Firefox Gets File Sharing Extension
Jonnty writes "Firefox finally has a good P2P extension.. "[It] incorporates peer-to-peer capabilities into the browser via a sidebar. AllPeers "combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent" to add media sharing to the long list of available extensions." "
Now Firefox can be sued by the RIAA! Seriously, won't this draw unneeded criticism of Firefox while it is still establishing its place in the browser market?
They call it free software but I suspect they mean "free beer". It sounds like nothing more than another bittorrent client.
There are other protocols that, in my opinion, are better that BT. I've seen a few that use other (third party) users to mask both the sender and receiver from one-another. I believe this is going to be important especially when it comes to government regulation and censorship. I'm anti-copyright, so I couldn't care less about who owns what.
Awesome, write the plugin and get into the browser. Perhaps if everyone has easy access to it (like they now will w/BT built in) then they will start to use it. The reason that HTTP and FTP are so popular is because support for those protocols were built into the browsers and you didn't need to have an external application fielding the transmissions.
If Foo P2P protocol is made available to everyone easily via IE and Firefox then they will pick it up quickly.
These protocols need one or more centralized server(s) to function properly.
Another idiotic idea. Why the hell would I want to spend my time LOOKING for the website I want, instead of just plain visiting it? Yes, this WOULD require me to look for the website. Also, security (Login information, et cetera) is practically impossible in such situations.
What you're basically saying, is that we should all go back to sharing plain-text ASCII, but in a new way.
I say NO THANK YOU, please leave the internet as it is already.
Why is this impressive, again? My browsing and file-sharing are completely separate tasks, and the integration is as logical as putting file system defragmenting in a sidebar.
This would be a good analogy if the only way you could defragment your hard drive was by clicking on links in firefox. When I click on an ftp link in firefox, firefox doesn't launch my ftp client. Why should clicking a torrent link be any different? To the average user, they're both just download links.
Since you've never lived in a society without copyright, how are you so sure you're going to enjoy it?
I look at the fact that I've earned a VERY good living the past 18 years by providing all my "creative" productions for free, and have never asked anyone to give me a dime or even give me recognition. My company wrote a very popular (in our market area) POP3/SMTP server over a decade ago that we gave away freely, and it made us a ton of cash in service. I write a few newsletters that I freely mail out (costing me thousands annually) that makes me decent money on speaking engagements. I've written 2 books that I've handed out person to person that nets me about $20 per reader (I request the money at the end of the book and I've received more than I've paid to get the books out). I've produced a few indie bands that have made more money giving away their music and not binding the listeners to copyright -- they make their money producing live music for their fans.
I see no need for copyright, and I've made good money without it. The only people I see making money WITH copyright are the publishing cartels, never the artists (except in extremely rare cases).
If you're a publisher, artist, musician or writer, don't look at copyright to make you rich. Hard work and getting out to see your fans makes you wealthier than protecting you work from unlimited copying.
I'm anti-copyright, so I couldn't care less about who owns what.
I find this position slightly disturbing. Well, more than slightly.
Has copyright law gotten out of hand? When work is copyrighted for the life of the creator plus 75 years, that is excessive. When copyrights keep getting extended and extended to protect works owned by companies, that is excessive.
However, the basic premise behind copyright is sound. If you write a book or compose a symphony, you SHOULD have the exclusive copyright on that work. It's your creation to do with as you see fit, whether it's put it in the public domain right away, lock it in a drawer, perform it in public for a fee, publish it, etc. It is completely up to the copyright holder to decide what happens to the work.
Your attitude, sir, carries a message of disrespect and contempt for copyright holders. Basically you're saying "F*** you and your rights, I'm going to take your creative work and do with it what I damn well please." Fair Use rights, you say? Why should I as a content provider respect your Fair Use rights if you don't respect my copyrights?
While I have no solid facts to back it, my gut tells me that if the content providers' copyrights were respected, then DRM wouldn't come around. DRM R&D costs time and money, and if copyright was on the whole respected, then the costs would outweight the revenues thet it would protect, and as everybody knows, a business won't do something if it doesn't bring a profit.
However, as long as there are enough visible attitudes like yours, DRM development will continue at the expense of Fair Use.
(and yes, I live in a Utopian world where political correctness and DRM isn't needed because people just "get along.")
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Hmm. So if you memorize one of my poems and want to recite it to a friend, I should have the right to use force to stop you? "Shut up or I'll shoot!"
No.
Ideas are not property. If you recite my poem, you take nothing away from me. My poem is not "mine" in the same sense that my guitar is "mine"; it more "mine" in the sense of "that's my girlfriend" or "that's my father". To say "the poem is mine" expresses relationship, not ownership. Any artist knows that the work "comes from, but mostly through".
My ethical rights as a creator are to have that relationship recognized, and to get my cut of any money that someone makes with that work. I think the way songwriter royalties currently work is the closest thing to a a workable "rights" system: you can play my songs all you want, but if you cover them on a CD, or play them and get paid, you owe me a royalty.
A copyright is an artificial legal creation. A "fair use right" is not a right unto itself, but a limitation on those artificial legal creation - these "fair use rights" (and many more) would exist if all copyright laws were repealed.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Anime is a genre, just as film noire is; each an adjective expanding the precision of English.
Anime = 3 sylables, Japanese Animation = 7 syllables: a greater than 50% increase in verbage to string it out. Some would have it be Japanime, but most who do know the word will know what one means by Anime. It adds to the utility of the language.
If you really want to rail against a coined word, go after methodology(ies) whenever used to mean method(s). It's the best example of incorrectly inflating a word purely for pretention. Methodology should only mean the study of methods.
The potato it is uninformed.
Should implies a moral position. I completely disagree with your position. I think the world would be far better off if instead as soon as you released a work into the world, it became the property of the world to do with what it pleases. Create a derivative work. Share it with a friend. Shout it from the rooftops. The only copyright I think would be of real value would be to require fair attribution, so that we can reward those who are creative as we see fit (rather than as they think they deserve or can extort).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking