Note that Micro$loth is on the top of the list of donors.
If you actually believe that a letter from you and a letter from Microsoft have the same weight in determining how Senator McCain votes on any specific issue, you're as clueless as the rest of your post shows you as.
The fact that you got moderated up to 5 is a demonstration of why I expect the US high-tech community to lose its freedom to create in the long run and why the laws Hollywood wants, it's going to get. Geeks think of themselves as "above" the political process, and more importantly, above bothering to find out how it works. They actually take your ideas pulled out of some half-assed memory of a high school civics class seriously
Ask the guy at MS who wrote the check to McCain, "populist hero". He knows how the process works.
You obviously don't.
This bill actually has a chance to pass, as Hollywood needs a way to strip-mine the public domain, too, and it enables the content industry to keep anything with possible commercial value while work of anybody else goes into the public domain, for our use, and theirs.
Note the name of the sponsors. They aren't exactly known for being our friends.
Back when I was working in engineering, I frequently worked late nights and on weekends and I needed pricing information immediately.
Not necessarily exact information, but at least ballpark information to find out if it would fit into the budget.
The ones that didn't have the pricing info on the site never found their way into my research report.
I've been doing journalism the last few years, often with the same kind of hours.
Guess what doesn't make it into my articles?
Somehow, I feel that my employers, clients, and readers haven't missed a damn thing with respect to the companies that wasted my time often frantically looking for info on their site because they figured that I needed a salesperson pressuring me along with the pricing info I actually wanted. Companies willing to waste the time of people checking their sites and their salespeople's time on non-qualified buyers simply aren't worth the hassle of dealing with.
Given that the record and film industry appears to have invested heavily in buying some congressmen, perhaps its time for the open source/public domain movements to do the same. All the good will in the world wont lead to actual passing of legislation when Time Warner/Sony/EMI/Bertlemann/Conglomokorp actually owns people on Capitol hill... we have a petition, but they have votes in Congress.
I don't see why the EFF and similar groups can't 'invest' in a few reelection campaigns. The business model is established by numerous corporations and special interest groups - all it would take are funds. In fact the same applies to all progressive social and political groups... how come the bad guys are smart enough to heavily influence politics with their money but the good guys aren't?
BECAUSE THEY CAN'T!!!
Non profit 503(c)3 "educational" organizations can't spend a single dollar on political campaigns. That's the tradeoff you get for knowing your contributions from them are tax-deductible.
The ONLY kind of organization that can raise money from the public
That's why EFF, Public Citizen, etc. can only wring their hands when shit like the DMCA passes. All they can do is beg and plead with Congresscritters for mercy. They get polite treatment. The people with the checks get results.
No, the major corporations don't always get their own way on the Hill. It is possible for people's organizations to get enough money from people in $5 and $10 and $20 and $100 contributions and disburse them in $1000 and $5000 and $10,000 checks, to hire full-time staff to analyze new laws so the members don't get blindsided, to hire lobbyists, to hire staff to open envelopes. And they can and do run political campaigns against people who persist in not getting the message.
The existence proofs are the NRA and the AARP. They are professionally run, they raise money, they represent their membership effectively.
What's the bottom line for us? A small group of people come up with a couple or 3 million dollars they don't expect to be tax deductible. Not to give to politicians, to hire top-bracket pros to build the fund-raising infrastructure to make it possible to raise money from us in $5 and $10 and $20 and $100 contributions to make meaningful contributions.
American high-tech types have the following choices:
learn to bend over and take it with a smile and practice "Would you like fries with that?"
Get it together and start doing the PAC stuff right fucking now.
get ready to leave the US permanently for places outside the reach of Hollywood cartel-owned politicians.
Hope the RIAA member labels go bankrupt before they do any more serious damage to the high-tech scene.
But without the startup money, this goes noplace. If nobody's willing to come forward with the price of freedom while it can still be paid in dollars, the only solutions to this problem are individual... figuring how to get out from under.
Nobody's going to come forward with the startup money.
The people who can are under the delusion that the Hollywood cartel can be negotiated with, and after they come up with consumer devices that'll make Hollywood happy but that nobody will buy because they're DRM-broken to uselessness, Hollywood will make all their content available for pay-per-download for everybody that the Internet infrastructure can't support, and we'll all march off to a future of infinite profits.
The RIAA started buying politicians in the early 1990s to pass the Audio Home Recording Act to make digital downloading illegal.
Does this mean there's a moral difference?
Of course not. The rational response to this would have been to extend mandatory licensing and "fair use" for individuals of the sort that made the RIAA labels into a mulitbillion dollar business into the digital/Internet domain.
Downloading is still illegal. But does the fact that the RIAA can bribe politicians make it wrong?
When the public disagrees with a bad law and the politicians are listening to their 0wN3rz, not the public, the law gets no respect and gets broken at every possible opportunity. This reduces respect for politicians and law in general, which in the current political climate, is probably healthy.
So the RIAA at last is going after end users en masse.
As parents see their kids getting sued and going to jail for doing with a computer what they used to do with a cassette recorder and analog tapes, this will erode public support for RIAA 0wn3d politicians.
As the RIAA attacks more and more of the people who truly love music, people are going to stop buying CDs as a political act.
We all knew that sooner or later, the RIAA would piss off enough people with their tactics so that we'd see successful organized boycotts of major record labels. A lot of us have been waiting for the major labels to go down.
Looks like the RIAA got tired of waiting. Will suing a few hundred people all over the country do it? Who knows? But enough of this will make people start pushing back.
It appears the RIAA is going to keep on pushing until the public stomps them.
Nobody hassles making MP3s available for P2P unless they really love music. So the industry is attacking customers so dedicated that they'll save the record companies money by making their promo material (and make no mistake, a 128K MP3 is broadcast quality, the same stuff RIAA labels pay to get played on FM radio is promo) availalble on their own dime.
So it's win-win; promotion of major label music gets reduced, plenty of people carry through on their promises never to buy major labels again, and the more terror the RIAA uses, the more people get turned off.
Do those fuckheads really think they can frighten people into buying CDs?
It's like Hatch speaking for the RIAA saying he wants them to have the power to destroy computers at random (english translation of his statement... we know that there is NO way to limit damage to "guilty computer users" even if he doesn't and the RIAA doesn't care.
So anybody who wants the major labels to finally retire permanently to the tarpits they've been plainly heading towards for the last 10 years... should greet this news with amusement.
What's the moral difference between recording to analog cassette off the radio which is explicitly legal and recording to MP3 format? What's the moral differnce between tape swapping and file swapping?--
I think it would be the scale. KaZAA has how many users?
Every single user expands the effectiveness of the record company's marketing program, assuming they aren't trying to market total shit. Every single downloader is a potential customer for the CD. It's like waking up one morning as someone managing payola and suddenly finding that the radio stations one has paid over cash to market suddenly all got bigger transmitters and more listeners, at no extra charge. Especially if the purchase of a CD gets the user things one can't get off Kazaa. Special "members-only areas on Websites with interviews and streaming videos, extra tracks, stuff that's cool if one likes the band. Remember, Internet marketing has been tried by both major label bands and indies and it works.
--Perhaps your RIAA propaganda has an answer for that. Hint: Don't try "perfect digital copy" bullshit here, you can't do that with 128K MP3 which is basically broadcast quality when ripped if everything goes right. Analog information gets lost when a 50 meg file is compressed to about 5 megs. If you were into music, maybe you'd know the difference. The difference is why people buy CDs instead of MP3s.--
Agreed, but most songs
Most?
can be had at a higher bit rate than that. Eventually 50 megs/gigs will not be a barrier.
Or 20-30, which can be done with lossless codecs.
For me, CD-quality is the product. As I said, I regard broadcast quality as promotional giveaway. If someone's uploading CD-quality rips, as far as I'm concerned, we're out of "fair usage" and into ripping everyone connected with the record off, just as giving away or selling physical CD bit-copies of a CD en masse is. A copy or two between friends is one thing, but the equivalent of X-thousand copies isn't cool.
I like watermarking a serial number into each CD as an answer. If a 20-100 meg rip of an audio CD shows up, the watermark can be used to trace it down to who did it.
