1) If you're going to boycott the RIAA, then make sure that you're not boycotting ALL CD companies. Most of the indie bands out there aren't represnted by the RIAA, and many of them are helping fight it. (Not that you HAVE to buy their stuff--just don't boycott them if they're not part of the problem)
2) "Boycotting for life" is silly. The point of a boycott is to make someone (the RIAA in this case) change their behaviour. If they've lost you completely as a customer for ever and ever, then there's no incentive for them to fix the problems.
If the RIAA started paying artists fairly (including benefits and healthcare), charged a fair price for a CD, came up with an online marketing model that worked, and quit harassing individuals or trying to break CDs (i.e. copy protection), then we would hopefully applaud them for seeing the light, and SUPPORT THEM WITH OUR MONEY again.
(Unless the original poster was just implying that there's no hope in hell of this sort of reform happening in his life)
"Yeah, until it is one of the starving kids next door stealing an apple from a rich man's orchards"
Well I'd argue that philosophically (and legally, as far as I understand it) that IS still a straightforward crime, but as a society we can chose to judge that the circumstances warranted the crime. (I certainly would, and I hope most people would agree with me, but 150 years ago, that kid would have been beaten to death by the orchard owner.)
In other words, we can accept that a crime has occurred, but decide on a punishment fitting the circumstances.
Now away from philosophy.:-)
I'm not claiming, at least here, that information theft is really theft. Bandwidth I would say qualifies (although you may disagree) and storage space--definitely! Disks are physical devices that you buy from the store, and if you can't use all of that device because someone else is using it without your permission, then I call that theft.
Now all of this is irrelevant (although highly entertaining). The crux is this:
"Can we just agree that these people are trashing the internet and they should be evicted / eviscerated?"
Absolutely! No argument from me on that. All we're really debating are the technical grounds for action--not that they exist.
2) Add in the DRM, but don't actually use it. If all of the BIOS companies start incorporating it, then in a few years every motherboard on the market will have DRM. THAT'S when you start tightening the thumbscrews on the consumer--when you've already eliminated any other choices.
Any company will do as much as it can to control its products as tightly as possible, without cutting into sales.
If you have a monopoly, you don't care about pissing off customers.
If you convince all of the other manufacturers to go along, then you have a collective monopoly, and don't care about jointly pissing customers off.
If you get legislation passed to make it mandatory, then all the other manufacturers have to go along, and...
Well, you get the idea. All they need to do is to make it universal, and it becomes irrelevant. If they can't accomplish that, then all they have to do is tie their DRM boards to some nifty new feature, that people want. This is how the screws get tightened down.
"Under current laws, spam is not illegal by itself, even if you use and open proxy."
Again, yes it is! Spam is theft. Theft is illegal. Spam through an open proxy is theft and fraud, both of which are illegal. There is no form of spam that is not theft, and that makes spam illegal unto itself.
"My point was that I'm biased because spam doesn't cost me much personally"
As, so you understand the costs, you just don't care? Well I guess that's how spam proliferates--not enough people care.
Look, if you have a bank person who is rounding up all of the fractional amounts on customers' statements, then rounding them down on all of the bank statements and pocketing the difference, it's theft. It probably won't cost any single customer more than 50 cents or a few dollars per year, but if it can be automated over ten million customers, then that's a lot of money stolen, and if the bank doesn't discover it, they'll just up their service charges and increase the lending/borrowing interest differential to compensate. It doesn't matter how little you lost personally--it's theft. It's illegal, it's amoral, and it's criminal.
Here's a scenario. I have rips of CDs at home, on my file server (although in real life, my RAID5 volumes are reconstructing itself as I type). I also have my skanky old corporate laptop which doesn't have the disk space for more than three tunes. I feel it's reasonable to set up a way of sharing that folder to myself, when I'm on the road.
Now I've got a friend who's a musician. He routinely sends me copies of songs he's written and recorded. I've already got a shared folder, and so I just give him access to it, rather than setting up a second share. Now if he downloads a song that he doesn't have the CD of, then have I just become a criminal?
