What license? CDs don't come with a license. They are covered by ordinary copyright law.
The reason why you can listen to your CDs all you want without permission of the recording company isn't because you're licensed to do so. It's because private listening to a CD isn't one of the "exclusive rights" granted to copyright holders in Title 17 Section 106:
Sec. 106. Exclusive rights in copyrighted works
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
OK, if product activation isn't the answer, then what is? Imagine you're running the Windows or Office business at Microsoft-how do you keep your product from being stolen without inconveniencing your customers or holding their PCs hostage? I'll take the best suggestions and pass them along to Microsoft.
Here's a simple approach. Cut deals with all of the hardware manufacturers so that they are forced to purchase a copy of Windows for each machine they sell, whether or not the user wants it. This way, Microsoft will receive automatic license payments on probably 95% of all PCs manufactured, leaving only the 5% or less of PCs that are built from scratch vulnerable to Windows piracy.
This is the "fantasy propaganda" of Patents. The idea that a "little guy" can invent something, take out a patent, and become a millionaire by licensing the patent. In reality, it hardly EVER works out that way. Instead, patents are expensive legal tools used by corporations with VERY deep pockets to go to war against other corporations with VERY deep pockets.
I just saw a fascinating news segment about one of those "inventors assistance" companies. The idea behind those companies is that if you, an ordinary person, invent something useful, you then take your invention to the company. The company employs patent lawyers, who will, at your expense, write up and submit a patent application for your idea, and give you a "list" of businesses that you can then try and sell your patent to. The show was amazing. My favorite was a little old lady who come up with a clever and useful invention, spent her life savings on getting it patented, then tried to find a company to license her patent. They all laughed in her face. One of them told her, "If we wanted your idea, we'd just steal it." And they probably would have. She had no means to defend the patent. She would have had to sell her house before the case even got out of discovery. The costs of suing someone for patent infringement START at about $100,000 and go up. The idea of an independent inventor inventing such a car engine, getting a patent, and successfully defending it against the auto industry is simply preposterous. If you had an invention like that, you'd spend the next 20 years of your life and all your money defending it, and then the patent would expire. Ask Philo Farnsworth. He invented television, got a patent, and RCA spent the next 20 years bleeding him dry.
No, patents are corporate tools that require enormous amounts of money to put to use. A patent is useless outside of a courtroom, and unless you have six figures to spend, it's useless inside a courtroom as well.
Let's revisit your hypothetical inventor. Call him Joe Inventor.
Joe would be unable to build and market his engine himself, because there are tens of thousands of patents covering every aspect of automobile engine design. It is simply inconcievable that he could design a complete engine without infringing on some big automaker's patent.
Let's say he designs manufacturers, and starts selling his 100MPG, zero emission engine.
A week later, Ford brings an infringment suit against him, listing 400 Ford engine design patents that he's infringing on.
Either Joe:
1) Stops making engines, in which case his patent is worthless.
2) Enters a "cross-licensing" agreement with Ford where, in exchange for being allowed to use Ford's patents, he allows Ford to use his patent. If he does this, Joe is screwed. Sure, he has the right to use Ford's patents, but he isn't an automobile manufacturer, and even if he did try and start up a company, he'd have to deal with a visit from Chevrolet's patent lawyers.
3) Sells his patent to Ford. In which case, Joe will get a small amount of money, and Ford will make millions and millions of dollars because they do have the resources to effectively enforce patents, and they have the cross-licensing agreements in place that allow them to produce engines without being sued left and right.
The idea that patents help the "little guy" is sheer propaganda. Patents are what keep the "little guys" out of the running.
Bottom Line: If you are not encrypting work to which you own the copyright then the DMCA does not apply to you.
But, apparently, once you DO encrypt even a single work to which you own the copyright, then the DMCA applies to you in full force.
Remember that the MPAA has successfully argued that DeCSS may be banned, because it decodes *their* copyrighted works, even though it also decodes works copyrighted by others.
Who wants to bet a virtual dollar that the incredible boom in CD sales in the last few years will begin to taper off once people lose their ability to check out new bands on Napster?
Now this is interesting. If I recall correctly, the GPS system is designed so that the civilian devices are deliberately less accurate then the military devices. It has something to do with the satellites introducing a deliberate error, and simultaneously transmitting an encrypted data stream with the corrections for the error.
Now if the source code for the satellites has escaped, it's possible that someone could study the program and figure out how to crack the data-correction information, and the result could be "bootleg" GPS receivers with military-grade accuracy.
