]...] which points out that the derivative work rights assigned to a copyright holder are what give the GPL it's teeth.
That's the interesting part about this ruling that a lot of people are missing. This is GOOD for the GPL (and similar license), because it states quite clearly and unambiguously that the original author reserves the right to make derivative works, and more importantly, that they have the right to _NOT_ make them available if they desire.
The fact that this was even a question, however, demonstrates that copyright law is in need of serious reform..
As the construction supervisor said to Arthur Dent referring to the amount of damage his equipment would recieve if he allowed them to simply run over Mr. Dent, "none at all."
AT&T is now the ILEC for the majority of America's most populous state (California), and recieves probably the majority of their day-to-day business from the Government itself. Even if 10% of consumers left AT&T for somebody else, they'd laugh it off: after all, most of those consumers are purchasing low-profit and high cost services anyway.
Besides, who are you going to go to? Where are you going to get local dialtone from if you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco? Go ahead. Buy it from a CLEC. If you can find one still selling service, guess who's gonna still get the revenue for the copper loop? Okay, so I'll go get service from the cable company. Oh, right. Comcast. A company that AT&T owns stock in.
Not in the kernel tree, but there is a third-party driver available. My understanding from associates who work with the Linux version is it isn't as feature-rich as the OpenBSD driver, and those who develop on it are also frustrated by Hifn's new policies.
What percentage of their customers rely on OpenBSD support? Who are they more loyal to, Hifn for the hardware or OpenBSD for the OS?
As someone who works for a place that uses crypto cards, I can tell you: we are more bound to the OS than the crypto hardware. There's a lot of different crypto hardware on the market, but if you want to do any kind of hardcore embedded systems development using a POSIX API, there aren't a lot of choices out there.
He makes more money than most people ever will, I don't feel bad for him because he's too dumb to make shitloads more.
Actually, as I understand it, Weird Al only takes home (on average) what would be comparable to a $100k/year salary. While arguably "more than most people ever will [make]", you make it sound like Weird Al is camping out in posh Beverly Hills digs with a butler and a limo.. when, in reality, he lives in a fairly normal middle-class house in a normal middle-class neighborhood, and makes about the same amount as a good IT professional would make in Los Angeles.
When it comes to parody and satire of the music industry, he's the best there is. It seems a bit of a shame that Weird Al even NOTICES that he makes less selling stuff through iTunes.. that means, to me at least, that Al is probably getting shafted like every other artist by the Cartel.
As it has been observed, Theo can be quite.. forceful with his viewpoints.
This is one of those cases where he is entitled to be. As Theo points out, datasheets for hardware chips are generally available freely from vendors: after all, if there are no drivers and if nobody knows how to interface with it, there are no chip sales, are there? Worse, this is all information that almost a decade ago WAS freely available, and suddenly has become UNavailable due to a policy change.
While we might not be "regulated", many VoIP companies use the "Regulatory fees" to recover their costs when those same fees are passed on to us on the circuits we buy. Facilities-based providers (especially small ones that are buying DIDs "PBX-style" on T1s) are often paying fees and taxes on those lines the same way a medium-size business would.
But, on the other hand, if you think the "regulatory compliance fees" you pay on your landline bill don't just go into the pocket of the phone company, you need to actually read the laws. A lot of the money from these things (including the "Interstate access fee") simply goes into funds that the phone companies draw upon to pay taxes and business expenses that any other business (like, say, the corner grocery store) would just simply add into their profit and loss calculations..
Recall that NTP only sued Blackberry when Blackberry was quite publically rumbling that they were considering suing Palm and other handheld vendors (Sidekick) for similar features in their handsets.
So, where on the site does it mention what phones it works with?
I apparently doesn't work with the world's most converged phones (well, I tried it on a Treo 650, and it doesn't work in IBM's Java client that comes with the Treo), and the website is.. appauling, even for a first effort.
Dodgeball, dudes. It's all about being able to do this stuff with SMS, which every phone has. Sure, they can have a fancy Java midlet later.. but first, it's gotta work on everybody's phone before it will have widespread acceptance.
The reviewer, and everybody else who's slamming it, is right. It has some quite obvious and annoying flaws that prevent it from doing what it is supposed to be.
I'm calling it for what it is. An underpowered, underfeatured, worthless piece of shit.
Hey! Idiots! Guess what? The PDA has morphed into this device called a smartphone.
The folks at Handspring saw the writing on the wall years ago... the standalone PDA has no future. It's the worst of all worlds: not enough power to replace a general-purpose computer, limited communications channels without a cell phone interface, and clumsy "integration" (ever used a PDA to dial a Bluetooth phone? Yeah. Me neither).
The word "smartphone" is a huge disservice to the world of the PDA. Every smartphone is, really, a PDA with a phone taped on the side.
Sun was right. The Network is the Computer. What makes smartphones such handy gadgets is the integration of PDA features into the very device you are going to be using to communicate. It just makes sense.
Are you serious? You think your kids going to ask for your classic Cypress Hill or some other album with "negative" connotations?;-) Part of growing up and getting into music is discovering new things, and for many people their parents music is a treasure trove. Are you going to ask your parents to burn their whole collection for you, just so you can listen to different things? Which you are going to have to rencode if you want to actually listen to it, as all your media players are apple solid state / portable hd products?
Given the fact that you can't redownload it, I make it a point to burn every album I buy on iTunes onto a decent-quality CD-R. If I lose the original, I have that backup copy.
So, any hypothetical "kid" would have no problem scrounging through the stacks of CDs, much like I as a kid scrounged through my uncle's 45 and 78 RPM records.
So what? This is completely different. iTunes controls 100% of the iPod market (and vice-versa) when it comes to buying legitimate media. With CDs, you could license then and people did. One of the reasons Betamax lost out to VHS was that the VHS consortium was more liberal in what they would allow (i.e. porn). Things are different with iTunes; it's the locked-down product that won the first round. You have no choice. If you really want to format shift to another device, you need to go via CDR and further audio compression, which is time consuming and probably beyond most iPod users as they are mostly normal people who know little of DRM, compression and so on. They'd just accept it and buy more apple devices in future.
That's piss-poor for the consumer.
Most consumers don't think so. So far, nobody has even come close to offering a completely integrated product like Apple. And, they likely won't.
Ironically enough, because of DRM: Sony (as a primary example) can't seem to figure out that "fair and flexible" DRM is acceptable to most consumers. Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" shows that even when you have a near-monopoly, if your DRM is not flexible enough for the consumer, nobody will give you the time of day.
Of course, it helps a lot that iTunes (the software) and iPod both play mp3's just fine. If you hate DRM, great. Go get an eMusic account. The reality of it is, most people are willing to accept a little "inconvenience" to get what they want. iTunes makes the DRM painless and non-intrusive. Which is why Apple dominates right now.
True, you are right. But would you be happy leaving it unattended? Depends on the parties you go to, but IMHO for a good party one thing needed is people you don't know.
I'm a grumpy scientist-type, who never gets invited to those kinds of parties.
Thats piracy, as you are making an unauthorized copy for someone else.
According to the RIAA, 'lending' is also against your rights. Says so right on the label. Your point?
But, the total irony of that is that the RIAA's position is asinine. People like buying things and "owning" them. I, personally, have purchased a ton of music after getting copies from friends. The stuff that's good, I want more of. The stuff that's really good, I want my own "legit" copy.. not because of some prurient sense of obligation (because, in reality, the artist doesn't make diddly off of album sales), but because I enjoy handling CDs and I like collecting them.
I just fear that DRM is going to cost us a slice of our collective culture. Sharing music, trying something new, random, different is significant in enjoying music. I see an alternative world brewing where there are only Britany Spears clones running around, with smaller acts pushed to the back of the iTunes catalogue, and we can only hear what we personally have paid for or have seen advertised on TV or radio.
As somebody who enjoys ragtime and "boogie woogie" musical styles of the 1910-1950 era, I can tell you that the culture that matters survives with or without DRM. The vast majority of the mu
1. Burn the m4p to a CD and hand it to your kids. 2. Technically every "CD Player" (that is, a player that plays those plastic ~~ 5" disks that have ADPCM-encoded audio on them) has paid a license fee to build a player using that technology. Sure, there are multiple companies making CD players: but a percentage of all the profit still goes to the fine folks that invented the technology. Every audio distribution media since the gramophone record has had some patent / license encumbrances. Let's not forget, everybody's "favorite" digital technology (mp3) has similar patent issues. 3. Funny. I have no problem taking my entire music library to a friend's house and playing it. It's called an "iPod". Bonus: it's not just one, two or ten CDs. It's a significant portion of my entire library. 4. See # 1.
RIM was the one beating the drum of "we're gonna sue anybody who uses this technology" until somebody else (NTP) said "yeah, um.. about that."
RIM was the bully in this situation. They got hosed. They are in no position to be crying that the rules aren't fair: they wanted to screw everybody else. It's their own damn fault they didn't think their cunning plan all the way through.
