Couldn't disagree more. A full size notebook is not good enough for people who want a netbook. If you've ever flown coach, the reasons are obvious. With a typical laptop, if you place it on your tray table and open the screen to a comfortable viewing angle, the edge of the screen neatly tucks in where the tray table was with very little extra space. This becomes a problem only when the person in front of you leans back and your screen gets compressed between the back of the seat and the tray table. In a panic, you have to yank the computer out of there or risk the screen breaking.
I desperately want a laptop that is about 1.5 inches shorter off the table when fully open so that it isn't at risk when using it on a tray table. A netbook would be perfect for that. Here's what I want in a netbook:
Extended battery life for long flights.
Swappable battery for long flights.
Don't care about weight.
Don't care about thickness except as it affects height.
Total height when open should be at least 1.5 inches shorter than a Macbook.
EIther FireWire 400 with power or a built-in CompactFlash-compatible reader---the USB readers suck in my experience and I like to be able to back up photos while on the go.
Sufficient external port power to drive an external laptop HD (again, ideally, through FireWire).
ExpressCard port for when I need a port that it doesn't provide.
Two USB ports.
Wired ethernet. Too many hotels I've stayed in recently don't have wireless or charge extra for it.
Low thermal output. I want to use this on my lap comfortably.
Must support at least 2GB of RAM.
Must not have soldered RAM on the motherboard. I've had lots of trouble with motherboard RAM going bad, so I like my RAM replaceable, thanks.
64-bit-capable Atom CPU for maximum viability.
Mac OS X support.
There's my list as a frequent traveler. In other words, a size-reduced (screen-border-reduced) MacBook with ExpressCard, no optical drive, and an Atom CPU instead of a Core 2 Duo CPU.
Much as one would hope we would demand better legislators and better laws after all the draconian things that have been passed in the last few years. Doesn't make it likely. Until it bites them directly, most businesses can't be bothered to care about details like draconian EULA restrictions.... They have more important things to worry about... like lobbying to protect their offshore bank accounts from taxation.:-D
Never mind about that first part. I just realized that the thing about trolling was referring to a reply to a reply to my comment.:-) Too late at night....
I'm not trolling at all. A EULA is binding upon the consumer solely because of copyright. Without copyright, because A. it is not a signed contract, B. the two parties are not equal, C. there is no negotiation, and D. the EULA is not agreed upon by both parties prior to the time of purchase, it is highly likely (nay, certain) that all EULAs would be prima facie unenforceable under pure contract law.
Without copyright to prop it up, sale of a copy of an app would be just that: a sale of a copy of an app. Therefore, EULA abuse is, by definition, copyright abuse because the former cannot rightfully exist without the latter.
More to the point, any file created by a user is inherently the sole property of the user. The only way contract terms prohibiting reverse engineering of file formats would hold up would be if the terms explicitly prohibited giving the file to anyone who is not bound by the contract.
In the absence of such a clause, as soon as that file leaves your hands into the hands of someone who did not agree to the contract terms, any rights the company has to protect their file format cease to be relevant or enforceable (with the exception of patents).
In the presence of such a clause, you're going to have a hard time selling your application to anyone with half a brain, and such a clause would almost certainly be thrown out as unconscionable because of the unreasonable burden it would place on the user to verify the license of someone else before giving that person data that the user legitimately created and on which the user holds exclusive copyright.
Either way, file formats effectively cannot be protected from reverse engineering. As such, this company would have to somehow prove that it was impossible to reverse engineer the file format without reverse engineering the app itself. Speaking as somebody who has reverse engineered file formats before, I can say that any such statement could not possibly be made by an intelligent person without it being perjury....
So there you go. This suit is frivolous, and I hope the company has to pay a few million in restitution for pain and suffering to the victims of the suit. Such IP fraud deserves nothing less than a huge in-court bitch slap. This is precisely the sort of case that makes me opposed to every aspect of the Pro-IP act.... Yet another case of copyright abuse by a corporation to harm consumers and illegally stifle competition from smaller players.... *sigh*
Just to add another point on this, I only say "vote the bums out" because I already did my part to lobby my Senator against this and she chose to ignore her constituents' opinions in favor of corporate lobbying. When she comes up for reelection, this decision will make me seriously think twice before voting for Senator Feinstein again.
Here's the letter I sent.
Senator Feinstein,
Recently, the House passed a bill that I feel undermines our nation's technology and copyright policy at a fundamental level: the so-called "Pro-IP" act. As both an independent musician and a computer programmer, I feel it is important to write you a letter explaining why I feel this bill is a terrible idea. As a busy professional, it is rare that I see an upcoming bill as so detrimental to our nation that it is worth taking time off work to compose a letter to my representative. As such, please consider this letter with the appropriate weight it deserves. I am also sending a copy of this letter to Senator Boxer.
For ease of skimming, I have divided this letter into parts describing each of my fundamental objections to this bill.
EQUIPMENT SEIZURE:
I'm assuming you pay attention to the news, so you know why the movie and music industries are pushing for this law: they are losing nearly every court case that goes to court, so their efforts to sue file sharers have been almost wholly ineffectual. The reasons they are losing the cases, however, are:
A. a high percentage of their charges have been utterly fraudulent in nature without a shred of evidentiary support, and
B. almost none of the cases have sufficient evidentiary support to even pass the relatively low preponderance of evidence requirement to win a civil trial, much less the "beyond a resonable doubt" bar required for a criminal trial.
