WMG's latest crime against humanity
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
hotwire your car and drive it off for a joy ride
But, see that's the difference... stealing a car or whatever leaves the owner with no car. Copying a car or whatever doesn't. So if someone were to put my car through a replicator and drive off with the copy, leaving me with my car unchanged, I'd have no problem.
PIEBALDconsult wrote:
So if someone were to put my car through a replicator and drive off with the copy, leaving me with my car unchanged, I'd have no problem.
Except that you wouldn't have a car. Why? Well, because no one could afford to make one (and that's the maximum they'd ever sell, 1) because everyone else would be driving copies. Which means that it would be so expensive that they probably wouldn't even sell the 1. So you still wouldn't have a car for others to copy. No problem!
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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My mortgage payment wants to be free, too. I'm just having a little trouble getting the word out to the bank. :) Yeah, I don't disagree that if it's digital it's going to be pirated. And yet, I am not at all a fan of DRM, as it tends to hassle the very people who want to pay me, and that's just not right. I figure if someone buys a copy of a book, or a song, or a piece of software from me, I don't care how many devices they own. They should be able to buy it once, and put it on all of them so that it's convenient for them to use wherever they are (anyone remember Borland's No Nonsense Agreement?). Of course, that also means they can give it to a million of their close, personal friends, too but I just don't have a solution for that other than encouraging an ethical shift towards doing what's right. And the only way I know of to promote that is to treat those who do buy my stuff as well as I can, in hopes that they'll appreciate it and continue to do the right thing.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
There have been lot of successful business models around Free.
I'm not sure I'd agree with this. There have been some successes built around free, but the Internet is a classic example of the fundamental difficulty inherent in this approach. Gazillions of developers have been desperately trying to make a buck on the web only to find that it's extremely difficult to convert free to profit. I think most of that line of thinking is more of the pretzel logic, trying to rationalize a bad situation after the fact rather than just calling a pig a pig. With no offense intended toward swine in general, of course. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
Christopher Duncan wrote:
There have been some successes built around free,
There have been a lot of successes built around free. This site is one very quick example.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Gazillions of developers have been desperately trying to make a buck on the web only to find that it's extremely difficult to convert free to profit.
It really depends on what you consider a profit as I stated in my reply to Ian. There might not be direct profits but sure there are lot of indirect profits (talk at conferences, contract jobs) etc.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
trying to rationalize a bad situation
What are your alternatives? Keep crying about the bad situation or understand that bad situation is bad and find ways to make it into a "good" situation.
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Well said, Chris. I'm going much the same route with mine. I chose a publisher that doesn't wrap any DRM into the digital copies of my book... Just a plain old PDF. It might be a little easier for authors than it is for musicians, as readers tend to be of a different demographic than the consumers of popular music... At least for the most part. Oddly, though, I've had a number of people buy my printed book, but only two digital sales... No love for the Kindle/E-Reader/whatever, apparently.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
Actually, in some ways musicians may have it better. At least popularity can lead to more live gigs, and since that's what musicians do, there's no doubt that the publicity helps. Of course, there are those who think that live performance should be the only way musicians are paid, and as you might imagine I take exception with that perspective. Even so, if you can deliver non digital product whose sales are increased by the promotional effects of piracy, then you're still getting screwed, but you at least have the chance to stay alive. With authors, unless you do speaking gigs or sell other (non digital) spinoff products, you don't reap the same promotional benefits. Your eBook gets passed around, everyone loves it, so even more people steal it. Not an encouraging model. That said, your observation about digital sales mirrors my own experience. Very few digital sales in contrast to paper ones, and that doesn't surprise me. I'm not going to sit in the bathroom balancing a laptop on my knees if I want to do some reading. Paper books are much easier to use (and if the book sucks, well, you can also reuse the paper). The Kindle/Nook/etc. trend isn't there yet. In fact, DRM is probably one of the reasons why. However, I find it incredibly disturbing that I could buy a book from Amazon one day and discover they've deleted it the next (there was a flap about 1984 a few months back where this happened). Of course, you're a much braver creature than I am. Writing non-fiction isn't nearly as tough a gig as trying to land book deals & build readership in the fiction world. If you've been able to make a go of it, you're on my list of heroes. :-D
