Yes, exactly right. This is a brilliant concept, it's exactly in the right direction and a Good Thing. And nobody seems to have thought of anything like this before.
The problem we've always had is "how to stop the pirates without inconveniencing the legit fair users?" This is a great solution, because it is a major deterrent to pirates but doesn't stop fair use, and as the parent said, it provides so little annoyance that nobody using it for fair use is going to go out of their way to break it.
There are some problems though. Main one being, as TFA says, the big companies won't accept it because it just fights piracy, while DRM helps them out in many more way$.
Also we do have to accept that we're still being prevented from piracy not by our sense of morals, but by fear. Fear is possibly worse for our freedoms than technical restrictions. If I had media like this on my computer, I'd be rather frightened of the possibility of someone getting their hands on it. Sure, there'd be no way I'd pirate it, but I'd always be worried. It's like how I never give Blizzard CD Keys to other people, I don't want my Battle.net games banned.
One more thing: Does this watermark survive microphone re-recording? (I suppose this is a video thing, but thinking ahead to it coming to an audio format). If so, it's just like the old watermarking proposals - you might be wary of even playing your music in public, for fear of someone "stealing" it with your fingerprints all over it.
Don't get me wrong: I love StarCraft, it was the best RTS ever, and I'd rather see a sequel to StarCraft than another Warcraft, but I've never understood why Warcraft III isn't considered to be as good a game as SC...
IMO WC3 is the greatest game ever made, with absolutely no competition (including StarCraft, or WoW for that matter) anywhere near it. I find it hard to go back to StarCraft. Why don't people respect WC3 like they do SC?
(Could one reason be, as someone pointed out, it's much harder to copy and required pretty high-end machines when it was released, so it isn't as popular at LANs?)
Pfft, no! Reselling media is as evil as lending it to a friend, or putting it on your iPod! You do realise that all your favourite artists will go out of business unless everyone supports them by buying first-hand copies?
See, that's just the problem. As a casual (or, ex-casual) WoW player, I had fun... I had a lot of fun, but then I realised that there's basically as much content in this game as there is in any other game, just stretched excruciably thin over waves and waves of similar quests. The bottom line is, I can't get to any high end content.
This bothers me for two reasons. Firstly, I really feel like I get more out of a game when I play all of it. Not when I play for three months and experience 1/24th of the content. Secondly, I feel pretty cheated since I'm paying every month for continual high-end content (not to mention the expansion which I gather is mostly high-end content), which I'll never ever see.
I'll stick with Warcraft III Battle.net. The greatest game ever made.
As for StarCraft II - well I hope to hell that is real. Now that'll be the greatest game ever made, if they can overcome the WoW mentality and get back to their roots.
"It means that computers are not safe," said Jeannie Bandy. "I don't want to have one in my house. Under even under the strictest rules and the strictest security, your computer is vulnerable."
Well the sad thing is, computers aren't "safe". No matter how hard you beef up security, there's always a "danger" that "harmful" materials will pop up or seep onto your computer somehow.
I use the terms in quotes because the only "danger" here is revoltingly ridiculous, paranoid laws which transform something a bit wrong which you might close and think nothing more about, into a crime which can, as we've seen with this guy and the teacher a few days ago, literally ruin your entire life.
As with a lot of things, the law is far more fucked up than the "crimes" themselves.
Wow, that would be a good shot in the back! I can't imagine how there's no prior art, but it'd be really sweet to have DRM patented by someone in the OS community.
(Can anyone find who the patent is actually registered to? Is it Alan Cox, or Red Hat, or is "Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale And Dorr, LLP patents" the name it will actually be registered under?)
You have made it very clear that your issue is not with DRM technology at all but with copyright and contract law.
I'm confused... I haven't talked about the law for several posts. This is all about the tech.
You can't "plug the analog hole" unless you have some way of, not only allowing, but forcing humans to receive and understand digital signals.
But as I said, you can plug all of it except for allowing them to videotape and microphone the output, which you must agree is nowhere near satisfactory for making backup copies.
no one is being forced to put DRM on their media
If you want to stay on topic, we're talking about if DRM itself is bad. Therefore it's irrelevant if producers are forced to use it - the topic is, if producers choose to use it (which they certainly do wherever possible), is it intrinsically distasteful - I say yes, because once they choose to use it, I am forced to put up with it.
Yeah that certainly does happen. I'd imagine it'd happen quite a bit with Word being used to write emails. But I prefer to be able to use it responsibly myself than to not use it at all - the people I communicate with are all mature enough to do the same.
Right. HTML emails make sense just purely from the fact you can use blockquotes, bold, italics, and preformatted (where if you sent a pure text email there's no guarantee it'll be displayed in a monospace font). I don't get why people want to see plain text emails when they can be more expressive with simple styling.
With a good mailer (such as gmail), it's going to send both an HTML and a text version at the same time, so text readers will still get the message (gmail is nice in that it formats it with HTML, then when it constructs the text version, it converts blockquotes into > and stuff like that). So if people have good mailers like this, nobody should complain.
Having said that, this topic is about Outlook. I don't know how it works. Odds are they're stupid enough to not auto-generate text versions, so complain all you like.
The flaw in your argument is the phrase you used, "at least as it stands so far". Once again, I'm not talking about today's technologies. I'm talking about tomorrow's. You keep using examples of existing technology.
I have never found a single DRM scheme that prevented analog copying, including of movies
OK Blu-ray players, HD-DVD players, and Windows Vista are three recent technologies which do. Well, they don't *prevent* analog copying, they just deliberately degrade the output analog signals, to prevent analog copying. (This is the canonical example of a deliberately degraded user experience in legitimate uses, due to DRM). While this isn't "preventing", it's too easy to imagine that the *next* wave of digital players will not support analog output at all - only supporting encrypted digital output.
And not because it's obsolete or inconvenient for player-makers. It will be mandated by format producers (as ransom for licensing) specifically to "plug the analog hole".
So what I'm reading from you is that the next stage of RM will be so complete that they won't be able to play sounds through speakers or video though displays.
Right, so in the future when it's impossible to make simple analog copies, it will still be possible to film the screen or mic the speakers. But that's far far worse off than copies you could have made with analog technologies. So yes, we are worse off.
In the digital age, we now have the ability to make perfect digital copies. We should be better off than in the analog age. The only barrier should be tech restrictions - there should be no deliberately imposed barrier.
Well yeah, that's all very true but if in his heart he wants to make The Hobbit, then it has to be a decision from the heart, based on creative urges and not money. So whether he's getting screwed or not, if he truly wants this then he has to say "yeah, OK I might get screwed one more time but at least I'll be able to go Back Again*".
He seems pretty well off anyway if indeed he is getting paid so many millions (unless this is millions for Wingnut, not him personally, I'm confused about that).
*That's Back Again as in "There and Back Again", not as in working with NL again after this is over!
Not trying to repeat myself but so far no DRM has prevent a person from making personal copies of anything, especially music, though it may have limited how you make those copies.
Well I'm not talking about DRM, the technology, I'm talking about DRM, the law (ie. DMCA, the law which protects DRM). And also I'm more interested in movies, which it certainly is preventing people from making personal copies of. And, I'm not talking about "so far". If the DRM that exists today was to continue, I would live with it. We're talking about the future and all the horribly twisted DRM they come up with then.
Simply running the analog line out from your CD/MP3 player to the line in of any analog audio record will allow you to make the same exact copies you would have been able to make 20 years ago, before direct digital copies were possible.
That is true, but again, I'm talking about the future. Next gen computers, DVD players and any other "authorized digital player" will prevent you from doing that by plugging the "analog hole" or so it is called.
Again being repetative, but this point needs to get across, the copyright legislature does not protect any particular form of reproduction, only that you can legal copy it, for certain purposes, if you can figure out how. And again this is not taking into account the DMCA which is an entirely different issue.
Why aren't you taking into account the DMCA? That's exactly the law I'm talking about. I'm in Australia and we've just had a DMCA replica law shoved down our throat. Hence my anger!!!
So yes, the CDs you own today will be copyable in the next 50 years. They have little or no DRM. The "new audio format" you buy (ie. online music which is becoming increasingly popular) tomorrow will be useless when the next audio player is released, the day after tomorrow.
As of yet I have not seen a form of DRM that stops a person from copying music through the analog output that is passed to there receiver, amplifier or speakers.
Get ready for DRM 2.0.
Anyway, there is clearly a difference between a non-reproduceable work (a sculpture) and easily-reproduceable works which have had explicit bars placed on the reproduceability. One of the big issues is that in 70+(author's life)+(RIAA deals) years time, the statue, if properly looked-after, will still be available for people to enjoy, while digital media will no longer be readable and theoretically will never have been format-shifted.
Keep fighting the current copyright protection schemes and you might find your self licensing your next audio purchase.