It seems clear that their intent of this bill is to create a new reason for people to be afraid of file sharing. Unfortunately, in light of the previous cases brought by the RIAA, it seems abundantly clear that the real-world result of such a bill will be people having their computers seized on scant evidence, and like most government seizures, being unable to get that equipment back without proving their -innocence- beyond a reasonable doubt. This is antithetical to the way our justice system is supposed to work and represents a fairly rapid descent into utter corporatist fascism.
LEGAL SALES AND FAIR USE:
Worse, this bill has no real purpose for existing. Services such as Apple's iTunes and Amazon Unboxed have shown conclusively that if you make the products available that the consumers want and in a format that is reasonable, they will overwhelmingly choose legitimate means of obtaining that content. File sharing of illegal content is rapidly becoming the exception rather than the rule, limited almost exclusively to content providers who do not make their content available through legitimate means.
I would also add that the majority of file sharing that remains is TV programming, not movies or music. That content has already been broadcast in an over-the-air fashion. It is completely within the bounds of copyright to allow both time and place shifting of this content, and making it available to people who already have the legal right to receive it (either from being within the broadcast area of a station or viewing it on cable) should be fundamentally protected by a fair use defense for a reasonable period of time after the show is broadcast. This law would substantially skew copyright by criminalizing something that isn't even clearly prevented by existing civil laws, and as such, represents a severe erosion of our nation's fair use rights.
REAL CAUSE OF INDUSTRY WOES:
And yet we watch as the movie and music industries repeatedly make false claims, blaming file sharing for their economic woes, when in reality their economic woes are caused by five fundamental problems:
More to the point, the current system encourages corporate greed and discourages creativity. At this point, if you read Bridgeport Music Inc. v Dimension Films, you will see that it only takes three notes to be a copyright violation. Based on that, we can trivially show mathematically that every possible musical composition in the Western tonal system is copyrighted, so no further creativity is possible. In fact, there are only 1,728 (12 ^ 3) legal compositions possible in a 12-tone system, assuming you ignore the starting pitch as Bridgeport did.
Things have gotten so bad that I am not publishing my collection of musical creations at this point out of fear that some idiot litigious type will hear something in them that reminds him/her of something else and sue me for the most trivial of similarities. Based on Bridgeport, there's statistically a 100% chance that such similarities exist, and more to the point, odds are good that sufficient similarities exist with at least a few hundred copyrighted works, creating a huge potential pool of jerks who could abuse copyright law and sue me. As an independent artist and composer, I really can't afford that level of financial exposure for the meager pittance I would expect to gain from the release of sacred choral works.
It is clear that this government is too focused on protecting the corporate overlords of large-scale copyrights without even a modicum of concern for the rights and protection of individuals who actually do the creation. It's time that we strip out this copyright regime and replace it with a Congress that actually cares about content creators instead of mindlessly buying the corporate lobbyists' lies hook, line, and sinker. I say vote the bums out. All of them.
In every area, it is stagnating because protection is too strong. It's just a question of how far along the stagnation is. The fact is that we need less copyright protection, not more. I'll explain.
Historically, copyright ended after 28 years. At that point, the material became part of the public domain and contributed fully to the artistic enlightenment of society through repurposing, derivative works, etc. Far more creativity comes from third parties due to a work falling out of copyright than from the original creator being encouraged to create because of the work remaining under it.
The current system is set up in a fundamentally broken and brain-damaged way. Except in cases where the content creator dies prematurely, it keeps material under copyright until effectively 50+ years after the last person who to see the content when it was new has died. The net effect is that all of the creativity bump that comes from the material going into the public domain ceases to happen because nobody still remembers the work at all by the time it falls out of copyright.
If your goal is to encourage creativity and foster the arts and creation thereof, the best thing you can do is reduce the copyright duration to something much shorter---say 28 years. This is ideal because the kids who grew up with the copyrighted material become adults who are ready to contribute their own derivative works, compilations, etc. fairly early on in their careers (when they are likely to be at their highest level of creativity). Further, it promotes the continued enjoyment of these works because children who grew up with the works are able to freely redistribute and share those works with others as they themselves reach childbearing age (when they are most likely to interact with other parents and children).
... encryption doesn't hide the fact that a particular media was requested or to verify that it was from a trustworthy source.
No, that's precisely what encryption is best at doing. Even at a trivial level, SSL prevents eavesdropping on web URLs. Encryption also provides you with the concept of digital signing, which lets you verify that something is unadulterated, i.e. that it is exactly the version provided by a trustworthy source.
The fact is, piracy is an unsolvable problem. As soon as you prevent mass piracy on the Internet, people will just go back to the old-fashioned means of swapping tapes. As long as there has been media to copy, there have been people who copied it without the creator's permission (and often claiming it as their own), even back in the day when that meant hand-copying a musical manuscript.... Trying to prevent piracy is like trying to prevent the wind from blowing.
There are only two things that can be done to sustain an intellectual-property-based business model in an era of rampant piracy:
Stay out ahead of the pirates. Produce new material faster than it can reasonably be copied. This doesn't really work very well for music, but it can be effective for more corporeal IP like microprocessor designs.
Make your product easily available at a low enough price and with sufficient quality so that the barrier to purchasing the product is low, thus ensuring that the majority of people buy the product legitimately.