SCO's claims have been, and remain, far more complicated than that.
SCO's claim is not necessarily that IBM stole code that they have a patent on. SCO's claim revolves around a contract that SCO and IBM have, and that IBM breached that contract by submitting code IBM wrote to Linux, and that IBM was contractually bound by SCO to not do that. SCO is not claiming (at least, from what I read) that IBM didn't write the code, just that IBM did not have the right to release the code to a third party without SCO's "approval" or licensing.
Yes, I agree SCO is being a bunch of ninnys, and I think that this is the crux of this motion by IBM.
That being said, this case isn't as simple as you make it out to be. SCO is saying, in essence, that "IBM violated our contract by submitting code that [contractually] we own to Linux". Part of SCO's "evidence" of this wrongdoing is the contract itself: what does the contract say? What are the terms? What constitutes "submitting" and "violation", in the framework of the contract?
Because this is not "simple common law" we're talking about here, it requires a certain amount of arbitration.
The system is working. I have no doubt that when this is all said and done, not only will IBM be victorious, but it will resolve once and for all the "legal questions" involving Linux and Open Source software generically.
This is partially why I don't believe there is any real Microsoft-SCO conspiracy.. because the last thing Microsoft really wants is a clearly defined court case that resolves the IP issues involved with Linux.. and for that matter, with the whole AT&T/BSD "who really owns UNIX" issue entirely.
SCO's initial claim may seem preposterous to us in the Open Source "community", but outside of our knowledge of the way things work, things are a bit murky. By the time this is done, the waters will be clear.. trust me. IBM wouldn't be fighting it if it wouldn't.
"Innocent until proven guilty" may, in fact, be a staple of the US criminal justice system, but it does not, in fact, have anything to do with contract and tort.
This fact is (or at least, should be) basic high-school civics stuff, not something you need a JD for, people. Get it right.
What if you are using Google for search, and you start to discover that response time to Google "seems slow" compared to Yahoo (who hypothetically is paying for "tiered access") ? If you are most people, you'll just start using Yahoo. Or MSN (don't think for a minute that Microsoft wouldn't jump at the chance to get ahead of the line of Google). The customer would hardly ever get blocked.. just pages would be slow to load.
If you want to see this "fuck it up just enough to be annoying" business model in action, look at Netflix. The vast majority of Netflix customers are blissfully unaware of the "rent too much, you get less" policies. The 5% that notice are usually the least-profitable customers, so Netflix loses very little if those customers go to Blockbuster. The vast majority (probably anywhere from 50% - 80%) never see the "policy". The people in between who get throttled either blame it on the delivery mechanism (damn post office!) or don't even notice because they're not sitting on their front porch with a stopwatch.
Same thing will happen here. Most users won't notice. If they do notice, they'll just switch to whatever works.. like the Internet, they'll view it as "damage" and route around it. The few that do? Dollars to donuts, AT&T et. al. view them as "unprofitable" and would prefer they go play BitTorrent on somebody else's network.
Welcome to modern business: where pissing off customers can be viewed as a "good" thing.
And you still haven't demonstrated why this is a problem.
Time and time again, it comes down to the fact that nobody has ever proven that the availalibility of illegal copies of something ever really truly makes a big impact in the sales of the legitimate product. In fact, the contrary seems to be true: that digital "illegal" copies of music, movies, TV shows, whatever seems to be able to drive sales of the product.
Increasingly, this is more about the Content Cartel's control of the pipeline. Digital media can make anybody a distributor, and that's what they fear. Not that Johnny Napster is going to post the Metallica CD that he bought at Target, but that their entire business model of screwing over both artists and patrons is in jeopardy.
"Piracy" creates competition for their cartel-like pricing schemes and artist-screwing contracts. Time and time again the record industry (as a prime example) has demonstrated that they operate like a monopoly cartel: price fixing, immoral contracts, etc. They're scared shitless that they might actually have to treat artists fairly and price their product at a competitive price point.
Slashdot Mirror
]...] which points out that the derivative work rights assigned to a copyright holder are what give the GPL it's teeth.
That's the interesting part about this ruling that a lot of people are missing. This is GOOD for the GPL (and similar license), because it states quite clearly and unambiguously that the original author reserves the right to make derivative works, and more importantly, that they have the right to _NOT_ make them available if they desire.
The fact that this was even a question, however, demonstrates that copyright law is in need of serious reform..
Around these parts (North Portland), we tend to refer to Vancouver as "The Leper Colony". Or, "Vantucky".