I think that there should be mandatory licensing on broadcast quality MP3 or successor formats, anyone using them for profit should have to pay the same royalty as is currently paid when radio stations play back MP3s on the air using the same mechanisms as is used to collect royalties now. (MP3 basically the universal radio station automation audio format)
--What's the moral difference between recording to analog cassette off the radio which is explicitly legal and recording to MP3 format? What's the moral differnce between tape swapping and file swapping?--
Again the scale. To me the artist should get paid, but this in fact does not happen 99% of the time because they have signed over their rights to a middle man.
Read the Janis Ian and Courtney Love interviews for the details.
I think the RIAA and maybe to a lesser extent the MPAA is concerned about loosing their distribution.
Make that "exclusive control of distribution". While the MPAA companies are doing fine due to a fairly priced product, what happens to them when an aspiring Spielberg or Lucas decides that he wants to make movies on his desktop and the technology is really there to do it? And decides that he wants to market direct to consumer and upload to theaters? What happens when one really can do Hollywood-scale movies on a shoestring? They've got about 5 years to make this impossible, by interfering with technological development or making its use by individuals illegal.
It's just a matter of time and bandwidth really. Artist could make and sell their own CD's. Of
I'm working with an artist that does. We figure we can do what others have done, make a pretty good living off tourin
Unfortunately, because these users are so young, they do not have the moral upbringing to realize that copyright violation is stealing.
"Moral upbringing" is irrelevant, because there's no question of morality involved.
What's the moral difference between recording to analog cassette off the radio which is explicitly legal and recording to MP3 format? What's the moral differnce between tape swapping and file swapping?
Perhaps your RIAA propaganda has an answer for that. Hint: Don't try "perfect digital copy" bullshit here, you can't do that with 128K MP3 which is basically broadcast quality when ripped if everything goes right. Analog information gets lost when a 50 meg file is compressed to about 5 megs. If you were into music, maybe you'd know the difference. The difference is why people buy CDs instead of MP3s.
Most parents are of a generation that grew up recording off the radio to reel-to-reel and later casettes. They are NOT teaching kids that the slightly modernized version of what we did when we were kids is wrong, because they don't see any moral difference.
That's because there isn't any, and not all the RIAA propaganda in the world, not even that parroted here by "useful fools" and people on the RIAA payroll will cause anybody who understands the issues to see a difference.
Why have record companies paid radio stations to play back their materials for generations despite the fact that people will STEAL IT!!!? Because the only value a broadcast-quality audio track has is to promote the actual product, which is a CD album, and nobody will buy the product outside of RIAA label suit fantasies. So the record labels give away free reduced quality samples to induce people to buy the product.
Why aren't the labels thrilled to distribute their promos via P2P and Internet Radio on the dime of the listener?
They have no control over distribution, everything that hits the network has a chance that people will listen to it and buy the CD. Whether the track comes from a bedroom studio or the latest "hot new discovery" (aka n'Sync clone). And they don't have enough confidence in their ability to do a better job of making stuff people will want to hear than a no-budget indie to tolerate a level playing field.
The only difference between "stealing" via digital and legitimate tape swapping is simply that the RIAA paid to get digital recording by end users without DRM illegal back in 1992. (Audio Home Recording Act)
So leave off with the moral bullshit, the RIAA bought the law fair and square and now are openly discussing getting cyberterrorism (you want to explain how "destroying user computers" can be called anything else?) to attempt to enforce the law.
As to why CD sales are dropping, there are lots of reasons starting with the fact that fewer CDs are distributed per album, the market is fractionating into niches too small for record labels to exploit via FM radio (know how many kinds of metal there are?), the economy, etc.
P2P isn't one of the reasons. It's just another promo distribution channel. If people hear tracks they really like on P2P, they'll go buy the CD because it sounds better.
Ask Eminem. His album was prereleased via P2P and went straight to #1... notice he isn't whining about P2P cutting into his sales.
I suspect Eminem himself pre-released it. . . being smarter than the people he and perhaps you work for.
Madonna cut a track whining about EVIL PIRATES and got that into P2P channels. Her album went into the toilet and her career is following it.
As a published writer, I don't favor copyright violation. However, I don't favor making xerox machines and PCs illegal to keep my stuff from getting copied, either. I just get pissed if it gets resold. People copying it for their own use... unlike you, I get the concept of fair use.
But to make this possible, you in the consumer electronics industry are going to have to come up with the political lobbying money and organize political action to break the political power of the Hollywood entertainment cartel to do this.
Yes, I mean break into corporate petty cash accounts to make outspending Hollywood 10 to one possible.
Most people don't appreciate just how much bigger the consumer technology industry is than the Hollywood cartel... the few that do wonder why you guys let Hollywood dictate the terms of what technology can be safely deployed in America and the part of the world it dominates via its paid mouthpieces in Congress.
It isn't like they have anything to offer you guys, even if they were willing to offer all their content via a DRM that would make them happy (i.e. almost useless to consumers), the Internet infrastructure is inadequate for delivering movies on demand to everyone everywhere anyway.
If and only if this bill finds a Congressional sponsor to introduce this. Which is extremely unlikely, but possible, I suppose.
However, business from WalMart on down will unite to fight any restriction or product labeling requirements.
Remember, there are people who want a Minority Report style future. There are others who simply see it as a way to make money... there are people who see "You wear adult diapers? We have Depends on sale" as simply an opportunity to make money.
It is the job of your Congressperson to make sure that his consituents are served. His constituents are the people who send him checks and only those people.
And if your RFID tag gets missed at checkout, it'll be your word against the store's that it's their fault. Enjoy your stay in jail.
Note: the 12% number isn't generally applicable, in most cases, artist = songwriter, the 8% mechanical royalty goes to them, too. So it's 20% on a product that does not add to their costs or hassles, Apple handles credit card billing, chargebacks, store setup and bandwidth. Their promo might add an extra line in a Web or print add mentioning iTunes. Incremental cost. . . practically zero. It's all gravy.
As we and they know, most albums have one or two good songs, the rest is filler. If people can buy the good songs, a lot of people who might not buy a $20 album will buy the 99 cent single they really want.
In any case, the people on the site will be using the streaming audio to review songs on records for possible purchase with Apple paying for bandwidth. Perhaps instead of buying via iTunes, they'll go to their record stores instead... kaching!
When they listen to it over and over enough to want better quality than improved 128K MP3, in many cases, the users will buy the physical CDs.
While Madonna, Jewel and Green Day are products of the old pre-Internet promo scene and have excuses (inertia and stupidity) for not knowing this, Linkin Park, Radiohead used the Net to build their careers. They never hesitated in the past to release MP3 singles in the past to promote on the listener's dime, maybe they think they're so big they don't need promo other than radio airplay anymore.
Maybe they finally decided that they're big enough to take advice from the conventional-minded fuckwits who advise the major labels and who are running them and their labels straight into the ground.
The indie musician I'm working with and I want to get our music onto iTunes and hoping the CDBaby deal works out to make this possible.
We are hoping this works out both in direct profits and helping us sell physical CDs, which will continue to have better sound than is possible from 128K compression in lossy formats like MP3 and the somewhat improved Apple format iTunes uses for distribution.
We're starting small and can't afford to be clueless fuckwits.
BTW, IMHO, the real reason for physical CD sales (let's face it, in most cases, you can download every track of a popular album via Kazaaa) is simply that... they sound better. While the average listener won't notice it consciously, there's a small, but significant difference between straignt digital recording and lossy compression using psychoacountic masking to hide compression artifacts to keep filesizes down to reasonable downloads... and that difference might not be noticeable on the first play... but the 20th or 30th, you'll decide it's time to "support the artist" and haul ass to your record store and buy the CD, which will take full advantage of your sound system.
Eminem's latest album was "accidentally" prereleased to P2P about a month in advance.
(Personally, I suspect that the guy who uploaded it was named Marshall Mathers, taking a page out of the Radiohead playbook and figuring it would make him lots of money and piss off his label - while I'm not that fond of his music, looks like win-win to me) The record supported by lots of Internet-created buzz went straight to #1.