Neither of these is something the industry is willing to do, so instead, they keep whining and will continue doing so instead of shoring up their business practices as long as anyone is willing to listen to their whining and legislate based on that whining. In the end, though, this will only speed their decline into obsolescence by destroying customer trust, destroying customer loyalty, and eroding availability (and thus visibility) of the product.
A TV broadcaster 70 miles away is barely even fringe. For deep fringe, we're talking about the rural South (e.g. the town where I grew up), where it's not unusual to want to receive signals from stations 150-200 miles away.
Wait, ~50 million other people use huge 25dB antennas to get channels from out-of-state TV stations?
Sounds about right. A 25 dB antenna isn't huge. That could be as little as a standard 7 dB-ish antenna with a 16-19 dB standard booster amp. That's fairly typical for people in a rural area. At last count, that was about 60 million people.
I'm not convinced that this problem is solvable without keeping a public database of allowable frequencies by ZIP code and mandating that these devices know their location and regularly update their cached copy of their location's data (or a copy of the entire database for a mobile device).
Well, there's a little thing called lex causae that kicks in here. We have laws of one state attempting to govern people who are not within that state and are not technically doing business in that state. This is effectively allowing the state of Kentucky to overrule the sovereignty of other countries. Such extraterritorial influence should only be allowable if the action they are prohibiting causes provable harm to victims within the state (e.g. fraud laws). These laws, however, prohibit harm to third parties (legal in-Kentucky gambling institutions).
Kentucky should have the right to punish its citizens for online gambling, but IMHO has no legitimate claim for punishing anyone outside of KY for taking the bets any more than they have the right to fine companies in California for shipping wine directly to KY residents (see Granholm v. Heald). In fact, that case is pretty much an exact mirror of the way this one would go down if it ever reached the Supreme Court except that in this case, Kentucky doesn't even have little bits of the 21st Amendment to help prop up their position.
This law about as clear a violation of the interstate commerce clause as you can possibly get, and it's only a matter of time before it gets overturned. That said, given that Kentucky has done this before with other industries and has been slapped down, I think this time the Kentucky government needs to be slapped down a LOT harder, much like a repeat offender gets a longer jail term....
You also have the whole "skip" phenomenon, but that's probably outside the scope of this discussion....
Anyway, speaking as someone who has monitored the transmitter output while working at a college radio station, there actually is a little bit of variation in output power. Not huge, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the effect could be noticeable under the right conditions out on the fringes, particularly if the small difference causes it to fall below some magic detection threshold below which the receiver can't lock or ends up locking to an adjacent channel's signal inadvertently. FM is cranky that way---the whole "capture effect" thing.
Well, the modulation used is better at covering a larger area with lower power. Thus, they invariably use lower power. And I suppose if they really cranked the power up to the same power level, I guess it might be able to match or exceed the range of analog or better if you assume an outdoor antenna with no sources of multipath interference. Get up into the hills over North Carolina (where this test was done), however, or use an indoor antenna with all the multipath interference from radio-reflective surfaces around your house, and there's a good chance you'll find that you're screwed.:-)
Of course, in my mind, the biggest disadvantage of the elimination of analog TV is that you can no longer receive the audio portion of TV channel 6 on your radio. In an era where most of the country lacks any dedicated news radio stations (or, for that matter any stations with a single human being on the premises other than the occasional appearance of an engineer to perform periodic computer maintenance), a very large percentage of the general public will lose all access to emergency information such as tornado warnings, etc. You can't count on an outdoor antenna continuing to work correctly during a storm when you're huddled in the basement, and ATSC doesn't work very well at all when used with indoor antennas unless you're in a large metropolitan area (and not particularly well even here in the SF Bay Area). That's a real blow to the public service nature of broadcasting.
That doesn't make a lick of sense, a digital signal broadcasting at the same power as an analog signal should be receivable farther from the tower...
Not by a long shot. People who are currently putting up with a snowy picture will find that they are unable to get anything at all after the DTV switch....
Analog TV degrades gracefully. The farther out you get, the worse the picture quality, but you can go right to the deep fringe reception area and still get something even if the quality sucks. With digital TV, once the signal drops below a certain threshold, the error correction is unable to compensate for the degradation, at which point you get a blank screen.
Then, there's the problem of multipath interference. With analog TV, you just get a ringing ghost signal that is still watchable. Unfortunately, the ATSC digital TV standard that the U.S. chose (unlike the standard chosen in Europe) is relatively poor at handling multipath interference. If you have much multipath interference at all, the signal goes away. This is pretty easy to demonstrate by watching an analog signal and a digital signal off a pair of rabbit ears and rotating the antenna....
Finally, there's the problem of encoding. ATSC uses MPEG-2 as its video encoding scheme. Ultimately, I think that will prove to be the greatest flaw in the ATSC standard. Because it uses interframe compression, as soon as you get a tiny bit of signal that can't be decoded, you can lose the signal for up to half a second. (I frames must be transmitted every half second according to the MPEG-2 spec.) Worse, because the audio is muxed with the video, if the video stream can't be properly interpreted, you lose the audio signal, too unlike in analog where audio is the last thing to go....
