Wish I didn't mispell "racing" though. That's probably the first spelling mistake I've made in a decade. Darn this IE6 and lack of spell-check! I don't have my last line of defense!
I love having been raised a country boy. Yea, I learned to program at 5 years old on my Apple ][, but I spent as many hours of my childhood wandering miles afield through the country. We had some neighbors that bootlegged. And, frankly, I trusted my neighbors far more than the revenuers that would routinely come upon me with weapons drawn when I was out stargazing with my telescope and binoculars (I had a nice $3000 Meade 8" aperture Maksutov-Cassegrain and a deep love of astronomy and cosmology). I even got arrested twice for my troubles, and my telescope got to sit, unattended, for hours in our field.
So, let them tax my connection. It just means I'll be even more motivated to bootleg my signal. It's in my blood to build hot-rods for bootlegging, and any excuse will do!
Actually, if my friend gives me a Harley for USD $0, I sure as heck owe a couple of thousand dollars in taxes! Try telling the state otherwise, and see how fast you get corrected. As in my example, try "giving away" some of your home-made corn liquor. You still have to send it to the ABC board for inspection and tax stamping. It's tax laws that let them come after you.
Will it be easy for the state to track you? No. But it will be another Damocles' Sword over your head.
Certainly, state governements will not be able to outlaw open, unencrypted access points. Michigan recently convicted a man of a felony for using an open access point, even though the AP owner had no problem with it (you can find three Slashdot dupes about this). That law could easily be struck down by a court for numerous reasons (right to association, cruel punishment, FCC regulations, etc.), but a tax would not.
The state would allow you to share that connection, but you'd be responsible for the use tax, or would be responsible for collecting the taxpayer information. And you have to calculate the tax or handle the tax information, but here are the relevant 3,448 pages of the revised tax code to help you understand better. Oh, and behave and play by our rules, or else you will not be able to get a Tax ID number.
No, it won't be illegal to share Wifi, but it will be just too onerous to share. Just like making your own corn liquor isn't illegal here, you have no shot at making a profit with the taxes and tax regulations in NC with homemade liquor. And that's assuming the county allows alcohol and the state board will grant you a tax ID and license your still.
I come from North Carolina. We invented NASCAR raceing because we got bored from bootlegging. Outwitting revenuers has been a sport here for a century. If we get not just a sales tax on the connection, but a "connection tax," will my open AP "WardriversWelcome" become a bootlegging operation?
The government, here and elsewhere, has shown a great willingness to try and control access to and content on the internet. However, direct control will equal censorship, and will always be declared unconstitutional. But if the internet can be licensed and taxed, the states can effectively control who can get connections. Imagine taxing internet connections at the same level as alcohol, somewhere between 25-62% in NC. Just imagine how many people that could price out of the market, and how onerous the effect would be on the rest of us. Imagine a bandwith tax sold to curtail piracy, but effectively cutting off Linux distributions.
Maybe bootlegging will come back into fashion again. Instead of stills we'll have WAPs, but we'll still have the revenuers with the machine guns, dynamite, and axes.
Yea, that part about being the hobbyist company makes my laugh. I've been a hobbyist my whole life, even being given an Apple ][ at age 5. My father has been one longer than I've been alive. Neither of us would ever classify Microsoft as hobbyist-friendly. Heck he got turned off to Apple, and they have always been loyal to enthusiasts. You are right, the whole thing is a lying PR fest.
All the manager had to do was say the EULA says "xyz," and is therefore in breach of our license. He never does that (and it looks like nobody else really has either). He says the EULA is violated, but then goes on to explain how the plugin goes against what Microsoft wants. And? I don't care that you sell software, give it away, or wear it around on a fashionable necklace, your business case isn't MY business. If you can't make money doing what you are doing, then nobody should defend you, really.
It really just looks like Microsoft was caught with it's pants down, and they are scrambling to obfuscate their screw-up.
I said the same thing too. Reading that response just said to me "we don't like what he did, we didn't plan for it, but since we're a bigger company, he needs to show respect and stop."
When has Microsoft ever played by that rule? Microsoft did to IBM and Apple what Jamie did to Microsoft- find a method to extend and exploit the functionality of someone else's product. Nobody can produce the EULA language that shows a breach, only vague references to "but that'll hurt our business plan!" It's sad that no mind at Microsoft can conceive of a compelling argument why Jamie is wrong.
The MS project manager goes on about working with Jamie to clear up the Express situation, but doesn't explain their reasoning beyond calling what he did "illegal."
First, that's not the way to treat your community. Either explain to him and to us exactly what he did that was wrong, beyond the vague wording at the beginning of not being in the "spirit" of Express editions. Second, when can Microsoft unilaterally declare breach of contract "illegal?"
I use DevC++ for all my hobby needs and teaching the kiddo. After this, I would never switch to MS C++ Express or VB Express, even if it was a vastly superior product. I just need some syntax highlighting and compiler integration. I don't want to dance around legal threats over what Microsoft's "spirit" is this week.
I have a terabyte RAID in my main computer, and a 2 TB fileserver. With my video editing, I'm starting to look at a full fileserver (still have most of my main box empty). And, I'm not even a pirate, and I've just been a computer and video hobbyist for 2 decades now. I'm not even that serious about my hobbies.
I can imagine we'll all need terabytes of capacity in the next few years. Some games are already into the 14-20GB sizes.
I remember in beta there was the ability to cast spells from the number bar in melee combat. I even had a sword-warmage. It was good times then, with the slidecasting and broken skills (free dagger did more damage than 16 point swords). It required skill, unlike nearly all other MMOGs (WoW is so dang boring and easy).
You may be right though, most everything that made the game great (easily breaking your character, the complete and total dependence on magic) was largely a mistake. The stories and lore weren't, and were largely player-driven. Add to that the world was so big, most people never really got to explore. You were always finding new things and random lore bits here and there. Good times.
