"Bloggers Versus Journalists Is Over" declares NYU Journalism Department Chair and "public journalism" advocate Jay Rosen. Before getting outraged at that declaration, take a good read of this don't-miss piece; long and link-filled. Rosen says there's no debate anymore that bloggers can be journalists, sometimes, and that what he and others are now calling "open-source journalism" is something newspaper editors downplay at their own peril.
Still, it's a two-way street. As I pointed out in a December '04 Seattle Magazine article on the Puget Sound blogosphere (scanned pdf file link via Ambra Nykol), the mainstream media is increasingly aware of bloggers and, de facto, works with them; picking up scoops and perspectives from the blogosphere to mitigate their occasional cluelessness.
In the current controversy over the botched election for Washington Governor, local, state and national media have been following bloggers, especially Sound Politics' intrepid Stefan Sharkansky, who appeared on Fox News with Brit Hume just last night, and whose work has been cited in the Wall Street Journal and many other MSM venues. Media, including local outlets, have been reporting some of Stefan's key findings, expanding the reach of Sound Politics.
Yet in many other instances, bloggers (all of us here included) work from material generated by print press, or radio or TV, hopefully providing some value added with additional commentary and information.
So, let's not forget that the relationship between bloggers and the MSM, while sometimes prickly, is symbiotic. Even though the burden of adaptation to a new age of news gathering and commentary lies with traditional media.
Rosen writes:
When 90 percent of the op-ed style writing was done on actual op-ed pages, editorial page editors had sovereignty over that region of public dialogue. With blogging and the online space generally, that rule is gone. Opinion in reaction to the news can come from anywhere, and the bloggers are frequently better at it than the sleepy op-ed page ever was. Newspaper op-ed pages can still have influence; they can still be great. But they are not sovereign in their domain, and so their ideas, which never anticipated that, are under great pressure.When Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and a figure in the news, wants to speak to fans, players or the community, he doesn't do it through the reporters who cover the Mavs. He puts the word out at his weblog. For the beat writers who cover the team this is a loss; Cuban hardly deals with them anymore. Here, however, the balance of power has shifted toward a figure in the news, once known as a source......
...this...does not mean that prospects for the public service press are suddenly dim. It does, however, mean that the old political contract between news providers and news consumers will give way to something different, founded on....a new "balance of power."
Rosen's piece via ex-San Jose Mercury News technology writer Dan Gillmor, who has just stepped down to develop a "citizen journalism" start-up.
Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 18, 2005 10:05 AM | Email ThisKerry Decries Suppressed Vote:
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/kerry/articles/2005/01/18/kerry_alleges_voters_were_suppressed/
Funny, he doesn't mention King Country. Will the MSM question any of these allegations? Doubt it.
Posted by: Greg M on January 18, 2005 10:16 AM....is largely due to the abdication of the "professional" journalists of their responsibility to report the facts.
In that role, they have an advantage over the bloggers, in that they are paid to find a story and follow it wherever it goes.
When the output of the "professionals" degenerated into opinion disguised as facts, they yielded that advantage.
Posted by: ewaggin on January 18, 2005 10:21 AMMore often then not, he was completely trashing technology, focusing on all the down sides and negatives, and very often was simply wrong in his assertions. My wife would cringe as I would read the paper each morning, as I would often “talk back” to Gillmor’s column, using phrases like “You’ve got to be kidding me” and “Oh please, you just have to find something wrong don’t you?”. It was really annoying, and yes, I know, I didn’t have to read it, which is why I stopped after a while. I’d usually find some sort of way to block his column so I could read the rest of the technology section unmolested by his frantic and fallacious views. Every now and then I’d get pulled in though, I can only describe the phenomenon as being similar to witnessing a train wreck, it’s horrible to watch, yet you can’t look away.
One of the more annoying aspects of Gillmor’s columns was his incredible ability to blame Microsoft for not only what was wrong with technology, but the world in general. Yes, I work for Microsoft, but I was reading his column long before I did, and it annoyed me even then. No matter what he was writing about, say cell phone coverage in Tibet, he’d manage to get a dig in on Microsoft somewhere in the piece. It was amazing, really. I wrote to him and his editors on several occasions, complaining that anyone so clearly biased against one of the biggest technology companies in the world had no business writing a technology column in “the paper of Silicon Valley” unless they were also prepared to present an opposing view point, otherwise their paper was doomed to marginalization due to totally skewed reporting.