Well that will suck, but be legal anyway. But you've pointed out a problem with DRM right here - we're being treated as if we're licensing media purchases, even though we're legally purchasing a product. I still haven't figured out quite how it is legal to prevent us from making our own personal copies of music which we own.
I guess when you're as rich as the RIAA, anything you like can be made illegal.
Well the thing about web pages is that horizontal space and vertical space are completely different from each other. The page width is the #1 user-determined factor controlling the page layout (besides whether or not they're using IE). If the width is too thin, things don't lay out as the designer intended, text (especially tables) may be wrapping one word per line, and you may start to see highly-irritating horizontal scroll bars.
(The horizontal scroll bar is annoying because there is no wheel to control it, and also it's confusing to have 2D scrolling).
Page height, on the other hand, controls nothing about page layout except the size of the vertical scroll bar. Typically, the viewer doesn't really care if they have to scroll up and down or not, because it's so natural to do so.
So horizontal space is far more valuable than vertical space on a web page. (However, as you say, with widescreens there is a lot of horizontal space around).
I can see where he's coming from to say "we don't want to make a film just to settle a lawsuit - you don't make films as a matter of convenience".
But it seems to me that the better thing to do would be to settle a lawsuit just to make a film, when clearly everybody's hearts *are* in it. In other words, even if PJ is owed another $50M, would it not be better for him to settle, go ahead and make The Hobbit, and earn another $250M from that - wouldn't everybody be happier?
It sounds like you have issues with these specific products; I don't see how you can apply this to all of AJAX.
From what I understand, AJAX would be a bitch to program right, and comes with a whole lot of issues that you describe for the programmer to sort out. But there are some clear success stories - gmail being the obvious one. Gmail started out with a couple of these issues, but google have been steadily fixing them and now it's slick and a great user experience.
And this is rather off-topic since it has nothing to do with the security vulnerabilities in TFA.
I'm not quite sure about this statement (so I pose it as a question): but could it be that they're excited about running individual KDE apps (like AmaroK) on Windows, as opposed to the whole environment? That could be a lot easier and useful for some apps.
Hooray for patents - only they can make one of the most important discoveries in history and what is commonly considered genuine altruism into corporate gain, and worse, potentially restrict its usage.
Yay, dude. You get my vote. It's great to see you raising your son with respect for moral values instead of blind faith in the increasingly-corrupt laws and governments.
D class objects are incompatible with C++ class objects.
That's the same for Objective C though. In general, all object oriented languages' objects / class interfaces are incompatible with each other, but they can still communicate through raw functions (in this case, the common framework of C).
(Though this refers to languages compiled to native code..NET objects are all compatible with each other, and Java VM classes are too I'm sure).
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Yes, exactly right. This is a brilliant concept, it's exactly in the right direction and a Good Thing. And nobody seems to have thought of anything like this before.
The problem we've always had is "how to stop the pirates without inconveniencing the legit fair users?" This is a great solution, because it is a major deterrent to pirates but doesn't stop fair use, and as the parent said, it provides so little annoyance that nobody using it for fair use is going to go out of their way to break it.
There are some problems though. Main one being, as TFA says, the big companies won't accept it because it just fights piracy, while DRM helps them out in many more way$.
Also we do have to accept that we're still being prevented from piracy not by our sense of morals, but by fear. Fear is possibly worse for our freedoms than technical restrictions. If I had media like this on my computer, I'd be rather frightened of the possibility of someone getting their hands on it. Sure, there'd be no way I'd pirate it, but I'd always be worried. It's like how I never give Blizzard CD Keys to other people, I don't want my Battle.net games banned.
One more thing: Does this watermark survive microphone re-recording? (I suppose this is a video thing, but thinking ahead to it coming to an audio format). If so, it's just like the old watermarking proposals - you might be wary of even playing your music in public, for fear of someone "stealing" it with your fingerprints all over it.
Don't get me wrong: I love StarCraft, it was the best RTS ever, and I'd rather see a sequel to StarCraft than another Warcraft, but I've never understood why Warcraft III isn't considered to be as good a game as SC...
IMO WC3 is the greatest game ever made, with absolutely no competition (including StarCraft, or WoW for that matter) anywhere near it. I find it hard to go back to StarCraft. Why don't people respect WC3 like they do SC?
(Could one reason be, as someone pointed out, it's much harder to copy and required pretty high-end machines when it was released, so it isn't as popular at LANs?)
