"You want a movie or an album. You don't want to pay for it. So you download it." There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.
One problem is that he neglected to say "illegally downloaded." There is nothing wrong with downloading movies. That is how some of them are distributed.
It is clear what he meant, but this is the kind of confusion that the MPAA uses to convince courts that P2P and Youtube et al have no legal purpose. If downloading movies is illegal, than P2P and Youtube really do have no legal purpose.
All of which begs the question: Just where is all this innovation going?
Does anyone else get the feeling that the editors actually do know what "begs the question" means, and are just screwing with us to get a higher post count?
FBI warnings reduce the likelihood of an ignorance of fact defense, which could reduce the damages that the copyright owner can collect from convicted[1] infringers. If a publisher cannot give FBI warnings on a given home video format, it might significantly raise the price of titles in that format to compensate for the cost of lost opportunity for damages.
1) there is no reason the movie company can't display the FBI warning anyway. 2) Everybody has seen the FBI warning. Most hundreds, maybe even thousands of times. That is why we skip it. Seen it already. The judge or jury would never believe they hadn't seen it. 3) The movie studios don't even go after people who share their DVDs, etc with friends. They would like to, but there is just no way. They don't get any damages for court cases they don't even persue. 4) The FBI warning has nothing to do with fact. It claims you can't do this or that under any circumstances. Which is simply not true. 5) UOP isn't used for FBI warnings. It is used for commercials. If it was just for the warnings, it would have been done differently.
You already see this with some studios exclusively releasing on HD DVD and others on Blu-ray Disc.
Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray support UOP. They have nothing to do with this thread. The exclusivity is due to multi-million dollar agreements, not because they prefer one or the other.
I can't think of many end users that would AGREE to have their control taken from them.
Movie with loss of control, or no movie at all. What would most residential end users prefer?
So if UOP became illegal, or for some reason impossible, or too difficult, then all of a sudden all of the movie producers will just pack up and go home and never create another movie again? I don't think so.
To be fair, any page without a DOCTYPE is not compliant, and can't be rendered in a compliant way. Any page without a DOCTYPE is probably buggy in other ways too. Firefox has a quirks mode too, and tries to fix buggy pages. It identifies a buggy page the same way, by looking at the DOCTYPE.
Everybody is in a pickle when it comes to rendering broken HTML. The only solutions are to do the best you can, or display an error message rather than a page. Also, to be fair, most of this mess is indeed caused by Microsoft, but even they can't fix it in a day.
I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Not a pop-up or anything, but a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad. If IE had this by default, I think there would be a lot less bad pages on the internet.
That is what the GPL is for. Release your military projects under a GPL distribution license, and if other nations use them in secret to annihilate you, you can sue them, and force them to release the designs to their derivative projects.
I haven't read TFA (been here a while). Is the DVD playback crippled? Will it refuse to skip previews and such? It doesn't sound like a fully functional DVD player would get the blessing, and the promise not to sue, from the MPAA.
Thanks for sharing your internet connection. I'm sure your neighbors appreciate it. I don't think you would be liable for other people using your connection for nefarious means. What you are doing is basically the same thing that an ISP does, except for free. You are routing traffic. In fact, you ARE an "Internet Service Provider".
However, you mentioned "what to do with the offending data?" If you nuke your disks in response to a **AA subpoena, then you are doing exactly what Torrentspy did, and you will get in trouble if caught. From a technical standpoint, you could probably nuke or replace your disks and get away it. Assuming, of course, that the **AA doesn't convince the judge that allowing copyright infringement on your network makes you a criminal. With how the **AA and judges have been acting lately, it is difficult to tell.
It doesn't help that you posted to slashdot asking about getting rid of offending data. Perhaps, if that post is ever linked to you, you could claim that we all misunderstood what you meant.
There was a Texan? woman recently who claimed that copyright infringement on her network originated form strangers using Wi-Fi, but that turned out to be false. The RIAA proved that the data came from her computer.
vorbis (recommended. free, open, patent license is free for all) mp3 (almost everybody has it on their computers already. I prefer vorbis over mp3, but mp3 over flash) flac (much too big for downloads. just saying it is there) aac
The real problem is DRM. The BBC does not want you to be able to keep the file on your computer. If they would forgo that requirement, then they could just use AV files, rather than using an intentionally limiting solution.
Did anyone bother to notice that your mobile and landline phone companies know *WAY* more about you than this program could ever hope to collect... yet the Slashdot crowd is more concerned with an open-source-based PBX collecting some high-level meta-data from users in an opt-out fashion?
It is possible for a person to be unhappy about two different things. And I don't recall anyone saying anything about the phone companies, including whether they were more or less upset about this or that.
we will start to see things like open-source projects where released compiled binaries are compilations of modified versions of the released source code, which contain malware. No amount of code review is going to catch that.
Somebody will notice, if it is a popular project. They won't notice from looking at the source, but some people have nothing better to do than run arbitrary binaries in a debugger, looking for anomalies. If it is a network anomaly, such as phoning home, it is even easier, because it will be in the network log. I think you underestimate the paranoia of some open source users.
I wonder if to counter-act this, open-source projects will start to release, in addition to the source, all of the compilation settings, etc. which were used to create their released binaries, so that anyone with the same development platform can more easily verify that there is no hanky-panky going on.
Like Debian? Every package in Debian has a source package. You can always build a deb archive with:
apt-get source package
cd package-*
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
When I read the part about sending stories to Digg, I thought "What's wrong with sending stories to Digg?" Isn't that what Digg is for? Or is there some Digg policy that you can't submit stories that you agree with?
Yes, the government loses a lot of secrets, and we hear about them on the news, or slashdot. But how many secrets has the government successfully kept?
Of course not. We're civilized in the United States. If you refuse to obey a judge's order on constitutional grounds, we'll just lock you up in jail until you obey. Or die. A reduction in living standards for sure, but not torture. See? We're civilized.
The problem isn't that US laws aren't keeping up. The problem is that they are difficult to enforce, and rather than politicians trying to fix this difficult problem, they feel it is easier to just make more laws, and claim that they are needed to keep up with technology. This results in a feedback loop, because making more useless laws makes all of them more difficult to enforce.
The crimes are assault, murder, theft, and fraud. Perhaps a few more. These haven't changed since the genesis of civilization.
You have a 5 second window to "cancel" the sending of the info
The 5 second window you speak of is a pop-up, and many people have their browsers configured to not display pop-up windows. These people will never get the warning, and will just have their porn habits displayed for the world.
If I recall correctly, Adblock (not plus) would, by default, not download ads. You could manually turn on a feature that would download them, but not display them. Some people would turn this feature on so that the webmaster would still get per-view credit, although the ads were not actually viewed.
I have been using Adblock Plus for some time. Adblock can't keep up with the latest versions of Firefox. Adblock Plus does not download ads by default. I can't find the equivalent feature to make it download them.
I am saving bandwidth, time, and privacy by using Adblock Plus.
Linux is like the girl next door, while Windows and MacOS are like hookers. Linux is free, and is plenty good enough for most people. It feels good to be with. Windows and MacOS have more eye candy (mascara), and can do some things that Linux can't (or won't), as long as you're willing to fork over the money.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem is that he neglected to say "illegally downloaded." There is nothing wrong with downloading movies. That is how some of them are distributed.
It is clear what he meant, but this is the kind of confusion that the MPAA uses to convince courts that P2P and Youtube et al have no legal purpose. If downloading movies is illegal, than P2P and Youtube really do have no legal purpose.
Does anyone else get the feeling that the editors actually do know what "begs the question" means, and are just screwing with us to get a higher post count?
1) there is no reason the movie company can't display the FBI warning anyway.
2) Everybody has seen the FBI warning. Most hundreds, maybe even thousands of times. That is why we skip it. Seen it already. The judge or jury would never believe they hadn't seen it.
3) The movie studios don't even go after people who share their DVDs, etc with friends. They would like to, but there is just no way. They don't get any damages for court cases they don't even persue.
4) The FBI warning has nothing to do with fact. It claims you can't do this or that under any circumstances. Which is simply not true.
5) UOP isn't used for FBI warnings. It is used for commercials. If it was just for the warnings, it would have been done differently.
Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray support UOP. They have nothing to do with this thread. The exclusivity is due to multi-million dollar agreements, not because they prefer one or the other.
So if UOP became illegal, or for some reason impossible, or too difficult, then all of a sudden all of the movie producers will just pack up and go home and never create another movie again? I don't think so.
To be fair, any page without a DOCTYPE is not compliant, and can't be rendered in a compliant way. Any page without a DOCTYPE is probably buggy in other ways too. Firefox has a quirks mode too, and tries to fix buggy pages. It identifies a buggy page the same way, by looking at the DOCTYPE.
Everybody is in a pickle when it comes to rendering broken HTML. The only solutions are to do the best you can, or display an error message rather than a page. Also, to be fair, most of this mess is indeed caused by Microsoft, but even they can't fix it in a day.
I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Not a pop-up or anything, but a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad. If IE had this by default, I think there would be a lot less bad pages on the internet.
That is what the GPL is for. Release your military projects under a GPL distribution license, and if other nations use them in secret to annihilate you, you can sue them, and force them to release the designs to their derivative projects.