Google on:
Radiohead "Internet promotion".
Lots of bands doing this now, even a few major label bands officially or unofficially.
Why?
Outside RIAA major label executive fantasies, nobody buys an album on without hearing something off it first.
That's why they pay radio stations to play their musicians.
The Internet works just as well for this as playing it on FM radio. The difference being that everybody has access to the Net, and the music industry doesn't like the idea that just anybody has a chance to get to the ears of millions of people.
So they bought politicians to get digital file swapping on the Net treated as a crime while trading cassette tapes made off the label is legal.
Smart bands and musicians with major label backing are bypassing their bosses and using the Internet to unofficially leverage their existing publicity channels... using the Net to create buzz that'll cause Net-connected people to tell their unwired friends about it. Multiply by millions and one has another platinum record.
Madonna is whining about it instead and is wondering what the fuck happened to her career. Must suck to be as young as she is and already obsolete and irrelevant.
Smart indie bands are taking advantage of the Net for promotion, selling records without record stores, and hopefully, selling through iTunes soon.
Hopefully, the CDbaby deal with iTunes will go through and anybody will be able to get onto it, I work with an indie musician now and we don't mind at all getting 12 cents + the 8 cent mechanical royalties per download out of a dollar, we don't have to pay for the bandwidth, we don't have to worry about getting a merchant credit card account, and any chargebacks are on Apple's dime. What's not to like?
Of course, we have to do our own promotion to get people to buy it, but that's the tradeoff for not going with a major label. The upside is being able to do one's own music, not what the label dictates, and keeping ALL the profits, not the "artists" share after Hollywood-style accounting and paying off a massive loan that's spent not by our, but at the record company's discretion.
Even if she only sells 10% as much music as she would with the help of a major label, she still makes more money and hopefully, better music.
The only people who are getting shot in the foot by P2P are the major label people who are afraid the can't compete on the level playing field they call the Internet, with the collateral damage being the record stores who depend on the major labels for product.
The shape of a new record industry is beginning to take form. If the laws bought by the *AA organizations kill it here, this means that the new industry will happen someplace else and we'll be getting not only our tech, but all the cool new music from places Hollywood doesn't OwN the politicians of.
An intelligent parasite knows when to slow before it kills its host. Hollywood is using its political influence to take over the development of high tech in the US and in as much of the world as it can get its tentacles into.
These are the same people who said that the VCR will kill the movie industry and who spent years trying to figure out how to keep the RIAA website running.
In other words, they are clueless fuckheads who make the '90s wave of vulture capitalists look like geniuses, and any high-tech economy they get to run, they will utterly destroy. They can't even figure out how to keep their own products selling, what makes you think they can pick winners in high-tech?
Hopefully, in the unlikely event that you work in high tech (as a janitor, maybe?), your job will go down with it.
You obviously like the idea of living in an economy where high-tech is something that one buys in shrink-wrapped boxes developed in India and China and made in Taiwan.
By the time you figure out how bad this is going to be, you'll be back with your own mommy and daddy... if they can afford to keep you. Of course, if you're as obnoxious in person as you are here, they might enjoy the thought of you eating out of garbage cans and sleeping in dumpsters.
If a professionally organized/managed PAC composed of a large part of the high-tech community had been put together a year or so ago, we'd be seriously discussing the campaign to repeal the DMCA right now.
Professional because nobody who has the competence and the skills and the background required to put this together works for free, and we really can't expect people to work full-time and overtime for no money indefinitely. We've hit the wall with volunteer, part-time "geek activism".
The price of freedom now is the willingness to pay the people capable of doing political activism in a way that will make politicians do what WE want them to do.
Even in the current FUBARed state of the economy, we could still raise enough in $5/20/100 contributions to buy most of the elected officials Hollywood thinks it 0wNz and defeat the majority of politicians honest enough to stay bought.
The AARP and NRA have done a hell of a lot for their members with organizations of comparable size to the population of serious computer users and lower per-capita income. So if we had a real PAC, we'd be carpet-bombing Hollywood and "rip, mix, and burn" would be a campaign slogan used by any politician who wants to stay in office.
Well, the chance to do this cheaply has come and gone. If somebody or a small group had come forward with $1M a year ago, the Federal and state-level paperwork required to raise and spend money for candidates would have been done a few months ago and those of us (hopefully, everyone on slashdot and a whole lot of people outside the community who want to "rip, mix, and burn" as well) on the mailing list would be sending the PAC our $5/10/100 contributions. The $1M just covers the professional staff and the infrastructure, the real money would come from us, and probably from any consumer electronics vendor who's had it with being pushed around by Hollywood. And the volunteer hours required to multiply the efforts of the full-time core staff would come from us... which is fair enough.
I'm fairly sure there would be some corporate money, there are a lot of people waiting for someone to answer the question:
"Where do you want to go today?"
"To war! Hollywood is that way, what are we waiting for?"
The PAC would be aggregating our contributions into checks big enough to make politicians sit up and take notice, and buying enough media time to make the mass media treat us with respect.
Well, nobody with the megabuck came across. Now, any filing date that hasn't come and gone is going to be horrendously expensive to pay people to prepare the paperwork and possibly, buy enough political influence to make late filings possible.
Can it be done at any price in time to affect the 2004 election? I really don't know. My guess is that the price of entry has gone up to $2-5M.
The odds that anyone would be willing to do this now are slim enough that it's more rational to figure out how to afford to get out of the US than to check into 51 filing deadlines and how tightly they are nailed down and which ones we could afford to miss.
Anyone who can afford to do this isn't going to contribute to any "political effort" that isn't tax-deductible. When they find out that the laws have changed to the point that any research worth doing in consumer tech has to be outsourced offshore because the research can't legally be done here, it's simply going to be too late.
But what the hell, it's cheaper to pay $1/hour to Indian and Chinese programmers and engineers and surely, some way can be come up with to dumb the tech down far enough so it can be sold in the US, right? Who cares if the R&D and production jobs are all offshore if the people who made their money off the high-tech boom and managed to keep it can continue to profit?
The vendor community is still doing "deer in the headlights" thing, hypnotized with Hollywood smoke and mirrors into believing that Real Soon Now, if the vendor commmunty gives
Nice to see that digital file-sharing, i.e. the digital version of analog tape-swapping which *is* legal is just as important as kidnapping, bank robbery, and terrorism.
Will not paying parking tickets also become a Federal crime next?
Do politicians have a clue as to why they don't have the public's respect anymore?
Perhaps they've proven they don't deserve it.
Just think. If anyone had come forward last year to put up the startup money for a professionally run high-tech PAC to represent us to Congress, we'd be talking this year about getting the votes together to get rid of the DMCA and any politician stupid enough to refuse to cooperate with us.
"People always get the local government they deserve." E.E. "Doc" Smith
This is as a grim a comment about US geeks (and the ones who aren't doing anything about anti-tech political action in the EU) as can be made.
Ever looked at a schematic for a car's electrical system or tried to troubleshoot using one?
A network environment where every electrical component's connections are power and ground from wherever convenient and data via internal LAN will be cheaper, less complex, more reliable, and a lot easier for any of us to troubleshoot. Or to make remote troubleshooting via wireless Net connect to the manufacturer possible. Wouldn't you rather find out that your brakes will be failing shortly via e-mail from your car vendor's customer service than from experience?
With respect to a microwave network connection, you are familiar with the "smart kitchen" concepts and technology? The networked refrigerator is already off the shelf.
Being able to plug your MP3 player into any free Ethernet jack might make it easier to move MP3s to the player from anywhere on the network
While I agree that things should be as simple as possible for the intended functionality, there are lots of unexpected places where network connections make sense.
You must be. Copyrights don't have to be registered. I own my own words and you own yours, though I really don't see why you'd want to own yours. Though registering your copyright if you plan commercial use is a good idea, and you can go to The US Copyright Office and find out how.
I'm not surprised that you don't know this, given the improbablility that you'll ever come up with anything that remotely looks commercially valuable, there's no reason why you should.
