hey guys, I think Tom uploaded more comments than he meant to. You better remove one of them before he serves notice.
A Good Grief
Helprin isn't that difficult to figure out (and that's no knock against him, since few folks who make a living publishing their opinions are). He wants to be Truman Capote. He wants to be feted and hailed for his command of a good quote and his facility with language. Thus, everything that makes it obvious that people who are not as good as him on his that scale of values are more broadly celebrated, is to be short down with all the venom he can muster, so people can see what a wit and raconteur he is.
I actually sympathize greatly with him: this is his way of fighting off the undermining of his lifestyle. But we can all see that it's misguided: techdirt commenters aren't trying to make him be wrong through the force of our ignorance and rudeness, any more than he can possible make us be wrong through force of savage wit.
It reminds me of Jim Craig being accused of "killing" the newspaper, whether from ignorance or spite (greed's ruled out, since he leaves millions of dollars in ad revenue on the table every year). But no one's guilty of that murder; the world is just turning away from the business model that sustained newspapers. That hurts the people who have spent significant portions of their lives being so sustained, and their grief at this loss has been loud and long.
We should expect that, and forgive them for it; before this new better thing came along, "old media" gave a lot of joy and did a lot of good. Getting over the loss and working through the grief is going to be harder for some than others : Helprin's on Anger, and may never leave it, whereas those he sees as his enemies are mostly well past Acceptance. I'm glad that Techdirt is keeping us abreast of this saga, but spending too many electrons mocking the guy seems a bit too much like bear-baiting to me. It's not even elitism, just pointlessly cruel.
What a better settlement looks like
In these kinds of cases, the optimum settlement is one where the plaintiffs have received the highest award they possibly could have. They will keep "renegotiating" as many times as they are permitted, until they reach that limit.
Ooh, ooh, me first!
"If this works, it will only be because [THE SMASHING PUMPKINS] are [ALREADY POPULAR]. A band that was instead [NOT YET POPULAR] could not replicate [THE SMASHING PUMPKINS]'s success. If, on the other hand, the results turn out discouraging, then obviously that acts as a general proof for all bands that the model doesn't work."
Does that sound about right?
Is living on Mars bad for the Earth's environment?
I'm with Charlie Stross on this one: copyright reform would be very difficult, much more so than just constructing a parallel, protected ecosystem of culture and escaping into it. I think Creative Commons is certainly the best attempt at that so far.
Great! Fantastic!
Now all they have to do is call torture, torture, and I'll lovingly dribble my traffic all over their beautiful webfaces.
Re: Infinite Music
There are infinite musical combinations only for certain restrictive values of "musical." Many combinations of tonal noise are effectively unusable. And human music is, sadly, quite bounded by finite human upper and lower limits on frequency, volume, and speed. And that's all without limiting yourself to entirely unique songs that at no point repeat any two second or longer segment from any other song.
On the discussion in general, there's nothing that says the various businesses of:
- Producing music
- Promoting music
- Distributing music
...all have to be done by the same people. If someone invented some kind of crazy super-cheap "publish it yourself and everyone in the world can see it" platform (perhaps it could be called the "Internet"), then distribution would go away, but that wouldn't stop the other facets (and forgive me if I'm missing any) from continuing to deliver value and make money.