if you make a threat, people aren't going to ignore that

this is not an overreaction or a big brother issue

you can never expect to make a statement which is clearly a threat and people are just going to ignore it

yup, well said

many of us also remember our youth fondly. when the teenage years are the most psychologically painful periods of a human life

we all have it. we forget the bad, and remember the good. it's also why people think things should be "like the good old days," to mythologize the past and always think things are getting worse. the truth of course that the past was more violent, poorer, and unhappier

it's a fundamental human conceit. historical myopia

you want to take away the government?

you want to magically remove corruptibility from the human race?

you don't want to go after the slimy assholes doing the corrupting?

you're a moron, really. not a baseless insult, an objective evaluation of your thinking. you want to ignore corruptors and focus only on the corrupted. fucking stupid

yes, absolutely, political corruption is a crime with a corruptor and a corrupted

why do you want to focus all blame on only one side of a deal that is the fault of two sides?

why do you focus zero blame on the guy who is paying for and often initiating the corruption? you think it's only innocent corporations being reached out to by sleazy politicians? seriously?

"someone bribed the bank guard and robbed the bank"

"so fire the guard, problem solved"

"what about the robbers?"

"uhhh...."

i see it as a similar conceit to anti-vaxxers

anyone who grew up when it was common for children to die at a young age due to common diseases would vaccinate wholeheartedly. but, distant those horrors, the effort necessary to maintain the status quo of healthy children becomes all you see: vaccinations, sticking needles in children, strange concotions i don't understand...

likewise, you have these similar fools who see the benefits of a regulated marketplace, but only see the onerous regulations, and not the horrors of what an unregulated marketplace is really like. so they react to the regulations as if they are the actual evil, just like anti-vaxxers

anyone who survived (broke) one of the many banking panics of the 1800s would claim the FDIC the greatest godsend. but, now that we don't have runs on banks, we just have this "evil" "world domination" "freedom destroying" scheme called the FDIC: morons think the FDIC is the actual evil

it's a conceit of lack of experience, lack of education, no awareness of history, prideful ignorance

According to TFS he set fire to the computer because he was , "mad and frustrated because he could not hack into the system." I'm not condoning his actions, but who amongst us hasn't, at least, entertained the idea of destroying a computer after simply trying to *use* it? I have bad thoughts about my Windows 7 desktop at work all... the... time. And to quote the movie "Office Space," "PC LOAD LETTER!!? What the fuck does that mean?" - didn't work out so well for that printer, did it?

so the rich and corporations do not use their money to change the laws to get even more money, for no extra effort?

you're ignorant and delusional

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

The consumers. You don't need a "next level up". Also, advertisers, corporations that want works for hire, any anyone else. Would you end up with individuals making millions off of one hit song? Probably not. But you'd end up with many more musicians than now actually able to make a living producing music.

Let's take this assertion by assertion.

1) What you don't understand....

Are you sure I don't understand? Or maybe you're not getting part of what I was saying?

2) Music production is expensive

It doesn't have to be. As I said, I've produced music. I've also performed music and recorded music. I've never spent more than $100/sitting for studio time; if you don't go with the major labels, you don't have to pay the major fees -- and the equipment has got to the point where recording and production doesn't really cost all that much in real expenses -- even Garage Band can handle basic production tasks (but doesn't have the recording room, which IS a major sunk expense). These days, I just trade studio time for services, and it costs me nothing but my time (and keeps my ears sharp).

3) If you want to be a musician you should be able to make a living at it without having to play I. Clubs every night.

I've never played I. Clubs. Of course, as a musician, I've never made it my day job either. But I could easily do so simply using an indy producer and social media, and not sell myself to the major labels, who might or might not decide to promote me. There's lots of ways to make a living as a musician; just not as a pop star -- because just like sports stars, there's only room for a few of those. Entitlement doesn't put food on the table.

4) There is only one Mona Lisa....

I personally wouldn't pay for a copy. I can see it online, I can make duplicates, take photos of it, etc. Copies are in the public domain. And da Vinci isn't going to be making any money off it anyway -- and didn't have copyright on his side back in the day; people copied his work freely, and yet people still appreciate it. So how did he make a living? He was a good painter, and people paid him to paint things. I think this example kind of proves my point much better than it proves yours.

5) Just because it can be copied and distributed daily doesn't make it right.

So you think it's wrong that I can copy and distribute the Mona Lisa daily? Do you think it's wrong that Disney can copy and distribute such titles as Cinderella, Mulan, Pocohantas, etc. daily, and even charge money for them? Because that's also copying the works of others. Or is your problem only with works that were produced by people still alive, who are expecting a certain level of remuneration for what they created?

6) The artist and the label should be paid.

Time to review my comments you replied to. Personally, I think the artist should be paid a lot MORE. I think labels should for the most part be abolished. I think recording studios should get paid what they charge the musicians, and if demand drops because someone can do it for less, then they don't deserve to be paid more, just because they want it. Right now, the labels only use specific studios, and so the studios have a monopoly on the labels' musicians, and can charge what they want (which gets paid by the labels, and docked against the musicians' contract).

The bigger question, and the point I was raising is WHO should pay the artist? In my view, this should be either a patron, crowdfunding, or someone backing the work being produced, with the understanding that what's being produced is a cultural artifact, not a physical good.