I know IP (that's Intellectual Property in this context, not Internet Protocol) law a bit better than you, I've filed patent apps on two technology-related patents and I'm also published writer on computers and the Net. This means that people pay for what I write on occasion.
Who knows, study and learn and maybe you'll think of a business method patent you can slip by a patent examiner who isn't paying attention someday.
and she is dumb if she doesn't, then the RIAA can't attack your friends for hosting her.
There's a real world out there. In that world, scanbots search sites looking for.mp3s with names resembling that of songs belonging to RIAA member labels, and bots send DMCA takedown notices to ISPs. Your choices if you find your site or account unplugged are to remove your content or be willing to hire a lawyer to represent you in Federal Court. It is not required that a DMCA takedown notice be fair or reasonable.
Why don't you read up on how the DMCA is applied by corporations against individuals in the real world before you expose your abject ignorance any further? Of course, this might puncture your delusion that corporations can do no wrong, and I doubt even having your college money tied up in Enron stocks would have taught you better.
commies like the people who would argue with me
You think anyone who disagrees with you is a communist?
Just what kind of nut are you?
Note: there are several statutes that have to do with copyright law. Perhaps you should look the other ones up if you can count to several on your fingers. Though 1, 2, 'many' might be close enough to your purposes.
As for fair use:
United States Public Law 102-563
Audio Home Recording Act of 1992
SUBCHAPTER D. PROHIBITION ON CERTAIN INFRINGEMENT ACTIONS, REMEDIES, AND ARBITRATION
Section 1008. Prohibition on certain infringement actions:
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.
Elsewhere in the text of the law is how digital audio recording is treated differently, and the DMCA expands on this further.
The difference between recording off the radio to analog tape (legal) and recording to disk (illegal) is because the *AA organizations per$uaded Congress to make the difference using this as the original law in the area. In the recent debate between an RIAA attorney and Lessig, the RIAA attorney correctly identified this. Is everybody wrong except you? Or are you getting your info from Rush Limbaugh?
If you know how to use google, find the cite yourself.
I don't have to use a "straw man" in arguing with you, you are one. Why don't you run along and play with matches?
This is as much time as I can conveniently waste on someone ineducable. The waste of taxpayer funds on educating you might be worth getting concerned about, but there are bigger things to worry about than some pissant born-again right-wing GOP crazy who managed to get promoted off the short bus you were taking in high school. Tardbashing is fun, but it gets old after a while. I've wrung as much entertainment value as you have out of you.
Say something stupid later and maybe I'll take another poke at you.
Hatch knew exactly what he was saying yesterday. He had at least $175,322 reasons to say that. Probably a lot more, many of the dollars from the "Law/Law firms" category was from lawyers donating on behalf of their clients in the entertainment industry.
Hatch was trying to play "good cop" today against his "bad cop" role yesterday. He's now telling us "We won't destroy your computers if you only do what my masters at the *AA organizations tell you."
This is crude blackmail and deserves all the negative publicity, fair or unfair that can be used to embarass him.
Of course, what's really needed here is a high-tech vendor community willing to stand up to an entertainment industry 1/10 it's size and say:
"We can outspend what you're paying for politicians by a factor of 10 out of petty cash until hell freezes over. Our lobbyists start today. The ads attacking any of your polticians that stay bought by you start running in 10 days.
Rip, mix and burn is going to be the law of the land and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it except hope we let you keep your golden parachutes when we buy your company at 5 cents on the dollar next year."
Of course, if a real high-tech community PAC with $1M or so of startup funding had been put together by last year, we wouldn't need to be hoping the high-tech vendors finally grow a backbone, our people would instead be talking to Congress about rolling back the DMCA.
Of course, this would require the high-tech community to give uo our perverse fascination with political voluntarism and our collective demand that any money given to activism must also be tax-deductible, and for those of us who managed to make a fortune during the dot.com boom and kept it to be willing to part with $1M startup funding to make it work.
In other words, it means that some of us would have to be willing to do more than whine on slashdot. Worse, some of us would have to put in some real money in something that isn't going to bring in megaprofits in 5 years, but might make it possible for all of us to work on advanced technology in the Western World in 5 years.
You know and I know that that's not happening, either.
At this point, I think our best hope is that the *AA organizations get what they ask for. What happens if they fry 1,000,000 computers in the course of the most interesting hour of Net time since it got started? How many will be badly secured VIP home computers?
They fry the wrong 1,000 computers and "immunity" or not, the major label CEOs can't run far enough, fast enough, of long enough to escape the consequences.
For instance, what if a dozen Fortune 50 CEOs have to use their cell phones to call their lawyers from home because their computers and their e-mail isn't working only find out that the RIAA and the label CEOs and the black hats immune to lawsuits because Congress made them that way? How do you punish a billion dollar company if you run a $100B company? What if you want to punish some Congresscritters?
Only works if somebody is paying someone at the other end of the local loop for the dial tone. If you move into a place that's been vacant for a few months and the landlord didn't decide to pick up the tab for access, don't expect dial tone.
What kind of music will you be listening to when Radiohead has to work the day shift at the 7-11 just to make ends meat?
Next time, get all of the facts from your bosses before posting. Had you ever heard of Radiohead before getting your assignment?
Radiohead is a case study in the use of Internet promotion: Radiohead's honour follows the group's decision to ditch traditional marketing methods for their recent album Kid A in favour of internet promotion.
Radiohead is a long-standing Internet success story, and if they'd listened to your friends, they'd be making a hell of a lot less money today.
An increasing number of artists have found that distribution of MP3s via Internet Radio and the networkss your OwN3rZ want to get rid of plus touring and direct sale of CDs at gigs and via the Net is a perfectly reasonable way to make a living. One has to sell a lot less records to make a living when one is getting 90% of the gross profit off a $10 CD than 1% of a $20 CD. Search for Janis Ian on slashdot. She's been making records longer than you've probably been alive. Find out if she thinks the record industry protects the rights of musicians.
With respect to your. . . interesting interpretation of copyright law, was your omission of any mention of "fair use" in your post deliberate, or left out of the RIAA propaganda you obviously based your post on.
Speaking as a published writer, I certainly support reasonable copyright protection. I don't need my copyright extended to 50 or 75 or 1000 years after my death. I don't want anyone to destroy computers by the millions to "protect" my work. I don't want protecting my work to come at the price of eventually forcing consumer electronics development to move out of the US and if EU follows the US lead as it seems to be doing, following software development to India and China. If someone xeroxes a copy of one of my print articles at a public library, I don't want any of your buddies to burn down the library to "protect" my copyright.
Oh, BTW, I'm working with an independent musician now. I can't find any friends willing to host her work for P2P networks because they're afraid of attack by the people who you are being a paid or unpaid mouthpiece for. So promoting her outside the RIAA framework is more difficult. Tell your bosses "Thanks, assholes"...
I don't know if you are on the RIAA payroll or not. You certainly parrot their party line perfectly.
However, since you do such a good job of playing a mouthpiece for RIAA viewpoints, if you aren't getting paid by them, you're awfully stupid. Go to their site and apply for a job. Use your post as proof that you're good at spreading "the good word" in a hostile forum.
Perhaps there are even a few people stupid enough to believe you.
Statements like that are made in the hope that the consumer electronics industry and the high-tech community can be crudely blackmailed by threat of insane government action into doing what we are told. That is part of what the *AA organizations are buying from him.
The computers Hatch seeks to destroy (everybody's, does anyone think these attacks can only be limited to the 'right') boxes are a fuck of a lot more important to the economy than the entertainment industry is. Though unless the entertainment industry stops using computers, they're theoretically at the same risk the rest of us are, but their arrogance with respect to technology means that their real risks are much higher.
What happens when they wipe out computers belonging to traders at the New York Stock Exchange? Investment bankers? White House? Congress itself? Department of Defense? *AA major label computers? The WETA renderfarm? What makes anyone think that the damage will be limited to the USA?
Everybody who voted to legalize black-hat bullshit is going to be in seriously deep shit. Guess who they are going to try to unload the blame on? Guess what the Congressional hearings investigating the *AA members and the *AAs themselves will look like?
