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Australia Rules DVD's are Films, Not Software
divereigh writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that an Australian Federal court has decided this case in favour of the Australian Video Rental Association. The Association had taken Warner Home Video to court for trying to classify DVD's as software and thus double the price for those sold into the rental market."
I hearby claim the first post in the name of the Queen of Spain!
p1st?
Thanks so much for the Mtn. Dew. It's been great for these past few weeks.
-Your apartment-mate, Mark
I have now suceeded in posting the first post, otherwise known as a "fr0st p1st" or an "fp." I am, without a doubt, the most elite reader on this website. Please, hold your applause. I am masturbating to my accomplishment at the moment!
Yeah, yeah, but I had to try...
DVD's are a storage medium. They are what someone makes them to be (ie. Movie DVD's, Software DVD's, etc).
Trying to classify Movie DVD's as software is sort of... dumb.
Well what about DVD's with software AND movies?
For a second their People in australia were going to get screwed with DVDs and bradband... Good thing its now back to get screwed with broadband
"You win again Gravity!" -Futurama (Zapp)
Yeah but they had to try... It would have been 100% more profits if they had won.
Shh.
Not that this isn't a good thing in the long run, but who does it really benefit now? I mean, if things in Australia are like they are in the US, Blockbuster still charges a premium for DVD rental over VHS rental even though a VHS movie might cost $120 and a DVD of the same movie $15.
Why is that, exactly? Is this the CD pricing scheme all over again? I stopped going to brick-and-mortar video stores and started a NetFlix account. It's a little less convienent, but I pay $2-3 per movie depending on how many I manage to cram into a month.
Phathead
The jews stole your first post. You should kill them.
Does this mean Region Code Enhancement, which uses scripting to check whether the player is region 1 (and IIRC only region 1), would be banned in Oz?
sulli
RTFJ.
I for one will gladly pay twice as much for DVD content as I would for equivalent VHS content; the extensive capabilities of the DVD format make the medium that much more valuable. By declaring this practise illegal, I'm afraid Australia could be severely stifling the incentive of movie companies to include special DVD-only features. This move doesn't benefit anyone; both the content producers and the consumers suffer.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda sat back in his chair gently massaging his cock. He was leafing through the latest issue of the Leisure Times porn catalog, contemplating which video he was going to buy next. The jerk-off factor of each video decreased after a few weeks, so he had to constantly update his collection.
... Ooohhh..." moaned Malda when he turned the page to the all-boys section; his cock throbbed with lust. "OK, how about 'Uncut Hunks' and 'Babes with Balls', you little freak," he said to his cock as he started to pump a little harder. He reached for the lube in his bottom drawer, slathering his hand and cock with the slippery stuff. He closely examined each small picture on the page. He especially liked the really muscular young guy in 'Boot Camp Boys'. Oh, to run his hands up and down that smooth, muscular stomach as he knelt in front of him, pulling that huge cock into his mouth.
Malda often spent late night hours at his office like this; his apartment was just too lonely. The benefit of having a basement office was no casual passers-by. Cliff always thought he was working late on some paperwork; he was notoriously slow in finishing anything dealing with the next Slashdot submission. Or doing work on the latest Slashcode revision. Cliff thought correctly that Malda had no personal life.
"Hmmm, should I get 'Killer Cumshots' or 'Ass Eating Insanity'? Or maybe I
Malda arched his back and groaned as he came, shooting cum all over the desk. He slumped back down into the chair as his breathing slowed to normal. "I'm definitely going to order 'Uncut Hunks' and 'Boot Camp Boys'."
After a few minutes he pushed his cock back into his pants and wiped up the lube and cum with a tissue. This had become almost a nightly ritual after his last meeting with Jon Katz earlier in the year. Malda wondered if he would ever figure out when that rat bastard would quit his job.
"I wonder if any of these videos star brunettes with green eyes?" Malda said thoughtfully as he flipped back through his catalog. "Or petite redheads?" he chuckled as he looked at the ad for 'Clit Licking Lezzies'.
Malda started to daydream about Michael and Timothy 69'ing each other. "Not again," he groaned as he leaned back to pull his erection out of his pants. He got into a great rhythm. The subjects of his daydream morphed from two homosexual men to two other homosexual men--CoyboyNeal and Hemos sucking each other's cocks.
"Yeah, that's it. That's it!" he panted, imagining himself sliding deftly in between those two hunks. He wanted nothing more than to be on his hands and knees sucking CowboyNeal's cock with Hemos fucking his ass.
"Uh...uh..." whimpered Malda; he could feel the cum ready to explode out of his cock when the door to the office slammed open and heavy footsteps, belonging to 2 or 3 people, pounded on the floor. Before he could cry out or even identify the intruders a heavy, black hood was shoved over his head and he was hauled roughly to his feet.
To be continued...
Will this set the standard on future legal cases? And if DVDs are not software then where does that put the interactive game dvds? (i.e. dragons lair and space ace)
Australia still sucks. No GTA3, and now they are making it a criminal offense again to grow marijuana plants.
God damn I would hate to be an Aussie right now.
MOST BEAUTIFUL JAPANESE FEMALE GO CHESS PLAYER.
http://www.yukari.gr.jp
http://www.yukari.gr.jp/movie.html
Since I'm not in Australia, this doesn't affect me directly, but it's still a moral victory (now if we can just convince a judge in the US to accept an Australian court finding as precedent...)
Basically, the decision ruled that DVD movies cannot be treated as software simply because they are digitally recorded, and because DVD players have processors. I wonder if now AOL Time Warner will try to "modify" the DVD standard in order to make DVDs into "software" so they can go ahead with their scheme anyway. I doubt customers (meaning me) would go for that, since it would probably mean that people would have to get newer-model DVD players, but I wouldn't put it past them to try it.
Now back to my evil plan of storing my data onto VHS tape and proclaiming it as "software"... heheheh...
DVD's are sold primarily as films. This makes perfect sense. I don't see the fact that they are encoded with region tags make them software. When was the last time you sat down to watch a movie and thought 'this is some great software here'?
Seriously though, has the US done anythnig about this?
Can be found here. It is dating back to Novemeber 05, 2001.
--Metrollica
Raise your voice! Fight to legalize the sacred herb of Jah!!!
So it's really consumers 1, video rental stores 1, giant corporation 0.
Sorry - but it's total crap. DVD's are software. They contain logic - menu systems, scene browsers, and most importantly, a nasty little piece of malicioius code called "region coding" which illegally allows the Motion Picture cartels to practice Predatory Price Discrimination against a worldwide customer base.
No, DVD's are software. Malicious software, in fact. They should be dealt with as such.
$2.75? I assume that's AUS$. I can walk down the street to Hollywood Video and pay US$5 for a DVD rental.
:P)
I guess pricing in Australia isn't like it is here. Lucky Australians......
I'll have to visit someday..(not because of the DVD rentals
They're plastic.
Or am I missing something, SuperTrooper?
As for the price disparity between rental DVDs and videos:
This ruling probably won't benefit consumers because, as someone else has already pointed out, DVD's will cost more to rent than VHS tapes regardless of how expensive it is for the rental chains to purchase them. However, I think it's gratifying anytime someone manages to beat the film industry in court.
Do people actually rent DVD's? Because of the higher cost of renting them, I've found that it's usually best just to buy the movie outright. In most cases, I find that a movie worth watching is worth watching again. So I think it would be kind of nice to have a movie library.
No, really!!!
http://www.msnbc.com/news/694484.asp?pne=msn
I think the main difference between a piece of software and a game is how much interactivity is offered. The first CD-ROM games that I played, back in the early 1990's, were "Spaceship Warlock" and "Hell Cab". While these were computer games and as such would be classified as software, they interactive experience entailed essentially clicking on things every once in a while and the rest of the time watching the story unfold.
The main difference between "playing" these games and watching a movie was the fact that they had a "choose your own adventure" style of playback; i.e. you could dictate the basic actions of the main character. So I would conclude that most DVD movies are indeed movies and not pieces of software, because they are mostly non-interactive, and for the most part, people by them to watch the movie and not play the silly little games included.
I think my sig has never been more appropriate than now. Check out my site if you want to know about backing up DVD's.
The future isn't what it used to be.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
DVDs are more prone to deterioration (being very vulnerable to scratches) and so will not allow as many rentals before requiring replacement.
That's interesting -- I would have guessed that DVD's last longer. VHS tapes are vulnerable to being chewed up by the VCR, and on some old videos that I have the magnetic tape is just wearing out. DVD's avoid both of those problems, but I suppose you're right about the scratching.
I'm not arguing with you -- I suspect you're correct. I'm just curious....
Steve
The company argued that it was entitled to charge more because, since a DVD - unlike a video-tape - is digitally recorded and is played on a machine containing a processor, it should be treated like a computer program and subject to copyright law.
The company argued that [...] a DVD [...] should be treated like a computer program and subject to copyright law.
The courts rejected the company's claim.
Does that mean that DVDs aren't subject to copyright law?
(yes, I know this is a silly conclusion; but I really can't work out what the quoted paragraph is supposed to mean.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Hmm... Maybe I'll watch some FreeBSD tonight.
Why must they be pigeon-holed into either category?
Jeezus christ, I hope this guy moderated himself to insightfull ... because you would hope that noone would moderate this combination karma-whore/troll up.
The problem is people already know how to handle VHS, and while they should know how handle DVD's (they are essentially the same as audio CD's), I believe most people have never learned the proper technique. From the DVD's I get at Blockbuster, it looks like people use them for outrageous things like scratching their asses, cooking, and frisbees.
The future isn't what it used to be.
"DVDs have better quality content so people will pay more."
Depends on what it is. How well the overall job was done (sound,video,layout).
"DVDs are more prone to deterioration (being very vulnerable to scratches) and so will not allow as many rentals before requiring replacement."
There's a protective film that can overlay both CD & DVDs. Get damaged (within reason), replace the film.
"DVDs are still catching on, people who own players tend to be wealthier and therefore less likely to be concerned about the higher cost."
I disagree. The price of DVD players has come down to about what one would pay for a VCR.
The disk themselves can be had for reasonable. Remember that "./" story about online bargains?
It has come to my attention that the entire Linux community is a hotbed of so called 'alternative sexuality,' which includes anything from hedonistic orgies to homosexuality to pedophilia.
What better way of demonstrating this than by looking at the hidden messages contained within the names of some of Linux's most outspoken advocates:
Linus Torvalds is an anagram of slit anus or VD 'L,' clearly referring to himself by the first initial.
Richard M. Stallman, spokespervert for the Gaysex's Not Unusual 'movement' is an anagram of mans cram thrill ad.
Alan Cox is barely an anagram of anal cox which is just so filthy and unchristian it unnerves me.
I'm sure that Eric S. Raymond, composer of the satanic homosexual propaganda diatribe The Cathedral and the Bizarre, is probably an anagram of something queer, but we don't need to look that far as we know he's always shoving a gun up some poor little boy's rectum. Update: Eric S. Raymond is actually an anagram for secondary rim and cord in my arse. It just goes to show you that he is indeed queer.
Update the Second: It is also documented that Evil Sicko Gaymond is responsible for a nauseating piece of code called Fetchmail, which is obviously sinister sodomite slang for 'Felch Male' -- a disgusting practise. For those not in the know, 'felching' is the act performed by two perverts wherein one sucks their own post-coital ejaculate out of the other's rectum. In fact, it appears that the dirty Linux faggots set out to undermine the good Republican institution of e-mail, turning it into 'e-male.'
As far as Richard 'Master' Stallman goes, that filthy fudge-packer was actually quoted on leftist commie propaganda site Salon.com as saying the following: 'I've been resistant to the pressure to conform in any circumstance,' he says. 'It's about being able to question conventional wisdom,' he asserts. 'I believe in love, but not monogamy,' he says plainly.
And this isn't a made up troll bullshit either! He actually stated this tripe, which makes it obvious that he is trying to politely say that he's a flaming homo slut!
Speaking about 'flaming,' who better to point out as a filthy chutney ferret than Slashdot's very own self-confessed pederast Jon Katz. Although an obvious deviant anagram cannot be found from his name, he has already confessed, nay boasted of the homosexual perversion of corrupting the innocence of young children. To quote from the article linked:
'I've got a rare kidney disease,' I told her. 'I have to go to the bathroom a lot. You can come with me if you want, but it takes a while. Is that okay with you? Do you want a note from my doctor?'
Is this why you were touching your penis in the cinema, Jon? And letting the other boys touch it too?
We should also point out that Jon Katz refers to himself as 'Slashdot's resident Gasbag.' Is there any more doubt? For those fortunate few who aren't aware of the list of homosexual terminology found inside the Linux 'Sauce Code,' a 'Gasbag' is a pervert who gains sexual gratification from having a thin straw inserted into his urethra (or to use the common parlance, 'piss-pipe'), then his homosexual lover blows firmly down the straw to inflate his scrotum. This is, of course, when he's not busy violating the dignity and copyright of posters to Slashdot by gathering together their postings and publishing them en masse to further his twisted and manipulative journalistic agenda.
Sick, disgusting antichristian perverts, the lot of them.
In addition, many of the Linux distributions (a 'distribution' is the most common way to spread the faggots' wares) are run by faggot groups. The Slackware distro is named after the 'Slack-wear' fags wear to allow easy access to the anus for sexual purposes. Furthermore, Slackware is a close anagram of claw arse, a reference to the homosexual practise of anal fisting. The Mandrake product is run by a group of French faggot satanists, and is named after the faggot nickname for the vibrator. It was also chosen because it is an anagram for dark amen and ram naked, which is what they do.
Another 'distro,' (abbrieviated as such because it sounds a bit like 'Disco,' which is where homosexuals preyed on young boys in the 1970s), is Debian, an anagram of in a bed, which could be considered innocent enough (after all, a bed is both where we sleep and pray), until we realise what other names Debian uses to describe their foul wares. 'Woody' is obvious enough, being a term for the erect male penis, glistening with pre-cum. But far sicker is the phrase 'Frozen Potato' that they use. This filthy term, again found in the secret homosexual 'Sauce Code,' refers to the solo homosexual practice of defecating into a clear polythene bag, shaping the turd into a crude approximation of the male phallus, then leaving it in the freezer overnight until it becomes solid. The practitioner then proceeds to push the frozen 'potato' up his own rectum, squeezing it in and out until his tight young balls erupt in a screaming orgasm.
And Red Hat is secret homo slang for the tip of a penis that is soaked in blood from a freshly violated underage ringpiece.
The fags have even invented special tools to aid their faggotry! For example, the 'supermount' tool was devised to allow deeper penetration, which is good for fags because it gives more pressure on the prostate gland. 'Automount' is used, on the other hand, because Linux users are all fat and gay, and need to mount each other automatically.
The depths of their depravity can be seen in their use of 'mount points.' These are, plainly speaking, the different points of penetration. The main one is obviously
More evidence is in the fact that Linux users say how much they love `man`, even going so far as to say that all new Linux users (who are in fact just innocent heterosexuals indoctrinated by the gay propaganda) should try out `man`. In no other system do users boast of their frequent recourse to a man.
Other areas of the system also show Linux's inherit gayness. For example, people are often told of the 'FAQ,' but how many innocent heterosexual Windows users know what this actually means. The answer is shocking: Faggot Anal Quest: the voyage of discovery for newly converted fags!
Even the title 'Slashdot' originally referred to a homosexual practice. Slashdot of course refers to the popular gay practice of blood-letting. The Slashbots, of course are those super-zealous homosexuals who take this perversion to its extreme by ripping open their anuses, as seen on the site most popular with Slashdot users, the depraved work of Satan, http://www.eff.org/.
The editors of Slashdot also have homosexual names: 'Hemos' is obvious in itself, being one vowel away from 'Homos.' But even more sickening is 'Commander Taco' which sounds a bit like 'Commode in Taco,' filthy gay slang for a pair of spreadeagled buttocks that are caked with excrement. (The best form of lubrication, they insist.) Sometimes, these 'Taco Commodes' have special 'Salsa Sauce' (blood from a ruptured rectum) and 'Cheese' (rancid flakes of penis discharge) toppings. And to make it even worse, Slashdot runs on Apache!
The Apache server, whose use among fags is as prevalent as AIDS, is named after homosexual activity -- as everyone knows, popular faggot band, the Village People, featured an Apache Indian, and it is for him that this gay program is named.
And that's not forgetting the use of patches in the Linux fag world -- patches are used to make the anus accessible for repeated anal sex even after its rupture by a session of fisting.
To summarise: Linux is gay. 'Slash -- Dot' is the graphical description of the space between a young boy's scrotum and anus. And BeOS is for hermaphrodites and disabled 'stumpers.'
FEEDBACK
What worries me is how much you know about what gay people do. I'm scared I actually read this whole thing. I think this post is a good example of the negative effects of Internet usage on people. This person obviously has no social life anymore and had to result to writing something as stupid as this. And actually take the time to do it too. Although... I think it was satire.. blah.. it's early. -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
Well, the only reason I know all about this is because I had the misfortune to read the Linux 'Sauce code' once. Although publicised as the computer code needed to get Linux up and running on a computer (and haven't you always been worried about the phrase 'Monolithic Kernel'?), this foul document is actually a detailed and graphic description of every conceivable degrading perversion known to the human race, as well as a few of the major animal species. It has shocked and disturbed me, to the point of needing to shock and disturb the common man to warn them of the impending homo-calypse which threatens to engulf our planet.
You must work for the government. Trying to post the most obscene stuff in hopes that slashdot won't be able to continue or something, due to legal woes. If i ever see your ugly face, i'm going to stick my fireplace poker up your ass, after it's nice and hot, to weld shut that nasty gaping hole of yours. -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
Doesn't it give you a hard-on to imagine your thick strong poker ramming it's way up my most sacred of sphincters? You're beyond help, my friend, as the only thing you can imagine is the foul penetrative violation of another man. Are you sure you're not Eric Raymond? The government, being populated by limp-wristed liberals, could never stem the sickening tide of homosexual child molesting Linux advocacy. Hell, they've given NAMBLA free reign for years!
you really should post this logged in. i wish i could remember jebus's password, cuz i'd give it to you. -- mighty jebus, Slashdot
Thank you for your kind words of support. However, this document shall only ever be posted anonymously. This is because the 'Open Sauce' movement is a sham, proposing homoerotic cults of hero worshipping in the name of freedom. I speak for the common man. For any man who prefers the warm, enveloping velvet folds of a woman's vagina to the tight puckered ringpiece of a child. These men, being common, decent folk, don't have a say in the political hypocrisy that is Slashdot culture. I am the unknown liberator.
ROLF LAMO i hate linux FAGGOTS -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
We shouldn't hate them, we should pity them for the misguided fools they are... Fanatical Linux zeal-outs need to be herded into camps for re-education and subsequent rehabilitation into normal heterosexual society. This re-education shall be achieved by forcing them to watch repeats of Baywatch until the very mention of Pamela Anderson causes them to fill their pants with healthy heterosexual jism.
Actually, that's not at all how scrotal inflation works. I understand it involves injecting sterile saline solution into the scrotum. I've never tried this, but you can read how to do it safely in case you're interested. (Before you moderate this down, ask yourself honestly -- who are the real crazies -- people who do scrotal inflation, or people who pay $1000+ for a game console?) -- double_h, Slashdot
Well, it just goes to show that even the holy Linux 'sauce code' is riddled with bugs that need fixing. (The irony of Jon Katz not even being able to inflate his scrotum correctly has not been lost on me.) The Linux pervert elite already acknowledge this, with their queer slogan: 'Given enough arms, all rectums are shallow.' And anyway, the PS2 sucks major cock and isn't worth the money. Intellivision forever!
dude did u used to post on msnbc's nt bulletin board now that u are doing anti-gay posts u also need to start in with anti-black stuff too c u in church -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
For one thing, whilst Linux is a cavalcade of queer propaganda masquerading as the future of computing, NT is used by people who think nothing better of encasing their genitals in quick setting plaster then going to see a really dirty porno film, enjoying the restriction enforced onto them. Remember, a wasted arousal is a sin in the eyes of the Catholic church. Clearly, the only god-fearing Christian operating system in existence is CP/M -- The Christian Program Monitor. All computer users should immediately ask their local pastor to install this fine OS onto their systems. It is the only route to salvation.
Secondly, this message is for every man. Computers know no colour. Not only that, but one of the finest websites in the world is maintained by a Black Man . Now fuck off you racist donkey felcher.
And don't forget that slashdot was written in Perl, which is just too close to 'Pearl Necklace' for comfort.... oh wait; that's something all you heterosexuals do.... I can't help but wonder how much faster the trolls could do First-Posts on this site if it were redone in PHP... I could hand-type dynamic HTML pages faster than Perl can do them. -- phee, Slashdot
Although there is nothing unholy about the fine heterosexual act of ejaculating between a woman's breasts, squirting one's load up towards her neck and chin area, it should be noted that Perl (standing for Pansies Entering Rectums Locally) is also close to 'Pearl Monocle,' 'Pearl Nosering,' and the ubiquitous 'Pearl Enema.'
One scary thing about Perl is that it contains hidden homosexual messages. Take the following code: LWP::Simple -- It looks innocuous enough, doesn't it? But look at the line closely: There are two colons next to each other! As Larry 'Balls to the' Wall would openly admit in the Perl Documentation, Perl was designed from the ground up to indoctrinate it's programmers into performing unnatural sexual acts -- having two colons so closely together is clearly a reference to the perverse sickening act of 'colon kissing,' whereby two homosexual queers spread their buttocks wide, pressing their filthy torn sphincters together. They then share small round objects like marbles or golfballs by passing them from one rectum to another using muscle contraction alone. This is also referred to in programming 'circles' as 'Parameter Passing.'
And PHP stands for Perverted Homosexual Penetration. Didn't you know?
Thank you for your valuable input on this. I am sure you will be never forgotten. BTW: Did I mention that this could be useful in terraforming Mars? Mars rulaa. -- Eimernase, Slashdot
Well, I don't know about terraforming Mars, but I do know that homosexual Linux Advocates have been probing Uranus for years.
That's inspiring. Keep up the good work, AC. May God in his wisdom grant you the strength to bring the plain honest truth to this community, and make it pure again. Yours, Cerberus. -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
*sniff* That brings a tear to my eye. Thank you once more for your kind support. I have taken faith in the knowledge that I am doing the Good Lord's work, but it is encouraging to know that I am helping out the common man here.
However, I should be cautious about revealing your name 'Cerberus' on such a filthy den of depravity as Slashdot. It is a well known fact that the 'Kerberos' documentation from Microsoft is a detailed manual describing, in intimate, exacting detail, how to sexually penetrate a variety of unwilling canine animals; be they domesticated, wild, or mythical. Slashdot posters have taken great pleasure in illegally spreading this documentation far and wide, treating it as an 'extension' to the Linux 'Sauce Code,' for the sake of 'interoperability.' (The slang term they use for nonconsensual intercourse -- their favourite kind.)
In fact, sick twisted Linux deviants are known to have LAN parties, (Love of Anal Naughtiness, needless to say.), wherein they entice a stray dog, known as the 'Samba Mount,' into their homes. Up to four of these filth-sodden blasphemers against nature take turns to plunge their erect, throbbing, uncircumcised members, conkers-deep, into the rectum, mouth, and other fleshy orifices of the poor animal. Eventually, the 'Samba Mount' collapses due to 'overload,' and needs to be 'rebooted.' (i.e., kicked out into the street, and left to fend for itself.) Many Linux users boast about their 'uptime' in such situations.
Inspiring stuff! If only all trolls were this quality! -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
If only indeed. You can help our brave cause by moderating this message up as often as possible. I recommend '+1, Underrated,' as that will protect your precious Karma in Metamoderation. Only then can we break through the glass ceiling of Homosexual Slashdot Culture. Is it any wonder that the new version of Slashcode has been christened 'Bender'???
If we can get just one of these postings up to at least '+1,' then it will be archived forever! Others will learn of our struggle, and join with us in our battle for freedom!
It's pathetic you've spent so much time writing this. -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
I am compelled to document the foulness and carnal depravity that is Linux, in order that we may prepare ourselves for the great holy war that is to follow. It is my solemn duty to peel back the foreskin of ignorance and apply the wire brush of enlightenment.
As with any great open-source project, you need someone asking this question, so I'll do it. When the hell is version 2.0 going to be ready?!?! -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
I could make an arrogant, childish comment along the lines of 'Every time someone asks for 2.0, I won't release it for another 24 hours,' but the truth of the matter is that I'm quite nervous of releasing a 'number two,' as I can guarantee some filthy shit-slurping Linux pervert would want to suck it straight out of my anus before I've even had chance to wipe.
I desperately want to suck your monolithic kernel, you sexy hunk, you. -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
I sincerely hope you're Natalie Portman.
Dude, nothing on slashdot larger than 3 paragraphs is worth reading. Try to distill the message, whatever it was, and maybe I'll read it. As it is, I have to much open source software to write to waste even 10 seconds of precious time. 10 seconds is all its gonna take M$ to whoop Linux's ass. Vigilence is the price of Free (as in libre -- from the fine, frou frou French language) Software. Hack on fellow geeks, and remember: Friday is Bouillabaisse day except for heathens who do not believe that Jesus died for their sins. Those godless, oil drench, bearded sexist clowns can pull grits from their pantaloons (another fine, fine French word) and eat that. Anyway, try to keep your message focused and concise. For concision is the soul of derision. Way. -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
What the fuck?
I've read your gay conspiracy post version 1.3.0 and I must say I'm impressed. In particular, I appreciate how you have managed to squeeze in a healthy dose of the latent homosexuality you gay-bashing homos tend to be full of. Thank you again. -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
Well bugger me!
ooooh honey. how insecure are you!!! wann a little massage from deare bruci. love you -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot
Fuck right off!
IMPORTANT: This message needs to be heard (Not HURD, which is an acronym for 'Huge Unclean Rectal Dilator') across the whole community, so it has been released into the Public Domain. You know, that licence that we all had before those homoerotic crypto-fascists came out with the GPL (Gay Penetration License) that is no more than an excuse to see who's got the biggest feces-encrusted cock. I would have put this up on Freshmeat, but that name is known to be a euphemism for the tight rump of a young boy.
Come to think of it, the whole concept of 'Source Control' unnerves me, because it sounds a bit like 'Sauce Control,' which is a description of the homosexual practice of holding the base of the cock shaft tightly upon the point of ejaculation, thus causing a build up of semenal fluid that is only released upon entry into an incision made into the base of the receiver's scrotum. And 'Open Sauce' is the act of ejaculating into another mans face or perhaps a biscuit to be shared later. Obviously, 'Closed Sauce' is the only Christian thing to do, as evidenced by the fact that it is what Cathedrals are all about.
Contributors: (although not to the eternal game of 'soggy biscuit' that open 'sauce' development has become) Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, phee, Anonymous Coward, mighty jebus, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, double_h, Anonymous Coward, Eimernase, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward. Further contributions are welcome.
Current changes: This version sent to FreeWIPO by 'Bring BackATV' as plain text. Reformatted everything, added all links back in (that we could match from the previous version), many new ones (Slashbot bait links). Even more spelling fixed. Who wrote this thing, CmdrTaco himself?
Previous changes: Yet more changes added. Spelling fixed. Feedback added. Explanation of 'distro' system. 'Mount Point' syntax described. More filth regarding `man` and Slashdot. Yet more fucking spelling fixed. 'Fetchmail' uncovered further. More Slashbot baiting. Apache exposed. Distribution licence at foot of document.
ANUX -- A full Linux distribution... Up your ass!
A DVD movie, on the other hand, is far more complex. The user can pick different soundtracks, different cuts, and all in all give more control to the user. This requires a significant amount of programming information to be present in the VOB files on the disc, much more than the jejune TOC system on an audio CD. There's a world of difference between the two media, and it's a fallacy to try to compare them.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
I guess it depends on were you live. I'm in the central US and at Blockbuster I pay about $3.75 for a rental.
Ah, cock. Lovely, long, thick, wide, juicy man meat, in my hand. Delicious cock. What a glorious phallus. Mmmm, penis...
Semi-seriously though, where can I get the powerful moderator crack? Whoring for RIAA does not insightful make.
"No, DVD's are software. Malicious software, in fact. They should be dealt with as such."
Well I've heard that Shrek installs spyware on your computer based DVD player.
So your not too far off the mark.
Decoding DVD content is STEALING. Get that through your thick head.
Mod me as a troll if you like but the way I see it is: Duh, of course it's a film!
Anyone who argues that a dvd (In this case, thatt's Digital VIDEO disc, not 'Versitile') is software more than it is film needs to reply to this and explain why.
A DVD contains ZERO in the way of executable code--zero, Zilch, NONE!
The word software came from the word hardware, but with the adaptation being that there was no hard-wired functionality. But what does the -ware in softWARE and hardWARE mean? In this case, functionality.
Graphics hardware: Stuff that makes pretty pictures, real fast.
Sound hardware: Stuff that converts binary audio data to analog, along with a lot of other stuff.
Linux: Software that runs a computer.
A DVD contains pure media. No functionality. It requires a seperate piece of hardware/software just to be used!
They are media, and as such they should be governed by the laws that cover media.
Oh, and by the way... the DVD Menu's? Those aren't executable. Those are A collection of images with a few links. They are not a program (To be that, they would have to have the capability of iteration, which they do not.)
I hope that someone can take it one step further and gain a ruling that DVDs legally purchased anywhere else in the world can be played legally in Australia - effectively, a ruling invalidating any so-called 'right' for content producers to restrict disks to geographical regions.
The 'region encoding' thing totally sucks. Not only do the anti-De-CSS rulings effectively make it illegal to play a DVD on a Linux box, it's also a thin edge of the wedge allowing content producers to exercise ridiculous levels of control over how people are able to consume content. What'll it be next? You can't watch a show unless you key in a serial number from inside the lid of a Coke bottle, plus a code from inside a Pizza Hut carton?
Australian legislators have some 'quirky' notions of technology that often differ to those elsewhere in the world - it just might be possible to get such a ruling and overturn this ridiculous region coding bullshit once and for all.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
uh, australia? what the fook does that have to do with the United States?
Did you miss the part about people not taking proper care of them? People aren't careful with anything they rent, and VHS certainly takes abuse better than DVD.
Common sense prevails
A Movie on DVD = a movie
A book on DVD = a book
Music on DVD = music
Art on DVD = art
Computer programs = software.
Sure, the DVDs may actually come with some executable code on them, but by and large, THE BITS OF THE DVD REPRESENT DATA.
This data is consumed by software to generate media, but IT IS *NOT* SOFTWARE.
Any good software engineer knows that CODE and DATA should be SEPARATE. I'm glad the court recognizes this as well.
VHS's are less susceptable to *people fucking with you* as well :-) Ive rented videos before and had them not be what was printed on the casette ... once someone taped over the movie I rented ... I dont know what exactly was on it, but it was a midget in a bathtub that was on sleds, sledding in a huge drainge ditch, he ate shit about halfway down the slope :) Of course that was way more entertaining then the crap my g/f had picked out for the evening ...
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
He was a taliban ;-)
Copy protection measures and aggressive licensing WOULD NOT BE NECESSARY if people like you weren't constantly trying to mass-pirate copies of COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, but the abundance of stolen media on Morpheus and Kaza clearly show that it IS NECESSARY. Circumventing decryption only serves to encourage mass piracy of content.
Offtopic rant time! My variant on this is that a movie worth watching is worth downloading - it takes a day or so and is a hassle, so I don't waste my time watching crap movies. Sure, it's piracy, but I'm not going to buy a DVD drive that will only work with certain movies and may be obsoleted to fix the broken region coding. I'm also not going to wait a year for the VHS, this is *much* less convenient for me than watching it on my computer.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
I just don't understand all the negativity here. Here's how I see it: WB was playing games with what a DVD really is in order to squeeze more money out of rental places in questionable ways. They lost that right, and were punished. Customers at rental places are renting MOVIES, no matter what kind of 'software' is on the DVD. They're not renting DVD's to solve a problem, virus scan their hard drive, or render images in 3D.
Most DVD's aren't worth owning. I don't want to spend $40 or so on a DVD unless it's the type of thing I think I'll come back to again and again, like I did with T2. However, I do rent quite a few DVD's. And what Warner Bros. basically did was try to take that right away from me by jacking up the prices on their DVD's specifically for rental stores. That was not right. Tough noogies if WB doesn't get money for each rental. If their content isn't worth owning, that's their fault. Don't punish the consumers for it.
I do have concerns of the ramifications this might have in the future, though. So far, I'm encouraged though. By defining DVD's as movies, then movie rights are seperate from Software rights. At least Warner Bros. can't grease up some politician to take movie rights away that affect how I use software.
"Derp de derp."
uh, australia? what the fook does that have to do with the United States?
:-)
Speaking as an Australian, I hold some hope your painfully US-centric attitude can be rectified.
Last time I checked , we were using something loosely defined as the World-Wide-Web , not the United-States-Web, so I think it is entirely relevant, as one day a reference to this particular decision could help you.
Your comment portrays a bad image of the U.S. to the rest of the world. Wake up. The sun does not shine out of the US's collective posterior.
Don't make me have to come over there and kick your ass to prove it
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
You know, as a perfect homosexual, I find the story
:)
.. I am gonna cry :)
rather sweet and erotic.
The only problem is, I have seen the people featured
in the story, and wouldn't consider even looking at
them, let alone engage with them intimately.
Malda might be an exception though, I remember his
picture and he was a bit puff and could make love
just like an athletic person.
CowboyNeal however, is a no no. Too hairy, too fat,
too pale, and has dirty teeth.
You know what I want for my birthday? (2 days from now
Any of the guys from "Friends".
Imagine having Ross right on top of you, looking
into your eyes, and filling you in and out, all
night long
It seems pretty strange to me since DVD is an acronym for Digital V ersatile Disk... :)
Classifying it as film only goes against the very name of the medium
Versatile: adj.
1) Capable of doing many things competently.
2) Having varied uses or serving many functions.
SYNONYMS: All-around, many-sided, multifaceted, multifarious. These adjectives mean having many aspects, uses, or abilities.
But ok, reading the article makes it much clearer, and I fully agree - Just because the medium is digital doesn't make it software!
:)
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
That's interesting -- I would have guessed that DVD's last longer. VHS tapes are vulnerable to being chewed up by the VCR, and on some old videos that I have the magnetic tape is just wearing out. DVD's avoid both of those problems, but I suppose you're right about the scratching
In my experience DVD's are a lot easier to damage than a Videotape. but DVD's, if taken care of, will last a lot longer.
Video's will deterioate, DVD's will not, however, droping a video on the ground does little damage to a Video, a DVD is a different matter, and I've seen the way some people treat rentals.
Leg Godt!
...to summarize:
"Dear MPAA, fuck you. We know you think of consumers as cattle that you can harvest when you need more meat, but this time you lose.
So fuck you and your children"
Signed,
The Australian Court System
And of course, if it's small-lot stuff that has to be shipped from overseas, *dingdingding*. Watch the dollars rack up. Australia is still a long haul from America and Europe, even in this modern age of jet aircraft. I'd love to buy some books from the US that I can't get over here, but the price of shipping is higher than the price of the books! (and considering the high price of books in Aus... I really want print-on-demand). Same applies to a lot of computer hardware (monitors, drives, boards, cpus, etc - all made in places far far away from Down Under).
Heh. Yeah, it's one of the nicer places in the world to live, in terms of both scenery and culture. Hey, just because nine of the ten most venomous critters on the planet call Australia home, doesn't mean you can't too.(seriously, the chances of getting fatally bit/clawed/stung by one of those critters is amazingly remote unless you do something really stupid or careless - or if you are named Steve Irwin and play with 'em for a living)
Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Windows system.
An important factor in Windows' cost is its maintenance. Windows requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the millions of low- paid Windows administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Windows seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Windows' native file system, FAT32, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system is accessed. Other OS file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows FAT32 out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
According to Windows advocates, an alternative to FAT32 would be FAT. Unfortunately, FAT is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Windows advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).
The other proposed 'solution', NTFS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient FAT32 file system remain in NTFS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the EXT2 heritage in EXT3 was considered a very bad thing by the Windows community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Windows, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Windows advocates.
Back to Windows' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Windows than on any other OS. On other OSes, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Windows are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Windows advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "blue screens of death".
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Windows' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of other OSes, but not one of them is implemented right. A Windows user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Windows is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
That cannot be a serious post. Reread it and whisper in your head I have been trolled... I have been trolled... If that writer wrote that in all seriousness then I will eat my socks!
I'm not asking this as a rhetorical question. I simply don't understand the guts of the case and am hoping that someone will explain.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
I want this girl to give me a blowjob.
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the spyware and virus that some DVD contain usually can only infect you if you 'Install' The DVD as in add-remove progams install so that you can launch the DVD from the start menu Which is insane but many DVDs Instruct PC users to play the DVD movies that way which is crazy what's wron with running PowerDVD and just Watchign the famn film without some 'special' player or adding a useless menu item to your start menu?
I hope that someone can take it one step further and gain a ruling that DVDs legally purchased anywhere else in the world can be played legally in Australia
DVDs legally purchased anywhere can be played legally in Australia. You just forgot to buy and import a player from that region when you bought the DVD.
Next time, get your fact straight, and argue that it's annoying to have to buy a player from each region.
heheeh. You said Steve Irwin.
CROIKEY!
I rented the fancy 2 disk Fight Club on DVD. Not only had someone used the second disk as a coaster, but they'd coastered something that burned a melted ring into the disk surface. And I'm not talking about the label side.
Blockbuster's response: "Well... Uhh... Does it play?"
DVDs are not more prone to deterioration. While i have seen a number of rental places that laminate the top of the disc (for single side releases) most minor scratches on the bottom can be easily repaired with appropriate materials and equipment. My favorite tools are a nice car-wax sponge and carnuba wax, since virtually any well stocked auto store already have these available at a commodity price.
On a slightly related note, I saw a Radio Shack in the big downtown mall with a demo machine running some kind of media player. It was playing Shrek, with the playlist reading Shrek DVD-RIP-SUP...
Just thought I'd like to share.
(if this gets modded up I will know for sure the mods are on crack)
I was involved in this case as an expert witness, so, if anyone has questions I'd be happy to answer them.
I mean, if things in Australia are like they are in the US, Blockbuster still charges a premium for DVD rental
Blockbuster deserves its own special category. Luckily even while the range of censored mainstream titles might be larger at blockbuster, over here (.au) they charge a lot more than your local video store.
The local store can also carry the uncensored films, and the more interesting films rejected by Blockbuster.
I havn't seen a blockbuster go broke yet.. but hopefully one day.
So in reality, its more like
Australian Consumer: 1
Independant Video Rental: 1
Warner & Friends: 0
---
Silence is consent.
There's a difference between deterioration from use and deterioration from abuse. Rub your VHS cassete with sandpaper and it stays fine. Rub the tape inside it by playing it in the VCR alot and it'll turn to crap. I've yet to hear of the lasers in DVD players wearing out whatever the ones and zeros are stored on.
The original poster has a point, he just chose to word it poorly. I'd expect VHS tapes to last much longer than DVDs (my local stores have some from the 80s, maybe earlier) simply because people can treat them like trash and they'll still work. I have friends who just leave stacks and stacks of CDs or DVDs on their computer desks or living room floor.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
There is nothing in our law stating that it is illegal to play region one DVD's in region 4. The whole region encoding thing is nothing more than a matter of standards compliance. It has no real legal basis. If it did, then you wouldn't be able to buy region 1 or region free players in Harvey Norman would you?
Ray.
Two key points: (1) this is a big victory for consumers in the realm of fair use, and (2) it helps keep a big media company's power in check, at least in this instance.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
As long as we are talking about video DVDs, this makes complete sense. Sure, DVDs have interactive programs on there, but you do not install anything; you just play them, the same as a CD. When it comes to DVDs for games and whatever that require some installation, then they had better classify them as software. If it's a DVD sold in a movie store or sold as a movie, it shouldn't be labeled software.
Heck, DVDs are expensive enough for movies. They expect to raise the price and acutally sell them?
uh, australia? what the fook does that have to do with the United States?
Isn't it obvious? He's a kiwi and sick of always hearing about those loud bastards across the tasman !
My washing machine has a embedded processor and software, so by your argument my washingmachine is software.
Get real dude, 99.9% (?) of a dvd is the movie, any software binaries that come with it are just ancillary stuff.
Of all the trivializing titles in the world, I think "content producer" is rather near the top.
You can't expect jargon to mean the same as the colloquial word. In the entertainment industry, "content" is simply jargon for "copyrighted works," and "producer" is the manager of a project who is responsible for hiring and firing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The lense will make contact with the disc. Just listen to the drive when a disk is in vs when its just spinning the motor.
What shill asked you to spout this crock of crap?
"By declaring this practise illegal, I'm afraid Australia could be severely stifling the incentive of movie companies to include special DVD-only features. This move doesn't benefit anyone"
What part of "120% increase" in price failed to register with you? what part of "would have forced some (Video Rental Stores) Out of business" did you fail to read? Sounds quite likely to me that
1. The Video Rental association in question only sued because, well the new contracts would have forced some of thier people out of business
2. Consumers win in this case because the extra costs of getting DVD's (the 120% increase mentioned) to rent will not be passed on to them...
3. Your argument that it's software fails on a few marks. Consider this. Is a Music CD, simply a "Music CD" or is it software? Replace VHS with Tape Cassettes, and DVD with "Music CD" in your argument. Are Music CD's (in particular the "Enhanced" or HyperCD's) Software or music? Even the RIAA considers them Music..(for many reasons, the AHRA (Home Recording act) amoung others).
4. Your statment "Australia could be severely stifling the incentive of movie companies to include special DVD-only features", leads to a strawman argument. Simply put, The move means that Warner (and other companies) will only be able to charge what is fair and reasonable, rather than a forced $55 per DVD, they still make money, they still can increase the price, but they can't lock the Rental houses in.
But ignoring that...It really doesn't matter a rats ass if it hurts the Movie rental industry, what DOES matter is, *Is the Practice (Contract in this case) Legal*, guess what, the courts said NO.
What caught my eye about your post is that it reads like the script that most of our Corporate attorneys spout.
Bugs Bunny was right.
We:
1. Funded arpa net
2. Built it
And australia did....?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
GTA3 is being re-released here on Feb 15th, one cut scene removed/modified.
Slashdot is a website that uses the subtitle "News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters." It is the result of the work and efforts of several people, notably Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda and Jeff "Hemos" Bates. It is a fantastic site, and is one of the best places on the web for finding technology-related news. It has grown over the years, and is now owned by Andover.net (although it's still run by CmdrTaco and Hemos), but it's still a place where anybody can learn about things that are going on in the world, comment on them, and discuss them. It's a great site, and I've been checking it on a daily basis (immediately after reading e-mail) for over a year.
There has been some discussion about the site as it grows. There are always people who feel the best way to contribute to a conversation is to comment on spelling mistakes in a post, or how they submitted a link to the same story and it didn't get posted, or how it shouldn't be on Slashdot in the first place.
These people seem to forget that the site was created as a place for Rob and Jeff to talk about the things that interest them. They may not be interested by the same things as the regular readers. Hell, they may not even be interested by some of the stuff that does get posted, but they post it because many of the readers seem to enjoy it (based on the volume of comments and quality of discussion.) They've never claimed to be an on-line Wall Street Journal of technology, and they've never claimed to cater to the tastes of anyone else. This is their site. They've got some other people working on it because it's become so popular, but it hasn't really changed. (At least, it hasn't changed drastically in the time I've been reading it, and they've added a few editors in those months.) These guys are doing a damn fine job. They've created a great forum, and asked nothing in return. What do they get in return? Abuse. A lot of it.
They take abuse because they make mistakes in their English that are easy to spot and correct. So what? The vast majority of these grammatical and spelling errors don't obscure the content of the piece. Nobody's perfect; deal with it and move on. Yes, they can run it through a spelling checker, but then they'd have to deal with the creative handles used by the submitter, the technical jargon that crops up in the kinds of stories they run, and the acronyms that appear along with this jargon. A lot of correctly spelled words would be flagged with the mistakes. It's not that important.
These guys also take abuse because some people abuse the site. They have trolls, just like the ones that appear on Usenet. In my experience, there are five kinds of trolls on Slashdot.
The Fist Prost Troll.
This troll exists because the site allows people to post comments and discuss articles. However, this troll doesn't care about the article itself; he/she only cares about being the first person to post a comment in that discussion. This means that many articles begin with five or six comments that say nothing but "I got the first post! Nya nya!" Well, I say, so what? This is not a race; it's a place to have intelligent conversation with people who share your interests.
The Slashdot programmers have come up with ways to reduce these trolls. They've restricted people from posting articles with the subject "First Post," which has led to the popular "Fist Prost" misspelling. The moderation system also helps. (More on that later.) There's no way to completely remove these pests without resorting to censorship. Those who created Slashdot refuse to take this step. Great!
The Goat-Boy Troll
These guys try to sound intelligent, and offer links to a website described as informative and relevant, but when you click on the link you are sent to photos depicting people fornicating with their barnyard friends, or other such irrelevant imagery that most web surfers don't want to see. (I'm just glad I browse with images off.) I don't know what they hope to accomplish by this. I picture these people are young, immature, and stoned out of their minds. I can think of no other mental state which would let them find this amusing. (It's not even like they can see your reaction when you click the link, if you do. They don't even know if it gets clicked on at all. Unless they also administrate the site, but then they've probably got far more psychological problems than I thought...)
The Slander Troll
These people post off-topic diatrab promoting their own favorite dogma. They sometimes post long, prepared essays full of contrived events about individuals the Slashdot community considers famous, such as Linus Torvalds, Rob, Jeff, Eric S. Raymond, Richard Stallman, or other talented and well-respected individuals. Sometimes they just respond to existing, productive comments with wholly unbased and unwarranted conjectures about the original poster's sexual preferences. Still others post about the sinners of the world, and why their particular religion or cult is the only one that will save us all from the pits of Hell.
These people contribute nothing to the conversation. The moderation system usually gets them correctly labeled within minutes, allowing the rest of us to get on with the discussion. And yet, Rob and Jeff still get e-mail about these "evil" posters.
The Karma Whore
These are people who post things which can be totally fabricated, simply regurgitations of the information available, bashing individuals or companies unpopular among Slashdot readers, or any other form of redundant or pointless contribution for the purpose of collecting "karma." This is described in more detail below, but suffice it to say that those individuals who consider collecting karma to be a status symbol need to get out more, and make some friends in meatspace.
The Thinking Troll
These are the only trolls I have any respect for. Some of them aren't even trying to troll.
Some of these trolls take the time to come up with humourous comments that actually relate to the topic at hand. Others actually have the audacity to say things like "Microsoft is not completely evil." These are the ones that result in the most hate mail for Rob and Jeff. They actually post things that some people like, so the moderators don't always drag their messages to the bottom of the heap. This is because they occasionally say things that actually contribute to the conversation. (Heaven forbid!)
The Moderation System
In all five cases, the moderation system works well. The moderation system on Slashdot allows frequent posters and readers occasional privelages to promote or demote comments. You can qualify a certain post as Funny, Interesting, Informative, Redundant, Troll, Flamebait, etc. and it will be "scored" accordingly. If the adjective is positive, the comment gets a higher score. If it's a negative adjective, the comment gets a lower score. If you posted that comment, your personal "karma" points on the Slashdot records will also increase or decrease. If your posts tend to get moderated down, they will start at lower scores. If they tend to get moderated up, you start to post with higher scores. The people reading Slashdot can then choose to only read posts that have a score higher than X, to sort comments so that those with the highest scores come first, etc. The moderators rank the posts, and the users decide how much they want to read, and what they choose to ignore. The system works very well.
The problems for Rob and Jeff come in when people decide that bad decisions made by moderators are the fault of the system's creators. Some of these trolls are trolling to demonstrate their perceived flaws in the system. Guess what guys? If you don't troll, then any flaws that might exist won't matter. Some troll because they are amused by it. So what? The moderation system weeds out the absolute crap by rapidly giving it the lowest possible score. If the post isn't absolute crap, it might not get modded that low.
Rob and Jeff work hard, and do a good job. In return, people send them abusive mail because some people with computer access aren't terribly mature. Well, as far as I'm concerned, Slashdot administrators are not to blame. They are trying to design and operate a system that allows several thousand people to discuss things they are interested in, without restricting the content in any way. It is an uncensored forum, and they are trying to make it the best possible site they can with the hardware they have available. If you have a problem with the trolls on Slashdot, take it up with the trolls. Their e-mail addresses are usually available in their posts. Deal with them directly. Rob and Jeff have enough to do.
- The BOFH Troll
I was going to let this comment slide by but your comment about being racist caught me. You damn kneejerk liberal. Please explain how claiming the US is the best is racist?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Simple. If they'r formatted as DVD-Video, they're movies with a twist. If they're formatted as DVD-ROMS, they're software that happens to contain motion pictures.
DVDs aren't like CDs. AFAIK, both DVD-ROM discs and DVD-Video discs are formatted in UDF; DVD-Video is simply a standard for the names, formats, and encryption of some files (*.vob and *.ifo). It's perfectly possible to have a folder on a DVD-Video disc containing DVD-ROM data designed for a computer.
Will I retire or break 10K?
We can checkout various software titles at our public library here in my town.
Copyright law makes copious exceptions for non-profit libraries and archives. Blockbuster Video is not a non-profit.
Will I retire or break 10K?
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.
A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon's troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph's use outside the U.S. and Canada.
A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally "gets it".
A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is 'bitchslapped.' The nation mourns.
A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its "freedom to innovate" and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as "Standa~1" and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
A.D. 1929: V.A. Linux's stock drops over 200 dollars on "Black Tuesday", October 29th.
A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
A.D. 1948: Slashdot runs the infamous headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous "I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream" speech, which stated: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek."
A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: "FIRST MOONWALK!!!"
A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for "Internet theft".
A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned "hacker" Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany "gets it".
A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa "gets it".
A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net
A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"
- The BOFH Troll
>region coding is _not_ "nasty malicious code."
No, but it certianly is nasty and malicious.
Yes it is code on some titles. These "Region Coding Enhanced" (RCE) discs contain valid content for all regions, but in all but the "correct" region the content is only "Wrong region" (confusing region-free players), and in the "correct" region there's a menu program that reads the player's make and model, and if it's a model known to be region-switchable or too easy to to modify to get rid of Macrovision or region lockout), the disc won't play.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Wow and apples are apples, oranges are oranges.
Who the hell thought they could get away with that?!?! damn.
Let's all take a minute to go back and read the article people. This case was more about copyright law then about DVD movies as software (which they are, come to think about it - depending on your definition of hard/software and 'is' is.) When you consider how DVDs are distributed in the US, you see that what the Australian's were doing would be ILLEGAL in America. The DVDs we buy here (for home use) are not for commercial use and thus cost (an inflated, IHMO) $24.00. DVDs for commercial use (almost exactly the same content) cost rental outlets more. Anybody reading the article (and living Stateside) should have recognized this.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
There is nothing in our law stating that it is illegal to play region one DVD's in region 4. The whole region encoding thing is nothing more than a matter of standards compliance.
Except the typical terms for the CSS licence amount to "If you don't comply with the standard, including the region coding and Macrovision® encoding, you lose your CSS keys on all future titles, and we have paid your Parliament millions of monetary units to get an equivalent to the American DMCA with a few SSSCA provisions thrown in with that, so the only way you can DeCSS discs is through this license, nyeh!"
If it did, then you wouldn't be able to buy region 1 or region free players in Harvey Norman would you?
The MPAA is probably already buying laws making it illegal to ship DVD-Video titles or players outside of their respective regions.
Will I retire or break 10K?
After serveral bad attempts at creating the ultimate in configurations for a wm and now a desktop shell. Rasterman and Mandrake have abandon E wm. ....
If the courts actually decide that it doesn't and that EULAs are binding (i.e. click-through/assumed agreements, obviously signed contracts for enterprise software ARE binding by contract law)
If you buy anything by credit card face-to-face, the EULA can be assumed to be binding, as you have signed the charge slip, and some crafty lawyer could probably twist that into having signed the EULA.
It's already been established that code is more or less equivalent to speech (no that's not a legal statement but a common sense translation), at least here in the US.
If it's not speech, then it'll have a real hard time qualifying as a Section 102 literary work under U.S. copyright law.
Nevertheless, the argument that a DVD *is* software is absurd - a DVD-Movie is data for a fixed playback algorithm.
Likewise, the argument that a computer program *is* software is absurd - a Windows-Executable is data for a fixed interpreter algorithm, encoded in the hardware of the AMD Athlon and Intel Pentium IV processors.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I saw a blurb on CNN last night where the RIAA made a claim that MP3 trading (like Napster) cost them four billion dollars. I think their math is based on "everybody that has MP3 is worth the CD that it was on."
I just don't think they can make this claim. What's going on with MP3 trading is not so much piracy, but demand for a new type of service. People want individual songs, not over-priced CD's full of crap. They want it on a non-CD media so they don't have to juggle CD's. And finally, they don't want to have to look very hard to find it. You'd have thought somebody would have said "hmm.. there's demand here, we should fill it!".
Then the RIAA would have created a business model for purchase and download of MP3's. If they had done that, I'd understand if their case that Napster is costing them money. But they're not even in that market, instead they're trying to sue it out of existence. Ever wonder if phone companies tried to sue cell phone companies?
The market has spoken about what it wants, and the RIAA is stupid enough to try to fight it. The movie industry is going to learn a harsh lesson too if they follow suit. People want to rent DVD's instead of buying them. Their best bet is to make the content on the DVD's worth owning. Compete with the rental companies by being better than them. Man I'm so glad Warner Brothers lost that case.
"Derp de derp."
As far as I know, the fist sale doctrine has never been applied to software. I don't think that any of the "no resale" clauses of many EULAs has been contested in court.
Unfortunately, it has. This very flawed decision set a precedent in some jurisdictions that 17 USC 117 applies only when the owner of a particular copy says it does. If you merely "possess" a copy of software, but somebody else owns the physical copy (in cases such as rental), some jurisdictions say that the owner of a copy of a work has the right not to license the rights under 17 USC 117 to the person merely in possession of the copy. And software publishers claim under some EULAs to transact a perpetual rental rather than a sale of a copy.
Will I retire or break 10K?
" DVD media will eventually drop in price as the technology is more refined and VHS is gradually deprecated and eliminated from the marketplace. "'
Something similiar was said about CDs when they first came out, and cassettes reined. Wonder when that "drop" is going to happen?
Last time I checked, we were using something loosely defined as the World-Wide-Web , not the United-States-Web
What about people who use America Online? In fact, the parent company of Warner Home Video (the plaintiff in this case) has "America" in its name (AOL Time Warner Inc; AOL is an acronym for America Online).
Will I retire or break 10K?
On a slightly aside. I've noticed that when you play a movie using Interact vs PowerDVD (or similiar). Some of the things you see are different. That new Jackie Chan/Chris Rock movie for example.
This is an american page right??? Are you sure? Cause it seems to me that a lot of Australian content is getting on this page. This is all fine and dandy, most of these stories are good and all. I just have to ask, why is so much shit going down in Australia.
" Most of my movie renting was done in Bumblefuck, Minnesota, where I went to college for a couple of years. "
Wow! Truth in advertising. No wonder it cost so much.
At first glance, I found this to be an interesting story on its own, because of the way it addresses the boundaries that the digital world is creating as it goes. But in another way, it's also the most boring story I've ever heard, in that this is the most predictable storyline you could come across. It's being repeated all over the industry:
1. New format for distribution threatens company that used to make easy profits without much innovation.
2. Company seeks to sue/tax/threaten promoters of new technology for infringing on its rights to make a profit.
3. Consumers/users actually like new format, saves them money, time.
4. Company actually ends up shooting self in foot, because its entrenched in old technology, refuses to embrace new opportunity. 5. Users adopt new technology anyway, leaving company in the dust.
I mean really, can't we do something different for once? Let's get over our petty interests, and have some vision, maybe? This has been / is being repeated everywhere you look: Napster vs recording companies, internet phone calls vs telecom companies, hybrid cars vs US car companies, xerox copiers vs carbon paper manufacturers, robots vs assembly line workers, Gutenberg vs monks...
If Blockbuster censors mainstream R-rated movies that would suck (among other reasons). But if nothing else that guarantees that your friendly neighborhood video store will never be completely replaced by Blockbuster/Hollywood. Where else will you get your porn and your *gasp* uncut R-rated movies?
And the other reasons they suck? Expensive, long slow lines, and always runs out of movies on the weekends.
Actually, price descrimination can be a good thing. For example, price descrimination is largely responsible for the availability of cheap airline tickets and airline tickets being generally available on short notice. Without price descrimination, you'd likely have a situation where you'd pay more than the cheapest fares these days and/or there'd be no seats available for the last minute traveller.
The DVD region system was a good idea, but it's poorly implemented. It's supposed to allow cheap DVDs to be sold in places like India without affecting the market in the US and Europe. Without it, DVDs would probably never be released in India at all, or they'd be released there at the same price as in the US and the middle class wouldn't be able to afford them. I don't see how either of these outcomes is better than $5 DVDs that only work in local DVD players.
Same applies to a lot of computer hardware (monitors, drives, boards, cpus, etc - all made in places far far away from Down Under). Yeah like Malaysia, Taiwan, China, Singapore and Japan.
Just listen to the drive when a disk is in vs when its just spinning the motor.
You can't be serious? That sound is not the lens scraping the disc. That's the motor working harder because the disc give it a higher moment of inertia -- more weight to accelerate and keep at speed.
I think you have misunderstood. I'm an Aussie and the problem was not in charging whatever the producer thought was fair for the product. The company wants to charge different prices to different customers for the same product. In Australian law you can charge whatever you think is a marketable price for your goods and you can change that price as you like. You cannot charge different prices to different markets for the same product.
DISCLAIMER: i am australian
The real issues in this case was that Warner decided to create a tiered system for DVD rental. Retail DVDs where marked as such and sold for standard prices (around $30 or so AUD, which is quite reasonable). Rental DVDs were at least double the price, and the publisher said that it was illegal to use retail movies for rental purposes. Big copyright notices and disclaimers are places in all retails movies to ensure that consumers are alered to the legalities if they rent one.
The effect of this was that the big coroprate rental shops (Blockbuster and VideoEzy among very few others) bore the cost, but the smaller and local rental places could not afford the new system and their business was threatend.
This smaller rental shops are the ones who took legal action.
technoshamanic resistance within hyper-transgressive ontology
The reason I could support something similar to what WB was trying to do, is that I could support the concept of limiting some of the traditional rights during a rental "situation". This was what Rep. Boucher was trying to accomplish with his DMCA clause.
Of course the actual result of that DMCA clause turned out to be another total victory for the recording industry. It was supposed to protect rental movies from being copied, by making it mandatory for all VCR's to recognize MacroVision/CopyGuard. The industry promptly screwed the consumers by using this copy protection in all movies sold, not just the rental versions.
Still, I could almost support the scheme of two types of movies: bought and rental. The reality is that this probably won't work for a number of reasons, the classic reasons cited in the article is that the "rental version" ends-up being more expensive, so rental stores use consumer versions instead.
Another practical reason why this would probably not work, is that the recording industry has proved time and again that they are totally untrustworthy! I have to stretch to come-up with an example of an industry that is more sleazy (have to drop into organized crime like loan sharking and illegal immigrant smugglers).
that's where my holiday footage went!
I meant "far far away" in more than just a geographical sense. Australia, AFAIK, doesn't have a "Silicon Valley" of its own as far as consumer-level electronics and associated IP revenue goes. Name an electronics multinational on a par with an Intel (America) or a Sony (Asia) that calls the Australian continent home...
Generally, DVD rental prices seem to be much lower than VHS in the places I've seen (Lane Cove for example).
Of course, it's been ages since I've been in a video rental shop, so I'm not an authority. However, I remember the prices were along the lines of $3/night for new releases, compared to about $6/night for new VHS releases.
Even when you take into account large numbers of rental DVDs being heavily scratched, costs should still be much lower with DVDs.
1. DVDs cost much less to manufacture in bulk.
2. DVDs take up much less storage space.
3. It is very easy to keep a large number of spare copies of a DVD.
You only need as many covers as you will rent at any one time (hell, you don't even need that, as most places use a standard white case for customers to take home, and just display one real cover per shelf spot). You can then keep 100 extra copies of the actual DVD, and if a disc comes back unusable, simply replace it. Once a release is no longer new (and thus moves to only one or two shelf spots) almost all the discs get returned (including damaged ones), or sold as ex-rental (only for those they have enough covers for).
Of course, I don't know if this is how they *are* doing it, but it's definitely how it *should* be done.
Try it with a thiner disk. At some point you get no noise. Service manuals for CD players used to tell you what distace the head at for proper pressure on the disc.
Unfortunately it is not possible to keep a huge number of extra copies around due to the cost of buying those copies (and the risk of not being able to recoup that cost). So most places seem to have fairly limited numbers of spares and keeping them out of covers probably contributes to the scratching problems. The best solution would be for the distributors to replace damage discs, but I can't see that happening unless it becomes a big PR issue. More likely the rental places will try to charge people returning damaged discs.
The subject of this judgement was not whether a dvd is a movie or software, it is about Time Warner using its larger size to extort extra money from the movie rental stores. (ie not allowing video stores to rent out the cheaper DVDs, but selling them others DVDs with the same qualities for a greatly increased price)
In Australia it is against the law for a company to interfere with any retailers pricing schemes. This is in order to encourage competition, and prevent price fixing, and also gives the same power to any individual that would be given to a company.
In Australia we have an Act to ensure the rights of all parties in any agreement are all an the same footing, and can be found here
To my knowlegde this exists nowhere else in the world, so it seems, once again that Australia is the fairest country in the world.
In Australia, it would be illegal, to restrict the sales of other region and multi region players, due to Trade practices act which forbids unfair or anti competitive acts. all it would take is a few days and a decent lawyer to get it repealed. http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/comact/browse/TOC TR.htm
thats pretty sweet :)
its 5 bucks canadian here for to rent a dvd and 2 bucks to rent vhs
~me
for a video rental store to buy a dvd to put on its shelf, they're generally not allowed to just walk into a futureshop or hmv and pick it off the shelves for normal price. no, they have to buy 'special rentable' dvds even though its usually the exact same thing
I think my aunt had said its like 50-75$ canadian for most dvds (she runs a small rental business). So yes, it is cheaper for them to buy a dvd than a tape, but itst not as cheap as you think...
~me
DOn't know about other places in Australia, but in Melbourne the rental prices for DVD's are significantly lower than for the same VHS. Something about better reliability, and more second hand resale value.
Thinking all this time that DVD's CD's, video tapes, ZIP disks and the like were all forms of media, while overhyped overbudget creative endeavors featuring self-absorbed celebrities in questionable plots using questionable diaglog were movies, and overhyped creative endeavors that never leave beta and crash my computer were software.
Obviously I didn't consider the legal definition.
Everyone who thinks it's time law schools require at least three logic courses, please raise your hands.
I mean there's a long way between
- DVD with nothing but menus
- DVD with some add-on apps (screen savers etc.)
- DVD *and* a solid app. Harry Potter DVD + Harry Potter game? Could have happened. Won't, but could be.
- DVD wtih an application like Premiere, with some example trailers
- Pure application DVD
Where does it stop being a movie and start being software, when can you sell it under the first sale doctrine, when would an EULA of no resale be binding? I'm curious at least.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
At least this shows that there are some sensible people involved in making legal juddements in this world, and not being lead by the corporations.
Now we just need to see the judgement for the BT/Prodigy hyperlink case. British Telecom's Hyperlink Claims To Reach U.S. Court
Anyone On Line...
and you might even lose a few pounds when you take them back to the gym!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That's also at the store within walking distance.
for the people I know in Australia the shop (any shop!) is at least 3 hours walk away!
So by the time you've walked to the shop and back that's 6 hours gone, watch the movie, bring it back, wow nearly 14 hours to watch a movie!
all made in places far far away from Down like Taiwan, China, Malasia!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I got the idea that the whole point with WB was to try to push two versions of the DVDs: one for rental and one for resale.
I live in Finland and, curiously, this is the way we've always had it. The DVD I rent from shop down the street has a text in the cover saying "For rental only. If you've bought this DVD, call xxxxx". The DVD I buy has a cover text saying "reselling, renting, copying and public presentation of this movie is prohibited."
Still, the video and DVD rental prices are exactly the same (3 EUR)!
It will probably benefit consumers in the long run if only to keep software style EULAs away from DVD movies.
Does this mean Region Code Enhancement [...] scripting [...] would be banned in Oz?
No, it just means scripting isn't considered software, which we all knew already. Sorry, kiddies.
I disagree. DVDs may be more prone to damage, but if you're careful with them and don't damage them, they won't deteriorate. With tapes, on the other hand, deterioration is inevitable and has nothing to do with how careful you are.
IMO, jewel cases are a hassle and a waste of space for the mostly minimal protection they provide (as long as you're not transporting them or constantly handling them out of the player). I've actually taken to storing most of my CDs in old CD-R spindles, since I've already ripped/backed-up the content, and since I'm not the type who needs to showcase my collection for friends to gawk at.
I would be doing the same for my few DVDs, except that I can't make cheap backups of 'em, so I can't risk scratches due to dirt getting between them on a spindle... though... maybe a layer of felt per would work...
Anyone manufacture something like this? a "super spindle" ... with tabs for indexing?
--
Power to the Peaceful
Data is actually stored on the reverse of the label and not the plastic underneath. Get a blank or useless cd and scratch off the label, and you'll see the shiny surface on the reverse :o) Watch out thoough, it tends to end up like confetti
My point is, what do we consider a DVD containing actual software to be, since it has been previously ruled that DVDs are in fact NOT software?
if you can backup your cd's to mp3, why cant you just rip your DVD's to Divx across 2 cd's? That's what I do. I reencode to SVCD format so i can pop it myu dvd player instead of playing on my computer and the difference in quality from the higher compresion is hardly noticable just like with mp3.
Before you bitch about the quality of the DVD and how it sucks... You should try watching some old HK movies. The older stuff wasn't exactly filmed using high quality cameras... Much of the "older" HK stuff uses like B-rated movie type equipment. And you all know how good the dubbing is.... ;) Those 5 dollar DVD's were probably just a straight copy of some 10 year old archival tape, stuck onto DVD>
So, no, I don't consider divx or multiple svcd disks a worthy backup of a DVD; only the original will do (until I can buy a cheap DVD-R burner).
--
Power to the Peaceful
IIRC, the U.S. has this. There are tiered VHS tapes, one set that sell at your local store for $10-20, and another for the movie rental stores that cost $100. I know that there was a big uproar over The Matrix - if it didn't clear 200$ million, the only VHS copy would be available for rental stores, so you'd have to pay $100 for it. The only difference between the tapes, I believe, was that one had a different "don't show this in public" warning or something like that. Would someone who work(s|ed) at a movie store like to join in?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
To all those claiming that a DVD is software because it contains logic; my microwave oven must be software because it contains logic in the popcorn mode.
A DVD of a film is not a film in the same sence the a video tape of a film is not a film, but the results are pretty much the same.
You can by these plastic films that just have a ring of gum arround the inner hole. You can stick them on both the front (to stop scratching from fucking up the transperant plastic the laser has to penetrate) & the back (to protect the label that has the track underneath). When the bottom one gets so warn it starts to intefer with the laser tracking, you just peel it off & stick a new one on.
Why isn't Steve Irwin dead yet? Anyone who can one minute say 'This is one of the deadliest snakes in the world' and the next minute say 'Lets pick him up and have a look at him' has definate suicidal tendencies...
...the insanely expensive plane tickets to small places. It's cheaper for me (Germany) to fly to the USA than to fly home (Norway, a little country just north of Germany for you US-centric) because of price discrimination.
...and what made DVDs that different from other media? Don't they sell VHS movies in India? Actually, I'd live with it if the European versions usually hadn't been late, in a worse format, lack extras and on top of it are more expensive. When you force people to pay more *for a late and inferior product* you're begging for trouble.
I don't think MPAA get it. If I can stroll down to the shop and buy a DVD, in a good format, with all the extras the US version has, I'll probably do that. If I can't buy it, but I can get it on DivX (not screener, DVDrip, from a US DVD) or it's a horribly crippled version, I'll screw it and get the DivX. I can deal with living in a rich part of the world and be expected to pay more. But when I'm treated like a second-rate customer, I take offense. Of course I should probably simply not buy DVDs at all, write a letter to WTO and sulk. Uh huh. See you all in the line to get the LotR DVD.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
yeah, BUT, a thinner disk has less mass, which means less inertia.
moox. for a new generation.
Warner contends that the means by which a DVD disc is played, which includes the sequential decompression of the audio, video and caption content and storage in RAM, constitutes a copying of the content.
Reading this line from the court ruling implies to me that I'm allowed to copy all Warner DVD's. Doesn't this make all the DeCSS court cases worthless?
I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but one has to consider the cost of creating the DVD. Granted, the cost to manufacture the disc is probably less than $5 US, but what about the extra stuff on the DVD? It isn't like VHS, where you just dump the lo-con print to tape, stick some trailers in front of it, and then go manufacture a few thousand. You've got to do the pan-and-scan telecine of the lo-con print, do the widescreen telecine of the lo-con print, put together the "Making of..." stuff, the filmographies, production photos, commentaries, etc.
So I can understand raising the price of each DVD by a few dollars (less than $5), but $25 for a DVD and $10 for the VHS of the same movie? Well, that's pushing it.
However, one still has to remember that if something is being sold for $20 in a store, the store keeps around half of that.
We'll have more crappy software packages on DVD's that refuse to give bonus footage unless we install it on our PC's?
Take the Phantom Menace DVD for example, where you have to either search around for a copy of the quicktime video of the Ep 2 trailers, or install the crappy Interactual software that comes with the DVD in order to access the Starwars.com site preview (of course this also axes Mac/Linux users)...
Since this is a growing trend with any movie company that wants to make the buyers jump through hoops just for a crummy bonus footage shot, I think that the Australian courts should reexamine their stance... Since the DVD holds software *on* the media itself, along *with* a movie, it counts as software *and* video media...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Anyway, I beg to differ. Menus, browsers, and region codes are not code, they're data. The line between code and data is often fuzzy, but these things are well beyond the fuzzy area. There's no programming that the player uploads and executes. (That would present interesting opportunities for virus writers!) It's just information that's used by the logic that already embedded in the player.
Which is not to dispute the "malicious" part of your comment. Indeed, that's why the entertainment industry is so uptight about open-source DVD software. Putting logic where people can hack it makes it more difficult for them to control the data the logic interprets.
I also have to point out that even if we accept your classification, it's a technical classification, not a legal one. Judges tend to classify things according to the way people use them. That's why the tomato is a legal vegetable, though botanically it's a fruit. And people use DVDs for watching movies, so embedded data is neither here nor there. Which is also true for the ID info embedded in MP3 files, the sideband data in analog TV broadcasts, and the recording speed info on VHS tapes.
the difference between right and wrong. It's just too bad that the U.S. government lost sight of the fact that they're supposed to protect consumers from big business, and not the other way around...
Albuquerque PC
It really should be the content of the medium that decides it's classification, not the medium itself. DVD's that contain a single film and whatever other material they choose to pack with it, should be considered a film.
I imagine that this was part of the deciding factor for the judgement but it also means that this will be a continued issue.
When you can start buying the entire Adobe suite of applications on a single DVD, then they can call it software.
Someone please mod this guy down as "-1, Ignorant".
Have you ever torn apart a cd/laserdisc/DVD player? Have you ever watched it play a disc? The laser lens does NOT touch the disc.
Sometimes I hate stupidity. I'm not trying to get on your shit, but come on, don't explain what's in the box if you've obviously never seen what's in the box.
- pan and scan : yep, those of us that purchase DVDs really really find it worth the extra money to have the studio thoughtfully excise about 25% of each and every frame.
- filmographies: yep, advertising fo other movies you might want to buy - we always love to pay extra for advertising
- making of: I'll grant you a half point here, but who really makes the "making of" shorts - they are not made for the express purpose of inclusion in the DVD, so it isn't really an extra cost.
- production photos: oh PUH LEASE!
But the commentaries are a legitimate value add. If I had a choice of two identical DVDs except that one had the commentary adn one did not... Well I'd pay an extra dollar for the commentary.In short, I would expect that the actual production differential between DVD s VHS is pretty close to nil, so I certainly can't see any justificaion for a significantly higher retail prce for DVDs. (Of course the studios need no more justification than the record labels - they will just need 20 years in the US before the FTC determines that they are engaged in price fixing)
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Maybe you should check out the Discus 40 or 20 at http://www.discgear.com/ Sounds exactly like what you're looking for. I use it to store CDs in my car, and they are wonderful, compact units.
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is that you watched the whole video.
I'm terribly confused. Here in Australia, virtually any VHS casette I've ever purchased states something to the description of of "The copyright proprieter has licensed this video for home use only. Any unauthorised hiring is strictly prohibited." I've always been under the impression that video stores have to obtain a copy that allows hiring (the only difference being the license) at a presumably higher price.
Has something changed with DVD? Is there actually going to be _less_ copyright control over this format than for VHS or am I misinterpreting the court victory?
Why is the Herald only reporting this now? And why is Slashdot only accepting the submission now? This was reported in Australian IT on December 10 (Films aren't software, court rules). It was also submitted to Slashdot, but rejected. Why? What's the bet that this comment gets censored too?
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Power to the Peaceful
Exactly how these things are defined in law is to a large extent pretty unexplored territory; and nobody should assume it won't change even if an attempt to define it has been made.
But, to put a little perspective on things referred to in this discussion...
If, by "Software" you mean "a computer program", I suppose a DVD-Video disk is software. Exactly where "computer program" begins and "useful information" ends is basically undefined in most jursdictions, so far.
If you take the "digital is special" arguement out of it, you come up with a few conclusions:
A movie is information encoded in a retreivable storage form. So's a book, so's a photograph, so's a sound recording.
To stick with the Movie analogy; a movie is not actors, dialog and a stage; it is information about these things. It is essentially irrelevant what medium is used to store the information. 70mm film, videotape, DVD-Video disk; all the same, whether digital or analog.
Now, if you think all things digital automatically encompass a magical transformation to something MORE than information about other information, you might, like WB, try to change the way the courts view it and probably to increase or change your revenue model. If you think it just a damn movie, obviously this approach won't work.
Clearly the Australian Court decided it was just a damn movie.
I believe that all the governments of the entire world shall rule that region coding, encryption, and the other "digital rights denial" technologies in DVDs are illegal, and rule that not only must they be banned, but that consumers should be encouraged to make copies of DVDs and distribute them. There would be a massive, multitrillion dollar marketing campaign to get people to copy and distribute DVDs. In fact, every DVD you buy should cost one cent, and it should come with 1000 blank recordable DVDs. DVD players would come equipped with a DVD copier which would simultaeously make 10 exact digital duplicates of a DVD in one minute. Each copy made by a consumer would allow him to claim a $1,000 tax deduction. And if you make 10,000 or more total copies of DVDs in a year, you automatically don't pay taxes, and get all your taxes refunded for the past 10 years, or 100,000 dollars, whichever is greater. To cover for this, the entertainment industry would repay the government all that money, with interest, penalties, and interest on the penalties. Finally, these laws would apply to music as well.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but if the lens on your CD player is touching the disc, you need to have it serviced. I've been on the design team for a few optical media devices and that's not the way they're designed. There is air space between the lens and the plastic of the CD. CDs wouln't last very long if there wasn't.
(example, take a sheet of paper and rub it around the axis on the data side of a CD... then put it in a CD player and try to play it. You notice how the CD cleaning cloths always say to rub from the center to the outside, you really don't need long grooves right above the data.)
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
News: One of many stories on the decision
The full text of the decision
Used to be Slashdot folks were on top of things.
proving once again that you do not have any capacity for will power, in which to employ to decide that if the price (money, ethical cost, etc) is too high that you can do without... but also we have the situation once again, that priority setting is something of an enigma as well. Way to go
Of course DVD's are film, not software. Really, guys, there are more important things going on in Sydney right now: http://www.smh.com.au/news/0201/28/sport/sport100. html :)
chapter 12 of the DMCA provides for the reverse engineering of "software" to create compatibility with other software (I.E. to allow word perfect to read MS word files).
If DVDs are software, as WB claims, then they ruin the merit of their lawsuits against the distributers, publishers, and creators of DeCSS "software"
But I did read the actual decision provided by another poster (earlier in the thread).
My interpretation could be off (I always seem to read legalese different from real laywers) but...
The Judge defined software, copyright, etc as it applies in Australian Law.
Both parties agreed you could rent DVDs.
Both parties agreed to the study of 2 titles as representative of all video DVDs.
Australian Law prohibits the rental of software.
The Judge spent some time going over the definition of software, and in particular that it is a set of instructions which produces a result.
You must be able to define the result; for example it does not follow that every result is protected by the same license/copyright. An analogy might be "Adobe doesn't own every work created in PhotoShop".
He found that the SW is nothing more than what is encompassed in the DVD-Video specifications, and controls play, stop, etc. He also found that if there is no movie, the sw does nothing (no result). I think this might have been the case-breaker for WB, but I'll leave that to real lawyers. He therefore concluded that it is the movie and not the sw the consumer is intending to rent.
He found that storage of data in memory (what a DVD player does) did not constitute copying of SW because the data is not normally accessable; is briefly stored and constantly replaced over the course of watching the film in real time. He agreed a computer along with additional SW (ie. SW not used to simply view the movie on a computer) could be used to do so but concluded it did not represent the intended use of most consumers when they rent.
They also analized the data and determined how many bits were sw and movie (about 5/95); and concluded the sw component is incidental to the use by consumers.
He considered the many additional features of DVD over VHS but concluded it was merely part of the format. The format allows for all kinds of information to be stored, and they defined DVD-Audio, data, MPEG-2, and others.
In Australia, it would be illegal, to restrict the sales of other region and multi region players, due to Trade practices act which forbids unfair or anti competitive acts. all it would take is a few days and a decent lawyer to get it repealed.
Isn't this act a ratification of Australia's treaty obligations with the rest of the world in the matter of free trade though.?
Since when did they start doing that? Last time I checked, they charge the same for both. (Then again, I can't remember when I last rented a tape...even before I had something that would play DVDs, I didn't rent tapes much.)
(BTW, whoever modded the parent post as flamebait needs to lay off the crack pipe and look up the definition of flamebait.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.