Certainly the risk of what you say always exists. But the probability of a ssh user account with a password of "password" getting broken into is about 100%, probably within a day. Your scenario while possible is much less likely.
You don't watch the news much do you? The vast majority of credit card thefts, identity thefts, document thefts, etc. happen in ways other than over the internet. The most common way for private data to be stolen is by forgetting a laptop in a car, or leaving it out in the open or some such.
Particularly if you are working in a small office that is not well known it is FAR more likely that someone with physical access to your equipment will steal your information than any obscure attacker over the web. Most crimes are commited by someone the victim has close, regular contact with. Businesses are no exception to this.
I see, I had it backwards as I forgot about the original intent! I suspect a great many others have as well.
That actually clears things up a lot regarding how copyright ought to work. Fair Use is part of the primary goal, and copyright is an exception that provides incentive.
It also shows exactly WHY that law professor Lawrence Lessig failed miserably in his SCOTUS bid to defeat copyright extensions. He argued copyright theory, but not the harm caused by the extensions. Copyright exists to improve everyone's quality of life, if an aspect of the law does the opposite it will be struck down. Fair Use is an example of this, copyright extensions could have been an example as well.
Does the GP ACTUALLY think that the massive and powerfull aggricultural lobbies exist to keep corporations from "winning"? Large "family" farms (usually a corporate operation privately owned at that size), very large family farms, and non-family farms (8 percent of all farms) account for 68% of production in the US. Who do you think is benefiting most from a price floor? Cut prices by 3/4 and eliminate the competition or make twice as much with a price floor. Hmmm... USDA stats on the matter are here.
Not too many high paid lobbyists schmoozing politicians for the guy who works but can't afford a decent meal. The fact that the corporations can make more money ripping off their customers via the US government than they can by killing off small family farms is just a happy side effect for the little guys.
The food price stability argument is bullshit. If the government were really concerned about food shortages in times of crisis they would set up emergency food supply stores across the country. You would only need to store things like grains, which last for a very long time and provide enough nutrition to live on until the crisis has passed. This would cost the US citizen significantly less per year than the farm subsidies do.
This technology has a LONG way to go, 100,000 gallons per year is quite litterally nothing in the energy business.
For example, the Alaska oil field, which produces quite a lot of oil but nowhere near what is needed, put out an average of 650,000 barrels per day, or just shy of 30 million gallons per day. That's ten and a half billion with a "B" gallons per year. Also bear in mind that Alaska accounts for only 1/3 the total oil production in North America, and also remember that the US must import 80% of its oil from overseas.
100,000 gallons per year is nothing more than a "proof of concept". If they can scale that up to the millions of barrels per year range they'll start making a profit. If this scales well enough it could eventually be a good replacement for gasoline, which would mean the demand for gasoline could be cut in half. That would be awesome.
...each of those people who *downloaded* a song is responsible for their copyright infringement...
Actually you have that backwards, case law has pretty clearly established that is the distribution, or the uploading, of the files that constitutes infringement. That puts the downloaders 100% in the clear. That's why the "making available" argument was pushed so hard, they wanted to be able to get anybody who made a file available for download to be considered infringing. That failed. The reason people downloading files via bitorrent are at risk is because every downloader is also an uploader. This was not necessarily true for Kazaa. It often was true, since Kazaa defaulted to sharing all arguments, but unlike with torrents it was not a given that if someone had downloaded a file they had also uploaded it and the RIAA is stuck with the "making available" argument if they can't show evidence that someone else downloaded that file from them.
That's because the fraction has nothing at all to do with what constitutes the fair use of a copyrighted item. It may influence the decision in a particular case, but it has nothing to do with the definition itself. There are many cases where the entire copy of a work can be distributed and it would be considered a fair use. In the case of parody, 95% of the work may be a direct copy of the original, but parody is squarely in the realm of fair use. In the case of excerpts from something like a book, 1% is pushing the limit. Magazine or news paper article excerpts you could see something in the 20% range and still be reasonable and fair.
In the case of distributed file sharing, this is one area where I think it would be more likely that they would completely ignore the actual amount of data you shared to each individual, and rather focus on how many people you intended to share the file to. If sharing a single 500kb chunk is deemed unfair use of copyright, people sharing copyrighted material could be in for a world of hurt.