Ok, true. By overclocking, you are probably shortening the life of your CPU, but CPUs and motherboards have a pretty short functional life anyhow.
How long do you expect to keep your current CPU and motherboard? Are you still using that 30 MHz I386 based computer you bought 10 years ago? Not likely. It's probably sitting, fully functional, in a landfill somewhere. You sure aren't running quake on it, unless you're a masochist.
If you're planning on keeping your computer for years, then overclocking is a bad idea. However, if you replace your computer, CPU, or motherboard every year to get the hottest new chip, then it doesn't matter if you reduce the life of your CPU from 10 years or more to 18 months. Better to get your money's worth out of it by using it up then to throw it away working perfectly. Old computers have zero resale value anyhow.
Top race car drivers burn through several sets of tires and wear out an entire engine driving a major race. It's the cost of winning. Think of overclocking as doing the same thing to your computer. It has tradeoffs; it's a cost/benefit situation.
Here's an actual case of exactly what you described.
An undercover agent drove by Terri White on the street and yelled out the window asking where he could buy drugs. Terri called over to someone around the corner who came out and sold $30 worth of drugs to the agent. The person who sold the drugs was a known drug dealer with a juvenile drug trafficking record. However, he was still five months away from his eighteenth birthday. Terri was charged with aggravated drug trafficking. In court the juvenile said that the drugs were Terri's.
When you buy a CD, or book, or DVD, you are buying a piece of plastic. You are not licensing a thing. The entire "licensing" phenomenon is an anomoly that arises because the computer industry was able to convince the courts that when you run a program, you are making a "copy" into the computer's memory, and therefore need a license to make that copy (and use the software.) This has absolutely no application to anything except software, and there's a school of thought that says that Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 117 eliminates this "requirement", in essence allowing you to freely use any software for which you own a legally made copy without any license whatsoever:
Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec. 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. - Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner...
Also, more to the point of this particular message, as an example of how artists do NOT have the right to control how their works are distributed and presented after first sale, for instance, it is completely legal for you to buy an art book, cut out each page, frame it, and sell them individually. Once you purchase a copy, you then have the right, not under some license, but under copyright law, to resell and/or dispose of your copy as you see fit.
Those who don't know your rights, might as well not have them.
It all depends on what you want to spend your money on, or what you happen to have a surplus of. Processing power or disk space.
If your webserver is so busy that a compressed filesystem adversely affects your performance, then obviously a compressed filesystem would be a poor choice. On the other hand, if you have a very lightly used web server with a large volume of data, then it might be a good idea.
Well, one of the purposes of releasing code under the GPL is to promote programming literacy.
:-)
If you release the client code under the GPL, you are inviting people to modify the client code. If people using modified clients "ruins" the game, then the basic premise of the entire project is in question, isn't it?
Plus, which would earn you more bragging rights -- using a super-duper client to kick ass, or releasing the source code to it?
On the other hand, easy scriptability is a game defect. If a game can be "mastered" by writing a script, then the game is uninteresting -- deterministic -- a solved problem, and playing the game is going to get boring after a while. There's plenty of games that get boring fast for this very reason.
The real challenge is twofold:
1) Writing a game that cannot be mastered by computer automation. Something that really, truly requires a human level of creativity, intuition, and interaction. Generally, having humans play against each other introduces a lot of strategy into the game.
2) Designing the interface between the client and server so that the server implements the "laws of nature", and the client implements the "human intelligence."
The problem is in what you consider to be "cheating." Think of Indiana Jones facing down the machete-swinging Ninja. Sure, pulling a gun on him and shooting him is "cheating", if you subscribe to the world-view that the Ninja, by challenging Indy, had defined the rules of the game as a sword-fight. On the other hand, you could interpret the Ninja as being the cheater -- after all, he was highly trained in sword combat, and, as far as he knew, all Indy had was a whip. The Ninja considered himself to be technologically superior to Indy, until Indy pulled his gun, and turned the tables.
If Indy had pulled a gun at a fencing match, he would be, at the very least, disqualified. However, in the wide world of the internet, it becomes impossible to determine who is "cheating" by modifying their client. Thus, the only way to guarantee that no one is cheating is to simply redefine what is fair. You have to start with the premise that you have a client/server interface, and anything on the client side is fair. All "unfairness" must be addressed on the server side and the server side alone. Otherwise, you're fooling yourself, and are going to be plagued with "cheaters."
