Given Apple's current stances on these very issues, I don't expect they're going to get a lot of sympathy here

Yet beyond the mere satisfaction of seeing the bully take a couple, it does highlight how inherently flawed the patent system has become, and that whether copyrights, patents or trademarks, it's all become so lawyered up as to defeat the very purpose of these limited protections.

That it arguably poisons the well for the rest of us and human innovation at large is something future generations are going to have to come to grips with; in the meantime as I don't see any short-term end in sight. Not a good time to be a start-up in that space.

Difficult to comment without having the inside scoop, but "sudden-death-by-beancounter" seems to be an increasingly common ailment in the electronic age.

Was either deemed superfluous, not worthy of the time, and I can hear the famous "can we just move on to focus on the core IP development" from the accounting department.

All arguments in which players having developed an emotional bond and deep attachment to the game has little if no place at all anymore; even though ironically that was the very thing the developers tried to elicit from customers at the start of the project. But in corporate terms, this has no place in any company's strategy.

Chew'em up, spit'em out. Any questions?

I would like to mention that with due respect to Ecoplate there are many seasoned audio professionals who would argue that the best reverbs are proper acoustic chambers like Capitol Studios' basement rooms, the Power Station's stairwells in NYC or the ones rumoured to be at Abbey Road and Air Studios in the UK.

As far as getting awesome plate reverb, there'll be some who will say that a pair of well-tuned and maintained mono tube EMT 140 units ganged together as a stereo effect is pretty much unbeatable. But the maintenance and tuning is a real lost art that very few techs remember. Also equally worthy of mention is the EMT 240 gold-foil plate, which has a sound of it own and has arguably been used on so many records that it is a necessary part of a producer's arsenal to get certain vintage sounds.

Although looked on as black sheeps by many fancy mix engineers, spring reverbs like the ones used back in the day at King Tubby's and Lee Scratch Perry's studios in Jamaica are something that just cannot be emulated with software, and have become such an integral part of the sound of Reggae that some pundits might find it a bit disingenuous to say that Ecoplates are that superior. Just as much, many producers used to splash AKG BX-10 and BX-20 spring reverb on many a track to the point that that sound became an important part of pop music in the late 60's and 70's.

So I'd venture to say that for anyone reading this who hasn't had experience with the gear mentioned those pronouncements about Ecoplate being so incredible should clearly be taken as a matter of someone's taste, aesthetic and cultural biases, rather than as fact.

I did not even bother going into the high-end digital reverb category, with serious contenders from Quantec, Bricasti, EMT, Sony, Lexicon, TC Electronics and other brands, many of which have found favor with all of today's price-is-no-object top mix engineers.

Just the same way a Neumann U-47 microphone can sound pretty bad when not used properly if either of its irreplaceable VF-14m tube inside or its gold-foil capsule have gone to the dogs, this is yet another illustration of what an inexact science audio production really is.

As always, use your ears!

Sounds like a patent deserving the 'Philip K. Dick Award' in the paranoid invention category.

I can guess a remedial approach... it's always been each person's choice to stop passively watching spoon-fed prime time entertainment programs.

There's so much high-quality content out there that more of it arguably makes little difference, especially since this quantity keeps increasing at such an exponential rate that we don't even have the time to watch a sliver of it anyway... I really don't see much of a down side to refusing to kowtow to any systems featuring 'safeguards' such as this, and that would include similar features.

All I can recall is the disappointment that occurred between the time I read the story and clicked on the link (anticipating a dreamy design of some sleek, yet-unseen and heretofore stunningly futuristic spaceship of the waters) and the first-glance impression when looking at the photos ("is this some sort of practical joke... structure looks like some gazebo-thing made out of Lego blocks with its square top... so totally, repulsively ugly not to mention impractical on the ocean"). Maybe it has some redeeming values somewhere else, but wow! That's a pretty amazing feat to design something that instantly feels this ugly.

On thinking about it a bit more, it did bring to mind the one-of-a-kind aircraft that Howard Hughes built, a monstrosity that he even managed to fly once, the Spruce Goose. But looking at it side-to-side, the biggest bird ever built seems fairly normal compared to this anomalous-looking ... 'thing'

Renamed "Steve's Folly', it will probably stay moored at some museum or other. Might just be the right kind of curiosity piece for Paul Allen to add to his collection.

Maybe we should reword this and describe this situation in tech terms.

Those wah-wah-bytes are really butthurt because they are very much like the classic monopolist telcos, some patent trolls, the **IAAs or anyone else who wants to continue to operate by steamrolling their competition, buying the laws to do this if necessary.

They have been historically accustomed to doing whatever they wanted, and are ready to go to any length to protect that monopoly. Just like the telco suing a town for giving its residents free wi-fi. Not so, you need to go through us...