Again, it's not the fraction that matters, it's whether or not using that fraction is fair. If distributing a chunk of copyrighted material for the sole purpose of helping someone else get a copy of that copyrighted piece is deemed unfair, you could potentially be considered violating for sharing a single byte, because the size won't matter in the slightest.
What you describe is only applicable to a distributed (I'm talking about file sharing here - all p2p networks are by definition a distributed network) p2p model, and even then it only applies to the average, not what each individual uploads. Last time I used Kazaa (granted, it was years ago, that shit was a security nightmare), it was in no way, shape, or form a distributed p2p network. When you downloaded a file, you were downloading it exactly one time from one user. The flip side was also true, the person sharing the file shared that file exactly one time. There were two files on the network now (kazaa shared downloaded files by default), but there were any number of reasons the original file hoster would be chosen over the new file hoster. The main reason was speed - if the original hoster had a T1 line, and the new guy was on 56k, the original hoster would be picked every single time. Because of this, many downloaders never actually shared the files they downloaded, while others shared the files many times over.
Furthermore, in a non-distributed p2p network it is relatively trivial to keep track of how many times a file has been uploaded - there are any number of logs that can be checked, and you can simply count the number of times the file has been uploaded. If logs have been deleted, or were never stored in the first place, this becomes more difficult, but that's where forensics come in. It is more difficult to do this in a distributed p2p network like bittorrent networks, but you still have imbalances and logs that can be tracked. Again, while the -average- upload for each machine must be essentially 1 for a torrent network, this in no way means each individual machine only uploaded one copy's worth of data. Seeders who leave their torrents running instead of turning them off will often have a much much higher upload rate than their download rate, with the initial seeder - if it continues for the life of the torrent - potentially sharing a file hundreds of times.
Also, don't think the "but I never uploaded a full copy to anyone!" argument will hold up in court. Even in criminal court, where the standards are higher, it would be reasonable to equate a 300% upload rate to sharing a file three times. Particularly since with a torrent-like network you are only ever sharing the same set of files, such a conclusion is easy to make. In a civil case, where the standards are much lower, if your uploading little bits to all those users is deemed an unfair use of copyright, you could potentialy be hit for THOUSANDS of violations, instead of just three. It probably wouldn't fly in criminal court, but it's not too far a stretch for civil court cases. If fair use becomes the sole purview of the judge, things could go very bad for copyright violators.
Except that, when such books are made public, other accountants who know the tricks can go through and dismantle those shady actions and expose them. This is exactly the situation where you want either the best money-hider in the world or the cleanest, most honest books in the world. Dirty accountants working on your books could land you in a lot more trouble than having clean books that simply make your public positions look bad.
I'm just asking, because the whole point of the motion was to prevent the records from becoming public. If they are presented in court as evidence they are, be default, public.
You do know that court records are public, right? They may not be exactly easy to just look up, but you can go see the court clerk for what ever court a case is held at and get a transcript of the records, most likely you'll have to pay a processing fee, but it would be minimal.
It takes a court order to seal records in a court case, which is what the RIAA tried to get. The judge said no.
I'm sorry, but the ones getting screwed out of money are the ones who are owed the money.
This is not a case of some crazy people coming out of the woodwork claiming rights to a long-dead relative's work and stalling the project. Tolkien himself signed a contract with these people for the use of his work, and they agreed to it. Tolkien died, but that contract doesn't suddenly go up in smoke, it goes to the beneficiaries and the contractual obligations agreed to by the studios remain in place for as long as that contract is valid.
This is NOT a copyright issue beyond the fact that what was sold was copyright, and copyright terms may affect the length of the contract. This is a CONTRACTUAL issue, and based on the contract they have with the Tolkien estate, they are owed money and the Studio is trying to screw them out of it.
How the hell do you expect us to sound like we know what we're talking about if we can't make shit up and use it to make a point?
Jeeze man, quit raining on my parade.
BTW, did you know making shit up is good for your health? It's true. It lowers the stresses that are caused by not knowing something. Instead of worrying about whether or not someone's rebuff is true, or the emberassment of not knowing an answer, when you make shit up you avoid those stresses almost completely. As long as nobody else knows what you're talking about either, it makes you sound a hell of a lot smarter, which can potentially lead to improvements in social standing as well. That last point isn't as well studied though.
