The question is what the Wall Street Journal provides that people are paying for. Mr. Murdoch seems to think that people are paying for access to the general newspaper sections that are shared with other papers - global news, national news, op-eds. I strongly suspect that he is wrong, that subscribers are paying primarily for the financial news. If I am right, then this model cannot be easily expanded to other newspapers.
As Clay Shirky argued, the newspaper itself is somewhat misplaced in an era where it is nearly free to copy and distribute information. What's the point of arguing over whether your pig ought to be pink or brown - it still won't fly.
You could be right; I can't find a picture of Klingons from the animated series, and I do remember the ones in the movie being a big deal - I always assumed that it was because so many people didn't watch the animated series.
But even the Linux users I know don't use Boxee. A quick survey of the office just now resulted in zero Linux users who had even heard of Boxee, where everyone here uses either Linux or Mac at home.
(Er, that should have been "has *it*" and "getting *it*". Serves me right for posting before I've had my coffee. The point stands, though - I don't think Boxee is nearly as popular or important as the Slashdot editors seem to think.)
Why is Boxee the real question? I'd never even heard of it until they got blocked by Hulu, I don't know anyone who has one, and nobody I know is even thinking of getting one. Sure it was a lousy decision, but is it really so world-changingly lousy that Slashdot CANNOT EVER post about Hulu without bringing Boxee up?
Nowhere in your writeup do you say whether P2P is actually the problem here. If all you have is a bandwidth graph, then what else is your boss going to do but make assumptions? There are a number of excellent tools on the market to monitor traffic and tell you exactly what services are using how much bandwidth, as well as which individual customers are the largest users of your network. What happens if you implement shaping and packet inspection, then discover that most of your bandwidth is going to people using Hulu and other video sites? I doubt your boss is going to say "turn off the shaping", you'll just wind up adding ever more draconian restrictions.
I agree as well with the people who are saying that this is fighting a losing battle. Your customers' usage patterns are not going to stay the same. They will want to use more bandwidth as time goes on, even if their surfing habits don't change - their favorite sites will include more and more video and Silverlight and all sort of shit, and they will be very angry with YOU if they cannot continue to operate as they have been. Packet-shaping and such tricks will not be sufficient in the long run.
I know this is a joke, but I do wonder how many FOIA requests the FBI gets on subjects that they really don't have information on: UFOs, Batboy, etc. Do trash requests like that get counted?
I was just thinking the same thing - Google is in many ways an engine of innovation, and they bring a lot of cash to bear on a problem. But as you suggest, the same was true of Microsoft in the late 80s and early 90s. The only real difference is attitude, and attitudes change.
As someone who makes use of Google's services, I think this is great, but I can't help but wonder whether this is ultimately stifling advancement in the field. Google doesn't NEED to innovate in voice, it just WANTS to. In some ways, that results in a better product: they take risks a small software house dares not. But they're not as committed to innovating, and they drive a lot of people out of the market. Gmail is a great service, and Google continues to do new and interesting things. But I haven't seen a single new webmail service since Gmail went live, and that's a little worrisome.
As a software developer, I used to worry that Microsoft might find my particular niche potentially profitable. Now I worry that Google might think it's cool.
I don't think cops should be joking about police brutality or corruption, period, let alone in a public forum where they are apparently easily identified as cops. The police have a really lousy image right now, and anything that helps them to be seen as bullies or on a power trip is detrimental to everyone involved - they can't do their job unless we trust them, and it's just not enough anymore to ask that we trust them for our own good.
Set up a robots.txt file to tell the search engines not to index the site (or maybe only the front page), and then require a ZIP code to register. It's the find of information any local would know, and that relatively few outsiders would bother to look up - but could if they have a valid reason to want to use your site.
According to the linked article, that *is* the first step. The summary here conflicts in several places with the Campbell piece, and without the text of the legislation, it's hard to tell what the truth is.
Frequently it does seem that companies and the government are following the old plan: "Something must be done. This random thing is something. Therefore it must be done!" When the idea of due diligence comes into play, frequently that "something" seems to be just enough to keep the legal wolves (who often do not actually understand the businesses involved) at bay.
Some of the problem, it seems to me, stems from perception of international competition. How many times have we heard it said, "Sure, they can make thousands of cheap plastic widgets, but they're just copying, they don't have real creativity." That old slander can only be repeated so often before people decide that creativity is our *only* advantage, and must therefore be protected and sheltered and otherwise kept free from "harm", even if that means protecting it from being put to actual use.
Like I said, I don't think they should have gone down this path in the first place. PDFs were not a prime candidate for working DRM in the first place. But if they simply abandon it, then they open themselves up to lawsuits from the publishers who had been using the DRM and would be left high and dry. The harder a fight Adobe puts up now, the less they stand to lose in court. And since I strongly suspect that the people handling the cease-and-desist stuff are staff lawyers who get paid either way, I doubt it costs them anything extra to fight tools like this at this stage.
