Right, well then there are two real points I disagree with you on.
First, I like the entertainment industry, and I don't see why an entire industry should be brought crashing to the ground because new technology allows people to break the law without getting caught. It's still breaking the law.
Second, The entertainment industry has existed on these principles since it's inception. These are not old freedoms you're protecting, but new ones that have been acquired at someone else's expense. Nobody argued 20 years ago that people should be allowed to share any data they wanted in a completely unsupervised manner regardless of the owner or legal nature of that content.
The new technology that enables you to fast-forward through adverts is the forcible acquisition of a new right. This right had already been eroded by VCRs, but now it's acquired completely. There's absolutely no reason why the industry and those who can still exercise channel control shouldn't be allowed to exercise *their* rights to put whatever they want on the screen if you're going to use their technology or their content.
Think about the consequences. The removal of advertising breaks will result in inline advertising during the feature presentation - this is already happening occasionally. Just because it's the natural evolution of the medium doesn't mean it's heading to a better place, and I for one don't want them shoving adverts onto the screen while I'm trying to watch the latest episode of 24. Unfortunately, now that advertising breaks are becoming a thing of the past, it's the next logical step.
This protection of "rights" at whatever cost, and to hell with the consequences, seems a little narrow-minded and very short-sighted to me. But as you say, we'll just have to disagree on that. If we were to have a vote among viewers of whether they wanted to have to put up with advertising breaks, or they could have no advertising but a significant drop in the quality of the programming, my guess is that they'd agree to put up with the advertising - I know I would. This is why I'm glad your minority (in my opinion) isn't winning this argument in practice - although on Slashdot, I don't expect to have many agree with me.
Everything, taken to an extreme, is bad. But the blind and fanatical preservation of individual control over distribution channels is, viewed from the supplier side, a rot that gradually sets in to your revenue stream, compromising your ability to run a viable business.
It's a tradeoff, and you have to be somewhere on it. Standing at one extreme and justifying that by claiming that any compromise on your position is "the thin end of the wedge" or a "slippery slope" is a form of denial.
Ultimately, you reach the point where providers won't provide without some form of social contract that is enforceable. Without the ability to enforce revenues for services provided, large segments of consumers will take them for free - the honesty model is crap as any of my friends who tried the shareware model will attest to. Hence people will provide services and goods if they can be guaranteed at least some measure of control over the channel through which their product is distributed.
In business today, especially in intangible goods (data/music/software/tv/movies) channel control is the only guarantee that you will be treated fairly by your end users. The slippery slope as far as they're concerned is when you start to turn a blind eye to the fact that some people can bypass the revenue model and effectively compromise the revenue-earning ability of your product through the *way* in which they consume your product.
I don't have the answer, but resisting anyone's ability to present advertising removes the current revenue model, and it is isn't replaced by another, then the supply of movies/tv is also compromised. At what cost your right to bypass advertising?
Well, pick your two favourite actors, and assume they only make movies that cannot be distributed by media that is TiVo-able, because that way it protects their value.
Now do you care?
Don't get me wrong - I agree that it *shouldn't* be an issue, but we live in a world governed by economic realities, and much as that may suck at times, like democracy, it's the best system we have.
It's not a bad idea. Your cable may cost you money, but TiVo doesn't see that cash. They're building a business at the expense of advertisers, who represent the greatest income flow to the industry, so it stands to reason that they're under immense commercial pressure to not only remove advertising, but replace it with something.
Of course we don't want advertising, but we have to acknowledge that it's the revenues from advertising that pump money into the TV and Movie supply chain. Take that away, and there's less money to pay for the Gandolfinis and Nicholsons that most people want to watch.
So now instead of having 5 theories about who killed JFK, if this technology existed at the time, we'd have 150 theories? Each with it's own grainy little footage and it's "magic bullet" catchphrase?
Yay to technology making the world a better place.
Of course he's not going to make a definitive statement about the DMCA. For him to have even addressed the question is astonishing.
If he's going to be political about it, he's trading off angry nerds against the industry lobby, and making a definitive statement of any kind will completely alienate at least one of the two parties, which given the nature of the race so far, he can't afford to do.
One side of the argument interprets that question as "Are you going to scandalously and unjustifiably infringe our rights to use technology freely and exchange information without constraint?". The other side hears, "Are you going to allow people to freely copy intellectual property as an alternative to purchasing it, thus creating a huge risk for us to mitigate in the coming years, turning back decades or intellectual rights protection?".