I came to the conclusion that he hated Microsoft mostly because Microsoft is a large and successful business, while Mr. Gillmor himself comes across as very anti-business. Any company that had the audacity to actually charge a fee for its service or product was simply trashed by Gillmor. He was all about open-source and this utopian dream of free hardware and software developers who fixed bugs and security holes in their free time without the need for financial compensation, because the satisfaction of serving the greater good should be all the motivation they need. I know this sounds like exaggeration, but just try looking up some of his older articles and you’ll see what I mean.
Anyway, before I get to far into a rant, I’d just like to warn people that I wouldn’t trust anything Dan Gillmor has to say anymore than I’d trust Dean Logan to manage the next election.
As far as Jay Rosen goes, I find him frustrating as well, but in a different way. He *almost* gets it. Most of his PressThink essays have him walk right up to a kernel of truth and just when you think the light bulb's finally going to go off, he turns and wanders off to some "journalism-is-a-sacred-trust" lily pad. But he's flat out unable to recognize the scope of media bias and how pervasive it is in the legacy media.
His comments about Opinion pages fit the pattern perfectly. He starts a paragraph with "When 90 percent of the op-ed style writing was done on actual op-ed pages..." and I think "hey, Rosen's finally got it! He finally realizes that journalists have been saturating their straight news stories with opinion pieces for decades! Op-Ed writing hasn't been confined to the op-ed pages for a long time - it infects the front page of the NYT and the evening news." But to go on reading is to discover that no, that's not what he means at all. When he says op-ed writing isn't confined to the op-ed pages, he's not implying it exists in straight news stories - no he means it has leaked out into the blogosphere too.
Rosen hasn't recognized that the news is biased, he's just saying that the blogosphere is better at opinion pieces that the officially sanctioned opinion writers in the legacy media.
For him, the crisis is not that the myth of objectivity has finally been unmasked. No, Rosen thinks the crisis is because the usefulness of objectivity has collapsed, and journalists are now no longer ethically bound to it.
Sigh. He thinks a gust of wind must have blown the Emperor's new clothes away. He doesn't understand there never were any clothes to begin with. So he's going to worry about how we can live in such a windy world rather than ask the cheating tailor for the money back.
Posted by: (the other) John Hawkins on January 18, 2005 11:44 AMBlogs are superior to the MSM. Why? Because there is more of a dialogue than one way presentation of "the facts." Correction to posts are routinely updated, corrected and retracted UP FRONT. Unlike most MSM outlets that hide these on back pages if at all.
The info on blogs is also presented in a more timely fashion. Somebody someplace is always digging at the truth and presenting as they find it. Blogs rarely have a "slow news day."
Do some blogs have an "slant" or point of view? YES...but this isn't disguised. The MSM insists the left leaning tripe they bradcast and print is "neutral." Opposing points of view are welcomed as long as there is a civil and factual discourse. Those posting on emotions and spin are known as trolls for just that reason.
Posted by: smoke on January 18, 2005 12:24 PMWe are the wolves, the mainstream media is the bloated carcass.
The MSM provides us with fodder, and we clean up the environment by eliminatng them.
Sure, that works.
Posted by: ERNurse on January 18, 2005 12:30 PM
What appears in the P-I is journalism...sometimes.
Well, why isn't Stewart qualified to be a CBS News reporter? He hates Bush, doesn't he?
The dinosaurs are dying.
Posted by: FedUpWithThis on January 18, 2005 01:20 PMI too disliked Dan Gillmor. He seemed throw in the occasional outrageous line to bring attention to himself a la Ken Schram.
Gillmor is clearly a leftist, long steeped in the left leaning culture that dominates the media. He seemed to have found himself accidentally in technology writing and often appeared to be more of a general left leaning editorialist in disguise as a tech writer. I never subscribed to the Mercury because subsidy only encourages them to continue printing that garbage.