As a fan and former Vanguard member on AC2, I noticed Turbine's greatest strength was a rather fast and sane response to player feedback (despite many claims to the contrary). I recall many AC and AC2 fans and 3rd party developers ended up on your dev teams. I witnessed all of this first-hand when you were developing the hero-class endgame mechanics. And despite the system's friendliness, balance, and incorporation of player feedback, most players were unhappy (they thought the system was too simplistic, a la WoW, or had other esoteric gripes).
Do you have any plans to try and continute to leverage your community, or do you find vocal MMOG players just too darn irrational and hard to please? Blizzard seems to regularly ignore players, and does quite well from what I hear.
And thanks for making games that don't suck. Asheron's Call was, to me, the finest example of storytelling with thousands of players done yet. Logging in to find my Monarch was Bael'zharon ranks as the coolest moment of my 20-odd years of gaming.
Although I don't agree with him completely on regulation and taxes (I think the government has a role in property crime prevention and the mitigation of natural externalities), he seems principled and honest about his views, and is much more willing to consider rights and freedoms than anyone else in Washington. I'm willing to vote for him just to see what that's like.
My favorite author. I've wanted to somehow legally list my religion as "Cthulhu cultist" for years now.
However, fan fiction occupies a very tenuous place. It is illegal, even if enforcement is rare. This is mostly because a fair use defense could be successful if the fan fiction isn't profitable, and I don't think anyone wants a big precedent for that. Copyright law does very explicitly say that derivative works are covered, and are the sole property of the copyright owner. But it does exist despite it's illegality, mostly because it's a feature of humanity that can't be controlled by laws. Society has deemed it useful to tell stories, and accepts it. Laws cannot change societies collective values.
It was terrible. You do seem much brighter than whomever wrote it. As for a history of EQ, I may read it, it sounds fascinating. The economies of online communities is my sad, sad nerd-hobby.
Without nitpicking, you are right about feudalism. In practice rents collected went to fighting other lords at home and abroad. Of course you need lords protecting you, as other lords would be invading you. In practice, across eastern Europe, real invaders were rarely fought off. But the idea was for buying collective defense. Practically serfs and even peasants were used to fund whatever the nobility wanted, with the exception of England. Also, I envy you, as looking back I would rather have had a degree in history. I don't have time for any more disciplines.
You are right about information as property. It isn't, and law can't make it so. However, law can cause many, many problems as while it's being used as a bludgeon against information flow and networking.
My final point is on "art." Legally, things like graphs cannot be copyright, as collections of data and presentation of data do not warrant copyright. The reasoning is that they provide nothing artistic, or add nothing of value. The idea of default copyright and restrictive IP is a rather modern concept, not intended to remunerate artists, but to fund monopolistic channels of distribution. The Writers Guild in Hollywood will tell you that no company is willing to give much money to the real creative minds in Hollywood. The price of new art is not very high. The costs given to us for distribution is not only high, but usually cashed in as profit.
A quick rule of thumb is that in a capitalist economy, or any free economy, the best sign of inefficiency is windfall profits. Competition should drive profits low, just to the cost level of entry to the market. With movie studios, and even TV studios, the barriers to entry are near infinite with media pressure and ever more restrictive interpretations of IP. Even Time-Warner, one of the only companies that could field a new major network, had to shut down their network from FCC pressure. And as I said elsewhere, companies right now aren't thinking "take over the globe," they are thinking "make the biggest pile of cash possible." But since this is Slashdot and sensationalism sells well, I like to present worst-case scenarios some days.
First, as the author of the EverQuest Companion (if it's the same one I had when playing Everquest oh so many years ago), thank you for providing me with plenty of bad information that helped me leave the game. Afterward I found Asheron's Call and had a wonderful time there.
Second, you realize that your "paper" comes from a general council for Paramount. Not exactly the paragon of honest research. I've read this before, and here are my responses.
Myth #2: Copyright good, public domain better.
As an economist, I know that copyright can be good, and that the public domain the the default state of information.
Myth #7: The Myth of the Holy Internet: the arrival of the Internet changes everything.
It works like this: Marginal costs of distributing information include publication costs, fixed costs include publishing equipment and original research. Ideally, we would like to see the creators of new information compensated, because we would like to subject the creation of new information to the benefecial forces of competition. It should mean better entertainment, more scientific innovation, and cheaper/faster distribution. The internet DOES change this. Publishing equipment means a small share of a $3000 machine. Marginal costs of distribution come out to fractions of a penny per reader. The problem is that with cheap distribution, the costs of original research and creator compensation can no longer ride on the distribution costs.
There is no empirical way to answer these questions, and anyone who claims to have an empirical answer is, in reality, merely advocating their personal perspective.
Horsecrap. Empirical study of economics is what I do. You can answer this question, you can model it, and you can decide on a legal framework to accomplish maximal good between publisher, creator, and society. This paper was crap 3 years ago, it's crap today. It's a movie company trying to push their agenda, as is their right and even responsibility. But it does not make it true.
If you think for one second that media companies do not want as much control over the flow of information as possible, you are either misinformed or far too trusting of actors in a free economy. DivX did not appear from nowhere. It was created as a distribution method based on rentiership. The concept of rents is very old, is was how feudal societies functioned. Lords did not provide positive value to their economies, but supported themselves by owning properties that then then rented to value-providing actors. The western world rebelled against that system many times over the last 500 years. Rents, while important to economic understanding, shouldn't be applied to non-goods or non-properties. Law is what makes information property, not economics.
As for conspiracy, control of knowledge and education has been the hallmark of tyranny. No, I don't believe Paramount is out to destroy anybody. They are out to turn profit by any means legal. But as a veteran of this world, people do not let power go unexploited. The moment all information is tagged as a commodity, you run into issues with distribution. If you must rent your news, or license it's distribution to your neighbor, how can you make informed decisions? How can you have libraries that are open to all?
