Slashdot Mirror

Did apple ever have to pay anything? Or were they just in trouble?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090204/1723223648.shtml

My search of "apple norway 'new arsehole'" didn't bring up what I wanted.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20071204/005038.shtml

First off, the process of jailbreaking an iPhone is so trivial that "hack" hardly does the process justice. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to describe it as a non-Apple approved upgrade.

Well, it's not exactly trivial according to the guide I read, but perhaps the state of the art has moved on since then.

However, it's worse than "non-Apple approved": Apple has been claiming that jailbreaking is illegal. Now, personally, I'm not at all opposed to copyright infringement, but given the choice between two devices that do all the same things, I'd still choose the one that does them legally (and I'd certainly recommend that one to friends who might be concerned about the law than I am).

Second, are you hainging out on the right website? It used to be the Slashdot mantra that the easy way was less desirable.

Er, I think that was a caricature of the "Slashdot mantra". Only a masochist would prefer the difficult way just for the sake of adding difficulty to his life.

But again, it's about more than whether it's easy or difficult to hack the device. It's about being treated with respect by the vendor. A vendor that gives you specs and drivers is better than one that gives you no support and makes you fend for yourself, even if it's a fun challenge to reverse engineer their hardware. A vendor that lets you install your own software right out of the box is better than one that makes you violate their recommendations and terms (and, potentially, the law) in order to do the same thing.

I'm the annonymous coward that posted this initially, just forgot to login. Gonna reference an article on techdirt.com where they talk about an interesting solution. Government funded companies lay down fiber and lease it to ISP's. This would be similar to how ISP's handled dial-up connections in the 90's using the existing phone lines. http://techdirt.com/articles/20090408/2138164440.shtml

Don't the torrent networks disallow MPAA use? That would mean on connection that the MPAA is in breach of contract, they're not law enforcement agents and presumably don't have a warrant of the court??

It would be impossible to breach the contract of a website outside of the US, I believe(I am curious myself, so someone correct me if I'm wrong), however you can use Peer Guardian for some basic protection from connections from places such as MediaSentry.
And, yes, there has been questions raised before about XXAA & MediaSentry getting/not having a private investigator license:
http://delta.techdirt.com/blog/index/articles/20090219/0135273829.shtml

I wrote a piece on Craigslist's Increasingly Complicated Battle Against Spammers last year. They've tried everything known and it hasn't worked. They've tried capchas, email confirmation, phone confirmation, and IP address checking. It hasn't helped. There's a whole industry providing tools to help spam Craigslist.

Craigslist is now leaning hard on some of the companies helping others spam Craigslist, with modest success. At least Craigslist spamming tools are no longer available via Google Checkout. (With that, Google was close to being an active participant in illegal activity.) "www.adsoncraigs.com", the source of Craigslist Auto Poster, has been shut down. Some of the Craigslist posting tools use a program to break captchas, and some outsource the job to a service in a low-wage country.

The going price for oursourced manual captcha solving is around $0.60/1000 captchas.

If Jailbreaking required breaking out the terminal and doing arcane things, I would not raise it as a point. But it's as easy as installing an application, literally anyone can do so, and there's no danger in doing so

If this guide is accurate, it's a little more involved than that. Certainly more complicated, and scarier for the average user, than what you need to do to enable an Android phone to run non-Market apps (4 clicks - no need to even hook it up to a computer).

It's simply disingenuous to pretend that iPhone is on the same level as Android when it comes to running arbitrary software. Yes, technically you can do it if you put in the effort, but it's not a trivial process, and you have to violate the intentions and recommendations of the manufacturer/carrier (and, allegedly, copyright law) to do it.

Theaters are losing ground? since when? Just because the industry says so doesn't make it true.

they just want a fanbase without piracy

Unfortunately for them, that's not going to happen. I'm not even going to blame it on the Internet because copyright infringement has been around for as long as copyright law. They should be looking to grow their fan base, not shrink it. Some people will pay for stuff they like, some will not, but that doesn't mean you should be ignoring the non-payers. They very well might encourage their payer friends who are not currently in your fan base to become a part of it. The goal should be to grow your fanbase.

Oh, I most certainly DO NOT believe anything the RIAA puts out for public relations. And, yes, I agree anything that goes counter to RIAA's wishes is great. My question, though, regards the treaty. If that treaty is signed, the courts will have very little to say, regarding enforcement. The government will be bound to round up anyone who violates the treaty, and to punish them. Of course, the treaty is all bound up in secrecy, with RIAA and brethren "advising" all the governments involved. Even the "Open Government" President, Obama, has signed off on that secrecy. We are about to be shafted, no matter what any court rules, thereby making all court rulings irrelevant. And, that won't just be us, in the U.S. - this thing is going to go global!! http://wikileaks.org/wiki/EU_denies_ACTA_document_request%3B_democracy_undermined%3F Obama Administration Claims Copyright Treaty Involves State Secrets?!? from the openness,-transparency dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090313/1456154113.shtml In short, my freind, the stakes have been raised.

that are filled with Verizon/SBC/etc patents.

Note to all, the telco monopoly litigate with vengeance when an organization tries to cut into their hostage base. See Vonage case for the ultimate, totally unjustified, vigorish.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070417/005814.shtml

Face it, if you're going to go on tour and cover the cost of touring, you'd better be pretty famous already. And the idea that people like to donate for free stuff in any significant amount is contradicted by pretty much everything I've heard whether it's software projects or otherwise.

You must work for a record label, because this is exactly the sort of nonsense they spout in order to try and prop up their failing business model through legislation.

Here is a great example of how giving away things can make you a lot of money in the long run. You don't have to be famous to begin with...you just have to be talented and smart enough to figure out how to make money with that talent.

I suspect this last part is the major reason there are so many musicians whining about file sharing taking food out of their mouth...the reality is that they just aren't talented or smart enough to keep producing music in a way that people are willing to pay for.

Except for the french president, he only needs two more.

Well, not directly him.

Simple. Accuse prominent law-makers of copyright violations.

Three times.

Except for the french president, he only needs two more.

There probably needs to be made a ruckus for each law-maker that needs to be disconnected, but after a few successful stories in the media, they'll either write exceptions for themselves into law (and that can easily be used against them next elections) or the law is dropped.

Incumbent short-sighted players have been able to hinder and harm progress, but they can't keep it down completely. That culture of improvement can't be stopped entirely.

[...] often [...] the innovators of yesterday seek to stop the innovators of tomorrow, but the march of innovation hasn't been stopped yet.

The sibling posters have made excellent responses to you already, but I'm going to point out another aspect.

Look at any supply and demand curve and you will see that when supply becomes infinite that price drops to 0 regardless of demand. In the digital age making copies can be done for such trivial cost and by anyone so easily that supply of a recorded song is infinite for all intents and purposes. Economically smart musicians will realize this, and the economically dumb ones should hire economically smart managers that would realize this. You sell the scarcity, not the infinite good. Every artist has some kind of scarcity they can sell. It could be concerts, t-shirts, posters, etc. But it could even just be access to the musician. This has been done by small-time artists (e.g., Corey Smith) as well as big-name artists (e.g., Trent Reznor).

If a musician is finding that it isn't worth creating music because of financial reasons, it could be that their music has no value to anyone(i.e., it sucks) or that people who would value it can't find them. Free music can help to fix the latter. No business model, no amount of copyrights, no amount of DRM, no amount of copy-protection is going to fix the former.

I know it must be hard for you to bear, having a responsible centrist president. But fortunately THESE election results were valid, unlike your Mr. Chimp's first election by judge. It shows your real character, that winning is more important to you than democracy. So I don't feel too sorry for you. In fact, I'm glad the Republicans have become the marginalized party of the deep south, religious fanatics, and wingnuts everywhere. Please, please run Palin for president! That would guarantee another four years of Obama. Seriously, you guys just need to form a new conservative party. Your current one is deceased.

Centrist!=responsible any more than left/right-wing==irresponsible.

You want responsible? Don't look at BHO. He just ballooned your personal debt to $42521.12 (individual share = total debt/population). That's debt you can't escape by filing bankruptcy. And if you don't pay it, <hyperbole>Dog the bounty hunter will come to your door with a Swat team of</hyperbole> IRS agents and take your freedom.

Bush wasn't particularly responsible in a lot of ways. I most certainly didn't agree with his actions regarding my freedoms enumerated in the constitution. I didn't agree with a lot of his fiscal policy, either. Especially towards the end. He wasn't the worst president, but he aslo wasn't the best. However, this isn't about him. He can never be president again. I wash my hands of him as much as I can.

Now, let's address your messiah, Obama. Noted in various sources to have been one of the most liberal senators in office (when he showed up for a vote), he arose out of nowhere in the political landscape and won his elections by invalidating his opponents' candidacies (not challenging the election counts, or mudslinging, he literally made himself the only choice).

He promised Hope(tm) and Change(tm) and to Clean Up Washington(tm). And how does he Change(tm) things? Hmmm, let's see. Looks like a more liberal version of the Clinton administration (complete with insiders from the original Clinton administration!). Obama also seems to have a distinct preference for nominating people for his cabinet who have tax issues. Definitely a Change(tm) we can all Believe(tm) in.

He promised responsibility, but we got a pork-laden "stimulus" package with such gems as more funding for ACORN and MoveOn.org. Certainly these wonderful organizations simply want to empower you! What's that? You went to ACORN and asked them to help you get out the vote for Ron Paul? Oh, right. They want to empower you only so long as you vote for their approved candidate. I knew there was a catch in there.

"But...", I hear you say, "he's upstanding and honest, a real bang up guy who wants to stand up for me!" O`Rly? That's why his VP is one Joeseph Biden, a known copyright hound. That's why three of his top appointments to the justice dept were lawyers for the RIAA. You know, the RIAA that seems to think suing children, grandmothers, disabled people, state universities, and laser printers is a good business model. That's why he stands up for more regulation and law like Roe v Wade which purports a right to privacy, but in reality just usurps state control for the federal government. That must be why he wants to send your money to other countries to support abortion. Surely that's out of the goodness of his heart.

I could go o

If this asshole did this with what I would have to guess was secure information....putting these plans on a non-secure computer, that alone can get you some heavy legal problems, and possibly jail time.

Except that these incidents happen happens all the time, without jail time. No one's been prosecuted publicly for deploying known insecure systems like Windows, despite there certainly being a paper trail leading to the culprits. Take the case where Windows somehow got onto base computers in Afghanistan and were subsequently owned by malware letting still more outsiders into the network. Windows has such a cult following that it's likely the authorities will continue to turn a blind eye to the incident and make up excuses for not deploying systems capable of filling mission-critical roles.

Another prime example is that the world's seventh largest economy was shut down for five hours because some individuals decided to override technical decisions with an ideology. There are more such incidents monthly than you can shake a stick at. In a lot of regions, a threat to national economy or security is rated by the cost of the damage. Yet, for anything related to Windows, these metrics appear not to be applied.

In any other field, heads would roll.

The President is appointing the legal staff of the BSA and RIAA to the top law enforcement positions in the land, and the MPAA has initiated the revolving door maneuver with Assistant Attorney General John Malcolm. It seems to me that the more things change the more they remain the same. What we've done is change who our government is sold out to.

Apparently with the change of administrations imaginary property has become the new military industrial complex because of a focus shift from foreign to domestic policy, in accordance with the party predilection. We're pulling out of wars with other people and engaging ourselves. Next step: disarm the victim. Yay! I can't wait to see how this turns out. I would rather we engaged foreign people if we have to fight at all, but my true preference would be to relax and let stuff sort itself out.