It would take a moron to say, "Yeah, I'm gonna totally let you copy anything you want, any time you want, regardless of what it is or who made it or whether its yours to copy, by nobbling the only law that was written to protect the technology that protects the intellectual property". So if you want an answer that dumb, go ask the other candidate (although it'll probably be equally dumb, but in the other direction).
The DMCA is horribly constrictive, but its supporters fear its removal because without it they have no defense against illicit copying and channel control (upon which large percentages of their revenues depend) other than trying to incentivise people to buy it rather than get it for free.
And given the choice, people will always take it for free. (cue the "but i download music and pay for it later" rebuttal that's utter rubbish).
In my opinion, the answer was so predictable that the question was a waste of breath (ink?).
While I agree that it should be built in, to be fair, if he tried to build it in, he'd be back in court again for anti-competitive behaviour against the likes of Symantec.
In the EU, they're trying to make M$ take Media Player out of XP because they say it unfairly competes against Realplayer and others since it's bundled with the OS and people have it by default. They're not a long way from forcing M$ to take out their SP2 firewall, or their TCP/IP layer, or M$ networking functionality. From there it will only be a short step to forcing M$ to *distribute* other people's software in order to level the playing field.
I hear this "change their business model" a lot, but the truth is that right now, six out of seven investments they make don't make a profit, but the seventh is sufficiently successful to make up for the losses they have to eat on the first six.
From time to time, that seventh is a band we all like. From time to time, it's a singer that only 15-year-old girls like, but what's important is that they've finally got a product they can sell for a few years, and the revenue stream keeps them going.
Essentially, they're the risk-takers, the only people willing to invest in lots of maybe artists, and lend them enough money to record an album, such that these artists get a chance at national or international success. It's because they are the only organizations willing to take this risk that artists are so keen to get "signed".
Start taking chunks out of their revenue streams, start creating even more variability and uncertainty in their revenue predictions, and they will - automatically, logically and with good business sense - scale down the risks of their investments in order to compensate. That means more Britney, more Christina, more N'Sync and Backstreet Boys and reliable packaged products, and fewer David Grays, Jewels and other singer-songwriters that are great when they succeed, but more often than not fail, and therefore represent a huge risk.
These companies will adapt, they already are. They change their investment strategy to avoid the risky but potentially brilliant artists and focus more on the "crap" that happens to appeal to the incredibly wealthy 13-16 year old demographic and that the radio stations love to play.
In the end, the losers are the public, because the companies sure as hell aren't going to eat a loss just to produce music - they'd be bankrupt in a couple of years, they just pass the damage on to us in the form of worse music.
Finally, I'm sorry if you didn't like my tone, but I've been reading slashdot for years, and while it's always been biased in some ways, the way the article was originally phrased, and the quality of the replies, this particular time, really had me gagging for breath.
Reading the article, and the response to it on Slashdot, it's clear that the prevailing opinion here is one-sided, and that Slashdot's demographic is so convinced of their own point of view, that this article and the responses to it really represents a really large group of people clapping each other on the back.
If you seriously think that the size of the revenues of an industry is in any way a measure of how much money is being lost through copyright infringement, then your logical abilities are clearly limited to hardware and software, and you should leave economics and finance to others.
If you also happen to think that the fact that a company makes profits (no matter how large or small) in any way justifies people with camcorders uploading copies to filesharing networks, or ripped DVDs being shared over the internet, then once again your logic has failed you, and I'm glad legislation is suggested and passed by others.
Finally, a load of articles said something to the tune of, "If they stop making shit films, they'll stop getting them stolen because people will actually pay to go see them". It's hard to grace a comment that immature and idiotic with an answer, but let's try: The quality of a service/product or lack thereof is not a valid justification for its theft, and to suggest that it is, even in passing, is morally and ethically bankrupt. If you don't like it, don't watch it, if you were willing to spend time watching it, such that you know if was bad, then there was clearly value to you in doing that, so stop moaning that it wasn't good enough. Yes Gigli was crap: I read the reviews, so I didn't watch it. If it was *that* crap, however, people wouldn't have taken the time to copy it, share it, download it, watch it, and then discuss how bad it was.
There may be good points lurking in the background of all this, along the lines of the tradeoffs between essential freedoms and the rights of companies to defend the revenue streams arising from their products through technology control or through legislation and lobbying activities, but the discussion is so incredibly one-sided and extreme, that it's hard to respect many of the comments enough to take the time to read between the lines, and it gets so nauseating reading through a lot of the rubbish that I end up abandoning the attempt before I get to anyone who posts anything reasonable.