Your, and many others', misconceptions about my views on copyright are wrong. I write, I have work published. I support copyright. However, my job revolves around understanding economics, and frankly you can't nail down information like you can a chair, or a table, or a building. Efficient use of information can happen from one person or all persons. A car or a chair can't do that. And the market will act accordingly, unless restricted by law. And to restrict the flow of information, in the form of derivative works or critical review (both of which the Alliance supports even further restricting), involves removing the last defense against tyranny- knowing what tyranny is and what your responsibilites are in fighting against it. Do not think it won't be exploited someday.
As far as I know, the latter is actually legal as things stand right now.
Not true. Copyright, in the US, protects derivative works. You can mount a fair use defense, but you can be sued, and you have no legal right to making derivative works. Even the Wikipedia has an entry for this.
As for music, it's quite legal to 'sample' someone else's work to use in your own.
Also, not true. Again, even the Wikipedia has an entry. You have no rights to sample even very small pieces of music, such as 3-5 note runs. Yes, this theoretically means that all music has long since been written. It practically means a legal nightmare.
My arguments do hold up. To do either, you must receive permission, usually as a license with requisite royalties. And yes, given legal standing to do so, I fully expect them to be exploited maximally. That's good, if I didn't think so, I wouldn't be an economist in the first world. What's not good is they are given that standing.
Time is an illusion, and lunchime doubly so. I'll keep this short.
I dislike piracy. Bitwise copies of DVDs certainly do harm creators, and I don't dislike copyright. However, why shouldn't I be allowed to say, edit the script to Star Wars, and refilm it with better actors and special effects? Before we freak out, remember this doesn't diminish the fact there is still an original recording, and will still have value when I'm done. I add value to the economy, I create value that didn't exist before, and I add to the general good if the final product is good. Why should I be restricted?
The answer is that some authors and all media companies want to maximize their income. They feel they did work, and that all subsequent work that even glances at theirs deserves their blessing (all for a hefty tithe of course). In the late 1500s, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Raleigh all wrote poems, plays, and stories that played off each others current works. There was an increase in cultural value from these works.
I'm not advocating piracy. I'm advocating a looser framework for mutating our own culture while still compensating creators (please, I am one). I'm advocating being your own librarian (pay-per-view, the media child of the future restricts that). I'm advocating the free-flow of ideas (eternal copyright and strict IP prevents that).
Also, there is no contract in just purchasing a copyrighted work. There is no meeting of the minds. You never negotiate. You purchase a product, and that is covered by separate law. I do agree you can decide not to purchase it though.
Look, I don't pirate. I don't care about you young'uns music. I have Netflix for all my movies (Some Like it Hot is on for the weekend). Thanks for your amazing leap to conclusions.
My argument is about the restrictions lobby groups like this one want to impose. Right now, if you want to legally review a DVD, you must get the pre-approved, licensed clips from the distributor to use in review. You can be denied these clips for any reason. Warner and Universal still claim non-digital reproduction like re-recording a circumvention of CSS, and we have no court findings yet. However, if this group gets it way, you can bet your sweet ass that any unapproved reproduction, even for critical reviews will be illegal. They are cutting off your right to information.
Universal and Disney are also pushing to have plots and storylines patentable. They have already submitted a few for patent review. If they pass, expect more. Does that scare you?
I'm a fan of 30-50 year copyrights (I'm an academic, it's my job). I think they balance public and private needs. I could live with longer or shorter. I prefer zero patents. I imagine inventors are in my boat in that regard, and would be willing to accept patents with limited lifespans. Don't think I hate copyright just because I hate restrictive IP. Restrictive IP would prevent me from doing my life's passion, not protect it like these bastards say it will.
Only because I'm ornery today. I own far more paper-published copyrighted works than you will. At exactly one work, I'm sure my wife does as well. Google my username to get my fictional works. You may find my real name, and come across my academic works too.
I have a need to eat, and I create as copyrighted works to pay for it (all academics, or programmers, or writers do). However my need to eat needs to balance your need to information. Sure, I don't want to starve, but I don't want my informed electorate to starve. I don't want our culture to starve, either. Did libraries and universities sharing information collapse literary and scientific innovation? No, it's easily argued it did the opposite. So, if a limited concept of information as property has done so well do we need a system of highly restricted intellectual property rights?
You created a derivative of my copyrighted work. I don't like what you said, and feel you should have to pay comensurate to the value you have extracted. Please remit $50,000 to Troll Chow, Inc, 1600 Domicile Bridge, Frothing Mouth, WI.
You're right. But, read up on our "founding fathers." They were an ornery, angry, unruly bunch. They were fanatical about being left the hell alone. Sure, they were personable, and many had quite a few friends and shared their ideas with the world, but they hated to be forced to action. They were even very disliked by the moneymakers in the colonies, part from loyalties to the Crown, and part from loyalties to their income streams.
Perfect information and instant communication destroy tyranny. You can't distort public perception if the public knows exactly what it perceives, and you can't distort history if we have a perfect, open record of government and offical business. So, yes, information access is anathema to control. That's why Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and others advocated public libraries so vigorously. But, we cannot have our original brand of democracy without it. Instead, we have our current democracy because of our lack of education and information.
Don't rely on others to control your culture. Write a story yourself, place it in the public domain...
First, I cannot put my stories in the public domain (I used to write more, I now help my wife write). If I do, someone like Disney can take the idea, copyright it (or even patent the plot), and prevent me from addressing their additions to my work. In fact, Disney or another large media company could force me to no longer use my original material in any substantive way. They are larger, and they can fight me off. Even though Anderson's The Little Mermaid is in the public domain, if I made an animated movie, they would certainly fight me in court. I have to use copyright as a 'bandaid' to defend your ability to make derivative works from mine (Creative Commons).