7) How do you people live in a capitalist society and not understand the basic principal of our economic system.

Multiple parts here... "you people" -- you mean the large segment of informed people who disagree with your narrow view of music and how it can be owned?

"live in a capitalist society" -- how do you know where I live? As it turns out, I live in a socialist society (not a communist society, but a social society -- yes, society even has social as its root).

But even in a capitalist society, if you're really playing by pure capitalist rules, the copyright construct would be abolished. People would pay for capital, not for ideas. There'd be less music professionally produced, it would probably be less diverse, but there'd be a HUGE folk music scene with music that wasn't professionally produced. And people would sell their music services at the rate that matched the demand, instead of labels creating artificial scarcity based on restrictive laws. It seems that I'm not the one not understanding the basic principles of capitalism and capitalist economics here.

8) An artist mushy spend $100000 in studio expenses and instruments along with weeks of work and tons of creative effort.

I think I've already covered that; it's provably false. It's the system that promotes current treatment of musical works that makes it cost so much for the artist. It's all about erecting barriers to entry to increase the value of each product released.

And weeks of work? Really? I spend YEARS on the stuff I create. I also do other things at the same time. Anything musically that's done in weeks is pretty much worthless, or is based almost totally on the works of others. And if you think a musician deserves money because they overspent on production, put in a few weeks on development and invested tons of creative effort... let me introduce you to the real world, where life doesn't work that way. I also write software. Some of it I've never got any money for at all, despite the fact that I know it's been used by others to make a profit. Most development houses spend months on new features, let alone the product itself.

Producing stuff takes LOTS of work. But you aren't entitled to making money just because you worked hard to produce something. People need to see value in it that makes them want to buy it. Usually, you do some market analysis first to see if you can find a buyer of your production services before you begin, or shortly after you begin, so that your sunk costs don't end up worthless.

On this note, it might be useful for more musicians to start using an agile methodology; work in sprints, produce something, make it available for consumption, and if people are willing to pay for it, use that money for the next round of development and production. If it turns out that nobody likes your work well enough to actually pay for it, quit while you're ahead, or figure out what you need to fix. You aren't entitled to being paid for it. Whether people borrow the ideas or not is beside the point.

9) And you think you should just be able to get that stuff for free? You think the studio should provide a million dollar recording studio for free?

I think you've totally missed my point. Why is it a million dollar recording studio in the first place? And everyone CAN get the "stuff" for free -- once it is shared, it's shared. You can't take it back again. That doesn't mean people should just go out and grab a product and distribute it for profit themselves; that's unfair competition. But it's also not what I was talking about. Some people are so caught up in a specific business model that they don't see how it harms society as a whole, and don't see the other alternatives that are already out there and being used, to make a living. Copyright is an imaginary construct; without it, music would be free. This is the point the GGP was making and that I agreed with.

10) Music and art are a business and just be user distribution mean gods changed doesn't change how the business works.

Businesses go bankrupt all the time; it's important how they execute their business plan. The current Labels-based music business is based on creating artificial monopolies at the expense of music in general, in order to funnel a large amount of money back to the middlemen. A business that doesn't turn a profit on its own merits doesn't survive, unless it is propped up by the government by things like copyright. This doesn't sound very capitalist, does it?

As I said before: Anyone who actually produces intellectual property who would feel threatened by things becoming free needs to take a hard look at why they feel threatened. Do they feel like they are currently being paid more than what they develop is actually worth on an open market?

plenty of those wealthy only get their wealth by warping the laws of the land to bring more wealth in their direction. we're not talking about hard working small business owners here, we're talking about parasites

additionally, i am not sure why we should worry about these "patriotic americans" fleeing the country being that doing so would give us more leverage to seize the means of their ill gotten gains, which is the real problem

so good fucking riddance should they flee

there's a certain kind of american who thinks "socialist" means "communist totalitarianism"

it's a kneejerk pavlovian response from cold war era propaganda without any thought education or historical awareness

i'm not a socialist and i can think of problems with socialism. but at least i can talk about the concept on its merits and lack thereof, rather than being a blind moron as to what the word really means and substituting ignorance from an expired era, the cold war, when considering the word emptily, rather than the real ideology the word actually represents

It would take a significant market penetration just to get to the point that night charging in this way would even offset the growth of electricity demand, let alone start counteracting the current incentives.

-Rick

• Customer: How do I do that?
• Tech Support: Use the big red switch at the back of the fuselage, just under the elevator. Flip it to 0/Off, count to 10 and flip it back to 1/On.

True story: Back in the early 1980s, I actually had a long-distance phone call with someone in which I was the "tech support" part of the above conversation. ... Me: "Are you sitting in front of the PC? Lean to your right... See that big red switch at the back of the case? ..."

The airlines will simply insert a clause in the purchase agreement that says they can dock you the difference if you don't show up on the second leg.

That is very unlikely to survive a legal challenge, because although statistically people doing what you are doing may be costing them money, (difficult to prove, but plausible) they would have a very hard time proving that not providing YOU the service caused them additional expenses that requires recovery.

Just because it's included in the contract doesn't guarantee it's enforceable.