In short, this was all very predictable and pretty much inevitable due to a combination of poor decisions when designing the standard and the need to greatly increase transmit power to cover the fringe reception areas with enough of a signal to be above the threshold of detection for digital
Good point. However, that's typically buying back a fairly small number of shares at a time. $40 billion in shares is on the order of 1.5 billion shares. That's enough to give every Microsoft employee close to 17,000 shares of stock apiece if my employment stats are correct---a roughly $450,000 bonus per employee from the janitorial staff up through the CEO....
There are only two good reasons I can think of to buy back stock:
To allow a reverse stock split to avoid delisting.
To defeat a hostile takeover attempt by ensuring that the company and its board own more than 50% of the stock.
So it's pretty obvious. They're afraid their stock is going to collapse to the point that they can be bought by SGI.:-D
In other words, I haven't the slightest idea what is going through their heads, but then again, computer people have been wondering what Microsoft could possibly have been thinking for years, so I guess that's nothing new....
AFAIK, BD+ was only broken in March of this year, and they're still iterating on the standard, so the protection has to periodically be rebroken. That's a lot better than DVD's protection, which has basically been completely broken for many years.:-)
Actually, Sony has a fairly significant entertainment arm. If anyone is in a position to kill off DVDs, it would be Sony. They have the ability to drive nails into its coffin both from the hardware side and the content side.
First, PayPal is not a general-purpose payment processor. It is a personal online payment processor for people without merchant accounts. By essentially eliminating the ability to use any other personal payment processors, that's prima facie monopoly abuse, and since eBay is the most common place for people to use those personal payment processors, that has a serious impact on those alternate processors.
Second, yes, eBay is pretty clearly a monopoly. There are one or two other online auction sites out there, but last I tried them, they all either suffer from usability problems, a lack of availability of interesting stuff, or both. The size of eBay has basically rendered them unable to usefully compete.
Forcing people to use one service in order to use another service is almost certainly illegal tying....
Nah. Even most people with high definition TVs don't see much real benefit from Blu-ray over properly upscaled DVD playback, either. At 720x480, DVD widescreen content is, frankly, plenty good enough to look reasonably crisp on all but the largest TVs. For that matter, even on the largest sets, it isn't objectionably fuzzy once you actually start watching it instead of staring at the screen up close.... Don't get me wrong, adoption will continue to grow, but now that the early adopters have pretty much finished adopting, there's not a lot of new market for this stuff as long as the media and the players are both so much more expensive than the comparable DVDs that are "good enough" for most purposes.
You see, people aren't really buying a DVD. They're buying a copy of a movie. That has a value that isn't really tied to the picture quality of the medium. People tend to be willing to spend a particular amount of money that tends to decrease rapidly as the age of the movie increases. Buying a $30 Blu-ray of a movie that you can buy in the $4.99 bargain bin at Wal-Mart is just plain not going to happen no matter how much better the picture quality is. Even buying a $30 Blu-ray of a movie that would cost $15 on DVD is pretty much a non-starter for most people. Their immediate judgment is "I have $60 to spend on entertainment this month. I can buy four new release DVDs or 8-12 older DVDs with that money (or some combination thereof). I could buy two Blu-ray discs." In the absence of their entertainment budget suddenly tripling, they will either buy fewer movies or will continue buying DVDs. Either way, the high cost of the discs is quite clearly limiting the uptake.
It's all about the Benjamins, so I'm pretty certain that Blu-ray purchases won't overtake DVDs until the price of the media drops to the price people are currently paying for DVDs (or less) or until the industry risks corporate suicide by stopping production of new DVDs to force adoption. Blu-ray purchases right now are basically equivalent to buying premium gasoline if your car doesn't knock with regular.... Sure, you'll convince a few people, but most people look at the benefit and the extra cost and conclude that the cost outweighs the benefit. Only when either A. the price is basically the same as DVDs or B. there's some other huge benefit that goes way beyond a slightly higher resolution will the majority of consumers care about Blu-ray or any other similar format.
There's also the penetration issue. I have a Blu-ray player hooked up to an HD set. I own one Blu-ray disc because I wanted to make sure the player could actually play them. Otherwise, I bought it to replace a DVD player that was flaking out, and I'm still buying DVDs. They play in every room of my house, while these only play in one room. So there's the compatibility issue and the need for 100% penetration in a household before people can start buying the discs in large quantities.... They don't replace all their DVD players with Blu-ray players quickly because the Blu-ray players are still relatively expensive. So there's cost factoring into adoption again.
In short, price and price are the two biggest factors in Blu-ray's current stagnation---price of players and price of media. Fix one or the other or both, and uptake will continue to increase steadily. Keep prices as they are, and uptake will slow and eventually stagnate. It is basic early adopter economics....
I wouldn't be so quick to see this decline as the end of the format. Purchases are drying up because the early adopters are tapped out. We'll probably see the law of supply and demand kick in pretty soon (given how people are eating up the now-defunct HD-DVD discs at $10 a disc), at which point they'll be forced to lower prices so their BD stuff will sell. When that happens, people will be more likely to buy the discs. We're also seeing economies of scale slowly bring the price of players down, which can't hurt....
The problem is that the entertainment industry is hoping to keep the prices propped up at $25-30 per disc for as long as they can get away with it. They can no longer get away with it because the luster of new tech is wearing off and they're crying "Boo Hoo".
If they could, they'd probably be looking for ways to blame piracy right now, but their copy protection is too good, so they've lost that scapegoat. The only question that remains is what red herring they'll come up with next....
