Does apple have a "monopoly"? In online music downloads and music players, yes
Having a monopoly is not against antitrust law. What is against the law is using monopoly power (which you can have without having a monopoly, BTW) in certain ways.
To the extent that Apple has a monopoly here, they got it by simply not being stupid. All the competing players and services were stupid, doing one or more of the following:
Offered crappy players.
Did not offer good software for their players, instead bundling MusicMatch Jukebox, or relying on Windows Media Player.
Did not work with any legal download service that worked with major labels.
There's nothing stopping someone else from launching a player and software and a download service that overcomes all of these problems. Even Apple's head-start isn't that much of a barrier, because if you look at the number of iTunes songs sold, divided by the number of iPods sold, you'll see that the average number of songs purchased from iTMS per iPod is not very large. Most people fill their iPods with ripped songs, which are not under DRM and so could be trivially moved to another player. (And since they only have a handful of iTMS songs, even those can be moved by burning one or two CDs and ripping them).
Why not worry about something else, like "very unique,"[...]
"very unique" is logical and useful and understandable. Almost everything is unique in some way, but the reason for uniqueness is often trivial, or transitory, or uninteresting. Thus, qualifying "unique" to indicate the quality of the uniqueness is quite reasonable.
With the interstellar travel system worked out by Kip Thorne. There's a funny story behind that. One of Thorne's pet peeves is science fiction stories that just hand-wave things like faster than light travel. One day, he and Sagan, who were friends, were talking, and Sagan tells Thorne he is writing a science fiction book, and sheepishly admits he is using faster than light travel and hand waved it. When Thorne finishes being outraged, Sagan asks him if he can fix it. Thorne tells him no, it's not possible--and then a bit later thinks of a way to do it, and works out the math. That's what appeared in the book.
Between the time he worked it out, and the time it appeared in the book, Thorne found another use for it. He put it on the final exam for the class he teaches on gravitation. Just the physics of the worm holes, not anything about how they could maybe be used for travel. He wanted to see if any of the students would see that, or if they would just solve the equations without thinking about or realizing what they mean. He was disappointed that the later is what happened.
I got this from a very interesting book Thorne was writing for the general public. He kept his drafts in 644 files in a 755 directory on a Unix system in the physics department, so all of us who worked there at the time eagerly read them. Some of that material ended up in his "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy" book, but I don't recall if this Sagan story did.
AFAIK, digging up information on a willing person and presenting isn't illegal
The arrest is obviously for something else (the digging for the presentation had only just been done, so even if there was some problem there, there would not have been time to arrest him for that). The conference just before his presentation was merely the place they found him to carry out the arrest.
This actually sets a good precedent and counters one of the arguments against leaving your wifi connection open. Even if someone uses you're internet connection, you won't be charged with a crime simply because you are the owner of that connection. Which means that we no longer have to live in paranoid fear of the tiny, tiny chance that trying to do something nice for people will end up with being arrested for aiding terrorists or pedophiles
Or it could go like this. You are a content provider, providing content that some might see as inappropriate for children.
Someone (the government, a religious group, etc) tries to get you shut down for providing this bad material to children. You counter that it is the parent's responsibility to control what their children do online.
...and that argument is shot down, because this decision is saying that the person who owns the method of access (the parent in this case) is NOT responsible for how their children use it (illegal filesharing in this case).
For maximizing freedom, I think the decision we want is that parents ARE responsible for what their children do on the net, or at least are responsible for taking reasonable steps to monitor and control their children.
(NOTE: I haven't read the decision--just going by what people have said here, so I probably have a totally wrong notion of what it actually said!)
Google isn't above questionable behavior, though. Look at their new payment service. Basically, if you are selling something, you can put a link on your order page that lets your customer use Google to handle the payment. Sounds pretty cool, right? However, one of Google's requirements is that you have that link on every ordering page of yours, and they require that the link includes the image they supply from their server. You can't make a local copy of the image on your server. You have to reference the image on their server from your page.
What this means is that everytime someone buys something through your site, even if they don't use Google to pay, Google gets a hit on that image. So, Google gets an accurate count of how many people visit your order page, and gets their IP addresses.
If they correlate that with searches from the same IP address, they are getting a hell of a lot of valuable information.
Actually, the artist and the scammer were not the same person. If you properly RTA (oops, this is slashdot, sorry) you will find that the scammer paid the artist to produce the carving in the hope that "Derek Trotter" would ultimately pay up big time in the form of a large "art scholarship".