And the wah-wah-bytes in question are certainly not ready to share these sophisticated mind control networks that took hundreds of years to build and maintain.

Why should anyone else have the right to be heard?

What's next after that, they're going to have to share the last mile of their brainwashing wires to let competing and unlicensed carriers deliver services over what they've built? Imagine! Suddenly having to allow others to freely voice their opinions, and for those opinions to be broadcast and heard without any control... that's just unheard of!

We should also takes these comments with a grain of salt, it's a show purely being put out for the home crowd to notice. The dudes saying this certainly aren't dumb enough to actually believe that it would work, but since Pakistan's prime minister clamored for the same thing the other day, they don't want to be less devout than the guy down the street and feel obligated to raise the stakes a bit higher on the BUPD scale (blind unconditional prophetic devotion).

But truly, once framed in corporate terms, all of it seems very far from outlandish. Quite the contrary, actually.... very practical and coherent.

Along the tortuous path of life, certain things irreversibly change over time. Accelerating the path to freedom from the mental shackles of organized, dogmatic religion would appear to be one of the direct consequences of inter-networked people freely and finally comparing notes between different brands of those good old 'All-powerful-being / be very scared / you should feel guilty, you unworthy scum' methods of mind control that have been in place for hundreds of years.

This happens to exactly be one of the first telltale signs of their unwilling abdication, as their hateful 'religion of peace' disintegrates in the face of a collective, planet-wide yawn. A day to celebrate!!

Good riddance.

Practical suggestion: close yourself off from the rest of the world instead. Miss you we will not.

Good luck, don't let the door hit you on the way out, and thanks for all the (fossilized) fish oil!

I certainly recall thinking to myself: "No way! This is about to open some mighty floodgates of industry regulation" and generally cause a category 4 sh*tstorm event by upsetting those who have suddenly been forced to think through the many consequences of such printing devices being made widely available to the general public without oversight.

It would only seem normal that whoever is in charge of domestic security would want to know all about this immediately, here and now. From an uniformed bystander's perspective (such as myself), investigating any similar scenario would appear to precisely be the very essence of their job description.

Given the current climate of constant knee-jerk hysteria as well as the über-paranoid security measures enacted on just about everything else, how can anyone even be surprised by this?

This really sucks, but from looking at this individual's Wikipedia entry he has successfully taken on far, far larger entities and caused enough trouble that it would seem as if he is some sort of well-funded masterful troll in his own way.

I think (unless you really want to go the predictably expensive legal route) the best course of action would be to find a way to start some sort of grass-roots effort to deface his entries and comment on all of these posts so that YouTube and WIkipedia are continuously overwhelmed with negative posts explaining the ploy, especially if you can find people who do it in in native tongue.

Then you can become a thorn on his side enough that at that time in my opinion he will just move on and pick other low-hanging fruits, driven by whatever motivates him and his organization of minions.

And if your work does not contain copyright notices, this incident should be a strong incentive to do it from here on out!

OK I happen to share his desire to make good-quality content available to people, no problem there.

But speaking from a studio perspective, and unless we're talking about analog masters from tape such as older recordings from the 70's and 80's, most modern masters are very seldom mixed to analog anymore, the majority of those who care about sound quality print digitally at resolutions of 24-bit / 96 kHz. [in MP3 language, that's 4608 kb/s, a fair amount of bandwidth] Now there are a few mastering houses who do 24-bit / 192 kHz... but I'd wager that they are a real minority already with that. From the 90's onwards, often times producers and bands only had the foresight to mix down to 16-bit / 44.1 kHz for their 2-track masters, and that's all that is ever going to be available. So this business about high quality sources being available is quite already murky IMHO.

Anyway, the important thing to keep in mind is that this previously quoted 24-96 number happens to be the sample and bit rate that the now-defunct DVD-Audio format was using. (R.I.P.) And for all intents and purposes, this sort of quality is also already currently available for download/purchase on HDTracks for a lot of classic Jazz albums. Would love to see sales figures on what that site sells. But I am sure that it's not very much.

Then there's the small matter of the death of SACD, Sony's wondrous Super Audio CD format no one knows about (or understands even, as it is not PCM). All of the 'Golden Ears' agreed that this was supposed to be far better than any existing system, and yet it doesn't appear to have worked out so well at all.

So I am scratching my head trying to understand what this Pono format can do better, when the sources have already been available at that level of definition, and that unless one goes back to analog masters (when available) and do new transfers, there is no more 'quality juice' to be squeezed out of that particular lemon.

Like I said, good intentions, but sadly it seems that the market has already spoken twice with regards to rejecting any high-resolution formats as being viable.

Besides the producer, the artist and the engineer, very few people care, it would seem. Not to sound cynical, but even on file-sharing sites where all of that stuff is basically 'free', it would appear that those hi-rez version do not get much in downloads at all.

