4 ms·

The issue with Home Depot is that if I buy a dishwasher from there, I get one dishwasher. If I give that dishwasher away, I have no dishwasher. With online cont

by cwyers 11y ago

The issue with Home Depot is that if I buy a dishwasher from there, I get one dishwasher. If I give that dishwasher away, I have no dishwasher. With online content, that doesn't hold. If I give away a copy of an article I just read in the New York Times, I still have a copy. It goes even further than that. Content I can share with my friends is MORE valuable than content I keep all to myself, in some cases. (Paywalls are most successful where that isn't true -- where there's some advantage to having information that other people don't.)

gameguy43 11y ago
Don't copy that floppy!
- Sideloader 11y ago
  Home taping is killing music! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    Did it though? Is music "better" or "worse" now?
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Justin Bieber and Nicky Manaj vs Sly and The Family Stone and Marvin Gaye.
      - slowmotiony 11y ago
        Mainstream music sure does suck now, but music in general is better today than it ever was.
        coldtea 11y ago
        Music in itself, probably. But the "mainstreamity" (connecting a society and being a central cultural focus) is also a desirable attribute from music (from art in general), that is lacking today. That is, there's music that's great but not mainstream and music that's mainstream but not great. The sixties and seventies (up to the nineties maybe) had both. Modern good music has lost that, and everyone listens to good or even excellent music oblivious on his own little world and niche. (Oh, and I'm not waxing because I'm some Beatles-loving older guy -- I'm much younger and in fact I listen to tons of new music most people wouldn't even touch, from Nobukazu Takemura to Mount Erie, Four Tet, etc.). For me it's like great modern music is like some excellent Social Media site, with tons of features, great layout, speedy backends, nice UI et al, but where there are very few people using it. Yeah, in itself it might be a great web app, but where's the conversation and the social aspect?
      - braythwayt 11y ago
        I was around for Sly and The Family Stone and Marvin Gaye, and your comparison is biased. You can always take any two periods of time and compare the worst of X to the best of Y. When looking backwards, you have an especial temptation to compare whatever is popular right-this-instant to whatever from back then has stood the test of time, even if it wasn’t the most popular thing in the world. I’d compare Justin Bieber to The Monkees, personally.
        coldtea 11y ago
        >You can always take any two periods of time and compare the worst of X to the best of Y. Yeah, but both were in the top charts. Not that good stuff in the charts nowadays. >I’d compare Justin Bieber to The Monkees, personally. That comparison would also make my point, though. Bieber is for teenage girls, period, and bad at that. 60's music for teenage girls were the Beatles or at worse Petula Clark and the like.
    - Sideloader 11y ago
      What do you mean by "better" or "worse"? Music is certainly alive and well and I am absolutely spoiled for choice. My musician/dj/producer friends are all busy, happy people. The recording industry's "good old days" were mostly before my time but producer and musician Steve Albini, who was around back then, called the record industry out in 1993 in an essay succinctly titled The Problem With Music http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 Here he talks "about the advantages of the internet, the death of the major label system, copyright law and that ‘purple dwarf in assless chaps'" http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-k... Article and video here... http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at-face-the-music-how-the-internet-solved-problem-with-music http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at... An excerpt: In contrast to what almost anyone else will tell you, Albini believes there has never been a better time to be involved in music – as a fan and as a musician (excluding, perhaps, the megastars): “I see more bands and I hear more music than ever before in my life. There are more gigs, more songs available than ever before, bands are being treated with more respect, and are more in control of their careers and destinies. “I see them continuing as a constellation of enterprises: some big, some small, most small but all of them with a more immediate response from their audience and a greater chance to succeed. It is genuinely exciting.”
      - 72deluxe 11y ago
        Yes I would agree it has never been a better time! I was just asking to see if home taping really did affect it like people believe. For one thing, the quality of recording interfaces and the accessibility of such hardware is really really great at the moment. I play in a few bands and being able to record practices in clear quality and listen back to them would have been unheard of 15 years ago. As for the quality of that music, that's entirely subjective.
hyperbovine 11y ago
Obviously, copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP for this model to work. But that is as separate issue which is not mitigated by the ad-supported model. E.g. there are whole sites devoted to blatantly ripping off content from NY Times, WSJ, etc. and slapping their own ads on top.
- cwyers 11y ago
  It's not about being able to control the distribution of their IP, it's that allowing users to redistribute their IP makes that IP more valuable for users. This isn't a universal truth of all content, but it's certainly a truth for stuff like news articles. Look at this very website. It's premised around sharing articles, blog posts, and such and allowing users to add their own commentary and see what others think about the same article. Every time a paywalled article comes up on the front page Hacker News, half the posts in the first 10 minutes are about how to get around the paywall or complaints about the paywall. The point is, for a user of Hacker News, an article he or she can post on this site and share with other HN users is simply more valuable than an article he or she cannot. And that's not just a local phenomenon, it's part of Twitter, Facebook and a bunch of other smaller (sometimes ad hoc) online communities.
  - amelius 11y ago
    But isn't it great that HN lets us know which articles are worth paying for?
- tolmasky 11y ago
  Its a deeply interrelated issue. Personally, "copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP" is far more frightening to hear to me than anything about ads. Every "advancement" made for IP holders is usually incredibly customer hostile. We've seen international trade deals over this issue, we've seen fundamental rights degraded over this issue. I personally would prefer it not boil down to legal means of ensuring content owners get their content not ripped off (a last resort that rarely works), as opposed to a natural solution where the distribution method matches the natural inclinations of the users (people generally DON'T feel bad about stealing "content", but DO feel bad about stealing washing machines). For the record, ads existed before the internet too. Remember the radio? Remember PHYSICAL newspapers. Remember TV? Its kind of nice that the lower economic stratus of society has SOME access to all these services without being blocked by a paywall. In a paywall world, you walk into a library to use the internet because you don't have a computer, then are turned away from every site because you also don't have a credit card.

by cwyers 11y ago

gameguy43 11y ago

Don't copy that floppy!