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Have you seen the racket that is the modern music industry? Seriously. A person downloading a free cd costs the band that made that CD some stupidly low number. why? Let's look at this legal slavery called the music industry. First, you sign a contract that allows them to own your music, lyrics and that album plus a number of others. If you suck, they can get out of the contract but if you do well, you are stuck with the terms. Prince hated it and changed his name since they owned the rights to "Prince" and the moment the contract was up, he changed back. Now you are given money to make the album. This loan has interest and is for making the CD using their prices and equipment. It also is to cover your expenses as you make it. They then get to take this money out of your royalties. Which begs the question, why are they charging the musicians and setting the price for something they should be doing as part of their cut? They then get their cut, AND get to charge for promotional costs (again, apparently the musician should pay for this even though they could do it themselves otherwise) and when you get all this over some of the most successful albums end up with the artists never having seen a penny past the intial amount. Otherwise they get such a small percentage of the gross it is almost a joke. The musicians make money from the tours. The ticket sales (again, a company has managed to make life hell for the musician and takes the lions share of all proceeds) and the merchandise and CDs sold at the concerts are where the real money is. Producing a CD does have a cost as does sending it out to stores, but the fact that the music industry jacked up the prices and the artists never saw any gain in their own profits or the fact that not a single dime from all the illegal filesharing settlements has ever touched an artists pockets tells us all where the system has broken down. All this and they pretty much control what gets played on air so unless you use them you won't get popular and won't get the tours means that we have an entrenched system that is designed not to encourage artists, but to rob them blind. Books may be different, but the music industry is not something we should be proud to support.
I agree, but you haven't disputed my point. Are the record companies, by corporate standards, "evil?" Yes, I think so. But does that give you the right to steal, setting aside the distinctions between theft and copyright infringement? No. It's illegal and unethical. The ethical alternative, since you hate the industry so much, is to not buy/download/copy the music AT ALL. Listen to unsigned musicians instead, and buy CDs directly from them (At concerts, or via their websites).
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
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As an ex-professional musician, I can assure you that I find RIAA and their clumsy, heavy handed tactics to be an embarrassment to the brotherhood. That said, and unpopular though I know this perspective to be, I simply can't fathom how people think they have any rights at all to the property of others just because someone's connected a few computers together. If I decided to come over to your house, hotwire your car and drive it off for a joy ride because, well, you know, "transportation wants to be free," I suspect I'd be leaving amidst a hail of gunfire. It's your car. I have no rights to it whatsoever, unless you explicitly grant them to me. Here's a true story that just recently happened. I'm at someone's house, and he introduces me to a friend who's also a geek. The friend says to me, "Hey, great to meet you. You know, I downloaded a copy of The Career Programmer from [pirate site name deleted] a few weeks ago and I just wanted to tell you how much I'm enjoying it..." I could see our mutual friend bite his tongue in amazement, but I simply smiled and thanked this guy for the kind words. This was no bottom feeder, scum of the earth type. He's a nice person, very active in his church and from what I can tell a stand up kinda guy in general. And yet, he saw no moral dilemma whatsoever with looking the author of a book right in the eye and telling him he'd stolen a copy via a pirate site. He even added, "I guess I probably owe you some money, huh?" as a joke, meaning he knew very well that it wasn't his to take for free. Mind you, I can't get all worked up about the miniscule amount of money that didn't make it into my pocket from this transaction, and I've actually kept in touch with this guy & consider him a friend. I just mention this to point out how dramatically many people's ethics have degraded because they buy into the propaganda that "information wants to be free" and the implicit credo that if it's available on the Internet, it's free - whether the owner likes it or not. And of course it doesn't end there. Not only is the property belonging to those of us who create (a group which includes software developers, folks) assumed to belong by birthright to the entire world, for no compensation. We also get the treat of listening to the righteous indignation of those who steal from us. This is often accompanied by an impressive amount of twisted pretzel logic, of course, but is otherwise just a tirade about how unfair it is that anyone should so much as lift a finger to protect that which is
Well and truly deserving of a 5. I continue to be amazed at how much people just steal stuff nowadays, and because it's easy and because nothing physical is stolen, they don't get that it's stealing at all.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
hotwire your car and drive it off for a joy ride
But, see that's the difference... stealing a car or whatever leaves the owner with no car. Copying a car or whatever doesn't. So if someone were to put my car through a replicator and drive off with the copy, leaving me with my car unchanged, I'd have no problem.