For example if they took the money earned by that author and invested it they are certainly entitled to reap those rewards.
You mean like sell the rights to his work with royalty provisions so he can get the actual value out of it rather than some pie-in-the-sky estimate that may be absurdley low? Oh wait, it was Tolkien that made that sale, not the Tolkien Estate. Obviously the Tolkien Estate does not deserve what money may still be owed to Tolkien after his death. Forgive all debts when a person dies eh?
The Tolkien Estate doesn't have the rights to Tolkien's works. Tolkien sold those. Part of the contract, however, were royalties. These are NOT copyright royalties!! It's a purchase price based on a percentage without a fixed end date, instead of a fixed number. You see the exact same kinds of contracts for anything with a value that is not immediately knowable.
The Studio is trying to screw the Tolkien estate out of money they are owed, the Tolkien estate is NOT trying to squeeze money out of a copyright that should have expired long ago.
Interestingly enough, if the contract was worded properly the studio could still owe the Tolkien estate money even if the works were public domain. Of course, if the contract was set to expire when the work enters the public domain that would not be the case, and I would imagine that that is in there.
Pretty big If, particularly when they know if they admit to whatever it is they really think, they know they will be totally fucked in that trial about that annoying guy they gutted and hung from that flag pole.
Especially considering that it would require quite a bit of significant fusion to create gold in any quantity. If we get to that point in our technology, gold will be a byproduct. The main product will be the energy, and the stuff you can do with it.
Except the fact that a 60gb cap does little to aleviate oversaturation at peak times. Perhaps a 20gb cap might, but probably not a 60gb.
I believe what the GP was talking about is a price for the bandwidth - say $10-30 for 1-10mbps, AND a price for the throughput, say $1 per GB of data you download. So, if you don't do much heavy downloading, you could have a fantastic web experience at 10mbps for just a touch over $40 a month or less. If you want to download a lot but don't have much cash, you could still pull in 30gb a month for $40 on a 1mbps connection. If you are a very heavy downloader with the cash to spend on it, you could pull in 150gb a month at 10mbps for $190.
Actually I really like that idea, change the structure up a bit to take advantage of peak and off times, say 10 cents per GB during the slowest hours of the day and scale it up to $2 per GB for the peak hours, and you have the recipe for a pricing model that maximizes your network usage with economic pressures instead of traffic shaping. And people who would be most affected by traffic congestion - like VOIP users - would use so little data $2 per GB is not at all expensive.
Your statement comes from a complete lack of understanding of the way networks, and TCP in particular, work.
First off, when you say p2p may reduce traffic by sharing packets to nearby neighbors, you are talking about bittorrent and similar protocols. These few protocols produce a lot of p2p traffic, but the vast majority of p2p protocols don't operate this way. So your bittorrent downloads may have a chance at traffic, but the rest of the p2p traffic almost certainly will not. Also, and this is purely anecdotal, but whenever I download a torrent I usually connect to 100 people at most, none of whom are within 100 miles of me. The chances of being on the same node as someone else who is receiving/seeding the same file that I want are probably in the millions, if not smaller. The vast majority of torrent connections are going well outside your ISP's local network.
Second, p2p absolutely reduces available bandwidth. Braindead math will help you here, but if your ISP has a 100mbps pipe, it only takes TEN people using up their 10mbps connection limit to bring the network to its knees. Combine your "traffic reducing" bittorrent protocol, which sends out large numbers of connections with the fact that TCP congestion is affected as much by the number of TCP connections as the amount of data moving through, and the truth is heavy p2p use can cause serious congestion in a 100mbps pipe before the load even gets to 50mbps.
The network simply cannot handle that much sustained traffic. Before the rise in popularity of agregate p2p protocols like bittorrent and a few others, which could grab parts of a download from multiple locations, it was rare that any one user could saturate their broadband connection. Selling 200 users 1-10mbps connections on a 100mbps node was not a problem, because even at peak times you might get five or six people saturating their connections downloading large files, and maybe another 50 or 100 bursting little 500kb web files. No problem. But now, in that same 200 user block, you might have 10 or 12 people or more leaving their 10mbps connections pegged downloading massive bittorrent or other files, because they can queue up all kinds of stuff and just let it come in. In that situation, the ISP has a severe problem.