I think Gillmor was wrong in many ways about Microsoft. Microsoft has done a lot of good for the world. Certainly, Bill Gates is a perfect example of American success and deserves our utmost respect. However I am very disappointed with the current Spyware, Virus, Malware combo of constant vigilence that is needed to keep a PC up and running and the fact that only recently, firewalling was instituted in SP2 to block the many open ports in the OS. I managed networks of UNIX machines for about 15 years, and then ended up managing PCs for a while. The difference in terms of more time, cost, headcount and frustration was an order of magnitude greater with MS products than it was managing equally sized UNIX networks. I'm all for big business though, competition will help Microsoft fix these problems faster than anything else.
Still though, I agree, I would not trust anything with which Gillmor is involved.
Posted by: Jeff B. on January 18, 2005 02:40 PMI used to respect him a lot more than I do now. There is an attitude, exhibited by Microsoft and others, that people do not have the right to control what goes on in their computer. To be sure, controlling everything that goes on in anything more complicated than a simple DOS-based PC is apt to be tricky, but Microsoft et al. are deliberately working to make it impossible.
If the Palladium efforts put forth by Microsoft et al. take hold, any malware author who can get his hands on the inner workings would be able to produce spyware which would be completely undetectable to anyone who did not also have access to the inner workings. That is just plain scary.
Posted by: supercat on January 18, 2005 04:24 PMAs a Microsoft employee, I can tell you that we do not sit around all day thinking up new and interesting ways to deny you control over your computer. However there has been an effort to abstract certain things by defualt, while allowing power users access if they want it.
You need to remember that the typical Windows user is not a Sys Admin, is not a CS grad, and generally doesn't care how their computer works, as long as it does so in a reliable and predicatable manner. In essense, most people want their PCs to be appliances. My mother-in-law would not be using a TV if she had to know exactly what frequencies to tune to get specific channels, just as she wouldn't be using a computer if she had to know cluster size to set for her hard disk.
The abstraction of data isn't done as a means of preventing people from controling their PCs, it's done as a means of removing barriers to people who just want to us it, and don't really care how it works.
Posted by: Jason on January 18, 2005 05:10 PMIn the old days, that was true. But in their efforts to persue "digital rights management", Microsoft et al. have sought to make things opaque for the purpose of making things opaque.
Basically, what Microsoft et al. are seeking is the ability to prevent users from doing anything with media content that the content providers don't want them to do. If a system were transparent, it would be possible for anyone who could experience media content in any way to 'capture' it; from then on, they'd be able to experience it however they want, regardless of what the provider wants.
The real question that needs to be asked is whether you want your computer to be owned by you or by anyone who supplies you with digital content. I think it's pretty clear whose side Microsoft is on.
Posted by: supercat on January 18, 2005 06:49 PMYou can't make Microsoft the bad guy here. If it weren't for DRM, the content providers would not have agreed to make the content available in the first place. Microsoft and others who have developed DRM solutions have done so not out of any interest to extend their control over your digital experience, but because without DRM your digital experience would be far more limited.
You seem to forget that you don't own the songs you hear on the radio, nor do you own the songs on a CD that you purchase. You have a license to use them, but not an unlimited license to do anything you want with them.
Don't believe me? Try puting your own Mix CD together from CDs that you own, and then put multiple copies of it up for sale on eBay. Watch how fast it's yanked off the market and you are sued for copyright violation. Just because you think you own something doesn't make it so.
Being "...able to experience (digital media) however they want, regardless of what the provider wants..." sounds like a great idea, but without those controls in place, the providers will simply stop providing. No DRM opens the doors wide open to theft, just as lose registration laws opened this election wide open to fruad. Life ain't a free ride, people deserve compensation for their work. Just because an artist sells a CD, or their song is played on the radio, does not make that song part of the public domain. The artist still owns the rights to it. It's the law.
DRM is still in it's early stages, we are still working to find the right balance between protecting copyrighted works, and allowing comsumers the flexibilty to use the content how they want to. I doubt that DRM as it exists today will resemble DRM 10 years from now. But I have no doubt that DRM will exist 10 years from now. The ability to cheaply and quickly replicate and distrubute digital media means that DRM is here to stay.
Posted by: Jason on January 18, 2005 11:18 PMIt seems to me that there is awful lot of content released in forms which are easily copied, and there has been for years.
