I've already seen one site prominent in the free software world blame this on Microsoft. Telstra has a guy on their board of directors who once worked for Microsoft. They think he didn't really leave Microsoft--he's just pretending so he can infiltrate Telstra and turn them away from Freedom and toward Microsoft. (They have a huge list of companies that are secretly under the control of Microsoft this way, along with much of the press and even several major governments, and one or two major Linux distribution).
The blog post comes a day after security vendor SMobile Systems published a report saying that 20% of Android apps are malicious
Bullshit. The report says that 20% of the apps are capable of collecting information that could be misused but that most collecting it are doing it for well-intentioned reasons.
Thank you for proving my point that you haven't followed the case very well. (Hint: one of the low offers was discussed, including the amount, at one of her trials).
For the number of songs she was actually "sharing", $3000 is quite reasonable, as it comes out to in the neighborhood of a buck a song.
For the number of songs that were actually involved in the lawsuit, $3000 is also quite reasonable, as it comes out to about the minimum amount the court would be able to impose as statutory damages if the court decided she was an innocent infringer and gave her the innocent infringer break.
When you get a settlement offer that is close to the best case realistic outcome of a trial, it is a damn good idea to take it.
I have been following this case as closely as anyone
No, you have not. Pretty much every reporter who has covered this case for pretty much every tech blog (CNET, Ars Technica, Engadget, etc.) has followed the case far more closely than you have.
Do you really think that any of your money makes it to the people who wrote, directed and produced the content?
So where do you think the money that goes to the writers, directors, and producers comes from? They do in fact get paid, so the money has to come from somewhere.
Just a thought, but maybe if the studios offered a low-cost, for-profit, legitimate download site without DRM, they could receive the profits at the expense of the cyberlockers
Nope. The illegitimate sites can always undercut the studios, as they don't have the expense of actually making the movies.
I'm guessing the RIAA are keeping this going just to avoid setting any 'dangerous' legal precidents that would undermine their future cases (like $54k being the most they can ever sue for from now on).
You guessed wrong. They are keeping it going because every time they offer to settle for a low amount (as low as around $3-5k), she refuses and insists she will never settle.
I'm totally amazed that none of the judges have found the RIAA guilty of causing unnecessary suffering to Jammie Thomas. I think she should countersue the RIAA for their ridiculous miscarriage of justice.
What miscarriage of justice? She was in fact guilty--this is not seriously in dispute. They offered to settle for an amount much lower than they were likely to get at trial. She refused, and when on to perjure herself while under oath, try to frame her kids, and try to destroy evidence. Any suffering she is undergoing is her own fault.
They would rather have a ridiculous sum in judgement than to seek the reasonable. A reasonable verdict is what they want to avoid because if we start seeing reasonable verdicts, the headlines go away, and the lawyers' gravy train ends
They repeatedly offered to settle for a reasonable amount. She repeatedly refused.
She is an idiot. After she got caught, she lied on the stand, she tried to frame her kids, and she tried to destroy evidence. Any sane person would have accepted one of the early, low, settlement offers.
Piracy does not kill industries, and neither would your hypothetical world
If we look back at all the past times that copying was made easier, and ask WHY they didn't kill industries, we can see that it was because there were inherent limits to the copying.
For example, consider copying LPs to cassettes, which was popular when I was in college. If a friend wanted to copy an album I bought, he'd bring his cassette deck to my room, hook it up, and copy the album. A good cassette cost about 1/3 of what an album cost, if I'm recalling prices correctly, so that's one limit. Copying was in real time, so it would take 30-40 minutes to make a copy. During that time, I could not listen to other music.
Besides being slow and having a non-trivial materials cost, copying was intimate. Either the friend comes to my room to make the copy, or I have to loan him the LP. LPs can easily be damaged if not handled carefully, so I would not loan an LP to just anyone who asked.
All of these factors combine to limit the number of copies that will be made from one LP. Similar considerations apply to second generation copies made from the tapes copied from my LP, with the addition that these are all analog copies, and so each generation loses some quality, adding another limit to just how many total copies spring from one purchased LP.
With digital copying and the internet, all these limits go away. Copying is fast--I don't have to set aside 40 minutes where my sound system (or computer) is dedicated to making the copy. It all takes place in the background--without monitoring software I probably would not even be able to tell when a P2P upload is happening. There are no noticeable material costs for either the person receiving the copy or the person sending the copy. There's no intimacy, so I'm not going to limit it to people I know. In fact, its EASIER to provide copies to everyone than it is to try to just provide copies to friends. To just provide copies to friends, I either have to be specifically sending the copies by something like email, or I have to know how to set up a protected server an give them access, or something like that. That's way more work than just putting everything in a P2P share directory. Also, copies now are digital, so there's no degradation with multi-generation copying.
So an accurate statement would be "Piracy in the past, with a bunch of restrictions due to limitations of the pirating technology that severely limited the amount of piracy, did not kill industries". To conclude from that that piracy with none of those limiting factors, or that making it outright legal, would not kill industries seems unwarranted.
How does this realistically differ from the current situation? The fact that it's illegal doesn't stop millions of people from doing it, and I'm not sure a colossal number of people would flood the p2p networks if noncommercial downloading and distribution of creative works were legalized
Legalizing somethings tells people its OK to do, so I think you would see a flood of people on P2P. I expect there would also be a bunch of P2P appliances offered, such as set-top boxes that grab music and movies for you.
All I care about is why that footage hasn't really been all that well explained by the military
On places where it was heavily discussed, such as Reddit, there were quite a few posts from people who've been in similar situations that explained it pretty well. The following is from memory, so I might have some things mixed up. This was near where an intense ground fight had just happened. The cameraman on the ground didn't have a gun, but on the small screen in the helicopter, when viewed by someone who is used to seeing guns and doesn't expect to see a camera, it looks very similar to a RPG, which can take down a helicopter. Others that the cameraman appeared to be with did have guns. Everything about the encounter looked, based on the information the people in the copters had, just like numerous prior encounters where the people on the ground would have in fact been enemies involved in the nearby firefight or reinforcements coming to that fight. But no one leaks video of the hundreds of encounters where a copter shots a bunch of insurgents.
Same goes for blasting the people who came to get the wounded. In the numerous prior encounters with insurgents, they've learned that when you see someone rush out to a wounded insurgent, its not medical personal or people trying to help get the wounded guy to a hospital. It's other insurgents, trying to get the wounded guy's weapons.
Even a cursory glance at Lamo's history will show he's not a "wannabe" hacker. He was and is a quite accomplished and successful (except for getting caught) hacker.
Piracy does not kill industries. This isn't tough to understand
We're not talking about piracy. We're talking about a hypothetical world in which it is legal to do unlimited copying and distribution if you aren't doing it commercially.
That may be true but really, almost every one of his predictions has come true in one way or another. As much as I really would like to dismiss him as having unworkable policies, he has been spot on for almost everything
Examples? Most of things that come to mind where I think of things turning out the way the FSF wanted have done so in spite of the FSF. For example, most music is now sold DRM-free. The FSF had almost nothing to do with this. Free software is widely used--because of the Open Source movement, with RMS unable to run any of the top Linux distributions because they contain software he considers to be non-free.
RMS is very much like Richard Altmayer from the Isaac Asimov story "In A Good Cause--".
How does it sound reasonable to you? Someone makes a movie. It costs them, say, $30 million. They try to sell DVDs of the movie to try to get back that $30 million, and maybe even make a profit.
So the DVDs go on sale, and the first person who buys a copy rips it and puts it up on the P2P networks. If the FSF had its way, this would be completely legal as long as the P2P networks are not commercial.
So where do the people that made the movie get their $30 million from? Ask for donations? Movies aren't like computer software, so they can't do it by selling support or customization.
Are they going to have to make it back during the theatrical run? In FSF-world, the incentive is for content creators to not release things in forms that can be copied, such as DVDs of music. The incentive for movies, for instance, is to only show them in theaters.
And what about books? At least movies can be shown in theaters, so there is a possibility of making money with them. How many authors could make a living doing paid readings from their books? In FSF-land, as soon as a book is published, someone will scan it and it will be available for free download.
For music, artists can do concerts. That screws artists whose music doesn't lend itself well to concerts though, or who just don't want to do concert tours (Kate Bush, for instance).
ACTA must respect sharing and cooperation: it must do nothing that would hinder the unremunerated noncommercial making, copying, giving, lending, owning, using, transporting, importing or exporting of any objects or works
They essentially only want copyright to prohibit making money by copying, etc., the works of others.
Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. There is no possible way to do any sort of control on clouds. They are all different. Trust me - I'm slogging my way through meteorology classes at the moment. I took a class that touched on cloud physics last fall
Pick 1000 clouds. Randomly assign them to two groups. Try cloud seeding in one of the groups. Fly identical airplanes through the other, going through the motions of cloud seeding, but not actually seeding. Observe results. Apply standard statistical tests of significance to see if there was a meaningful difference in rainfall from the two groups of clouds.