The compression rates are defined by the person producing the disc just like they are for DVDs. I could pack 1 Mbps video on a DVD and get almost 10 hours of video on a single-layer DVD, or almost 20 hours on a dual-layer DVD. The Blu-Ray standard is specced for 23 hours of standard definition video per 50 GB disc, which works out to about 4.5 Mbps---about the typical bit rate for a commercial DVD.
I was about to post the same thing. The best thing they can do to drive the Blu-Ray format forward is to release entire seasons on a single Blu-Ray disc for less than the seasons cost new on DVD. They have to do most of the same post-production work anyway, and the incremental cost of building the BRD menus should be fairly small. The dramatically lower cost of producing a single BRD instead of a half dozen DVDs means that they should be able to undercut the DVD sales. When people see a financial incentive to buy a BRD player instead of a DVD player, they will do so....
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Couldn't disagree more. A full size notebook is not good enough for people who want a netbook. If you've ever flown coach, the reasons are obvious. With a typical laptop, if you place it on your tray table and open the screen to a comfortable viewing angle, the edge of the screen neatly tucks in where the tray table was with very little extra space. This becomes a problem only when the person in front of you leans back and your screen gets compressed between the back of the seat and the tray table. In a panic, you have to yank the computer out of there or risk the screen breaking.
I desperately want a laptop that is about 1.5 inches shorter off the table when fully open so that it isn't at risk when using it on a tray table. A netbook would be perfect for that. Here's what I want in a netbook:
There's my list as a frequent traveler. In other words, a size-reduced (screen-border-reduced) MacBook with ExpressCard, no optical drive, and an Atom CPU instead of a Core 2 Duo CPU.
Much as one would hope we would demand better legislators and better laws after all the draconian things that have been passed in the last few years. Doesn't make it likely. Until it bites them directly, most businesses can't be bothered to care about details like draconian EULA restrictions.... They have more important things to worry about... like lobbying to protect their offshore bank accounts from taxation. :-D
Never mind about that first part. I just realized that the thing about trolling was referring to a reply to a reply to my comment. :-) Too late at night....
I'm not trolling at all. A EULA is binding upon the consumer solely because of copyright. Without copyright, because A. it is not a signed contract, B. the two parties are not equal, C. there is no negotiation, and D. the EULA is not agreed upon by both parties prior to the time of purchase, it is highly likely (nay, certain) that all EULAs would be prima facie unenforceable under pure contract law.
Without copyright to prop it up, sale of a copy of an app would be just that: a sale of a copy of an app. Therefore, EULA abuse is, by definition, copyright abuse because the former cannot rightfully exist without the latter.
More to the point, any file created by a user is inherently the sole property of the user. The only way contract terms prohibiting reverse engineering of file formats would hold up would be if the terms explicitly prohibited giving the file to anyone who is not bound by the contract.
In the absence of such a clause, as soon as that file leaves your hands into the hands of someone who did not agree to the contract terms, any rights the company has to protect their file format cease to be relevant or enforceable (with the exception of patents).
In the presence of such a clause, you're going to have a hard time selling your application to anyone with half a brain, and such a clause would almost certainly be thrown out as unconscionable because of the unreasonable burden it would place on the user to verify the license of someone else before giving that person data that the user legitimately created and on which the user holds exclusive copyright.
Either way, file formats effectively cannot be protected from reverse engineering. As such, this company would have to somehow prove that it was impossible to reverse engineer the file format without reverse engineering the app itself. Speaking as somebody who has reverse engineered file formats before, I can say that any such statement could not possibly be made by an intelligent person without it being perjury....
So there you go. This suit is frivolous, and I hope the company has to pay a few million in restitution for pain and suffering to the victims of the suit. Such IP fraud deserves nothing less than a huge in-court bitch slap. This is precisely the sort of case that makes me opposed to every aspect of the Pro-IP act.... Yet another case of copyright abuse by a corporation to harm consumers and illegally stifle competition from smaller players.... *sigh*
Just to add another point on this, I only say "vote the bums out" because I already did my part to lobby my Senator against this and she chose to ignore her constituents' opinions in favor of corporate lobbying. When she comes up for reelection, this decision will make me seriously think twice before voting for Senator Feinstein again.
Here's the letter I sent.
Senator Feinstein,
Recently, the House passed a bill that I feel undermines our nation's technology and copyright policy at a fundamental level: the so-called "Pro-IP" act. As both an independent musician and a computer programmer, I feel it is important to write you a letter explaining why I feel this bill is a terrible idea. As a busy professional, it is rare that I see an upcoming bill as so detrimental to our nation that it is worth taking time off work to compose a letter to my representative. As such, please consider this letter with the appropriate weight it deserves. I am also sending a copy of this letter to Senator Boxer.
For ease of skimming, I have divided this letter into parts describing each of my fundamental objections to this bill.
EQUIPMENT SEIZURE:
I'm assuming you pay attention to the news, so you know why the movie and music industries are pushing for this law: they are losing nearly every court case that goes to court, so their efforts to sue file sharers have been almost wholly ineffectual. The reasons they are losing the cases, however, are:
A. a high percentage of their charges have been utterly fraudulent in nature without a shred of evidentiary support, and
B. almost none of the cases have sufficient evidentiary support to even pass the relatively low preponderance of evidence requirement to win a civil trial, much less the "beyond a resonable doubt" bar required for a criminal trial.