You have a license to use them, but not an unlimited license to do anything you want with them.
Courts have held that you have a right to do quite a lot with them that DRM would prevent. If I bought an 8-track tape in the 1970's, I have every right to transfer it to a modern medium for my own personal use without having to seek any approval from the original publisher.
Being "...able to experience (digital media) however they want, regardless of what the provider wants..." sounds like a great idea, but without those controls in place, the providers will simply stop providing. No DRM opens the doors wide open to theft, just as lose registration laws opened this election wide open to fruad.
I guess nobody has bothered to publish any books since the invention of the photocopier.
DRM is still in it's early stages, we are still working to find the right balance between protecting copyrighted works, and allowing comsumers the flexibilty to use the content how they want to. I doubt that DRM as it exists today will resemble DRM 10 years from now. But I have no doubt that DRM will exist 10 years from now. The ability to cheaply and quickly replicate and distrubute digital media means that DRM is here to stay.
Fundamentally, the only way DRM can work is if the possessors of the equipment used to experience DRM content cannot really control it. In some cases, this may be entirely reasonable. If I rent a box from a cable provider, it's their box, and they have every right to have ultimate control over it. That is very different, though, from saying that I have no right to own a PC over which I have ultimate control.
Beyond the fact that I see the DRM war as being evil on the basis that it makes the denial of people's control over their equipment a central goal, I would also posit that it is fundamentally counterproductive, since it makes content providers the enemy of consumers and pirates their friend. After all, if I buy a CD which I can't play on my portable player but I can download the same thing off Napster, who's my friend and who's my enemy? To be sure, the artist produced the music and should be paid for that, but can can I really condemn those who made it possible for me to actually use what I paid for?
If content providers focused on trying to make their customers happy, they'd realize that the vast majority of people who will buy content if they can't get it illegally will still buy it even if they can get it illegally. People like to rightfully own stuff. But which do you think people would rather own--a recording that they know they and their descendants will be able to play as long as they wish, on any playback device they own or may acquire in future (including those not invented yet), or a recording that they can only play on equipment approved by the seller for as long as that equipment happens to last?
Given a choice between plunking down $15 for a disk or going through the effort to find a copy online somewhere, I'll plunk down the $15 (if I want the material enough to bother with it at all). But if finding a copy on-line is the only way I can use the content as I want to (e.g. on my non-DRM portable player) I'd no longer have that choice. My choices would instead be: (1) download an illegal copy, but buy a real one (which I then don't actually use), (2) download an illegal copy, and don't bother with a real one (why should the manufacturer get $15 for making me go through all the extra hoops?), or (3) don't bother with the material at all.
The DRM issue is way off-topic for this thread, but it just seems to me that those who are pushing DRM are fundamentally seeking to prevent people from controlling the equipment they own. And that, I see, as a Very Bad Thing.
Posted by: supercat on January 19, 2005 04:46 PMYour arguments don't hold water for several reasons:
"It seems to me that there is awful lot of content released in forms which are easily copied, and there has been for years."
"I guess nobody has bothered to publish any books since the invention of the photocopier."
These are false arguments because regardless of how easy it may be to copy an 8-track tape to an audio cassette, or to photocopy a book, you aren't making a digitally perfect copy that can be instantly distributed to millions of people around the world a little or no cost to you or them.
DRM exists because while it's always been relatively easy to make single copies of older media, it was never practical to make multiple copies that were identical in quality to the original, and then distribute those copies with equal easy.
You simply can't argue that because we don't need DRM for print media, or older analog media, that we therefore don't need it for digital media. It is the nature of digital media that is driving the need for DRM.
If paper books and 8-track tapes were as easily copied and distributed as MP3s are, they would have developed DRM a long time ago. In effect, the difficultly of reproducing those older media forms was it's own sort of DRM.
When I bought a vinyl record in the early 80's, I was able to make an audio cassette for my own use. But it took about an hour to do so (or howerver long it took to play the record). So the chances that I would mass produced copies of it were pretty slim. However with MP3s, I can not only reproduce it thousands of times in an hour, but I can also post it to a website for millions of people to download. That simply wasn't possible with the replication techniques for older analog media, so you can't logically compare the two.