Uhm...the article Slashdot links to says no such thing. You are thinking of the article that that article links to.
Anyway, there is still a potential problem, as we don't know how much the artist was paid. Remember, the artist is dealing with the 419 scammer, who might not be honest with him (I doubt these people confine their dishonesty to their dealings with Europeans...). He might, for example, have told the artist about the scholarship, and offered to help the artist get it, if the artist would produce the required works cheaply (say, at materials cost) and give the 419 scammer a big cut if he got the scholarship. So, we may very well have a legitimate artist who was scammed in this thing.
Could you make a compressor that is smart enough to not do this?
Consider starting from a given wave file. You compress it with an MP3 compressor down to a 128 kbit/second MP3, and then run that through an MP3 decoder, to get wave file 2. Wave file 2 differs from wave file 1, because some things were lost to make the MP3.
How difficult would it be to make an MP3 compressor that could take wave file 2 and produce a 128 Kbit/second MP3 that decodes back to wave file 2? Wave file 2 is exactly representable as an MP3 of that bitrate, so it should be possible to make such a compressor.
Well, a lossy compression system basically works by looking for inaudible things to discard, so that it is left with something it can compress well. Given something that ALREADY has those things discarded, it would seem that it should not need to discard any more.
... between talking on a hand's free set, and talking to passengers in your car?
Passengers are in the car with you. If something arises that requires your concentration, the passenger has a good chance of noticing, and shutting up. A person jabbering at you on the hand's free set will just keep jabbering away.
A more interesting question would be how a hand's free set compares to listening to the radio (and maybe different things on the radio, such as music, news, and talk radio).
If you don't want someone to use it then you have to keep the radio waves out of his property
He wasn't just sitting there receiving the radio waves from the AP that happened to pass through his point. He was also sending back radio waves, to the AP. If your argument had any merit, it would only be for people who are only receiving broadcast services.
When I studied this in law school, 10 years ago, a DNA test consisted of comparing the samples at a handful of positions. Even for the most accurate, expensive, test that was used in law enforcement at the time, there could potentially be dozens of people in the world that would match a given crime scene sample.
What this meant was that the proper way to use DNA testing was to find suspects by traditional methods, and THEN test them. If you got a match from among them, you had your criminal (or, rather, you had someone who left DNA at the crime scene...not always the same thing!).
What this also meant is that it did not work to START with DNA to find suspects. That is, if you took a DNA sample from the crime scene, and matched it against a database of DNA you had collected for something unrelated to that crime, and got one match, it wasn't that good at all. It told you that this person was one of dozens (or even thousands for some of the tests in use) people with that DNA profile.
Basically, a DNA database, as a tool to find criminals, with the DNA testing technology in use then, would only work if it had everyone who could conceivably be the criminal in the database.
Had DNA testing progressed enough since then that they can now test at enough sites to actually make a DNA match prove (ignoring twins, I suppose!) identity?
Welcome to the world of tomorrow! They'll adapt their business model eventually, and they'll start making shows available online. Or they'll keep their hands clamped over their ears and shout "LALALALA!" louder and louder until they go out of business. You're one of these people who thinks that it's the customer's duty to give a shit about producers, and that's just not the way it's supposed to work
Wow...you sure completely missed his point. Yes, they'll adapt their business models, to only produce those kind of shows that can make money even when widely pirated. His point is that this class of shows will include fewer, if any, good shows.
TV and movies are not like music, where the artists make most of their money outside of sales of the music (e.g., bands make their money from their concerts).
Piracy fails the "what if everyone did it?" test. When it is a small, underground activity, it likely actually helps music and movie and TV revenue, by acting as advertising. If it becomes the mainstream way of getting content, however, then it does make it uneconomical for the producers of content (except for news and for programs where the view interacts with the show, such as by voting on what contestants win or lose).
Where do you draw the line? What about google or any other search engine? What about community sites, several cases of rape and pedophilia has been caused by connections made on such sites, are they assisting these crimes as well?
The legal systems in most countries are able to take into account the intent of the actor when evaluating his/her/its actions.
I have a Sprint DSL connection that they claim is 5 mbit/second down, 640 kbit/sec up.
If I measure the speed by noting the time and byte count on my ethernet interface during a download, wait a few seconds, and again note the time and byte count, and then calculate my download speed by taking the byte count difference * 8, and dividing by the time difference, I get 5251000 bits/second. Dividing that by 1024*1024, I get 5.01 mbit/sec. (When I say "noting the time and byte count", I mean having a program note these, of course...I'm not sitting there with a stopwatch).
This kind of surprised me, in that they aren't even doing the trick of defining a mbit as 1000000 bits to make it look faster.
You are thinging traditional VOIP subscriber. Buy an adaptor at ______ with cash. Activate it with a stolen card and ID. Hook it directly to a wireless access point in client mode. Wardrive near hotels. Park nearby for a couple days.
So, basically, instead of using a fairly innocuous radio, which is easy to explain away if apprehended, you propose that the secret agent go around carrying stolen cards and stolen ID and wardrive? I think the general idea is for spies to not call attention to themselves, and engaging in two or three activities that might be illegal even if not connected with spying is probably not the best procedure!
It's much harder to pinpoint the source than a radio signal. RF Direction equipment can triangulate a HF signal quite quickly.
The numbers stations broadcast on shortwave frequencies whose signals carry very far, with plenty of bounces off the ionosphere. You can triangulate them to approximately what quarter-hemisphere they come from. And even if the exact location were found, it wouldn't help catch the spy receiving the signal, nor even give any indication that the signal is for a spy in your country.
Re:Has this guy got much legal defence?
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The concept of `model releases' is pretty sketchy in UK law: if I go out into the street and photograph random bystanders, those photographs and their copyright belong to me absolutely. See this JISC document. You don't have a right to your image in public.
Some of those photographs don't look like they were in public.
Re:Has this guy got much legal defence?
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This guy sold the computer and recieved payment? Wouldn't that mean the hard drive & its contents are now owned by the guy who bought it, and its up to him what he wants to do to it?
No, it wouldn't. The buyer would not own the copyright on any writings or photographs or movies or music or software found on the drive. He'd just own those particular copies, and so would be limited to doing with them what any other owner of a particular copy is allowed to do when they do not own the copyright.
Besides the copyright problems, there may be other problems with publishing the photos. The people in the photos may have a cause of action against the guy, as I doubt he has a model release from them.
I believe the UK has a court system, which is perfectly capable of handling a problem when a seller and buyer of an item have a disagreement. Generally, using this system is a lot better than trying to come up with some scheme of your own, like this buyer did, and he stands a good chance of getting a painful and expensive lesson on this.
There was an article in the San Jose Mercury News, if I recall correctly, about 15 years ago, that explored this question. It examined various candidates, and looked at why they had not developed as technology birthplaces to the extent Silicon Valley has.
There were a variety of factors that could stop such development. For example, what stopped Research Triangle Park is Southern attitudes toward failure. The financial infrastructure there is dominated by Old South money and attitudes. If you start a company, and go under, you are done--you've disgraced yourself and shamed your family. You are a failure, and the banks won't finance you for a second chance.
In Silicon Valley, on the other hand, having a few failed companies under your belt isn't bad--people expect startups to fail, and you move on, more experienced, get more financing, and maybe the next one will work out better. Sometimes it does, and another great company is born.
I don't recall the details, but I think they came up with something like a dozen factors like that, and any one missing made it unlikely that a region would duplicate Silicon Valley's success, and they looked at maybe a dozen candidates, and pointed out which of the factors were missing.
To be analagous to the Netscape situation, they would have to be clearly the best product in their category before Microsoft moves in. They are not. There are several other anti-spyware products that are as good as or even better than SpySweeper, some free, and some for-pay.
Instead, you have close up photos of obviously man-made fibers in a wide variety of colors not found in nature [...]
Huh? I didn't notice any colors that aren't found on nature. Just take all the colors found on mammal fur, and all the colors found on insect wings, and I think you'll have pretty much every color that humans can see.
Slashdot Mirror
To the extent that Apple has a monopoly here, they got it by simply not being stupid. All the competing players and services were stupid, doing one or more of the following:
There's nothing stopping someone else from launching a player and software and a download service that overcomes all of these problems. Even Apple's head-start isn't that much of a barrier, because if you look at the number of iTunes songs sold, divided by the number of iPods sold, you'll see that the average number of songs purchased from iTMS per iPod is not very large. Most people fill their iPods with ripped songs, which are not under DRM and so could be trivially moved to another player. (And since they only have a handful of iTMS songs, even those can be moved by burning one or two CDs and ripping them).
"very unique" is logical and useful and understandable. Almost everything is unique in some way, but the reason for uniqueness is often trivial, or transitory, or uninteresting. Thus, qualifying "unique" to indicate the quality of the uniqueness is quite reasonable.
With the interstellar travel system worked out by Kip Thorne. There's a funny story behind that. One of Thorne's pet peeves is science fiction stories that just hand-wave things like faster than light travel. One day, he and Sagan, who were friends, were talking, and Sagan tells Thorne he is writing a science fiction book, and sheepishly admits he is using faster than light travel and hand waved it. When Thorne finishes being outraged, Sagan asks him if he can fix it. Thorne tells him no, it's not possible--and then a bit later thinks of a way to do it, and works out the math. That's what appeared in the book.
Between the time he worked it out, and the time it appeared in the book, Thorne found another use for it. He put it on the final exam for the class he teaches on gravitation. Just the physics of the worm holes, not anything about how they could maybe be used for travel. He wanted to see if any of the students would see that, or if they would just solve the equations without thinking about or realizing what they mean. He was disappointed that the later is what happened.
I got this from a very interesting book Thorne was writing for the general public. He kept his drafts in 644 files in a 755 directory on a Unix system in the physics department, so all of us who worked there at the time eagerly read them. Some of that material ended up in his "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy" book, but I don't recall if this Sagan story did.
The arrest is obviously for something else (the digging for the presentation had only just been done, so even if there was some problem there, there would not have been time to arrest him for that). The conference just before his presentation was merely the place they found him to carry out the arrest.
Or it could go like this. You are a content provider, providing content that some might see as inappropriate for children.
Someone (the government, a religious group, etc) tries to get you shut down for providing this bad material to children. You counter that it is the parent's responsibility to control what their children do online.
For maximizing freedom, I think the decision we want is that parents ARE responsible for what their children do on the net, or at least are responsible for taking reasonable steps to monitor and control their children.
(NOTE: I haven't read the decision--just going by what people have said here, so I probably have a totally wrong notion of what it actually said!)
Google isn't above questionable behavior, though. Look at their new payment service. Basically, if you are selling something, you can put a link on your order page that lets your customer use Google to handle the payment. Sounds pretty cool, right? However, one of Google's requirements is that you have that link on every ordering page of yours, and they require that the link includes the image they supply from their server. You can't make a local copy of the image on your server. You have to reference the image on their server from your page.
What this means is that everytime someone buys something through your site, even if they don't use Google to pay, Google gets a hit on that image. So, Google gets an accurate count of how many people visit your order page, and gets their IP addresses.
If they correlate that with searches from the same IP address, they are getting a hell of a lot of valuable information.
Uhm...the article Slashdot links to says no such thing. You are thinking of the article that that article links to.
Anyway, there is still a potential problem, as we don't know how much the artist was paid. Remember, the artist is dealing with the 419 scammer, who might not be honest with him (I doubt these people confine their dishonesty to their dealings with Europeans...). He might, for example, have told the artist about the scholarship, and offered to help the artist get it, if the artist would produce the required works cheaply (say, at materials cost) and give the 419 scammer a big cut if he got the scholarship. So, we may very well have a legitimate artist who was scammed in this thing.
Consider starting from a given wave file. You compress it with an MP3 compressor down to a 128 kbit/second MP3, and then run that through an MP3 decoder, to get wave file 2. Wave file 2 differs from wave file 1, because some things were lost to make the MP3.
How difficult would it be to make an MP3 compressor that could take wave file 2 and produce a 128 Kbit/second MP3 that decodes back to wave file 2? Wave file 2 is exactly representable as an MP3 of that bitrate, so it should be possible to make such a compressor.
Well, a lossy compression system basically works by looking for inaudible things to discard, so that it is left with something it can compress well. Given something that ALREADY has those things discarded, it would seem that it should not need to discard any more.
Passengers are in the car with you. If something arises that requires your concentration, the passenger has a good chance of noticing, and shutting up. A person jabbering at you on the hand's free set will just keep jabbering away.
A more interesting question would be how a hand's free set compares to listening to the radio (and maybe different things on the radio, such as music, news, and talk radio).
He wasn't just sitting there receiving the radio waves from the AP that happened to pass through his point. He was also sending back radio waves, to the AP. If your argument had any merit, it would only be for people who are only receiving broadcast services.
Except Adobe granted everyone a patent license to use those patents. It's right in the PDF specification you can download from Adobe.
If you don't want to download that, which is kind of big, you can also read it in this short text document.
Try thinking about it.
What this meant was that the proper way to use DNA testing was to find suspects by traditional methods, and THEN test them. If you got a match from among them, you had your criminal (or, rather, you had someone who left DNA at the crime scene...not always the same thing!).
What this also meant is that it did not work to START with DNA to find suspects. That is, if you took a DNA sample from the crime scene, and matched it against a database of DNA you had collected for something unrelated to that crime, and got one match, it wasn't that good at all. It told you that this person was one of dozens (or even thousands for some of the tests in use) people with that DNA profile.
Basically, a DNA database, as a tool to find criminals, with the DNA testing technology in use then, would only work if it had everyone who could conceivably be the criminal in the database.
Had DNA testing progressed enough since then that they can now test at enough sites to actually make a DNA match prove (ignoring twins, I suppose!) identity?
Wow...you sure completely missed his point. Yes, they'll adapt their business models, to only produce those kind of shows that can make money even when widely pirated. His point is that this class of shows will include fewer, if any, good shows.
TV and movies are not like music, where the artists make most of their money outside of sales of the music (e.g., bands make their money from their concerts).
Piracy fails the "what if everyone did it?" test. When it is a small, underground activity, it likely actually helps music and movie and TV revenue, by acting as advertising. If it becomes the mainstream way of getting content, however, then it does make it uneconomical for the producers of content (except for news and for programs where the view interacts with the show, such as by voting on what contestants win or lose).
The legal systems in most countries are able to take into account the intent of the actor when evaluating his/her/its actions.
If I measure the speed by noting the time and byte count on my ethernet interface during a download, wait a few seconds, and again note the time and byte count, and then calculate my download speed by taking the byte count difference * 8, and dividing by the time difference, I get 5251000 bits/second. Dividing that by 1024*1024, I get 5.01 mbit/sec. (When I say "noting the time and byte count", I mean having a program note these, of course...I'm not sitting there with a stopwatch).
This kind of surprised me, in that they aren't even doing the trick of defining a mbit as 1000000 bits to make it look faster.
So, basically, instead of using a fairly innocuous radio, which is easy to explain away if apprehended, you propose that the secret agent go around carrying stolen cards and stolen ID and wardrive? I think the general idea is for spies to not call attention to themselves, and engaging in two or three activities that might be illegal even if not connected with spying is probably not the best procedure!
It's much harder to pinpoint the source than a radio signal. RF Direction equipment can triangulate a HF signal quite quickly.
The numbers stations broadcast on shortwave frequencies whose signals carry very far, with plenty of bounces off the ionosphere. You can triangulate them to approximately what quarter-hemisphere they come from. And even if the exact location were found, it wouldn't help catch the spy receiving the signal, nor even give any indication that the signal is for a spy in your country.
Some of those photographs don't look like they were in public.
No, it wouldn't. The buyer would not own the copyright on any writings or photographs or movies or music or software found on the drive. He'd just own those particular copies, and so would be limited to doing with them what any other owner of a particular copy is allowed to do when they do not own the copyright.
Besides the copyright problems, there may be other problems with publishing the photos. The people in the photos may have a cause of action against the guy, as I doubt he has a model release from them.
I believe the UK has a court system, which is perfectly capable of handling a problem when a seller and buyer of an item have a disagreement. Generally, using this system is a lot better than trying to come up with some scheme of your own, like this buyer did, and he stands a good chance of getting a painful and expensive lesson on this.
But at least the iPod won't decide that you are an imperfect biological infestation and try to wipe you out.
What's the connection between this story and my rights online?
There were a variety of factors that could stop such development. For example, what stopped Research Triangle Park is Southern attitudes toward failure. The financial infrastructure there is dominated by Old South money and attitudes. If you start a company, and go under, you are done--you've disgraced yourself and shamed your family. You are a failure, and the banks won't finance you for a second chance.
In Silicon Valley, on the other hand, having a few failed companies under your belt isn't bad--people expect startups to fail, and you move on, more experienced, get more financing, and maybe the next one will work out better. Sometimes it does, and another great company is born.
I don't recall the details, but I think they came up with something like a dozen factors like that, and any one missing made it unlikely that a region would duplicate Silicon Valley's success, and they looked at maybe a dozen candidates, and pointed out which of the factors were missing.
To be analagous to the Netscape situation, they would have to be clearly the best product in their category before Microsoft moves in. They are not. There are several other anti-spyware products that are as good as or even better than SpySweeper, some free, and some for-pay.
Huh? I didn't notice any colors that aren't found on nature. Just take all the colors found on mammal fur, and all the colors found on insect wings, and I think you'll have pretty much every color that humans can see.