It seems clear that their intent of this bill is to create a new reason for people to be afraid of file sharing. Unfortunately, in light of the previous cases brought by the RIAA, it seems abundantly clear that the real-world result of such a bill will be people having their computers seized on scant evidence, and like most government seizures, being unable to get that equipment back without proving their -innocence- beyond a reasonable doubt. This is antithetical to the way our justice system is supposed to work and represents a fairly rapid descent into utter corporatist fascism.
LEGAL SALES AND FAIR USE:
Worse, this bill has no real purpose for existing. Services such as Apple's iTunes and Amazon Unboxed have shown conclusively that if you make the products available that the consumers want and in a format that is reasonable, they will overwhelmingly choose legitimate means of obtaining that content. File sharing of illegal content is rapidly becoming the exception rather than the rule, limited almost exclusively to content providers who do not make their content available through legitimate means.
I would also add that the majority of file sharing that remains is TV programming, not movies or music. That content has already been broadcast in an over-the-air fashion. It is completely within the bounds of copyright to allow both time and place shifting of this content, and making it available to people who already have the legal right to receive it (either from being within the broadcast area of a station or viewing it on cable) should be fundamentally protected by a fair use defense for a reasonable period of time after the show is broadcast. This law would substantially skew copyright by criminalizing something that isn't even clearly prevented by existing civil laws, and as such, represents a severe erosion of our nation's fair use rights.
REAL CAUSE OF INDUSTRY WOES:
And yet we watch as the movie and music industries repeatedly make false claims, blaming file sharing for their economic woes, when in reality their economic woes are caused by five fundamental problems:
A. The Bush economy---when people start
More to the point, the current system encourages corporate greed and discourages creativity. At this point, if you read Bridgeport Music Inc. v Dimension Films, you will see that it only takes three notes to be a copyright violation. Based on that, we can trivially show mathematically that every possible musical composition in the Western tonal system is copyrighted, so no further creativity is possible. In fact, there are only 1,728 (12 ^ 3) legal compositions possible in a 12-tone system, assuming you ignore the starting pitch as Bridgeport did.
Things have gotten so bad that I am not publishing my collection of musical creations at this point out of fear that some idiot litigious type will hear something in them that reminds him/her of something else and sue me for the most trivial of similarities. Based on Bridgeport, there's statistically a 100% chance that such similarities exist, and more to the point, odds are good that sufficient similarities exist with at least a few hundred copyrighted works, creating a huge potential pool of jerks who could abuse copyright law and sue me. As an independent artist and composer, I really can't afford that level of financial exposure for the meager pittance I would expect to gain from the release of sacred choral works.
It is clear that this government is too focused on protecting the corporate overlords of large-scale copyrights without even a modicum of concern for the rights and protection of individuals who actually do the creation. It's time that we strip out this copyright regime and replace it with a Congress that actually cares about content creators instead of mindlessly buying the corporate lobbyists' lies hook, line, and sinker. I say vote the bums out. All of them.
In every area, it is stagnating because protection is too strong. It's just a question of how far along the stagnation is. The fact is that we need less copyright protection, not more. I'll explain.
Historically, copyright ended after 28 years. At that point, the material became part of the public domain and contributed fully to the artistic enlightenment of society through repurposing, derivative works, etc. Far more creativity comes from third parties due to a work falling out of copyright than from the original creator being encouraged to create because of the work remaining under it.
The current system is set up in a fundamentally broken and brain-damaged way. Except in cases where the content creator dies prematurely, it keeps material under copyright until effectively 50+ years after the last person who to see the content when it was new has died. The net effect is that all of the creativity bump that comes from the material going into the public domain ceases to happen because nobody still remembers the work at all by the time it falls out of copyright.
If your goal is to encourage creativity and foster the arts and creation thereof, the best thing you can do is reduce the copyright duration to something much shorter---say 28 years. This is ideal because the kids who grew up with the copyrighted material become adults who are ready to contribute their own derivative works, compilations, etc. fairly early on in their careers (when they are likely to be at their highest level of creativity). Further, it promotes the continued enjoyment of these works because children who grew up with the works are able to freely redistribute and share those works with others as they themselves reach childbearing age (when they are most likely to interact with other parents and children).
No, that's precisely what encryption is best at doing. Even at a trivial level, SSL prevents eavesdropping on web URLs. Encryption also provides you with the concept of digital signing, which lets you verify that something is unadulterated, i.e. that it is exactly the version provided by a trustworthy source.
The fact is, piracy is an unsolvable problem. As soon as you prevent mass piracy on the Internet, people will just go back to the old-fashioned means of swapping tapes. As long as there has been media to copy, there have been people who copied it without the creator's permission (and often claiming it as their own), even back in the day when that meant hand-copying a musical manuscript.... Trying to prevent piracy is like trying to prevent the wind from blowing.
There are only two things that can be done to sustain an intellectual-property-based business model in an era of rampant piracy:
Neither of these is something the industry is willing to do, so instead, they keep whining and will continue doing so instead of shoring up their business practices as long as anyone is willing to listen to their whining and legislate based on that whining. In the end, though, this will only speed their decline into obsolescence by destroying customer trust, destroying customer loyalty, and eroding availability (and thus visibility) of the product.
A TV broadcaster 70 miles away is barely even fringe. For deep fringe, we're talking about the rural South (e.g. the town where I grew up), where it's not unusual to want to receive signals from stations 150-200 miles away.