Posted by: Jason on January 19, 2005 05:15 PMSo, if I buy a piece of music protected by some absolutely unbreakable DRM scheme, put my player in a quiet room, stick a microphone in front of it, and an hour later I'll have a digital file that can be copied just as easily as if the DRM never existed. And with more justification than if the music were sold on unprotected CD (since in the latter case there isn't much reason why anyone who legitimately had it couldn't rip it for their MP3 player themselves).
True, the quality of recording produced by such methods wouldn't be the equal of the original, but whatever quality was achieved in the first recording could be passed on without generational loss. And most people who pirate stuff aren't really picky about quality anyway--just look at the sales of DVD's that people shot in a movie theater.
Besides, you haven't addressed either of my three main points, which are: (1) the fact that most people who would buy media content if they couldn't get it otherwise will not be dissuaded from purchase by its illicit availability, except in cases where trying out the material before purchase leads them to decide they don't want it; (2) treating consumers as friends rather than enemies will make them feel better about buying stuff from you; this can boost your sales more than leeches will depress them; (3) presently, the pirates do serve some useful functions, and it will be difficult to summon up much social condemnation against them as long as that remains so.
About a 15 years ago, Borland published their software under the Borland "No Nonsense License Agreement". I would suggest that if the music industry were to take a similar approach, it would receive a much warmer reception that it will pushing DRM and such. Basically, the NNLA says that the purchaser of a work must ensure that the number of copies in use does not exceed the number purchased. If someone installs a copy at home and at work, that's fine provided the person can be sure both are not used simultaneously.
Obviously the NNLA would be breached if someone were to open up their content for promiscuous downloading, since one would have no plausible means of ensuring that none of the people who downloaded it were using it simultaneously. But it explicitly allows one to copy the material onto any form of medium, including those not yet invented, provided one keeps control of where it goes.
Finally, I would like to ask: is it better for a work to sell 500,000 copies and have 0 pirate copies floating around, or to sell 750,000 copies and have 1,500,000 pirate copies floating around? Whether or not you agree that those would be the choices one faced, in the event that a content producer did face those choices, which should be preferred?
Posted by: supercat on January 19, 2005 10:44 PMI'll address your points in a second, but first I can't help but think that you are hopelessly trying to apply the standards of the past to current situations, and that is where I believe your arguments fall apart.
You site dubbing a recording using a microphone. Of course, that technique will defeat all existing DRM as it applies to music today. But seriously, when was the last time anyone actually did that? Don't get tripped up by something simply because it is possible, you also need to consider whether or not it is plausible as well. People don't dub songs using mics because it takes a long time, is an imperfect process, and requires special equipment (like a sound insulated room). So even though it's possible, content providers aren't too concerned about it because it isn't plausible.
In regards to Borland, first off they've moved away from the NNLA in recent years. And with good reason too, it was costing them money. Take a look at their latest financials:
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Revenues for the third quarter of 2004 were $77.6 million, up 10% from $70.6 million reported in the third quarter of 2003. GAAP net loss for the third quarter of 2004 narrowed to $160,000, or $(0.00) per share, as compared to a GAAP net loss of $12.2 million, or ($0.15) per share, reported in the third quarter of 2003.
======
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=112793&p=irol-newsArticle&t=Regular&id=634345&
They had a net loss for their most recent quarter, I'd have picked a better example if I were you.
Now on to your three points:
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(1) the fact that most people who would buy media content if they couldn't get it otherwise will not be dissuaded from purchase by its illicit availability, except in cases where trying out the material before purchase leads them to decide they don't want it.
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You can't site opinion as fact, show me some numbers to back that up. I take it you haven't been on a college campus recently. People are absolutely dissuaded from purchasing if they can simply point to a network share and download their 10,000 most favorite songs in the same time it takes to get a Latte from Starbucks.
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2) treating consumers as friends rather than enemies will make them feel better about buying stuff from you; this can boost your sales more than leeches will depress them.