For that matter, if I use gnutella to download music that I already own (much easier than making my own rips, when the stuff is out there) into a shared out folder, why am I not justified in assuming that other people will do the same--download songs from my server that they already own on CD?
I don't think the courts can legally presume to know why I set my computer up the way I have, nor what I intend to do with files. Furthermore, what if someone gives me a Brittney Spears album, and I'm so disgusted with it that I rip it, and share it out to the world so that no one will ever have to pay for her lack of talent. Well it's likely that no one will ever download any of it, and so what then? I've made songs avaiable that have never been downloaded--am I still 'distributing illegally?'
And one last point. I don't think there's anything on the lawbooks in most of the western world that makes attempting to break the law a crime in and of itself. (note that attempted murder is explicitly a separate crime)
Ah well. I might be able to claim that it's all just negligence. Hell, half of the people sharing stuff out through Kazaa don't understand it anyways.
1) All playback media that _looked_ like a CD but wasn't would have to have a label on the front in large letters saying, "THIS IS NOT A CD. IT MAY NOT PLAY IN YOUR CD PLAYER."
2) All such media would have to be shelved separately in the stores. There would be a CD section, and an "other" section.
What I don't understand is why Phillips can't sue for the misuse of their physical format, even if it's not labelled as a CD. It's pretty clear that these things are intended to be almost exactly like a CD, but violate the standard (and hence, not always work.) This is damaging to Phillips, damaging to their product, and damaging to the (real) CD format.
OK, here are my alternatives to fossil fuels: Renewable, non-polluting resources. We have wind turbines on our power grid here, and a surprising number of people have voluntarily been paying a premium on their monthly power bills to support it. Solar power is equally viable, especially with the current high-efficiency cells.
The nice thing about these methods is that they are emissions free, and renewable for the life of the planet.
And as far as reduced energy consumption, I am DEFINITELY suggesting that! That's why I'm happy that my country has backed the Kyoto Accord (since a major part of reduced emissions is reduced consumption). I also don't care about the majority view--I'm going to do what *I* can, and do my damnest to convince others around me to act similarly. It doesn't matter if I'm just pissing in the ocean because if I don't do it, NO ONE will.
Hmm. And then what do I do with my $12,000 CD player? Oh, I guess I quit listening to new music.
All right, I don't personally have a CD player that expensive (although my turntable is worth about $1500). It's irrelevant--if they're going to force me to upgrade my stereo, then they'd better be offering me something POSITIVE, not just more restrictions!
It's not a compact disc. Phillips did, in fact, vigorously defend their legal rights to the name, won a small court victory, and convinced the manufacturers of these things to comply. If you look at any of these copy-protected things, you'll notice that they don't say "Compact Disc," "Compact Disc digital audio," "CDDA," or have the CD logo anywhere on them.
However, who knows how valid that is in France? It looks like the courts considered a copy protected thingy to be a broken CD, so maybe the above doesn't hold up over there. (or alternatively, they might not be complying with the US ruling over there)
RIAA vice-president Matt Oppenheim called the arguments "surprisingly shallow"....
Mr Oppenheim also said the RIAA was immume from rules on unreasonable searches on the internet, because it did not have links with law enforcement agencies.
You know, you just can't make this stuff up! This statemtn has got to be the shallowest of the shallow, and they call Jane Doe's defense shallow?
Uploading? There IS no uploading in a P2P network. I put my files on my machines. If I make them available on my machines through Kazaa or Gnutella or NFS or CIFS, then suddenly what others do becomes my responsibility?
That's a very tricky bit of law--not nearly as clear as you make it out to be. I'm not distributing, I'm not giving away, I'm not disallowing access to my own material.
Well, theft is a pretty straightforward crime in any society that recognises personal property and/or money. Vandalism is even more basic than that, so I don't have too many qualms about branding spammers as 'criminals' under any law or society.
But regardless, they suck and should be beaten with reeds.
It makes SENSE??? There's nothing about it that makes sense! All it will do is ensure that ALL of the countries will be out of energy sooner than if we behaved rationally.