No matter how good immunity provisions are protecting *AA and its scr1pt k1dd13z, the best legal minds in America will be working 24/7 to figure out how to bypass the provisions to make it possible to file both civil suits and criminal charges against corporations and individually against corporate officers... and these corporate officers won't be going to country-club prisons. They're going into cells along with people named "Bubba". Perhaps they can be found in violation of RICO and the Patriot Act. While the PATRIOT Act is an abomination, something tells me that if the *AA label CEOs suddenly find themselves in Guantanamo Bay, even their own attorneys won't be lifting a finger to defend them. If they have any sense, they'll be looking for places they can't be legally extradited from.
A recent estimate says that there are 43,000,000 file traders. Even if they miraculously only limit the damage to the "guilty", some of those machines are going to be critical to somebody bigger than the *AA organizations, their member labels, or their owners.
So they ratfuck only 10,000,000 computers, some "innocent", some loaded with MP3s ripped by the legal owners of the CDs, some with MP3s of non-*AA content? The aggregate value of the data is going to be far above the current net worth of the labels combined. I don't actually expect damage to be this bad, I think any netblock RIAA black hats work out of will be disconnected by their upstream providers *quickly*.
It's time for the major players in the *AA organizations to go down.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that Micro$loth is on the top of the list of donors.
If you actually believe that a letter from you and a letter from Microsoft have the same weight in determining how Senator McCain votes on any specific issue, you're as clueless as the rest of your post shows you as.
The fact that you got moderated up to 5 is a demonstration of why I expect the US high-tech community to lose its freedom to create in the long run and why the laws Hollywood wants, it's going to get. Geeks think of themselves as "above" the political process, and more importantly, above bothering to find out how it works. They actually take your ideas pulled out of some half-assed memory of a high school civics class seriously
Ask the guy at MS who wrote the check to McCain, "populist hero". He knows how the process works.
You obviously don't.
This bill actually has a chance to pass, as Hollywood needs a way to strip-mine the public domain, too, and it enables the content industry to keep anything with possible commercial value while work of anybody else goes into the public domain, for our use, and theirs.
Note the name of the sponsors. They aren't exactly known for being our friends.
Not necessarily exact information, but at least ballpark information to find out if it would fit into the budget.
The ones that didn't have the pricing info on the site never found their way into my research report.
I've been doing journalism the last few years, often with the same kind of hours.
Guess what doesn't make it into my articles?
Somehow, I feel that my employers, clients, and readers haven't missed a damn thing with respect to the companies that wasted my time often frantically looking for info on their site because they figured that I needed a salesperson pressuring me along with the pricing info I actually wanted. Companies willing to waste the time of people checking their sites and their salespeople's time on non-qualified buyers simply aren't worth the hassle of dealing with.
I don't see why the EFF and similar groups can't 'invest' in a few reelection campaigns. The business model is established by numerous corporations and special interest groups - all it would take are funds. In fact the same applies to all progressive social and political groups... how come the bad guys are smart enough to heavily influence politics with their money but the good guys aren't?
BECAUSE THEY CAN'T!!!
Non profit 503(c)3 "educational" organizations can't spend a single dollar on political campaigns. That's the tradeoff you get for knowing your contributions from them are tax-deductible.
The ONLY kind of organization that can raise money from the public
That's why EFF, Public Citizen, etc. can only wring their hands when shit like the DMCA passes. All they can do is beg and plead with Congresscritters for mercy. They get polite treatment. The people with the checks get results.
No, the major corporations don't always get their own way on the Hill. It is possible for people's organizations to get enough money from people in $5 and $10 and $20 and $100 contributions and disburse them in $1000 and $5000 and $10,000 checks, to hire full-time staff to analyze new laws so the members don't get blindsided, to hire lobbyists, to hire staff to open envelopes. And they can and do run political campaigns against people who persist in not getting the message.
The existence proofs are the NRA and the AARP. They are professionally run, they raise money, they represent their membership effectively.
What's the bottom line for us? A small group of people come up with a couple or 3 million dollars they don't expect to be tax deductible. Not to give to politicians, to hire top-bracket pros to build the fund-raising infrastructure to make it possible to raise money from us in $5 and $10 and $20 and $100 contributions to make meaningful contributions.
American high-tech types have the following choices:
- learn to bend over and take it with a smile and practice "Would you like fries with that?"
- Get it together and start doing the PAC stuff right fucking now.
- get ready to leave the US permanently for places outside the reach of Hollywood cartel-owned politicians.
- Hope the RIAA member labels go bankrupt before they do any more serious damage to the high-tech scene.
But without the startup money, this goes noplace. If nobody's willing to come forward with the price of freedom while it can still be paid in dollars, the only solutions to this problem are individual... figuring how to get out from under.Nobody's going to come forward with the startup money.
The people who can are under the delusion that the Hollywood cartel can be negotiated with, and after they come up with consumer devices that'll make Hollywood happy but that nobody will buy because they're DRM-broken to uselessness, Hollywood will make all their content available for pay-per-download for everybody that the Internet infrastructure can't support, and we'll all march off to a future of infinite profits.
I'm looking for . . . an individual solution.
What's the difference?
The RIAA started buying politicians in the early 1990s to pass the Audio Home Recording Act to make digital downloading illegal.
Does this mean there's a moral difference?
Of course not. The rational response to this would have been to extend mandatory licensing and "fair use" for individuals of the sort that made the RIAA labels into a mulitbillion dollar business into the digital/Internet domain.
Downloading is still illegal. But does the fact that the RIAA can bribe politicians make it wrong?
When the public disagrees with a bad law and the politicians are listening to their 0wN3rz, not the public, the law gets no respect and gets broken at every possible opportunity. This reduces respect for politicians and law in general, which in the current political climate, is probably healthy.
So the RIAA at last is going after end users en masse.
As parents see their kids getting sued and going to jail for doing with a computer what they used to do with a cassette recorder and analog tapes, this will erode public support for RIAA 0wn3d politicians.
As the RIAA attacks more and more of the people who truly love music, people are going to stop buying CDs as a political act.
We all knew that sooner or later, the RIAA would piss off enough people with their tactics so that we'd see successful organized boycotts of major record labels. A lot of us have been waiting for the major labels to go down.
Looks like the RIAA got tired of waiting. Will suing a few hundred people all over the country do it? Who knows? But enough of this will make people start pushing back.
It appears the RIAA is going to keep on pushing until the public stomps them.
Let the games begin.
So it's win-win; promotion of major label music gets reduced, plenty of people carry through on their promises never to buy major labels again, and the more terror the RIAA uses, the more people get turned off.
Do those fuckheads really think they can frighten people into buying CDs?
It's like Hatch speaking for the RIAA saying he wants them to have the power to destroy computers at random (english translation of his statement... we know that there is NO way to limit damage to "guilty computer users" even if he doesn't and the RIAA doesn't care.
So anybody who wants the major labels to finally retire permanently to the tarpits they've been plainly heading towards for the last 10 years... should greet this news with amusement.
I think it would be the scale. KaZAA has how many users?
Every single user expands the effectiveness of the record company's marketing program, assuming they aren't trying to market total shit. Every single downloader is a potential customer for the CD. It's like waking up one morning as someone managing payola and suddenly finding that the radio stations one has paid over cash to market suddenly all got bigger transmitters and more listeners, at no extra charge. Especially if the purchase of a CD gets the user things one can't get off Kazaa. Special "members-only areas on Websites with interviews and streaming videos, extra tracks, stuff that's cool if one likes the band. Remember, Internet marketing has been tried by both major label bands and indies and it works.
Agreed, but most songs
Most?
can be had at a higher bit rate than that. Eventually 50 megs/gigs will not be a barrier. Or 20-30, which can be done with lossless codecs.
For me, CD-quality is the product. As I said, I regard broadcast quality as promotional giveaway. If someone's uploading CD-quality rips, as far as I'm concerned, we're out of "fair usage" and into ripping everyone connected with the record off, just as giving away or selling physical CD bit-copies of a CD en masse is. A copy or two between friends is one thing, but the equivalent of X-thousand copies isn't cool.
