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German Censorware Targets Music
If you only read one link, read Fitug's fact sheet (in English). It summarizes the situation pretty well. See Declan McCullagh's Politech for some more links.
Basically, the German recording industry is selling the idea that they should have carte blanche to block any incoming packets they see fit, at the router. As Lawrence Lessig and others have warned, the large ISPs are the weak link, subject to easy regulation. And as Fitug's paper says, only the large service providers need be forced to use this system: small providers get their feeds from the large ones, auto-censored for their pleasure.
Think for a moment about how this system will work in practice. Pirate websites, by definition, operate under the radar: they are hard to find. They are often up only briefly, or require a password to access. They aren't linked to search engines. Sharing copyrighted material is illegal is every major Western country, so these sites aren't going to list themselves on Yahoo.
But it's already been shown that censorware can't even block what's on Yahoo. That's not an exaggeration. I work with the Censorware Project, and we did a report on Bess in 1999. The software didn't just fail to block a lot of hardcore sex. It failed to block hardcoresex.com - and hundreds of other porn sites listed on Yahoo.
This new "Rights Protection System" is going to use the same technologies as existing censorware and have about the same results:
"Im Prinzip funktioniert das 'Right Protection System' also ähnlich wie das Programm Cyberpatrol..."
"So in principle, the 'Rights Protection System' will work like the program Cyber Patrol..."
Someone has to maintain this "Rights Protection System," just like someone has to maintain Cyber Patrol. What chance does it have to find even a fraction of the napster servers, hotline servers, IRC channels, and, yes, even websites where pirate MP3s are being traded?
And when a pirate site is found, the rock'n'roll will be blocked the same way existing censorware blocks sex or drugs. Let's say a directory full of copyrighted MP3s is at
http://BigUniversity.edu/users/joepirate/secret/
The RPS staffers have no way of knowing whether "joepirate" is going to have friends who share MP3s, is going to change user IDs, or is going to put his songs into some other directory. The block will be made not on the /secret/ directory. If the university is lucky, there will be a block on the /users/ directory.
But since the "filtering" takes place at the router, it is much more likely that the entire webserver will be blocked. Big University probably won't be getting many exchange students from Germany next year.
And on what basis is the country going to ask its service providers to put this extra software on their routers? According to a spokesperson for the German branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI):
"The packet forwarding process in the router is not a passive forwarding of the incoming signals. The packet is processed and manipulated by the router before it is transmitted onwards. So the [service providers] that purchase and install these routers have a heavy participatory role in the operation of the Internet."
In other words, since the hardware is already routing ("manipulating") packets from one network to another, it's really no different to add a blacklist that forbids certain URLs or IP numbers.
The executives speaking in favor of this proposal make it sound like it's going to benefit the little musician, the one struggling to make it. The IFPI points out magnanimously that it invests some of its profits in unknown artists (duh):
"Jede dritte Mark, die mit den Hits der Megastars erwirtschaftet wird, fließt heute in die Förderung junger Künstler."
"Today, every third Mark made by the megastars' hits goes toward the promotion of young artists."
Isn't that nice. But what about the "young artists" who haven't been signed with a label yet?
If I'm trying to make a name for myself by giving away my own music, and the RPS staffers spot a directory full of my MP3s, are they really going to compare each of my files' titles against their libraries? Are they going to listen to each MP3 they find? More likely, they will assume that files named "my_heart_will_go_on.mp3" and "song-001.mp3" are songs copyrighted by someone else, and not my own original work.
Simple solution: block my whole directory. Or my whole server. If there's a little collateral damage - well, less competition for their own artists.
And they won't bother to tell me about it, of course; so my music is now blocked from eighty million potential listeners - customers - and I will never know.
This doesn't help "young artists" - unless you think enslaving them to the existing labels is helping them. The IFPI chooses to ignore that giving away MP3s can help a struggling artist, not hurt.
Meanwhile, executives for the German Authors' Rights Society (GEMA) redefine arrogance. My German is rusty and Babelfish is almost no help, so bear with me. First, they count their money:
"Erfolgreiche Jahresbilanz. Zunächst aber habe ich die Ehre, Ihnen den Geschäftsbericht 1998 vorzulegen. Er dokumentiert mit seinem Gesamtertrag von DM 1,465 Mrd. und einer Verteilsumme von DM 1,263 Mrd. die wirtschaftliche Ertragskraft unserer musikalischen Verwertungsgesellschaft..."
"Successful Annual Balance. But first I have the honor to submit the business report for 1998. It documents total proceeds of 1.465 billion Marks and a distribution total of 1.263 billion Marks for our commercial music corporation..."
(Incidentally, Babelfish translates "unserer musikalischen Verwertungsgesellschaft" as "our musical exploitation corporation" - which may be accurate but probably isn't what was intended.)
Then, two sentences later:
"...auch die den kreativen Schöpfer bedrohenden Kräfte, die sich hinter Schlagworten wie 'arbeitsplatzschaffende Kommunikationsgesellschaft' oder 'Digitalisierung der Welt' verstecken, nicht aus den Augen verloren werden dürfen. Hier drohen uns - allerdings zu bewältigende - Gefahren. Und in der Tat, sie werden auch nicht eine Sekunde aus den Augen verloren, diese Gefahren. So wird denn die GEMA nicht müde, die globalisierungssüchtigen Verfechter absoluter Kommunikationsfreiheit und damit Verächter von Kultur und geistigem Eigentum immer wieder in die Schranken zu verweisen."
"...and we should not lose track of those powers who threaten creative people*, who hide themselves behind slogans like 'job-creating communications company' or 'digitalization of the world.' We are threatened by these dangers - which nevertheless can be overcome. Indeed, these dangers will not for one second be lost from our eyes. GEMA will never, ever tire of putting these globalization-addicted advocates of absolute freedom of communication - the depisers of culture and intellectual property - in their place."
Boy. How serious are these guys?
But of course they're serious. After all, negative billions are at stake.
Finally, consider what will happen once the German music industry, or any other, manages to install content-based blocking at the routers of the entire country.
Pirated music isn't the only illegal content in Germany. And once the software's in place, no politician will be able to resist adding one more type of content to block.
What will be the next category they enable on their nationwide blacklist? You might think sex. I'm betting it's Holocaust-denial. The denial of the Holocaust is something I've been working against for eight years (wearing one of my other "activist hats"). And for eight years I've been repeating that the most effective way to repudiate this dishonest political ideology is to expose it to the light of day.
Let people read the junk. And let them read refutations of the junk. That's the best way for people to recognize that deniers are liars: give them access to what everyone says, and let them make up their own minds.
But the German government disagrees. Unfortunately, they don't realize that the best way to convince a confused citizen that Holocaust-deniers are saying something valuable is to have the government ban it. "After all," goes the logic, "they wouldn't ban it if it weren't dangerous - and what could be more dangerous than the truth?"
Then, finally, after they make free-speech martyrs out of neo-Nazis, will come the effort to block sexual content. All of these blocking efforts - music, Holocaust-denial, sex - will work approximately as well as censorware has worked anywhere else. And will do approximately as much collateral damage.
This approach to censoring an entire country - block content at the incoming routers - has not yet been tried on a large scale in any Western country. Many Asian countries (notably excepting Japan) and most if not all fundamentalist Islam countries have adopted nationwide blocking. We'll see if this is the first step toward bringing the technology to the West.
If anyone has information about who will be creating and maintaining the blacklists used by the "Rights Protection System," please post a comment here or email me.
I could never achieve what you have done.
You are so friggin clueless. Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Most people on slashdot would agree that if you don't pay for it in some way, you don't own it. Yet, the musicians rights are not above our rights to see what is on the internet. jesus H. christ, get a fucking clue. cracking photoshop under GPL? WTF? do you know what the GPL is? obviously not.
She did the work of recording the music. You did nothing.
Does your desire to enjoy a *luxury* product trump her right to be paid for her work?
Does your employer have a "right" to your unpaid labor? Or do you have a right to be paid?
Read it, read it again, then moderate up, up, up!
Please
not to nitpick, but I already pointed this out in post #200.
Intellecutal products have a value OUTSIDE of their market value: progress in science and the arts. That value is considerably more important than the market value. It enriches us ALL as opposed to only enriching the individuals involved in a particular transaction.
The founders of this country understood these things. Apparently you don't.
don't presume to speak for the status quo. cock gobbler.
Could the German fear of being labeled "nazi" be just another excuse for the German government to act like....nazis?
Its interessting that in Germany, it IS ALLOWED to copy music for your own, or even for (some) friends. The law does grant everybody the right to do so. And it *does not* matter whether the copy you make a copy FROM is a legal copy. Your copy is legal. And since you could be a personal friend of the guy running the website, the can NOT stop you accessing the mp3s, although they are illegal (cause they are available for everbody, not only the personal friends). ct ran a big article about mp3 copying a short time ago. Plz excuse my bad English.
Intellecutal [sic] products have a value OUTSIDE of their market value: progress in science and the arts. That value is considerably more important than the market value. It enriches us ALL as opposed to only enriching the individuals involved in a particular transaction.
That's called "socialism". In case you haven't heard, this is a free country and we're having none of it.
Thanks for playing.
any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
So by substituting "ownership" for "means of production and distribution", somehow this becomes a completely different concept?
You're talking about taking the property of a few people, and handing it out to everybody else because it will "benefit" them.
You are either shockingly brainless, or else knowingly dishonest. I don't much care which one it is.
Within your definition, the law against randomly killing people would be labelled socialist because it benefits a group (our society as a whole), by making it safe for people to go outside, at the expense of an individual's ability to go around shooting people.
Brainless. Definitely brainless. Killing people is not a right. Ownership of one's own property is a right. Can you comprehend the difference between outlawing crimes, and abolishing rights? No? That's over your head?
Yup, brainless. Dumb as a stump.
Absent legally-recognized IP, the GPL doesn't work, but there is also little need for it. Yes, you can distribute things as binary-only, but people who want the source can reverse-engineer and re-implement them.
Free software is best served by the abolition of intellectual property law, because clever hacks like the GPL become superfluous.
As a german i feel a need to clarify some things about the games. No game producer HAS to make a special version to release it here. Games containing excessive violence are not outlawed but they are put on an index of games which are not allowed to be sold to minors (up tp this point everything is fine and well and understandable but now comes the bad part) or advertised. And these advertising restrictions are handled rather restrictive (too restrictive i and many others think): games on the index are often not displayed in stores and games magazines can often not report about them so the publishers of these games loose a lot of money because even the people who are allowed to buy them (grown-ups) effectively cant do so! The solution is to release a version specifically for the german market where some models or sounds are exchanged. Because most games are translated anyway the cost associated with it are relatively small. At least better than facing the chance of loosing nearly the whole german market so they do these changes volutarily.
In the case of Nazi symbols its even more restrictive. E.g. Wolfenstein 3D (remember that?) was even forbidden to be sold at all because it contained those.
No, because the vast majority of musicians don't make several million dollars over their career. Many of them are great musicians, too. For them, lost money is significant, not the difference between buying an indoor or outdoor swimming pool. Especially if they produce their own CDs, which is entirely feasible nowadays.
"They make money on tour" you say.
Well, some musicians don't have a big enough audience to tour. Some musicians have kids, and thus can't tour for a while. Should their income *stop* then? What about musicians who *can't* tour, perhaps due to some medical reason?
Heh. we'll just hack their routers and remove or misdirect the filters ;P
Seriously, this is one of the more absurd ideas that I have heard in a long time. Its not technically feasable to filter on content without getting into a lot of problems with other laws and causing a lot of other damage on the way.
Filtering on ip or url is so easy to circumvent (try iptunnel to a friend in another country and encrypt it) that its basicly pointless to even try such things. It would be a good idea however if thought would be put into solving the concerns of the holders of various copyrighted materials while also protecting the rights of the consumer.
Cencorship and stopping trade in illegal material is something different. If you want to fight cencorship you have to fight making things illegal (things like.. thoughts, opinions, publications thereof etc.)
This is about a 'practical' means to enforce certain rules, not about what will be considered illegal content as such. Obviously copyrighted music that is 'traded' on the net is mentioned, and given who are behind this it is of little surprise that it is, but those mp3s do not require any laws to make them illegal, they already are. This idea does not change anything about that.
Taking the step from blocking content that is illegal because of copyright issues is not the same as blocking content because it is politically unwanted, just the technology that people attempt to employ to do those things happens to be the same.
dude, just shut the hell up, you have no idea.
But to my point, how feasable would it be to incorporate a public/private key pair into the napster client (actually, the gnutella program would be better because it is fully distributed)? Just in case they decide to filter any packets that even look like mp3 files? This doesn't have to be some super-secure system, just something to scramble the data while it is travelling between users...
... just imagine
And if they break the encryption we can sue THEM under the DMCA
Just another attempt to get in on another "Industry buzzword" Open sourcing CE will just let the world see how crappy microsoft code is.
>kind of been warped around here. If you were to ask RMS, he'd tell you that programmers should be paid as much as possible.
Yeah, but have you heard RMS's singing???
Does this mean that anything that benefits a group of people as opposed to an individual is socialist?
Anything that benefits a group of people at the involuntary expense of an individual is, indeed, socialism. That is in fact the definition of socialism.
This is not, and never has been about either rights or censorship. It is about money. Most people don't understand how this works. If you write a song and it gets recorded on a label, you get paid $0.0755 for each record sale (single or album; CD, cassette or vinyl) containing the song. If the record sells a million copies, you make $75,500. Actually, the $75,500 is split between the song writer and the music publisher. While $75,500 is a nice sum, it doesn't really make you rich. The real money is in performance income...primarily radio airplay. A hit song can easily earn $300,000-500,000 from perfomance income. So, what all the music biz folks are worried about is losing out on performance income. If you download MP3s and listen to them, the song writer doesn't get paid. Now, we can (and should) discuss whether the system is flawed. For example, when I pay $15 for a CD, why do the song writers only get $0.0755 per song? But within the context of the current system, you have to admit that music biz types have reason for concern. Don't you think if you write a hit song, it should be worth more than $75,000? Lots of us geek types make more than that annually. There are far fewer people capable of writing hit songs than there are people capable of writing Java code. You can read more about this at Musicians Friend.
And his purpose was to accumulate enough donations to buy a 40oz container of beer and enough crack to vaporize and inhale. thereby forming cocaethylene in his bloodstream.
Very well thought-out.
>Releasing a binary under the GPL is just plain meaningless
:-)
What if you programmed it using assembly or machine language?
The crucial difference that made the Grateful Dead successful: they were good. Can you imagine what would happen to the music industry if listeners listened only to groups good enough to make it without a marketing machine?
>>The German government has already blocked certain domains that host sites which contain political speach that is illegal under German law. Dont think so, Im quite sure I can access everything I want from here (Germany). The (german) laws against holocaust denial are comparable to general laws against "incitement of the masses" (Volksverhetzung). Im, for that matter, do see a much larger threat to free speech in some attempts to control criminality with city wide video surveilance. (like in London).
BTW: No, Italy dont have Fascists, they have Mafia.
what a deep, though provoking comment -- dude. Be sure to check in with us again when YOU get a fucking clue.
Your example doesn't exactly make it clear where the rest of the money goes, for a million selling track. What is the revenue from one track? Say it's $2 per sale (I'm in the UK, it's a lot more than that over here). So the artist/publisher makes ~4% margin. This leaves $1,920,000 going to who? If copyright theft starts focussing people's minds on trying to re-arrange the system to distribute the money to the people we appreciate (the music creators) and not to people we couldn't care less about (the distributors) then onward with such crime, until the system balances. For _every_ song I've _ever_ liked, I am happy to give $2 to the artist/publisher. Even if I can chose not to do so. However, the distributors can starve if they want to keep up the current margins.
There wasn't nearly as much. What there was, was funded by wealthy patrons. Artists had little leeway for their own creativity, because they had to please the Duke, or the King, or the Church, or whomever. Needless to say, such a system wasn't able to support a fraction of the artists we have today. The cost of supporting an artist is divided up among hundreds or thousands of people, rather than a select few. In exchange, far more people get to enjoy the music.