As the construction supervisor said to Arthur Dent referring to the amount of damage his equipment would recieve if he allowed them to simply run over Mr. Dent, "none at all."
AT&T is now the ILEC for the majority of America's most populous state (California), and recieves probably the majority of their day-to-day business from the Government itself. Even if 10% of consumers left AT&T for somebody else, they'd laugh it off: after all, most of those consumers are purchasing low-profit and high cost services anyway.
Besides, who are you going to go to? Where are you going to get local dialtone from if you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco? Go ahead. Buy it from a CLEC. If you can find one still selling service, guess who's gonna still get the revenue for the copper loop? Okay, so I'll go get service from the cable company. Oh, right. Comcast. A company that AT&T owns stock in.
Yep. You can run, but you can't hide.
The hype was extremely misguided - it's just a very small tablet PC, it was never going to set the world on fire.
As hot as it gets, it might not set the world on fire, but it might set your hands ablaze.
Is Hifn's hardware supported in Linux?
Not in the kernel tree, but there is a third-party driver available. My understanding from associates who work with the Linux version is it isn't as feature-rich as the OpenBSD driver, and those who develop on it are also frustrated by Hifn's new policies.
What percentage of their customers rely on OpenBSD support? Who are they more loyal to, Hifn for the hardware or OpenBSD for the OS?
As someone who works for a place that uses crypto cards, I can tell you: we are more bound to the OS than the crypto hardware. There's a lot of different crypto hardware on the market, but if you want to do any kind of hardcore embedded systems development using a POSIX API, there aren't a lot of choices out there.
He makes more money than most people ever will, I don't feel bad for him because he's too dumb to make shitloads more.
Actually, as I understand it, Weird Al only takes home (on average) what would be comparable to a $100k/year salary. While arguably "more than most people ever will [make]", you make it sound like Weird Al is camping out in posh Beverly Hills digs with a butler and a limo.. when, in reality, he lives in a fairly normal middle-class house in a normal middle-class neighborhood, and makes about the same amount as a good IT professional would make in Los Angeles.
When it comes to parody and satire of the music industry, he's the best there is. It seems a bit of a shame that Weird Al even NOTICES that he makes less selling stuff through iTunes.. that means, to me at least, that Al is probably getting shafted like every other artist by the Cartel.
As it has been observed, Theo can be quite.. forceful with his viewpoints.
This is one of those cases where he is entitled to be. As Theo points out, datasheets for hardware chips are generally available freely from vendors: after all, if there are no drivers and if nobody knows how to interface with it, there are no chip sales, are there? Worse, this is all information that almost a decade ago WAS freely available, and suddenly has become UNavailable due to a policy change.
Bump that.
While we might not be "regulated", many VoIP companies use the "Regulatory fees" to recover their costs when those same fees are passed on to us on the circuits we buy. Facilities-based providers (especially small ones that are buying DIDs "PBX-style" on T1s) are often paying fees and taxes on those lines the same way a medium-size business would.
But, on the other hand, if you think the "regulatory compliance fees" you pay on your landline bill don't just go into the pocket of the phone company, you need to actually read the laws. A lot of the money from these things (including the "Interstate access fee") simply goes into funds that the phone companies draw upon to pay taxes and business expenses that any other business (like, say, the corner grocery store) would just simply add into their profit and loss calculations..
Modchip? We don't need no stinking modchip! Where the hell you've been?
Oh, and Apple claims it is, too.
Funny. Linux Journal and a whole host of other publications think that it is.
Recall that NTP only sued Blackberry when Blackberry was quite publically rumbling that they were considering suing Palm and other handheld vendors (Sidekick) for similar features in their handsets.
Hey! OS X uses a microkernel, and seems to have no difficulty handling multiprocessor systems, dammit.
So, where on the site does it mention what phones it works with?
I apparently doesn't work with the world's most converged phones (well, I tried it on a Treo 650, and it doesn't work in IBM's Java client that comes with the Treo), and the website is.. appauling, even for a first effort.
Dodgeball, dudes. It's all about being able to do this stuff with SMS, which every phone has. Sure, they can have a fancy Java midlet later.. but first, it's gotta work on everybody's phone before it will have widespread acceptance.
I've looked at it.
The reviewer, and everybody else who's slamming it, is right. It has some quite obvious and annoying flaws that prevent it from doing what it is supposed to be.
I'm calling it for what it is. An underpowered, underfeatured, worthless piece of shit.