Before 'money', it used to be obvious how to get what you want. Bargain for it. 3 pigs not worth 2 chickens? Tell the other person so. You'll either come to an agreement, or buy from someone else.
Second, before "money," if I wanted to give away a copy of a scroll, I'd copy it and give it to you. I didn't need to pay the guy who originally wrote it, or figure out who wrote it 500 years ago, find his descendants, and figure out which one is owed the royalties. How do you divide 3 chickens 900 ways among great-grandkids?
Not happy with a DVD you can't freely copy? Don't buy it.
Third, don't buy that DVD? It's part of our shared culture. Sure, I can ostrasize myself from my peers and have my own culture unique to me. Wait, no I can't, that's not what a culture is. Fact is, media companies control the flow, content, and mutability of our culture. I'm not judging it, I'm saying it's true. Really, do people who watch American Idol contemplate they no longer play a role in their own culture? Does it mean they have no culture? How do we voluntarily wean everyone from restricted IP? I can't answer those questions. But I know if I don't watch American Idol, Lost, or other big shows I share much less ground with those around me.
People keep buying goods without liking the contract.
Third, permissions, contract? Whisky Tango Foxtrot, indeed. It's copyright law, not contract law that determines what I do with that CD. It's the DMCA that dictates what I do with that DVD. There are zero contracts regarding my purchase of them.
I expect the government to get the hell out of my culture, out of my abilites to archive and record that culture, and respect my natural right to share information freely. Thomas Jefferson held very deep the belief that knowledge should be shared freely. He made a great statement about candles and flames and lighting the darkness, look it up. The governemnt doesn't need to repect my rights. It needs to get the hell out of the monopoly-granting business. We need no more Charters of the Crown. We are a democracy, damnit, and all rights are ours be default! I don't need a government to protect them, and I certainly don't need one taking inalienable liberties away.
I'm not attacking you, as you are certainly sympathetic to most of my arguments. I am attacking a bit of what you said though. Keep on arguing, and keep on sharing your ideas. It's what makes us great.
The inability to share knowledge will collapse a democracy. A democracy can only survive with free access to information, and a population willing to be educated. Soon, we will have neither. How can we trust our neighbor to help run this country when they know nothing?
In fact, we as a soceity cannot survive without free exchange of information. Culture, the shared information of a group, includes not only "book learning" but stories, music, patterns, and ideas. All of those are being taken from us and gifted to monied interests.
Once, poems like Beowulf would be told, retold, and changed according to the zeitgeist. The characters would be familiar, the plot would be familiar, but the small changes over time would stand out to listeners, and the bards and shapers would emphasize or change different parts to better reflect their audience and the state of current culture. That is what held us together.
Now, we no longer have the power to control our own culture, it will be permenant and immutable for all eternity. Star Wars is a new Beowulf, but we as a culture cannot own it and make it ours. It is now eternal and unchanging, as will be our culture. Another word for eternal and unchanging is dead.
Add to the dead culture and uneducated citizenry a new type of tax- the culture and learning tax, paid to everyone who holds IP. Do you think that given the total control of information flow that IP-holders wouldn't leverage every dollar from their holdings? They'll go so far to protect their "property" that they will certainly cut off all fair uses, such as critical review. Expect even bad movie reviews to go the way of the dinosaur. "Sorry Mr. Ebert, you gave us one too many bad reviews, your license to view all Universal movies has been revoked."
The only silver lining is that the same technology to lock down all ideas has given us a massive, nearly infinite virtual library. The internet, large hard drive arrays, and instant communications have given us the means to acquire and archive massive amounts of data. Do you remember your grade-school librarian? She was a scary old woman probably, and would scare the pants off of little kids. Librarians have always needed to be scary, as they have a hard job keeping information from the hands that would hide it. In the future, we are our own librarians. It's time to get scary.
However, if LensCrafters went around saying that their glasses "made your eyesight better" they would be sued. They would probably lose too, as their glasses don't fix your eyesight. They correct your eyesight. The former statement is a lie, and if they advertised improving your eyesight, they could get in trouble. If it was a small ad that said it (like the Apple issue here) they will probably be told to stop doing it. If Lenscrafters had millions of ad dollars in promoting "eyeglasses that fix your vision," they should be prepared for a massive hellstorm from the courts.
You can do some crazy stuff in marketing, but you had better not make a substantively false statement.
I will defend Apple and say that only one notebook display manufacturer has 8-bit displays, Samsung, and only IBM/Lenovo used them.
I'd say it's reasonable that a consumer would understand "Millions of colors" as 8 bit. I don't, but I get pissy when a sales clerk or website provide dick-all in terms of specifications. The bottom line is, don't buy something unless you know the specifications and understand them, even if you trust the manufacturer.
However, knowing everything about every product is impossible, and most of us approximate based on loose specifications. It's like a can of beans. I don't think too many of us would pick up a can that just had a label "beans." What kind of beans? However, if we bought "pinto beans" and what was inside was a really rare, weird variety of pinto beans that taste or look different than normal "pinto beans" we'd be justifiably angry. The court is just deciding in this case if the product labeling was deceptive. We just don't know what merit that may have, until the court is done. What I do know is that this was rather shady out of a company like Apple, who sells on trust as well as honest specifications, and of whom we generally expect better.
I must say, I was disappointed. I hate running around Thunder Bluff trying to find anything, and I'd love to see it cleaned up. And I've only played Tauren.