Why would you think the complexity of clouds precludes doing a controlled experiment?
Actually, it is more accurate to say at some point the game has to execute code locally on the user's computer. Where the user has full control of what runs and what doesn't run. Where the user can use a disassembler to reverse engineer the game and disable the DRM
For now, as homomorphic encryption is still in its infancy. Once we get practical fully homomorphic encryption, everything changes.
They aren't saying that the sleep/wake aspect of this is new. Their paper is not about invention, but rather about evaluation. They say their's is the first reasonably large scale evaluation of the energy savings from this kind of thing in a decent sized production environment.
As I have understood the terms, you have optimal resource allocation when the marginal cost is equal to the marginal revenue. So I'm not sure I understand how p2p sharing is anything other than what economics predicts? I'm also not sure how this is less than optimal resource allocation? It might not make those who profit from artificial scarcity happy, but that doesn't mean it's not an optimal allocation of resources
The thing with marginal costs and optimal resource allocation works in a free, competitive market when goods have certain attributes. Digital goods do not have the necessary attributes unless artificially given them by law.
Let's take big blockbuster movies. People enjoy them, and want to consume them. If there is no profit to be made in making them, though, no resources will be allocated to making them. That's not an optimal allocation. Optimal allocation will have the market producing the things consumers want.
Not that the "IP" solution is optimal. If a movie costs the consumer $20 on DVD, the consumer is not going to consume as many movies as he would have the price had been closer to the marginal cost. So you end up with underconsumption.
You end up having to have a trade off. Do you want underproduction or underconsumption? The "IP" approach leads to underconsumption. The "let people copy all they want" approach leads to underproduction. The "Department of Entertainment funds artists through tax dollars" approach can achieve a nice balance between the two, but at the cost of having the government deciding what movies and music gets funded.
Slashdot Mirror
...or the people who comment on patents without studying them to determine what is actually claimed and the scope of those claims?
I've already seen one site prominent in the free software world blame this on Microsoft. Telstra has a guy on their board of directors who once worked for Microsoft. They think he didn't really leave Microsoft--he's just pretending so he can infiltrate Telstra and turn them away from Freedom and toward Microsoft. (They have a huge list of companies that are secretly under the control of Microsoft this way, along with much of the press and even several major governments, and one or two major Linux distribution).
The blog post comes a day after security vendor SMobile Systems published a report saying that 20% of Android apps are malicious
Bullshit. The report says that 20% of the apps are capable of collecting information that could be misused but that most collecting it are doing it for well-intentioned reasons.
SourceForget?
Is that a typo or a commentary on the quality of SourceForge?
Thank you for proving my point that you haven't followed the case very well. (Hint: one of the low offers was discussed, including the amount, at one of her trials).
For the number of songs she was actually "sharing", $3000 is quite reasonable, as it comes out to in the neighborhood of a buck a song.
For the number of songs that were actually involved in the lawsuit, $3000 is also quite reasonable, as it comes out to about the minimum amount the court would be able to impose as statutory damages if the court decided she was an innocent infringer and gave her the innocent infringer break.
When you get a settlement offer that is close to the best case realistic outcome of a trial, it is a damn good idea to take it.
I have been following this case as closely as anyone
No, you have not. Pretty much every reporter who has covered this case for pretty much every tech blog (CNET, Ars Technica, Engadget, etc.) has followed the case far more closely than you have.
Do you really think that any of your money makes it to the people who wrote, directed and produced the content?
So where do you think the money that goes to the writers, directors, and producers comes from? They do in fact get paid, so the money has to come from somewhere.
Just a thought, but maybe if the studios offered a low-cost, for-profit, legitimate download site without DRM, they could receive the profits at the expense of the cyberlockers
Nope. The illegitimate sites can always undercut the studios, as they don't have the expense of actually making the movies.
I'm guessing the RIAA are keeping this going just to avoid setting any 'dangerous' legal precidents that would undermine their future cases (like $54k being the most they can ever sue for from now on).
You guessed wrong. They are keeping it going because every time they offer to settle for a low amount (as low as around $3-5k), she refuses and insists she will never settle.
I'm totally amazed that none of the judges have found the RIAA guilty of causing unnecessary suffering to Jammie Thomas. I think she should countersue the RIAA for their ridiculous miscarriage of justice.
What miscarriage of justice? She was in fact guilty--this is not seriously in dispute. They offered to settle for an amount much lower than they were likely to get at trial. She refused, and when on to perjure herself while under oath, try to frame her kids, and try to destroy evidence. Any suffering she is undergoing is her own fault.
They would rather have a ridiculous sum in judgement than to seek the reasonable. A reasonable verdict is what they want to avoid because if we start seeing reasonable verdicts, the headlines go away, and the lawyers' gravy train ends
They repeatedly offered to settle for a reasonable amount. She repeatedly refused.
She is an idiot. After she got caught, she lied on the stand, she tried to frame her kids, and she tried to destroy evidence. Any sane person would have accepted one of the early, low, settlement offers.
Piracy does not kill industries, and neither would your hypothetical world
If we look back at all the past times that copying was made easier, and ask WHY they didn't kill industries, we can see that it was because there were inherent limits to the copying.
For example, consider copying LPs to cassettes, which was popular when I was in college. If a friend wanted to copy an album I bought, he'd bring his cassette deck to my room, hook it up, and copy the album. A good cassette cost about 1/3 of what an album cost, if I'm recalling prices correctly, so that's one limit. Copying was in real time, so it would take 30-40 minutes to make a copy. During that time, I could not listen to other music.
Besides being slow and having a non-trivial materials cost, copying was intimate. Either the friend comes to my room to make the copy, or I have to loan him the LP. LPs can easily be damaged if not handled carefully, so I would not loan an LP to just anyone who asked.
All of these factors combine to limit the number of copies that will be made from one LP. Similar considerations apply to second generation copies made from the tapes copied from my LP, with the addition that these are all analog copies, and so each generation loses some quality, adding another limit to just how many total copies spring from one purchased LP.
With digital copying and the internet, all these limits go away. Copying is fast--I don't have to set aside 40 minutes where my sound system (or computer) is dedicated to making the copy. It all takes place in the background--without monitoring software I probably would not even be able to tell when a P2P upload is happening. There are no noticeable material costs for either the person receiving the copy or the person sending the copy. There's no intimacy, so I'm not going to limit it to people I know. In fact, its EASIER to provide copies to everyone than it is to try to just provide copies to friends. To just provide copies to friends, I either have to be specifically sending the copies by something like email, or I have to know how to set up a protected server an give them access, or something like that. That's way more work than just putting everything in a P2P share directory. Also, copies now are digital, so there's no degradation with multi-generation copying.
So an accurate statement would be "Piracy in the past, with a bunch of restrictions due to limitations of the pirating technology that severely limited the amount of piracy, did not kill industries". To conclude from that that piracy with none of those limiting factors, or that making it outright legal, would not kill industries seems unwarranted.
How does this realistically differ from the current situation? The fact that it's illegal doesn't stop millions of people from doing it, and I'm not sure a colossal number of people would flood the p2p networks if noncommercial downloading and distribution of creative works were legalized
Legalizing somethings tells people its OK to do, so I think you would see a flood of people on P2P. I expect there would also be a bunch of P2P appliances offered, such as set-top boxes that grab music and movies for you.
All I care about is why that footage hasn't really been all that well explained by the military
On places where it was heavily discussed, such as Reddit, there were quite a few posts from people who've been in similar situations that explained it pretty well. The following is from memory, so I might have some things mixed up. This was near where an intense ground fight had just happened. The cameraman on the ground didn't have a gun, but on the small screen in the helicopter, when viewed by someone who is used to seeing guns and doesn't expect to see a camera, it looks very similar to a RPG, which can take down a helicopter. Others that the cameraman appeared to be with did have guns. Everything about the encounter looked, based on the information the people in the copters had, just like numerous prior encounters where the people on the ground would have in fact been enemies involved in the nearby firefight or reinforcements coming to that fight. But no one leaks video of the hundreds of encounters where a copter shots a bunch of insurgents.
Same goes for blasting the people who came to get the wounded. In the numerous prior encounters with insurgents, they've learned that when you see someone rush out to a wounded insurgent, its not medical personal or people trying to help get the wounded guy to a hospital. It's other insurgents, trying to get the wounded guy's weapons.
wannabe hacker Adrian Lamo
Even a cursory glance at Lamo's history will show he's not a "wannabe" hacker. He was and is a quite accomplished and successful (except for getting caught) hacker.
Piracy does not kill industries. This isn't tough to understand
We're not talking about piracy. We're talking about a hypothetical world in which it is legal to do unlimited copying and distribution if you aren't doing it commercially.
That may be true but really, almost every one of his predictions has come true in one way or another. As much as I really would like to dismiss him as having unworkable policies, he has been spot on for almost everything
Examples? Most of things that come to mind where I think of things turning out the way the FSF wanted have done so in spite of the FSF. For example, most music is now sold DRM-free. The FSF had almost nothing to do with this. Free software is widely used--because of the Open Source movement, with RMS unable to run any of the top Linux distributions because they contain software he considers to be non-free.
RMS is very much like Richard Altmayer from the Isaac Asimov story "In A Good Cause--".
How does it sound reasonable to you? Someone makes a movie. It costs them, say, $30 million. They try to sell DVDs of the movie to try to get back that $30 million, and maybe even make a profit.
So the DVDs go on sale, and the first person who buys a copy rips it and puts it up on the P2P networks. If the FSF had its way, this would be completely legal as long as the P2P networks are not commercial.
So where do the people that made the movie get their $30 million from? Ask for donations? Movies aren't like computer software, so they can't do it by selling support or customization.
Are they going to have to make it back during the theatrical run? In FSF-world, the incentive is for content creators to not release things in forms that can be copied, such as DVDs of music. The incentive for movies, for instance, is to only show them in theaters.
And what about books? At least movies can be shown in theaters, so there is a possibility of making money with them. How many authors could make a living doing paid readings from their books? In FSF-land, as soon as a book is published, someone will scan it and it will be available for free download.
For music, artists can do concerts. That screws artists whose music doesn't lend itself well to concerts though, or who just don't want to do concert tours (Kate Bush, for instance).
Here's the first item on their list:
ACTA must respect sharing and cooperation: it must do nothing that would hinder the unremunerated noncommercial making, copying, giving, lending, owning, using, transporting, importing or exporting of any objects or works
They essentially only want copyright to prohibit making money by copying, etc., the works of others.
The link you got that text from is quoting text from Spamhaus. They are not experts in British law.
Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. There is no possible way to do any sort of control on clouds. They are all different. Trust me - I'm slogging my way through meteorology classes at the moment. I took a class that touched on cloud physics last fall
Pick 1000 clouds. Randomly assign them to two groups. Try cloud seeding in one of the groups. Fly identical airplanes through the other, going through the motions of cloud seeding, but not actually seeding. Observe results. Apply standard statistical tests of significance to see if there was a meaningful difference in rainfall from the two groups of clouds.
Why would you think the complexity of clouds precludes doing a controlled experiment?
Actually, it is more accurate to say at some point the game has to execute code locally on the user's computer. Where the user has full control of what runs and what doesn't run. Where the user can use a disassembler to reverse engineer the game and disable the DRM
For now, as homomorphic encryption is still in its infancy. Once we get practical fully homomorphic encryption, everything changes.
This is something new?
Why didn't you RTFA?
They aren't saying that the sleep/wake aspect of this is new. Their paper is not about invention, but rather about evaluation. They say their's is the first reasonably large scale evaluation of the energy savings from this kind of thing in a decent sized production environment.
Running on Linux. Maybe GNU, maybe not.
As I have understood the terms, you have optimal resource allocation when the marginal cost is equal to the marginal revenue. So I'm not sure I understand how p2p sharing is anything other than what economics predicts? I'm also not sure how this is less than optimal resource allocation? It might not make those who profit from artificial scarcity happy, but that doesn't mean it's not an optimal allocation of resources
The thing with marginal costs and optimal resource allocation works in a free, competitive market when goods have certain attributes. Digital goods do not have the necessary attributes unless artificially given them by law.
Let's take big blockbuster movies. People enjoy them, and want to consume them. If there is no profit to be made in making them, though, no resources will be allocated to making them. That's not an optimal allocation. Optimal allocation will have the market producing the things consumers want.
Not that the "IP" solution is optimal. If a movie costs the consumer $20 on DVD, the consumer is not going to consume as many movies as he would have the price had been closer to the marginal cost. So you end up with underconsumption.
You end up having to have a trade off. Do you want underproduction or underconsumption? The "IP" approach leads to underconsumption. The "let people copy all they want" approach leads to underproduction. The "Department of Entertainment funds artists through tax dollars" approach can achieve a nice balance between the two, but at the cost of having the government deciding what movies and music gets funded.