P2p is not the only problem, and really it probably isn't even the biggest problem (now days 100 of those 200 users may be streaming 20-100mb youtube videos and other similar large files at peak hours), but to say p2p reduces bandwidth for ISPs is asinine.
Basically, the problem is the infrastructure no longer meets the demands of the users, and instead of improving the infrastructure (because it's hella expensive), they are reducing the demand on their equipment. Argue THAT point all day long, but don't make the idiotic statement that p2p improves bandwidth.
Yeah, except TCP connections begin to degrade network throughput at 30-40% capacity, not 95%.
So really, by not limiting P2P to a reasonable degree, you could be denying 100% of their customers the bandwidth they are paying for. Any customer sending out 50 TCP connections at a time at 5kb/s each is going to cause significantly more congestion than a customer sending out one TCP connection at 250kb/s. It's a flaw in the protocol's congestion management mechanism, and any peer to peer software that connects to more than one host at a time is going to cause a worst-case-scenario for network management.
Throttling is legitimate and may be necessary to provide the service they have agreed to provide to the largest number of customers. However, is 1.5% fair? It is definitely extreme, and it might be during peak times, but I can't see it at all during off peak times. It should crank way up when congestion is low.
I don't mean this as a personal attack, but your argument is based on ignorance. It is well established that TCP's congestion control mechanism is so poor that network degradation is noticeable when bandwidth usage is at less than 50% capacity.
To give a beloved car analogy, have you ever seen a traffic jam with no apparent cause? No accident, no police, no tow truck, nothing? Well, traffic can be running smoothly at near full capacity as long as nobody needs to slow down. As soon as somebody hits their breaks, the person directly behind them must also hit their breaks, but because they were unsure of why the person in front of them slowed down, they slowed down a little more to give them room. The effect cascades causing a complete standstill in mere minutes, even though the initiating car only slowed down for a few moments - it can be as little as pressing the brake for a second and letting off again - and then got right back up to speed.
The exact same thing happens with TCP, except instead of just slowing down, the packet goes all the way back home and starts the trip over. At 50% capacity, if one router in the line has a hiccup for half a second, dumping the new TCP packets in that time period, millions of packets can be sent back. These packets all wait several milliseconds to ensure they can get through this time, so they burst through during a half second interval at the same time as the normal traffic that managed to miss the jam. Now for half a second you've hit 100% capacity or more, and now several routers drop packets for half a second. The effect cascades and the effective network bandwidth is a fraction of what it should be.
For this reason, prioritization is critical, but it may not be enough. To ensure this can't happen without traffic throttling (by way of immediately discarding a percentage of high bandwidth low priority packets, like p2p protocols) the ISP not only needs to undersell capacity, they need to have at least double the capacity of their peak usage. That is a LOT of infrastructure to upgrade.
I am pro Net Neutrality, but only in as much as ISPs attempt to throttle competitors or charge extra to visit certain provider's networks. I don't WANT traffic shaping, but I am not against it if done fairly in respect to the overall network needs. Obviously some ISPs don't do this fairly, and that is what should be addressed with Net Neutrality.
The problem such a broad law I thought of immediately is what is an ISP? If worded incorrectly, such a law could easilly apply to a company's LAN that outsources its network management to another company!! You would litterally destroy hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses for whom the network is critical, but rely on protocol prioritization, traffic management, and web filtering to keep their infrastructure costs low. All of these things are perfectly legitimate and necessary for a private network.
I like the idea, and I think it would force honesty in the industry, but such legislation could easily go very, very wrong.
It sounds like you're saying "Fair Use" boils down to not so much a defined legal exception to Copyright, but more like breaking the law in a way that has been designated as fair, and therefore unpunishable? Is that a confusing but more or less accurate way of looking at it?
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Certainly the risk of what you say always exists. But the probability of a ssh user account with a password of "password" getting broken into is about 100%, probably within a day. Your scenario while possible is much less likely.
You don't watch the news much do you? The vast majority of credit card thefts, identity thefts, document thefts, etc. happen in ways other than over the internet. The most common way for private data to be stolen is by forgetting a laptop in a car, or leaving it out in the open or some such.