What do you expect them to do, wave a white flag and say "It's a fair cop, you got us"? They have a responsibility to their shareholders to do everything they can to protect a) their investment in creating the DRM in the first place, and b) the value of their licensed software and agreements with publishers.
While I personally believe that Adobe would have been better-advised to have not bothered with this in the first place, DRM being particularly silly for text, they did. And because they did, saying nothing right now is not an option, or their shareholders could rightly accuse them of not being duly diligent. If the DeCSS/Streisand effect kicks in, well that's just part of the dance they started way back when.
My understanding is that the supposed "terrorist-counterfeiters" are selling physical media. Forcing them to compete with a free product could indeed put them in the red - they would not be paying customers, but rather their suppliers of media.
... except the paid banner ads and internal content ads (which may or may not be positioned according to payment like some search engines' results). If we don't acknowledge that those are there (and missing from Boxee), some marketing jerk is likely to say "they're not obtrusive enough, make them flash and change size!"
OK, I did misunderstand -- as a programmer, that phrase suggests "register at start, then re-register X years later" where you meant, "register X years after start"?
I'm not arguing against your plan, I'm simply saying that it needs to be amended slightly to keep the solutions you talk about above. If prior registration is required to claim copyright, then a work that is physically stolen and released before the author registers it would not be under copyright. Registration by a third party after the death of the author would also be up in the air.
Accidental release in forgetting to renew within a reasonable window is fine, sure (though it would be more negligence than accident). Accidental release would also happen, though, if a bright young author were to be ignorant of copyright law and publish something without registering it. I bring up Night of the Living Dead because a lot of geeks are thrilled that it's not copyrighted, and not all of them admit the idea that this is a bad thing for a director they like.
That's not your intent, obviously, and it can be fixed by allowing retroactive registration, which to my understanding was not always a component of copyright law in all countries. Like I said in my original post, it's a small but important change, but lots of people who suggest a return to the registry/renewal scheme overlook it.
Not at all. He says that we do not have a right to his creative work. We do, whether he ever gets paid for it or not - just not right now. (I plainly should have included Kafka in my list, who never got a dime) At some point ALL creative work belongs to all of us, just by virtue of being born. The question is not whether, but when.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is what the Wall Street Journal provides that people are paying for. Mr. Murdoch seems to think that people are paying for access to the general newspaper sections that are shared with other papers - global news, national news, op-eds. I strongly suspect that he is wrong, that subscribers are paying primarily for the financial news. If I am right, then this model cannot be easily expanded to other newspapers.
As Clay Shirky argued, the newspaper itself is somewhat misplaced in an era where it is nearly free to copy and distribute information. What's the point of arguing over whether your pig ought to be pink or brown - it still won't fly.
You could be right; I can't find a picture of Klingons from the animated series, and I do remember the ones in the movie being a big deal - I always assumed that it was because so many people didn't watch the animated series.
Yeah, most of the aliens got "facelifts" in the animated series, as I recall.
But even the Linux users I know don't use Boxee. A quick survey of the office just now resulted in zero Linux users who had even heard of Boxee, where everyone here uses either Linux or Mac at home.
(Er, that should have been "has *it*" and "getting *it*". Serves me right for posting before I've had my coffee. The point stands, though - I don't think Boxee is nearly as popular or important as the Slashdot editors seem to think.)
Why is Boxee the real question? I'd never even heard of it until they got blocked by Hulu, I don't know anyone who has one, and nobody I know is even thinking of getting one. Sure it was a lousy decision, but is it really so world-changingly lousy that Slashdot CANNOT EVER post about Hulu without bringing Boxee up?
Nowhere in your writeup do you say whether P2P is actually the problem here. If all you have is a bandwidth graph, then what else is your boss going to do but make assumptions? There are a number of excellent tools on the market to monitor traffic and tell you exactly what services are using how much bandwidth, as well as which individual customers are the largest users of your network. What happens if you implement shaping and packet inspection, then discover that most of your bandwidth is going to people using Hulu and other video sites? I doubt your boss is going to say "turn off the shaping", you'll just wind up adding ever more draconian restrictions.
I agree as well with the people who are saying that this is fighting a losing battle. Your customers' usage patterns are not going to stay the same. They will want to use more bandwidth as time goes on, even if their surfing habits don't change - their favorite sites will include more and more video and Silverlight and all sort of shit, and they will be very angry with YOU if they cannot continue to operate as they have been. Packet-shaping and such tricks will not be sufficient in the long run.
Wait. Does that mean that slashdotters are actually reading the article BEFORE commenting? That can't be right.
I know this is a joke, but I do wonder how many FOIA requests the FBI gets on subjects that they really don't have information on: UFOs, Batboy, etc. Do trash requests like that get counted?
I was just thinking the same thing - Google is in many ways an engine of innovation, and they bring a lot of cash to bear on a problem. But as you suggest, the same was true of Microsoft in the late 80s and early 90s. The only real difference is attitude, and attitudes change.