Seriously though, I play on a RP server, just so I don't have to deal with idiotic crap. Sure, we get plenty of dumb drama that keeps my playtime to less than 8 hours a month anymore. I do wonder, if the novelty of race-baiting and idiocy would be better than the age-old drudgery of dealing with tiny little egos crying to me about other tiny little egos crying to me. Word of advice, don't ever run a massive guild, don't ever sit on a playtest team, don't ever be friends with a successful and popular guild leader. If you do, you aren't playing a game any longer.
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Wish I didn't mispell "racing" though. That's probably the first spelling mistake I've made in a decade. Darn this IE6 and lack of spell-check! I don't have my last line of defense!
I love having been raised a country boy. Yea, I learned to program at 5 years old on my Apple ][, but I spent as many hours of my childhood wandering miles afield through the country. We had some neighbors that bootlegged. And, frankly, I trusted my neighbors far more than the revenuers that would routinely come upon me with weapons drawn when I was out stargazing with my telescope and binoculars (I had a nice $3000 Meade 8" aperture Maksutov-Cassegrain and a deep love of astronomy and cosmology). I even got arrested twice for my troubles, and my telescope got to sit, unattended, for hours in our field.
So, let them tax my connection. It just means I'll be even more motivated to bootleg my signal. It's in my blood to build hot-rods for bootlegging, and any excuse will do!
Actually, if my friend gives me a Harley for USD $0, I sure as heck owe a couple of thousand dollars in taxes! Try telling the state otherwise, and see how fast you get corrected. As in my example, try "giving away" some of your home-made corn liquor. You still have to send it to the ABC board for inspection and tax stamping. It's tax laws that let them come after you.
Will it be easy for the state to track you? No. But it will be another Damocles' Sword over your head.
Certainly, state governements will not be able to outlaw open, unencrypted access points. Michigan recently convicted a man of a felony for using an open access point, even though the AP owner had no problem with it (you can find three Slashdot dupes about this). That law could easily be struck down by a court for numerous reasons (right to association, cruel punishment, FCC regulations, etc.), but a tax would not.
The state would allow you to share that connection, but you'd be responsible for the use tax, or would be responsible for collecting the taxpayer information. And you have to calculate the tax or handle the tax information, but here are the relevant 3,448 pages of the revised tax code to help you understand better. Oh, and behave and play by our rules, or else you will not be able to get a Tax ID number.
No, it won't be illegal to share Wifi, but it will be just too onerous to share. Just like making your own corn liquor isn't illegal here, you have no shot at making a profit with the taxes and tax regulations in NC with homemade liquor. And that's assuming the county allows alcohol and the state board will grant you a tax ID and license your still.
I come from North Carolina. We invented NASCAR raceing because we got bored from bootlegging. Outwitting revenuers has been a sport here for a century. If we get not just a sales tax on the connection, but a "connection tax," will my open AP "WardriversWelcome" become a bootlegging operation?
The government, here and elsewhere, has shown a great willingness to try and control access to and content on the internet. However, direct control will equal censorship, and will always be declared unconstitutional. But if the internet can be licensed and taxed, the states can effectively control who can get connections. Imagine taxing internet connections at the same level as alcohol, somewhere between 25-62% in NC. Just imagine how many people that could price out of the market, and how onerous the effect would be on the rest of us. Imagine a bandwith tax sold to curtail piracy, but effectively cutting off Linux distributions.
Maybe bootlegging will come back into fashion again. Instead of stills we'll have WAPs, but we'll still have the revenuers with the machine guns, dynamite, and axes.
Yea, that part about being the hobbyist company makes my laugh. I've been a hobbyist my whole life, even being given an Apple ][ at age 5. My father has been one longer than I've been alive. Neither of us would ever classify Microsoft as hobbyist-friendly. Heck he got turned off to Apple, and they have always been loyal to enthusiasts. You are right, the whole thing is a lying PR fest.
All the manager had to do was say the EULA says "xyz," and is therefore in breach of our license. He never does that (and it looks like nobody else really has either). He says the EULA is violated, but then goes on to explain how the plugin goes against what Microsoft wants. And? I don't care that you sell software, give it away, or wear it around on a fashionable necklace, your business case isn't MY business. If you can't make money doing what you are doing, then nobody should defend you, really.
It really just looks like Microsoft was caught with it's pants down, and they are scrambling to obfuscate their screw-up.
I said the same thing too. Reading that response just said to me "we don't like what he did, we didn't plan for it, but since we're a bigger company, he needs to show respect and stop."
When has Microsoft ever played by that rule? Microsoft did to IBM and Apple what Jamie did to Microsoft- find a method to extend and exploit the functionality of someone else's product. Nobody can produce the EULA language that shows a breach, only vague references to "but that'll hurt our business plan!" It's sad that no mind at Microsoft can conceive of a compelling argument why Jamie is wrong.
The MS project manager goes on about working with Jamie to clear up the Express situation, but doesn't explain their reasoning beyond calling what he did "illegal."
First, that's not the way to treat your community. Either explain to him and to us exactly what he did that was wrong, beyond the vague wording at the beginning of not being in the "spirit" of Express editions. Second, when can Microsoft unilaterally declare breach of contract "illegal?"
I use DevC++ for all my hobby needs and teaching the kiddo. After this, I would never switch to MS C++ Express or VB Express, even if it was a vastly superior product. I just need some syntax highlighting and compiler integration. I don't want to dance around legal threats over what Microsoft's "spirit" is this week.
I have a terabyte RAID in my main computer, and a 2 TB fileserver. With my video editing, I'm starting to look at a full fileserver (still have most of my main box empty). And, I'm not even a pirate, and I've just been a computer and video hobbyist for 2 decades now. I'm not even that serious about my hobbies.
I can imagine we'll all need terabytes of capacity in the next few years. Some games are already into the 14-20GB sizes.
I remember in beta there was the ability to cast spells from the number bar in melee combat. I even had a sword-warmage. It was good times then, with the slidecasting and broken skills (free dagger did more damage than 16 point swords). It required skill, unlike nearly all other MMOGs (WoW is so dang boring and easy).