The headline might as well read "Sun's McNealy wishes for invisible pink unicorn."

Just because giving credit is generally worthy doesn't mean it should be legally mandated in all situations. Nor do legal mandates magically prevent the scenario painted above. Nor does not legally mandating credit disallow you from claiming credit for your work. And copying without credit is not always bad in a straightforward manner. Check out some of the articles linked at http://techdirt.com/search.php?q=plagiarism for some explorations of pluses and minuses. And of course you don't have to use the instrument if you don't want to.

I am certain this will work!

Micropayments are not an answer for anything.

What that really means is that 2$ is what we consider the total value of news. Not "2$ daily".

2$/yr? I'll pay that for news subscriptions. Anything more? What's the point? I don't want paper, and news isn't even reliable anymore. Honestly what was the last time the spin was worse via newspaper than via internet?

Masnick's Law! You can always see it coming from a mile.

OK, then, how about substituting "Internet Movie Database" for "The Pirate Bay"?

Both make money in exactly the same way...with ads that appear on a site that has a lot of information about copyrighted material.

Heck, if you treat copyright the way the Associated Press does, IMDB is far worse, as they directly host things like quotes from movies and TV shows, which means they should pay up to the copyright holders.

That's the whole point of this trial...despite what the big copyright holders want you to believe about copyright law, it's generally not actually written the way they claim it is.

Are Radiohead and NineInchNails big enough?
Oh wait, I know your response: the recording industry made them famous first, so now they don't need them, so they're not valid examples.
Ok, what about this guy or this guy or these guys or the $4.2million guy.

Don't confuse the record labels mass market hits which you've heard of with bands and artists that are doing quite well without them.
Just to be clear, I'd never heard of Blake Shelton but that doesn't mean he isn't making gobs of money for the record companies, so don't presume that just because you've never heard of these people that they are not popular, and more importantly that they can't make a living without the recording industry.

Are Radiohead and NineInchNails big enough?
Oh wait, I know your response: the recording industry made them famous first, so now they don't need them, so they're not valid examples.
Ok, what about this guy or this guy or these guys or the $4.2million guy.

Don't confuse the record labels mass market hits which you've heard of with bands and artists that are doing quite well without them.
Just to be clear, I'd never heard of Blake Shelton but that doesn't mean he isn't making gobs of money for the record companies, so don't presume that just because you've never heard of these people that they are not popular, and more importantly that they can't make a living without the recording industry.

The Democrats are in the **AA's pockets even more than the Republicans, hell VP Biden might might as well be on the payroll.

The Justice Department certainly is.

If you're using a standard connector, use it as intended! A "USB type B" connector should only be 5V, should not exceed the current ratings, etc. If the device being charged is built per the USB slave specs:

- Any USB connector is a suitable power supply for recharging.

- You don't need a special chip, nor a special charger.

- The USB connector is used in a 100% standard way, so there is no risk of damaging another USB device by attaching it to the charger instead of the PC.

- A standard battery charger IC can handle the job at less cost.

- Using standard USB for charging has already been proposed in China.

It would also be a helluva lot more successful if we could eliminate most of piracy.

Yes it would, but is it the most efficient business model? I don't know, but unless people try other models we'll never know. Oh hey look, people are and they are being successful, and their business models don't rely on checking or curbing piracy, which means they don't have to resort to more expensive litigation and DRM and "educational campaigns" that add to their costs but contribute nothing to their revenues.

I can also say that if we condone piracy, then we have a lot to lose.

Not so, if the business models moved to not only allow but perhaps even encourage piracy then we lose nothing and gain a lot. And that "would make distribution easier, benefiting publishers, the artists working for them, and especially, indie artists who can't survive piracy sapping their few profits." So I guess it does come down to business model issues. There are people out there right now experiment and changing their business models with great success to where they don't care if their stuff gets pirated and some even want their stuff on bittorrent.

Proving what? That pirates buy media?