Particularly if you are working in a small office that is not well known it is FAR more likely that someone with physical access to your equipment will steal your information than any obscure attacker over the web. Most crimes are commited by someone the victim has close, regular contact with. Businesses are no exception to this.
I see, I had it backwards as I forgot about the original intent! I suspect a great many others have as well.
That actually clears things up a lot regarding how copyright ought to work. Fair Use is part of the primary goal, and copyright is an exception that provides incentive.
It also shows exactly WHY that law professor Lawrence Lessig failed miserably in his SCOTUS bid to defeat copyright extensions. He argued copyright theory, but not the harm caused by the extensions. Copyright exists to improve everyone's quality of life, if an aspect of the law does the opposite it will be struck down. Fair Use is an example of this, copyright extensions could have been an example as well.
Very interesting.
Lobbyists, duh.
Does the GP ACTUALLY think that the massive and powerfull aggricultural lobbies exist to keep corporations from "winning"? Large "family" farms (usually a corporate operation privately owned at that size), very large family farms, and non-family farms (8 percent of all farms) account for 68% of production in the US. Who do you think is benefiting most from a price floor? Cut prices by 3/4 and eliminate the competition or make twice as much with a price floor. Hmmm... USDA stats on the matter are here.
Not too many high paid lobbyists schmoozing politicians for the guy who works but can't afford a decent meal. The fact that the corporations can make more money ripping off their customers via the US government than they can by killing off small family farms is just a happy side effect for the little guys.
The food price stability argument is bullshit. If the government were really concerned about food shortages in times of crisis they would set up emergency food supply stores across the country. You would only need to store things like grains, which last for a very long time and provide enough nutrition to live on until the crisis has passed. This would cost the US citizen significantly less per year than the farm subsidies do.
This technology has a LONG way to go, 100,000 gallons per year is quite litterally nothing in the energy business.
For example, the Alaska oil field, which produces quite a lot of oil but nowhere near what is needed, put out an average of 650,000 barrels per day, or just shy of 30 million gallons per day. That's ten and a half billion with a "B" gallons per year. Also bear in mind that Alaska accounts for only 1/3 the total oil production in North America, and also remember that the US must import 80% of its oil from overseas.
100,000 gallons per year is nothing more than a "proof of concept". If they can scale that up to the millions of barrels per year range they'll start making a profit. If this scales well enough it could eventually be a good replacement for gasoline, which would mean the demand for gasoline could be cut in half. That would be awesome.
Yeah, socialism is way better because all that stuff is built in automatically. No need to seek legislation at all! Saves lots of time.
...each of those people who *downloaded* a song is responsible for their copyright infringement...
Actually you have that backwards, case law has pretty clearly established that is the distribution, or the uploading, of the files that constitutes infringement. That puts the downloaders 100% in the clear. That's why the "making available" argument was pushed so hard, they wanted to be able to get anybody who made a file available for download to be considered infringing. That failed. The reason people downloading files via bitorrent are at risk is because every downloader is also an uploader. This was not necessarily true for Kazaa. It often was true, since Kazaa defaulted to sharing all arguments, but unlike with torrents it was not a given that if someone had downloaded a file they had also uploaded it and the RIAA is stuck with the "making available" argument if they can't show evidence that someone else downloaded that file from them.
That's because the fraction has nothing at all to do with what constitutes the fair use of a copyrighted item. It may influence the decision in a particular case, but it has nothing to do with the definition itself. There are many cases where the entire copy of a work can be distributed and it would be considered a fair use. In the case of parody, 95% of the work may be a direct copy of the original, but parody is squarely in the realm of fair use. In the case of excerpts from something like a book, 1% is pushing the limit. Magazine or news paper article excerpts you could see something in the 20% range and still be reasonable and fair.
In the case of distributed file sharing, this is one area where I think it would be more likely that they would completely ignore the actual amount of data you shared to each individual, and rather focus on how many people you intended to share the file to. If sharing a single 500kb chunk is deemed unfair use of copyright, people sharing copyrighted material could be in for a world of hurt.
Again, it's not the fraction that matters, it's whether or not using that fraction is fair. If distributing a chunk of copyrighted material for the sole purpose of helping someone else get a copy of that copyrighted piece is deemed unfair, you could potentially be considered violating for sharing a single byte, because the size won't matter in the slightest.
Ok, your idea of p2p is way, way, WAY off.
What you describe is only applicable to a distributed (I'm talking about file sharing here - all p2p networks are by definition a distributed network) p2p model, and even then it only applies to the average, not what each individual uploads. Last time I used Kazaa (granted, it was years ago, that shit was a security nightmare), it was in no way, shape, or form a distributed p2p network. When you downloaded a file, you were downloading it exactly one time from one user. The flip side was also true, the person sharing the file shared that file exactly one time. There were two files on the network now (kazaa shared downloaded files by default), but there were any number of reasons the original file hoster would be chosen over the new file hoster. The main reason was speed - if the original hoster had a T1 line, and the new guy was on 56k, the original hoster would be picked every single time. Because of this, many downloaders never actually shared the files they downloaded, while others shared the files many times over.
Furthermore, in a non-distributed p2p network it is relatively trivial to keep track of how many times a file has been uploaded - there are any number of logs that can be checked, and you can simply count the number of times the file has been uploaded. If logs have been deleted, or were never stored in the first place, this becomes more difficult, but that's where forensics come in. It is more difficult to do this in a distributed p2p network like bittorrent networks, but you still have imbalances and logs that can be tracked. Again, while the -average- upload for each machine must be essentially 1 for a torrent network, this in no way means each individual machine only uploaded one copy's worth of data. Seeders who leave their torrents running instead of turning them off will often have a much much higher upload rate than their download rate, with the initial seeder - if it continues for the life of the torrent - potentially sharing a file hundreds of times.
Also, don't think the "but I never uploaded a full copy to anyone!" argument will hold up in court. Even in criminal court, where the standards are higher, it would be reasonable to equate a 300% upload rate to sharing a file three times. Particularly since with a torrent-like network you are only ever sharing the same set of files, such a conclusion is easy to make. In a civil case, where the standards are much lower, if your uploading little bits to all those users is deemed an unfair use of copyright, you could potentialy be hit for THOUSANDS of violations, instead of just three. It probably wouldn't fly in criminal court, but it's not too far a stretch for civil court cases. If fair use becomes the sole purview of the judge, things could go very bad for copyright violators.
So I guess what I'm saying, is see sig. :)
Except that, when such books are made public, other accountants who know the tricks can go through and dismantle those shady actions and expose them. This is exactly the situation where you want either the best money-hider in the world or the cleanest, most honest books in the world. Dirty accountants working on your books could land you in a lot more trouble than having clean books that simply make your public positions look bad.
Er, you do read right?
I'm just asking, because the whole point of the motion was to prevent the records from becoming public. If they are presented in court as evidence they are, be default, public.
You do know that court records are public, right? They may not be exactly easy to just look up, but you can go see the court clerk for what ever court a case is held at and get a transcript of the records, most likely you'll have to pay a processing fee, but it would be minimal.
It takes a court order to seal records in a court case, which is what the RIAA tried to get. The judge said no.
I'm sorry, but the ones getting screwed out of money are the ones who are owed the money.
This is not a case of some crazy people coming out of the woodwork claiming rights to a long-dead relative's work and stalling the project. Tolkien himself signed a contract with these people for the use of his work, and they agreed to it. Tolkien died, but that contract doesn't suddenly go up in smoke, it goes to the beneficiaries and the contractual obligations agreed to by the studios remain in place for as long as that contract is valid.
This is NOT a copyright issue beyond the fact that what was sold was copyright, and copyright terms may affect the length of the contract. This is a CONTRACTUAL issue, and based on the contract they have with the Tolkien estate, they are owed money and the Studio is trying to screw them out of it.
How the hell do you expect us to sound like we know what we're talking about if we can't make shit up and use it to make a point?
Jeeze man, quit raining on my parade.
BTW, did you know making shit up is good for your health? It's true. It lowers the stresses that are caused by not knowing something. Instead of worrying about whether or not someone's rebuff is true, or the emberassment of not knowing an answer, when you make shit up you avoid those stresses almost completely. As long as nobody else knows what you're talking about either, it makes you sound a hell of a lot smarter, which can potentially lead to improvements in social standing as well. That last point isn't as well studied though.
For example if they took the money earned by that author and invested it they are certainly entitled to reap those rewards.
You mean like sell the rights to his work with royalty provisions so he can get the actual value out of it rather than some pie-in-the-sky estimate that may be absurdley low? Oh wait, it was Tolkien that made that sale, not the Tolkien Estate. Obviously the Tolkien Estate does not deserve what money may still be owed to Tolkien after his death. Forgive all debts when a person dies eh?
The Tolkien Estate doesn't have the rights to Tolkien's works. Tolkien sold those. Part of the contract, however, were royalties. These are NOT copyright royalties!! It's a purchase price based on a percentage without a fixed end date, instead of a fixed number. You see the exact same kinds of contracts for anything with a value that is not immediately knowable.
The Studio is trying to screw the Tolkien estate out of money they are owed, the Tolkien estate is NOT trying to squeeze money out of a copyright that should have expired long ago.
Interestingly enough, if the contract was worded properly the studio could still owe the Tolkien estate money even if the works were public domain. Of course, if the contract was set to expire when the work enters the public domain that would not be the case, and I would imagine that that is in there.
if they trust you...
Pretty big If, particularly when they know if they admit to whatever it is they really think, they know they will be totally fucked in that trial about that annoying guy they gutted and hung from that flag pole.
Wait that works?
I'm volunteering at a clinic in my off time from now on...
Fortunately, this seems to be a ways off.
Especially considering that it would require quite a bit of significant fusion to create gold in any quantity. If we get to that point in our technology, gold will be a byproduct. The main product will be the energy, and the stuff you can do with it.
Except the fact that a 60gb cap does little to aleviate oversaturation at peak times. Perhaps a 20gb cap might, but probably not a 60gb.
I believe what the GP was talking about is a price for the bandwidth - say $10-30 for 1-10mbps, AND a price for the throughput, say $1 per GB of data you download. So, if you don't do much heavy downloading, you could have a fantastic web experience at 10mbps for just a touch over $40 a month or less. If you want to download a lot but don't have much cash, you could still pull in 30gb a month for $40 on a 1mbps connection. If you are a very heavy downloader with the cash to spend on it, you could pull in 150gb a month at 10mbps for $190.
Actually I really like that idea, change the structure up a bit to take advantage of peak and off times, say 10 cents per GB during the slowest hours of the day and scale it up to $2 per GB for the peak hours, and you have the recipe for a pricing model that maximizes your network usage with economic pressures instead of traffic shaping. And people who would be most affected by traffic congestion - like VOIP users - would use so little data $2 per GB is not at all expensive.
Your statement comes from a complete lack of understanding of the way networks, and TCP in particular, work.
First off, when you say p2p may reduce traffic by sharing packets to nearby neighbors, you are talking about bittorrent and similar protocols. These few protocols produce a lot of p2p traffic, but the vast majority of p2p protocols don't operate this way. So your bittorrent downloads may have a chance at traffic, but the rest of the p2p traffic almost certainly will not. Also, and this is purely anecdotal, but whenever I download a torrent I usually connect to 100 people at most, none of whom are within 100 miles of me. The chances of being on the same node as someone else who is receiving/seeding the same file that I want are probably in the millions, if not smaller. The vast majority of torrent connections are going well outside your ISP's local network.
Second, p2p absolutely reduces available bandwidth. Braindead math will help you here, but if your ISP has a 100mbps pipe, it only takes TEN people using up their 10mbps connection limit to bring the network to its knees. Combine your "traffic reducing" bittorrent protocol, which sends out large numbers of connections with the fact that TCP congestion is affected as much by the number of TCP connections as the amount of data moving through, and the truth is heavy p2p use can cause serious congestion in a 100mbps pipe before the load even gets to 50mbps.
The network simply cannot handle that much sustained traffic. Before the rise in popularity of agregate p2p protocols like bittorrent and a few others, which could grab parts of a download from multiple locations, it was rare that any one user could saturate their broadband connection. Selling 200 users 1-10mbps connections on a 100mbps node was not a problem, because even at peak times you might get five or six people saturating their connections downloading large files, and maybe another 50 or 100 bursting little 500kb web files. No problem. But now, in that same 200 user block, you might have 10 or 12 people or more leaving their 10mbps connections pegged downloading massive bittorrent or other files, because they can queue up all kinds of stuff and just let it come in. In that situation, the ISP has a severe problem.