The correct approach to solving the "cheating client" problem is NOT for the game designer to make a dumb client, and attempt to prevent people from "smartening up" the client. This will always fail, especially if the client is GPLed. The correct approach is to make the client as smart as possible -- so that improving the client becomes a genuine challenge. Then, if improvements are made to the client that create an "unfair" advantage, those improvements can be rolled into the next version of the client, not banned. Sure, it becomes an "arms race", but eventually everyone is going to run into the same walls, and the game remains fair.
The alternative is security-by-obscurity, which is really no security at all. After all, you wouldn't accept a "security system" that did password checking and authentication unprotected on the client side, would you? The common practice of releasing binary-only game clients has made game designers lazy -- a "hackable" client is just as defective as a "hackable" security system.
In a well-designed client/server game, a "smartened up" client with a human controlling it should, in general, be able to defeat a "smartened up" client that is running on autopilot. That "cheater" should wake up the next morning to find his player dead. If not, then your game suffers from a defect -- it doesn't require human-level intelligence to win.
My friends and I have parties. We bring turntables and a DJ mixer, and spin & scratch records. We have a lot of fun manipulating commercial audio works to make our own works in real time.
DeCSS is the underlying technology that will allow people to "play with" DVD video content in ways that are analogous to the way that DJs play with vinyl and CD audio content.
Just as many people in the recording industry would prefer that "sampling" be made illegal and physically impossible, the motion picture industry wants to make access to the bits on a DVD illegal and physically impossible.
That's what's important about DeCSS. It creates new possibilities that no one has even thought of yet.
The hell with "free movies." That's a bottom dweller argument. You don't need DeCSS to copy movies. You need DeCSS to manipulate movies and use them as raw material. 10 years from now, we'll look back and realize that that's what this was really about. The ability to interact with commercial video, as opposed to sit on the couch and passively watch it.
Why do you think most people listen to radio? Because most people are lazy.
Because one comes attached to their car. Because it's free. Because they don't have to carry around anything to listen to the radio. Most people use radio as background noise, to alleviate boredom, not because they have a specific body of music that they want to listen to. That's not how radio works. That doesn't make radio listeners lazy though... it's a result of the limitations of the medium.
The _want_ to have music preselected for them.
You'll note that the recording industry, when they provided congress with the draft legislation that became the webcasting laws, made it essentially impossible for a webcaster to allow listeners to select their own music. (You have to get permission from each individual copyright holder to do that.) The lack of an ability for a radio listener to preselect is where the industry's power to promote their music comes from. If users could select what music they wanted to hear on the radio, then the recording industry would be powerless to impose new music on the airwaves. People would listen to what they wanted to, instead of what the RIAA wanted them to.
What if you could type in your desired playlist into your radio, and hear it, along with commercials, news reports, and weather reports. You'd be happy, because you'd hear the songs you like. The radio station would be happy, because you'd be listening to their commercials. The record companies would be very unhappy, because they don't get to pound the new Brittany Spears song into your brain.
That's why they made it illegal. Not because people want to have music preselected for them, but because people put up with it because they have no choice, and the recording industry is hell bent on keeping things that way.
They aren't transmitting flawless copies of their digital masters. They are transmitting heavily compressed MPEG data streams that have visible digital distortion artifacts.
A couple of early Apple II games that sort of got forgotten...
Eamon -- a text adventure game designed to be extendable. Lots of people wrote lots of game modules for this one. Anyone remember it? Guess it wasn't so influential...
Castle Wolfenstein (the overhead-shooter game, not the first person shooter) -- ACHTUNG! AAAHHHGGGH!!
And... the original Ultima for the Apple II, which was the first really big explore-the-landscape game. Ultima also, if I remember correctly, was the first game to implement a 3d first person shooter perspective, although it wasn't in real time.
Slashdot Mirror
What license? CDs don't come with a license. They are covered by ordinary copyright law.
The reason why you can listen to your CDs all you want without permission of the recording company isn't because you're licensed to do so. It's because private listening to a CD isn't one of the "exclusive rights" granted to copyright holders in Title 17 Section 106:
Sec. 106. Exclusive rights in copyrighted works
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
Or going back further, RT/11 for the PDP/11 series fit the entire operating system, including drivers, multitasking, memory management, etc, in 4K.
300K of tight assembler can contain an enormous amount of functionality.
In other words, Microsoft is implementing the exact strategy of the MPAA's CSS encryption.
Even if someone were to figure out how to circumvent the activation system, what are the odds that the hack will find its way onto the web?