That's just stupid. The fact is that the analogy is flawed because you CAN steal a book or a CD without taking the original, but the person stealing it, gets it full benefit without paying for it. That's why some people are retarded enough to not see that they are stealing.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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Ian Shlasko wrote:
the "free" model doesn't work universally
The problem is that the "Stop Piracy" model does not work either and I think there are less chances of getting the "Stop Piracy" model to work rather than the "Free" model.
Ian Shlasko wrote:
If all of the profit was stripped out of these things, those people would not be able to survive, financially.
I am not saying that you need to strip the profit out. You just need to realize where the profits are. The profits may not be with distribution but with other things. For example, People who contribute articles at Code Project even though freely apart from getting accolades and fame, do land up in contract jobs and may be better jobs. So there is the profit.
Ian Shlasko wrote:
Maybe we'll just go back to ye olden days of patronage, where writers, musicians, and artists would just be hired by rich people with too much money to throw around...
Believe it or not it is becoming true. Musicians in India whose music is practically free due to piracy are being hired for corporate events and conferences. The paradox is that giving things away for free does not mean no profit.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
The problem is that the "Stop Piracy" model does not work either and I think there are less chances of getting the "Stop Piracy" model to work rather than the "Free" model.
Agreed, but the "free" model isn't workable yet on a large scale... I don't know what the solution is, but there needs to be some kind of compromise.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
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PIEBALDconsult wrote:
So if someone were to put my car through a replicator and drive off with the copy, leaving me with my car unchanged, I'd have no problem.
Except that you wouldn't have a car. Why? Well, because no one could afford to make one (and that's the maximum they'd ever sell, 1) because everyone else would be driving copies. Which means that it would be so expensive that they probably wouldn't even sell the 1. So you still wouldn't have a car for others to copy. No problem!
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
If we could replicate the car for free. Someone would make it for free. You really think no one would jump at the chance to make the only car everybody drives? "Where's the motivation if you can't make a profit?" Um, fame? Maybe the fact that everybody is driving the "RagnrocknRoll" Model A. Or maybe the fact that I made the car and I have the best possible knowledge of how it works and so when it breaks down, I can charge more than other folks to fix it? Or any of the dozens of related service industries I can build around my free car. But you folks are right, there aren't any working models of people just handing out their product for free and still making money. Not like Red Hat makes a ton off of training people to use and maintain their OS, or anything like that. Heck, it's not like Radio Head made any money off of their "pay whatever you want" album. And Reznor was a complete fool to do the same. I'm not saying steal everything. I am saying being in the outmoded way of thinking that it must come with an up front cost and there is no way to make a profit if you don't charge is not seeing how things are changing.
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Actually, in some ways musicians may have it better. At least popularity can lead to more live gigs, and since that's what musicians do, there's no doubt that the publicity helps. Of course, there are those who think that live performance should be the only way musicians are paid, and as you might imagine I take exception with that perspective. Even so, if you can deliver non digital product whose sales are increased by the promotional effects of piracy, then you're still getting screwed, but you at least have the chance to stay alive. With authors, unless you do speaking gigs or sell other (non digital) spinoff products, you don't reap the same promotional benefits. Your eBook gets passed around, everyone loves it, so even more people steal it. Not an encouraging model. That said, your observation about digital sales mirrors my own experience. Very few digital sales in contrast to paper ones, and that doesn't surprise me. I'm not going to sit in the bathroom balancing a laptop on my knees if I want to do some reading. Paper books are much easier to use (and if the book sucks, well, you can also reuse the paper). The Kindle/Nook/etc. trend isn't there yet. In fact, DRM is probably one of the reasons why. However, I find it incredibly disturbing that I could buy a book from Amazon one day and discover they've deleted it the next (there was a flap about 1984 a few months back where this happened). Of course, you're a much braver creature than I am. Writing non-fiction isn't nearly as tough a gig as trying to land book deals & build readership in the fiction world. If you've been able to make a go of it, you're on my list of heroes. :-D
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
Eh, I'm trying, but not catching on much so far. I think I've sold maybe 20-30 copies, but I don't actually know yet. Royalties from Amazon sales are on a four-month lag, believe it or not, and that's the only way I'll know how many were sold. I should start seeing numbers for July (When it was released) next month. But yeah, I guess musicians do have it a little easier with the promotion angle. We authors, however, have the advantage of being able to just do it in our spare time. When a band is on tour, they're not working a 9-to-5.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
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Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
The problem is that the "Stop Piracy" model does not work either and I think there are less chances of getting the "Stop Piracy" model to work rather than the "Free" model.
