Slashdot Mirror
Digital Shoplifting From Bookstores?
ipandithurts writes "According to a report from Tokyo via IOL, Japanese publishers have launched a campaign to stop 'digital shoplifters.' These 'digital shoplifters' are using cellphones to photograph magazine pages in bookstores, rather than buying them. 'Digital shoplifting is becoming a big problem as camera-equipped mobile handsets are spreading fast and their quality is improving greatly,' said Kenji Takahashi, an official at the Japan Magazine Publishers Association. Will entry into a bookstore soon include a 'cell-phone patdown?'"
People do obnoxious things like this (man I have been waiting to slashdot them for a while).
Don't these people know there are bookstores where you can just go in, buy a coffee, sit around and read the magazine, then put it back on the shelf and leave?
-a
Subject says it all.
I've been waiting for a story like this to come along for awhile now. IMHO this signifies the start of an unevitable transition to paperless media. with hard copy so easy to get for free, about the only for print media to ensure it's position would be to become exclusively mail-based.
Cogito Eggo Sum, I think therefore I'm a waffle
If you're going to stand in a bookstore, taking 500 pictures of the latest fav-novel of your choice, and *not* get caught, then you probably deserve to get away with the pictures.
On the other hand, if someone didn't spend so much money on the cell phone to take 600 pictures of a book, they probably could.. well.. buy the book.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
How long before stores start installing cellphone jammers?
All of modern technology seems to be going that way: A constant arms race between the people trying to sell a device to perform a function and the people trying to sell a device or service to prevent the function from being performed.
It's one thing to photograph a 100 page magazine where half the pages are ads, but do you really think people will sit there in the store undetected while they take pictures of all 900 and some pages of the new Harry Potter book?
Simple solution if they don't want people browsing the magazines with the risk of them photgraphing them, put them behind the counter.
You walk into the bookstore. Two army officers approach you with AK-47s. "Excuse me sit, could you step into the office here? Thank you. Now, you have been chosen at random to be strip-searched. This is not racial profiling. Please remove all of your clothes and bend over."
I came, I saw, She conquered.
I suffer from lack of photographic memory, thus such devices are my aids. On a similar note, my ability to perfectly memorize movies and music is also impaired, thus I am justified in downloading MP3's and movies.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
It's troubling that the intellectually unwholesome analogy which the record and movie industry lobby groups in America, that copying is identical to stealing, is finding purchase in other cultures.
Copying is one thing, stealing/shoplifting is another. Copying may not be good, but for goodness sake it's different than stealing! This press release, and the 'educational' campaign that it outlines, clouds thought in contexts where it need not be clouded.
Isn't paper obsolete yet?
We need a cheap source of e-readers / tablets. I mean *super* cheap, like $10 each. When they're everywhere, sell all magazine content digitally, pass the savings through lack of physical printing on to the consumer and be done with it.
There is clearly a requirement here for some sort of DRM for printed materials. What about something like those 3D glasses they used to hand out in theaters. Make it so you can only read the magazine with those glasses on.
Might have some interesting side effects for Playboy magazine.
(This is a joke - unless you want to patent this idea. Then it is prior art.)
Bureaucracy loves company.
Between this, the problems with music/movie/software piracy and copyright abuse and confusion, and even micropayment schemes, it is becoming apparent that technology is fast approaching a point where it will be hard for companies that provide a service, specifically concerning information and even products whose sole purpose is to inform (books and magazines) to continue to justify why we have to pay for the material the book is made out of and the shelves that hold the books and the people that make and stock them when we could do it all digitally. as it becomes easier to store, move and view digital information, business built around the fact that the info had to physically get out there are panicking, how much worse can it get?
I remember when all the newspapers began to publish their work on the internet. Everyone said that none would buy the paper version anymore and that the newspapers would have to charge money for viewing their news on the net.