So yes.
Sounds about right. A 25 dB antenna isn't huge. That could be as little as a standard 7 dB-ish antenna with a 16-19 dB standard booster amp. That's fairly typical for people in a rural area. At last count, that was about 60 million people.
I'm not convinced that this problem is solvable without keeping a public database of allowable frequencies by ZIP code and mandating that these devices know their location and regularly update their cached copy of their location's data (or a copy of the entire database for a mobile device).
Well, there's a little thing called lex causae that kicks in here. We have laws of one state attempting to govern people who are not within that state and are not technically doing business in that state. This is effectively allowing the state of Kentucky to overrule the sovereignty of other countries. Such extraterritorial influence should only be allowable if the action they are prohibiting causes provable harm to victims within the state (e.g. fraud laws). These laws, however, prohibit harm to third parties (legal in-Kentucky gambling institutions).
Kentucky should have the right to punish its citizens for online gambling, but IMHO has no legitimate claim for punishing anyone outside of KY for taking the bets any more than they have the right to fine companies in California for shipping wine directly to KY residents (see Granholm v. Heald). In fact, that case is pretty much an exact mirror of the way this one would go down if it ever reached the Supreme Court except that in this case, Kentucky doesn't even have little bits of the 21st Amendment to help prop up their position.
This law about as clear a violation of the interstate commerce clause as you can possibly get, and it's only a matter of time before it gets overturned. That said, given that Kentucky has done this before with other industries and has been slapped down, I think this time the Kentucky government needs to be slapped down a LOT harder, much like a repeat offender gets a longer jail term....
You also have the whole "skip" phenomenon, but that's probably outside the scope of this discussion....
Anyway, speaking as someone who has monitored the transmitter output while working at a college radio station, there actually is a little bit of variation in output power. Not huge, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the effect could be noticeable under the right conditions out on the fringes, particularly if the small difference causes it to fall below some magic detection threshold below which the receiver can't lock or ends up locking to an adjacent channel's signal inadvertently. FM is cranky that way---the whole "capture effect" thing.
Well, the modulation used is better at covering a larger area with lower power. Thus, they invariably use lower power. And I suppose if they really cranked the power up to the same power level, I guess it might be able to match or exceed the range of analog or better if you assume an outdoor antenna with no sources of multipath interference. Get up into the hills over North Carolina (where this test was done), however, or use an indoor antenna with all the multipath interference from radio-reflective surfaces around your house, and there's a good chance you'll find that you're screwed. :-)
Of course, in my mind, the biggest disadvantage of the elimination of analog TV is that you can no longer receive the audio portion of TV channel 6 on your radio. In an era where most of the country lacks any dedicated news radio stations (or, for that matter any stations with a single human being on the premises other than the occasional appearance of an engineer to perform periodic computer maintenance), a very large percentage of the general public will lose all access to emergency information such as tornado warnings, etc. You can't count on an outdoor antenna continuing to work correctly during a storm when you're huddled in the basement, and ATSC doesn't work very well at all when used with indoor antennas unless you're in a large metropolitan area (and not particularly well even here in the SF Bay Area). That's a real blow to the public service nature of broadcasting.
Not by a long shot. People who are currently putting up with a snowy picture will find that they are unable to get anything at all after the DTV switch....
Analog TV degrades gracefully. The farther out you get, the worse the picture quality, but you can go right to the deep fringe reception area and still get something even if the quality sucks. With digital TV, once the signal drops below a certain threshold, the error correction is unable to compensate for the degradation, at which point you get a blank screen.
Then, there's the problem of multipath interference. With analog TV, you just get a ringing ghost signal that is still watchable. Unfortunately, the ATSC digital TV standard that the U.S. chose (unlike the standard chosen in Europe) is relatively poor at handling multipath interference. If you have much multipath interference at all, the signal goes away. This is pretty easy to demonstrate by watching an analog signal and a digital signal off a pair of rabbit ears and rotating the antenna....
Finally, there's the problem of encoding. ATSC uses MPEG-2 as its video encoding scheme. Ultimately, I think that will prove to be the greatest flaw in the ATSC standard. Because it uses interframe compression, as soon as you get a tiny bit of signal that can't be decoded, you can lose the signal for up to half a second. (I frames must be transmitted every half second according to the MPEG-2 spec.) Worse, because the audio is muxed with the video, if the video stream can't be properly interpreted, you lose the audio signal, too unlike in analog where audio is the last thing to go....
In short, this was all very predictable and pretty much inevitable due to a combination of poor decisions when designing the standard and the need to greatly increase transmit power to cover the fringe reception areas with enough of a signal to be above the threshold of detection for digital
Quick! Everybody hide!
:-D
Good point. However, that's typically buying back a fairly small number of shares at a time. $40 billion in shares is on the order of 1.5 billion shares. That's enough to give every Microsoft employee close to 17,000 shares of stock apiece if my employment stats are correct---a roughly $450,000 bonus per employee from the janitorial staff up through the CEO....
There are only two good reasons I can think of to buy back stock:
So it's pretty obvious. They're afraid their stock is going to collapse to the point that they can be bought by SGI. :-D
In other words, I haven't the slightest idea what is going through their heads, but then again, computer people have been wondering what Microsoft could possibly have been thinking for years, so I guess that's nothing new....