Hey! Idiots! Guess what? The PDA has morphed into this device called a smartphone.
The folks at Handspring saw the writing on the wall years ago... the standalone PDA has no future. It's the worst of all worlds: not enough power to replace a general-purpose computer, limited communications channels without a cell phone interface, and clumsy "integration" (ever used a PDA to dial a Bluetooth phone? Yeah. Me neither).
The word "smartphone" is a huge disservice to the world of the PDA. Every smartphone is, really, a PDA with a phone taped on the side.
Sun was right. The Network is the Computer. What makes smartphones such handy gadgets is the integration of PDA features into the very device you are going to be using to communicate. It just makes sense.
Are you serious? You think your kids going to ask for your classic Cypress Hill or some other album with "negative" connotations? ;-) Part of growing up and getting into music is discovering new things, and for many people their parents music is a treasure trove. Are you going to ask your parents to burn their whole collection for you, just so you can listen to different things? Which you are going to have to rencode if you want to actually listen to it, as all your media players are apple solid state / portable hd products?
Given the fact that you can't redownload it, I make it a point to burn every album I buy on iTunes onto a decent-quality CD-R. If I lose the original, I have that backup copy.
So, any hypothetical "kid" would have no problem scrounging through the stacks of CDs, much like I as a kid scrounged through my uncle's 45 and 78 RPM records.
So what? This is completely different. iTunes controls 100% of the iPod market (and vice-versa) when it comes to buying legitimate media. With CDs, you could license then and people did. One of the reasons Betamax lost out to VHS was that the VHS consortium was more liberal in what they would allow (i.e. porn). Things are different with iTunes; it's the locked-down product that won the first round. You have no choice. If you really want to format shift to another device, you need to go via CDR and further audio compression, which is time consuming and probably beyond most iPod users as they are mostly normal people who know little of DRM, compression and so on. They'd just accept it and buy more apple devices in future.
That's piss-poor for the consumer.
Most consumers don't think so. So far, nobody has even come close to offering a completely integrated product like Apple. And, they likely won't.
Ironically enough, because of DRM: Sony (as a primary example) can't seem to figure out that "fair and flexible" DRM is acceptable to most consumers. Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" shows that even when you have a near-monopoly, if your DRM is not flexible enough for the consumer, nobody will give you the time of day.
Of course, it helps a lot that iTunes (the software) and iPod both play mp3's just fine. If you hate DRM, great. Go get an eMusic account. The reality of it is, most people are willing to accept a little "inconvenience" to get what they want. iTunes makes the DRM painless and non-intrusive. Which is why Apple dominates right now.
True, you are right. But would you be happy leaving it unattended? Depends on the parties you go to, but IMHO for a good party one thing needed is people you don't know.
I'm a grumpy scientist-type, who never gets invited to those kinds of parties.
Thats piracy, as you are making an unauthorized copy for someone else.
According to the RIAA, 'lending' is also against your rights. Says so right on the label. Your point?
But, the total irony of that is that the RIAA's position is asinine. People like buying things and "owning" them. I, personally, have purchased a ton of music after getting copies from friends. The stuff that's good, I want more of. The stuff that's really good, I want my own "legit" copy.. not because of some prurient sense of obligation (because, in reality, the artist doesn't make diddly off of album sales), but because I enjoy handling CDs and I like collecting them.
I just fear that DRM is going to cost us a slice of our collective culture. Sharing music, trying something new, random, different is significant in enjoying music. I see an alternative world brewing where there are only Britany Spears clones running around, with smaller acts pushed to the back of the iTunes catalogue, and we can only hear what we personally have paid for or have seen advertised on TV or radio.
As somebody who enjoys ragtime and "boogie woogie" musical styles of the 1910-1950 era, I can tell you that the culture that matters survives with or without DRM. The vast majority of the mu
1. Burn the m4p to a CD and hand it to your kids.
2. Technically every "CD Player" (that is, a player that plays those plastic ~~ 5" disks that have ADPCM-encoded audio on them) has paid a license fee to build a player using that technology. Sure, there are multiple companies making CD players: but a percentage of all the profit still goes to the fine folks that invented the technology. Every audio distribution media since the gramophone record has had some patent / license encumbrances. Let's not forget, everybody's "favorite" digital technology (mp3) has similar patent issues.
3. Funny. I have no problem taking my entire music library to a friend's house and playing it. It's called an "iPod". Bonus: it's not just one, two or ten CDs. It's a significant portion of my entire library.
4. See # 1.
Yep, exactly.