Sideloader 11y ago
Home taping is killing music! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  Did it though? Is music "better" or "worse" now?
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Justin Bieber and Nicky Manaj vs Sly and The Family Stone and Marvin Gaye.
    - slowmotiony 11y ago
      Mainstream music sure does suck now, but music in general is better today than it ever was.
      - coldtea 11y ago
        Music in itself, probably. But the "mainstreamity" (connecting a society and being a central cultural focus) is also a desirable attribute from music (from art in general), that is lacking today. That is, there's music that's great but not mainstream and music that's mainstream but not great. The sixties and seventies (up to the nineties maybe) had both. Modern good music has lost that, and everyone listens to good or even excellent music oblivious on his own little world and niche. (Oh, and I'm not waxing because I'm some Beatles-loving older guy -- I'm much younger and in fact I listen to tons of new music most people wouldn't even touch, from Nobukazu Takemura to Mount Erie, Four Tet, etc.). For me it's like great modern music is like some excellent Social Media site, with tons of features, great layout, speedy backends, nice UI et al, but where there are very few people using it. Yeah, in itself it might be a great web app, but where's the conversation and the social aspect?
    - braythwayt 11y ago
      I was around for Sly and The Family Stone and Marvin Gaye, and your comparison is biased. You can always take any two periods of time and compare the worst of X to the best of Y. When looking backwards, you have an especial temptation to compare whatever is popular right-this-instant to whatever from back then has stood the test of time, even if it wasn’t the most popular thing in the world. I’d compare Justin Bieber to The Monkees, personally.
      - coldtea 11y ago
        >You can always take any two periods of time and compare the worst of X to the best of Y. Yeah, but both were in the top charts. Not that good stuff in the charts nowadays. >I’d compare Justin Bieber to The Monkees, personally. That comparison would also make my point, though. Bieber is for teenage girls, period, and bad at that. 60's music for teenage girls were the Beatles or at worse Petula Clark and the like.
  - Sideloader 11y ago
    What do you mean by "better" or "worse"? Music is certainly alive and well and I am absolutely spoiled for choice. My musician/dj/producer friends are all busy, happy people. The recording industry's "good old days" were mostly before my time but producer and musician Steve Albini, who was around back then, called the record industry out in 1993 in an essay succinctly titled The Problem With Music http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 Here he talks "about the advantages of the internet, the death of the major label system, copyright law and that ‘purple dwarf in assless chaps'" http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-k... Article and video here... http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at-face-the-music-how-the-internet-solved-problem-with-music http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at... An excerpt: In contrast to what almost anyone else will tell you, Albini believes there has never been a better time to be involved in music – as a fan and as a musician (excluding, perhaps, the megastars): “I see more bands and I hear more music than ever before in my life. There are more gigs, more songs available than ever before, bands are being treated with more respect, and are more in control of their careers and destinies. “I see them continuing as a constellation of enterprises: some big, some small, most small but all of them with a more immediate response from their audience and a greater chance to succeed. It is genuinely exciting.”
    - 72deluxe 11y ago
      Yes I would agree it has never been a better time! I was just asking to see if home taping really did affect it like people believe. For one thing, the quality of recording interfaces and the accessibility of such hardware is really really great at the moment. I play in a few bands and being able to record practices in clear quality and listen back to them would have been unheard of 15 years ago. As for the quality of that music, that's entirely subjective.

hyperbovine 11y ago

Obviously, copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP for this model to work. But that is as separate issue which is not mitigated by the ad-supported model. E.g. there are whole sites devoted to blatantly ripping off content from NY Times, WSJ, etc. and slapping their own ads on top.

cwyers 11y ago
It's not about being able to control the distribution of their IP, it's that allowing users to redistribute their IP makes that IP more valuable for users. This isn't a universal truth of all content, but it's certainly a truth for stuff like news articles. Look at this very website. It's premised around sharing articles, blog posts, and such and allowing users to add their own commentary and see what others think about the same article. Every time a paywalled article comes up on the front page Hacker News, half the posts in the first 10 minutes are about how to get around the paywall or complaints about the paywall. The point is, for a user of Hacker News, an article he or she can post on this site and share with other HN users is simply more valuable than an article he or she cannot. And that's not just a local phenomenon, it's part of Twitter, Facebook and a bunch of other smaller (sometimes ad hoc) online communities.
- amelius 11y ago
  But isn't it great that HN lets us know which articles are worth paying for?
tolmasky 11y ago
Its a deeply interrelated issue. Personally, "copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP" is far more frightening to hear to me than anything about ads. Every "advancement" made for IP holders is usually incredibly customer hostile. We've seen international trade deals over this issue, we've seen fundamental rights degraded over this issue. I personally would prefer it not boil down to legal means of ensuring content owners get their content not ripped off (a last resort that rarely works), as opposed to a natural solution where the distribution method matches the natural inclinations of the users (people generally DON'T feel bad about stealing "content", but DO feel bad about stealing washing machines). For the record, ads existed before the internet too. Remember the radio? Remember PHYSICAL newspapers. Remember TV? Its kind of nice that the lower economic stratus of society has SOME access to all these services without being blocked by a paywall. In a paywall world, you walk into a library to use the internet because you don't have a computer, then are turned away from every site because you also don't have a credit card.