bryans

Having a GPS location doesn't mean you have a suspect. Unless the person called from their own property (zero chance) or didn't move locations at all after making the call (very unlikely), it would require a substantial investigation that most departments aren't able or willing to do, because the odds of catching someone would be extremely low.

Late on the reply, but I don't think your argument matches reality.

1. Storage for 50MB is less than $0.001 per month. So, even if you're storing and backing up every every version of an app, and they update a very high 50 times per year, and they're storing on 12 different locales, that's less than $1 per year for the typical app.

2. "Global distribution" is a one time cost per app update at approximately $0.006 per 50MB per server. For 12 updates per year spread across 12 servers, that's less than $1 per year total. Over 75% of apps are updated less than once per month.

3. Retries, re-downloads and updates are already insignificant transfer costs, per my original comment. Even if you want to attribute 90% of those downloads to being updates from the same set of users, and keep the lifetime revenue per user at a very low estimate of $1, Apple is still taking $6,000 for approximately $105 of hosting costs.

All in all, that matches my original estimate of $100 per 200k downloads for transfer and $5 for server fees. So, as I said, hosting isn't relevant to the conversation, at all.

> The servers do not cost 30% of all sales on the platform. Not even close.

Specifically, the transfer cost to download a 50MB app is approximately $0.0005. That's 200,000 downloads per $100. Even assuming a low average revenue of $1 per download, that's a $60,000 take for Apple for maybe $105 worth of hosting.

That's not to say there aren't other costs involved in running the store. But we definitely shouldn't be pretending that hosting is even relevant to the conversation. Hosting costs haven't been relevant for over a decade.

No, you literally cannot stop people from acquiring guns in the United States, as it's baked in the Constitution. Please make arguments based in reality.

If you want to build trust in this industry, I think you'll need to do better than cloning an existing product and slapping a "for the people" label on it. Content creators of all types are exhausted by the endless nickel and diming, so at this point, transparency is going to be the only way to attract a mass audience.

When everyone knows hosting costs equate to a fraction of a penny per sale, you'll need to strongly justify that 5% fee. You'll need to pay ~3.5% in PRO fees just to have public playback on the site -- even if there's not a single cover song among the uploaded albums -- so let both the artist and fan know where that money is going and why.

A huge problem with the "pay what you want" model is that the host and PRO still get to middleman what is fundamentally a tip from the fan. Find a way to implement a secondary form for tips that go straight to an account the artist owns, without making the purchase form more complicated, and you'll have an attractive and unique feature.

However, Fourthwall already has a polished version of your product roadmap and charges less for it, albeit without the music-specific theming, and even Patreon recently implemented direct digital sales. You're facing an uphill battle against entrenched and VC-backed products.

When it comes to drug abuse, harm reduction can mean providing clean needles and other supplies to the user. The person isn't going to stop just because they're denied clean supplies. In the same way that you can't stop people from acquiring guns, but you can help prevent them from purchasing guns that are fundamentally unsafe to operate.

There are some clever folks on gig sites (Fiverr, Upwork, etc) who are feeding stock video into AI just for the "artificialization" of each frame, while visually retaining the same actors' features, clothing and background scenes -- which also allows cuts that are longer than 4s. The results are surprisingly good, as long as you can find stock footage of the scenes you need.

I just moved into an apartment advertised at $1,420/mo that is costing over $1,700/mo because of extra fees only mentioned in fine print inside a 100+ page lease. The "no hidden fees" ISP that I'm now forced to use has over $30/mo in hidden fees. It's not just prevalent, it's business as usual for every company everywhere -- because they can and they know nobody will do anything about it.

MIDI playback does not require a device and is baked into the OS via QuickTime's synthesizer and Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth.

> No, they aren’t.

Very convincing argument. Also, that's maybe the one part of this discussion that can't be debated. Possession of illegally obtained property, intellectual or otherwise, is illegal. Always has been, always will be. It's bizarre for you to be claiming otherwise.

> While copyright violation is often metaphorically (or hyperbolicly) referred to as stealing [...]

You are making a pedantic argument about the term "stealing," which is annoyingly pointless given the rest of that sentence (which you conveniently didn't quote) acknowledges the debate about the term. However, there's no debate to be had. The courts have clarified that violating intellectual property is still a denial of owed compensation (theft), but instead prefer the term "infringe" to make clear the distinction between violating physical rights (criminal) and violating intellectual rights (civil).

It's still a violation of copyright to be in possession of works obtained via illegal reproduction. You have zero fair use protections for illegally reproduced content. You are still breaking the law. You are still stealing via denial of compensation. The courts have already clarified all of this. Your pedantry doesn't change any of that.

Absolutely it is. There is two centuries of precedence marking copyrighted works as property. It's literally called intellectual property. The courts have only made clarification that intellectual property doesn't violate physical property theft laws (denying ownership), but instead intellectual property theft laws (denying compensation).

> Right, the question is, when my computer requests a file from your computer, which one of us is "making a copy" ? It becomes less ambiguous to ask who is doing the publishing.

That question is irrelevant in a discussion about legality, because it doesn't matter who physically made the copy at the time of transfer. It only matters if the first party has the legal rights to distribute it, which they don't. Since you are knowingly taking possession of copyrighted property that they don't have the rights to, then you have now violated the copyright by obtaining an illegal reproduction.

> In a physical analogy, if someone is selling bootleg DVDs on the street, I don't think anyone ever got busted for being a customer.

Just because you don't get arrested for purchasing a bootleg DVD, doesn't make it legal. Not all illegal things involve arrest or prosecution. Lots of illegal things can only result in civil lawsuits. This is one of those things. The reason the seller of the bootleg DVDs can be arrested, is because the cities where bootleg sales are most common have laws specifically targeting the advertisement and sale of copyrighted works that were reproduced illegally. If you buy one, you're still violating the copyright and the MPAA could file a lawsuit if they had any evidence of your purchase and felt it was worth their time.

> Possession of copyrighted material in itself is not illegal.

The means of procurement matters. If they are in possession of copyrighted material because someone without the proper rights gave it to them illegally, then the possession itself is also illegal. It's illegal to own knowingly stolen property in all 50 US states and most countries, and while we could argue to the end of days about whether copying a file truly qualifies as stealing, the legal precedents are very clear on the matter.