RIM was the one beating the drum of "we're gonna sue anybody who uses this technology" until somebody else (NTP) said "yeah, um.. about that."
RIM was the bully in this situation. They got hosed. They are in no position to be crying that the rules aren't fair: they wanted to screw everybody else. It's their own damn fault they didn't think their cunning plan all the way through.
NTP's story is actually quite interesting..
SCO's claims have been, and remain, far more complicated than that.
SCO's claim is not necessarily that IBM stole code that they have a patent on. SCO's claim revolves around a contract that SCO and IBM have, and that IBM breached that contract by submitting code IBM wrote to Linux, and that IBM was contractually bound by SCO to not do that. SCO is not claiming (at least, from what I read) that IBM didn't write the code, just that IBM did not have the right to release the code to a third party without SCO's "approval" or licensing.
Yes, I agree SCO is being a bunch of ninnys, and I think that this is the crux of this motion by IBM.
That being said, this case isn't as simple as you make it out to be. SCO is saying, in essence, that "IBM violated our contract by submitting code that [contractually] we own to Linux". Part of SCO's "evidence" of this wrongdoing is the contract itself: what does the contract say? What are the terms? What constitutes "submitting" and "violation", in the framework of the contract?
Because this is not "simple common law" we're talking about here, it requires a certain amount of arbitration.
The system is working. I have no doubt that when this is all said and done, not only will IBM be victorious, but it will resolve once and for all the "legal questions" involving Linux and Open Source software generically.
This is partially why I don't believe there is any real Microsoft-SCO conspiracy.. because the last thing Microsoft really wants is a clearly defined court case that resolves the IP issues involved with Linux.. and for that matter, with the whole AT&T/BSD "who really owns UNIX" issue entirely.
SCO's initial claim may seem preposterous to us in the Open Source "community", but outside of our knowledge of the way things work, things are a bit murky. By the time this is done, the waters will be clear.. trust me. IBM wouldn't be fighting it if it wouldn't.
"Innocent until proven guilty" may, in fact, be a staple of the US criminal justice system, but it does not, in fact, have anything to do with contract and tort.
This fact is (or at least, should be) basic high-school civics stuff, not something you need a JD for, people. Get it right.
Nope, it's a perfect comparison.
You are paying for a higher tier of service. Many people on the 3-disc tier get The Shaft, and get nothing when they complain.
The truth is not that black and white.
What if you are using Google for search, and you start to discover that response time to Google "seems slow" compared to Yahoo (who hypothetically is paying for "tiered access") ? If you are most people, you'll just start using Yahoo. Or MSN (don't think for a minute that Microsoft wouldn't jump at the chance to get ahead of the line of Google). The customer would hardly ever get blocked.. just pages would be slow to load.
If you want to see this "fuck it up just enough to be annoying" business model in action, look at Netflix. The vast majority of Netflix customers are blissfully unaware of the "rent too much, you get less" policies. The 5% that notice are usually the least-profitable customers, so Netflix loses very little if those customers go to Blockbuster. The vast majority (probably anywhere from 50% - 80%) never see the "policy". The people in between who get throttled either blame it on the delivery mechanism (damn post office!) or don't even notice because they're not sitting on their front porch with a stopwatch.
Same thing will happen here. Most users won't notice. If they do notice, they'll just switch to whatever works.. like the Internet, they'll view it as "damage" and route around it. The few that do? Dollars to donuts, AT&T et. al. view them as "unprofitable" and would prefer they go play BitTorrent on somebody else's network.
Welcome to modern business: where pissing off customers can be viewed as a "good" thing.
And you still haven't demonstrated why this is a problem.
Time and time again, it comes down to the fact that nobody has ever proven that the availalibility of illegal copies of something ever really truly makes a big impact in the sales of the legitimate product. In fact, the contrary seems to be true: that digital "illegal" copies of music, movies, TV shows, whatever seems to be able to drive sales of the product.
Increasingly, this is more about the Content Cartel's control of the pipeline. Digital media can make anybody a distributor, and that's what they fear. Not that Johnny Napster is going to post the Metallica CD that he bought at Target, but that their entire business model of screwing over both artists and patrons is in jeopardy.
"Piracy" creates competition for their cartel-like pricing schemes and artist-screwing contracts. Time and time again the record industry (as a prime example) has demonstrated that they operate like a monopoly cartel: price fixing, immoral contracts, etc. They're scared shitless that they might actually have to treat artists fairly and price their product at a competitive price point.
Funny. The "music industry" seems to have done fine for the last 90 or so years without any sort of DRM.