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Please, when was the last time you altered your own purchasing habits becuase the retailer made you feel like a friend? Maybe for big ticket items, like a car, or a house, if you have a good relationship with the dealer or realtor you might be more inclined to use them again, or refer others to them, but we are talking about small $1 - $15 purchases here. Yeah, I like iTunes, and I purchase music there and recommend it to others, but that has nothing to do with them treating me friendly, it has to do with the selection, the quality of the songs, and the ease of navigation through their site. Most consumers are looking for good products at a good price. "Friendships" don't come into play unless you are talking about small mom-and-pop operations, or big ticket items which tend to be more complex purchases.
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(3) presently, the pirates do serve some useful functions, and it will be difficult to summon up much social condemnation against them as long as that remains so.
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That's one of your points? I suppose you think car theives and drug dealers serve some useful functions as well? No, I don't think the kids who swap thousands of MP3s for free are worthy of the same social condemnation as car theives and drug dealers, but you'd have a hell of a time convincing me or anyone else that they serve some useful purpose.
If anything, pirates are the reason why DRM exists. If you want to vent your anger about DRM at someone, it ought to be vented at the pirates. Blaming Mircosoft for DRM is like blaming the University of California at Berkeley for Spam, because they helped develop e-mail 25 years ago.
Big corporations aren't the root of all problems. Often it's people who try to game the system and take advantage of situations such as free music downloads that lead corporations to respond with solutions to protect themselves and others. If it weren't for your "useful" pirates, Microsoft and others would never have had reason to develop DRM. It was developed because people, individuals and corporations, got tired of being ripped off by their "friends", the consumers.
And for your final point, about selling 500,000 copies with 0 pirates, or 750,000 copies with 1.5 million pirates. I'm not going to agree to the false premise you setup. You assume that just because something can't be copied, I won't sell as well. That might be true for some underground release that doesn't get much press or exposure otherwise, but for the vast majority of mainstream content, stuff that is really sought after, that simply isn't true. If people want it, they will buy it, and they certainly won't buy more of it if they can get it for free, particularly if they can get an exact digital replica for free. Take a stroll through any dorm of your local college, and you'll see exactly what I mean.
Posted by: Jason on January 20, 2005 12:20 AMPeople make illicit copies of movies in theaters, which has even worse quality problems and runs a much higher risk of detection than recording something in a private quiet room. Of course other means of dubbing (such as analog-out to analog-in) are better, but something only has to be dubbed once for it go get 'shared' to hundreds or thousands of people.
>>
In regards to Borland, first off they've moved away from the NNLA in recent years. And with good reason too, it was costing them money. Take a look at their latest financials:
>>
(1) the fact that most people who would buy media content if they couldn't get it otherwise will not be dissuaded from purchase by its illicit availability, except in cases where trying out the material before purchase leads them to decide they don't want it.
>
You can't site opinion as fact, show me some numbers to back that up. I take it you haven't been on a college campus recently. People are absolutely dissuaded from purchasing if they can simply point to a network share and download their 10,000 most favorite songs in the same time it takes to get a Latte from Starbucks.
>>
2) treating consumers as friends rather than enemies will make them feel better about buying stuff from you; this can boost your sales more than leeches will depress them.
>
Please, when was the last time you altered your own purchasing habits becuase the retailer made you feel like a friend? Maybe for big ticket items, like a car, or a house, if you have a good relationship with the dealer or realtor you might be more inclined to use them again, or refer others to them, but we are talking about small $1 - $15 purchases here. Yeah, I like iTunes, and I purchase music there and recommend it to others, but that has nothing to do with them treating me friendly, it has to do with the selection, the quality of the songs, and the ease of navigation through their site. Most consumers are looking for good products at a good price. "Friendships" don't come into play unless you are talking about small mom-and-pop operations, or big ticket items which tend to be more complex purchases.
>>
(3) presently, the pirates do serve some useful functions, and it will be difficult to summon up much social condemnation against them as long as that remains so.
>
That's one of your points? I suppose you think car theives and drug dealers serve some useful functions as well? No, I don't think the kids who swap thousands of MP3s for free are worthy of the same social condemnation as car theives and drug dealers, but you'd have a hell of a time convincing me or anyone else that they serve some useful purpose.