Agreed, but the "free" model isn't workable yet on a large scale... I don't know what the solution is, but there needs to be some kind of compromise.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
Ian Shlasko wrote:
the "free" model isn't workable yet on a large scale
That's not true at all. It is working right now. It has worked for CodeProject people are giving away code for free and both CodeProject and authors have benefited from it, it has worked for Google, and it has worked for many internet companies. There is a good book on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp/1401322905[^] (BTW you can find the digital format of this book free).
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
There have been some successes built around free,
There have been a lot of successes built around free. This site is one very quick example.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Gazillions of developers have been desperately trying to make a buck on the web only to find that it's extremely difficult to convert free to profit.
It really depends on what you consider a profit as I stated in my reply to Ian. There might not be direct profits but sure there are lot of indirect profits (talk at conferences, contract jobs) etc.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
trying to rationalize a bad situation
What are your alternatives? Keep crying about the bad situation or understand that bad situation is bad and find ways to make it into a "good" situation.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
There have been a lot of successes built around free. This site is one very quick example.
Man, Chris is going to set the hamsters on me for this one. And I blame you, Rama! Chris, let me just say up front that every night I go into a small room full of candles and incense and chant many prayers to small, furry dieties for the joys that CP has brought into my life. I'm a devoted fan. Truly. Please don't throw me into the fire and shred my membership card, I implore you... That said, Rama, that's about the worst example you could possibly come up with for building a success around free. It's called "crowdsourcing" and I personally refer to it as "suckersourcing." You get a bunch of people to deliver your content on a silver platter in exchange for their 15 minutes of fame. You then leave them with the fame and take all of the money for yourself. Sure, there might be the occasional CPian who parlays that 15 minutes into actual hard currency, but divide that number by the total membership and you're going to have a long string of zeroes after the decimal point before you actually hit a positive number. From the point of view of the content creator trying to build a success around free, i.e. they're not getting paid for their content, that's odds that no businessman would touch with a ten foot water bottle. A better example of success built around free would be a web developer who offers a basic level of service for free, and enhanced service for a paid membership. In this case the content provider (i.e. the developer), profits by giving away a certain amount of his or her stuff for free. As for my definition of profit in the business world, it involves an amount of money that exceeds the cost of expenses to earn that money. Most businesspeople would agree with me on that one. :) And while I may not have an alternative just yet, I don't think pretending an unfair situation is acceptable offers any tangible benefits. Seems more like capitulation to me. I'd rather tilt at windmills in hopes that one day an equitable solution really will be found. I will say this, however. Although we disagree on most of this stuff, the fact that you're an author who lives or dies by the same sword certainly gives your voice more credibility to me than those who are just out to get something for nothing.
Christopher Duncan www.Practic
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I agree, but you haven't disputed my point. Are the record companies, by corporate standards, "evil?" Yes, I think so. But does that give you the right to steal, setting aside the distinctions between theft and copyright infringement? No. It's illegal and unethical. The ethical alternative, since you hate the industry so much, is to not buy/download/copy the music AT ALL. Listen to unsigned musicians instead, and buy CDs directly from them (At concerts, or via their websites).
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
We aren't at odds on this. All my music is from open source (yes it exists), free (thanks Trent), or public domain sources. I haven't bought a modern music CD in ages and if I have gotten any music outside those areas it was from iTunes. I paid for it. I have very rarely done that and usually try to get a way to get it from the artist in a manner that maximizes their profit. What I don't like is people supporting a system designed to screw over artists just because some business suit decided early on that the hippies were an easy mark and using them they could get rich. Heck, I won't even buy rock band Metallica because they are just shills for the industry at this point and their music has sucked roten eggs for almost 20 years.
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Ian Shlasko wrote:
the "free" model isn't workable yet on a large scale
That's not true at all. It is working right now. It has worked for CodeProject people are giving away code for free and both CodeProject and authors have benefited from it, it has worked for Google, and it has worked for many internet companies. There is a good book on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp/1401322905[^] (BTW you can find the digital format of this book free).