Again you are missing the point on the piracy buying media thing. Did you read any of those articles? They don't say pirates buy media, they say pirates buy more media than the average media buyer. It might be because of guilt. It might be because they like to support those that create stuff they like. It might be that they pirate because they really like media more than others and thus of course are going to be spending more on that media. Does it matter why they do it? Perhaps, but as of right now, they buy more on average than non-pirates.

Also, it doesn't show guilt is in play. None of those studies showed that was the reason. They only reported on the findings that pirates buy more on average, not the reasons why. You are jumping to that conclusion and so the rest of that paragraph is useless conjecture at this point. I will venture a useless guess as well and say that people pirate because they love music/movies/games and because they love it they buy it, and because they've bought so much they can't afford to buy more, so by pirating they didn't cost any one a sale since they weren't going to buy it anyway. In short, they pirate because they bought so much they couldn't afford any more.

As a final note, I'd like to add that since your first comment in this thread you have not provided one source or link to back up anything you've said. On the other hand, I have given over a dozen links various websites, articles, studies, blog posts, artist forums, etc that backup my claims. I'll

South Koreans consume LOTS of bandwidth just watching "broadcasting" and films/"pirated" DVDs. Probably there is little crackdown on at least the piracy of DVDs and related material because ultimately sales downstream probably depend upon or are enhanced by it. Plus, in the South, there are seriously dedicated gamers who'd probably put to shame just about any of the rest of the world.

The Bandwidth Capital of the World
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.08/korea.html

Korea Broadband Archives (12)
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/broadband/korea/

Who Wants To Watch Full Length Movies On Their Mobile Phones?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080401/105208716.shtml

south korea, bandwidth
http://www.zdnetasia.com/tags/south-korea+bandwidth/

Until and unless US bandwidth consumers need or demand higher speed and quality and demand it for reasonable (to consumer, not to the execs/investors or excessive R&D or boondoggling) pricing, people here will just shrug it off.

Afterall, don't forget:

Two-thirds of Americans without broadband don't want it
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/01/two-thirds-of-americans-without-broadband-dont-want-it.ars

Most Americans without broadband don't want it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/23/poll_most_without_broadband_dont_want_it/

(Captcha: maleness)

• Subscription based models like MMOs
• Sell a different service
• Trust that pirates will still buy your game
• Move entirely to consoles
• Move to arcades only
• Tie your games to hardware
• Ask fans for donations
• Offer tiers for pricing giving away more scarce goods
• Offer incentives to buy

However, what you are really asking is for someone who is complaining to do the job of the business department of the video game companies. It is their job to figure out how to make money, not the legal departments, not their customers. It wouldn't matter if piracy were never an issue, sitting around hoping that the previous generation's business model will work for you is the most certain way to be a dying company.

I would suggest that any game company that resorts to DRM really needs to fire their business people. It fails miserably in its intended purpose, pisses off paying customers, and costs more money (thus less profit) to implement. It is an abject failure, yet some brain dead idiots think they'll get it right "this time."

They might see an increase in sales via preview assuming they have good content—if it's only okayish, however, someone listening to a free preview might decide not to buy it, instead of committing to do so. The reverse, of course, also applies.

I don't think record companies are disallowing copies of their content for that reason (surely they'd see both sides of the free preview coin), but it's an interesting side effect, and one that's generally relevant to free-content business models.

Mr. Masnick's techdirt post is a welcome call for calm and even optimism. It is a reminder of the importance of perspective, the sort of wisdom encapsulated in the expression "This, too, shall pass" -- that is, just as most joy and glory is transient, so will the troubles and woes of today eventually vanish.

That said, his post is revealingly presumptuous. He writes about people trying to "hold back progress" and describes his frustration at not being able to convince them "of just what opportunities moving forward provides." But perhaps the reason he is so frustrated is that he misses a basic truth: that the people he describes aren't actually seeking to "hold back progress" -- they just have a different understanding of what is progress and what isn't, of what counts as "moving forward" and what doesn't. People do not agree on what is in the public interest; they do not agree about what is best for society, for the state, for the family.

Persuading those who disagree with you is not always a matter of marshalling facts or, as Mr. Masnick puts it, "clearly paint[ing] a picture." Often the people who disagree with you already understand the facts full well and already see the picture clearly -- they just disagree about whether what you call progress is indeed progress. This disagreement might well be rooted in a vision of the future that is fundamentally in conflict with your own. (See, for example, Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions and Yuval Levin's Imagining the Future .)

This, incidentally, is why the book that Mr. Masnick approvingly cites, Robert Friedel's excellent A Culture of Improvement, deliberately eschews the term "progress". You might think human cloning or nuclear weapons or Windows Vista are all examples of unambiguous progress; your neighbor might well disagree.

Didn't you read this?

More Musicians Recognizing The Power Of Free

It sounds a bit like this story about Apple charging for the software to upgrade your wireless to 802.11n (purely a firmware/driver issue) because they thought Sarbanes Oxley required it.

In other words, it wasn't so much a legal issue as much as an accounting issue. People don't know how to deal with $0.00 items in accounting appearently.

Techdirt recently asked if we could finally declare BPL officially dead. I guess not!

There was great concern in the radio control modeling community about potential interference from BPL. In fact, a significant amount of fields are underneath or near these powerlines in the "wasted" space where no one wants to build houses. I recall in 2004 or so there being significant email/forum traffic, particularly from those clubs with sites very close to powerlines or from RC Glider pilots that fly long distances from view, toward the horizon, where planes are susceptible to inteference. It was predicted that there was plenty of potential for concern.

Apparently with the concept dying off, so did the concern from RC pilots. I found a post as recently as 2006 where there was found to be little cause for concern (gmarc.com) using a spread spectrum analyzer.

How about when a Judge in KY orders the domain names of companies to be transferred to the State of Kentucky. I don't mean just redirection the DNS lookup, but changing the ownership?

http://techdirt.com/articles/20081020/0058002578.shtml

Or when a judge in CA blocked wikileaks?

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080218/115934282.shtml

How about when a Judge in KY orders the domain names of companies to be transferred to the State of Kentucky. I don't mean just redirection the DNS lookup, but changing the ownership?

http://techdirt.com/articles/20081020/0058002578.shtml

Or when a judge in CA blocked wikileaks?

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080218/115934282.shtml

In fact, I'm not sure despite how often that term is thrown around that MS actually hires any astroturfers, or at least I have not seen any direct evidence of this.

Is it that hard to type "Microsoft" and "Astroturf" into Google and click on one of the top links?
LINK
LINK
LINK
LINK
It is pretty clear from a simple ONE MINUTE investigation that MS does hire astroturfers. Why bother to imply the opposite?

I'm probably going to get modded troll or flamebait for this, but everything I am about to say is 100% true to the best of my recollection. And no, I am not an astroturfer for MS. In fact, I'm not sure despite how often that term is thrown around that MS actually hires any astroturfers, or at least I have not seen any direct evidence of this.

It would REALLY help you to be taken seriously if you actually provided enough information for people to be able to check your story.

Phrases like "loaded with Linux" and "magical incantations that were supposed to compile and install the drivers" are EXTREMELY VAGUE.

Also, your expectations seem unrealistic. You put an OS that by itself requires 2 GB on a computer that only has 2 GB disk space. To put it bluntly: What the heck were you thinking? Of course it didn't work. Even if it did install, you would have been out of disk space the first time you created a document or applied a software patch.
Sure it would have been nice to get a warning about it, but when you're within less than one percent of the minimum, does it really take hours to determine that might be the problem?
Was is really out of the question to install an OS that only required 1GB? Wouldn't that have been the reasonable choice from the get-go?

