The viewpoint you are missing is called compensation. From the opyright owner's point of view, the music is already out there and can't be taken back. The only thing left is compensation for it. So who do they turn to? The guy with the big money. Why chase down thosands of people with expensive lawsuits and have no money to pay you when you can just chase one guy with lots of money to give when you win? We may not agree with this line of rationalization, but I mean let's face it, they do deserve some compensation. That we can agree to.
It is just that you and I are not disinterest bystanders. The effect of these actions on us is that the barriers to entry for ISP's are raised. We get less choice of ISP's and less services. But we can't get any representation in this legal process! We have to go aroundabout to lobby for laws to stop this kind of thing. This is more complicated and is hard.
I am just dreaming here, but maybe if the courts are not just about one-party versus another, but also have third party, public interest kind of representation... (cut to John Lennon's Imagine)
Some history: Amazon sells books. Tim O'Reilly is a book publisher. A while ago, Tim O'Reilly wrote an open letter to Jeff Bezos, asking him to back down on his position. I just wrote a parody of the sequence of events, subsituting of Amazon with InTouch, and O'Reilly with MP3.com (music publisher). For comedy.
Didn't really think it was that insightful really.
If Bill Gates wants to donate, I think it is great. The world could always do with one more philanthropist.
But, I consider that to be him, giving in his private capacity. In fact, morally, I rate the poor fellow living on minimum wage a greater social consciousness if he gives a mere $20 to his favourite charity. Becuase of the element of sacrifice. None of Bill's charitable donations cost him anything. He has way too much money for one single person to spend anyway.
Now Microsoft giving out donations to Universities, and hospitals. That's a wholly different thing. If they are doing this to gain good PR, well, that is really despicable. No amount of whitewashing will get them out of that anti-trust suit.
You geeks who insist on watching movies on your computer monitors are deranged. There are many things that one could do, besides watching DVD's passively. One could cut several scenes out and study the scenes for the technical filmaking aspects. One could take a few shots and make a paraody. One could rip a few scenes, and insert say, Natalie Portman, as the red lady in the Matrix. All of thee forms of creative expression is valid, and MPAA has no right to tell anyone not to do it.
Hey I agree with you. We need to be thinking of the long term, rather than the mere expediency of having another closed DVD player. Seems like everything is done is software (DeCSS or something equivalent must still be there), and nobody is willing to release the sources.
Isn't some form of DeCSS needed to handle the decryption? Or is this handled all by the hardware? If this is the case, there a whole lot of interesting issues.
Firstly, Creative has shown that it can comply with CSS (fsck them!) and still make cards that have open-sourced drivers. More power to them! This mean that there is chance that the other unices can too have DVD playback.
But then our chief weapon against the evils of DVD encryption is lost. The content is still encrypted. Those MPAA idiots are still locking us into their commercial interests, and are not thinking about the future long-term culteral heritage. 100 years laters, archivists interested in what we see, how we think will laugh at us for trying to protect the unprotectable. The region-locks are also provide too much power over how we use the technology.
Well, it's hard to judge if this is a good thing or not.
Well why not? Why isn't it cool for companies to open-source their products? From my point of view, it's excellent! As long as they know that it doesn't make them cool forever.
The only issue seems to be whether they can keep maintaining it open-sourced, if it is really opensourced in the first place. Now that would make them continually cool. And that is the hard thing for commercial interests to do.
So MS hires some big gun to clean its PR. How is this any different from what they are doing?
And what about this reference to Satan? MS is not satan! They may have stifled competition, thumbed their noses at Judges, bully OEMs, forced Go out of business, dumped Internet Explorer, write sneaky code to make compatible products incompatible, misrepresented their committment to OS/2... but they are not evil.
Why can't we just live along together? Isn't skins about customizablility? If some 3l33t h4ck0r wants to put some funny skins on his computer let him.
For the rest of us who want to get things done, something simple would be enough. I propose that judging on useability standards be applied to the DEFAULT (or default few) skin/desktop/window manager. For all others, go ahead and customize it to your desire. (It is customizable, right?)
I loved the arc story about the PsiCorps. Having read Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, I must applaud B5 in its true and honest portrayal of how a class of Psi elites must be set up, to control them, and how it eventually leads to them controlling us. Beautiful. And naming the lead character "Bester" is a very excellent tip of the hat off by Straczynski to the true master, Alfred Bester.
This is the series that got me interested in space-opera again. Something that Star Trek, in its endlessly repititive episodes, fail to deliver. (Dons flame retardent asbestos suit).
I like your advocacy of the PURL. In essence, this is a use of the market to control the behaviour of software companies, and puts worth into owning software licenses. I like the consideration and thought you have given to all parties, even the free-software zealots.
How much advocacy of this idea have you done? What is the response like? Do you see or predict people wanting to change to this kind of software licenses? In particular, what would you say to the Intellectual-Property hating zealots here on Slashdot?
Pardon me for being clueless, but what is the point of this cracking effort?