As someone who makes use of Google's services, I think this is great, but I can't help but wonder whether this is ultimately stifling advancement in the field. Google doesn't NEED to innovate in voice, it just WANTS to. In some ways, that results in a better product: they take risks a small software house dares not. But they're not as committed to innovating, and they drive a lot of people out of the market. Gmail is a great service, and Google continues to do new and interesting things. But I haven't seen a single new webmail service since Gmail went live, and that's a little worrisome.
As a software developer, I used to worry that Microsoft might find my particular niche potentially profitable. Now I worry that Google might think it's cool.
If he can still perform fine with that BAC, he probably wouldn't have been pulled over in the first place.
I don't think cops should be joking about police brutality or corruption, period, let alone in a public forum where they are apparently easily identified as cops. The police have a really lousy image right now, and anything that helps them to be seen as bullies or on a power trip is detrimental to everyone involved - they can't do their job unless we trust them, and it's just not enough anymore to ask that we trust them for our own good.
Set up a robots.txt file to tell the search engines not to index the site (or maybe only the front page), and then require a ZIP code to register. It's the find of information any local would know, and that relatively few outsiders would bother to look up - but could if they have a valid reason to want to use your site.
According to the linked article, that *is* the first step. The summary here conflicts in several places with the Campbell piece, and without the text of the legislation, it's hard to tell what the truth is.
Frequently it does seem that companies and the government are following the old plan: "Something must be done. This random thing is something. Therefore it must be done!" When the idea of due diligence comes into play, frequently that "something" seems to be just enough to keep the legal wolves (who often do not actually understand the businesses involved) at bay.
Some of the problem, it seems to me, stems from perception of international competition. How many times have we heard it said, "Sure, they can make thousands of cheap plastic widgets, but they're just copying, they don't have real creativity." That old slander can only be repeated so often before people decide that creativity is our *only* advantage, and must therefore be protected and sheltered and otherwise kept free from "harm", even if that means protecting it from being put to actual use.
Like I said, I don't think they should have gone down this path in the first place. PDFs were not a prime candidate for working DRM in the first place. But if they simply abandon it, then they open themselves up to lawsuits from the publishers who had been using the DRM and would be left high and dry. The harder a fight Adobe puts up now, the less they stand to lose in court. And since I strongly suspect that the people handling the cease-and-desist stuff are staff lawyers who get paid either way, I doubt it costs them anything extra to fight tools like this at this stage.
What do you expect them to do, wave a white flag and say "It's a fair cop, you got us"? They have a responsibility to their shareholders to do everything they can to protect a) their investment in creating the DRM in the first place, and b) the value of their licensed software and agreements with publishers.
While I personally believe that Adobe would have been better-advised to have not bothered with this in the first place, DRM being particularly silly for text, they did. And because they did, saying nothing right now is not an option, or their shareholders could rightly accuse them of not being duly diligent. If the DeCSS/Streisand effect kicks in, well that's just part of the dance they started way back when.
heheheh. I'm never going to see the RCA dog the same way again.
My understanding is that the supposed "terrorist-counterfeiters" are selling physical media. Forcing them to compete with a free product could indeed put them in the red - they would not be paying customers, but rather their suppliers of media.
... except the paid banner ads and internal content ads (which may or may not be positioned according to payment like some search engines' results). If we don't acknowledge that those are there (and missing from Boxee), some marketing jerk is likely to say "they're not obtrusive enough, make them flash and change size!"
OK, I did misunderstand -- as a programmer, that phrase suggests "register at start, then re-register X years later" where you meant, "register X years after start"?
Yes, in that case my objections are irrelevant.
In your original post, the very first line was,
If you're now saying that you don't want to require registration, just renewal, that's fine - my objections would not apply.
I'm not arguing against your plan, I'm simply saying that it needs to be amended slightly to keep the solutions you talk about above. If prior registration is required to claim copyright, then a work that is physically stolen and released before the author registers it would not be under copyright. Registration by a third party after the death of the author would also be up in the air.
Accidental release in forgetting to renew within a reasonable window is fine, sure (though it would be more negligence than accident). Accidental release would also happen, though, if a bright young author were to be ignorant of copyright law and publish something without registering it. I bring up Night of the Living Dead because a lot of geeks are thrilled that it's not copyrighted, and not all of them admit the idea that this is a bad thing for a director they like.
That's not your intent, obviously, and it can be fixed by allowing retroactive registration, which to my understanding was not always a component of copyright law in all countries. Like I said in my original post, it's a small but important change, but lots of people who suggest a return to the registry/renewal scheme overlook it.
Not at all. He says that we do not have a right to his creative work. We do, whether he ever gets paid for it or not - just not right now. (I plainly should have included Kafka in my list, who never got a dime) At some point ALL creative work belongs to all of us, just by virtue of being born. The question is not whether, but when.