You may be right though, most everything that made the game great (easily breaking your character, the complete and total dependence on magic) was largely a mistake. The stories and lore weren't, and were largely player-driven. Add to that the world was so big, most people never really got to explore. You were always finding new things and random lore bits here and there. Good times.
As a fan and former Vanguard member on AC2, I noticed Turbine's greatest strength was a rather fast and sane response to player feedback (despite many claims to the contrary). I recall many AC and AC2 fans and 3rd party developers ended up on your dev teams. I witnessed all of this first-hand when you were developing the hero-class endgame mechanics. And despite the system's friendliness, balance, and incorporation of player feedback, most players were unhappy (they thought the system was too simplistic, a la WoW, or had other esoteric gripes).
Do you have any plans to try and continute to leverage your community, or do you find vocal MMOG players just too darn irrational and hard to please? Blizzard seems to regularly ignore players, and does quite well from what I hear.
And thanks for making games that don't suck. Asheron's Call was, to me, the finest example of storytelling with thousands of players done yet. Logging in to find my Monarch was Bael'zharon ranks as the coolest moment of my 20-odd years of gaming.
Although I don't agree with him completely on regulation and taxes (I think the government has a role in property crime prevention and the mitigation of natural externalities), he seems principled and honest about his views, and is much more willing to consider rights and freedoms than anyone else in Washington. I'm willing to vote for him just to see what that's like.
My favorite author. I've wanted to somehow legally list my religion as "Cthulhu cultist" for years now.
However, fan fiction occupies a very tenuous place. It is illegal, even if enforcement is rare. This is mostly because a fair use defense could be successful if the fan fiction isn't profitable, and I don't think anyone wants a big precedent for that. Copyright law does very explicitly say that derivative works are covered, and are the sole property of the copyright owner. But it does exist despite it's illegality, mostly because it's a feature of humanity that can't be controlled by laws. Society has deemed it useful to tell stories, and accepts it. Laws cannot change societies collective values.
It was terrible. You do seem much brighter than whomever wrote it. As for a history of EQ, I may read it, it sounds fascinating. The economies of online communities is my sad, sad nerd-hobby.
Without nitpicking, you are right about feudalism. In practice rents collected went to fighting other lords at home and abroad. Of course you need lords protecting you, as other lords would be invading you. In practice, across eastern Europe, real invaders were rarely fought off. But the idea was for buying collective defense. Practically serfs and even peasants were used to fund whatever the nobility wanted, with the exception of England. Also, I envy you, as looking back I would rather have had a degree in history. I don't have time for any more disciplines.
You are right about information as property. It isn't, and law can't make it so. However, law can cause many, many problems as while it's being used as a bludgeon against information flow and networking.
My final point is on "art." Legally, things like graphs cannot be copyright, as collections of data and presentation of data do not warrant copyright. The reasoning is that they provide nothing artistic, or add nothing of value. The idea of default copyright and restrictive IP is a rather modern concept, not intended to remunerate artists, but to fund monopolistic channels of distribution. The Writers Guild in Hollywood will tell you that no company is willing to give much money to the real creative minds in Hollywood. The price of new art is not very high. The costs given to us for distribution is not only high, but usually cashed in as profit.
A quick rule of thumb is that in a capitalist economy, or any free economy, the best sign of inefficiency is windfall profits. Competition should drive profits low, just to the cost level of entry to the market. With movie studios, and even TV studios, the barriers to entry are near infinite with media pressure and ever more restrictive interpretations of IP. Even Time-Warner, one of the only companies that could field a new major network, had to shut down their network from FCC pressure. And as I said elsewhere, companies right now aren't thinking "take over the globe," they are thinking "make the biggest pile of cash possible." But since this is Slashdot and sensationalism sells well, I like to present worst-case scenarios some days.
First, as the author of the EverQuest Companion (if it's the same one I had when playing Everquest oh so many years ago), thank you for providing me with plenty of bad information that helped me leave the game. Afterward I found Asheron's Call and had a wonderful time there.
Second, you realize that your "paper" comes from a general council for Paramount. Not exactly the paragon of honest research. I've read this before, and here are my responses.
As an economist, I know that copyright can be good, and that the public domain the the default state of information.
It works like this: Marginal costs of distributing information include publication costs, fixed costs include publishing equipment and original research. Ideally, we would like to see the creators of new information compensated, because we would like to subject the creation of new information to the benefecial forces of competition. It should mean better entertainment, more scientific innovation, and cheaper/faster distribution. The internet DOES change this. Publishing equipment means a small share of a $3000 machine. Marginal costs of distribution come out to fractions of a penny per reader. The problem is that with cheap distribution, the costs of original research and creator compensation can no longer ride on the distribution costs.
Horsecrap. Empirical study of economics is what I do. You can answer this question, you can model it, and you can decide on a legal framework to accomplish maximal good between publisher, creator, and society. This paper was crap 3 years ago, it's crap today. It's a movie company trying to push their agenda, as is their right and even responsibility. But it does not make it true.
If you think for one second that media companies do not want as much control over the flow of information as possible, you are either misinformed or far too trusting of actors in a free economy. DivX did not appear from nowhere. It was created as a distribution method based on rentiership. The concept of rents is very old, is was how feudal societies functioned. Lords did not provide positive value to their economies, but supported themselves by owning properties that then then rented to value-providing actors. The western world rebelled against that system many times over the last 500 years. Rents, while important to economic understanding, shouldn't be applied to non-goods or non-properties. Law is what makes information property, not economics.
As for conspiracy, control of knowledge and education has been the hallmark of tyranny. No, I don't believe Paramount is out to destroy anybody. They are out to turn profit by any means legal. But as a veteran of this world, people do not let power go unexploited. The moment all information is tagged as a commodity, you run into issues with distribution. If you must rent your news, or license it's distribution to your neighbor, how can you make informed decisions? How can you have libraries that are open to all?
Your, and many others', misconceptions about my views on copyright are wrong. I write, I have work published. I support copyright. However, my job revolves around understanding economics, and frankly you can't nail down information like you can a chair, or a table, or a building. Efficient use of information can happen from one person or all persons. A car or a chair can't do that. And the market will act accordingly, unless restricted by law. And to restrict the flow of information, in the form of derivative works or critical review (both of which the Alliance supports even further restricting), involves removing the last defense against tyranny- knowing what tyranny is and what your responsibilites are in fighting against it. Do not think it won't be exploited someday.
Not true. Copyright, in the US, protects derivative works. You can mount a fair use defense, but you can be sued, and you have no legal right to making derivative works. Even the Wikipedia has an entry for this.
Also, not true. Again, even the Wikipedia has an entry. You have no rights to sample even very small pieces of music, such as 3-5 note runs. Yes, this theoretically means that all music has long since been written. It practically means a legal nightmare.
My arguments do hold up. To do either, you must receive permission, usually as a license with requisite royalties. And yes, given legal standing to do so, I fully expect them to be exploited maximally. That's good, if I didn't think so, I wouldn't be an economist in the first world. What's not good is they are given that standing.
Time is an illusion, and lunchime doubly so. I'll keep this short.
I dislike piracy. Bitwise copies of DVDs certainly do harm creators, and I don't dislike copyright. However, why shouldn't I be allowed to say, edit the script to Star Wars, and refilm it with better actors and special effects? Before we freak out, remember this doesn't diminish the fact there is still an original recording, and will still have value when I'm done. I add value to the economy, I create value that didn't exist before, and I add to the general good if the final product is good. Why should I be restricted?
The answer is that some authors and all media companies want to maximize their income. They feel they did work, and that all subsequent work that even glances at theirs deserves their blessing (all for a hefty tithe of course). In the late 1500s, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Raleigh all wrote poems, plays, and stories that played off each others current works. There was an increase in cultural value from these works.
I'm not advocating piracy. I'm advocating a looser framework for mutating our own culture while still compensating creators (please, I am one). I'm advocating being your own librarian (pay-per-view, the media child of the future restricts that). I'm advocating the free-flow of ideas (eternal copyright and strict IP prevents that).
Also, there is no contract in just purchasing a copyrighted work. There is no meeting of the minds. You never negotiate. You purchase a product, and that is covered by separate law. I do agree you can decide not to purchase it though.
Look, I don't pirate. I don't care about you young'uns music. I have Netflix for all my movies (Some Like it Hot is on for the weekend). Thanks for your amazing leap to conclusions.
My argument is about the restrictions lobby groups like this one want to impose. Right now, if you want to legally review a DVD, you must get the pre-approved, licensed clips from the distributor to use in review. You can be denied these clips for any reason. Warner and Universal still claim non-digital reproduction like re-recording a circumvention of CSS, and we have no court findings yet. However, if this group gets it way, you can bet your sweet ass that any unapproved reproduction, even for critical reviews will be illegal. They are cutting off your right to information.
Universal and Disney are also pushing to have plots and storylines patentable. They have already submitted a few for patent review. If they pass, expect more. Does that scare you?
I'm a fan of 30-50 year copyrights (I'm an academic, it's my job). I think they balance public and private needs. I could live with longer or shorter. I prefer zero patents. I imagine inventors are in my boat in that regard, and would be willing to accept patents with limited lifespans. Don't think I hate copyright just because I hate restrictive IP. Restrictive IP would prevent me from doing my life's passion, not protect it like these bastards say it will.
Only because I'm ornery today. I own far more paper-published copyrighted works than you will. At exactly one work, I'm sure my wife does as well. Google my username to get my fictional works. You may find my real name, and come across my academic works too.
I have a need to eat, and I create as copyrighted works to pay for it (all academics, or programmers, or writers do). However my need to eat needs to balance your need to information. Sure, I don't want to starve, but I don't want my informed electorate to starve. I don't want our culture to starve, either. Did libraries and universities sharing information collapse literary and scientific innovation? No, it's easily argued it did the opposite. So, if a limited concept of information as property has done so well do we need a system of highly restricted intellectual property rights?
You created a derivative of my copyrighted work. I don't like what you said, and feel you should have to pay comensurate to the value you have extracted. Please remit $50,000 to Troll Chow, Inc, 1600 Domicile Bridge, Frothing Mouth, WI.
You're right. But, read up on our "founding fathers." They were an ornery, angry, unruly bunch. They were fanatical about being left the hell alone. Sure, they were personable, and many had quite a few friends and shared their ideas with the world, but they hated to be forced to action. They were even very disliked by the moneymakers in the colonies, part from loyalties to the Crown, and part from loyalties to their income streams.
Perfect information and instant communication destroy tyranny. You can't distort public perception if the public knows exactly what it perceives, and you can't distort history if we have a perfect, open record of government and offical business. So, yes, information access is anathema to control. That's why Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and others advocated public libraries so vigorously. But, we cannot have our original brand of democracy without it. Instead, we have our current democracy because of our lack of education and information.
None of that is what I addressed.
First, I cannot put my stories in the public domain (I used to write more, I now help my wife write). If I do, someone like Disney can take the idea, copyright it (or even patent the plot), and prevent me from addressing their additions to my work. In fact, Disney or another large media company could force me to no longer use my original material in any substantive way. They are larger, and they can fight me off. Even though Anderson's The Little Mermaid is in the public domain, if I made an animated movie, they would certainly fight me in court. I have to use copyright as a 'bandaid' to defend your ability to make derivative works from mine (Creative Commons).