I like watermarking a serial number into each CD as an answer. If a 20-100 meg rip of an audio CD shows up, the watermark can be used to trace it down to who did it.
I think that there should be mandatory licensing on broadcast quality MP3 or successor formats, anyone using them for profit should have to pay the same royalty as is currently paid when radio stations play back MP3s on the air using the same mechanisms as is used to collect royalties now. (MP3 basically the universal radio station automation audio format)
Again the scale. To me the artist should get paid, but this in fact does not happen 99% of the time because they have signed over their rights to a middle man.
Read the Janis Ian and Courtney Love interviews for the details.
I think the RIAA and maybe to a lesser extent the MPAA is concerned about loosing their distribution.
Make that "exclusive control of distribution". While the MPAA companies are doing fine due to a fairly priced product, what happens to them when an aspiring Spielberg or Lucas decides that he wants to make movies on his desktop and the technology is really there to do it? And decides that he wants to market direct to consumer and upload to theaters? What happens when one really can do Hollywood-scale movies on a shoestring? They've got about 5 years to make this impossible, by interfering with technological development or making its use by individuals illegal.
It's just a matter of time and bandwidth really. Artist could make and sell their own CD's. Of
I'm working with an artist that does. We figure we can do what others have done, make a pretty good living off tourin
"Moral upbringing" is irrelevant, because there's no question of morality involved.
What's the moral difference between recording to analog cassette off the radio which is explicitly legal and recording to MP3 format? What's the moral differnce between tape swapping and file swapping?
Perhaps your RIAA propaganda has an answer for that. Hint: Don't try "perfect digital copy" bullshit here, you can't do that with 128K MP3 which is basically broadcast quality when ripped if everything goes right. Analog information gets lost when a 50 meg file is compressed to about 5 megs. If you were into music, maybe you'd know the difference. The difference is why people buy CDs instead of MP3s.
Most parents are of a generation that grew up recording off the radio to reel-to-reel and later casettes. They are NOT teaching kids that the slightly modernized version of what we did when we were kids is wrong, because they don't see any moral difference.
That's because there isn't any, and not all the RIAA propaganda in the world, not even that parroted here by "useful fools" and people on the RIAA payroll will cause anybody who understands the issues to see a difference.
Why have record companies paid radio stations to play back their materials for generations despite the fact that people will STEAL IT!!!? Because the only value a broadcast-quality audio track has is to promote the actual product, which is a CD album, and nobody will buy the product outside of RIAA label suit fantasies. So the record labels give away free reduced quality samples to induce people to buy the product.
Why aren't the labels thrilled to distribute their promos via P2P and Internet Radio on the dime of the listener?
They have no control over distribution, everything that hits the network has a chance that people will listen to it and buy the CD. Whether the track comes from a bedroom studio or the latest "hot new discovery" (aka n'Sync clone). And they don't have enough confidence in their ability to do a better job of making stuff people will want to hear than a no-budget indie to tolerate a level playing field.
The only difference between "stealing" via digital and legitimate tape swapping is simply that the RIAA paid to get digital recording by end users without DRM illegal back in 1992. (Audio Home Recording Act)
So leave off with the moral bullshit, the RIAA bought the law fair and square and now are openly discussing getting cyberterrorism (you want to explain how "destroying user computers" can be called anything else?) to attempt to enforce the law.
As to why CD sales are dropping, there are lots of reasons starting with the fact that fewer CDs are distributed per album, the market is fractionating into niches too small for record labels to exploit via FM radio (know how many kinds of metal there are?), the economy, etc.
P2P isn't one of the reasons. It's just another promo distribution channel. If people hear tracks they really like on P2P, they'll go buy the CD because it sounds better.
Ask Eminem. His album was prereleased via P2P and went straight to #1... notice he isn't whining about P2P cutting into his sales.
I suspect Eminem himself pre-released it. . . being smarter than the people he and perhaps you work for.
Madonna cut a track whining about EVIL PIRATES and got that into P2P channels. Her album went into the toilet and her career is following it.
As a published writer, I don't favor copyright violation. However, I don't favor making xerox machines and PCs illegal to keep my stuff from getting copied, either. I just get pissed if it gets resold. People copying it for their own use... unlike you, I get the concept of fair use.
Yes, I mean break into corporate petty cash accounts to make outspending Hollywood 10 to one possible.
Most people don't appreciate just how much bigger the consumer technology industry is than the Hollywood cartel... the few that do wonder why you guys let Hollywood dictate the terms of what technology can be safely deployed in America and the part of the world it dominates via its paid mouthpieces in Congress.
It isn't like they have anything to offer you guys, even if they were willing to offer all their content via a DRM that would make them happy (i.e. almost useless to consumers), the Internet infrastructure is inadequate for delivering movies on demand to everyone everywhere anyway.
However, business from WalMart on down will unite to fight any restriction or product labeling requirements.
Remember, there are people who want a Minority Report style future. There are others who simply see it as a way to make money... there are people who see "You wear adult diapers? We have Depends on sale" as simply an opportunity to make money.
It is the job of your Congressperson to make sure that his consituents are served. His constituents are the people who send him checks and only those people.
And if your RFID tag gets missed at checkout, it'll be your word against the store's that it's their fault. Enjoy your stay in jail.
Glad I could help.
Once they've read a few, hopefully they'll wonder just what else they're reading that ain't so.
Sounds like either you're got outstandingly fucked schools or we still haven't heard the worst news about the state of US public education.
You can't stick an enforcable EULA on an E-mail. Opening an e-mail doesn't create any contract with the sender.
As we and they know, most albums have one or two good songs, the rest is filler. If people can buy the good songs, a lot of people who might not buy a $20 album will buy the 99 cent single they really want.
In any case, the people on the site will be using the streaming audio to review songs on records for possible purchase with Apple paying for bandwidth. Perhaps instead of buying via iTunes, they'll go to their record stores instead... kaching!
When they listen to it over and over enough to want better quality than improved 128K MP3, in many cases, the users will buy the physical CDs.
While Madonna, Jewel and Green Day are products of the old pre-Internet promo scene and have excuses (inertia and stupidity) for not knowing this, Linkin Park, Radiohead used the Net to build their careers. They never hesitated in the past to release MP3 singles in the past to promote on the listener's dime, maybe they think they're so big they don't need promo other than radio airplay anymore.
Maybe they finally decided that they're big enough to take advice from the conventional-minded fuckwits who advise the major labels and who are running them and their labels straight into the ground.
The indie musician I'm working with and I want to get our music onto iTunes and hoping the CDBaby deal works out to make this possible.
We are hoping this works out both in direct profits and helping us sell physical CDs, which will continue to have better sound than is possible from 128K compression in lossy formats like MP3 and the somewhat improved Apple format iTunes uses for distribution.
We're starting small and can't afford to be clueless fuckwits.
BTW, IMHO, the real reason for physical CD sales (let's face it, in most cases, you can download every track of a popular album via Kazaaa) is simply that... they sound better. While the average listener won't notice it consciously, there's a small, but significant difference between straignt digital recording and lossy compression using psychoacountic masking to hide compression artifacts to keep filesizes down to reasonable downloads... and that difference might not be noticeable on the first play... but the 20th or 30th, you'll decide it's time to "support the artist" and haul ass to your record store and buy the CD, which will take full advantage of your sound system.
You missed something obvious.
Internet radio and P2P downloads are promotion.
Eminem's latest album was "accidentally" prereleased to P2P about a month in advance. (Personally, I suspect that the guy who uploaded it was named Marshall Mathers, taking a page out of the Radiohead playbook and figuring it would make him lots of money and piss off his label - while I'm not that fond of his music, looks like win-win to me) The record supported by lots of Internet-created buzz went straight to #1.
Google on:
Radiohead "Internet promotion".
Lots of bands doing this now, even a few major label bands officially or unofficially.
Why?
Outside RIAA major label executive fantasies, nobody buys an album on without hearing something off it first.
That's why they pay radio stations to play their musicians.
The Internet works just as well for this as playing it on FM radio. The difference being that everybody has access to the Net, and the music industry doesn't like the idea that just anybody has a chance to get to the ears of millions of people.