DOTA? Pfft! DOTA's Warcraft III without the armies, base building and strategies, and stretched out to an unbearably long game!
Melee all the way!
Pfft, no! Reselling media is as evil as lending it to a friend, or putting it on your iPod! You do realise that all your favourite artists will go out of business unless everyone supports them by buying first-hand copies?
See, that's just the problem. As a casual (or, ex-casual) WoW player, I had fun... I had a lot of fun, but then I realised that there's basically as much content in this game as there is in any other game, just stretched excruciably thin over waves and waves of similar quests. The bottom line is, I can't get to any high end content.
This bothers me for two reasons. Firstly, I really feel like I get more out of a game when I play all of it. Not when I play for three months and experience 1/24th of the content. Secondly, I feel pretty cheated since I'm paying every month for continual high-end content (not to mention the expansion which I gather is mostly high-end content), which I'll never ever see.
I'll stick with Warcraft III Battle.net. The greatest game ever made.
As for StarCraft II - well I hope to hell that is real. Now that'll be the greatest game ever made, if they can overcome the WoW mentality and get back to their roots.
Well the sad thing is, computers aren't "safe". No matter how hard you beef up security, there's always a "danger" that "harmful" materials will pop up or seep onto your computer somehow.
I use the terms in quotes because the only "danger" here is revoltingly ridiculous, paranoid laws which transform something a bit wrong which you might close and think nothing more about, into a crime which can, as we've seen with this guy and the teacher a few days ago, literally ruin your entire life.
As with a lot of things, the law is far more fucked up than the "crimes" themselves.
Wow, that would be a good shot in the back! I can't imagine how there's no prior art, but it'd be really sweet to have DRM patented by someone in the OS community.
(Can anyone find who the patent is actually registered to? Is it Alan Cox, or Red Hat, or is "Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale And Dorr, LLP patents" the name it will actually be registered under?)
I'm confused... I haven't talked about the law for several posts. This is all about the tech.
But as I said, you can plug all of it except for allowing them to videotape and microphone the output, which you must agree is nowhere near satisfactory for making backup copies.
If you want to stay on topic, we're talking about if DRM itself is bad. Therefore it's irrelevant if producers are forced to use it - the topic is, if producers choose to use it (which they certainly do wherever possible), is it intrinsically distasteful - I say yes, because once they choose to use it, I am forced to put up with it.
Yeah that certainly does happen. I'd imagine it'd happen quite a bit with Word being used to write emails. But I prefer to be able to use it responsibly myself than to not use it at all - the people I communicate with are all mature enough to do the same.
Right. HTML emails make sense just purely from the fact you can use blockquotes, bold, italics, and preformatted (where if you sent a pure text email there's no guarantee it'll be displayed in a monospace font). I don't get why people want to see plain text emails when they can be more expressive with simple styling.
With a good mailer (such as gmail), it's going to send both an HTML and a text version at the same time, so text readers will still get the message (gmail is nice in that it formats it with HTML, then when it constructs the text version, it converts blockquotes into > and stuff like that). So if people have good mailers like this, nobody should complain.
Having said that, this topic is about Outlook. I don't know how it works. Odds are they're stupid enough to not auto-generate text versions, so complain all you like.
The flaw in your argument is the phrase you used, "at least as it stands so far". Once again, I'm not talking about today's technologies. I'm talking about tomorrow's. You keep using examples of existing technology.
OK Blu-ray players, HD-DVD players, and Windows Vista are three recent technologies which do. Well, they don't *prevent* analog copying, they just deliberately degrade the output analog signals, to prevent analog copying. (This is the canonical example of a deliberately degraded user experience in legitimate uses, due to DRM). While this isn't "preventing", it's too easy to imagine that the *next* wave of digital players will not support analog output at all - only supporting encrypted digital output.
And not because it's obsolete or inconvenient for player-makers. It will be mandated by format producers (as ransom for licensing) specifically to "plug the analog hole".
Right, so in the future when it's impossible to make simple analog copies, it will still be possible to film the screen or mic the speakers. But that's far far worse off than copies you could have made with analog technologies. So yes, we are worse off.
In the digital age, we now have the ability to make perfect digital copies. We should be better off than in the analog age. The only barrier should be tech restrictions - there should be no deliberately imposed barrier.
Don't most countries have indecent exposure laws? Most certainly the US...
Well yeah, that's all very true but if in his heart he wants to make The Hobbit, then it has to be a decision from the heart, based on creative urges and not money. So whether he's getting screwed or not, if he truly wants this then he has to say "yeah, OK I might get screwed one more time but at least I'll be able to go Back Again*".