>
If anything, pirates are the reason why DRM exists. If you want to vent your anger about DRM at someone, it ought to be vented at the pirates. Blaming Mircosoft for DRM is like blaming the University of California at Berkeley for Spam, because they helped develop e-mail 25 years ago.
>
Big corporations aren't the root of all problems. Often it's people who try to game the system and take advantage of situations such as free music downloads that lead corporations to respond with solutions to protect themselves and others. If it weren't for your "useful" pirates, Microsoft and others would never have had reason to develop DRM. It was developed because people, individuals and corporations, got tired of being ripped off by their "friends", the consumers.
>
And for your final point, about selling 500,000 copies with 0 pirates, or 750,000 copies with 1.5 million pirates. I'm not going to agree to the false premise you setup. You assume that just because something can't be copied, I won't sell as well. That might be true for some underground release that doesn't get much press or exposure otherwise, but for the vast majority of mainstream content, stuff that is really sought after, that simply isn't true. If people want it, they will buy it, and they certainly won't buy more of it if they can get it for free, particularly if they can get an exact digital replica for free. Take a stroll through any dorm of your local college, and you'll see exactly what I mean.
People make illicit copies of movies in theaters, which has even worse quality problems and runs a much higher risk of detection than recording something in a private quiet room. Of course other means of dubbing (such as analog-out to analog-in) are better, but something only has to be dubbed once for it go get 'shared' to hundreds or thousands of people.
[[
In regards to Borland, first off they've moved away from the NNLA in recent years. And with good reason too, it was costing them money. Take a look at their latest financials:
]]
When did they move away from the NNLA? And what were other market factors around that time? It seems to be that the intertwining ofr Microsoft's roles as a development tools vendor and an OS vendor might have a lot to do with Borland's financials.
[[[
(1) the fact that most people who would buy media content if they couldn't get it otherwise will not be dissuaded from purchase by its illicit availability, except in cases where trying out the material before purchase leads them to decide they don't want it.
]]]
[[
You can't site opinion as fact, show me some numbers to back that up. I take it you haven't been on a college campus recently. People are absolutely dissuaded from purchasing if they can simply point to a network share and download their 10,000 most favorite songs in the same time it takes to get a Latte from Starbucks.
]]
There are some people who buy very little music because they're satisfied with downloading illicit copies off the net, granted. But my own experience and impression is that a lot of college students aren't exactly overflowing with cash. They certainly never bought CDs in anything near the quantity that they're downloading music. More often, they got their music free via another source--the radio. Although composers get royalties from radio play, artists and record companies get none. To the contrary, record companies pay promoters to get their music played on the radio. Why do you suppose that is?
[[[
2) treating consumers as friends rather than enemies will make them feel better about buying stuff from you; this can boost your sales more than leeches will depress them.
]]]
[[
Please, when was the last time you altered your own purchasing habits becuase the retailer made you feel like a friend? Maybe for big ticket items, like a car, or a house, if you have a good relationship with the dealer or realtor you might be more inclined to use them again, or refer others to them, but we are talking about small $1 - $15 purchases here. Yeah, I like iTunes, and I purchase music there and recommend it to others, but that has nothing to do with them treating me friendly, it has to do with the selection, the quality of the songs, and the ease of navigation through their site. Most consumers are looking for good products at a good price. "Friendships" don't come into play unless you are talking about small mom-and-pop operations, or big ticket items which tend to be more complex purchases.
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My personal selection of vendors is definitely affected by perceived attitude. Not that I want one that is overly chatty and sociable, but rather one that effectively helps me accomplish what I'm seeking to do.
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(3) presently, the pirates do serve some useful functions, and it will be difficult to summon up much social condemnation against them as long as that remains so.
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That's one of your points? I suppose you think car theives and drug dealers serve some useful functions as well? No, I don't think the kids who swap thousands of MP3s for free are worthy of the same social condemnation as car theives and drug dealers, but you'd have a hell of a time convincing me or anyone else that they serve some useful purpose.
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If I buy a piece of copy-protected commercial software and it doesn't work in my machine, but I can find a 'crack' for it that will make it work, has the person who supplied me with the 'crack' not provided a societally useful service, at least in my case?