So they bought politicians to get digital file swapping on the Net treated as a crime while trading cassette tapes made off the label is legal.
Smart bands and musicians with major label backing are bypassing their bosses and using the Internet to unofficially leverage their existing publicity channels... using the Net to create buzz that'll cause Net-connected people to tell their unwired friends about it. Multiply by millions and one has another platinum record.
Madonna is whining about it instead and is wondering what the fuck happened to her career. Must suck to be as young as she is and already obsolete and irrelevant.
Smart indie bands are taking advantage of the Net for promotion, selling records without record stores, and hopefully, selling through iTunes soon.
Hopefully, the CDbaby deal with iTunes will go through and anybody will be able to get onto it, I work with an indie musician now and we don't mind at all getting 12 cents + the 8 cent mechanical royalties per download out of a dollar, we don't have to pay for the bandwidth, we don't have to worry about getting a merchant credit card account, and any chargebacks are on Apple's dime. What's not to like?
Of course, we have to do our own promotion to get people to buy it, but that's the tradeoff for not going with a major label. The upside is being able to do one's own music, not what the label dictates, and keeping ALL the profits, not the "artists" share after Hollywood-style accounting and paying off a massive loan that's spent not by our, but at the record company's discretion.
Even if she only sells 10% as much music as she would with the help of a major label, she still makes more money and hopefully, better music.
The only people who are getting shot in the foot by P2P are the major label people who are afraid the can't compete on the level playing field they call the Internet, with the collateral damage being the record stores who depend on the major labels for product.
The shape of a new record industry is beginning to take form. If the laws bought by the *AA organizations kill it here, this means that the new industry will happen someplace else and we'll be getting not only our tech, but all the cool new music from places Hollywood doesn't OwN the politicians of.
These are the same people who said that the VCR will kill the movie industry and who spent years trying to figure out how to keep the RIAA website running.
In other words, they are clueless fuckheads who make the '90s wave of vulture capitalists look like geniuses, and any high-tech economy they get to run, they will utterly destroy. They can't even figure out how to keep their own products selling, what makes you think they can pick winners in high-tech?
Hopefully, in the unlikely event that you work in high tech (as a janitor, maybe?), your job will go down with it.
You obviously like the idea of living in an economy where high-tech is something that one buys in shrink-wrapped boxes developed in India and China and made in Taiwan.
By the time you figure out how bad this is going to be, you'll be back with your own mommy and daddy... if they can afford to keep you. Of course, if you're as obnoxious in person as you are here, they might enjoy the thought of you eating out of garbage cans and sleeping in dumpsters.
Professional because nobody who has the competence and the skills and the background required to put this together works for free, and we really can't expect people to work full-time and overtime for no money indefinitely. We've hit the wall with volunteer, part-time "geek activism".
The price of freedom now is the willingness to pay the people capable of doing political activism in a way that will make politicians do what WE want them to do.
Even in the current FUBARed state of the economy, we could still raise enough in $5/20/100 contributions to buy most of the elected officials Hollywood thinks it 0wNz and defeat the majority of politicians honest enough to stay bought.
The AARP and NRA have done a hell of a lot for their members with organizations of comparable size to the population of serious computer users and lower per-capita income. So if we had a real PAC, we'd be carpet-bombing Hollywood and "rip, mix, and burn" would be a campaign slogan used by any politician who wants to stay in office.
Well, the chance to do this cheaply has come and gone. If somebody or a small group had come forward with $1M a year ago, the Federal and state-level paperwork required to raise and spend money for candidates would have been done a few months ago and those of us (hopefully, everyone on slashdot and a whole lot of people outside the community who want to "rip, mix, and burn" as well) on the mailing list would be sending the PAC our $5/10/100 contributions. The $1M just covers the professional staff and the infrastructure, the real money would come from us, and probably from any consumer electronics vendor who's had it with being pushed around by Hollywood. And the volunteer hours required to multiply the efforts of the full-time core staff would come from us... which is fair enough.
I'm fairly sure there would be some corporate money, there are a lot of people waiting for someone to answer the question:
"Where do you want to go today?"
"To war! Hollywood is that way, what are we waiting for?"
The PAC would be aggregating our contributions into checks big enough to make politicians sit up and take notice, and buying enough media time to make the mass media treat us with respect.
Well, nobody with the megabuck came across. Now, any filing date that hasn't come and gone is going to be horrendously expensive to pay people to prepare the paperwork and possibly, buy enough political influence to make late filings possible.
Can it be done at any price in time to affect the 2004 election? I really don't know. My guess is that the price of entry has gone up to $2-5M.
The odds that anyone would be willing to do this now are slim enough that it's more rational to figure out how to afford to get out of the US than to check into 51 filing deadlines and how tightly they are nailed down and which ones we could afford to miss.
Anyone who can afford to do this isn't going to contribute to any "political effort" that isn't tax-deductible. When they find out that the laws have changed to the point that any research worth doing in consumer tech has to be outsourced offshore because the research can't legally be done here, it's simply going to be too late.
But what the hell, it's cheaper to pay $1/hour to Indian and Chinese programmers and engineers and surely, some way can be come up with to dumb the tech down far enough so it can be sold in the US, right? Who cares if the R&D and production jobs are all offshore if the people who made their money off the high-tech boom and managed to keep it can continue to profit?
The vendor community is still doing "deer in the headlights" thing, hypnotized with Hollywood smoke and mirrors into believing that Real Soon Now, if the vendor commmunty gives
Will not paying parking tickets also become a Federal crime next?
Do politicians have a clue as to why they don't have the public's respect anymore?
Perhaps they've proven they don't deserve it.
Just think. If anyone had come forward last year to put up the startup money for a professionally run high-tech PAC to represent us to Congress, we'd be talking this year about getting the votes together to get rid of the DMCA and any politician stupid enough to refuse to cooperate with us.
"People always get the local government they deserve."
E.E. "Doc" Smith
This is as a grim a comment about US geeks (and the ones who aren't doing anything about anti-tech political action in the EU) as can be made.
A network environment where every electrical component's connections are power and ground from wherever convenient and data via internal LAN will be cheaper, less complex, more reliable, and a lot easier for any of us to troubleshoot. Or to make remote troubleshooting via wireless Net connect to the manufacturer possible. Wouldn't you rather find out that your brakes will be failing shortly via e-mail from your car vendor's customer service than from experience?
With respect to a microwave network connection, you are familiar with the "smart kitchen" concepts and technology? The networked refrigerator is already off the shelf.
Being able to plug your MP3 player into any free Ethernet jack might make it easier to move MP3s to the player from anywhere on the network
While I agree that things should be as simple as possible for the intended functionality, there are lots of unexpected places where network connections make sense.
And that's an excuse for being a drooling idiot?
You a liberal arts major?
If your indie artist owns her own copyrights,
You must be. Copyrights don't have to be registered. I own my own words and you own yours, though I really don't see why you'd want to own yours. Though registering your copyright if you plan commercial use is a good idea, and you can go to The US Copyright Office and find out how.
I'm not surprised that you don't know this, given the improbablility that you'll ever come up with anything that remotely looks commercially valuable, there's no reason why you should.
I know IP (that's Intellectual Property in this context, not Internet Protocol) law a bit better than you, I've filed patent apps on two technology-related patents and I'm also published writer on computers and the Net. This means that people pay for what I write on occasion.
Who knows, study and learn and maybe you'll think of a business method patent you can slip by a patent examiner who isn't paying attention someday.
and she is dumb if she doesn't, then the RIAA can't attack your friends for hosting her.
There's a real world out there. In that world, scanbots search sites looking for .mp3s with names resembling that of songs belonging to RIAA member labels, and bots send DMCA takedown notices to ISPs. Your choices if you find your site or account unplugged are to remove your content or be willing to hire a lawyer to represent you in Federal Court. It is not required that a DMCA takedown notice be fair or reasonable.
Why don't you read up on how the DMCA is applied by corporations against individuals in the real world before you expose your abject ignorance any further? Of course, this might puncture your delusion that corporations can do no wrong, and I doubt even having your college money tied up in Enron stocks would have taught you better.
commies like the people who would argue with me
You think anyone who disagrees with you is a communist?