Many composers were deeply in debt. Who knows? Had Mozart been protected by copyright, and earned royalties, perhaps he would have lived longer, and we'd have a lot more Great Music.
Do we really want to go back to a system where musicians work for the elite, because only the elite pay?
My take on all of this is that as soon as society (atleast physical society) realizes that internet society co-exists with physical society, it isn't really a part, everything is free and lives under that mentality. If I write some great piece of software, I want everyone to use it, not just people who give me $ for the right to use it. Music is slightly different, as is pirated software, but the people making laws and feeding lawmakers with vast quantities of money (fat pockets, ehh) need to realize this fact, the internet is its own society, and laws based on a physical world have limited application. BTW, it won't work to censor at the router level. I don't know what fossil thought of that, but it just won't work. The only way for them to prevent music from reaching the internet and being distributed for free is to not let a soul listen to it. Even live concerts which haven't been released on physical media are making thier way onto mp3 servers. There is NOTHING they can do.
I will personally kill you if you dare to do this. We have our own monsters. Think of Heino.
Would you be annoyed if someone else took your songs, recorded them, made millions of dollars, didn't pay you a cent, and didn't even give you credit?
That's another aspect of copyright.
Unless RatShit has a patent on the part, I have the right to manufacture more of them.
I think it's time to stop posting our opinion on this matter. After all, its Germany: it's their country and they can do any damded thing they want. When we do experiments on animals, and some freak from god knows where starts screaming about animal rights (nevermind a few million aids patients who might die, but one monkey, ooh no); I mean I frankly could not care less: It is our country and we decide what is best for us. Now this issue is German. We should only make sure that nothing like this happens here in US (and it might) and we should only give our support to those in germany who oppose this stupid decision to censor speech. BUT WE SHOULD NOT TELL THEM WHAT TO DO AND HOW BAD THEY ARE FOR DOING IT. It is their country. If they want to hear one monotonous voice over the radio that tells them "YOU ARE GETTING SLEEPY" well, their life, their problem! I certainly would not want to hear some of them bashing on soem slashdot.de saying how evil americans forbid human rights by banning cocaine. I mean, if they think that their country benefits from this crap, hey ... Who are we to tell them what to do.
To whatever troll says to me "F**k you" or anything similar (which will happen, I'll bet), here's a hearty "F**k you back" - in advance.
Troll here. Why would I say "'F**k you' or anything similar" to you? Even if I knew how to pronounce the "**" morpheme (is it a diphthong?
In any case, I'll see your smiley-with-nose and raise you one without:
--80md
There is one way for this blocking to become totally worthless. Just make sure the new TCP standard has the string "mp3" in the header...
It is non of your fucking business to judge what happens in Germany or not. Mind your own business and shoot a few more children in your schools. You would do the world a favour.
Awesome 3D movies, music, all fed directly into your nervous system via a port on your spinal cord. Of course the port and firmware will support SCMS, pay per view, track marketing preferences, etc. And the input data stream will be digitally encrypted and not decoded until it's in your spinal port. So you *can* see and hear, but not record!
HTTP 1.1 protocol necessitates that you send the "Host:" header after GET and HTTP. An error (400) occurs otherwise.
95% of the web is porn links, the rest is actually porn.
We talk about the same web, do we? Because that does not sound like the web i know.
>Troll here. Why would I say "'F**k you' or anything similar" to you? Even if I knew how to pronounce the "**" morpheme (is it a diphthong? :), I can't imagine why I'd have a problem with your post. Blue Lang recognized that I was a troll, and paid me a very nice compliment. He was also considerate enough to let all the fish hook themselves before he blew the whistle. Under the circumstances, how can I object to your paying him a compliment? Unless I'm missing your point.
:-), :)
:-)
:^) Hope I didn't offend you (but then again, that was what you were aiming for, a reaction, right?)...
>In any case, I'll see your smiley-with-nose and raise you one without:
Sorry, it was just the stereotype coming out. Didn't mean anything by it, but I get sorta mad when a troll responds to me with something as lame as "here's what I think of your comment: see gotse.cx". And most of the time it is guranteed to happen when you support the "Anti-Troll" voice...
I got ya wrong - you aren't a knuckle dragging moron - sorry.
BTW: And you got me too... I posted the AC reply #120...
If all the trolls on slashdot were well written (like yours) and not "suck my petrified ass" crap, well, maybe then moderation wouldn't be needed (or - wait a minute - maybe moderation would actually work as advertised)...
we need one, and this whole sub-thread belongs there...:-)
A: Their brains are swimming around in a flexible membrane that absorbs all the shocks their brains get, you moron.
the business people need to artificially create scarcity (and hence value). But, by simply saying they don't have the protection of the laws to do so, I am somehow denying them of this scarcity? To my eye, it seems like I am merely ensuring the natural outcome, and it is the business people who -- by needing to act -- need to justify their actions.
Hmm, true. However, the framers of the Constitution, however much they may have argued over the issue, did in the end conclude that such artificial monopolies would tend to be beneficial. They were neither perfect nor precognitive and I'm not resorting to the "Consitution is scripture" fallacy, but the fact is they set a balance between interests which worked tolerably well for two hundred years. Technology is upsetting the balance, and at the moment a lot of people seem to think that the balance is dead, and from here on in it's a winner-take-all matter. The megalibertarian argument against IP in general and in principle is a crock. The corporatist semi-libertarian argument that the MPAA should run the government (as I've been playfully asserting
We have a choice between demanding everything and getting damned near nothing, or else compromising and having some chance at a workable modus vivendi. Fuck principle, fuck legal theories, and -- if you're not ready to take up arms and die bravely in defense of your Elvis Costello bootlegs -- fuck natural rights as well. This isn't about principles or theories, this is about finding a workable compromise in the real world. It's a lot less romantic, but a lot less people end up lying in ditches with their intestines in their laps and the crows picking at their eyeballs.
A-hem. I rant. But I really can't see how these penny-ante legal scholars and dorm-room philosophes are any less annoying, mindless, and ultimately destructive than the raving jackass I was impersonating.
It's intolerably bad form for a troll to get all sincere and say what he really thinks, but dammit, I do actually care about this issue. Never troll a discussion you care about; it puts you off your game
--80md
What do you define as a leisure product? Software in general?
:-)
Well, there's software in a heart monitor. Is that a leisure product? There's software in a stove, is that a leisure product? There's software in games, is that a leisure product?
When does something start being a leisure product? When it enhances life? A heart monitor would enhance my life if it saved it. When it is only for pleasure? Some people play Quake III because that is their job (software tester). When it is only for specialized jobs? Some people would say that OrCad (electronics design software) is only for specialized jobs, but I _NEED_ it to pass my EET courses at College.
While _I_ don't feel that having Quake III should be my right, I might feel differently if my being unable to access it would endanger my employment. I feel right now, that a "luxury" item like a heart monitor is a human right. And I damn well feel I have a right to use OrCad, being that I do have the right to an education (by law, infact!).
There is no black/white idea of leisure, so the argument doesn't work properly.
>What about the right for a worker to be compensated for their labor?
Now that I agree with. People who create software need compensation for their time and effort. I have no problem with that. I feel bad if/when I violate a license agreement. But, what can I do when I want to pass College? There is no student version of OrCad, and the cheapest copy is $13,000 dollars. I don't think my failing the course would be fair... (but then again, that isn't a black/white issue either).
While I agree, I have no right to stop the people at OrCad from benefiting from their labour, where should their benefit end? Should it end when other people are penalized and kept down as uneducated second class citizens because of it? That's what slavery was about. Make sure that the slaves can't get educated enough to do work that would allow them to support themselves financially, and, bingo, you have a slave.
I would personally LOVE to give OrCad a REASONABLE fee for the use (and, PROMOTION - remember, I WILL ask the company I work for to buy OrCad) of their software. Say $100. That's more than I would have to pay for almost ANY other "educational version" software as a student, but still relatively reasonable.
(Note: OrCad may have changed their pricing scheme by now. I really don't care...
Thank you
Misrepresenting the photoshop/GPL thing was a stroke of genius.
Heh heh
Oh, well. I had fun so I can't complain
--80md
So I suppose
#hexed anysonghere.mp3
is illegal, then?
A lot of us don't watch very much television - it's too bland and inane.
A lot of us don't read the newspapers - they contain very little information that's of interest to us. Instead we use online services.
A lot od us don't listen to the radio - it's mainly just "Top 40" trash - we prefer mp3's.
That's the reason why this story is a newsworthy item to us - it's about the communication channels that we use rather than about the ones that we can't stand.
Exactly! Kansas banning evolution in high skool...
Good comment (to the moderators: moderate the parent message up!)... you made me thinking: I thought for a while about the issues you brought up and i first recognized what the real moral values were which i have followed the last years. ... uh ... minor-and-not-so-serious crime if there is money involved (either as earnings on my side or losses on the side of the "robbed").
Ive "pirated" some MP3s (though i own some CDs i think are good), Windows, games (but i paid for the good ones) and some programs i run but i dont think of that as a serious crime because i did not inflict damage to others AND i did not do it to enrich myself. I dont really feel guilty for these acts (though i recognize it would be better if i paid for them) but i would feel guilty if i would earn money redistributing these things or, for that matter, if i would have stolen a CD (because that would have cost the store owner a certain sum). So the line i draw between a crime and a
So what you proposed would be wrong in my (distorted?) view of morality.
On another thought i found out that this is the reason why i like the GPL: it lets me legally do everything with software that i would do anyway (and even more) but it forbids things i consider bad (ripping off money from other people by making it a proprietary product).
Oh finally i wanted to say that i dont consider my view as good or better than someones elses, but it is not bad (i still give money where i think money is deserved). I think it is my right to live and act freely as long as i dont restrict the freedom of others.
This is not possible anyway,
and I am even sure, that the German government will prevent the Gema from doing this... The protest of the internet-community will be to big... so don't worry.
cu
Just think, a nation of customers for a service to give them access to everything, no blocks. Setup servers in another un-blocked country and have all the traffic of subscribers tunneled to it and then let loose on the internet. Make it cheap so lots of people will sign up and then you can get rich off the lame restrictions AND look like you are the good guy giving people unrestricted access at the same time.
Enough with the freaking holocaust!!
There are enough of them to go around without hearing the same ol' broken record.
What about the Armenians?
Oh...wait!!
Im sorry....Armenian deaths arent as important because they dont have the economic clout.
Why dont you talk about that for awhile?
It wouldnt bother me as much if the jews didnt fuck the Palestinians.
Not too mentione Sabrah & Shatilla massacres, the bombing of foreign countries....etc.etc....
As for WW2, they didnt lose more people than the Russians (sheer numbers) or the Yugoslavs (% of population)
You are right about the 'making interpretations of historial events into a crime'
Political correctness has banned ANY (Im not talking the neo-nazis here)discussion.
Considering that history is a very, very relative subject (check Turkish textbooks and the history bokks of the people the Turks massacred for over 400 years and you'll see what I mean)
And holocaust deniers are still very welcomed if they know which hand to grease:
The Croatian president (Frank whatever) was a supposed history buff and wrote in a book that jews didnt die as much as people think, the number was 2 million he said. And at a certain death camp, they were the ones who were extorting their own people and that the said camp didnt have 1 million dead but something like 25,000.
So what happened to him?
He got invited to that Washington museum thing opening a few years ago!
Bang! I knew then that all this stuff was all for the goobers who read Time and Newsweek and breath the word Holocaust every second.
You can deny all you want when the White House supports you.
When it came down to it, they didnt have the guts because it didnt serve the US' work in the Balkans.
That ranks right there with the Kurt Waldheim so-called 'scandal'. The US knew before he became UN sec-gen. that he was an SS officer but decided to keep it under wraps until they needed it.
I forgot exactly under what circumstances it was 'discovered' but if I remember he was about to become or already was chancellor of Austria. Right about the time they said no to entering NATO.
you can look at the pretty visulization effects in your player... but anywa, if you want porn, look at porn... its not that hard.
Oh, come on. They did not ban the teaching of evolution in Kansas -- they made it optional. I can't think of one science teacher I ever had who wouldn't still have taught it.
This is going to sound like "me too"... but that had to be the funniest Anti-Troll I've read today.
:-)
BTW: To whatever troll says to me "F**k you" or anything similar (which will happen, I'll bet), here's a hearty "F**k you back" - in advance.
'A lot od us don't listen to the radio - it's mainly just "Top 40" trash - we prefer mp3's.'
It sounds as though you have a great deal in common with those people who believe that "the Internet is just porn."
Obviously, encouraging a black market drug industry, and expanding a prison system entirely paid for by taxpayers, by making drug use a crime, is the right solution!
This is inherently anti-capitalist. Lets say you have a widget and it has a certain market value. If I make ten better widgets, your widget's market value will decrease. You do not have a right, for example, to protect the scarcity (value) of your widget by doing anything that would interfere with my better widgets. The market value of an item is determined not by you, but by the market.
Yet you insist that the same crime is no longer a crime if we merely change the context.
No, but an action is no longer a crime if we merely change the context. Consider an action which causes the death of another. In one context it is homicide. In another context it is self defense.
It really doesn't matter what you call him. I lived in Vienna during his campaing and saw lots of down right evilness on his part. Full out attacks on Chineese resturants and how they were all under cover drug dealers etc.. Posters about "Asyl-missbruach" (Asylium missuse), "Stop die Ueberfremdung" (Stop the over forinization), "Einer der unsere Sprache spricht" (One this speaks our language). He also reduced the Visa quota in his region to zero (0), yes no forginers at all. I'm not the first and certianly not the last to identify Joergie as being quite similar to the Nazis, Austria's broadcasting station (ORF) has indriectly said some pretty harsh things about him and Naziism. Though as in 1938 Germany, it wasn't the people living in the cities that elected Hitler, it was the working class, farmers, taxi drivers etc.. There is nothing new now.
The strange and very sad part about the whole thing (for everyone) is that the educated Austrian people, although they don't agree with Haider, also don't see the simularities in his party to the Nazi party. Some do, though many don't.
"It could be easily done with a computer..."
We'll meet again
don't know where, don't know when
But I know we'll meet again
Some sunny day!
That's also what was thought about Hitler might I add. Though Austria did have alternative parties and they weren't voted for. Why? Well you just had to watch the TV. ORF interviewed people after Haider had won and the sigle thing that everyone had in common was that they thought that he was the only one that was saying what "needed to be said." It was made quite clear that Austrian's blamed forigners for the state of thier country.
Shadowcaster if you curious. I'm just not logged in. I think this is a great idea. I'm surprised RIAA hasn't started lobbying the US govt for the same thing. You don't have a "right" to view mp3s, especially ripped off mp3s. Shadowcaster - wishing he would get more karma for this post. :(
Just out of curiosity, why did you leave Korea out of your list?
" and the rights that get protected are those of Mariah Carey and her label, needless to say, not yours or mine." And why exactly do you or I have any rights to the work of Mariah Carey? She and her label created the music from nothing. Where do you or I come into it? A bunch of knee-jerk dopes around here; playing follow the leader and never thinking - grow up. Geeks suck.
The last time I checked, alcohol was a psychoactive substance. It is a rare country indeed in which the consumption of alcohol is banned.
By the way, nicotine and various organic solvents are also psychoactive substances. I trust the tobacco companies and glue-sniffers have your support?
The best person I ever saw for handling change was the Good Humor man. But he had one of those money changer things, so I guess he should have been good at it.
Exactly. Though this is common in North America in Europe its still not fully understood. To find proof of the matter one only has to look south to Austria, where a Nazi (sic), Joerg Haider, was recently elected into the Aus. gov.. 1/3 of Austria's voters voted for him, and noone was shocked by it. Everyone expectes people in the country to have a bit of Nazi in them anyway. So where were all these anti-Nazi laws then? They didn't do squat, and even after the EU, Finland, Israil and the USA sounded alarm, Austria's Goverment just threw a temper-tantrum.
Sorry folks, the anti-Nazi laws have actually made things even worse. 1938 Germany is by no means just something of the past, the Austrian FPOe is alive and well and is funded with Austrian Tax (euro) Dollars. Which country is next in line?
>>so that everyone can see what dumbfucks they are. Problem is, they wont see this. Why? Not only to dumb. But not old enough. A lot of neonazi get into when they are quite young, say, 12 and up. I dont think a 14 year old can see the how dumb these people are, cause most of them are quite good? speakers.