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If anything, pirates are the reason why DRM exists. If you want to vent your anger about DRM at someone, it ought to be vented at the pirates. Blaming Mircosoft for DRM is like blaming the University of California at Berkeley for Spam, because they helped develop e-mail 25 years ago.
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I'm not saying the blame only goes in one direction--don't get me wrong on that. But the reaction by content vendors often ends up hurting legitimate consumers as much as it hurts the pirates. Indeed, with the advent of the Internet, the situation has become even more unbalanced than it was in the 'old days'. A record company could release a CD with absolutely unbreakable DRM and, after the 70 minutes it would take to dub, it would still become available for download everywhere. Is it worthwhile for a company to hassle all its legitimate customers, just so it can delay by 70 minutes the appearance of unauthorized copies of its work?
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Big corporations aren't the root of all problems. Often it's people who try to game the system and take advantage of situations such as free music downloads that lead corporations to respond with solutions to protect themselves and others. If it weren't for your "useful" pirates, Microsoft and others would never have had reason to develop DRM. It was developed because people, individuals and corporations, got tired of being ripped off by their "friends", the consumers.
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Well, purchasers should be considered friends, even though leeches generally shouldn't be (unless they can be convinced to become purchasers). But I see your arguments as being similar to politicians' arguments for gun control (we wouldn't need gun control if criminals weren't so irresponsible with guns, but since criminals use guns we need to crack down on the law-abiding).
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And for your final point, about selling 500,000 copies with 0 pirates, or 750,000 copies with 1.5 million pirates. I'm not going to agree to the false premise you setup. You assume that just because something can't be copied, I won't sell as well. That might be true for some underground release that doesn't get much press or exposure otherwise, but for the vast majority of mainstream content, stuff that is really sought after, that simply isn't true. If people want it, they will buy it, and they certainly won't buy more of it if they can get it for free, particularly if they can get an exact digital replica for free. Take a stroll through any dorm of your local college, and you'll see exactly what I mean.
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I do not doubt that 'file-sharing' has damaged the bottom line of some record companies. It has also considerably benefitted the bottom line of some others whose works would otherwise be unknown. Obviously the Big Five record producers are going to see things differently from the independents, though I would expect that the benefits to the independent producers are more likely to trickle down to artists than the damage to the Big Five.
Let me close, though, by restating the big question: do Americans have the right to own computers they can control? I can certainly see that some people would not like Americans to have that right, for reasons that go far beyond copyright issues. I see DRM as being like gun control: the imposition of restrictions which affect the law-abiding much more than criminals, often imposed with motives much deeper and more sinister than the prevention of crime.
Posted by: supercat on January 20, 2005 06:47 PMUnder such a system, if I buy a piece of music from a record company, it would me marked with a watermark identifying that I purchased it from the record company; the watermark would only be detectable and decodable with a private key the record company would retain.
If I wanted to lend a copy of a piece of music to my friend, I could watermark it with a note explicitly stating that I was lending it to him and take from him a signed note acknowledging such; I would keep a private copy of the "key" to that watermark. If my friend circulated the file, the record company would point to me but I could in turn point to him.
If I wanted to sell a copy of a piece of music to my friend, I would give him a signed bill of sale and keep from him a signed receipt for same. As above, I would add my own watermark to the file, but this time noting that it was sold. Again, if my friend circulates the file, the music company points to me and I point to my friend.
I don't know whether the technological hurdles required to make such watermarking effective could be overcome, but if they could it would offer a means of countering piracy without having to interfere with people's right to own their own equipment. Since the only people manipulating watermarks would be those who created them, there would be no need for all the black-box initiatives surrounding DRM. People would retain all of the rights they enjoy under copyright law, but the rights of copyright holders would be protected as well.
What would you think of that sort of system, if the technological issues could be overcome?
Posted by: supercat on January 20, 2005 09:24 PMThis conversation we are having, while interesting, isn't scaling well given the forum we are having it in. If you'd provide a real e-mail address we can continue that way. Or just use mine, it's real.
And for the record, as a gun owner myself, I do support some forms of gun control. There are absolutely valid reasons why we need some gun control laws, just like there are valid reasons for DRM. If you want to continue talking about it, send me e-mail.
Posted by: Jason on January 20, 2005 10:09 PM