Capitalism as it exists now is a nightmare of big companies fighting for the right to screw the consumer harder, and colluding on it at the same time. It exists to grown and consume, and for no other purpose.
" It's not really rational to expect that we'll stop using a resource that's available now..."
It's ENTIRELY rational to plan for long term stability and viability. It's irrational (but entirely expected) that we continually fail to move away from a rapidly dwindling resource that our entire society is based on.
"Doesn't that defeat the use of having the reserves, if nothing you do requires that reserve?"
A statement like this implies that the purpose of resources is to be consumed--by us. As far as I'm concerned, that's utter bollocks. It is neither our duty or our right to strip the earth of everything useful it produces, and sooner or later (more likely sooner) that sort of behaviour will get us so far up shit creek that we won't be able to do anything except wait for the end.
I've got a good idea about bandwidth costs. However, last year Alan Ralsky bought a house for $740,000. How much bandwidth will 150 or so spammers be able to afford?
"No, they're not. As long as they don't forge headers or falsely advertise (under the false advertising laws), they're not breaking the law."
Yes they ARE! Clearly, using an open mail relay is theft, no matter how irresponsible the mail admin is (and this is still how most spam gets sent today). However, even if they're not...
Your ISP is paying real amounts of money for bandwidth. Not dial-up or DSL connections, but really big pipes that they share amongst their subscribers. They're also paying for disk space to store their customers' mail.
Now if spam takes up 20% of their bandwidth and 40% of their mail spooler's disk space before they have an opportunity to filter it, who do you think pays for it?
You do. And I do. Our monthly costs are in effect renting a tiny fragment of the resources of the internet, and roughly a third of the internet is now spam. (email and newsgroups, which translates to bandwidth, time, computing power, and storage)
Spammers do NOT pay for their bandwidth! If they did, then spam wouldn't be a problem.
Shitsticks. It's now been half an hour more, and there's no hint of the site going down.
This SHOULD give people an idea of the resources behind these dirtballs. They've got money, they've got hardware, they've got ego, and they've got a massive amount of greed to fuel them indefinitely.
Even a good/.ing wouldn't have accomplished much. Sadly, the/. crowd is much better at getting pissed off than acting.
These people aren't political dissidents. They're criminals, and they're perpetrating crimes against ME! Furthermore, the data is a list of the members of a willful collusion. The very fact that they're on this list defines that they are actively, and deliberately trying to commit crimes against me and others.
It's not a level playing field. I'd have sympathy for AA members, even if some of them had caused harm by drunk driving. I have no sympathy for people who gather to discuss and plan how best to commit crimes. I would have no sympathy for an online thieves guild (real thieves, not for games), or a collection of pedophiles who are trying to legitimise their actions.
How much do you pay per month for your internet access? ~30% of that is because of spammers. If you're paying $30/month, then every year you have had $120 stolen from your person by these people.
Do we provide safe harbor to unrepentant criminals? Not in my house, and not on my internet!
Well, that might be the case for Symantec. Amazon are just filthy spammers, and always have been.
Once a year or so, they rewrite their policies and require you to go back and re-opt-out of their spam lists. Bastards. I quit buying from them years ago, and have gotten into a pretty intense conversation on the phone with them about their spamming practices, but I still get crap.
I've seen some of the opt-in lists. I've been on a few, despite not having opted in.
If you tell me that there are 1.7 million people in the entire world willing to be put on an opt-in advertising list, I call bullshit. The "Opt-in" lists as they exist now get subscribers by surreptitiousness (putting the "you will be added" on page 43 of a contest agreement form), deceit ("By not failing to have clicked in the position indicated, you are agreeing to not rescind the option to be excluded from..."), and flat out fraud (adding people who didn't ask for it, and claiming they did).
That's how opt-in lists work. If you've got 1.7 million people on one list, then that's how you work, and that makes you a spammer.
Slashdot Mirror
"Every geek, and indeed every human, must ask him or herself whether to try to profit by bringing misfortune to others..."
Um...
Why is harming others necessary for profit?
Yeah, and the worst part was that they were pictures of someone else's family!
Two points that we should all keep in mind.