Yep, but I replied right after I saw it, before looking at the comments... oh well
WTF is this? Every time Germany gets mentioned in a not so pleasing context, there are some people who cry nazi immediately.
Grow up for Christ's sake! That shit happened over 50 years ago.
It should never be forgotten of course but this kind of "Germany did this one bad but they're all nazis anyway" attitude is just ridiculous. Burning people in furnaces isn't hardwired into every German, just like bombing little South-Asian kids with napalm isn't hardwired into every American.
As for the issue at hand, I think the idea sucks and probably was conceived up by some hot shot exec with no factual knowledge about technology. The idea will probably just die out. But they are free to make their own laws. It's up to the people of Germany and not the USA to protest.
Meanwhile, instead of talking BS, if you're into music... why not release your own music in MP3 format for free (gratis, libre or even both)? Put it on a website, copy it to friends, whatever. The mainstream lives under the assumption created by the record companies that all MP3s are pirated and therefore "bad". If mom and pop can find nice and legal music from the web for free or buy it directly from the artist, well.... it's better than handing out a major part of your money to support some overcommercialized superstar whose only purpose is to be bland enough so that "one voice fits all".
Im German, and I have to say STOP here.
It is certainly not good to stop free speech (what we are not doing, just stopping "volksverhetzung", see above), IT IS A difference to beeing a nazi.
Nazis didnt just stop you saying what you want.
They killed you.
They tried to kill every single jew they can find.
They started a terrible war, killing even more people.
I DO favour the right to live a little bit more than the right to speak (But i will risk my life to achieve freedom of speech).
It is prohibited to deny the holocaust because it is PROVEN to have happened. And we dont want to let it happen again!
Unfortunately, they were wrong. The recent revelations about the number of German citizens who were involved in sheltering Jews is just one piece of evidence to that effect.
BTW, I don't recall any similar laws in Italy, but I don't remember the Fascists returning to power there, either.
dude! ive always wanted to know what history was like in germany and what they thought of it. like since 5th grade i wonderred that. and now one day, whilst high and browsing /., i am answered.
god bless the 'net!
We think we can license a lot of these under our new "rent-an-app" sales model. The software costs nothing (feel free to copy it), but you have to connect to our Internet server regularly for it to run, and that service costs $10 per month.
Microsoft Linux comes with winmodem drivers, "Son of DVD" decoders, embraced-and-extended Network protocols, and many other fine features that serve to lock out competition. But it's still based on Linux and runs every app that Red Hat Linux does!
What's that? You want to know if you can get the source code for our modified Microsoft Linux? Of course not! We don't make that available! You're welcome to make copies of the binary for your friends, though. They can use it all they want as long their credit cards are accepted at our server.
What about the GPL? As our friend Another MacHack has pointed out: the original Linux kernel code is still in the possession of the original author, Linus Torvalds. He can do whatever he wants with his copy of his code, and we'll do whatever we want with our copy of his code.
That's where your still in the possession argument leads: the loss of a creator's right to enforce the GPL. Fuck that!
Shaun Savage
I would eat Mariah Carey's asshole with a spoon.
Yes. Nothing will shatter the fundamental American premise that SEX is BAD. And Americans think they're really hot stuff! LMAO!
Well you're a turnip in that case because:
/. and try to advocate yourself as some kind of superbrain, get your facts straight.
"I think the worst thing about CSS are the region codes."
Region coding ISN'T part of the CSS algorithms. Before you flame
--
slashdot-contact@easypenguin.co.uk
it will protect me from MP3s of lousy nazi techno pop crap from freaks dressed in black.
Get it? You. Have. No. "Rights". To. Other. People's. Property.
Learn that. Beat it into your pointy little heads. Tattoo it on your limp, ratlike little paws.
Between this MP3 thievery and "cracking" copy-protected software to release it under the "GPL" (at least it's not "shareware", where the crackers want you to pay them), I really have just about given up on Slashdot. This used to be a Libertarian forum, but all I see nowadays is criminal after criminal demanding that the taxpayer aid him in his crimes.
It's pathetic.
But what about Gnutella?
:-(
Yea, except AOL blocked that before they could release the source.
--
This post is 100% fire-and-forget.
It sounds as though you have a great deal in common with those people who believe that "the Internet is just porn."
No, there is plenty of information on the internet besides porn. In the case of a decent search engine, it's easy to filter what you don't want by the use of boolean operators.
This allows me to avoid most of the stuff that I don't want. It isn't perfect, but what gets through a boolean expression that I don't want to see is generally a small enough percentage that I can ignore it.
In the case of the main stream media, this is somewhat more difficult to achieve.
In the case of radio, yes, it is possible to find some decent stations if you are prepared to spend the time channel surfing. The question is - why would I bother when there are other more efficient alternatives available?
1) It does restrict your privacy.
I think the loss of privacy is followed by a loss of free speech
2)>> maybe we can have a lower crime rate dispite the amazing stupidity of European law dissalowing video evidence to be substantial enough to convict
Stupidity? Genious id say. Do you know how easy it it to fake a video? Look at cinematic effects. How much easier is this when its a distorted b/w video?
Why? It is pointless to argue about this. It's the same old broke record. People need some country they can hate, and Germany is always a good target for hate. Most of the religious free speach advocates of course have never been in Germany, don't know the German laws they are talking about, and have also no clue about German history and presens, others than the hate and propaganda tought them in school.
I guess this is usually the point were one is supposed to list the bad things in the US to defend other contries like Germany, but I will skip the procedure. Instead, I will only state that I, like a lot of Germans, have traveled the world (as opposit to the majority of US citizens), and that I still feel that Germany is one of the most free countries in the world.
So we leave the hate to the US, and do things the way we like, and not the way the US would like to dictate us. It is not your business.
The US public is already used to having certain restrictions placed on their freedom, even if the results are dubious at best.
So, why don't you care about your freedom, and we care about ours.
BTW, some of the "facts" you mentioed are, well, lets say, not in line with reality.
The Americans, Brits, and Australian who you mention have distributed the stuff in Germany they were jailed for in Germany. They broke a German law. They ended up in jail, according to the law. End of story. It doesn't matter if the stuff was printed in the US, sending it to Germany was breaking a German lay. If then someone is so stupit to even travel to Germany to get arrested, he already deserves the punishment for beeing an idiot.
Please grow up, or blaim your education system on letting you down on this.
No, they are supposed to increase their profitability by becoming more efficient and reducing costs. As far as I'm aware, increasing profits by artifically increasing the scarcity of their product is against the law in most parts of the world, including the USA.
You would deny honest businessmen the scarcity, and therefore the market value, of their products.
The term "honest businessmen" is clearly a contradiction of terms. This is why we have laws to protect the rights of consumers - to protect them from being goughed by corporations that try to artificially inflate the value of what they provide.
That's absolutely absurd. As demonstrated above, ownership and control of property is the force that drives free markets, and therefore drives all freedom.
Really? I was under the impression that freedom was the result of noble ideals and a fierce demand for personel and social justice, not some buisnessman's greedy, self-centered attempts to grab as much as they can for as long as they can.
Normally I find that these arguments are presented by those who are offended by the fact that the law limits their own predatory inclinations to rip people of at every possible oportunity. Generally this thin coating of pseudo-idealitic tinsel unravels as the individual begins to maddly rant and rave and accuse anyone who dis-agrees with them as being a communist/homosexual/[insert your favorite boogyman here].
You may as well declare yourself a socialist, because your principles are the same.
Aha! A "reds under the beds" freak. Now we know exactly what buttons to push to send your blood pressure soaring to dangerous heights.
What can I say? If you don't want people to wind you up, don't hand them the key.
Next?
Have a little patience ok? It's a bit furthur down the page. You might want to take this opportunity to pop some valium to keep your blood pressure under control before you hit it though.
Can't comment on mobile charges in Germany - but as for the rest, my heart bleeds. Compare and contrast: Cable modems - in the UK, we have been promised cable modems up and running now for years. Still damn all happening. ADSL - there have been a couple of limited trials of ADSL to date; BT is unwilling to put in ADSL in general because it detracts from the pigs ear of an ISDN implementation they have only recently managed to get to a decent state. I mean, come on - ISDN is at least 10 years out of date; ADSL isn't all that hot - but better than 56k. The "free" net access deals coming out conform to TANSTAAFL. Either you pay per-minute, or you pay some other way - e.g. one cable (tel)co has an offer whereby you get "unlimited" access to their ISP only, IFF you spend a minimum of 10 UKP on voice calls. So - no choice on ISP, and they can't handle the demand, so the service isn't worth having. Am I complaining? Kind of. I'm fed up of paying over the odds for something that should be near as damn it free - and more than a little bit fed up of being held back from new tech.
I suggest we ship Mariah Carey off to Germany.
Why are slashdoters so fucking stupid. Do you have no brains at all? Is that why you insist on having "rights" to others' creations? Are you so incapable of creating anything of you own? Slashdot has become such a hypocritical swamp it is seriously pathetic. Please change your moto to News for Juarez kiddies, Shit thats immoral and illegal. Honestly..
I figured he was either trolling or fudding.
it was possible to download that Porsche without removing the one in the dealership.
The reduction in value comes from the harm done, not the other way around. The harm done is the foul odors, poisoned groundwater, etc.. The plummeting value of the house is a recognition by the market of the harm that has been/will be done to anyone living in the house.
of a time when I posted a couple of mp3's of my OWN music on my web site. My isp deleted the mp3's. I never bothered fighting it, because I moved my mp3's to a friend's server anyways.
This article is kinda lame.
Oh, yeah, right. Like Mariah Carey fans know how to use MP3's. Hah!
> they will never been able to do this...
They won't stop unauthorized copying of MP3s.
But they will be able to institute political censorship through the same framework, give legal MP3 distributors a hard time, and add more expense/taxes to Internet access...
I have no moral obligation to respect your definition of property when it interferes with my human rights. The quibble is what can morally be called property.
In other words, you consider yourself above the law. No doubt you would "legalize" murder for yourself if there were some advantage in it for you.
I'm trying to figure out what you mean by "'cracking' copy-protected software to release it under the GPL"
I refer to the practice of cracking the copy protection on software to release it under the GPL. How many interpretations can there be? If some kid cracks the copy protection on, say, Photoshop, his purpose is to release that cracked version of Photoshop under the GPL. This is called theft. It is wrong. Those who advocate the GPL can yelp about freedom all they like, but it's a red herring: The bottom line is that they are stealing the product of someone else's labor. You can sit there with your "GPL" copy of Photoshop, and your "GPL" copy of Word, and you can try to "spin" the facts to your hearts content, but you remain a thief and nothing can change that.
But jamie's point was that it's not the blocking of pirated music which is bad, but the blocking of all the other stuff.
It's like saying "we want to give freedom of speech to everybody. However, we will block all lies." Well, that's a noble goal... But who decides what is truth? How possible is it to block only the lies and not some true, or even satiricle stuff?
So the real problem is that whatever method they use, it will block things like original work and even stuff unrelated to pirated music.
--Eric Guenterberg
It's about getting Gubbanint off our backs and into our shorts, and charging us for it.
Allowing both sides to be heard is essential, because in these kinds of highly emotional disputes, where one side is being denied access to the public, it is all too easy for defenders of the established orthodoxy to misrepresent and distort what the other side is saying, secure in the knowledge that most "respectable" people will not take the time to learn what the "disreputable" other side is really saying.
Not that it matters in the larger scheme of things. Most people are too timid to think for themselves and won't even use a search engine to find arguments for both sides of any issue. Pressure for intellectual conformity always favors the established views.
> Something has to be done, or we will not have as much great music as we do.
Did "great music" not exist until copyright laws came into effect in the 1700s?
Did "great music" not exist until electronic recording was made possible?
Did "great music" not exist until large media corporations came into being?
Did easy access to cassette recorders, and the ability to duplicate cassettes, destroy "great music"?
"intellectual property" differs from real property in that my use of an idea (or a digital recording, or a piece of software) does not necessarily preclude your simultaneous use of the idea, song, etc. An idea, once released, is not a scarce resource
The fundamental principle of free trade is the voluntary exchange of value: You give me value, I give you value in return.
Now read that again, carefully. Is anything being said about either of us having to lose value? What difference does it make to you whether I lose value or not? If the value I give you costs me nothing, how does that harm you? It doesn't harm you. It's completely irrelevant to our relationship. The bottom line is that A must not receive value from B without providing value to B in return, no more and no less. That is the archetypical contract on which all free societies are based.
In other words: Your reasoning has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on any aspect of the current debate.
I gave a homeless person $1 yesterday. I guess I'm not a nerd.
Sounds like people need to get to work on freenet and gnutella. Make it impossible to censor.
Your corporate bootlicking has consequences far beyond merely keeping some kid (who might not have the money to line Mariah's pockets anyways) from illegally trafficing in pirate audio.
That is why most of the more spined among us object to this sort of facist crap.
It's time for the RIAA to die. If Mariah has to go with them, so be it damn it. The old monopolies on distribution and marketing no longer make any sense.
The whole point of market exchanges is the scarcity of value. All our economies are driven by that.
Your car is fueled by gasoline. Is gasoline the "whole point" of your car? No. Case closed. Scarcity drives market value, but market value is "the point". Since market value is the point, it is only reasonable for somebody with a product to drive up the market value of that product by ensuring scarcity. This is called "doing business". You would deny honest businessmen the scarcity, and therefore the market value, of their products.
That's called theft. You're giving them no value in return for the value you've taken: You are a thief.
The ability to 'own ideas' was rightfully seen as dangerous and contrary to liberty.
That's absolutely absurd. As demonstrated above, ownership and control of property is the force that drives free markets, and therefore drives all freedom. IP and IP rights are wealth creation. Period. You oppose the creation of wealth. You may as well declare yourself a socialist, because your principles are the same. Case closed.
Next?
So, unless a "great musician" can make several million dollars from his/her music, "great music" will be on the decline?
Not necessarily, but the incentive to make music is lessened. Sure, there are people who do it for the sake of doing it, and can cover their costs other ways. But your average artist needs to see some income, if only to defray the cost of the recording. And then there are those who actually want to make money off of it! *gasp*
I'm not going to go into semantics, but it boils down to this: if Joe Artist wants to make music, but knows that the best he can do is sell a few copies, and only make a little money, will he bother? Some will, but others won't. The best way to encourage people to do something you like is to reward them for doing it. And the easiest way to do that is to give them money.
Like Mariah Carey? Spend money, so that she can do it full time, there's excess money for tours, promotions, TV show appearances, etc. Don't like her? Don't buy it. She'd have to have a "real" job, would put out an album every 5 years (or hopefully less often), or the label would drop her and we'd never see her again.
Oh, and how is this relevant? The more artists, the greater likelihood of great music.
> How about they analyze the packets, and, in the case of an mp3, check the ID3 tag to ensure
> whether or not it is illegally distributed, *then* decide if it should be blocked or not?
(1) This will never happen. The people who want this censorship don't want to to only block illegal files, they want to block all files that they don't control.
(2) Doing this would require about 100 times more CPU capacity in the existing routers than we have today.
(3) Doing this would never work as intended anyway, you can send mp3 files in a million different formats (archives, encrypted, non-simple transports, non-TCP transports, etc, etc). The blocking system cannot possibly analyse each and every packet to determine which of a million different formats it could possibly be.
The goal is to make MP3s hard to transfer across the net by legitimate providers. That forces them to sign up with the RIAA and other exploiters who are the folk who really make the money The idea of a band going around them and their distribution monopoly collapsing must scare the pants off them. The prospect of people giving away music and making money on the gigs is sheer terror. That would kill them
I can see it now. Some hapless German nationalist band, already banned by the government and subjected to periodic police raids, will now be informed that the free mp3's it put on websites to publicise its music are now blocked "to protect their intellectual property rights"! Ah, irony.
I gave a homeless person $1 yesterday.
Regardless of your "intent", the effect of your actions is to enslave that homeless person by making him dependent on your "charity".
It was a criminal, aggressive act, against someone helpless to defend himself. You are truly contemptible.
NT = no text
Just think, with all the packets they're going to be droppping, that'll free up a lot of bandwidth for important things...like Quake
Of course, Quake packets will probably be the next things to be blocked
So naturally anyone who wants to keep his job and stay out of jail avoids the topic like the plague, or mouths inane but safe platitudes. Way to go, "democratic" Germany.
Naturally, what constitutes "denying" and what constitutes the "holocaust" are never defined in any way in which it would be possible to defend one's views in court by appeal to evidence, since the court can rule that the evidence itself is "denial". So much for the rule of law.
It all sounds quite medieval - like denying the "truths" of the geocentric universe.
We need more internet for everyone, more projects like freenet and gnutella to make it impossible for governments to censor.
This latest proposal just shows how corporations and governments have the same interests in controlling us - contrary to libertarian theory.
First off, this article seems technically unlikely. They apparently have no idea how widespread mp3 trading has actually become. Blocking URLs is next to useless. But to my point, how feasable would it be to incorporate a public/private key pair into the napster client (actually, the gnutella program would be better because it is fully distributed)? Just in case they decide to filter any packets that even look like mp3 files? This doesn't have to be some super-secure system, just something to scramble the data while it is travelling between users... -Az
actually, the commands go in this order:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.slashdot.org
Of course they do. No one here is arguing for the elimination or non-enforcement of copyright law (although I'm sure a lot of people are against extension of copyright and other recent changes to copyright law). Personally, I just think that any measures to protect Mariah Carey's copyrights shouldn't interfere with LEGAL activities. If they interefere with the legal rights of new artists and consumers, then they should be dropped; law enforcement officials can always go back to the old-fashioned method of arresting people who are breaking the law instead of burdening the rest of us with measures designed to make it marginally more difficult for determined big-time pirates to break the law and much more difficult for people with limited financial resources and technical skill to distribute their music.
We may be starting down a path that can only lead to more rights being censored away
The German courts have thrown people in jail for "denial". "Denial" of course can be anything from crude anti-semitic rants to learned engineering essays; the standards of the court being in both cases that truth is no defense. So I don't think there's any doubt about what can be censored.
Americans, Brits, and Australians who were not in Germany at the time and who were exercising their legal rights as Americans, or Britons, or Australians, have been jailed or at least put on trial or subjected to other legal measures by German authorities.
Where your point about Germany having to appease foreign critics does not hold up, is that these kinds of measures have been taking place all over Europe, in Canada, and elsewhere. It's not just Germany.
>>Germany, where free speech is not quite as cherished as in the US
Germany does allow strong encryption, it even supports it. WITHOUT a backdoor. Did you know NSA tried to make the european parliament ban stron encryption. Do you know the clipper chip?. Do you know key recovery? strong encryption is privacy. privacy is free speech.
DL'ing MP3 isn't pirating. It's free advertising.
Really? Great! Now I'll just waltz on over to my local Porsche dealership, steal one of those zippy new Boxsters I've had my eye on, and they'll thank me for providing "free advertising" as I drive it around town. Great idea!
So given a non-scarce product, I can exchange very little value, something like my attention or my bandwidth or my harddrive, for something of very little value, since it's not scarce, and we're square.
Didn't you read my post? No? Well, go back and read it. The fact that you're losing your bandwidth, or your attention, or your HD space is irrelevant, because I am not gaining it. You are not "giving" me something if you throw it away in some random direction and I never even see it. How irrational can a person be? Look, here, I'll pull a dollar bill out of my wallet, tear it up, and throw it in the wastebasket. By your logic, I have "given" you a dollar.
Get it?
Furthermore, if I own a thing, I have a perfect right to protect the scarcity which preserves its market value. If you build a petroleum refinery next to my house, fill my air with foul odors, and poison the groundwater that feeds my well, the resale value of my home will plummet. You will have harmed me by reducing the value of my possessions. Do you understand the principle here? Yet you insist that the same crime is no longer a crime if we merely change the context.
If you truly believe that stop fucking using their products. Its hypocritical to claim they are facisits and then go and (ab)use their products. DOnt fucking use what htey produce. It really isnt' that difficult of a concept. What fucking part of it confuses you? The 'don't use part' or the fucking part?
Yep... but what does that matter? Why should Germany care if France gets that Illegal copy of that Polish music? heh... couldn't think of any better reference, but that doesn't mean i should be moderated down.
--
linuxisgood:~$ man woman
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Censors! Nazis! Holocaust!
/. This is not news for nerds. You provided a soapbox for a clueless xenophile full of hatred.
I am left speechless. What a piece of rubbish.
Let me recommend one thing: Before you ever again post such a piece of uninformed rubbish, look at what that rubbish contains.
Good-bye
If you want to be taken seriously, grow up.
"I would personally LOVE to give OrCad a REASONABLE fee for the use (and, PROMOTION - remember, I WILL ask the company I work for to buy OrCad) of their software. Say $100. That's more than I would have to pay for almost ANY other "educational version" software as a student, but still relatively reasonable."
You know, of course, that Orcad will give you, or me, or anyone who asks, a free demo copy of their entire suite, right? There's a 30-component-per-schematic limit, but that shouldn't be a problem for educational/hobby purposes. All of the schematics on my website were drawn with it.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
>Moore's law, if routers aren't fast enough now, they will be soon.
:-(
:-)
:-)
Moore's law is the ONLY thing keeping the routers on the internet from bursting at the seams. Unless the internet stops growing for a couple of years, or Moore's law doubles in speed, development isn't going to be fast enough to implement FASTER connectivity that everyone at home is getting (cable modems, etc...) AND filtering (on the router).
No, I don't see it happening unless some company wants to double their R&D. That won't happen unless someone else pays for it -- I guess it is possible after all
As far as making it "technically difficult" to get the stuff, well, I think that you just opened up another market right there -- unfiltered surfing! It'll be the latest rage! Like pirate satellite cards and pirate cable decoders were in the early 80s!
I'll stand to make some BIG dough if this happens. It'll be worth my time to find a way around the restrictions if I can get some cash for it!
Not even 12 hours has gone by, and I've already got a use for the mail tunneling protocol posted earlier.
Some thoughts: 1) To determine if a given packet is valid or has to be blocked, they have to look at it. They dont know beforehand, so they WILL read my email. They arent allowed to do so. I WILL sue them 2) Since the german law allows me to copy music for my personal use, and it doesnt matter where i get it from, they break the law when they try to stop me. They can stop the illegal "making it available", but they cant stop the LEGAL "downloading it". So I WILL sue them. 3) The German government has proven quite sane when they didnt gave in when CIA and NSA tried to force europe to ban strong cryptopgraphie. So I dont think they will give in to some commercial institution. 4) The GEMA has NO right to force ISP in blocking illegal content. Its the same with Compuserves Sommer, who was first found guilty for not blocking porn, but later was found not guilty. The ISPs ARE NOT responsible for content they led thru, just for those they host by themselfes. BTW: Did you know that the NSA own (or rent) some rooms exactly in the building where most of the seecables start?
Not surprisingly, the texas legislature has a similar proposal in the senate that suggests adopting a similar deal. Yes I know we live in america, but texas politicians don't realize that. Article is at this site
He's not being "knee-jerk"; you are being obtuse.
It is already illegal to "deny" the "holocaust" (which is never really defined) in most European countries; in France they even went so far as to make it illegal to deny the "facts" established by the Nuremburg trials (so I guess the Germans really did murder all those Polish officers at Katyn, and not the Soviets!).
This is a really serious threat to freedom of speach and conscience; making interpretations of historial events into a crime. Not to mention that there are wide differences between different types of "holocaust denial". These legal ursurpations lump them all together and use the legal system for something it should never be used for - enforcing orthodoxy of opinion concerning historical events.
He's damn right that if this goes through it will be used against unpopular political opinion. The German government has already blocked certain domains that host sites which contain political speach that is illegal under German law.
Ah yes, true.
HTTP/1.1 GET http://slashdot.org/
/" when I've checked with sniffers. When a browser connects to a proxy, it does give the whole URL like that. Most all modern browsers specify the host (for virtual hosts to kick in) via the Host: parameter after the GET.
Actually, it's just "HTTP/1.1 GET
HTTP/1.1 GET /
Host: slashdot.org
And naturally, two returns afterward.
they will never been able to do this... take an example of China trying to block a lot of site and they CAN'T. Even if germans put filter on their backbone router to detect "MP3", if you zipped your MP3 the router will see nothing special... it makes me laugh what government are trying to do :) Internet is free and will always be.
--
BeDevId 15453
Download BeOS R5 Lite free!
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
While this sounds like a big conspiracy, it is nothing at all. First, Music is not "copyrighted" material in sense of american law in germany. In fact, its perfectly legal to copy music without charge for "private, personal", non-commercial purposes. If I download 1000 CDs from the internet, I can`t be blamed. But the operator of the website can be sued, because he did deal with a anonymous person and not a personal friend or relativ. Second, music will most likely not become "copyrighted material" in germany, because then the large GEMA organisation would have to be scraped also. GEMA is a private organisation, charges quite some money on EVERY media sold in germany and distributes the revenues between the artists. Third, the internet-providers will laugh about any attempt to make them block anything. Routers, like our companys big cisco7500, cost several $100.000 and are still under hard preasure to keep up with the traffic (we use quite alot of em and we are just a small provider in southern germany). Making them filter would demand 10-100 times more power, which means raising by factor 10 or more. I know what I am talking about, I have to use filters from time to time on our core-gate and it imediately loses performance. Impossible to do this on a large scale. And last but not least law itself would intervene: You can techically only block nearly all digital media or nothing. By law you may not block in general to block a specific content and therefore a general filter is illegal.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Korea was more of the entire world's fault, rather than just the US. At least, that's the impression that I got from my history classes.
I agree with all your comments, with one exception:
>BTW, in the US, Nazi propaganda is legal (AFAIK),
>and I've yet to ear an American to ridicule them.
This is not true. For every neo-Nazi group in North America, there's about a dozen different groups educating people about the Holocaust. Believe me, except in the deep, deep south of the US (and even there it's very rare) you will not find anyone who will defend the Nazis. Hell, not even the most right-wing of the christian churches will say anything encouraging about the Nazis.
I believe it's because of our collective guilt over our own Holocaust, the genocide of the Native Americans/Indians (whatever term you prefer) over the past centuries. It may not be as blatant as the Jewish Holocaust, but these mass murders also occured. I think everytime that the public here demands that the US and Canada get involved in the ethnic conflicts going on elsewhere in the world, it's because of that guilt.
There are a few cases where some neo-Nazi made some public comments, but the public here is extremely hostile to those publicity-seekers
that spread neo-Nazi propaganda.
Here's one case that's happened very close to where I live, actually: A public school teacher named Malcolm Ross in the city of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada, wrote a book that downplayed the death toll of the Holocaust. Apparently, he did this in private, and never discussed his views in class at all. (I believe he was a math teacher, but that's just rumor. The media never said what he taught.) When someone found out about this book, he was fired on the spot. He appealed the firing to the Labour Relations Board (a board that decides on whether disputed firings are reasonable and maintains standards on workplace safety, among other things) and won, but was not given a teaching job after the DOE's phones rang off the hook for several days straight. This wasn't censorship, this was public pressure.
Nazi propaganda may be legal, but it's harshly condemned by everyone. It doesn't need to be made illegal, because everyone knows it's a lie, and parents make damn sure to tell thir kids about the Holocaust.
Err, sorry for the long post...
Your comment is rather self-defeating by being considerably more bigoted than any other in this thread.
As stated, FreeUser was expressing h/er opinions about the pragmatics of rebuilding post-holocaust Germany. In fact s/he acknowledged the USA's own overbearing censorship, so why you chose to reply to this particular comment is beyond me. Your reply sounds as if you read only the first paragraph.
You are quite right that it is nobody else's business but your own, but these people are offering their opinion. Do you seek to censor that?
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Let's say I have a pea power FM station. It's legal, with the 100 watt license from the FCC, How do I get music to play? I cnat just grab Cowboy neals, music and broadcast it, that's illegal, or as far as I see the RIAA saying. anything other than myself playing the music in a locked closet that is sound proofed, I cannot play or "broadcast" someones music without written authorization. Ok, so a radio station must have file cabinets upon file cabinets full of written authorizations?? How do you legally broadcast music? Anyone have a clue? Anyone here a GM for a radio station?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I just wish most Americans knew what we have done in the past, from slavery, to the Native Americans, to Vietnam, to Latin America and even in our own cities. We are *still* in sorry shape.
Jeff
A lot of people are "trading" MPEGs these days. Thanks to irc and gnutella.
OK, they want to block illegal mp3s. Whether or not you agree with this is a different issue.
How about they analyze the packets, and, in the case of an mp3, check the ID3 tag to ensure whether or not it is illegally distributed, *then* decide if it should be blocked or not?
The technology is there to acheive this properly, but it won't happen. It will come down to all or nothing, and Cowboy Neal's groovy tunes will be blocked, just because they are mp3s.
Sure, it's a shame, those are unexpected groovy treats, but if you're German, you won't get to hear them. Not without an offshore shell account and encryption, but how long until PGP packets are banned? Then they ban usenet, then email, then web. Welcome to the new net. An engineer's playground, brought into check by those who know better than you. You might have helped built it, but the goverment knows better.
'Think for yourself, and question authority.'
Timothy Leary vs. the Grid
Probably on Napster as an mp3, if you can't find it, get napigator and search for it. It's in there, and I doubt anyone involved would object to it's distribution.
Support freenet & blacknet, it's the only realistic way to can advance without interference.
Good reason? Feh. I think we should all encourage Nazis get their message out -- so that everyone can see what dumbfucks they are. Suppressing them makes them underdogs, and makes them look "cool" to people who just wanna rebel against something. It also gives them a legitimate reason to hate their government. (IMHO, a government that censors its people, forfeits the right to govern those people, and they are morally free to act against that government in any way, without restrictions.)
Germany's censorship policies are doing the Nazis a big favor. That's a funny way to act if they want to appear anti-Nazi. It makes me wonder if they feel that the Nazi viewpoint actually merits supression instead of merely ridicule. That's creepy!
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Well as long as the average person can sign up to that MP3-blocking thingie so that it can proect the music I produce at home with some friends I am for it. But as this wont happen it as this is just for corporate monopolistic suppression I say I hate it.
Encrypted FTP session
I Love It!
.sig here...
"GEMA will never, ever tire of putting these globalization-addicted advocates of absolute freedom of communication - the depisers of culture and intellectual property - in their place."
I just wish we could get some RIAA and MPAA people to repeat this. How good would their PR be if people really understand that Free Speech is the mortal enemy of "culture and intellectual property".
Maybe I'm getting closer to a
chris
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
It is claimed by some involved in Anti-Fascist movements that there is a correlation between public meetings led by such luminaries as the Holocaust denier David Irving and attacks on perceived enemies afterwards.
I should point out that I haven't seen actual statistical proof for this. ( I have witnessed an instance first-hand, but anecdote doesn't count for much unless it occurs en masse.)
We're sure you mean it. But if you're going to denounce anything as "uninformed rubbish" it is incumbent upon you to inform us differently. If you do not, then, as the moderators have wisely deemed, it is flamebait.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
>>"No, that is the wrong question. The right question is are Mariah Carey's rights more important than yours or mine? "
>She did the work of recording the music. You did nothing.
So, her right to not have her music illegally distributed is more important than my right to distribute *my* work any way I see fit?
-Nick
-Nick
My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. You killed my master. Prepare to die.
>So, apparently Mariah Careys rights don't matter?
No, that is the wrong question. The right question is are Mariah Carey's rights more important than yours or mine?
-Nick
-Nick
My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. You killed my master. Prepare to die.
BMG is "Bertlesmann Music Group" .. no? So, only 3 I would say.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
HTTP/1.1 GET http://slashdot.org/
:P
Not to nitpick, but that should be
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: slashdot.org
(note the two newlines at the end of the request).. And that would be in a packet addressed to slashdot.org:80. but, if you don't put the Host: whatever header, http 1.1 implementations (at least apache) will give you an error message. I've spent most of this week coding an HTTP server in java so I'm still 'fresh'
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
heh... couldn't think of any better reference, but that doesn't mean i should be moderated down.