I have to defer to Chris's below reply to this argument... He said it perfectly. http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/3249306/Re-WMGs-latest-crime-against-humanity.aspx[^]
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
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Well and truly deserving of a 5. I continue to be amazed at how much people just steal stuff nowadays, and because it's easy and because nothing physical is stolen, they don't get that it's stealing at all.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
Yeah, I gotta tell you, when it was just me and my friend again and the guy who'd scarfed my book had gone home, we just rolled on the floor laughing and shaking our heads for that very reason. The guy clearly just didn't get it that what he'd done was stealing. Well, more likely that like so many others he's just in a deep sense of denial about it. Ed Koch, who was the mayor of NYC back in the 80s, defined chutzpah as, "A child who, after killing his father and mother, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan." Koch woulda loved this guy. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Eh, I'm trying, but not catching on much so far. I think I've sold maybe 20-30 copies, but I don't actually know yet. Royalties from Amazon sales are on a four-month lag, believe it or not, and that's the only way I'll know how many were sold. I should start seeing numbers for July (When it was released) next month. But yeah, I guess musicians do have it a little easier with the promotion angle. We authors, however, have the advantage of being able to just do it in our spare time. When a band is on tour, they're not working a 9-to-5.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
Ian Shlasko wrote:
When a band is on tour, they're not working a 9-to-5.
Wait a minute, you meant that as a bad thing, right? :-D
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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If we could replicate the car for free. Someone would make it for free. You really think no one would jump at the chance to make the only car everybody drives? "Where's the motivation if you can't make a profit?" Um, fame? Maybe the fact that everybody is driving the "RagnrocknRoll" Model A. Or maybe the fact that I made the car and I have the best possible knowledge of how it works and so when it breaks down, I can charge more than other folks to fix it? Or any of the dozens of related service industries I can build around my free car. But you folks are right, there aren't any working models of people just handing out their product for free and still making money. Not like Red Hat makes a ton off of training people to use and maintain their OS, or anything like that. Heck, it's not like Radio Head made any money off of their "pay whatever you want" album. And Reznor was a complete fool to do the same. I'm not saying steal everything. I am saying being in the outmoded way of thinking that it must come with an up front cost and there is no way to make a profit if you don't charge is not seeing how things are changing.
ragnaroknrol wrote:
Or maybe the fact that I made the car and I have the best possible knowledge of how it works and so when it breaks down, I can charge more than other folks to fix it?
You haven't thought this through! :-D Who is going to pay you to fix something if they can copy a new one for free. If everybody steals everything they want, there is nothing to steal because nobody can afford to make anything!!
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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possibly. but i doubt they'd rely on an automated system to make a conclusive determination. i think it'd be pretty easy to fool such a system.
Not as the only way to reject stuff; but "We've implemented a system to prevent anything identical to something that you[big content]'ve flagged as a copy violation from being approved again." is cheap and shows making a good faith effort. The database it runs on is then fueled by an automated DMCA take down server that is primarily used by big content. Depending on how clever they're being they might try and look for steganographic bitrot (bitrot that doesn't change the seen/heard quality of the video/audio); but I suspect most of that would require storing something other than hashs of reported stuff which would make system requirements sky rocket. Storing hashes of short snippets and using a consistent triggering method for when to take them (beats in audio, video scene changes, something cleverer, etc) would allow stopping the "I'll just delete/pad the first/last fraction of a second of it" bypass attacks.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
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Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
There have been a lot of successes built around free. This site is one very quick example.
Man, Chris is going to set the hamsters on me for this one. And I blame you, Rama! Chris, let me just say up front that every night I go into a small room full of candles and incense and chant many prayers to small, furry dieties for the joys that CP has brought into my life. I'm a devoted fan. Truly. Please don't throw me into the fire and shred my membership card, I implore you... That said, Rama, that's about the worst example you could possibly come up with for building a success around free. It's called "crowdsourcing" and I personally refer to it as "suckersourcing." You get a bunch of people to deliver your content on a silver platter in exchange for their 15 minutes of fame. You then leave them with the fame and take all of the money for yourself. Sure, there might be the occasional CPian who parlays that 15 minutes into actual hard currency, but divide that number by the total membership and you're going to have a long string of zeroes after the decimal point before you actually hit a positive number. From the point of view of the content creator trying to build a success around free, i.e. they're not getting paid for their content, that's odds that no businessman would touch with a ten foot water bottle. A better example of success built around free would be a web developer who offers a basic level of service for free, and enhanced service for a paid membership. In this case the content provider (i.e. the developer), profits by giving away a certain amount of his or her stuff for free. As for my definition of profit in the business world, it involves an amount of money that exceeds the cost of expenses to earn that money. Most businesspeople would agree with me on that one. :) And while I may not have an alternative just yet, I don't think pretending an unfair situation is acceptable offers any tangible benefits. Seems more like capitulation to me. I'd rather tilt at windmills in hopes that one day an equitable solution really will be found. I will say this, however. Although we disagree on most of this stuff, the fact that you're an author who lives or dies by the same sword certainly gives your voice more credibility to me than those who are just out to get something for nothing.