1) If you're going to boycott the RIAA, then make sure that you're not boycotting ALL CD companies. Most of the indie bands out there aren't represnted by the RIAA, and many of them are helping fight it. (Not that you HAVE to buy their stuff--just don't boycott them if they're not part of the problem)
2) "Boycotting for life" is silly. The point of a boycott is to make someone (the RIAA in this case) change their behaviour. If they've lost you completely as a customer for ever and ever, then there's no incentive for them to fix the problems.
If the RIAA started paying artists fairly (including benefits and healthcare), charged a fair price for a CD, came up with an online marketing model that worked, and quit harassing individuals or trying to break CDs (i.e. copy protection), then we would hopefully applaud them for seeing the light, and SUPPORT THEM WITH OUR MONEY again.
(Unless the original poster was just implying that there's no hope in hell of this sort of reform happening in his life)
"Yeah, until it is one of the starving kids next door stealing an apple from a rich man's orchards"
:-)
Well I'd argue that philosophically (and legally, as far as I understand it) that IS still a straightforward crime, but as a society we can chose to judge that the circumstances warranted the crime. (I certainly would, and I hope most people would agree with me, but 150 years ago, that kid would have been beaten to death by the orchard owner.)
In other words, we can accept that a crime has occurred, but decide on a punishment fitting the circumstances.
Now away from philosophy.
I'm not claiming, at least here, that information theft is really theft. Bandwidth I would say qualifies (although you may disagree) and storage space--definitely! Disks are physical devices that you buy from the store, and if you can't use all of that device because someone else is using it without your permission, then I call that theft.
Now all of this is irrelevant (although highly entertaining). The crux is this:
"Can we just agree that these people are trashing the internet and they should be evicted / eviscerated?"
Absolutely! No argument from me on that. All we're really debating are the technical grounds for action--not that they exist.
Oh, I can see a number of ways it might happen.
1) Legislate it.
2) Add in the DRM, but don't actually use it. If all of the BIOS companies start incorporating it, then in a few years every motherboard on the market will have DRM. THAT'S when you start tightening the thumbscrews on the consumer--when you've already eliminated any other choices.
Any company will do as much as it can to control its products as tightly as possible, without cutting into sales.
If you have a monopoly, you don't care about pissing off customers.
If you convince all of the other manufacturers to go along, then you have a collective monopoly, and don't care about jointly pissing customers off.
If you get legislation passed to make it mandatory, then all the other manufacturers have to go along, and...
Well, you get the idea. All they need to do is to make it universal, and it becomes irrelevant. If they can't accomplish that, then all they have to do is tie their DRM boards to some nifty new feature, that people want. This is how the screws get tightened down.
"Under current laws, spam is not illegal by itself, even if you use and open proxy."
Again, yes it is! Spam is theft. Theft is illegal. Spam through an open proxy is theft and fraud, both of which are illegal. There is no form of spam that is not theft, and that makes spam illegal unto itself.
"My point was that I'm biased because spam doesn't cost me much personally"
As, so you understand the costs, you just don't care? Well I guess that's how spam proliferates--not enough people care.
Look, if you have a bank person who is rounding up all of the fractional amounts on customers' statements, then rounding them down on all of the bank statements and pocketing the difference, it's theft. It probably won't cost any single customer more than 50 cents or a few dollars per year, but if it can be automated over ten million customers, then that's a lot of money stolen, and if the bank doesn't discover it, they'll just up their service charges and increase the lending/borrowing interest differential to compensate. It doesn't matter how little you lost personally--it's theft. It's illegal, it's amoral, and it's criminal.
Hmm.
Here's a scenario. I have rips of CDs at home, on my file server (although in real life, my RAID5 volumes are reconstructing itself as I type). I also have my skanky old corporate laptop which doesn't have the disk space for more than three tunes. I feel it's reasonable to set up a way of sharing that folder to myself, when I'm on the road.
Now I've got a friend who's a musician. He routinely sends me copies of songs he's written and recorded. I've already got a shared folder, and so I just give him access to it, rather than setting up a second share. Now if he downloads a song that he doesn't have the CD of, then have I just become a criminal?