Second, before "money," if I wanted to give away a copy of a scroll, I'd copy it and give it to you. I didn't need to pay the guy who originally wrote it, or figure out who wrote it 500 years ago, find his descendants, and figure out which one is owed the royalties. How do you divide 3 chickens 900 ways among great-grandkids?
Third, don't buy that DVD? It's part of our shared culture. Sure, I can ostrasize myself from my peers and have my own culture unique to me. Wait, no I can't, that's not what a culture is. Fact is, media companies control the flow, content, and mutability of our culture. I'm not judging it, I'm saying it's true. Really, do people who watch American Idol contemplate they no longer play a role in their own culture? Does it mean they have no culture? How do we voluntarily wean everyone from restricted IP? I can't answer those questions. But I know if I don't watch American Idol, Lost, or other big shows I share much less ground with those around me.
Third, permissions, contract? Whisky Tango Foxtrot, indeed. It's copyright law, not contract law that determines what I do with that CD. It's the DMCA that dictates what I do with that DVD. There are zero contracts regarding my purchase of them.
I expect the government to get the hell out of my culture, out of my abilites to archive and record that culture, and respect my natural right to share information freely. Thomas Jefferson held very deep the belief that knowledge should be shared freely. He made a great statement about candles and flames and lighting the darkness, look it up. The governemnt doesn't need to repect my rights. It needs to get the hell out of the monopoly-granting business. We need no more Charters of the Crown. We are a democracy, damnit, and all rights are ours be default! I don't need a government to protect them, and I certainly don't need one taking inalienable liberties away.
I'm not attacking you, as you are certainly sympathetic to most of my arguments. I am attacking a bit of what you said though. Keep on arguing, and keep on sharing your ideas. It's what makes us great.
The inability to share knowledge will collapse a democracy. A democracy can only survive with free access to information, and a population willing to be educated. Soon, we will have neither. How can we trust our neighbor to help run this country when they know nothing?
In fact, we as a soceity cannot survive without free exchange of information. Culture, the shared information of a group, includes not only "book learning" but stories, music, patterns, and ideas. All of those are being taken from us and gifted to monied interests.
Once, poems like Beowulf would be told, retold, and changed according to the zeitgeist. The characters would be familiar, the plot would be familiar, but the small changes over time would stand out to listeners, and the bards and shapers would emphasize or change different parts to better reflect their audience and the state of current culture. That is what held us together.
Now, we no longer have the power to control our own culture, it will be permenant and immutable for all eternity. Star Wars is a new Beowulf, but we as a culture cannot own it and make it ours. It is now eternal and unchanging, as will be our culture. Another word for eternal and unchanging is dead.
Add to the dead culture and uneducated citizenry a new type of tax- the culture and learning tax, paid to everyone who holds IP. Do you think that given the total control of information flow that IP-holders wouldn't leverage every dollar from their holdings? They'll go so far to protect their "property" that they will certainly cut off all fair uses, such as critical review. Expect even bad movie reviews to go the way of the dinosaur. "Sorry Mr. Ebert, you gave us one too many bad reviews, your license to view all Universal movies has been revoked."
The only silver lining is that the same technology to lock down all ideas has given us a massive, nearly infinite virtual library. The internet, large hard drive arrays, and instant communications have given us the means to acquire and archive massive amounts of data. Do you remember your grade-school librarian? She was a scary old woman probably, and would scare the pants off of little kids. Librarians have always needed to be scary, as they have a hard job keeping information from the hands that would hide it. In the future, we are our own librarians. It's time to get scary.
However, if LensCrafters went around saying that their glasses "made your eyesight better" they would be sued. They would probably lose too, as their glasses don't fix your eyesight. They correct your eyesight. The former statement is a lie, and if they advertised improving your eyesight, they could get in trouble. If it was a small ad that said it (like the Apple issue here) they will probably be told to stop doing it. If Lenscrafters had millions of ad dollars in promoting "eyeglasses that fix your vision," they should be prepared for a massive hellstorm from the courts.
You can do some crazy stuff in marketing, but you had better not make a substantively false statement.
I will defend Apple and say that only one notebook display manufacturer has 8-bit displays, Samsung, and only IBM/Lenovo used them.
As far as I can tell, being a massive hardware geek, that's a no. Most LCD monitors ARE 8 bit. Hell even cheapo LCD panels are 8 bit.
I'd say it's reasonable that a consumer would understand "Millions of colors" as 8 bit. I don't, but I get pissy when a sales clerk or website provide dick-all in terms of specifications. The bottom line is, don't buy something unless you know the specifications and understand them, even if you trust the manufacturer.
However, knowing everything about every product is impossible, and most of us approximate based on loose specifications. It's like a can of beans. I don't think too many of us would pick up a can that just had a label "beans." What kind of beans? However, if we bought "pinto beans" and what was inside was a really rare, weird variety of pinto beans that taste or look different than normal "pinto beans" we'd be justifiably angry. The court is just deciding in this case if the product labeling was deceptive. We just don't know what merit that may have, until the court is done. What I do know is that this was rather shady out of a company like Apple, who sells on trust as well as honest specifications, and of whom we generally expect better.
I must say, I was disappointed. I hate running around Thunder Bluff trying to find anything, and I'd love to see it cleaned up. And I've only played Tauren.
Seriously though, I play on a RP server, just so I don't have to deal with idiotic crap. Sure, we get plenty of dumb drama that keeps my playtime to less than 8 hours a month anymore. I do wonder, if the novelty of race-baiting and idiocy would be better than the age-old drudgery of dealing with tiny little egos crying to me about other tiny little egos crying to me. Word of advice, don't ever run a massive guild, don't ever sit on a playtest team, don't ever be friends with a successful and popular guild leader. If you do, you aren't playing a game any longer.