This is an endemic situation with ALL friggin web content.
If you use search engines which don't check the accuracy of the data they scrounge or run your own with Archie/Veronica types of searches or worse, become your own search engine, snooping on everybody's hard drives, you're going to take longer and longer to retrieve indexes to content that is of more and more dubious quality.
The world NEEDS MP3.com types of businesses that rate & index as well as store content.
The world NEEDS engines that can demand micro-payment from the recipient before sending a file.
The world NEEDS micro payment services like X3.com to catch the pennies and send the content producers their due.
And SCREW the RIAA, MPAA and other Luddites and SCREW the culture vultures who rip off the concent creators (artists and writers etc.) and rip off the consumers by over charging simply because they put themselves in everybody's faces.
Has anyone ever noticed that projects which were started to make great advances have never yielded the great advances they were supposed to deliver. (Like the Aswan dam, Reagan's "austerity" budget which racked up the largest deficit in US history, contact with sport safety equipment being the leading source of sport injuries, etc.)
I have a sneaky suspicion that the X-box that will eventually come out of the pipe won't be the be-all and end-all that is being touted and that the premises (I won't call them promises, they are more like soggy dreams,) are going to seem like the other stains in somebody's shorts when something finally pours out of the pipe.
Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it. This is the same bunch that took six years to kludge up an OS (NT) that's still worse that what a kid in Finland managed with no budget but with a lot of friends
These organizations have been against EVERY technological of procedural development which might be perceived as any kind of change in information storage and dissemination since the invention of the player-piano roll.
And they have NEVER won. Not ONCE. There is NO development which they opposed that has NOT come into being to the betterment (and profit) of the community, including their members.
They don't abet ANYTHING. They only know how to obstruct.
How long are people going to support this bunch of utter and complete loser, this pathetic bunch of knee-jerk-offs.?
How do you define small? How do you define big? What constitutes an appropriate size for a user base?
With the introduction of the PowerPC, in one year, Apple became the largest vendor of RISC machines on the planet.
With the introduction of OS X, Apple will become the largest vendor of Unix machines. Apple will ship more copies of OS X in the next twelve months than have shipped copies of Linux since day dot.
If its sheer numbers you want, their user base is some twenty-five million machines that are manufactured durably, reliably and usably.
Unlike a server farm where a lucky few (now there's a REAL niche for you,There ONLY seven or eight million sites running Unix & Linux) who sit over some impressive technology, each of those machines is attended to by a single person trying to do something else for a living.
If you want something really dreadful to ponder. The number of Web Servers on the planet will more than double in the coming year. All running on Macs.
Until OS X ships, officially and fur real, its a great beta... Lots of things have died in beta.
I'm waiting until the General Availability release before declaring victory. Then its party time...
Unixes/Linuxen win, CLIs win where they should, GUIs win where they should. Aqua spreads like warm massage oil over computing platforms everywhere its needed but only there, and Apple sells really neat hardware people can work and play with.
Oh, wasn't there a strong-arming bunch of FUD types from Redmond a while back? Made buggy whips didn't they?
The only reason for giving away the hardware is because you've made something that you don't understand.
They could have come here FIRST, got all the drivers they could ever need, come up with a whole lots more reasons to use this thing and sold them at 300% mark-up. They'd be making money now.
Instead, they though they'd slip this in as a Trojan horse between consumers and their vendors. This business plan was cobbled together by someone with zero imagination and a sneaky, theiving heart.
Their CluelessCat was already in the trash compactor (I own Macs.) After the stupid handling of the entire debacle, I'll do without a spy in my midst thank you. Don't bother sending me another one. Not even if it has a REAL USB connection.
For what? This is a remarkably useless product. Really lame too. They probably thing they can slap that bad-boy onto a WinCE "GameBoy" and
The IR port on my Handsprint Visor can be hacked to do the same thing. Big Deal. I cant' think of a single application where this would be worth doing.
Its been tried before for scanning in software and the magazines that tried it have disappeared.
This is NOT a good idea. Its just some idiocy spouted by some fast-talker who has managed to talk some dentists into investing their surplus disposable income into his "vision."
This is not the first time that barcodes were put in magazines. They want people to leave them alone. I'm sure they'll be quite pleased.
As a Mac owner I don't even have a choice. First: no effin drivers. Second: the CluelessCat USB cabling sucks! Its a standard, DC. A standard! A simple connector. Stick your parallel and keyboard cable kludge where it'll hurt.]:-)
I predict an overwhelming yawn from the public. The Linux hackers are probably the ONLY people who will have installed and played with this stupid looking piece of plastic.
This is about an idea as D.A.T. in an age of CD-ROM burners.
The DeCSS decision (under appeal) has zero effect on this. I have the DeCSS code on a t-shirt I bought here. I wear it with pride.
The RIAA, MPAA and other bullies of this world who try to restrict technology by force of will are sitting on beach chairs telling the tide to stop. I pity them, but not much.
Changes in distribution and payment technologies will sweep away the useless and leave us all with more money in our pockets.
Before Gates commoditized the distribution of software in shrink-wrapped boxes, all software was open source.
I worked for a hospital where we paid McCormick & Dodge for an accounting package and we, (the entire client base, not just the hospital,) regularly fixed bugs, made contributions and otherwise tighened things up.
It was COBOL and could have been compiled into obscurity but we were paying BIG BUCKS and there was no way in Hell we'd have bought the code without the source.
The shrink-wrap and the incredible hutzpah of some very venal people combined with M$ strong-arm sales to the distribution channel is at the root of the virus writers abilities to exploit weaknesses that wouldn't exist for very long if we all could scrutinize the code. (but its mostly crap and they're ashamed to let it out anyway.)
By itself, Napster is not good for artists as anything but advertising.
If you add micro-payment collection from the download receiver (cutting out the RIAA, the MPAA, the record companies and otehr pimps who had no hand in promotion or distribution,) then Napster is very good for artists.
The price for consumers would be VERY nice too.
A trusted source to weed out the jokers (like BNL and others which less noble motives) who spam the p2p broadband, somebody like MP3.com, is all that's needed.
Untrusted Peer-to-peer is fine, if your peers are weirdoes, nuts, anybody who wants to spoof you, infect you and abuse you.
Napster by itself is going to become commercial community television. Its going to go the same way as the news groups... Spammed to death.
This world NEEDS editors (the human sort) and trusted sources...
The problem is that people are confusing the underlying object model with the implementation.
As anyone who has ever ordered breakfast in a Mexican hotel can tell you, their implementation of the business model is strict, exact and a big pain in the but when you haven't even had a friggin' coffee yet, but they are conducting business correctly (order processing, work tickets, inventory reduction, finished goods entry, billing, receipts and maybe you get some toast, OJ and coffee [experienced in Cancun.]) The business model is being religiously adhered to.
Bezos managed to patent a method which uses prior information to avoid some information gathering steps on subsequent order processing and fulfilment.
Big... deal!
If you want prior art, I got to a restaurant everyday, I don't even ask for anything anymore, I hand the guy my money and he gives me my lunch, the same thing every day. He makes the same thing when he even sees me unless I wave and look like I'm going to ask for something else (which is not often and doesn't always work,:-) I get the same thing.
Apple paid Bezos his shekel so that nobody could accuse them of kicking up a fuss. Were they right? Think of it as paying litigation insurance. For once they DIDN'T march in with a phalanx of lawyers leading the fray.
Now if only they can learn to do that with the media and their own customers...
Napster is clearly illegal, indefensible and doomed, as it currently exists.
No reflection on peer-to-peer file transfer, 'net broadcasting or file linking. (Which the law in its infinite [lack of] wisdom can't see are symptoms NOT causes.)
But with micro-payments going directly to the artists (via services like X3.com,) and using "web bugs" to collect payment from the recipient of every over-the-net transfer, then you are not pretending to get or give something for nothing.
The content providers are compensated as adequately as they need to be (THEY set the price) and the content recipients are not under an illusion that they're getting something for nothing (they pay the price if they feel its worth it...)
And the RIAA can suck eggs and the songs drop to something affordable (not $21 for a CD that costs $0.02 to make,) while the artist gets the full benefit without getting ripped of by agents, (mis)management, inflated production costs and all the ways the RIAA and its members have figured out to keep Li'l Richard touring at 72 because he HAS to since HE never made any money off his music.
And don't worry about 'em. The RIAA, the MPAA or any of these other industry associations has NEVER won a single rear-guard, stop-the-tide, un-invent the atom-bomb neo-Luddite, anti technology actions. Not one.. Since before the invention of the player-piano roll.
They may the stupidest, most wasteful self perpetuating bunch of troglodytes on the planet and idiot intransigent moves like Universal's stubborn refusal to negotiate with MP3.com may cost them their very existence but, lets face it, no one will weep for them when the next phase of the Net economy starts up without them.
ARTISTS OF THE WORLD! Get your money DIRECTLY from your listeners and avoid paying a fortune for the privilege of getting screwed by a recording company who will screw your fans by over charging and then screw you by paying you off of net when they make sure there's never any left
Napster is clearly illegal, indefensible and doomed, as it currently exists.
No reflection on peer-to-peer file transfer, 'net broadcasting or file linking. (Which the law in its infinite [lack of] widom can't see are symptoms NOT causes.)
But with micro-payments going directly to the artists (via services like X3.com,) and using "web bugs" to collect payment from the recipient of every over-the-net transfer, then you are not pretending to get or give something for nothing.
The content providers are compensated as adequately as they need to be (THEY set the price) and the content recipients are not under an illusion that they're getting something for nothing (they pay the price if they feel its worth it...)
And the RIAA can suck eggs and the songs drop to something affordable (not $21 for a CD that costs $0.02 to make,) while the artist gets the full benefit without getting ripped of by agents, (mis)management, inflated production costs and all the ways the RIAA and its members have figured out to keep Li'l Richard touring at 72 because he HAS to since HE never made any money off his music.
And don't worry about 'em. The RIAA, the MPAA or any of these other industry associations has NEVER won a single rear-guard, stop-the-tide, un-invent the atom-bomb neo-Luddite, anti-technology actions. Not one.. Since before the invention of the player-piano roll.
They may the stupidest, most wasteful self perprtuating bunch of troglogytes on the planet and idiot intransigent moves like Universal's stubborn refusal to negiate wiht MP3.com may cost them their very existence but, lets face it, no one will weep for them when the next phase of the Net economy starts up without them.
ATRISTS OF THE WORLD! Get your money DIRECTLY from your listeners and avoid paying a fortune for the privilege of getting screwed by a recording company who will screw your fans by over charging and then screw you by paying you off of net when they make sure there's never any left
The new world will belong to someone who does an end-run around the whole IP debacle.
How? By using a physical emplacement, like Sealand, to host a site, call it Arachnea, where artists will catalog and store their music and where listeners can get snippets online and, if they like what they heard, make micro-payments via a service, like x3.com, to down the complete file DIRECTLY to the artist.
Web bugs resididing in each file would insure that the artist is paid his micro-payment by the recipient with every copy that occurs over the internet.
This is economically sound because:
1) The amount the recipient is charged is so small its not worth committing fraud over.
2) The artist would get the entire benefit of the micro-payment.
3) The host site charges the artist a storage fee and transmission changes.
4) The micro-payment service makes money on the float.
Its a cooperative arrangement that works well for everybody.
No RIAA. No MPAA. No ASCAP. No self-serving or thieving guilds or unions. No managers who can't manage. No production costs that always seem to insure that there no net left from the gross.
If you have something to flog, regardless of which sense it appeals to, and it can be transmitted digitally, you can use Arachnea.
As a recent victim of forgery, I feel your pain. The bank even had the balls of closing my account because of a negative balance after the forger cratered my balance to the tune of $1,200
There is also identity theft where someone poses as you to apply for credit (usually using some stolen information like your SSN,) and runs up charges before running away. My wife was victim of that crime to the tune of almost six grand.
Total cost to me, some aggravation and irritation. Total cost to the bank and the credit issuers, several grand. And its not going to get any better until a few things are improved.
Single use card are like one-time crypto pads so they are more secure against serial use but the source and cause of the problem remains the same.
The problem is that none of the authentication systems work properly. Verification is currently based on what you know, easily forgable, instead of what you are (biometrics are much harder to forge.)
Its the same principle, or simple lack of planning and forethought, behind car alarms that wail at you in the middle of the night so that you would pay someone to steal the effin' car.
Or sirens that demand that I GET OUT OF THE WAY!!! when I'm sitting in my apartment trying ot read.
If you want other vehicles to get out of the way, the horns should be IN THE OTHER VEHICLES. Honking at me up there is wasteful, inelegant, irritating and stupid because in my town, its likely to get you a brick thrown through your windshield.
Read "Sytemantics The Underground Text of Systems Lore. How Systems Really Work and How They Fail" for a most cogent analysis of why things don't work too well.
Seagram's was a small distillery in Ville LaSalle, Quebec, Canada until they hooked up with rhum runners for the duration of the prohibition.
My father worked for the Ol' man Seagrams back then, for the princely sum or $37 even weeks and $42 odd weeks and my mother still has the original architectural plans for the expansion required by the orders of booze coming from Capone, Lanski et alia.
This is his grand son's shame and a sham. So much for his motivation. He doesn't care about this as anything but a white-wash on gran-pa's past.
Now the only recourse all the artists who were on MP3.com will have is to start a class action suit against Seagrams & Universal for record deals (with record releases,) because a lot of them can't get their music out to the public any more.
The law is stupid enough to do it too. Its a double-edged sword and all these idiotic retrograde groups are falling on it.
The MPAA and RIAA have managed to make linking illegal, peer-to-peer file sharing illegal and don't get me started on the Millenium Copyright Act... Well if they can get it enforced anyway. (Will MP3.com relocate to SeaLand?)
Eventually, the industries will realize that their "representative groups" and industry associations, those intellectually-challenged neo-Luddites that have been against every innovation since the player piano roll, the reel-to-reel tape, cassette, VCR, DAT ad nausium, have cost them millions at every turn.
You don't fight technology, you figure out how to make a buck from it. You know it won't last for ever. But instead they're trying to command the tide, to put the genie back in the bottle, to un-invent teh atom bomb, the hand-gun or the pointed stick.
It doesn't work that way. Its never worked that way and its not about to start because somebody's ashamed of what his gran-pa did for a living. Bigger and better have tried it and failed.
Real criminals will keep ripping them off, easily in the case of the MPAA since the MPAA seems to be too stupid to improve their encryption but instead wants to bury all our heads in the sand instead, knowing that you can write a virus, bring down half the mail servers on the planet cause billions in damages and not even come to trial.
The only people they are hurting are their legitimate clientelle. And I now ABSOLUTELY REFUSE to buy or see, read or hear anything by produced Universal or drink any of Seagram's booze EVER AGAIN.
I don't need to be regarded as a criminal simply because I'm alive.
Its been kicked around since Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).
While I agree that technology's accelerating pace is changing the game, for a very few of us, the players (we,) have not evolved to keep pace.
But until it becomes obvious to the individual that cooperation is a feature of civilization and preferable over competition, you can expect crimes de passion and drunken brawls over unfeeling babes on Saturday nights...
And stupid IP laws, patents by the uncaring against the unknowing and criminals of every stripe and size.
By the way, outlawing file sharing (a la Napster and DeCSS decisions,) makes the entire internet illegal and hyper-linking a criminal offense.
IP law as it now stands is the TRIUMPH of selfishness over cooperative behavior. If its allowed to stand, never mind fester, you can kiss the twenty-first century good bye...
I've got the same issue with Ixla who sold a cheap camera (so far so good,) and said that it could be a web cam, right on the box, (that what I wanted and why I bought it, to replace my aged B&W Connctix,) but they haven't even finished writing the DRIVERs yet.
This is on a Mac so it wont be a Linux/Unix issue until OS X is released, but Jezz Lou-eez! I'd love to write one for 'em and get to use my new Cam instead of feeling I should sue for false advertising.
Why are people so bad at estimating the strength and breadth of their markets?
Slashdot Mirror
This is an endemic situation with ALL friggin web content.
If you use search engines which don't check the accuracy of the data they scrounge or run your own with Archie/Veronica types of searches or worse, become your own search engine, snooping on everybody's hard drives, you're going to take longer and longer to retrieve indexes to content that is of more and more dubious quality.
The world NEEDS MP3.com types of businesses that rate & index as well as store content.
The world NEEDS engines that can demand micro-payment from the recipient before sending a file.
The world NEEDS micro payment services like X3.com to catch the pennies and send the content producers their due.
And SCREW the RIAA, MPAA and other Luddites and SCREW the culture vultures who rip off the concent creators (artists and writers etc.) and rip off the consumers by over charging simply because they put themselves in everybody's faces.
Really, 13-16 year old? To play doctor I suppose?
Has anyone ever noticed that projects which were started to make great advances have never yielded the great advances they were supposed to deliver. (Like the Aswan dam, Reagan's "austerity" budget which racked up the largest deficit in US history, contact with sport safety equipment being the leading source of sport injuries, etc.)
I have a sneaky suspicion that the X-box that will eventually come out of the pipe won't be the be-all and end-all that is being touted and that the premises (I won't call them promises, they are more like soggy dreams,) are going to seem like the other stains in somebody's shorts when something finally pours out of the pipe.
Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it. This is the same bunch that took six years to kludge up an OS (NT) that's still worse that what a kid in Finland managed with no budget but with a lot of friends
These organizations have been against EVERY technological of procedural development which might be perceived as any kind of change in information storage and dissemination since the invention of the player-piano roll.
And they have NEVER won. Not ONCE. There is NO development which they opposed that has NOT come into being to the betterment (and profit) of the community, including their members.
They don't abet ANYTHING. They only know how to obstruct.
How long are people going to support this bunch of utter and complete loser, this pathetic bunch of knee-jerk-offs.?
RIAA, MPAA, Luddites all, and about as effective.
How do you define small? How do you define big? What constitutes an appropriate size for a user base?
With the introduction of the PowerPC, in one year, Apple became the largest vendor of RISC machines on the planet.
With the introduction of OS X, Apple will become the largest vendor of Unix machines. Apple will ship more copies of OS X in the next twelve months than have shipped copies of Linux since day dot.
If its sheer numbers you want, their user base is some twenty-five million machines that are manufactured durably, reliably and usably.
Unlike a server farm where a lucky few (now there's a REAL niche for you,There ONLY seven or eight million sites running Unix & Linux) who sit over some impressive technology, each of those machines is attended to by a single person trying to do something else for a living.
If you want something really dreadful to ponder. The number of Web Servers on the planet will more than double in the coming year. All running on Macs.
Until OS X ships, officially and fur real, its a great beta... Lots of things have died in beta.
I'm waiting until the General Availability release before declaring victory. Then its party time...
Unixes/Linuxen win, CLIs win where they should, GUIs win where they should. Aqua spreads like warm massage oil over computing platforms everywhere its needed but only there, and Apple sells really neat hardware people can work and play with.
Oh, wasn't there a strong-arming bunch of FUD types from Redmond a while back? Made buggy whips didn't they?
Can you imagine trying to run a game server on some NT box. Bwahahahaha.
That's one sure way to send Bungy into a black hole and cut out one source of games form a competing platform...
The only reason for giving away the hardware is because you've made something that you don't understand.
They could have come here FIRST, got all the drivers they could ever need, come up with a whole lots more reasons to use this thing and sold them at 300% mark-up. They'd be making money now.
Instead, they though they'd slip this in as a Trojan horse between consumers and their vendors. This business plan was cobbled together by someone with zero imagination and a sneaky, theiving heart.
Their CluelessCat was already in the trash compactor (I own Macs.) After the stupid handling of the entire debacle, I'll do without a spy in my midst thank you. Don't bother sending me another one. Not even if it has a REAL USB connection.
NEXT!
Given the talent available, they should have floated the idea here FIRST. Then they'd have got a much better implementation.
:-)
However, its still a lame-ass product. It won't fly any better than it has before (and it has been tried before...
Nice product?
For what? This is a remarkably useless product. Really lame too. They probably thing they can slap that bad-boy onto a WinCE "GameBoy" and
The IR port on my Handsprint Visor can be hacked to do the same thing. Big Deal. I cant' think of a single application where this would be worth doing.
Its been tried before for scanning in software and the magazines that tried it have disappeared.
This is NOT a good idea. Its just some idiocy spouted by some fast-talker who has managed to talk some dentists into investing their surplus disposable income into his "vision."
Didn't these people do their homework?
:-)
This is not the first time that barcodes were put in magazines. They want people to leave them alone. I'm sure they'll be quite pleased.
As a Mac owner I don't even have a choice. First: no effin drivers. Second: the CluelessCat USB cabling sucks! Its a standard, DC. A standard! A simple connector. Stick your parallel and keyboard cable kludge where it'll hurt.]
I predict an overwhelming yawn from the public. The Linux hackers are probably the ONLY people who will have installed and played with this stupid looking piece of plastic.
This is about an idea as D.A.T. in an age of CD-ROM burners.
The DeCSS decision (under appeal) has zero effect on this. I have the DeCSS code on a t-shirt I bought here. I wear it with pride.
The RIAA, MPAA and other bullies of this world who try to restrict technology by force of will are sitting on beach chairs telling the tide to stop. I pity them, but not much.
Changes in distribution and payment technologies will sweep away the useless and leave us all with more money in our pockets.
Before Gates commoditized the distribution of software in shrink-wrapped boxes, all software was open source.
I worked for a hospital where we paid McCormick & Dodge for an accounting package and we, (the entire client base, not just the hospital,) regularly fixed bugs, made contributions and otherwise tighened things up.
It was COBOL and could have been compiled into obscurity but we were paying BIG BUCKS and there was no way in Hell we'd have bought the code without the source.
The shrink-wrap and the incredible hutzpah of some very venal people combined with M$ strong-arm sales to the distribution channel is at the root of the virus writers abilities to exploit weaknesses that wouldn't exist for very long if we all could scrutinize the code. (but its mostly crap and they're ashamed to let it out anyway.)
By itself, Napster is not good for artists as anything but advertising.
If you add micro-payment collection from the download receiver (cutting out the RIAA, the MPAA, the record companies and otehr pimps who had no hand in promotion or distribution,) then Napster is very good for artists.
The price for consumers would be VERY nice too.
A trusted source to weed out the jokers (like BNL and others which less noble motives) who spam the p2p broadband, somebody like MP3.com, is all that's needed.
Untrusted Peer-to-peer is fine, if your peers are weirdoes, nuts, anybody who wants to spoof you, infect you and abuse you.
Napster by itself is going to become commercial community television. Its going to go the same way as the news groups... Spammed to death.
This world NEEDS editors (the human sort) and trusted sources...
The problem is that people are confusing the underlying object model with the implementation.
... deal!
:-) I get the same thing.
As anyone who has ever ordered breakfast in a Mexican hotel can tell you, their implementation of the business model is strict, exact and a big pain in the but when you haven't even had a friggin' coffee yet, but they are conducting business correctly (order processing, work tickets, inventory reduction, finished goods entry, billing, receipts and maybe you get some toast, OJ and coffee [experienced in Cancun.]) The business model is being religiously adhered to.
Bezos managed to patent a method which uses prior information to avoid some information gathering steps on subsequent order processing and fulfilment.
Big
If you want prior art, I got to a restaurant everyday, I don't even ask for anything anymore, I hand the guy my money and he gives me my lunch, the same thing every day. He makes the same thing when he even sees me unless I wave and look like I'm going to ask for something else (which is not often and doesn't always work,
Apple paid Bezos his shekel so that nobody could accuse them of kicking up a fuss. Were they right? Think of it as paying litigation insurance. For once they DIDN'T march in with a phalanx of lawyers leading the fray.
Now if only they can learn to do that with the media and their own customers...
To be read in a breathless, fawning, pansy voice by some tiny John Leguizamo look-alike poof:
"Windows CE is simply the best doan'tcha 'no...
I simply love my hand-holder since he started crashing over at my place. Well, that's what the letters PDA stand for now... Penicious Data Anihilator.
Oh its about Windows Me?!?
#u@k that! Last time that happened, it took simply months until the cast came off.
Okay, I landed badly, but they spun me while they were heaving me and my leg hit the sash.
I can't dance the Lambada anymore. "
Yes you too can have an exciting career making buggy whips, saddles, horse brasses and shoes.
Send me $10 and I'll tell you how.
DeCSS will last as long as Linux users need to access DVDs and the MPAA is too dumb to realize that:
a) Their encryption was so poor it was broken by a kid. So they either need to:
1) Improve their algorithm or
b&2) Maybe encrypting it is not such a good idea or
c) maybe they sould not assume that the x86 and Windows are their only platform and they should license their encryption algorithm instead.
What has to happen is that somebody needs to come up with a way to get money from the recipient every time the file is transferred.V
Napster is clearly illegal, indefensible and doomed, as it currently exists.
No reflection on peer-to-peer file transfer, 'net broadcasting or file linking. (Which the law in its infinite [lack of] wisdom can't see are symptoms NOT causes.)
But with micro-payments going directly to the artists (via services like X3.com,) and using "web bugs" to collect payment from the recipient of every over-the-net transfer, then you are not pretending to get or give something for nothing.
The content providers are compensated as adequately as they need to be (THEY set the price) and the content recipients are not under an illusion that they're getting something for nothing (they pay the price if they feel its worth it...)
And the RIAA can suck eggs and the songs drop to something affordable (not $21 for a CD that costs $0.02 to make,) while the artist gets the full benefit without getting ripped of by agents, (mis)management, inflated production costs and all the ways the RIAA and its members have figured out to keep Li'l Richard touring at 72 because he HAS to since HE never made any money off his music.
And don't worry about 'em. The RIAA, the MPAA or any of these other industry associations has NEVER won a single rear-guard, stop-the-tide, un-invent the atom-bomb neo-Luddite, anti technology actions. Not one.. Since before the invention of the player-piano roll.
They may the stupidest, most wasteful self perpetuating bunch of troglodytes on the planet and idiot intransigent moves like Universal's stubborn refusal to negotiate with MP3.com may cost them their very existence but, lets face it, no one will weep for them when the next phase of the Net economy starts up without them.
ARTISTS OF THE WORLD! Get your money DIRECTLY from your listeners and avoid paying a fortune for the privilege of getting screwed by a recording company who will screw your fans by over charging and then screw you by paying you off of net when they make sure there's never any left
Napster is clearly illegal, indefensible and doomed, as it currently exists.
No reflection on peer-to-peer file transfer, 'net broadcasting or file linking. (Which the law in its infinite [lack of] widom can't see are symptoms NOT causes.)
But with micro-payments going directly to the artists (via services like X3.com,) and using "web bugs" to collect payment from the recipient of every over-the-net transfer, then you are not pretending to get or give something for nothing.
The content providers are compensated as adequately as they need to be (THEY set the price) and the content recipients are not under an illusion that they're getting something for nothing (they pay the price if they feel its worth it...)
And the RIAA can suck eggs and the songs drop to something affordable (not $21 for a CD that costs $0.02 to make,) while the artist gets the full benefit without getting ripped of by agents, (mis)management, inflated production costs and all the ways the RIAA and its members have figured out to keep Li'l Richard touring at 72 because he HAS to since HE never made any money off his music.
And don't worry about 'em. The RIAA, the MPAA or any of these other industry associations has NEVER won a single rear-guard, stop-the-tide, un-invent the atom-bomb neo-Luddite, anti-technology actions. Not one.. Since before the invention of the player-piano roll.
They may the stupidest, most wasteful self perprtuating bunch of troglogytes on the planet and idiot intransigent moves like Universal's stubborn refusal to negiate wiht MP3.com may cost them their very existence but, lets face it, no one will weep for them when the next phase of the Net economy starts up without them.
ATRISTS OF THE WORLD! Get your money DIRECTLY from your listeners and avoid paying a fortune for the privilege of getting screwed by a recording company who will screw your fans by over charging and then screw you by paying you off of net when they make sure there's never any left
The new world will belong to someone who does an end-run around the whole IP debacle.
.
How? By using a physical emplacement, like Sealand, to host a site, call it Arachnea , where artists will catalog and store their music and where listeners can get snippets online and, if they like what they heard, make micro-payments via a service, like x3.com, to down the complete file DIRECTLY to the artist.
Web bugs resididing in each file would insure that the artist is paid his micro-payment by the recipient with every copy that occurs over the internet.
This is economically sound because:
1) The amount the recipient is charged is so small its not worth committing fraud over.
2) The artist would get the entire benefit of the micro-payment.
3) The host site charges the artist a storage fee and transmission changes.
4) The micro-payment service makes money on the float.
Its a cooperative arrangement that works well for everybody.
No RIAA. No MPAA. No ASCAP. No self-serving or thieving guilds or unions. No managers who can't manage. No production costs that always seem to insure that there no net left from the gross.
If you have something to flog, regardless of which sense it appeals to, and it can be transmitted digitally, you can use Arachnea
As a recent victim of forgery, I feel your pain. The bank even had the balls of closing my account because of a negative balance after the forger cratered my balance to the tune of $1,200
There is also identity theft where someone poses as you to apply for credit (usually using some stolen information like your SSN,) and runs up charges before running away. My wife was victim of that crime to the tune of almost six grand.
Total cost to me, some aggravation and irritation. Total cost to the bank and the credit issuers, several grand. And its not going to get any better until a few things are improved.
Single use card are like one-time crypto pads so they are more secure against serial use but the source and cause of the problem remains the same.
The problem is that none of the authentication systems work properly. Verification is currently based on what you know, easily forgable, instead of what you are (biometrics are much harder to forge.)
Its the same principle, or simple lack of planning and forethought, behind car alarms that wail at you in the middle of the night so that you would pay someone to steal the effin' car.
Or sirens that demand that I GET OUT OF THE WAY!!! when I'm sitting in my apartment trying ot read.
If you want other vehicles to get out of the way, the horns should be IN THE OTHER VEHICLES. Honking at me up there is wasteful, inelegant, irritating and stupid because in my town, its likely to get you a brick thrown through your windshield.
Read "Sytemantics The Underground Text of Systems Lore. How Systems Really Work and How They Fail" for a most cogent analysis of why things don't work too well.
Seagram's was a small distillery in Ville LaSalle, Quebec, Canada until they hooked up with rhum runners for the duration of the prohibition.
My father worked for the Ol' man Seagrams back then, for the princely sum or $37 even weeks and $42 odd weeks and my mother still has the original architectural plans for the expansion required by the orders of booze coming from Capone, Lanski et alia.
This is his grand son's shame and a sham. So much for his motivation. He doesn't care about this as anything but a white-wash on gran-pa's past.
Now the only recourse all the artists who were on MP3.com will have is to start a class action suit against Seagrams & Universal for record deals (with record releases,) because a lot of them can't get their music out to the public any more.
The law is stupid enough to do it too. Its a double-edged sword and all these idiotic retrograde groups are falling on it.
The MPAA and RIAA have managed to make linking illegal, peer-to-peer file sharing illegal and don't get me started on the Millenium Copyright Act... Well if they can get it enforced anyway. (Will MP3.com relocate to SeaLand?)
Eventually, the industries will realize that their "representative groups" and industry associations, those intellectually-challenged neo-Luddites that have been against every innovation since the player piano roll, the reel-to-reel tape, cassette, VCR, DAT ad nausium, have cost them millions at every turn.
You don't fight technology, you figure out how to make a buck from it. You know it won't last for ever. But instead they're trying to command the tide, to put the genie back in the bottle, to un-invent teh atom bomb, the hand-gun or the pointed stick.
It doesn't work that way. Its never worked that way and its not about to start because somebody's ashamed of what his gran-pa did for a living. Bigger and better have tried it and failed.
Real criminals will keep ripping them off, easily in the case of the MPAA since the MPAA seems to be too stupid to improve their encryption but instead wants to bury all our heads in the sand instead, knowing that you can write a virus, bring down half the mail servers on the planet cause billions in damages and not even come to trial.
The only people they are hurting are their legitimate clientelle. And I now ABSOLUTELY REFUSE to buy or see, read or hear anything by produced Universal or drink any of Seagram's booze EVER AGAIN.
I don't need to be regarded as a criminal simply because I'm alive.
Its been kicked around since Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).
While I agree that technology's accelerating pace is changing the game, for a very few of us, the players (we,) have not evolved to keep pace.
But until it becomes obvious to the individual that cooperation is a feature of civilization and preferable over competition, you can expect crimes de passion and drunken brawls over unfeeling babes on Saturday nights...
And stupid IP laws, patents by the uncaring against the unknowing and criminals of every stripe and size.
By the way, outlawing file sharing (a la Napster and DeCSS decisions,) makes the entire internet illegal and hyper-linking a criminal offense.
IP law as it now stands is the TRIUMPH of selfishness over cooperative behavior. If its allowed to stand, never mind fester, you can kiss the twenty-first century good bye...
I've got the same issue with Ixla who sold a cheap camera (so far so good,) and said that it could be a web cam, right on the box, (that what I wanted and why I bought it, to replace my aged B&W Connctix,) but they haven't even finished writing the DRIVERs yet.
This is on a Mac so it wont be a Linux/Unix issue until OS X is released, but Jezz Lou-eez! I'd love to write one for 'em and get to use my new Cam instead of feeling I should sue for false advertising.
Why are people so bad at estimating the strength and breadth of their markets?
Patenting software.
So nobody else could possibly market something similar... What a great way to stifle innovation and screw the user.
Now your system is so hermetic that anyone trying to ride your bicle has to wear your shoes.
I'll walk thank you. At least my pants won't get dirty when the chain come off.
You just don't get it do you?