No, you should get modded down for posting twice
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Well, it's
GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n
indeed... The HTTP 1.1 protocol wants a Host: header, as it is said in another post.
But you also can do:
nc proxy.whatever.com 8080
GET http://www.slashdot.org/ HTTP/1.0
And what the hell do video cameras have to do with restricting free speech? You can talk freely, just be aware that it's taped. You can talk all you want, just don't trash everything.
Video taping the city is a _good_ idea IMHO, maybe we can have a lower crime rate dispite the amazing stupidity of European law dissalowing video evidence to be substantial enough to convict.
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
...slashdot's turned into this great little place where everybody says the same thing over and over again.
Indeed. Wait a minute, I've got it -- lets take a page from Microsoft's book and implement automatic symlinking of identical comments!
Jeff
For the record, I just performed step one - wiping out all of my .mp3s and the Zip backups I kept from when I reformatted my drive (Sept. 4, the day I installed Linux:). I also proved the etheraeal nature of .mp3 when I almost wiped out .mp3 backups of some radio work I did over the summer. Fortunately, I hadn't wiped out the Zips by that point, so I still had one digital backup left.
.mp3 my fave CDs for my personal use, and ONLY for my personal use. I don't know when I'm going to perform step 2....when I get around to it, I guess.
Next, I'm going to
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
provider's routers?
They might try actually reading the packets and blocking any packet that contains some string of 'illegalMP3s.com'. But that would also block any site with a link to 'illegalMP3s.com'.
The technical infeasability of this plan is absurd. Even if they did somehow manage to keep an accurate list of evil URL's, how could they block them without blocking everything on that IP?
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
Amusing perhaps, when you remember that the record companies (at least here in the states) had record sales and profits for the last year. When they are fighting to "save their industry", they are making more money than ever before. Not to mention all of the beneficial web pages that will be blocked from the innocents.
How do you inforce something like this? Will all computers be forced to display their contence to the Rights Protection System? Or just public servers? And only enforced upon German computers? If it is on all computers, how do you force someone to install the software, or how do you stop someone from removing it if it comes preinstalled? Which OS will it run on? Does it block MP3 transfers on all protocols? MP3s on the web are hard to find even in the US, but on IRC I can find any song I want. How can the software tell if a song is copyrighted or not? This software's likelyhood to suceed. There are too many factors involved for it to efficently "protect your rights".
Something has to be done, or we will not have as much great music as we do.
So, unless a "great musician" can make several million dollars from his/her music, "great music" will be on the decline?
i know that's happened before, but it didnt' work this time...
--
linuxisgood:~$ man woman
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Yep... but what does that matter? Why should Germany care if France gets that Illegal copy of that Polish music? heh... couldn't think of any better reference, but that doesn't mean i should be moderated down.
--
linuxisgood:~$ man woman
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
yes, i'm on a cablemodem and get impatient with things when they don't show up right away... often that means i hit "stop" and try the link (or button as the case may be) again, without thinking. Apologies for redundancies, and to think i didn't even have anything good to say in the first place.
--
linuxisgood:~$ man woman
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Now given that censoring mp3's is a next to impossible task, if any country was going to endevor into such an evil task, I'd give Germany the highest chance of suceeding (well, short of the psuedo Commie-Capitalists of China).
I am an avid fan of a certain video game, Jagged Alliance 2, and remember the amount of work Germans had to go through to get the game with its gore... smuggling, warez... Germany as a country (sadly) seems supportive of these kind of activities.
OK. So you want to block packets containing MP3 data. How are you going to recognize MP3 data? You must assume, of course, that the pirates will quickly switch to SSL, possibly augmented by other encryption schemes. And you can't tell a packet of encrypted MP3 from a packet of more innocuous encrypted data because, well, they're encrypted.
Beyond that, there would be no way to tell the difference between an MP3 containing copyrighted data and an MP3 containing something you own (like, say, a recording of your daughter's violin recital). Blocking MP3s at the packet level would amount to a net-wide ban on the MP3 format (of course, I don't suppose RIAA would shed many tears if that happened...)
-y
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
Thank you! I was actually hoping to get a respons from an actual German, because, as I said, my knowledge is based on speaking with an American who lived in Germany.
You're right, freedom and democracy do have to have restrictions. I may have been a bit too vague on that. My apologies.
Again, thank you for your perspective. I hope to learn a lot more about your culture as I study the language!
______________________
Can we possibly get the two buttons seperated a bit? They're a little too close together for my comfort...
______________________
Believe me, no one with a right mind in Germany merely tells the problem to go away. As stated in other posts there's education (in all forms) going on inside schools and out. Still, 50 yrs after and it will go on and IMHO should never stop.
Please tell me, what reason other than trying to hold up "freedom of speech" by all means (which doesn't work anywhere btw, for good reasons) is there to allow Neonazis to bear swastikas etc.
IMHO it's also a sign of maturity finding out that there is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech. After all you'd have to ensure it and thereby already compromise somebody else's. As we see here on /. almost daily it's very difficult and the preferrably few restrictions should be placed very wisely.
This law doesn't inhibit in any way open discussion or block anything from mind. Open a book or watch tv or whatever if you want to learn. But I don't want to live in a Germany with that history and have to answer, why the hell we let Neonazis parade in the street bearing all those symbols. I think the same question being asked here "Didn't you learn?" would be much more profound then.
This is all part of never again and it's (mostly :) ) certainly not blind brainwashed fear but critical thinking.
greetings,
Roland
And still it is more expensive to make calls then elswhere, especially mobile phones.
When it comes to access to the internet, i get wet eyes thinking about how cheap a decent connection to the 'net is elswhere. In Germany:
No cable modems, per-minute cost and ADSL only in mayor cities (even slow with 786kbit/s, expensive too) :-((
Nearly impossible to get a static IP.
-- Having problems sending big files over the net? Try out Efisto (http://efisto.org)
They can set up a hotline for people to send in tips, and perhaps have some folks occasionally try the search engines and USENET. If these folks can't, after a bit of time, find a given MP3 site, then neither will most of the potential users...
Then, ban the site as it's found. If the first several pages' worth of links from, say, Lycos, Google and AltaVista all return 404s, then won't most users give up?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
C'mon now! She's not all bad, I mean, she is pretty easy on the eyes.. The mute button is your friend!
.sig: Now legally binding!
If you hit submit without changing the message at all, slashdot will not post the duplicate.
--
The shareholder is always right.
Just give up. If I can listen to it or watch it I can copy it if I really want to.
You're only going to inconvenience legitimate customers by encrypting and licensing and tracking down and blacking all the bad guys.
So just give it up!!!
Hahah... blacking = blocking
I even used preview.
This 70 second wait to repost is lame, because it doesn't let you post after 70 seconds since your first post, but since you last TRIED to post. Run the clock from the last successfully submitted post, dammit.
Why are we constantly beseiged on all sides by this kind of stupidity? Like, every day I come on here and see something just as dumb as this idea.
bah.
I don't really know where I'm going with this, I just wanted to bitch and moan a little.
If exist mp3
say=fuck the publisher;
If say=fuck the publisher
cost -= $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$;
If costearning profit=yes;
What's the problem?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Haha!
(hmm unofficial moderation) uh oh did I start a trend? Sowwy. After all it's just a bunch of colored pixels, subject, comment, and all.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Sure - if they can keep up with all of them; but how are they supposed to do that? Not possible.
The best (or rather, worst) they can do is keep updating the router access lists, which is a ton of overhead and will slow traffic, especially with as many ip's as they will have to include.
"Sure. But it also grants the German people (government and citizens) to effectively combat any major effort to disrupt the process of healing."
It's not the process of healing that gets disrupted, it's the process of blocking it from memory. The conflict or wound is still very much present in the German population, and will be inherited to the children until people decide to really deal with it.
If you tell a problem to go away, it will. However, it will still come back again to haunt you.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
If they only blocked Mariah Carey or Backstreet Boys it would be more like a spam filter. -Aaron
We have the best government that money can buy.
Is router-based packet blocking an overly draconian measure? Perhaps so, but I just can't figure out why nearly everyone who reads /. thinks being compenstated for your efforts is wrong.
Dear moderator(s),
please pay a visit to your nearest McDonalds and get yourself a nice clue with a lot of ketchup.
Mmhhh. Fantastic. No thinking required.
"Here at the Delft university of Technology we are working on compression algorithms that compress audio with a factor of 24, without perceptual loss. Combined with new recordable devices it will become possbile in 5 years to store all the popular music produced of the last year on a single disc."
I'd love to know how you've managed it - with fractal and wavelet algorithms buried under patent encrustation, it'd sure be great to have something else better than mpeg. Are you referring to MPEG-2 AAC, in your link, there, or is Delft's algorithms something else?
"The other, ironically the same physical network, will be the realm where those with the technical know how ellude these goofy and poorly implemented laws."
Your prediction is true already - http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php
"Unlike the Web, Freenet is designed to allow thoughts and ideas to be published and read without fear of censorship of any kind. To participate in this system users will simply need to run a piece of server software on their computer, and optionally use a client program to insert and remove information from the system. Anyone can write a client (or indeed a server) program for Freenet. Reference implementations of these programs are being written in the Java programming language."
"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?' " -Mike Godwin
The GEMA is a NON profit Organization. Every Author, Componist or other copyright holder can become a member an can register their works with them. Everyone who wants to use works registered with GEMA in non private use (Playing at public places. Broadcasting via Radio, TV. Using in Films) has to contact GEMA and has to pay a fee. The fee's are redistributed by GEMA to the copyright holders.
GEMA fee's are often the only payment the copyright holder (The Bands!) recive after the initial payment they received from the label which brought their record to market.
The GEMA gets a small fee for every recording equipment und recording media. This fee allows everyone who owns a record to make copys of this records for personal use. You can even give this recordings to friends without getting into legal trouble. The fee on media is small, a few Pfennig ( 1 Pfennig = 1/2 cent) per media.
So GEMA is not a tool og the recording industry to make their profits on the back of the authors. It's a tool to get the authors the licensing fees the users have to pay for using their music.
if you want to read more about GEMA try their website. As for the potential misuse of the content blocking system, i must completely agree with you.
Its "Rights Protection System" is rumored to already be in testing - and the rights that get protected are those of Mariah Carey and her label, needless to say, not yours or mine.
Speak for yourself. If you've never had an idea or done anything original, I guess intellectual property protection like this doesn't help you out much.
Censorship is a slippery slope; once you start down it, everything is vulnerable.
The biggest effort in censorship these days is in fact "political correctness" -- banning arbitrary terms and claiming to protect people. German law makes one specific lie illegal. Furthermore this article about denying the Holocaust is 50+ years old now and has not been extended to any other subjects, so the slope is in fact not that slippery.
One holds it out for the world to see... and ridicule and spit upon and point and laugh and use as an object lesson for your kids when they're old enough to handle it.
... and until then? As in most cases, the good is weaker than the evil, and neo-Nazis don't wait til your kids are old enough. BTW, in the US, Nazi propaganda is legal (AFAIK), and I've yet to ear an American to ridicule them.
The Germans want to censor. What really doesn't matter, we must do what we can to stop them, simply on principle.... because censorship leads to thoughtcrime, and everyone who has ever read 1984 knows where that leads.
Well, no. Nobody here in Germany is foolish enough to believe that neo-Nazi propaganda can be suppressed by making it illegal. That's not the point. The point is to make a specific kind of lie illegal, not to prevent this lie but to have a handle to punish people who spread this lie.
Yes, we (Germans) are pretty sensitive to Nazi propaganda, for a specific reason you already stated:
Never Again. At all costs.
And we do take means towards that goal.
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
So, apparently Mariah Careys rights don't matter? The bulk of the of money artists make is from the album. Tours are from a business standpoint advertising rather than actual presentation of the product. If Mp3s become popular among the masses, it will bite seriously into their profits. It hasn't happened yet but it is coming. With broadband net access becoming more common, its almost more convenient to download an album in Mp3 than buy it, if you own a Rio or a CD-R it is. Heck with a cable modem from a provider that has a reasonably solid network downloading entire CD images is almost practical. As the masses catch on and CD burners become more common piracy will skyrocket. Something has to be done, or we will not have as much great music as we do.
There's nothing to "understand" about this. It's simply a quite debatable principle.
To find proof of the matter one only has to look south to Austria, where a Nazi (sic), Joerg Haider, was recently elected into the Aus. gov.. 1/3 of Austria's voters voted for him, and noone was shocked by it. Everyone expectes people in the country to have a bit of Nazi in them anyway. So where were all these anti-Nazi laws then?
Actually, Haider is not a Nazi. He's just a very clever, rhetorically giftend and incredibly slippery guy who will at any point in time say what his current audience wants to hear without the slightest regard for facts, common sense or what he said yesterday.
Sorry folks, the anti-Nazi laws have actually made things even worse.
They allow us to do something against "ideological pyromanicas" before someone gets killed. In what way is that worse than only being able to do something about them after the deed?
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
The way people rant here it sounds as if this were at least a formal bill proposal. It is not. It is basically a wish list formulated by record companies. They will come to the legislature saying "could you please do this", and the legislature will reply "Nope, sorry." and that will be that.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
It does no good to keep harping on what are essentially good arguments for MP3. What needs to be done is to _show_ people, a high profile case that demostrate conclusively that MP3's can be legal, that one does not have to have a history of being a warez d00d to defend MP3.
This really needs to be done to demostrate the morally dubious arguments against MP3 by the MPAA and RIAA.
maybe setting up a few encrypted/compressed tunnels to outside the country might help to get around it. only thing im worried about is if germany does it, things are bad, and then the chance for other countries to try it will increase, making things REALLY bad.
or maybe we could just say "screw it all" and start massive ham-radio network that all for-profit organizations/individuals, organizations/individuals that represent for-profit groups, and governments are blocked from. give them some of their own ideas. hey... maybe ipv6 could actually get USED for once!
---- Sig? What sig? Who needs one, anyway?
Have you ever heard of Fugazi? No, probably not.
:)
See that web page link next to my user name? Go ahead and follow it, if you think you can handle it. It leads to the radio station site WMBC, of UMBC campus. We play almost entirely independant music, stuff that is not on major labels like these, and that major labels would probably prefer to see go away. In fact, some people don't even listen to any bands that are on major labels. For many of these bands, their albums are not even sold in all major cities in the US, let alone in different countries...MP3 is the only way they're likely to be heard in Germany. In fact, they even voluntarily allow distribution of their songs in this format...if you can imagine!
The FACT is, that the mp3 format itself is not illegal. Nowhere in the story did it ever advocate _illegal_ mp3s. In fact, Jamie gave the example of being a self-promoting independant musician, and having your site stomped out (without notice! and you'll probably never know, because you think it's still up...because it is!) of view from a big chunk of the population by huge record companies. These record companies are responsible for commercial radio being as bad as it is, and they certainly don't want some upstarts coming along and trying to change the state of things...they like their money.
I personally am part of an unsigned band. Yes, I have the copyright to all of my songs, and yes, I distribute them in MP3 format. Please try and tell me how that is illegal; I'm all ears.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
so i guess we will have to change extensions from .mp3 to .jpg ?
Systems like this are BOUND for failure. If there is a will then a way shall be discovered. It could be as simple as renaming extenstions from .mp3 to .bah
What if it scans the actual file to determine its an mp3? Compress it in winzip first so as to change the file and THEN rename your file.
Its impossible to block something like Mp3's you can take down the major sites and block the napster ports.. but HOW can you stop the determined ( the people who really want the things in the first place? ) *shrug*
I dunno, I see MP3z as a good way to for my friend (http://www.mp3.com/eviladam/) to distribute music. If I listen to music and like it enough, I'll buy it to let the publisher know I liked what that artist did. I check out alot of independent MP3z too... But I don't go d/ling with the intent of stealing. The artist worked hard and deserved some compensation, right?
But if Germans want to ban Mariah Carey that much, fuck it, let them! She sucks. =)
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
This will never work, you'll see. Someone is going to come along with a little patch or something and make all this effort to censor worthless.
Besides what if the mp3 files are zipped up and distributed that way? That would fool the censor software easily...
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
I own a small record label. We encourage people to download our music, and to make it available on Napster, etc. (Click the URL above to see our permission grant). The big labels hate this more than they hate people "pirating" Mariah Carey. It bypasses their traditional control over distribution, publicity, and marketing by eliminating all those bottlenecks. No need to fight Sony for shelf space when you can sell over the web; no need to battle payola-fed radio stations for airplay when people can hear your stuff over the web. Since the record industry no longer provides any value-added (Spotting talent? Right. Tell it to the Backstreet Boys), their only real edge is their control over these bottlenecks. Independent artists are already making more money with their own labels. The wide variety of music on the Web for free is an even bigger danger to them. Watch and you'll see that their efforts are aimed mostly at shutting down people like me.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
In germany it is allowed to 1. download copyrighted mp3's from the internet and listen to them. 2. trade mp3's with friends 3. make copies for personal use or for friends Recently there was a good article in the ct, a german computer magazine about this issue.
That cannot be done.
Instead of wasting their time putzing around trying to roll back the clock, why don't they spend some of that effort trying to reinvent themselves? The concept of a music industry is NOT doomed! The current concept of the music industry, on the other hand, might be in serious trouble.
But there I go again, thinking that the RIAA (and their German equiv.) might have intelligent people on staff! How foolish of me . . . I've seen cabbages with a better grip on handling change.
I have no
By rights, copyrights...
But then, who has rights? Maybe just priveledges?
The priveledged few, and not necessarily those who are deserving has been my experience.
Eh...
Summary - nerds are the master race, therefore they will agree with me
This is repulsive
TomV
Sure, they can probably block MP3 sites, but there are ways around everything.
Still, it's yet more proof that the governments on this planet are in fact owned by big business, like the recent blank CDR tax introduced here in Canada. Now every time I make a Linux CD, I get to the pay the govt. and the record companies here for the honour. When an indie band wants to make a demo CD, they now have to pay the record companies to do so...
Democracy my ass...
Just rename all your mp3's to *.mp4
Considering that 99.99% of the music produced in the past 100 years is in my opinion bloody awful, do I really care what the RIAA tries to protect?
Perhaps you should heed your own advice and read a few of Marx's writings, instead of bundling his profoundly humane and equitable theories with the historically unsound and just plain repulsive ideas of the holocaust nay-sayers. As you so eloquently put in your post, ignorance is no solution to the world's problems.
There's no apostrophe in the possessive "its".
Supposing they actually manage to get this scheme in place. That would totally destroy the whole infrastructure of the Internet. Most sites with illegal MP3's and warezzzz tend to be put up on remote parts of totally legitimate servers, without the administrators of those servers knowing about it. Now they block every server that sends out MP3's. They'll block out a lot of servers that are very important in routing other, legal packets as well. My guess is that the Internet will come to a grinding halt if they really manage to pull this off, especially in Europe (look at a map again in case you're wondering why).
They're doing this because they're scared shitless. Think about it...in principle every artist can now distribute his or her own music now. I myself do this a lot...just take the finished master of a track (which in my case is always a WAV-file anyway), MP3 it and dump it on the net. If you're good and you're lucky, a large number of people will hear your song. There's no drawback to circumventing the major labels, getting on one takes a lot of luck (and a nice pair of breasts) as well, so why bother? Of course in the past artists would get advances (out of their own pockets, I might add) to record their tracks in a professional studio, something which is hideously expensive. Nowadays, though, with hardware prices being as low as they are, there's not that much need for such expensive studios anymore. Just get yourself a USD1000 pc, and twice that on software and a decent mic, and you're in business. Only two years ago, that kind of money could barely get you a HD-8 track recorder, now it gets you unlimited tracks and much better sound quality (Rolands use compression, you know). Lots of artists can manage to save up USD3000 for basic equipment, so there's no need for record labels in that respect as well.
The majors aren't stupid, they see this as much as you and I do. They can see that pretty soon their multibilliondollar swindles will be out of business and there's nothing they can do. So what do they do? They put up a fight for no reason but to make life miserable for the rest of us. Too bad they're going down no matter what. Should we be upset that they're trying to destroy the Internet? A little bit..but not too much. In the end, we'll win anyways. Don't forget what Germany looks like today, only 55 years after it was blown to bits.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
How do Pedophiles and Marxists and Holocaust-deniers get grouped together? How can a post as idiotic as this get moderated up?
This post seems so typical of a product of the American education system where they're just pushed to believe Communism is the root of all evil. It's obvious this poster is too stupid or ignorant to understand Marxism or any government system that isn't our 'democracy'.
And in reference to Mein Kampf and Hitler, what's so bad about Hitler? The man practically did what Napoleon did in a span of 6 months. He almost took over the fucking world, and it seems that no one has respect for a man who stood up against the world and said fuck off. Even though I don't agree with his POLICIES (genocide, censorship), he got a lot more accomplished then any other government or country of his time. And by the way, most European countries and America were aware of the Holocaust by 1937, but they chose to do nothing. As the saying goes... if you're not part of the answer you're part of the problem....
Um, not all... some of us are trying to pick up some of this, and appreciate the occasional tidbit thrown to the wind... If it's short and on-topic (as this was) I think it's great to share technical insight.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
This one isn't too bad. There is still no decision made yet and in Europe people are still a little bit more aware of people's need then in America where one big company can easily outwheigh a lot of citizens. So be aware and lobby against it wherever you are (provided you are german), but remember that this is just in testing, nothing more.
But still, if it would be implemented then it would be fatal, because they are already lobbying with the possibilities it gives you to block rassistic, etc., content.
"It may be your sole purpose in life to serve as a warning to others."
What your web browser would do is connect to slashdot.org's port 80 and send:
GET / HTTP/1.1\n\n
oops, well, I guess that was pretty picky.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Playing MP3's with the mute button on... was there a point you were trying to make?
This is just another reason why copyright laws should be abolished.
"Have you eaten your
Between this MP3 thievery and "cracking" copy-protected software to release it under the "GPL" (at least it's not "shareware", where the crackers want you to pay them),
For gods sake! Home many times does this have to be explained? The GPL is a licensing structure that is used by CREATORS of ORIGINAL software, who wish for their software to be free. It has NOTHING to do with cracked, copyrighted software.
So, for example, if I wrote a program to keep track of my record collection and wanted other people to use it, I could release it to the internet as GPL software. Then others would be free to use my source code, to improve the program. (Which is a good thing because I am not a good programmer)
Shareware is NOT someone cracking software and then charging for it. It is when I write my record collection organizer, and allow people to download it, with a warning that says "If you use this software, send me $5, if you don't you can't use it". True, this involves an honor system, but, hey- I wrote the program for myself, if even one person sends me the $5 thats more than I would have made had I not made it shareware.
Please, people, before you flame the evil GPL crackers, do a little research and realize GPL and cracking are completely unrelated.
That's plain wrong. It's the recording industry who wants to protect their profits by all means. That's not a specific German problem by the way.
But it's very unlikely that they will ever get that far:
This means that the blockage of content must be zumutbar (~ acceptable). Blocking whole servers or a large performance penalty is probably not zumutbar, especially if other, legal content would be affected -- something the grounds for the law explicitly state!
You can have a look at the TDG (Teledienstegesetz, ~ Tele Services Statue), including its grounds at http://www.fitug.de/ulf/politik/iukdg.ht ml (German only, sorry). It basically says in 5: (1) You're fully responsible for your own content. (2) You're responsible for content from others if you keep it on your own servers, have knowledge of it and it's zumutbar to block/delete it. (3) You're not responsible for content you only provide access to. Same for content you only cache temporarily.
The recording industry wants to have that changed. Until then, they just spread inaccurate information; ie that this blocking software makes it zumutbar to block that content -- which, even if it's true does not have any effect on content to which only access is provided.
It should be noted that -- according to the grounds for the TDG -- this is not because it was deemed impossible to influcence that content but because an access provider does not attribute to the violation of the provider of the content. The "new" blocking system does not change that.
(Of course, the interpretation of the recording industry is different, just as it is different in other areas of copyright law... But that's another story.)
I don't see any connection to the Holocaust. Some people seem to be extremy paranoid about this.
Claus
As a consequence, Austrian history "glosses over" the war, and they often appear insensitive to these issues
On Joerg Haider's party's vote in the recent Austrian elections, it is less significant than it appears: it is largely a reaction to the two main establishment parties who have up to now, in effect, stitched up Austrian politics between themselves, extending to political control of government appointments. A section of the Austrian people would probabally have voted for any party opposed to the other two. I do agree that the Austrian official response to protests was pathetic, but do bear in mind that there has been significant internal protests.
---- For Whigs admit no force but argument
The argument about the nature of nerds/libertarians is circular.
I have yet to see a Libertarian argument (including the substantive parts of this one) that does not reduce down to "All the problems of the world would vanish if the Government went away"
Truly ludicrous.
---- For Whigs admit no force but argument
Actually I wasn't being obtuse, I was being confused. I misunderstood the original remark! It is already illegal to deny the holocaust, as you say, and censorship tools like this one would be used to enforce the law. Most of the neo Nazi stuff you hear in Germany nowadays comes from abroad, especially America, and the internet makes things easier for all demagogues.
However, none of this is ever going to happen in any significant way. As I mention somewhere else, the German government's hands are pretty much tied, what's the point of blocking a URL anyway?
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
Believe me, there is nothing that needs to be done. The German government's hands are tied. It's caught between the German states on the one hand, which according to the constitution regulate the media (but not the telecoms) and the European Union on the other, which is now the de facto trade regulator. It's just talk.
The Germans are funny - they used to go on and on about how their national telecoms monopoly was a Good Thing, and everyone seemed to believe it until the EU forced the government to allow competition. Within months, Germany was one of the most competitive telecoms markets in the world.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
Warner Electra Atlantic equals 'we-a' instead of fighting them why dont you go FREE MUMIA!!!
The blood versions of the game are NOT banned in Germany. It ist allowed to sell them to everybody older than 18. It is not allowed to sell them to younger people or to promote them. Its a try (i dont think it works, but then again, we dont have so many gang wars like america) protect the children. FYI, Germany is more restrictive in censoring brutality, but A LOT more free in displaying sex than America. So I could say the Americans are used to restrictions, because they restrict sex so much!
There are no "good" reasons for this. If anyone commits real crimes - murder, robbery, arson, whatever - then bust 'em. Otherwise, you are creating a class of political crime.
If you think that these political persecutions are doing any real good, remember what Nietzsche said: "that which does not kill me makes me stronger".
Also, these groups are always among the first to figure out the new technology (computers, BBS's, internet, mp3's, etc) because they are forced to by government restrictions. They will always figure out how to regroup and reorganize around these obstacles.
People are, I hope, fully aware that 'promotion of young artists' means printing of posters and things, the physical pressing of albums, making of cardboard signs that hang in stores, and does not in any way shape or form translate to 'giving the money to young artists'? I don't mention recording costs because the young artists actually stand those costs themselves through advances on royalties. I'm only talking _promotion_ expenses. This doesn't mean artists don't go broke, it means the companies are willing to print up cardboard signs _while_ the artists go broke.
On a happier, more personal yet still vaguely ontopic note- finally got the ADAT and I've hacked the electronics until the thing begins to sound as warm as my open-reel deck- airwindows rides again! And I will still offer free recording to opensource authors willing to release the results as free mp3s. (You'll have to get yourself to Brattleboro Vermont on your own, tho). I hope to have some mind-blowing tracks out soon- still building equipment like mad, hacking the ADAT was more exciting than building the multiband compressor I need for serious mastering :)
You simply cannot block any MP3's this way.
You can't try to block all MP3's, because if you do so then you block out the legal ones as well (and yes, there are many legal MP3's out there; too many for this sort of witch-hunt to start up and not raise a stink).
But if you block based on filenames, you're still sunk, because filenames are trivially easy to change. You block *.mp3? Fine. Excuse me while I send leet-music.empeethree to my friend in Germany. Or leet-music.nc3 (nc3 = mp3 rot13'd).
And you can't even block based on content either, because you would have to block based on specific bit patterns. All I have to do is change the quality, use a different encoder... heck, I can just decompress, change formats, and recompress; there are lots of ways to change the sequence. If they try coming up with sound-analysis software, then there's always steganography.
My point? Censorware never works. Apply it to mp3's and it's even less effective than for Websotes, which at least have to keep some attributes (such as address) constant. But I can think of literally hundreds of ways to circumvent these filters. So in the end, this "Rights Protection System" is a joke.
"The black scenario of all major ISPs falling for this software is very grim. But is it realy true that in a commercial world the ISPs that deliver bad service or block parts of the Internet *remain* big ISPs?
:) which states that we bear the right to access any kind of information without censoring.
Filtering fat Internet pipes is perhaps feasible, but doing it provides not real benefit for the ISPs. Is the music industry preasure big enough to block parts of the Internet? "
I guess so. There's only a handful of really big providers. Once these implement the filtering the smaller providers get it automaticly. And I fear it's rather likely that the big providers will implement it as there are some dubious legal possibilities to sue them for any illegal content that goes over their lines.
We have a law that makes providers responsible for the content they provide as long as it's "technicaly feasible" to monitor the content. With the proposition of this RPS it would be "feasible", so it's likely that they get sued to hell if they dont implement it. The only legal ground that might actually prevent this from happening is our 5th ammendement (I'm not sure if that's the right word but you get the idea
And german politicians might actually like the idea of a nationwide filtering system. After all they could be protecting the poor musicians, prevent the kids from accessing porn and the bad Nazis from spreading their crap. The same negative hype that caused the whole library censoring in the US is comming up in germany, also. So it's likely some conservative politicians will use this for their own agenda.
And with the decreasing interest in politics and self-education that's currently ongoing here (well, maybe i'm cynical, but what the heck) those claims might be taken for true without a closer look at the consequences.
All in all, yes, I am worried...
I read Mein Kampf (in English) when I was 10 or so. Nothing since has been even close to that kind of obscenity; it is on a plane by itself. No doubt there are some warped minds who would enjoy it, but they have probably already embarked on their twisted journey.
The worst thing possible for the Nazis is to expose them to the light of day.
Even the slightest censorship is harmful.
--
Infuriate left and right
I don't think that this is some unsolvable technical problem. If this fails it is going to be legislative, not technical.
If they want to bankroll this they could probably make it happen. Yes, MP3 pirates (using the word loosely) would probably find annother means of distribution (different ports, changing servers frequently, free accounts, etc.) but it could be very effective against the average Joe surfer. Most people aren't technically inclined enough to try very hard to find this stuff, if they (the Government) can make it difficult or inconvienent then they have achived their objective.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Absolutely.
They should have though of this first.
What's even scarier to them is the thought that somehow, some day, somewhere, somebody is going to start creating *EDUCATED* music consumers who recognize that there's more to appreciating music than hit singles. If and when demand starts driving the market, things are going to get really ugly, because (good) musicians won't need the industry to shovel their crap into people's ears.
Okay, so how do we route around this:
1) Encoding the MP3's into other formats to eliminate the possibility of having a filter figure out whether the traffic is an MP3 or something else. I mean heck, you could just ZIP the damn things and accomplish this
2) Smaller ISP's in Germany can establish peering agreements with other countries. Granted this is a risk to the them and so probably wouldn't happen.
3) People who want to trade in illegal MP3's already move around like mad, so this isn't really a big change for them.
What's screwed up about this is that ultimately the people they want to fight (those evil mean hackers) are the people most capable of elluding their efforts. The people who get screwed are the common person, the small record label trying to make a place for themselves, etc.
Someday I envision that there will be pratcially two Internets. One, heavily regulated and strictly controlled. The other, ironically the same physical network, will be the realm where those with the technical know how ellude these goofy and poorly implemented laws.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
The ruling Social Democratic Party is against it, the co-ruling Greens of course too. It's just a proposal from record industry representatives.
Link in German
Babelfish translation
It wouldn't work and they know that. In Germany everybody remembers the XS4all case that lead to the world-wide mirroring of the far-left texts they wanted to block.
Computers. You can't live with them, you can't live without them.
Copying music for private purposes is, as far as i know, perfectly legal in germany, since you pay a fee on every tape etc. you buy. The GEMAs task is to distribute this collected money, so this whole piracy/freedom-of-use debate is a bit different here. It even looks like posession of pirated Mp3s is legal, but distribution is not (but i'm no lawyer).
The freedom of speech is kind of limited, if it comes to NeoNazi and other "extreme"-stuff. The german government has tried some time befor to get some sites of the net (zuendel et.al.), but hasn't had much success with it. I think this is result of some old anti-nazi-laws, which were introduced after WW-II. The whole thing is then called "Volksverhetzung" (distributing hate-speech) and you will definitly get yourself into trouble, if you deny the Holocaust...
Really? Great! Now I'll just waltz on over to my local Porsche dealership, steal one of those zippy new Boxsters I've had my eye on, and they'll thank me for providing "free advertising" as I drive it around town. Great idea!
Wow, your Porsche dealer has that special model where anyone can walk up, press a button and make a perfect copy a billion times over and he still has his?! That's awesome, give me the address.
Well, go back and read it. The fact that you're losing your bandwidth, or your attention, or your HD space is irrelevant, because I am not gaining it.
So I guess, by your logic, all those pizza delivery people working for Domino's are NOT, in fact, using their cars to help distrubute Domino's product. Domino's isn't gaining a huge personal delivery fleet, just a bunch of people delivering pizzas. ?!?!?
How irrational can a person be? Look, here, I'll pull a dollar bill out of my wallet, tear it up, and throw it in the wastebasket. By your logic, I have "given" you a dollar.
How metaphorically challenged can a person be. First off, you need to stop using examples with physical objects. They don't apply. None of them. We're talking about magnetic charges and electrons, and until E, MC and C come around, they don't have much to do with physical objects that can't be infinitely reproduced. This is a very important point, it's the basis for the rest of the argument, and why MP3s are NOT Porsches.
Furthermore, if I own a thing, I have a perfect right to protect the scarcity which preserves its market value.
You have a right based on the law of the land, not on any natural or perfect model. The only way you can even begin to protect that right it through MASSIVE outside interference, given that your product is inherently infinite, you must CONSTANTLY be making an effort to keep it scarce. This costs money (lawyers are expensive). So, what you're saying, is that you want a market where I pay to help keep an infinite product scarce, so I can pay more, to help keep it scarce. Riiiiight.
--
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
+&x
If this is implemented wrong, or someone trying to set up this kind of blocking blows it, or some other godforsaken issue that no one considered about this kind of packet filtering shows up, Germany could end up blackholing or even completely blocking itself on port 80, or whatever else they plan to filter. I'm sure the Germans would just love that situation. The people who put that system in place, and who wanted/ordered it put in place, would have some fast explaining to do.
It's all supposition, but there are always RISKS...
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Even enabling filtering at the IP level slows down many routers. Instead of their custom built hardware switching the packets, the CPU has to look at them to decide where to switch the packet.
"There are no "good" reasons for this."
They had the option of adopting one particular infringement of civil liberties, or of witnessing their country self-destruct, probably violently. Would you rather have another Nazi industrial giant in Europe today, or would you have a Germany the way it is currently? Given time things will heal and restrictions will be lifted...but WWII is not something people forget that quickly.
I'm sure it wasn't an easy decision, but there are "good" reasons. Everything is not black and white.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Nazi doctrine, although it was welcomed in Italy, did not originate there. I'm sure the Italian people couldn't have cared less. However, for much of the German populac, Nazi doctrine was common knowledge, ubiquitously accepted, a part of the culture, while it was never really so in Italy (afaik). People take a very long time to change. Generations.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
So, what can we in the USA do? Any suggestions?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Can your IM do this?
Germany doesn't deny the whole thing. The basic idea is that they try to control the way people learn about it. Yes, that is censorship in a certain way, but we had this quite lengthy in school with a lot of discussion.
Yes Nazi Germany is a difficult subject, especially in Germany, but I don't think that there is any denial going on or the attemp to silence the other speakers, just the fear that people might like to listen to them more then to the reality.
No I am not for censoring it, I believe that it should be available for all to read, and I read it myself to get an idea what they are proposing, but I also understand the fear some people have about it.
Face it. Whenever Germany is doing something unpopular very fast the past is pulled out and stuck into our face. So it isn't very surprising that there are people (3, 4 Generation after everything has happened) that they WANT to forgot. Not because they deny that it happened, but because they don't want to feel responsible for it. I know I don't want to, and I never will feel responsible for what happened back then.
If it would happen today: Other story.
Michael
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Filtering fat Internet pipes is perhaps feasible, but doing it provides not real benefit for the ISPs. Is the music industry preasure big enough to block parts of the Internet? Shouldn't we look at things in perspective: they just getting in panic mode now that the Napster phenomenon and other threaths are here to stay.
Try to predict the infuence of Napster technology, compression, and Terabyte storage on the future of the music industry. Their future looks grim. Now it is possible for consumers to store 12 audio CDs/ CDrom. With recordable DVDs and the AAC compression standard the audio track/disc are raised to more then 2500... Here at the Delft university of Technology we are working on compression algorithms that compress audio with a factor of 24, without perceptual loss. Combined with new recordable devices it will become possbile in 5 years to store all the popular music produced of the last year on a single disc. Just imagine the impact on the music industries business model.
I find it disturbing the extent to which the cult of "personal responsibility" is allowed to overwhelm soceital responsibility in these cases. Basically, you're saying that if everytime a certain person speaks, an innocent gets killed, it doesn't matter. Not only will we not hold that person responsible to deaths which arguably would not have occured if they hadn't been there, we won't even try to prevent it from happening again.
Hey, an inflamatory speaker is coming to town. Almost every speaking event he has held in the past has been followed by listeners injuring or killing members of the group he opposes. I guess we'll just hold a few spaces in the emergency room and a few others in jail. But god forbid we touch that sacred cow of freedom of expression to prevent someone from dying.
Personal responsibility is a great thing. Except when it clouds your mind to actually solving problems instead of laying blame for them. When a person harms another person, they hold the legal blame. But the fact that you can't hold an instigator legally responsible for the violence that follows them doesn't mean you have to stand back and let them just keep speaking. There are other rights than free speech. Some are even more important. Real ethics are about balance, not using personal responsibility to find the one person for blame for every action and declaring everything that happened up to their personal decision irrelevant.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
Actually you can buy Mein Kampf in Germany.
Yes you cannot buy it on Amazon, because the german goverment requires that the reader must be over 18 years old.
And the Nazi part of our German history is the biggest part in our history lessons. (And every pupil has to take history lessons, there is NO way around them.)
And I think we in German have a greater knowledge of our faults in the past than other countries of their faults.
daniel
Now I can surf the Internet without fear of being exposed to Mariah Carey and her music. Thank you censorware! :-)
This is absolutely true. I own a small record company that distributes music via the web and Napster (click on the URL above to see an example of our blanket permission for copying, downloading, etc.). It's worked very well for us because it bypasses the majors' stranglehold on distribution and promotion. That's what they're really afraid of.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
It's all a trap, to catch those people smuggling hardcore images from Germany to the US in MP3 files. Now you can be nabbed at either end, sentanced to life, extradited and sentanced to life again.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
A government can go a step further and outlaw all on-line audio and video formats that don't incorporate copy protection; if you break those laws, they would be able to confiscate your equipment and assess penalties, and any dealer who sells or distributes such equipment would face stiff penalties as well.
This is clearly where the RIAA, the MPAA, and their equivalents in other countries would like things to go. They want to replace all open audio and video formats with proprietary formats, formats that incorporate copy protection and per-use payments. Restrictions on reverse engineering and "breaking copyright protections" make open implementations impossible. Patented compression and encryption schemes would further limit the ability of others to legally access that content.
Even personal content you create would be subject to those restrictions. If you want to be able to look at your kid growing up in copy-protected, proprietary video 20 years from now, think again. The proprietary players will not work on the new hardware and software, and since they never got documented or reverse engineered, your data will be lost. And if you are a small artist, you will, of course, have to pay the "inventors" of those proprietary formats a pretty penny for the privilege of using their technology; funny that the same "inventors" are also your big name competition in the media markets.
Media companies want to control the distribution channels (Sony music, Polygram, and all those others sites, of course, wouldn't get blocked, but small artists would) and the formats (have you tried making a consumer-readable DVD recently? why do you think it's so expensive?).
It's not surprising that these organizations have a sympathetic ear in Germany, where free speech is not quite as cherished as in the US. But in both countries, everybody should get scared by this. Allowing big media companies to control the formats by which we communicate is a direct attack on our most basic rights. Streaming MP3 and MPEG-2 will likely become the formats of choice for audio and video mail and conferencing once bandwidth catches up (their quality is too low for real music enjoyment anyway). MP3 and similar formats are the direct equivalent of the air, paper, and wires we communicate over today. Do we want to hand control over those to a few large companies?
I hope politicians will get sufficiently frightened by such a future to prevent it. Open media formats and open access to those media formats is essential in a free, democratic society. Most other considerations ought to be secondary.
When you consider how many of the world's largest copyright-dependent companies are German:
Deutsch Grammophon
Polygram
BMG
Bertlesmann
etc.
I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if the entertainment industry comprised a larger percentage of Germany's GDP than it does our own...
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
Censorship is a slippery slope; once you start down it, everything is vulnerable.
Well, everything can be claimed to be a slippery slope to some undesired destination. Mostly though we're able to avoid the undesired consequences if we wish to: in the case of censorship the implementation of antagonistic review bodies and safeguards operating in the public domain should be enough to prevent the destruction of democratic debate providing there are enough people that care about it. There's no way to implement a comprehensive set of rules that will function without superintendence - a constant struggle between interested parties carried out in the public eye is probably the best way to ensure that any abuse that happens is condoned by a large number of people in our society.
One holds it out for the world to see... and ridicule and spit upon and point and laugh and use as an object lesson for your kids
That sounds good. What happens though if there are people convinced by these arguments and they act upon them? It is claimed by some involved in Anti-Fascist movements that there is a correlation between public meetings led by such luminaries as the Holocaust denier David Irving and attacks on perceived enemies afterwards. Indeed Searchlight magazine, a british publication quotes Irving as stating that the setting up of "fascist cells" is the object of his League of St.George appearances. So, these things are not necessarily just academic debates about how many died. They are potentially the nucleus for the death or maiming of some "degenerate". IMHO it is the same problem that always attends discussion of free speech: the decision to allow it should take into account its likely effects. Your post seems to advocate an absolute right to speech without this consideration. Do I misunderstand you? If not how do you propose to avoid these problems?Your fist, my nose.
That is where the line is drawn. The old Flip Wilson line "The devil made me do it" is an abandonment of personal responsibility. One is free to say what one wants; one is also free to decide what to do about it. It is the rioters who are at fault, not the so-called inciter. If they use force against people or property, they should be brought to justice.
Now, it is the function of government to punish force, or fraud. If one can prove an inciter to riot used some sort of fraud (anything from fallacious argument to outright lies) to inspire the people to riot, then he can and should be held responsible in civil court for his damages. Same thing with "fire" in a crowded theatre... unless there really is a fire, in which case Good Sam clauses apply.
It's about each person taking responsibility for his or her own self, and not being led around by the likes of the last scuzzball orator they just heard, no matter how outrageous it might have been, or how much sense it might make.
--
"It seemed the logical thing to do at the time." -- Sarek
This getting a bit off-topic, but I would like to comment on jamie's remarks about the German government and the way it deals with Holocaust denial and other forms of Nazi sympathy.
Actually, I tend to agree with jamie's point that censorship is not the way to deal with something like this. However, as an American who has lived in Germany for over ten years now, I've also come to understand Germans who are exasperated at Americans and others for the contradictory messages that they send about dealing with latter-day Nazis and other right-wing extremists in Germany.
For every rallying cry for freedom of speech such as jamie's, even in the face of the worst kind of speech, there is someone else in the world darkly warning that the Germans are a congenitally dangerous people who are constantly in danger of turning into Nazis again, and so they damn well better do anything, no matter how ruthless, to make sure it never happens again.
This message was communicated very strongly by the Allies after the war, and they institutionalized it in the German constitution and in their efforts at "de-Nazification". It's constitutional in Germany to ban political parties, strip citizens of their civil rights in certain very extreme cases, and possibly even censor Holocaust denial (I think the courts are still unsure about that), specifically because the Allies wanted Germans to do all those things to drive the Nazi mindset out of the culture. To this day, there are many people around the world who fully expect the Germans to keep on doing all of these things.
Americans often get frustrated at the feeling that Europeans will criticize us no matter what we do -- it seems like it's damned if you do, damned if you don't all the time. Many Germans' reaction to criticism such as jamie's is very similar. To be sure, one can't expect everybody in the world to have the same opinion about what to do, but I often wonder if someone like jamie realizes how controversial his suggested solution is around the world.
The Germans are very sensitive about their image in the rest of the world and are trying to the right thing. But they're just as uncertain as everyone else about what the right thing is.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
I am attending college here in the USA at the same time as my sister, who happens to be a German language major. We've discussed this, and talked with her professors, and it's a fact of life in Germany that certain freedoms are restricted. I'm sure some of you in the gaming community have noticed that sometimes gamemakers mention they have to make special versions for German customers. Unreal Tournament had to release a German version in which your opponents are clearly androids so that there is no blood. A similar thing happened with Myth, and Bungie eventually added a 'No Blood' option when they released Myth 2, causing all opponents you kill to disappear in a cloud of stars, a-la Mario Bros. One of the more interesting things is that Nazi propaganda is expressly outlawed in Germany. Unlike how the article reads, they aren't trying to cover up the Holocaust... however, swastikas and pro-Nazi symbolism are flat-out illegal. While it is still considered free speech to have and share such views, it is illegal to openly display them. German WW2 products cannot have the swastikas, feature (obvious) SS officers, etc. Just last week, a group of Neo-Nazis marched through Berlin to promote themselves. The government allowed it, though it did arrest a few individuals before the march began because of their display of said materials. Before they reached their rally point though, the ~200-300 Neo-Nazis were met by nearly 2000 protesters coming the other way. Needless to say, there were some rocks (and even bicycles) thrown, and many more people were arrested. The entire point behind these restrictions is to prevent such a thing as the Holocaust from happening again. Admittedly, it strikes me as overkill, but the German people tend to be very formal and reserved in public situations or with people outside their immediate friends and family, and used to doing things in a certain manner. Restricting such things isn't always popular, but the majority simply take it in stride because it seems necessary. What does any of this have to do with the article? The German public is already used to having certain restrictions placed on their freedom, even if the results are dubious at best. However, the use of the Internet has expanded rapidly in the last few years there, and certain factions will be lining up on both sides of the issue there, just as they are here on the issue of sex on the 'net. It would be a long, hard struggle to kill such legislation if it came to be in Germany, and I'm not sure there would be enough people worried about MP3s to stop it.
______________________
First, to get the coordinates straight, I am a German in US college.
:)
So, while you're completely correct about observing that it is illegal to publicly display 3rd Reich symbols in Germany, I think you are mistaking that as a sort of general passive attitude in dealing with restrictions of democratic freedom(s) and rights.
You have to understand that freedom has a million different interpretations and that those interpretations as laid down in laws naturally arise from the historical background of when those laws were written. In Germany (IMHO) we still have quite some problems dealing with WWII history, even though it's been 50 yrs now since it all happened. So, at the time (of writing the constitution) it was ca. 5yrs since 6million people were killed in KZ's. I think it is quite natural (even if you now might think of it as an overreaction now) that you get strict laws against openly campaiging for that or even openly stating that most of it is untrue. After all, Germany caused an unimaginable pain to a whole people. To make it short, those laws have a background and I think in Germany not many people oppose it and that that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Does it limit your freedom of speech? Sure. But it also grants the German people (government and citizens) to effectively combat any major effort to disrupt the process of healing.
Another example: in Germany you don't have the universal right to bear arms. Surely this impairs said freedom but it also grants you the freedom of not having to worry a whole lot about life-threats when sending your kid to school.
Also, as we all have been watching here, it is very difficult nowadays to ensure the freedom of speech (and the right to bear arms and others), which have (yet again) so profound historical and therefore emotional roots in the US.
My point being is that in a democracy there are freedoms which need to be restricted, so more important freedoms are granted, such as the restriction of killing people and so on.
Example in US: here you don't have the freedom to drink alcohol until you're 21 although you can already be sentenced to death at age 16. Different cultures, different laws. Is one better than the other? Wrong (too simple) question. If you think about it, almost any item in the Bill of Rights has so far been reduced, some sensibly some not.
With all that being said, I don't have the slightest doubt in my mind, that this kind of vastly pro-corporate restriction on your internet content will be as fiercely combated in Germany as in the US. In Germany we IMHO have a very strong sense of civil rights and their upkeeping. And actually for that reason I don't think laws like this will even pass our parliament, but that's speculation.
BTW, the German constitution also has a passage ensuring the legality of (if necessary violently) overthrowing a government which tramples on your basic human rights.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not pissed or offended or anything, I just think you have to evaluate things in context. I e.g. think, it is downright crazy to allow everybody to have a gun, but then if you look where it comes from, it makes more sense.
To make this a little more on-topic:
This stuff is politically and technoligically not really feasible, as also pointed in other posts. But if stupidity takes over, I'll be there to campaign against it!
Amen,
Roland
I will start with two statements that most everyone should agree with.
1) There is nothing wrong, legally or morally, with music encoded into MP3s, or the distribution of music encoded in the MP3 format.
2) Artists (and their agents, the record labels) have the legal and moral right to demand payment in exchange for their product, like any other legal business.
Everyone is all up in arms over the MP3 format because it seems that the two points above are in conflict, as MP3 files are quickly and readily shared, often illegally. But there is a simple solution that requires no new laws to be formed.
The goverments of the world need to combine forces to create a clearinghouse organization that would have the power to force an ISP to remove digtal media content (software, music, video, etc) that is illegally copied. Call them the ICE (International Copyright Enforcers).
If an artist came across their materials that were illegally available on the web, they could report it to ICE and shut the site down. This means that if an artist (say Mariah Carey) really wants to protect against her music being copied, she or her record label could hunt down MP3 music (via web searches and napster, etc) and report violating sites to ICE. But if another artist (say Skippy Martens) didn't care about his music, there would be no reporting to ICE, and thus no problem.
This puts the ball in the artist's court: if they want to stop illegal copying -- go find it and tell us about it. But don't blame the media format (MP3) or the distribution channel (Napster) because those are legally neutral.
Now, this would work because if I can find illegal MP3s, so could the artists. And the labels (not to mention software companies) would be more than happy to have a small staff of people devoted to hunting illegal files. And if you want to rip MP3s, make several copies -- that's fine as long as no one can find it (and why would the artists care about it if no one can find it?).
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
It's funny... slashdot's turned into this great little place where everybody says the same thing over and over again. It's always about "Us Vs Them", or more often "U.S. Vs Them". The People Against the Govenment(s). Linux Against Microsoft. The Geeks Against The Corps. To be honest, I'm getting a little tired of it.
Yes, it's about rights. People should have a right to look at whatever they want - be it porn, how to make a bomb, or how to create a more effecicient O/S.
The thing is, it's not just about your rights. Policians have to think about the rights of childeren, the rights of artists, or more to the point, they think about the rights that people with money believe they have.
I have downloaded MP3's. I think nearly everybody has. I have about 400 CD's worth of MP3's. The thing is, I bought about 300 CD's and MP3'd them. I figure that I paid to listen to them, and if I wish to listen to them in another format, that's my choice. The other 100 CD's are mostly old 80's hits you can't get anymore...
On the other hand, I'm not denying the fact that the artists have rights. If any of the artists in question want royalties, they can come around and I'll pay them the same 5 cents the record company would.
It's a similar story with CSS. I think the worst thing about CSS are the region codes.
The term "free as in speech, not as in beer" has kind of been warped around here. If you were to ask RMS, he'd tell you that programmers should be paid as much as possible. They (we) work very hard, and deserve to be rewarded. On the other hand, any program you pay for, you should be able to modify, change, give away, spraypaint pink or do whatever you feel is appropriate with, because one you pay for something it should be yours.
None of this license crap.
The other thing is the hidden internet. People have been talking about encryption, filtering, hidden or removed networks for longer than I've been here - so I ask everyone: Have ANY of you ever set anything like that up? Any IPv6 experts here? Anybody know how to set up a root server? Any CA's here? Many IMAP guru's? Everybody know how to configure SSL under Apache or AOLServer? Christ, do any of you even know how to untar Apache?
I've done most of those. It took an afternoon to get IPv6 running properly on all the Linux boxen and the NT servers - although I had a lot of fun tunneling through the switch (thanks 3Com), I have 3 DNS servers running fine and dandy here (with rob.is.a.turnip. pointing to
I'll tell you what, if any of you are REALLY serious, I'll run as the root server, the CA, and offer SSL hosting for anybody that can prove they're a real geek. I'll run a tutorial showing everybody how to configure dial up networking so you can see what's going on. I'll explain how to configure IPv6 to anybody that wants to route packets around Germany / America / Mongolia. Better yet, I'll do the root server, CA, and help bit for free.
Who's interested?
</RANT>
Yeah, that's a huge task in itself. But what about Gnutella? Forget blocking it. It's not going to be possible. Anyone can set up a server and by it's very nature, it's meant to be uncensorable (AKA unblockable).
kwsNI
It said it was filtered at ISP level, so it shouldn't affect it. If it would be filtered at UUNet, that would be a big problem since Frankfurt is a Multiple Hub City.
There are no "good" reasons for this. If anyone commits real crimes - murder, robbery, arson, whatever - then bust 'em. Otherwise, you are creating a class of political crime.
Some German folks should probably weigh in on this one, but at the risk of annoying everyone on both sides of this touchy issue I'll weigh in with my unsolicited opinions, as an Auslander (foreigner) who lived there for a number of years.
While I too disagree with Germany's approach to their Nazi, and more recently, neo-Nazi problem, one must consider the practicalities of their situation. After world war II there were still a large number of people who, privately, still supported much of what the Nazis had stood for. The allies and early German administrations felt the danger represented by this anomolous political sitiuation was simply too severe, and too immediate, to allow themselves the luxery of tolerating it in the name of free speach or expression, so yes, in effect, they did create a "political class" of criminals. It is illegal in Germany to be a Nazi, period. You can go to jail for espousing Nazism, displaying Nazi symbols, making Nazi salutes, etc. This is their solution to an intolerable problem. It is not necessarilly a good solution, and it does have a heavy price, but it is the solution they have chosen.
Whether they were right or wrong in this assessment is an interesting discussion of its own. Nevertheless, their reasons for this policy were very obvious, very good, and very, very compelling. One of the aforementioned "heavy prices" Germany is paying today IMHO is an expression of pent up, suppressed speach in the form of neo-Nazism. Another is the much more insidious (and possibly more dangerous) tendency for institutions in Germany to engage in large scale, draconian censorship which other democratic nations would be reluctant to consider (the USA being a possible exception) for reasons which, while much less compelling than the Nazi issue, appear to them to be nevertheless "good."
This isn't a justification, merely a commentary on the state of things as I see them. Again, while I disagree with their choice to use censorship to address the Nazi issue (far better to allow your opponent to make an ass of themself and then ridicule them publicly than to suppress their right to express themself), I think one must be a little understanding as to why the felt compelled to do so. This empathy should not, however, be extended to include the modern day abuses of this power which some institutions in Germany appear to now take for granted as their "right."
If Germany is indeed a mature, "grown up" democracy (to borrow a phrase from the press), then they really should reevaluate the role censorship is playing in their society.
On the other hand, so should we here in the USA, as you imply and as numerous stories here on slashdot and elsewhere have made abundantly clear, time and time again.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
That's why the more likely (and scary) approach would be to block entire servers. A router could easily block packets from/to a specific IP address, it would simply drop them, no added overhead. The client web browser would just think that the server doesn't exist, because it isn't returning any of its packets.
Of course, what would make more sense is to impliment this as firewalls, not routers. You would have to replace all ISP's gateways with transparent filtering firewalls/proxies, which could selectively block URLs at any level, with much less of a performance hit. However, this still has the problems of bad filtering.
All in all, this is a bad idea, no matter how it is implimented.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Won't this also block packets destined for another country which happen to get routed through Germany? Germany will only get routed around if the retries happen to get routed along a different path, else the block gets exported to wherever the recipient happens to be.
Half-baked idea...
First, if you have any illegal .mp3's - that is, any mp3s of copyrighted songs by artists you don't already own the CDs for - delete them from your system, especially if the same computer is your webserver. Just trust me on this...
Second, go find a site put up by an independent artist that offers some full songs or clips for download. Grab them, then politely ask the band if you can mirror them on your own site.
Third, if you get the OK, offer them for download. Hell, devote a small section of your site to independent bands. Offer links to their sites and the mp3s. Encourage visitors to at least follow the links, maybe buy a CD or two.
Fourth...when organizations like RIAA, CRIA, the German organization, and the like bitch and whine about "stolen music" and "artists' rights", bring up your own site, with music by indies which is perfectly legal to download, supporting indies' rights to promote themselves. And if blocking systems like the "Rights Protection System" are implemented anywhere, you and the bands can legitimately say their exposure is being blocked by big labels. Large companies do not like having a public image of squashing the little guy for their own profit, even if it's true.
This won't eliminate the issue of copyright violations of music by label artists, but you'll have retaken the moral high ground by having a working example of what we've been pointing to as a useful aspect of MP3 the whole time, along with backing up your own music collection.
Remember - do not offer any music for download that you don't have permission to mirror! I don't know how many bands would have issues with having the music they offer for download mirrored. Some, certainly. Still, it's worth a shot, as it would prove that the mp3 form of distribution can legally work to build exposure for an artist, or at least get some of their music out and about. It's also a good chance to tweak the attack lawyers and execs who try to make .mp3 look like crack cocaine.
DISCLAIMER: I haven't done the above...yet. I've become a bit more aware of digital distribution, copyright, fair use, and control issues. I may do the above soon, if this doesn't end up alongside the other 5000 ideas I come up with and forget about every day. It's certainly an attractive cause, though...especially after the visit by CRIA goons to my school...
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
You've mistranslated the German.
It should read "we should not lose track of those powers who threaten creative people", not "those creators of threatening powers"
I really think you're being knee-jerk about the Holocaust. I don't see the connection at all. It's just some pompous corporate posturing by some guys who would rather protect the market share they inherited than risk innovation.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
If I've got this right, this shows an abysmal lack of understanding of how routing actually works. See, IP packets have an "envelope" and a payload (the content). The envelope contains the source and destination addresses and ports ("From: 123.45.678.90:12345, To: 234.87.53.309:80"). It also contains some information destined to be used at the other end, such as whether the packet was fragmented along the way and which fragment # this one contains so that the original information can be reconstructed at the receiving end.
The "payload" of the packet is the content; what's inside the envelope. This is where all the data is put, including the HTTP "GET" requests. When you fetch a web page, your browser sends something like the following inside an IP packet:
HTTP/1.1 GET http://slashdot.org/
(There's more to it; read RFC 2616 to learn all about the HTTP/1.1 protocol). The point is that this is *inside* the packet. How are you going to tell which packets contain HTTP GET requests, huh? Look inside every packet? Sorry, buddy, not gonna do it. That would slow down ping times by at least a factor of ten: instead of 100-200ms, you'd have ping times of one or two seconds. For every communication.
Or maybe you just look inside packets with a destination port of 80? Yeah, that'd work, right? Nope -- web servers can run on any port. You'd immediately see lots of web servers hanging off port 8080, 8088, or even weird port numbers, serving up MP3's with unfiltered impunity.
There are a lot more reasons (which I won't go into) as to why this thing won't work as suggested. Thought exercise: where are the blocking lists going to live? And how will they be updated? Turn in a 500-1000 word essay to my desk by Monday for extra credit. :-)
Not to say that SOME kind of required-filtering law may be passed in Germany, but this isn't going to be it. If this gets passed, it will either (a) be utterly useless, or (b) slow down ALL Internet usage in Germany so much that the law would get repealed in record time as the German legislation realizes that it just cut its entire country off from the Internet.
I'm sure there are some factual errors in the above, as I whipped it out with virtually no research whatsoever. But the technical details of how routing works are pretty much as described. For the full story about IP and how it works, read RFC 791. For more about HTTP version 1.1, see the link several paragraphs above.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
The old-guard recording industry, for all its rhetoric to the contrary, is far more concerned with crushing the emerging competition they are feeling from sites such as mp3.com, than they are with preventing unauthorized copying of music.
The RIAA, and its foreign equivelents, are confronted with the unpleasant situation in which artists are refusing to sign contracts giving the recording companies 99.9% of the profits from CD sales and instead are selling (or giving away) their music on-line in exchange for 50% (!!!) of the CD sales proceeds, or simply greater exposure of their work.
Worse still, artists are actually defecting from the recording industry, discovering that they can make better money selling 1000 CDs and taking home $5/CD, than they do by selling 90,000 CDs and only keeping $0.05 per CD.
This, the old-guard recording companies simply can't abide. Their strategy is, of course, under the guise of fighting unauthorized copying, to use the clout of a dysfunctional legal system and the long arm of government law enforcement to destroy the emerging paradigm shift in its infancy and protect their defacto monopoly.
Germany has for a long time been actively censoring right wing and neo-nazi hate groups, with obvious and very, very good reason. The unfortuante side effect of this is that they are in some respects much further down the slippery slope of censorship than many other countries, so much os that such draconian measures as these are not only thinkable, but remarkably reasonable sounding to the powers-that-be. Other examples include the indictment of compuserve execs for their customers use of the internet to access foreign porn sites, the xs4all political web censorship fiasco, and so on.
Of course, warez kiddies will still be swapping their musing using ssh tunneled ftp, new protocols, or even old protocols encapsulated or stealthed to get around the packet blocking. The only thing that will be killed will be legitimate, competing businesses such as mp3.com, not children swapping warez and illegally copied music.
This, as far as the old-guard recording industry is concerned, is a perfectly acceptable solution.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Please cite examples of "cracking" copy-protected software to release it under the "GPL"
Although your post has the ring of flaimbait, I will assume you are just woefully misinformed about both the mp3 community (where both legal and, unfortunately, a great deal of illegal copying does occur) and open source software, and are lashing out at offenses you perceive which in fact are either not as pervasive as you think, or completely non-existent (to my knowledge no program has been "cracked" and subsequently distribued under the GPL as open source software).
As a counter example, I will use myself. My situation is by no means unique to slashdot or the net as a whole, indeed, if you search prior archives for mp3 related discussions, you will hear many others voicing the exact same scenerio.
All of my mp3's are legal. Yes, that's right, every last one of them.
90% of them are ripped from my own CD collection.
Another 5% are authorized downlaods from mp3.com and elsewhere, by artists who are trying to get exposure. On occasion I buy the CD, either to support the artist or to have available in places I can't listen to mp3's (e.g. my airplane, or a friend's car), although I am by no means obligated to do so.
Even those that I have downloaded which are "unauthorized copies", as defined by the RIAA, are not illegal! How can I make this bold claim? Because I already own the vinyl record, or the cassette tape, or some other medium (8 track in one particulary archaic case, CDs in others). I have already paid for the right to store the music in whatever medium I wish, including mp3 format on my hard drive. This has been decided in court decision after court decision. Whether I hook up my friend's turn table and arduously rip the record to cd or mp3 format (I have done this for some rare Hungarian pop music form the mid 1980s), or download the exact same song from someone who has already done the work using napstre, makes no difference. Indeed, I can even pay a third party, commercial enterprise, to convert the data from one medium and format to another, perfectly legally. This right, as well, has been sustained in numerious court rulings, the recording industries protestations notwithstanding. I own a right to the music, as evidenced by the physical record in my possession, and am entitled to be able to listen to it with the tools at my disposal and to store it in whatever form I wish, be it mp3 or binary code tatooed on my left bicep. This, too, has been decided more than once in a court of law.
In other words:
I. Do. Have. Every. Right. To. My. Property. Which. I. Have. Paid. Good. Hard. Cash. For.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If, as you point out, it will protect me from MP3's of Mariah Carey, it can't be all bad ...