Here's a simple approach. Cut deals with all of the hardware manufacturers so that they are forced to purchase a copy of Windows for each machine they sell, whether or not the user wants it. This way, Microsoft will receive automatic license payments on probably 95% of all PCs manufactured, leaving only the 5% or less of PCs that are built from scratch vulnerable to Windows piracy.
Oh wait
This is the "fantasy propaganda" of Patents. The idea that a "little guy" can invent something, take out a patent, and become a millionaire by licensing the patent. In reality, it hardly EVER works out that way. Instead, patents are expensive legal tools used by corporations with VERY deep pockets to go to war against other corporations with VERY deep pockets.
I just saw a fascinating news segment about one of those "inventors assistance" companies. The idea behind those companies is that if you, an ordinary person, invent something useful, you then take your invention to the company. The company employs patent lawyers, who will, at your expense, write up and submit a patent application for your idea, and give you a "list" of businesses that you can then try and sell your patent to. The show was amazing. My favorite was a little old lady who come up with a clever and useful invention, spent her life savings on getting it patented, then tried to find a company to license her patent. They all laughed in her face. One of them told her, "If we wanted your idea, we'd just steal it." And they probably would have. She had no means to defend the patent. She would have had to sell her house before the case even got out of discovery. The costs of suing someone for patent infringement START at about $100,000 and go up. The idea of an independent inventor inventing such a car engine, getting a patent, and successfully defending it against the auto industry is simply preposterous. If you had an invention like that, you'd spend the next 20 years of your life and all your money defending it, and then the patent would expire. Ask Philo Farnsworth. He invented television, got a patent, and RCA spent the next 20 years bleeding him dry.
No, patents are corporate tools that require enormous amounts of money to put to use. A patent is useless outside of a courtroom, and unless you have six figures to spend, it's useless inside a courtroom as well.
Let's revisit your hypothetical inventor. Call him Joe Inventor.
Joe would be unable to build and market his engine himself, because there are tens of thousands of patents covering every aspect of automobile engine design. It is simply inconcievable that he could design a complete engine without infringing on some big automaker's patent.
Let's say he designs manufacturers, and starts selling his 100MPG, zero emission engine.
A week later, Ford brings an infringment suit against him, listing 400 Ford engine design patents that he's infringing on.
Either Joe:
1) Stops making engines, in which case his patent is worthless.
2) Enters a "cross-licensing" agreement with Ford where, in exchange for being allowed to use Ford's patents, he allows Ford to use his patent. If he does this, Joe is screwed. Sure, he has the right to use Ford's patents, but he isn't an automobile manufacturer, and even if he did try and start up a company, he'd have to deal with a visit from Chevrolet's patent lawyers.
3) Sells his patent to Ford. In which case, Joe will get a small amount of money, and Ford will make millions and millions of dollars because they do have the resources to effectively enforce patents, and they have the cross-licensing agreements in place that allow them to produce engines without being sued left and right.
The idea that patents help the "little guy" is sheer propaganda. Patents are what keep the "little guys" out of the running.
Bottom Line: If you are not encrypting work to which you own the copyright then the DMCA does not apply to you.
But, apparently, once you DO encrypt even a single work to which you own the copyright, then the DMCA applies to you in full force.
Remember that the MPAA has successfully argued that DeCSS may be banned, because it decodes *their* copyrighted works, even though it also decodes works copyrighted by others.
Okay, so who decides what is copywritten or not?
In the U.S., everything is copyrighted automatically the instant it's recorded in some form.
What if a band that is not signed with a member of the RIAA wants their songs removed from napster?
They would probably use the same mechanism as the RIAA members -- a letter specifying the song title, artist, and filename.
Or what if a band that IS signed with a member of the RIAA WANTS their songs on napster?
They should check their recording contract, where they will find that they relinquished that right as a condition of getting a recording contract.
Who wants to bet a virtual dollar that the incredible boom in CD sales in the last few years will begin to taper off once people lose their ability to check out new bands on Napster?
Now this is interesting. If I recall correctly, the GPS system is designed so that the civilian devices are deliberately less accurate then the military devices. It has something to do with the satellites introducing a deliberate error, and simultaneously transmitting an encrypted data stream with the corrections for the error.
Now if the source code for the satellites has escaped, it's possible that someone could study the program and figure out how to crack the data-correction information, and the result could be "bootleg" GPS receivers with military-grade accuracy.
Ok, true. By overclocking, you are probably shortening the life of your CPU, but CPUs and motherboards have a pretty short functional life anyhow.