AFAIK, BD+ was only broken in March of this year, and they're still iterating on the standard, so the protection has to periodically be rebroken. That's a lot better than DVD's protection, which has basically been completely broken for many years. :-)
Actually, Sony has a fairly significant entertainment arm. If anyone is in a position to kill off DVDs, it would be Sony. They have the ability to drive nails into its coffin both from the hardware side and the content side.
First, PayPal is not a general-purpose payment processor. It is a personal online payment processor for people without merchant accounts. By essentially eliminating the ability to use any other personal payment processors, that's prima facie monopoly abuse, and since eBay is the most common place for people to use those personal payment processors, that has a serious impact on those alternate processors.
Second, yes, eBay is pretty clearly a monopoly. There are one or two other online auction sites out there, but last I tried them, they all either suffer from usability problems, a lack of availability of interesting stuff, or both. The size of eBay has basically rendered them unable to usefully compete.
Forcing people to use one service in order to use another service is almost certainly illegal tying....
Nah. Even most people with high definition TVs don't see much real benefit from Blu-ray over properly upscaled DVD playback, either. At 720x480, DVD widescreen content is, frankly, plenty good enough to look reasonably crisp on all but the largest TVs. For that matter, even on the largest sets, it isn't objectionably fuzzy once you actually start watching it instead of staring at the screen up close.... Don't get me wrong, adoption will continue to grow, but now that the early adopters have pretty much finished adopting, there's not a lot of new market for this stuff as long as the media and the players are both so much more expensive than the comparable DVDs that are "good enough" for most purposes.
You see, people aren't really buying a DVD. They're buying a copy of a movie. That has a value that isn't really tied to the picture quality of the medium. People tend to be willing to spend a particular amount of money that tends to decrease rapidly as the age of the movie increases. Buying a $30 Blu-ray of a movie that you can buy in the $4.99 bargain bin at Wal-Mart is just plain not going to happen no matter how much better the picture quality is. Even buying a $30 Blu-ray of a movie that would cost $15 on DVD is pretty much a non-starter for most people. Their immediate judgment is "I have $60 to spend on entertainment this month. I can buy four new release DVDs or 8-12 older DVDs with that money (or some combination thereof). I could buy two Blu-ray discs." In the absence of their entertainment budget suddenly tripling, they will either buy fewer movies or will continue buying DVDs. Either way, the high cost of the discs is quite clearly limiting the uptake.
It's all about the Benjamins, so I'm pretty certain that Blu-ray purchases won't overtake DVDs until the price of the media drops to the price people are currently paying for DVDs (or less) or until the industry risks corporate suicide by stopping production of new DVDs to force adoption. Blu-ray purchases right now are basically equivalent to buying premium gasoline if your car doesn't knock with regular.... Sure, you'll convince a few people, but most people look at the benefit and the extra cost and conclude that the cost outweighs the benefit. Only when either A. the price is basically the same as DVDs or B. there's some other huge benefit that goes way beyond a slightly higher resolution will the majority of consumers care about Blu-ray or any other similar format.
There's also the penetration issue. I have a Blu-ray player hooked up to an HD set. I own one Blu-ray disc because I wanted to make sure the player could actually play them. Otherwise, I bought it to replace a DVD player that was flaking out, and I'm still buying DVDs. They play in every room of my house, while these only play in one room. So there's the compatibility issue and the need for 100% penetration in a household before people can start buying the discs in large quantities.... They don't replace all their DVD players with Blu-ray players quickly because the Blu-ray players are still relatively expensive. So there's cost factoring into adoption again.
In short, price and price are the two biggest factors in Blu-ray's current stagnation---price of players and price of media. Fix one or the other or both, and uptake will continue to increase steadily. Keep prices as they are, and uptake will slow and eventually stagnate. It is basic early adopter economics....
I wouldn't be so quick to see this decline as the end of the format. Purchases are drying up because the early adopters are tapped out. We'll probably see the law of supply and demand kick in pretty soon (given how people are eating up the now-defunct HD-DVD discs at $10 a disc), at which point they'll be forced to lower prices so their BD stuff will sell. When that happens, people will be more likely to buy the discs. We're also seeing economies of scale slowly bring the price of players down, which can't hurt....
The problem is that the entertainment industry is hoping to keep the prices propped up at $25-30 per disc for as long as they can get away with it. They can no longer get away with it because the luster of new tech is wearing off and they're crying "Boo Hoo".
If they could, they'd probably be looking for ways to blame piracy right now, but their copy protection is too good, so they've lost that scapegoat. The only question that remains is what red herring they'll come up with next....
The compression rates are defined by the person producing the disc just like they are for DVDs. I could pack 1 Mbps video on a DVD and get almost 10 hours of video on a single-layer DVD, or almost 20 hours on a dual-layer DVD. The Blu-Ray standard is specced for 23 hours of standard definition video per 50 GB disc, which works out to about 4.5 Mbps---about the typical bit rate for a commercial DVD.
I was about to post the same thing. The best thing they can do to drive the Blu-Ray format forward is to release entire seasons on a single Blu-Ray disc for less than the seasons cost new on DVD. They have to do most of the same post-production work anyway, and the incremental cost of building the BRD menus should be fairly small. The dramatically lower cost of producing a single BRD instead of a half dozen DVDs means that they should be able to undercut the DVD sales. When people see a financial incentive to buy a BRD player instead of a DVD player, they will do so....