I haven't read TFA (been here a while). Is the DVD playback crippled? Will it refuse to skip previews and such? It doesn't sound like a fully functional DVD player would get the blessing, and the promise not to sue, from the MPAA.
Thanks for sharing your internet connection. I'm sure your neighbors appreciate it. I don't think you would be liable for other people using your connection for nefarious means. What you are doing is basically the same thing that an ISP does, except for free. You are routing traffic. In fact, you ARE an "Internet Service Provider".
However, you mentioned "what to do with the offending data?" If you nuke your disks in response to a **AA subpoena, then you are doing exactly what Torrentspy did, and you will get in trouble if caught. From a technical standpoint, you could probably nuke or replace your disks and get away it. Assuming, of course, that the **AA doesn't convince the judge that allowing copyright infringement on your network makes you a criminal. With how the **AA and judges have been acting lately, it is difficult to tell.
It doesn't help that you posted to slashdot asking about getting rid of offending data. Perhaps, if that post is ever linked to you, you could claim that we all misunderstood what you meant.
There was a Texan? woman recently who claimed that copyright infringement on her network originated form strangers using Wi-Fi, but that turned out to be false. The RIAA proved that the data came from her computer.
I think it's funny how you got modded as funny. Nobody believes someone could actually like Vista.
Disclaimer: I have never used Vista. I dislike previous Microsoft products.
For video:
theora (not recommended. not ready yet)
x.263
x.264
whatever realplayer uses.
For audio:
vorbis (recommended. free, open, patent license is free for all)
mp3 (almost everybody has it on their computers already. I prefer vorbis over mp3, but mp3 over flash)
flac (much too big for downloads. just saying it is there)
aac
The real problem is DRM. The BBC does not want you to be able to keep the file on your computer. If they would forgo that requirement, then they could just use AV files, rather than using an intentionally limiting solution.
It is possible for a person to be unhappy about two different things. And I don't recall anyone saying anything about the phone companies, including whether they were more or less upset about this or that.
Somebody will notice, if it is a popular project. They won't notice from looking at the source, but some people have nothing better to do than run arbitrary binaries in a debugger, looking for anomalies. If it is a network anomaly, such as phoning home, it is even easier, because it will be in the network log. I think you underestimate the paranoia of some open source users.
Like Debian? Every package in Debian has a source package. You can always build a deb archive with:
apt-get source package
cd package-*
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
When I read the part about sending stories to Digg, I thought "What's wrong with sending stories to Digg?" Isn't that what Digg is for? Or is there some Digg policy that you can't submit stories that you agree with?
Yes, the government loses a lot of secrets, and we hear about them on the news, or slashdot. But how many secrets has the government successfully kept?
Yes. We should refrain from solving any problem until some other problem gets fixed. That'll get things done.
Yes. See? Civilized!
Of course not. We're civilized in the United States. If you refuse to obey a judge's order on constitutional grounds, we'll just lock you up in jail until you obey. Or die. A reduction in living standards for sure, but not torture. See? We're civilized.
Isn't this standard lawyer behavior? Objecting to everything the other side does?
The problem isn't that US laws aren't keeping up. The problem is that they are difficult to enforce, and rather than politicians trying to fix this difficult problem, they feel it is easier to just make more laws, and claim that they are needed to keep up with technology. This results in a feedback loop, because making more useless laws makes all of them more difficult to enforce.
The crimes are assault, murder, theft, and fraud. Perhaps a few more. These haven't changed since the genesis of civilization.
The 5 second window you speak of is a pop-up, and many people have their browsers configured to not display pop-up windows. These people will never get the warning, and will just have their porn habits displayed for the world.
I just checked. The "sponsor websites" ability has not been in Adblock Plus since 0.5. See this forum thread: http://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5980#5980
If I recall correctly, Adblock (not plus) would, by default, not download ads. You could manually turn on a feature that would download them, but not display them. Some people would turn this feature on so that the webmaster would still get per-view credit, although the ads were not actually viewed.
I have been using Adblock Plus for some time. Adblock can't keep up with the latest versions of Firefox. Adblock Plus does not download ads by default. I can't find the equivalent feature to make it download them.
I am saving bandwidth, time, and privacy by using Adblock Plus.
Linux is like the girl next door, while Windows and MacOS are like hookers. Linux is free, and is plenty good enough for most people. It feels good to be with. Windows and MacOS have more eye candy (mascara), and can do some things that Linux can't (or won't), as long as you're willing to fork over the money.
Who downloads ads any more? They make the internet too slow for me.
Unless you are reporting that CSS (content scrambling system) has been cracked.
Yes, it is clear. But money trumps constitution.