So one particular message, encrypted with one particular pair of keys was cracked after running a brute force cracker on lots and lots of machines. I don't get it, what does this prove? Does it not in fact demostrate how hard it is to crack ECC? In fact, this does not prove anything. Maybe there are specific key-pairs which are particularly easy to brute force?
All i'm whining about is, userspace is vastly more important than piddly dumbfuck kernel, as nice and interesting as it may be.
I don't disagree. Just want to point out that none of this would have been possible without the kernel. It's the kernel that determines what you can and cannot do.
(Of course, the GNU stuff was written pretty much without that kernel, on other Unices.)
This is not the point at all ...
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The whole point of this is that Free OSes cannot play or use DVDs. This is not about Linux.
And not just that. As PC users, we want flexibility. I want to manipulate the video stream. I want to be able to stop a frame, capture it, and perhaps make a parody. In a film-making class, studying such things one frame at a time is one way of learning the craft.
There are just so many legitimate uses of DVD and digital media. I can't even think of all of them on the spot. To the MPAA: You never had any issue with how your movies are used. True, if we publish anything defamatory, you can sue. That not copyright law. Copyright law only extends to distribution, and many of are willing to abide my those laws! Who gave you the authority to dictate use terms upon us? Whatever gave you the authority to choose our OS for us?
And I am not even saying that this is an us-vs-you issue. By us I mean you too, in the future, when your future studios can't and won't be able to use these locked-in materials. Ever think about that? Don't tell me that the Warner-Fox-MGM-blah consortium will remain bed-fellows forever?
I used to work on a dual processor Alpha and dual processor Pentium IIs. Floating point operations noticeably faster on the Alpha thn the pentium.
But the compiler probably has something to do with it. I hate to break the news, but DEC's proprietry optimizing C compiler consistently produced faster code than the GNU C compiler for that alpha machine. A difference of 2 hours vs 1 hour of computation (Unloaded).
"Welcome to Hotel Mir, how may we help you today?"
"Give me a room with a good view."
"Well, that going to be hard. For safety reasons, none of the guest rooms have a portal. We do however have multiple viewcams that you can look rthrough by selecting channels 332 to 389 on the TiVo..."
"OK. Then any room will do right?"
"Yes. But in actuality, we are now on the night-side, and there is really nothing to see. You'll have to wait 8 hours."
"Then what can I do? Is there a casino or a bar someplace?"
"Well due to space restraints, you can enjoy a tube of wine within the comforts of your own room, and you can always surf the web to a casino site..."
"WTF! Then what's the point of coming here? I might as well go back!"
"OK. As you wish. That will be $500 thousand for the return trip..."
Linux is not the only Free-OS around. What about the FreeBSD guys, and the Solaris fellows? One of the advantages of free-software is portability. If we see the source of one, we can port it for the others. Get it MPAA? You create one, we will create the rest for you, so that MORE PEOPLE will want to buy DVDs! Get it?
Long-term portability. One of the great advantages of free-software is that I can tailor my own system to suit my needs. If I change a sound card, just recompile the new sound module. With a closed source binary, it is a real pain to get it to work with new hardware/new releases of the kernel.
How will this help people create DVDs for other people to use? Ever heard of home movies? With open-source, once we understand how it's play, we can see how to do it for DVDs. This is not contributing to the technical knowledge of DVDs at all.
The MPAA still does not get it. All this is about is extracting largesse from the population at large. How about our cultural heritage? Will future generations have to crack your codes to understand our culture, our movies?
I think they will laugh at you, for being closed-minded enough to encrypt your creative efforts, using such weak encryption, and believing that it can profited from.
Face it, USENET is dying. I got out in 1996, and I am not turning back. The Signal/Noise ratio was just getting too high. As my country was getting wired up, suddenly, anonymous posts using the ol' anon.penet.fi anonymous server crept up. None of these was posted in the spirit of criticism. All of it were trolls. People threatened each other with lawsuits on the newsgroup which I hung out on soc.culture.singapore.
What has changed? The content of USENET posts will degrade, kept alive only by the informative stuff in the comp.* groups. As discussion forums move onto the web (like slashdot), I predict that nobody will over even remember USENET. This is just one more nail in the coffin.
God forbid someone threaten slashdot-style forums.
Slashdot Mirror
(For Americans, gaol is a british word for jail).
It is just that you and I are not disinterest bystanders. The effect of these actions on us is that the barriers to entry for ISP's are raised. We get less choice of ISP's and less services. But we can't get any representation in this legal process! We have to go aroundabout to lobby for laws to stop this kind of thing. This is more complicated and is hard.
I am just dreaming here, but maybe if the courts are not just about one-party versus another, but also have third party, public interest kind of representation ... (cut to John Lennon's Imagine)
Didn't really think it was that insightful really.
Rinse, Repeat.
But, I consider that to be him, giving in his private capacity. In fact, morally, I rate the poor fellow living on minimum wage a greater social consciousness if he gives a mere $20 to his favourite charity. Becuase of the element of sacrifice. None of Bill's charitable donations cost him anything. He has way too much money for one single person to spend anyway.