How long do you expect to keep your current CPU and motherboard? Are you still using that 30 MHz I386 based computer you bought 10 years ago? Not likely. It's probably sitting, fully functional, in a landfill somewhere. You sure aren't running quake on it, unless you're a masochist.
If you're planning on keeping your computer for years, then overclocking is a bad idea. However, if you replace your computer, CPU, or motherboard every year to get the hottest new chip, then it doesn't matter if you reduce the life of your CPU from 10 years or more to 18 months. Better to get your money's worth out of it by using it up then to throw it away working perfectly. Old computers have zero resale value anyhow.
Top race car drivers burn through several sets of tires and wear out an entire engine driving a major race. It's the cost of winning. Think of overclocking as doing the same thing to your computer. It has tradeoffs; it's a cost/benefit situation.
Here's an actual case of exactly what you described.
An undercover agent drove by Terri White on the street and yelled out the window asking where he could buy drugs. Terri called over to someone around the corner who came out and sold $30 worth of drugs to the agent. The person who sold the drugs was a known drug dealer with a juvenile drug trafficking record. However, he was still five months away from his eighteenth birthday. Terri was charged with aggravated drug trafficking. In court the juvenile said that the drugs were Terri's.
Sentence: 12 years
Link to the article on FAMM (Families Against Mandatory Minimums)
When you buy a CD, or book, or DVD, you are buying a piece of plastic. You are not licensing a thing. The entire "licensing" phenomenon is an anomoly that arises because the computer industry was able to convince the courts that when you run a program, you are making a "copy" into the computer's memory, and therefore need a license to make that copy (and use the software.) This has absolutely no application to anything except software, and there's a school of thought that says that Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 117 eliminates this "requirement", in essence allowing you to freely use any software for which you own a legally made copy without any license whatsoever:
...
Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec. 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. - Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner
Also, more to the point of this particular message, as an example of how artists do NOT have the right to control how their works are distributed and presented after first sale, for instance, it is completely legal for you to buy an art book, cut out each page, frame it, and sell them individually. Once you purchase a copy, you then have the right, not under some license, but under copyright law, to resell and/or dispose of your copy as you see fit.
Those who don't know your rights, might as well not have them.
It all depends on what you want to spend your money on, or what you happen to have a surplus of. Processing power or disk space.
If your webserver is so busy that a compressed filesystem adversely affects your performance, then obviously a compressed filesystem would be a poor choice. On the other hand, if you have a very lightly used web server with a large volume of data, then it might be a good idea.
Nice to have the option
Don't forget web pages! Those are generally stored uncompressed, and a large web site can literally have gigs of HTML files.
Well, one of the purposes of releasing code under the GPL is to promote programming literacy.
:-)
If you release the client code under the GPL, you are inviting people to modify the client code. If people using modified clients "ruins" the game, then the basic premise of the entire project is in question, isn't it?
Plus, which would earn you more bragging rights -- using a super-duper client to kick ass, or releasing the source code to it?
On the other hand, easy scriptability is a game defect. If a game can be "mastered" by writing a script, then the game is uninteresting -- deterministic -- a solved problem, and playing the game is going to get boring after a while. There's plenty of games that get boring fast for this very reason.
The real challenge is twofold:
1) Writing a game that cannot be mastered by computer automation. Something that really, truly requires a human level of creativity, intuition, and interaction. Generally, having humans play against each other introduces a lot of strategy into the game.
2) Designing the interface between the client and server so that the server implements the "laws of nature", and the client implements the "human intelligence."
The problem is in what you consider to be "cheating." Think of Indiana Jones facing down the machete-swinging Ninja. Sure, pulling a gun on him and shooting him is "cheating", if you subscribe to the world-view that the Ninja, by challenging Indy, had defined the rules of the game as a sword-fight. On the other hand, you could interpret the Ninja as being the cheater -- after all, he was highly trained in sword combat, and, as far as he knew, all Indy had was a whip. The Ninja considered himself to be technologically superior to Indy, until Indy pulled his gun, and turned the tables.
If Indy had pulled a gun at a fencing match, he would be, at the very least, disqualified. However, in the wide world of the internet, it becomes impossible to determine who is "cheating" by modifying their client. Thus, the only way to guarantee that no one is cheating is to simply redefine what is fair. You have to start with the premise that you have a client/server interface, and anything on the client side is fair. All "unfairness" must be addressed on the server side and the server side alone. Otherwise, you're fooling yourself, and are going to be plagued with "cheaters."