I think this is these "doomsday" warnings all over again
The problem with any society is that there is always going to be some low life that does not want to work for what they have. Rather they want to take it without appreciation for the investment in time and effort that any thing worth while takes to either manufacture or compensate the creator of that item for. Technology will always facillitate this and will open new pathways for old crimes.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
... in Japanese?
They probably caught one person doing it and had to make a big stink about it.
This is pretty bogus if you think about it. Try taking a picture of a magazine page at a news stand and see just how readable it is.
Must be a slow news day in Japan. I guess Godzilla and Gamera are shacking up in Mexico again...
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I can't think of anyone in thier right mind that would actually want to try and read these photos rather than the actual magazine/book ?
:)
And if they want to print them out, they'll probably end up spending almost as much as buying the damn thing in the first place, plus the quality will suck.
Ok - so they want to read them on screen - sure, wonderful to read 50 pages of a bit skew maybe slightly blurry text
Storm in a tea-cup.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Perhaps money intended to be allocated to preventing digital shoplifting would be best invested in or donated to libraries - the books are free to borrow and if there isn't a copy available, you either wait until it's returned or suck it up and buy the book. I mean sweet merciful crap - taking 1000 pictures in a readable quality (a quality you would WANT to read) would amount to like 700MB. That's a hella-expensive phone/camera/mailbox.
I'm not too current on cell phones (I still use an original StarTac) but do these things have a high enough resolution to take a good snapshot of a page of a book or magazine? From the demos I've seen, I'm guessing the resolution of the cameras found on most phones is 640x480 at most.
Is this really a problem or is this just some case where *one* crazy guy walked into a bookstore and started taking snapshots with his phone (or camera)?
What about those savants with photographic memory? I'm sure their mental images have much higher resolution than a camera phone. Extrapolating, what about those with good aural memory who can playback a tune they heard, or even transcribe it onto musical score?
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
They can go to all this effort or just goto the library and then get a copy for free and read it in the comfort of their own home or am I missing something?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
The local newspapers' articles were light on content so I can't say for sure, but I suspect the main "violators" are teenage kids who don't have a lot of pocket money in the first place. That aside, though, this has all the markings of an industry not being able to cope with technology. The main "victims" seem to be information magazines and books--restaurant guides and whatnot--but given that the same information is already available with a quick Internet search, I fail to see what effect disallowing pictures would have on readers, other than driving them away. I guess alienating your customer base is the "in" thing these days...
(I'll save my comments that you could do this just as easily with pen and paper for another post.)
Aside from someone (the newspaper? the publishers?) calling this "digital shoplifting", thus implying a crime, I see nothing worse than rudeness.
I was wondering, if instead of a phone camera, what if you just walked in with a real, good camera and started clicking away? And on the subject, what if you had a digital camera that encrypted the photos on the fly, so that there would be no evidence of what you may or may not have in there. Is there "self incrimination" protection that permits you to withhold encryption keys?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
> Who's is going to stand there and photograph every page...?
..., but who the heck wants to open tons of images to read a lame magazine article that you can probably get online in a number of minutes?
/"a-s&-'ni-n&-tE/ noun
Is it so much more unrealistic then somebody going to a Star Wars movie and sets up his video camera in the middle of the movie theatre? That's happened too!
Don't underestimate what people are willing to do if they can save a buck...
>
Magazines maybe, but whole books never go (fully) online. So flipping 197 pages is the only alternative.
Also, you can make PDF's of a row of images, therefore no flipping needed. Or you could use ACDSee where you only need to push to PgDown key to go to the next image.
P.S. Don't you mean asinine?
Main Entry: asinine
Pronunciation: 'a-s&n-"In
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin asininus, from asinus ass
Date: 15th century
1 : marked by inexcusable failure to exercise intelligence or sound judgment
2 : of, relating to, or resembling an ass
synonym see SIMPLE
- asininely adverb
- asininity
Buyers want all goods to be free. Sellers want all goods to have a high price. The goods themselves really don't "want" anything. Inanimate objects really don't have complex desires and social lives like the gurus pretend they do.
Saying a car "wants" to go fast or information "wants" to be free is just an anthtropomorphism. It is you, as a buyer, assigning your emotions on to an object.
Here in Australia, there's been a fuss about people taking camera phones into gym change rooms. One of the current affairs TV shows did an "expose" (pardon the pun) where they showed just how easy it was for a woman reporter to go into a gym change room with a hidden cell phone; we got to see lots of pixellated naughty bits on TV while we were eating dinner.
Given this, I can see that camera phones will get killed off in the near future, before they get a chance to become deeply entrenched. At the moment, there's no real "killer app" for these devices and not huge market penetration, so I wouldn't expect a massive public outcry if governments were to ban either the phones themselves or legislate to stop phone networks carrying MMS data (which would be as good as banning the phones themselves).
Okay, where to start:
1) magazines are insanely priced here in Japan. A general purpose one (say, equiv to cosmo) would be 700 yen (think 6 dollars). A specialty one, say an hobby related RC magazine is a whopping 1,800 yen (about 15 dollars)*
2) generally all stores you can go in and read, but you have to stand there and do it - that has never prevented hordes of people from standing by the magazine racks and browsing through everything; japanese people are usually very accustomed to be on their legs, many having to stand on the train for commute and walk between the trainstation and their destinations
3) Interestingly, the porn sections in japan are not shrinkwrapped - and I do wonder if this is where the digital shoplifting takes place more than anywhere else: while it's fine and good to look at naked ladies standing next to an obasan browsing through summer-cooking recipies, where you really want to be is the privacy of your home with such magazines (let's be realistic here). So I can imagine that being a good candidate for such "theft." Of course, the obasan next to you might be stealing recipies too, but frankly the phones don't have THAT good of resolution - text won't come out.
now - you can stand and browse magazines ANYWHERE, including convenience stores (which, coincidentally, have adult sections - so if you suddenly have an urge to see pictures of naked woman at 3am, 7-E is the place to go), but nowhere I know have sit-down drinking coffee type.
side note: the "adult section" should probably include PC games section, which, as far as I can tell, is by far occupied with hentai-themed games than anything else. But none of them is censored or in a separate area. stupid american "decency laws"
other side note: the real popular stuff, they usually shrink wrap - this include popular comics, and game-hintguides, etc...
* last note: there is no such thing as subscription, or subscription discounts in japan: you can get a subscription, but then the book seller where you get it from would just mail you the said magazines on an interval and charge you cover price plus postage (ok maybe 5% discount). silly, eh? no wonder people "steal" the content.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Stores have the right to restrict whether you can or cannot take pictures on their premises: if they see you taking a picture, they can ask you to leave, or they can prohibit cameras on their premises altogether.
But that's all they can do. Being able to keep you from taking pictures doesn't mean that the act of taking pictures itself would be illegal. In fact, the article itself states that it is not.
This basically means that stores have a choice: disgruntle their customers or live with it. It doesn't sound like a big problem to me.
People won't pay for what they don't value, and ultamatly, as technology progresses and if control of that technology stays in the hands of people, we'll begin to see new kinds of media such as people throwing up e-newspapers and instead of asking for payment, ask for donations.
The store owners are simply angry becuase an old system they've been using for years is finally beginning to fade away into obsolecence. What people are doing isn't even a crime; as far as the law is conserned you can take all the pictures you want in public in america you want. If you go into a store, it's considered rude to try to make a copy of something that way like it's rude to stand there and read the magazine in the store without buying it.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Store clerk to manager: "You know, I've been seeing photoflashes every 5 seconds for an hour." Manager: "Yes, it's that 13 year old with the cellphone and that copy of Playboy."
No, seriously, this might actually enhance the word-of-mouth publicity for certain magazines. If I were a porno magazine owner in Japan, (let's face it, I bet porno is the first thing people are copying), I'd embed the magazine logo and its url in each photograph worth taking.
And before banning anything, I'd also run some numbers on the effect of digital cameras on the marketplace. Here in the US, Barnes&Noble and Borders let us open and read books for hours on end. In Europe, some book chains have started doing this as well (I've read many books that way). This practice seems profitable for them, otherwise, I don't think they would be doing it.
I live in Japan. I can't imagine that this makes any significant difference in peoples buying habits. People already spend lots of time reading magazines in 7-11 and Lawsons and similar convenience stores, with no intention of buying in the first place. I'm sure this is a natural extension of that habit. I doubt if its ever to actually steal or retain the original information. Its probably more like jotting down a note. Also, people spend lots of time holding their open phones facing outwards sending email! So, I would think its difficult to distinguish when someone's taking a picture, and when someone's just emailing their friend. Finally, I think in Japan the notion of intellectual property and the illegality of it is not as severe as it is in the states. Its more a social issue, and I can't imagine any laws developing from this, or similar IP issues.
No newsstand or any other specific place was cited. No quotes from anyone who actually did it or actual "victims" were used. The closest anyone comes is the one who said that she took pictures out of a hair style catalogue to a hairdresser to avoid taking the actual (heavy) book. A human face is the sort of thing highly compressed low-res images do best. There's a very big difference between this (which probably is fair usage and grabbing a magazine full of text and images frame-by-frame.
Hand scanners might make sense, but low-res mobile phone cams?
How many newsstands are going to let a cell phone user stand and photograph every page a 100 page magazine? What's the quality going to be like? JPGs including text images are rather hard to read unless a very low level of compression is used. Are mobile phones that much better at handling text detail in uploadable pictures? More to the point, isn't the pixel count in a mobile phonecam low enough that reproducing copy that might be typeset at 1200-2400 dpi is sort of hopeless?
What's the billing per image as uploaded via mobile? At more than 10 cents USD / frame, it would be generally cheaper to buy the magazine even assuming the user's time is worth nothing.
Has anyone actually seen this done and what the results look like?
If this really is a serious concern, spend the extra penny and shrinkwrap the suckers. Busting the shrinkwrap is vandalism of merchandise. No new law is needed.
I think some content providers are trying to get some PR support for anti-technology copy control legislation of some sort in Japan... i.e. something that looks good to elected officials who don't think terribly hard about what they're being asked to support.
Tech Public Policy stuff
While that tramp "Intellectual Property" just wants to be 0wn3d.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
They'll need a whole new Orwellian pseudo-crime-name for that... I suggest "digital molestation of kittens".
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
They just want to feel like James Bond... or Peter Graves.
Tonight on Biography, should you choose to accept it, you must retrieve a copy of the enemy's secret plans. Though their headquarters looks like a normal bookstore, do not be fooled. Every moment you spend within those walls, their operatives will be watching you, andpaying special attention to your consealed cameras. They've already been alerted to the briefcase camera, so you'll have to make do with the cell phone model. As usual, if you or any of your team is captured in the course of this operation, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existance, as well as every having paid for "those magazines".
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Just to clarify a few of these...
($US1 = 118 JPY, 100 JPY = $US0.84)
books / magazines
Japanese paperbacks vary between 350 and 650 yen. Hardback novels are usually 1200 to 2500 yen.
CDs / DVDs
CDs are 2000-3000 yen, although the cheap 'collections' are usually 1000-1200 yen (older artists). DVDs vary between 2500 and 7500 yen (higher end is for things like anime).
movie tickets
1500-1800 yen.
gasoline
90-100 yen per litre.
fruits
Depends where you buy, but a punnet of strawberries in season is 200-350 yen, apples are 100-200 yen each, 1Kg of oranges is 300-500 yen.
rice
Don't really know - I get all my rice from relatives (farmers).
vitamins
Dunno, don't buy them.
stationary
That's what work is for, right?
postage (delivery fee, let's say)
~80 yen for a postcard, ~100 yen for a letter. I find shipping costs worse - 5000+ yen to ship a server from one side of Tokyo to the other is a ripoff.
beer
130-150 yen for a 300ml can of 'happoshu', which is basically beer but brewed in a way which excepts it from the taxes on beer. Real beer is 200-300 yen for a 300ml can. Of course, buying in bulk reduces the cost by quite a bit.
"Cheap" stuff...
cigarettes
I don't smoke, but quite a few friends bitch that Japanese cigarettes are expensive (250-300 yen for a box of 20).
low-quality sake (rice-wine)
Not necessarily low quality; quite decent sake can be had for 1200-1800 yen for an isshobin (1.8 litre bottle).
RC parts (that are made in japan)*
Dunno...
- the magazines are too expensive
- porn-related and other lame jokes
- it's not "stealing" it's "infringement"
- and so on..
(I'm surprised i haven't seen anybody screaming about corporations have abused 'fair use' yet).Now, this is slashdot, so I shouldn't be surprised, but I was hoping against hope that for one /. would actually live up to its own tripe and condemn the violators while not blaming the technology. In fact, I was hoping against all hope that somebody might actually suggest a credible scheme or two to curb such behavior. "Japaneses publishers should lower their prices" is not a credible scheme.
Do we have anybody with any credible schemes to prevent this, short of shrink-wrapping magazines, which sounds like sort of a cop-out?
Sue me.
Here in Pakistan, foreign books and magazines start at 10 dollars (no matter what the actual price) and go up to 50 dollars. Local books are priced from 5 to 25 dollars. Here, a middle class salaried person makes around a 100 dollars or less a month. He/she has to support a family. You can imagine that books are the last thing they are every going to buy. Even for the well off, buying a book is something which has to be planned in advance, budgeted, then finally bought. Since we have low literacy rates here, there isn't much local content of high quality available. Magazines are one thing, but as long as books are priced beyond your typical consumer, there is something wrong with the business model. If the costs have been covered in the first world then there should be cheaper priced editions available in the rest of the world. The problem is not that playboy is too expensive, it is that technical books and magazines are priced well beyond reason. Our govt. is too blame also as they do not do anything at all about getting books into the country, providing translations etc. Anyways my point was, over here our main source of new content is Piracy. either someone gets one copy and reprints it here, or they get a scanned copy from a agent/pirater abroad etc. etc. So the more piracy going on the more stuff we get to read. The choice isn't about pirating or buying. It's about being able to read the damn things. Pakistan has a developing IT industry, and 99% of the students don't have enough money to buy ONE copy of a typical academic book per year.
OK, obviously you can't phone-copy a whole magazine, just a few of the pages you like the best, say the latest fashion shots, or whatever.
But. How about starting a club; 26 people in it. You take turns buying the magazine, scanning it on your home scanner, and then publishing it on a private homepage. Then you just have to pay for the mag every 2 years, and you still get to read every issue, in your home, with high quality picture.
Semantics aside, if you take something without paying for it (assuming the creator/owner of that thing intended for you to pay for it), regardless of whether or not it is a physical object or a digital copy, or if it doesn't seem to adversely affect the owner, it is still wrong, and I call it stealing.
Just because you can't afford it, and the "original" still exists, doesn't make it acceptable, or justifiable. It also doesn't mean that you SHOULD be able to benefit from it.
If you can't afford to pay for it, WHY should you get to have it? It goes back to that over-inflated sense of self-entitlement that I was referring to earlier.
As to the electricity example, sure, that's a little far fetched. How about cable? If you steal cable, it (usually) doesn't affect the quality of the "original", so does that mean you're copying it, and you should be allowed to because it's not a physical object? I'd say "no", because it's a service, and it's still theft.
Maybe selling a magazine is more of a sale of a "service" as opposed to a sale of a physical object... it just happens that the service is in part contained within the object in the form of created or compiled works. Regardless of the status of the object, the service of compiling and arranging information, and then transferring the knowledge/information compiled within that magazine has been performed.
I've always assumed that browsing magazines was intended to allow the potential purchaser to peruse the content so that they could get a feel for the content and quality, not to read it in its entirety or copy it. Maybe we'll see the browsing of magazines eliminated due to what seems to me to be a "breach of trust".
I still think that if you take something that you haven't paid for, that is theft. That includes making a digital copy of something that you haven't purchased.
Now, if you've purchased something, like a CD or DVD, I fully believe that you can make as many copies as you want, for your own personal use. But once again, it was paid for.
$0.02 (CDN)
one of these days people will start recording music they hear on the radio on so called "tape recorders" which enables them to listen to the music again and again without paying for it. The industry is doomed...
> Semantics aside [...]
How can you rant about a semantics thread by starting with "Semantics aside"?
Your argument is along the lines of "it's bad so it's stealing". So what if I get my hair cut and run out without paying? Can you "steal" a hair-cut? Yes, it's illegal, but it's a different "crime". Just like murder is different from vandalism.
Semantics are important in this case, because people have a much stronger response to "theft" than to "copyright violation". So the author of the original article used incorrect language intentionally to convince the reader. It is perfectly legitimate to point this out, and every single poster in this thread has acknowledged that they think copyright violation *should* be illegal.
ponxx
Why pat down? There have been numerous items of news on people who've come up with devices to block cellphone signals. I believe there was a Slashdot story a few years ago about a guy who came up with wooden panels for movie theatre seats, etc. that could completely block cell signals.
... ), and the idiots.
This is what we need. Just last week I was in Barnes and Noble and some dimwitted, inconsiderate ignoramus was chatting loudly on her mobile. I consider the bookstore to be like the library - it should have a certain level of quiet. Having yammering idiots with cell phones stuck to their heads ( which are often stuck up their asses in return ) yacking away kind of defeats all that.
By blocking the cell signal outright, you'd eliminate the Cameras ( from what I've seen alot of these camera phones lack the storage to do a picture locally - rather, they send them off to a server for storage almost immediately
I travel to washington DC from time to time and like to visit the gift shops at the smithsoneon museums. The one in the basement of American History has a particularly good collection of books for sale. If the book is reasonable, I buy it. If it's overpriced, I take out the digital camera (not an unusual thing to have in a musuem) and snap a photo of the ISBN number then visit Half.com when I get back to the office and buy it, often for half of what I saw it for in the bookstore.
This is the only reason I can see for having a camera equiped phone, a different sort of notepad.
Actually, the two definitions of theft as most commonly applied to crimes anyway are: (1) To take (the property of another) without right or permission; and (2) to get or effect surreptitiously or artfully.
Obviously, taking photos of the 100 plus pages of a magazine with a digital camera would fall well within the second category of obtaining something (in this case, the magazine material) both surreptitiously and artfully, and without right or permission. So it is qualified as theft, its just not theft that deprives the owner of the property.
Larceny (grand, petty, and petit) sets the requirements for unlawful taking or removal of anothers property with intent to permanently deprive the owner; as does burglary, though theft does has some legal definition its more of a moral term, used as the building block for other crimes.
I don't want to sound like the kill joy, laughing at everyone's book photo taking fun, but I've actually tried stuff like this. It's not hard to get away with, but I consider my time pretty valuable. That's the big reason I think this kind of behavior is just plain silly.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to copy a book this way? Not to mention that this really isn't what the cameras on the phones are meant to do, so the quality of it is going to be lousy. Wasted bandwidth storing and sending... etc. I have a hard time believing this is a serious problem anywhere.
Going out of your way to go after people who are going out of their way to do something stupid is... well... stupid.
If anyone ever got an entire 400-700 page book by taking a picture of it, I applaud them. They must have had an awful lot of time on their hands.
Isn't there some kind of award for that?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I still think that if you take something that you haven't paid for, that is theft. That includes making a digital copy of something that you haven't purchased.
Then you're a fool. Theft is prosecuted under different laws than copyright infringement. Theft is a different word from copyright infringement. Theft involves actions completely different from copyright infringement. Finally, theft introduces a class of economic losses wholly dissimilar to those introduced by copyright infringement.
Maybe you could make the case that the two are philosophically similar, in a universal-justice kind of way, but saying that one is the other is nothing but disingenuous.
Actually this is the perfect answer. If the shop owners get a digital camera, a big one with a wicked obnoxious flash on top and when folks are reading (or phone photo'ing) magazines all he has to do is walk up and start flashing that monster xenon bulb connected to his digital camera at them. Pictures of them gathered around a nudie magazine, pictures of their butts, pix of the look on their faces ...
... In this case, I can see where the lookie-loo magazine readers would never come back.
Native American lore says that when you take someone's picture you capture a part of their soul. There is a very significant psychological impression of having a camera flash in your face, the stronger the flash bulb, the stronger the impression
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Imagine having a pair of glasses with a camera/microphone at the outside corner of each lens. You wear these everywhere you go, everything you see/hear gets recorded, you drop them in their holder next to your bed every night and they dump their contents to your personal memory backup. I'd start using something like this in a heartbeat, with appropriate protections (encrypted, password based on my biometrics, Fifth Amendment protected).
This kind of thing will be feasible in ten to twenty years if Moore's law continues to hold.
And a few years after that, it may be possible to have something like this, without the glasses - the microphones are implanted in your earlobes, the camera sits inside your eye on your blind spot, and you can't take it off...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
When I was in college, I would regularly do research by finding the shelf or shelves in the library that I needed and browsing through a huge number of books on them. One day, a guy in a wheelchair (who couldn't even get between the shelves, let alone browse the high shelves) was with an official librarian who went with him and found the two books he'd written down and brought them to the end of the stacks and handed them to him and left. I asked him if he wanted anything else, and he said "Everything," so I brought the entire shelf over and put them on a table so he could browse them. It was a simple thing to do and he seemed to appreciate the simple effort. Since then, I've been very aware of how often I originally reach for one thing, but wind up with the book that's next to it.
Man, there's a lot of it out there today!
Magazines are destroyed if they don't sell; the covers returned to the publisher for a refund. So the bookstore doesn't lose a dime, unlike if an actual product was stolen. As such, this IS not the same as shoplifting. The only money being 'lost' is that of a potential sale, which probably wouldn't happen anyway, since the 'thief' is clearly not concerned with the content of the article, (since you can't hope to read comprehensive text from a 120 x 120 dpi JPG image.)
As for the publisher, point of purchase sales, except in the cases of maybe the 5 or 6 leading magaaines, don't account for ANY significant amount of income. The publishers make virtually ALL their money from the advertisers. So they have no reason to care! --Heck, the simple fact that ANYBODY is bothering to leaf through their rag looking for pictures of dresses to scan, should make them happy.
All in all, this sounds like just another dumb excuse to clamp down on society with ever-increasing thumbscrews of social control.
Thank goodness people are wise enough to impeach stupid and dangerous leaders.
-FL
People do this all the time at the Barnes & Noble where I used to work, except they would plop down in the art section with a stack of books, whip out a bigass digital camera and start snapping away. When politely informed that they were breaking the law and would be removed from the store if they continued they got amazingly indignant, like we actually WERE a library.
Sometimes I cannot believe the ballsiness of people.
Triv
For the love of god, we're not disagreeing with you. I'll keep this short:
Stuffing a CD under your shirt and walking out of the store without paying for it is stealing and it is wrong.
Downloading a song off the internet is copyright infringement, and it is wrong. But it is not stealing.
Stealing is worse than copyright infringement.
But copyright infringement is still wrong.
Are we all in agreement on these points? Good. Then this thread can end.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again