Your comment about being afraid to edit text files seems pretty odd. If you're as tech savvy as you say, you would have experience with the Windows registry. Is that really preferable to just editing a simple text file? (Sure you can pick a specific UI feature the is in a config file in Linux and is a GUI option in windows, but I could turn around and point out a similar feature the requires registry hacking in windows.)
Say, why did you want to edit this anyways?

The chinese government has decided that, in the future, all phones will be required to use the humble USB port for charging.

I have a Motorola phone with the USB port, and was quite distraught to find that it wouldn't charge when I plugged it into my computer. WTF? There's a russian site online that shows how to short a USB cable so it can charge. I eventually found that if I installed Motorola's drivers it'd charge just fine.

They don't attack people with patents outright. They say "Hey, Novell... we've got patents covering shit you're doing. It'd be in your best interests to work with us on the terms we specify". Microsoft doesn't need the money from the lawsuits, they aren't looking at it as a revenue stream. They look at it as a pointy stick to get people to do what they want, and license the patents BEFORE the lawsuits happen.

The US has already ruled you can't be forced to give out an encryption key.

I believe that is only a ruling by a federal judge, not any higher courts (federal appeals courts or SCOTUS).

http://techdirt.com/articles/20071216/163110.shtml

TFA also forgot that MD also dabbled in the porn business for awhile. As for why this is news,I want to know any business that MediaDefender is in so I can avoid it like the clap!!! Let me put it this way: With all the low down,dirty,underhanded,sneaky bullsh*t that they have pulled over the years would YOU want their software to have access to your machine? Would YOU trust them with your CC? I'm guessing that is a big no. These guys aren't any more trustworthy than the ones writing viruses. And why hasn't someone busted their @ss for the DDoS BS? I thought that was illegal?

No myth, you are very mistaken. Read this, this, and probably about a hundred other articles over the last couple of years about how the telcos take federal tax money as incentive to improve and expand their services while continuing to invest as little in infrastructure as they can get away with while charging absurdly high rates for services. The telcos are ripping us off blind with the government's blessing, and they get away with it because they own so many elected officials.

It's time they answer to the people. We've paid far to much for far too little for far too long. The same goes for the cablecos.

Here is an article regarding cannibalization of CD sales by DVDs for your entertainment:

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2004/03/cd_no_dvd.html

It is NOT outlets like iTunes OR piracy OR music quality that is depressing CD sales.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20070209/082603.shtml

iTunes is just ONE retailer of music that accounts for 75% of online sales. There are MANY CD retailers.

CD sales still account for the vast majority of music sales:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB117444575607043728-lMyQjAxMDE3NzI0MTQyNDE1Wj.html

Now mod my VERY insightful original posting back up.

You haven't heard about the olympic committee going ballistic on anyone who uses the phrases or shows the rings?

It has the same problems as the DMCA: it's easier to stifle someone's freedom/speech than it is to fight back such situations.

The state's new (Democratic) attorney general has just issued a rule banning the practice of election workers taking the machines home with them the night before elections.

There had to be a rule issued to stop this? Could we not have a simple "don't be a moron" rule? In what way does it not look bad if people are taking the easily-hackable machines home with them?

It is entirely within your power to stop the RIAA suits as well.

Turn off your file-sharing software.

What about legitimate file-sharing, such as creative commons, open source, and free as in free beer content? And how exactly do you define "File sharing". File sharing can be done through anything as simple as e-mail or ftp.

The RIAA's been known to target the most trivial instances of file sharing, and in some cases you don't even need a computer

I applaud Google for taking the extra step of actually contacting the IOC and asking them if they truly want to pursue this or are they just trying to pander to the Chinese. The Chinese are horrible and sure they can make a pretty show but they have total disregard for human rights...

...and I swear the Chinese's pretty little show doesn't change anything.

Why do you think the Chinese government cares so much about one free Tibet video on youtube? there are already so many other ones uploaded already regarding Tibet and the Beijing Olympics... it would be pretty meaningless.

On the other hand IOC has "long history of overzealously "defending" its trademarks".