I mean, not that there's anything wrong with being a bit quixotic about things you obsess about, especially if you can afford it. That can only be positive in the sense of raising people's awareness that all digital sounds are not created equal, and that some are quite awful to listen to, while others can make for a reasonably pleasurable experience.

But anyway: #goodluckwiththat

I think that in this case the 800-pound gorilla in the room is the fact that US terrestrial radio has been able to successfully keep extending an exemption from paying royalties to the owners of the sound recordings that Congress has granted them since 1934 or so; at the time the exemption was given in order for them to build their FM networks... wait! they're still building them. That's what it must be ... or else it would imply that radio and the NAB who represents them were just a bunch of greedbags.. clearly, this can't be!

we're not talking about the publishing side, only sound recordings, which is totally different

Keep in mind that every other radio station in the entire world is paying this sound recording royalty for the use of music on their stations.

Made sense to give US radio a break when records were selling by the bucketload, but now that they don't anymore, what's the reason for those stations to keep making bushels of money off advertisers by broadcasting that music for free, only paying the songwriters but not those who own the recordings?

The kicker is that because of reciprocity laws, no US owner of sound recordings gets paid from radio stations in the rest of the world for those same royalties which go to black box and gets shared by foreign companies since the royalties are not paid to foreign copyright owners by US terrestrial radio.

Of course, on the other hand Internet and Satellite radios have to pay... lovely... >:(

Wish I could have given you a nudge with this... thank for posting.

I must surely be one of the lone dissenting voices with this idea, but - as a long-time iPad owner - I often found myself wishing Apple (or anyone else) also offered a hand-held touch-screen model that was twice as large, where reading books and magazines didn't feel so constricted and one could actually enjoy this wonderful portable medium for the experience it should be able to deliver around the household or elsewhere.

Probably won't happen until we have paper-thin computing devices.... but I can't fail to observe that this whole digital revolution keeps manufacturers bringing a lot of their smaller/cheaper/lighter 'innovations' at the expense of a certain comfort and quality standards we all sort of were taking for granted, and which had to do with basic ergonomics and functionality rather than cramming features into something that sacrificed the very essence of the user's experience with the device in question.

[/rant_off]

Funny you came up with the same exact figure that most of these shady Russian sites sold music for.... (AllOfMP3.com, and so many more like Nuloop and such)

I'd say that $0.20 per track is a pretty reasonable price for digital goods, problem is you're starting to run into a conflict with the amount of revenue the law allocates to the composition's publishers and the songwriters they represent, which in the US is a statutory mechanical royalty rate of around $0.09 which did not seem outrageous when songs were selling for $1 or more, but at $0.20 for the whole thing, this has the potential to become a huge problem.

Anyway, my main argument is that the Russian sites must have researched the tipping point that would make people 'click and buy', which for music seems to me remarkably accurate at around $0.15 to $0.25 per song. Of course I wouldn't expect any record label to agree to this, this is a fight that will go on until those on the side of copyright owners who must change their expectations are given no other choice but to grudgingly take it.

Speaking of mechanical royalties, the white elephant in the room that almost everyone is continuing to ignore is that US terrestrial radio is -unlike any other radio networks in the entire world- still exempt from paying royalties to copyright owners for the use of the sound recording due to a long-standing exemption granted to them by Congress in 1933 to build out their FM networks. (they're still building them as we speak) Only publishers get paid, but nothing goes to those who funded and own the sound recording. [yes, publishing and ownership of master recordings are two separate, distinct areas that most people who aren't familiar with the setup tend to bundle as one thing]

To add insult to injury, and because of reciprocity agreements with other countries, this means that the owners of US copyright cannot collect income from radio play from stations in other countries since those foreign artists are not getting paid this income by US radio. That money goes to 'black box', famously shared and redistributed among society members in whatever country this happened

This exemption is therefore costing the owners of sound recordings an double whammy in lost income. This obviously made sense when one hand was washing the other, and radio play helped certain acts sell into the millions. So it was overlooked as a mere promotional expense. But now that records are not selling, the fact that radio is using all of this music for free -by only paying the publishers- is sticking out like a sore thumb.

I'd say for anybody who's mad, that'd be a much more logical place to start looking for some easy and very large additional income streams, rather than blabber on uselessly flapping their wings about online piracy. But it means butting heads with the NAB's tough lobbyists and ruffling a lot of feathers in places we usually don't have much access to, starting with addresses on K Street, District of Columbia.

Also have one of those Dell E6520 Windows 7 Pro 64-bit / Ubuntu dual boot - absolutely awesome machine with a full keypad, customizable media tray where you can put a second hard drive, a very sharp display and tons of expansion ports.

When those Dell boxes work, they're pretty sweet and very reasonably priced. Fingers crossed, mine never had any troubles...