For that matter, if I use gnutella to download music that I already own (much easier than making my own rips, when the stuff is out there) into a shared out folder, why am I not justified in assuming that other people will do the same--download songs from my server that they already own on CD?
I don't think the courts can legally presume to know why I set my computer up the way I have, nor what I intend to do with files. Furthermore, what if someone gives me a Brittney Spears album, and I'm so disgusted with it that I rip it, and share it out to the world so that no one will ever have to pay for her lack of talent. Well it's likely that no one will ever download any of it, and so what then? I've made songs avaiable that have never been downloaded--am I still 'distributing illegally?'
And one last point. I don't think there's anything on the lawbooks in most of the western world that makes attempting to break the law a crime in and of itself. (note that attempted murder is explicitly a separate crime)
Ah well. I might be able to claim that it's all just negligence. Hell, half of the people sharing stuff out through Kazaa don't understand it anyways.
"and in the end
the love you take
is equal to the love
you make."
Sorry, got carried away there.
The only way this would work is thus:
1) All playback media that _looked_ like a CD but wasn't would have to have a label on the front in large letters saying, "THIS IS NOT A CD. IT MAY NOT PLAY IN YOUR CD PLAYER."
2) All such media would have to be shelved separately in the stores. There would be a CD section, and an "other" section.
What I don't understand is why Phillips can't sue for the misuse of their physical format, even if it's not labelled as a CD. It's pretty clear that these things are intended to be almost exactly like a CD, but violate the standard (and hence, not always work.) This is damaging to Phillips, damaging to their product, and damaging to the (real) CD format.
OK, here are my alternatives to fossil fuels: Renewable, non-polluting resources. We have wind turbines on our power grid here, and a surprising number of people have voluntarily been paying a premium on their monthly power bills to support it. Solar power is equally viable, especially with the current high-efficiency cells.
The nice thing about these methods is that they are emissions free, and renewable for the life of the planet.
And as far as reduced energy consumption, I am DEFINITELY suggesting that! That's why I'm happy that my country has backed the Kyoto Accord (since a major part of reduced emissions is reduced consumption). I also don't care about the majority view--I'm going to do what *I* can, and do my damnest to convince others around me to act similarly. It doesn't matter if I'm just pissing in the ocean because if I don't do it, NO ONE will.
Hmm. And then what do I do with my $12,000 CD player? Oh, I guess I quit listening to new music.
All right, I don't personally have a CD player that expensive (although my turntable is worth about $1500). It's irrelevant--if they're going to force me to upgrade my stereo, then they'd better be offering me something POSITIVE, not just more restrictions!
It's not a compact disc. Phillips did, in fact, vigorously defend their legal rights to the name, won a small court victory, and convinced the manufacturers of these things to comply. If you look at any of these copy-protected things, you'll notice that they don't say "Compact Disc," "Compact Disc digital audio," "CDDA," or have the CD logo anywhere on them.
However, who knows how valid that is in France? It looks like the courts considered a copy protected thingy to be a broken CD, so maybe the above doesn't hold up over there. (or alternatively, they might not be complying with the US ruling over there)
RIAA vice-president Matt Oppenheim called the arguments "surprisingly shallow". ...
Mr Oppenheim also said the RIAA was immume from rules on unreasonable searches on the internet, because it did not have links with law enforcement agencies.
You know, you just can't make this stuff up! This statemtn has got to be the shallowest of the shallow, and they call Jane Doe's defense shallow?
Uploading? There IS no uploading in a P2P network. I put my files on my machines. If I make them available on my machines through Kazaa or Gnutella or NFS or CIFS, then suddenly what others do becomes my responsibility?
That's a very tricky bit of law--not nearly as clear as you make it out to be. I'm not distributing, I'm not giving away, I'm not disallowing access to my own material.
Well, theft is a pretty straightforward crime in any society that recognises personal property and/or money. Vandalism is even more basic than that, so I don't have too many qualms about branding spammers as 'criminals' under any law or society.
But regardless, they suck and should be beaten with reeds.