P2p is not the only problem, and really it probably isn't even the biggest problem (now days 100 of those 200 users may be streaming 20-100mb youtube videos and other similar large files at peak hours), but to say p2p reduces bandwidth for ISPs is asinine.
Basically, the problem is the infrastructure no longer meets the demands of the users, and instead of improving the infrastructure (because it's hella expensive), they are reducing the demand on their equipment. Argue THAT point all day long, but don't make the idiotic statement that p2p improves bandwidth.
Yeah, except TCP connections begin to degrade network throughput at 30-40% capacity, not 95%.
So really, by not limiting P2P to a reasonable degree, you could be denying 100% of their customers the bandwidth they are paying for. Any customer sending out 50 TCP connections at a time at 5kb/s each is going to cause significantly more congestion than a customer sending out one TCP connection at 250kb/s. It's a flaw in the protocol's congestion management mechanism, and any peer to peer software that connects to more than one host at a time is going to cause a worst-case-scenario for network management.
Throttling is legitimate and may be necessary to provide the service they have agreed to provide to the largest number of customers. However, is 1.5% fair? It is definitely extreme, and it might be during peak times, but I can't see it at all during off peak times. It should crank way up when congestion is low.
I've never heard of a live stream from YouTube, where do you get those?
I don't mean this as a personal attack, but your argument is based on ignorance. It is well established that TCP's congestion control mechanism is so poor that network degradation is noticeable when bandwidth usage is at less than 50% capacity.
To give a beloved car analogy, have you ever seen a traffic jam with no apparent cause? No accident, no police, no tow truck, nothing? Well, traffic can be running smoothly at near full capacity as long as nobody needs to slow down. As soon as somebody hits their breaks, the person directly behind them must also hit their breaks, but because they were unsure of why the person in front of them slowed down, they slowed down a little more to give them room. The effect cascades causing a complete standstill in mere minutes, even though the initiating car only slowed down for a few moments - it can be as little as pressing the brake for a second and letting off again - and then got right back up to speed.
The exact same thing happens with TCP, except instead of just slowing down, the packet goes all the way back home and starts the trip over. At 50% capacity, if one router in the line has a hiccup for half a second, dumping the new TCP packets in that time period, millions of packets can be sent back. These packets all wait several milliseconds to ensure they can get through this time, so they burst through during a half second interval at the same time as the normal traffic that managed to miss the jam. Now for half a second you've hit 100% capacity or more, and now several routers drop packets for half a second. The effect cascades and the effective network bandwidth is a fraction of what it should be.
For this reason, prioritization is critical, but it may not be enough. To ensure this can't happen without traffic throttling (by way of immediately discarding a percentage of high bandwidth low priority packets, like p2p protocols) the ISP not only needs to undersell capacity, they need to have at least double the capacity of their peak usage. That is a LOT of infrastructure to upgrade.
I am pro Net Neutrality, but only in as much as ISPs attempt to throttle competitors or charge extra to visit certain provider's networks. I don't WANT traffic shaping, but I am not against it if done fairly in respect to the overall network needs. Obviously some ISPs don't do this fairly, and that is what should be addressed with Net Neutrality.
The problem such a broad law I thought of immediately is what is an ISP? If worded incorrectly, such a law could easilly apply to a company's LAN that outsources its network management to another company!! You would litterally destroy hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses for whom the network is critical, but rely on protocol prioritization, traffic management, and web filtering to keep their infrastructure costs low. All of these things are perfectly legitimate and necessary for a private network.
I like the idea, and I think it would force honesty in the industry, but such legislation could easily go very, very wrong.
Damn dude, very nice.
It sounds like you're saying "Fair Use" boils down to not so much a defined legal exception to Copyright, but more like breaking the law in a way that has been designated as fair, and therefore unpunishable? Is that a confusing but more or less accurate way of looking at it?
Would you rather a public servant or an accountant
decide your treatment?
I'd rather a doctor decide my treatment, but that's just me...
Why is this Flamebait? It's an opinion in a thread of opinions; it's just as valid as the others.