Month: January 2008

This Washington Post article has been getting a lot of play, and from a pretty diverse group of bloggers (like here, here, and here – not to mention every tech blog on the planet). (It also looks as though the suit in question is not over copying CDs, but rather downloading. Regardless, RIAA goes on record saying that copying CDs is illegal.)

None of this should be a surprise – the original drafts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act tried to make it illegal to copy any digital content. Whether that made it into the final Act, I don’t know, but that was certainly the position of the content-provision industry all along.

And why not? This is an industry whose entire business model for the past quarter century has been based on selling you stuff you already own. In the 80s, they sold you CDs to replace the records you already bought. Every Christmas since, they repackage greatest hits compilations to sell you more stuff that you probably already own. Now they want us to pay to download music that we probably already own in two or three different formats and on two or three different albums. With a business model like that, suing your customers makes a hell of a lot more sense than trying to come up with a quality product worth buying.

In the comments section of my last post, Cap’n Transit points to an entry on his blog that brings up an aspect of making connections to the ferry that I had not considered. Namely, that the ferry companies do it. The Cap’n mentions the success that New York Waterway (the “Jersey ferry”) has had with running shuttle buses both in Manhattan and New Jersey. Imperatore and company figured out long ago that without connections on the land side, ferries were really only useful to people who lived and worked within a short walk of the ferry. By providing an extensive shuttle service on land, NYWW has greatly expanded its customer base. By doing so, they effectively eliminate the need to get on public transit in Manhattan, thus eliminating the two fare problem (in the process, though, adding to the congestion on Manhattan streets).1

I’d recommend reading Cap’n Transit’s original blog post (Water Taxi: What If?). He also touches on the issue of accessibility that I discussed, but from the point of view of LIC commuters. The formula remains the same (live near the ferry, work near the ferry – no problem), he just provides more and different examples. The rest of the blog is also worth a tour.

1. NYWW has an advantage over New York Water Taxi (the “East River ferry”), in that NYWW is a much bigger operation, and can thus better afford to run an extensive shuttle service. The incremental cost per fare (which is surely included in the fare) is thus pretty negligible.↩