Christopher Duncan www.Practic
Christopher Duncan wrote:
r who offers a basic level of service for free, and enhanced service for a paid membership
That's just one of the business model around free called "freemium". There are several such business models around free.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
nvolves an amount of money that exceeds the cost of expenses to earn that money.
Sure, that's might be a classic definition. But in this Internet world you have to think slightly out of the box.
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
r who offers a basic level of service for free, and enhanced service for a paid membership
That's just one of the business model around free called "freemium". There are several such business models around free.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
nvolves an amount of money that exceeds the cost of expenses to earn that money.
Sure, that's might be a classic definition. But in this Internet world you have to think slightly out of the box.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
That's just one of the business model around free called "freemium". There are several such business models around free.
Yeah, and I've spent the past year on some web dev projects trying to exploit them. I gotta say, I have a lot of respect for those who can make a living that way, because it's a much, much harder path than simply seling a product or service outright. Only a tiny, tiny percentage of commercial web sites out there are making money, and that's not the same percentage as the number of web devs who would like that to be their reality.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
Sure, that's might be a classic definition. But in this Internet world you have to think slightly out of the box.
Sorry, Rama, but you're waaaay too smart for me to let you get away with something this lame. :) Those who don't make more money than they spend can't pay the bills. Profit is profit, on the Internet or anywhere else. Nice try, though. :-D
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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We aren't at odds on this. All my music is from open source (yes it exists), free (thanks Trent), or public domain sources. I haven't bought a modern music CD in ages and if I have gotten any music outside those areas it was from iTunes. I paid for it. I have very rarely done that and usually try to get a way to get it from the artist in a manner that maximizes their profit. What I don't like is people supporting a system designed to screw over artists just because some business suit decided early on that the hippies were an easy mark and using them they could get rich. Heck, I won't even buy rock band Metallica because they are just shills for the industry at this point and their music has sucked roten eggs for almost 20 years.
Agreed... But like all arguments, there are two sides. The record companies ARE providing a service... They provide the financial investment to get studio time. They do the marketing and promotion... It's a significant cost. That said, I do agree that the deal artists are getting nowadays isn't fair... They just don't have much of a choice. I'll use my own situation as an example, as there's a close parallel in the world of written works... When you write a book, you basically have three options: 1) Traditional publisher: Same thing as an RIAA company. You submit your work to them, and have a <1% chance of being accepted. You sign EVERYTHING to them, they gain complete control. You get a miniscule royalty, but since you're backed by one of the big guys, you'll be on all the shelves in all the retail chains (B&N, Borders, etc). If you fill the right demographic, and they really like you, they'll pay extra to get you premium placement. 2) Vanity Press: Kind of like being an independent musician. You lay out all of the money for the print run (Which can be substantial - Talking $10k+). You do your own marketing and sales. You get 100% of the profits after printing costs, but you're totally on your own. Bookstores won't carry it unless you're already famous, so you have to find your own sales channel. 3) Self-Publish/POD: Print-on-demand is the middle-of-the-road solution. You sign up with one of the smaller publishers. You pay to start the process (Much less than in #2), but they handle sales and fulfillment. They take a cut, but you still get a decent royalty, and can get listed on the major online booksellers. You usually won't get shelf space in the brick-and-mortar stores, so you're basically stuck with online sales unless you go out and sell it in person. So you see, there are some major advantages to signing your soul over to one of the big publishers/studios. Me, I went with option #3, which is sort of like signing with an independent label, but less restrictive. The irony, of course, is that the very existence of #1 is what makes #2 and #3 so much more difficult (They're hogging all of the shelf space)... As long as they exist, they're really the only way to make it to the big leagues. I think I made a point in there somewhere... I started thinking about six different things at once, all non-related, so wasn't paying attention for the second half of this post...
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark.