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EFF Creates Endangered Gizmos List
linuxwrangler writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation this week announced the creation of the Endangered Gizmos List. According to their press release, this project highlights 'the way misguided laws and lawsuits can pollute the environment for technological innovation.' The site categorizes technologies ranging from the Betamax to the Advanced eBook Processor as 'Saved', 'Endangered' or 'Extinct'."
From my viewpoint although a lot of these laws and mandates are a pain in the ass they do lead to people trying to find new and possibly better products/methodologies to get around them. Its the strengthen the product versus develop new/different products argument and sometimes new/different is definitely better. (Hell I bet if there was a law that was detrimental to Windows we might actually get a better product from them!)
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Along similar lines, Tom Jennings has a database of obsolete formats and devices of various kinds, at deadmedia.org.
His site is more focussed on older (nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century) stuff than the EFF site, and of course, not everything dies of regulatory or copyright strangulation.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Interesting:
censorship bears the legacy of copyright. For example, the custom of printers and authors to have their name listed with their creations began as a law demanding this practice, not to ensure the originator due credit, but in order for the king to keep track of disobedient writers. Brendan Scott (2000)
falling costs is met with more computer capacity for a sustained price, and therefore that new computers never will reach the poor majority (Stallabrass, 1995)
"The justification for the patent system is that by slowing down diffusion of technological progress it ensures that there will be more progress to diffuse... Since it is rooted in a contradiction, there can be no such thing as an ideally beneficial patent system [...]" [60].
Yes I do lean towards marxism and no, this is not a anti-capitalism rant although this article [firstmonday.org] does point out the obvious (for some) that we have moved from feudalism to capitalism and are GRADUALLY moving towards something else.
I once read that the Teddy Ruckspin doll was supposed to play and "sing along" to all music cassettes. But the lawyers decided that they might get sued because it might be considered a "performance" which would require payments to the copyright holders. To play it safe, they stuck with proprietary tapes.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
it's endangered because of DMCA or people suing based on stupid reasons, not because people do not use them.
mp3 players, A/D - D/A chips, TIVOs and P2P software are on that list, and you can't say people don't use them.
What a I missing ?
--> reading the FA before posting an opinion maybe
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
MyBlog
Perhaps there will be a lot of DRM-crippled A/D D/A converters in such applications but there will ALWAYS be non-crippled parts available to the industry.