It makes SENSE??? There's nothing about it that makes sense! All it will do is ensure that ALL of the countries will be out of energy sooner than if we behaved rationally.
That's what I'm waiting for.
Capitalism as it exists now is a nightmare of big companies fighting for the right to screw the consumer harder, and colluding on it at the same time. It exists to grown and consume, and for no other purpose.
" It's not really rational to expect that we'll stop using a resource that's available now..."
It's ENTIRELY rational to plan for long term stability and viability. It's irrational (but entirely expected) that we continually fail to move away from a rapidly dwindling resource that our entire society is based on.
"Doesn't that defeat the use of having the reserves, if nothing you do requires that reserve?"
A statement like this implies that the purpose of resources is to be consumed--by us. As far as I'm concerned, that's utter bollocks. It is neither our duty or our right to strip the earth of everything useful it produces, and sooner or later (more likely sooner) that sort of behaviour will get us so far up shit creek that we won't be able to do anything except wait for the end.
I've got a good idea about bandwidth costs. However, last year Alan Ralsky bought a house for $740,000. How much bandwidth will 150 or so spammers be able to afford?
"No, they're not. As long as they don't forge headers or falsely advertise (under the false advertising laws), they're not breaking the law."
Yes they ARE! Clearly, using an open mail relay is theft, no matter how irresponsible the mail admin is (and this is still how most spam gets sent today). However, even if they're not...
Your ISP is paying real amounts of money for bandwidth. Not dial-up or DSL connections, but really big pipes that they share amongst their subscribers. They're also paying for disk space to store their customers' mail.
Now if spam takes up 20% of their bandwidth and 40% of their mail spooler's disk space before they have an opportunity to filter it, who do you think pays for it?
You do. And I do. Our monthly costs are in effect renting a tiny fragment of the resources of the internet, and roughly a third of the internet is now spam. (email and newsgroups, which translates to bandwidth, time, computing power, and storage)
Spammers do NOT pay for their bandwidth! If they did, then spam wouldn't be a problem.
Shitsticks. It's now been half an hour more, and there's no hint of the site going down.
/.ing wouldn't have accomplished much. Sadly, the /. crowd is much better at getting pissed off than acting.
This SHOULD give people an idea of the resources behind these dirtballs. They've got money, they've got hardware, they've got ego, and they've got a massive amount of greed to fuel them indefinitely.
Even a good
An interesting point, but flawed.
These people aren't political dissidents. They're criminals, and they're perpetrating crimes against ME! Furthermore, the data is a list of the members of a willful collusion. The very fact that they're on this list defines that they are actively, and deliberately trying to commit crimes against me and others.
It's not a level playing field. I'd have sympathy for AA members, even if some of them had caused harm by drunk driving. I have no sympathy for people who gather to discuss and plan how best to commit crimes. I would have no sympathy for an online thieves guild (real thieves, not for games), or a collection of pedophiles who are trying to legitimise their actions.
How much do you pay per month for your internet access? ~30% of that is because of spammers. If you're paying $30/month, then every year you have had $120 stolen from your person by these people.
Do we provide safe harbor to unrepentant criminals? Not in my house, and not on my internet!
Well, that might be the case for Symantec. Amazon are just filthy spammers, and always have been.
Once a year or so, they rewrite their policies and require you to go back and re-opt-out of their spam lists. Bastards. I quit buying from them years ago, and have gotten into a pretty intense conversation on the phone with them about their spamming practices, but I still get crap.
Who are "we?"
I've seen some of the opt-in lists. I've been on a few, despite not having opted in.
If you tell me that there are 1.7 million people in the entire world willing to be put on an opt-in advertising list, I call bullshit. The "Opt-in" lists as they exist now get subscribers by surreptitiousness (putting the "you will be added" on page 43 of a contest agreement form), deceit ("By not failing to have clicked in the position indicated, you are agreeing to not rescind the option to be excluded from..."), and flat out fraud (adding people who didn't ask for it, and claiming they did).
That's how opt-in lists work. If you've got 1.7 million people on one list, then that's how you work, and that makes you a spammer.