The correct approach to solving the "cheating client" problem is NOT for the game designer to make a dumb client, and attempt to prevent people from "smartening up" the client. This will always fail, especially if the client is GPLed. The correct approach is to make the client as smart as possible -- so that improving the client becomes a genuine challenge. Then, if improvements are made to the client that create an "unfair" advantage, those improvements can be rolled into the next version of the client, not banned. Sure, it becomes an "arms race", but eventually everyone is going to run into the same walls, and the game remains fair.
The alternative is security-by-obscurity, which is really no security at all. After all, you wouldn't accept a "security system" that did password checking and authentication unprotected on the client side, would you? The common practice of releasing binary-only game clients has made game designers lazy -- a "hackable" client is just as defective as a "hackable" security system.
In a well-designed client/server game, a "smartened up" client with a human controlling it should, in general, be able to defeat a "smartened up" client that is running on autopilot. That "cheater" should wake up the next morning to find his player dead. If not, then your game suffers from a defect -- it doesn't require human-level intelligence to win.
The ownership of Rdb is completely irrelevant.
It doesn't matter in the slightest who originally published the technique. It's the simple fact that it was published that makes it prior art.
If you look at their fee schedule, in "poster's world", you'll find that the person or company offering the bounty pays:
o The bounty
o a $2500 listing fee
o 40% of the bounty if an exact match is found.
Richard Feynman was known for making similar rants when he felt he was being asked a stupid question.
...or is it just to get free movies?
Or is it to gain the ability to play with movies.
My friends and I have parties. We bring turntables and a DJ mixer, and spin & scratch records. We have a lot of fun manipulating commercial audio works to make our own works in real time.
DeCSS is the underlying technology that will allow people to "play with" DVD video content in ways that are analogous to the way that DJs play with vinyl and CD audio content.
Just as many people in the recording industry would prefer that "sampling" be made illegal and physically impossible, the motion picture industry wants to make access to the bits on a DVD illegal and physically impossible.
That's what's important about DeCSS. It creates new possibilities that no one has even thought of yet.
The hell with "free movies." That's a bottom dweller argument. You don't need DeCSS to copy movies. You need DeCSS to manipulate movies and use them as raw material. 10 years from now, we'll look back and realize that that's what this was really about. The ability to interact with commercial video, as opposed to sit on the couch and passively watch it.
Why do you think most people listen to radio? Because most people are lazy.
... it's a result of the limitations of the medium.
Because one comes attached to their car. Because it's free. Because they don't have to carry around anything to listen to the radio. Most people use radio as background noise, to alleviate boredom, not because they have a specific body of music that they want to listen to. That's not how radio works. That doesn't make radio listeners lazy though
The _want_ to have music preselected for them.
You'll note that the recording industry, when they provided congress with the draft legislation that became the webcasting laws, made it essentially impossible for a webcaster to allow listeners to select their own music. (You have to get permission from each individual copyright holder to do that.) The lack of an ability for a radio listener to preselect is where the industry's power to promote their music comes from. If users could select what music they wanted to hear on the radio, then the recording industry would be powerless to impose new music on the airwaves. People would listen to what they wanted to, instead of what the RIAA wanted them to.
What if you could type in your desired playlist into your radio, and hear it, along with commercials, news reports, and weather reports. You'd be happy, because you'd hear the songs you like. The radio station would be happy, because you'd be listening to their commercials. The record companies would be very unhappy, because they don't get to pound the new Brittany Spears song into your brain.
That's why they made it illegal. Not because people want to have music preselected for them, but because people put up with it because they have no choice, and the recording industry is hell bent on keeping things that way.
- John
They aren't transmitting flawless copies of their digital masters. They are transmitting heavily compressed MPEG data streams that have visible digital distortion artifacts.
Digital does NOT mean flawless.
... bulletproof copy protection is impossible. Every single attempt has been defeated.
Well, DIVX was never cracked, but only because it went out of business before anyone had a chance to work on it.
I suppose that in another sense, DIVX was defeated. Not by technology, but by the marketplace.
Warning: It's the goatsex link on steroids
A couple of early Apple II games that sort of got forgotten ...
...
... the original Ultima for the Apple II, which was the first really big explore-the-landscape game. Ultima also, if I remember correctly, was the first game to implement a 3d first person shooter perspective, although it wasn't in real time.
Eamon -- a text adventure game designed to be extendable. Lots of people wrote lots of game modules for this one. Anyone remember it? Guess it wasn't so influential
Castle Wolfenstein (the overhead-shooter game, not the first person shooter) -- ACHTUNG! AAAHHHGGGH!!
And