Now Microsoft giving out donations to Universities, and hospitals. That's a wholly different thing. If they are doing this to gain good PR, well, that is really despicable. No amount of whitewashing will get them out of that anti-trust suit.
You geeks who insist on watching movies on your computer monitors are deranged. There are many things that one could do, besides watching DVD's passively. One could cut several scenes out and study the scenes for the technical filmaking aspects. One could take a few shots and make a paraody. One could rip a few scenes, and insert say, Natalie Portman, as the red lady in the Matrix. All of thee forms of creative expression is valid, and MPAA has no right to tell anyone not to do it.
My solution: Stop buying/renting/watching DVDs.
Firstly, Creative has shown that it can comply with CSS (fsck them!) and still make cards that have open-sourced drivers. More power to them! This mean that there is chance that the other unices can too have DVD playback.
But then our chief weapon against the evils of DVD encryption is lost. The content is still encrypted. Those MPAA idiots are still locking us into their commercial interests, and are not thinking about the future long-term culteral heritage. 100 years laters, archivists interested in what we see, how we think will laugh at us for trying to protect the unprotectable. The region-locks are also provide too much power over how we use the technology.
Well, it's hard to judge if this is a good thing or not.
The only issue seems to be whether they can keep maintaining it open-sourced, if it is really opensourced in the first place. Now that would make them continually cool. And that is the hard thing for commercial interests to do.
One at a time.
And what about this reference to Satan? MS is not satan! They may have stifled competition, thumbed their noses at Judges, bully OEMs, forced Go out of business, dumped Internet Explorer, write sneaky code to make compatible products incompatible, misrepresented their committment to OS/2 ... but they are not evil.
For the rest of us who want to get things done, something simple would be enough. I propose that judging on useability standards be applied to the DEFAULT (or default few) skin/desktop/window manager. For all others, go ahead and customize it to your desire. (It is customizable, right?)
This is the series that got me interested in space-opera again. Something that Star Trek, in its endlessly repititive episodes, fail to deliver. (Dons flame retardent asbestos suit).
The Matrix has you.
How much advocacy of this idea have you done? What is the response like? Do you see or predict people wanting to change to this kind of software licenses? In particular, what would you say to the Intellectual-Property hating zealots here on Slashdot?
So one particular message, encrypted with one particular pair of keys was cracked after running a brute force cracker on lots and lots of machines. I don't get it, what does this prove? Does it not in fact demostrate how hard it is to crack ECC? In fact, this does not prove anything. Maybe there are specific key-pairs which are particularly easy to brute force?
Can someone please enlighten me?
I don't disagree. Just want to point out that none of this would have been possible without the kernel. It's the kernel that determines what you can and cannot do.
(Of course, the GNU stuff was written pretty much without that kernel, on other Unices.)
And not just that. As PC users, we want flexibility. I want to manipulate the video stream. I want to be able to stop a frame, capture it, and perhaps make a parody. In a film-making class, studying such things one frame at a time is one way of learning the craft.
There are just so many legitimate uses of DVD and digital media. I can't even think of all of them on the spot. To the MPAA: You never had any issue with how your movies are used. True, if we publish anything defamatory, you can sue. That not copyright law. Copyright law only extends to distribution, and many of are willing to abide my those laws! Who gave you the authority to dictate use terms upon us? Whatever gave you the authority to choose our OS for us?
And I am not even saying that this is an us-vs-you issue. By us I mean you too, in the future, when your future studios can't and won't be able to use these locked-in materials. Ever think about that? Don't tell me that the Warner-Fox-MGM-blah consortium will remain bed-fellows forever?
But the compiler probably has something to do with it. I hate to break the news, but DEC's proprietry optimizing C compiler consistently produced faster code than the GNU C compiler for that alpha machine. A difference of 2 hours vs 1 hour of computation (Unloaded).
Oh great! So now I know how fast it is orbitting!
"Give me a room with a good view."
"Well, that going to be hard. For safety reasons, none of the guest rooms have a portal. We do however have multiple viewcams that you can look rthrough by selecting channels 332 to 389 on the TiVo ..."
"OK. Then any room will do right?"
"Yes. But in actuality, we are now on the night-side, and there is really nothing to see. You'll have to wait 8 hours."
"Then what can I do? Is there a casino or a bar someplace?"
"Well due to space restraints, you can enjoy a tube of wine within the comforts of your own room, and you can always surf the web to a casino site ..."
"WTF! Then what's the point of coming here? I might as well go back!"
"OK. As you wish. That will be $500 thousand for the return trip ..."
I think they will laugh at you, for being closed-minded enough to encrypt your creative efforts, using such weak encryption, and believing that it can profited from.
Hey they tried! But each NT server tied itself up trying to fight the others to be Domain Controllers!
What has changed? The content of USENET posts will degrade, kept alive only by the informative stuff in the comp.* groups. As discussion forums move onto the web (like slashdot), I predict that nobody will over even remember USENET. This is just one more nail in the coffin.
God forbid someone threaten slashdot-style forums.