Just what kind of nut are you?
Note: there are several statutes that have to do with copyright law. Perhaps you should look the other ones up if you can count to several on your fingers. Though 1, 2, 'many' might be close enough to your purposes.
As for fair use:
United States Public Law 102-563
Audio Home Recording Act of 1992
SUBCHAPTER D. PROHIBITION ON CERTAIN INFRINGEMENT ACTIONS, REMEDIES, AND ARBITRATION Section 1008. Prohibition on certain infringement actions:
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.
Elsewhere in the text of the law is how digital audio recording is treated differently, and the DMCA expands on this further.
The difference between recording off the radio to analog tape (legal) and recording to disk (illegal) is because the *AA organizations per$uaded Congress to make the difference using this as the original law in the area. In the recent debate between an RIAA attorney and Lessig, the RIAA attorney correctly identified this. Is everybody wrong except you? Or are you getting your info from Rush Limbaugh?
If you know how to use google, find the cite yourself.
I don't have to use a "straw man" in arguing with you, you are one. Why don't you run along and play with matches?
This is as much time as I can conveniently waste on someone ineducable. The waste of taxpayer funds on educating you might be worth getting concerned about, but there are bigger things to worry about than some pissant born-again right-wing GOP crazy who managed to get promoted off the short bus you were taking in high school. Tardbashing is fun, but it gets old after a while. I've wrung as much entertainment value as you have out of you.
Say something stupid later and maybe I'll take another poke at you.
Hatch was trying to play "good cop" today against his "bad cop" role yesterday. He's now telling us "We won't destroy your computers if you only do what my masters at the *AA organizations tell you."
This is crude blackmail and deserves all the negative publicity, fair or unfair that can be used to embarass him.
Of course, what's really needed here is a high-tech vendor community willing to stand up to an entertainment industry 1/10 it's size and say:
"We can outspend what you're paying for politicians by a factor of 10 out of petty cash until hell freezes over. Our lobbyists start today. The ads attacking any of your polticians that stay bought by you start running in 10 days.
Rip, mix and burn is going to be the law of the land and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it except hope we let you keep your golden parachutes when we buy your company at 5 cents on the dollar next year."
Of course, if a real high-tech community PAC with $1M or so of startup funding had been put together by last year, we wouldn't need to be hoping the high-tech vendors finally grow a backbone, our people would instead be talking to Congress about rolling back the DMCA.
Of course, this would require the high-tech community to give uo our perverse fascination with political voluntarism and our collective demand that any money given to activism must also be tax-deductible, and for those of us who managed to make a fortune during the dot.com boom and kept it to be willing to part with $1M startup funding to make it work.
In other words, it means that some of us would have to be willing to do more than whine on slashdot. Worse, some of us would have to put in some real money in something that isn't going to bring in megaprofits in 5 years, but might make it possible for all of us to work on advanced technology in the Western World in 5 years.
You know and I know that that's not happening, either.
At this point, I think our best hope is that the *AA organizations get what they ask for. What happens if they fry 1,000,000 computers in the course of the most interesting hour of Net time since it got started? How many will be badly secured VIP home computers?
They fry the wrong 1,000 computers and "immunity" or not, the major label CEOs can't run far enough, fast enough, of long enough to escape the consequences.
For instance, what if a dozen Fortune 50 CEOs have to use their cell phones to call their lawyers from home because their computers and their e-mail isn't working only find out that the RIAA and the label CEOs and the black hats immune to lawsuits because Congress made them that way? How do you punish a billion dollar company if you run a $100B company? What if you want to punish some Congresscritters?
Be assured that they'll think of something.
Only works if somebody is paying someone at the other end of the local loop for the dial tone. If you move into a place that's been vacant for a few months and the landlord didn't decide to pick up the tab for access, don't expect dial tone.
Next time, get all of the facts from your bosses before posting. Had you ever heard of Radiohead before getting your assignment?
Radiohead is a case study in the use of Internet promotion:
Radiohead's honour follows the group's decision to ditch traditional marketing methods for their recent album Kid A in favour of internet promotion.
That's from a winter 2000 BBC news article.
Radiohead is a long-standing Internet success story, and if they'd listened to your friends, they'd be making a hell of a lot less money today.
An increasing number of artists have found that distribution of MP3s via Internet Radio and the networkss your OwN3rZ want to get rid of plus touring and direct sale of CDs at gigs and via the Net is a perfectly reasonable way to make a living. One has to sell a lot less records to make a living when one is getting 90% of the gross profit off a $10 CD than 1% of a $20 CD. Search for Janis Ian on slashdot. She's been making records longer than you've probably been alive. Find out if she thinks the record industry protects the rights of musicians.
With respect to your. . . interesting interpretation of copyright law, was your omission of any mention of "fair use" in your post deliberate, or left out of the RIAA propaganda you obviously based your post on.
Speaking as a published writer, I certainly support reasonable copyright protection. I don't need my copyright extended to 50 or 75 or 1000 years after my death. I don't want anyone to destroy computers by the millions to "protect" my work. I don't want protecting my work to come at the price of eventually forcing consumer electronics development to move out of the US and if EU follows the US lead as it seems to be doing, following software development to India and China. If someone xeroxes a copy of one of my print articles at a public library, I don't want any of your buddies to burn down the library to "protect" my copyright.
Oh, BTW, I'm working with an independent musician now. I can't find any friends willing to host her work for P2P networks because they're afraid of attack by the people who you are being a paid or unpaid mouthpiece for. So promoting her outside the RIAA framework is more difficult. Tell your bosses "Thanks, assholes"...
I don't know if you are on the RIAA payroll or not. You certainly parrot their party line perfectly.
However, since you do such a good job of playing a mouthpiece for RIAA viewpoints, if you aren't getting paid by them, you're awfully stupid. Go to their site and apply for a job. Use your post as proof that you're good at spreading "the good word" in a hostile forum.
Perhaps there are even a few people stupid enough to believe you.
This time, you made the stupid mistake.
Hatch got $175K from the entertainment industry. Do you think he accepted it by accident?
Hatch's remark was NOT a mistake.
Statements like that are made in the hope that the consumer electronics industry and the high-tech community can be crudely blackmailed by threat of insane government action into doing what we are told. That is part of what the *AA organizations are buying from him.
What happens when they wipe out computers belonging to traders at the New York Stock Exchange? Investment bankers? White House? Congress itself? Department of Defense? *AA major label computers? The WETA renderfarm? What makes anyone think that the damage will be limited to the USA?
Everybody who voted to legalize black-hat bullshit is going to be in seriously deep shit. Guess who they are going to try to unload the blame on? Guess what the Congressional hearings investigating the *AA members and the *AAs themselves will look like?
No matter how good immunity provisions are protecting *AA and its scr1pt k1dd13z, the best legal minds in America will be working 24/7 to figure out how to bypass the provisions to make it possible to file both civil suits and criminal charges against corporations and individually against corporate officers... and these corporate officers won't be going to country-club prisons. They're going into cells along with people named "Bubba". Perhaps they can be found in violation of RICO and the Patriot Act. While the PATRIOT Act is an abomination, something tells me that if the *AA label CEOs suddenly find themselves in Guantanamo Bay, even their own attorneys won't be lifting a finger to defend them. If they have any sense, they'll be looking for places they can't be legally extradited from.
A recent estimate says that there are 43,000,000 file traders. Even if they miraculously only limit the damage to the "guilty", some of those machines are going to be critical to somebody bigger than the *AA organizations, their member labels, or their owners.
So they ratfuck only 10,000,000 computers, some "innocent", some loaded with MP3s ripped by the legal owners of the CDs, some with MP3s of non-*AA content? The aggregate value of the data is going to be far above the current net worth of the labels combined. I don't actually expect damage to be this bad, I think any netblock RIAA black hats work out of will be disconnected by their upstream providers *quickly*.
It's time for the major players in the *AA organizations to go down.
They want to commit suicide? Encourage them..
And look to your firewalls and IDS.