He seems pretty well off anyway if indeed he is getting paid so many millions (unless this is millions for Wingnut, not him personally, I'm confused about that).
*That's Back Again as in "There and Back Again", not as in working with NL again after this is over!
Well I'm not talking about DRM, the technology, I'm talking about DRM, the law (ie. DMCA, the law which protects DRM). And also I'm more interested in movies, which it certainly is preventing people from making personal copies of. And, I'm not talking about "so far". If the DRM that exists today was to continue, I would live with it. We're talking about the future and all the horribly twisted DRM they come up with then.
That is true, but again, I'm talking about the future. Next gen computers, DVD players and any other "authorized digital player" will prevent you from doing that by plugging the "analog hole" or so it is called.
Why aren't you taking into account the DMCA? That's exactly the law I'm talking about. I'm in Australia and we've just had a DMCA replica law shoved down our throat. Hence my anger!!!
So yes, the CDs you own today will be copyable in the next 50 years. They have little or no DRM. The "new audio format" you buy (ie. online music which is becoming increasingly popular) tomorrow will be useless when the next audio player is released, the day after tomorrow.
Get ready for DRM 2.0.
Anyway, there is clearly a difference between a non-reproduceable work (a sculpture) and easily-reproduceable works which have had explicit bars placed on the reproduceability. One of the big issues is that in 70+(author's life)+(RIAA deals) years time, the statue, if properly looked-after, will still be available for people to enjoy, while digital media will no longer be readable and theoretically will never have been format-shifted.
Well that will suck, but be legal anyway. But you've pointed out a problem with DRM right here - we're being treated as if we're licensing media purchases, even though we're legally purchasing a product. I still haven't figured out quite how it is legal to prevent us from making our own personal copies of music which we own.
I guess when you're as rich as the RIAA, anything you like can be made illegal.
Well the thing about web pages is that horizontal space and vertical space are completely different from each other. The page width is the #1 user-determined factor controlling the page layout (besides whether or not they're using IE). If the width is too thin, things don't lay out as the designer intended, text (especially tables) may be wrapping one word per line, and you may start to see highly-irritating horizontal scroll bars.
(The horizontal scroll bar is annoying because there is no wheel to control it, and also it's confusing to have 2D scrolling).
Page height, on the other hand, controls nothing about page layout except the size of the vertical scroll bar. Typically, the viewer doesn't really care if they have to scroll up and down or not, because it's so natural to do so.
So horizontal space is far more valuable than vertical space on a web page. (However, as you say, with widescreens there is a lot of horizontal space around).
That sucks :(
I can see where he's coming from to say "we don't want to make a film just to settle a lawsuit - you don't make films as a matter of convenience".
But it seems to me that the better thing to do would be to settle a lawsuit just to make a film, when clearly everybody's hearts *are* in it. In other words, even if PJ is owed another $50M, would it not be better for him to settle, go ahead and make The Hobbit, and earn another $250M from that - wouldn't everybody be happier?
It sounds like you have issues with these specific products; I don't see how you can apply this to all of AJAX.
From what I understand, AJAX would be a bitch to program right, and comes with a whole lot of issues that you describe for the programmer to sort out. But there are some clear success stories - gmail being the obvious one. Gmail started out with a couple of these issues, but google have been steadily fixing them and now it's slick and a great user experience.
And this is rather off-topic since it has nothing to do with the security vulnerabilities in TFA.
I'm not quite sure about this statement (so I pose it as a question): but could it be that they're excited about running individual KDE apps (like AmaroK) on Windows, as opposed to the whole environment? That could be a lot easier and useful for some apps.
:) Woo.
I'm not a huge fan of AmaroK but... KATE
Hooray for patents - only they can make one of the most important discoveries in history and what is commonly considered genuine altruism into corporate gain, and worse, potentially restrict its usage.
The OLPC doesn't have a hard drive. They're cutting out expensive hardware. I think they've done their calculations...
Yay, dude. You get my vote. It's great to see you raising your son with respect for moral values instead of blind faith in the increasingly-corrupt laws and governments.
That's the same for Objective C though. In general, all object oriented languages' objects / class interfaces are incompatible with each other, but they can still communicate through raw functions (in this case, the common framework of C).
(Though this refers to languages compiled to native code. .NET objects are all compatible with each other, and Java VM classes are too I'm sure).