I think a lot of people were in the Beta - I got in, and I'm not generally invited to such things:)
What's more is that when I tried for some typical email addresses, they were already gone - I would assume that GMail employees got to invite their friends before the Beta was opened to the likes of me.
Last week, GMail gave every current subscriber (at least I think it was everyone) the ability to invite 2 more people to use the system, I think that's how they're growing their crowd at the moment, and it's kind of nice, because it makes sure that most of the people who get accounts aren't the kind of jerks that would deliberately register a cool name so that they could sell it... oh... hang on. Damn. Human nature acts up again. If I were google, and I saw that EBay advertisement, I'd cancel the account, then cancel the account from which the invitation to become a Beta tester was sent. Then classify the address as permanently unusable, just to be bitchy.
It is, however, a kick-ass system, and I highly recommend it to anyone out there once it goes live or if they know someone who can invite them in during the beta.
Actually, it's not - it only shares contact details. I used the free version for a while and it's quite effective at keeping your address book up-to-date. I don't know how it got the label "new" though since it's been around for a while now.
Only problem is that on Outlooks that are connected to MS Exchange servers like mine, it slows it down to a crawl. I've no idea what it's doing with so much bandwidth - I think it checks my entire address book against the 300 addresses I have in Plaxo every time I open a new email. I think the software needs some tweaking - anyway, I uninstalled it because of the delays.
Depends on whether they were statistically honest. They may have limited their data to those computers that systematically report issues. If they included all the people that automatically click "don't send" (like me), then the number would probably be closer to 0.05 crashes per day, since everyone learns pretty fast that clicking the "report" button results in 3 minutes of waiting as it gathers the data, sends it to microsoft and wears the hard disk down doing God knows what.
Let's not assume we know how they got the data, since in reality we can only guess.
Right, but with my WinXP computer, launch random app., wait for crash, realize computer is now running really slowly and lacking system resources. Check running processes and realize there's a whole load of junk in there and you've no idea where it came from (along with many many instances of svchost and others), watch system gradually come to almost a grinding halt, try to manually end useless processes, realize that most of your system resources are neither in use nor free and that every time you type a single character into word, the entire swap file needs to be swapped through the memory, and reboot the piece of junk yourself because it's become slower than a 386 running Windows 3.1.
Fair use isn't a right granted to you in the same way as your right to free speech. It's an exemption to copyright law that states that people should be able to use certain materials in certain ways - they should be able to make copies of items to which they already own the license, they should be able to quote non-substantial sections of work in order to refer to them and build new work.
If you buy the disney movie from the disney site, the license you're going to receive is going to be pretty precise - it's going to say that you've been granted the right to watch the movie as many times as you like within a 24-hour window, and that's the agreement you're going to sign/click.
If you find a way to transform a document that was intended to be a temporary copy of something into a permanent copy of something, you're not exercising fair use, you're forcibly acquiring a copy of the material that allows you to do more than was originally intended, and more than the license you paid for and signed for gives you right right to. Therefore it is perceived as the "theft" of rights that were not granted to you in the first place. Were you to want to own the material indefinitely, there are ways of acquiring that right legally, by purchasing the DVD or video, or by entering into a contract that grants you those rights, were the other party also willing to enter into that contract (at present, Disney are unwilling to do this over the internet).
Also, I believe that recording movies that were broadcast is still subject (at least in theory) to regulations that state that you shouldn't be allowed to keep it indefinitely. Now obviously everyone flaunts that, but were you to hack into their digitally protected files, keep a copy of that, and then claim it was fair because they actually broadcast "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" way back in 1987, I don't think the judge would be very sympathetic, because (a) you're not on the right side of the law anyway, because you never paid for a permanent license, and (b) you're playing silly buggers with the letter of the law, and despite popular depictions of legal proceedings, judges seem to really hate it when you do that.
Here's a question though : if they managed to protect DVDs such that it was impossible to copy them, and the DVD got damaged, I would still own the right to the material contained on the DVD. Theoretically therefore, the production house that created the DVD would be legally obliged to help me recover a new copy of that material, since I have a license to it, and their protection systems prevent me from getting it without their help. I wonder what happens then? Would they be forthcoming with a new copy if you handed them back the damaged DVD/media?
You don't get to watch the movie for 30 days - you get to watch the movie for 24 hours at any point during 30 days from the day you started the download.
If this catches on, it's going to kick an awful lot of small DVD/Video rental stores out of business.
Why is it that the second a company tries to release it's hold over it's own copyright content, the first thought that crosses your mind is how to rip it off?
Your message is like a poster-advert for end-to-end DRM.
I'm not interested in the Bushes - I can't vote in the US anyway, and if I could, I'd probably not vote for Bush. So don't take my defence as anything more than additions to the fact base.
That having been said : Laura Bush is now of drinking age, if she wants to get trashed, she's free to, and given how many people who were not "born with silver spoons" do that on a daily basis, on either side of the drinking age, I think you can take your double-standards and shove them where the sun don't shine, thank you.
I agree, I'm dying to get something like the apple service for M$ PCs, in the meantime, I'm unwilling to buy "subscriptions" to services, since I'm more interested in individual songs once in a while.
I decided a while ago not to download music anymore because I couldn't justify it to myself (hence my arguments on here), and either bought the CDs of, or deleted my MP3s, but now I'm a little frustrated at my inability to get my hands on one or two individual singles at short notice (usually at 3am, drunk, with an irrational desire to listen to a specific song). The service will appear soon - either Apple will expand their service to the PC, or someone else will pick up the flag and run with it - the problem, as always, is getting each individual studio and artist to sign on the dotted line to make the entire thing legal.
To be fair to the Bushes, when she got caught drinking underage, the secret service didn't get in the way of the police, and her dad let her take her punishment (community service as I recall) without intervening.
I suppose the legal argument is that as a 9-year-old, she is under the supervision of her parents, cannot be sued individually, and so ultimately her legal guardians are responsible for "losses" she caused.
The political reality is that this is legal harassment by the RIAA, but it's "legal" legal harassment, if you get my meaning, and while it may cost them a fair bit of money to get going, that (a) goes to show how much money they must believe they are losing, and (b) is probably going to be quite effective in stopping many of the filesharers (IMO).
This doesn't set a precedent - they've been legally able to film what goes on in a plane for many years, they just didn't have a reason to until now.
I really don't see how this is going to help them. If someone hijacks the plane, it's not really going to be useful after the fact.
You're already filmed going through customs, then immigration, then at every stage of your trip through the terminal. Your passport is scanned (or entered) into a computer at both check-in and immigration on international flights and Sabre can be consulted for ever more to see if you did or didn't check in for that flight, so your anonymity is pretty screwed anyway.
But is this your privacy being threatened? I think not. You're not in a private place on board an aircraft. In fact, it's one of the least private places in the world, given how cramped together everyone is. It's also a space controlled by a company, used under contract by clients, and so the company sets the rules in that contract. My guess is they could probably have gotten away with not even telling people they were going to do this. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that there's anything wrong, legally or ethically, with recording the activities of passengers on a flight, and if you've nothing to hide today, why would you want to hide it in the future? 10 years seems a bit excessive, but it makes no difference if its 1, 10 or 100, apart from the cost of maintaining the archives of film footage. Why would anyone care? You can always fly with a different airline.
On a related subject, I flew across the Atlantic on BA last week and they have a CCTV camera recording everyone that approaches the flight deck. I was surprised at the camera at first, but then it occured to me that we're not allowed near the flight deck anyway, so theoretically it should only record the flight crew, assuming nobody tries anything naughty.
A big part of the RIAA's tactics in this debate is to make you think file sharing is a crime. They want to embed in your consciousness that "listening to music that someone else purchased" is morally equivalent to "boarding a ship and stealing the cargo."
Well, given some recent legal decisions, I would think the courts are generally more in agreement with the RIAA than with the filesharers. From reading some of the judgements, I have to agree with them that there's a clear argument to be made that there's something being stolen.
But nobody ever said it was tangible property. They said it was (A) Usage rights, and (B) revenues.
Assuming it was found to be perfectly legal to take music off the internet without paying for it, based on the arguments here, then I would feel reasonably comfortable going downstairs in my building and taking a crowbar to the electricity meter, because my usage of a little more electricity here isn't going to be felt anywhere else, so where's the damage? Then I could build lots of arguments about how the electricity I was using over and above my previous consumption was electricity I wouldn't be using otherwise, and since there's surplus capacity in my part of the country, I'm not harming anybody. Am I?
There's a fairly strong precedent for cases like this. There have been several cases in the past where a company has promised to develop a system with certain bells and whistles, and then delivered something vastly inferior after taking a number of interim payments during the development phases.
The way new, custom-designed enterprise software gets created is on a project basis where payments are made in advance for the development of a system. As the company builds the system, interim progress reports make sure they're going in the right direction. The problem is that what's really happening is the purchaser is paying for the development of a new piece of software, and the expertise that's developed by the software company can then be sold on in numerous other projects, but the client won't see a penny of that.
I forget the case, but the one I studied was in the Eastern Europe banking sector a little after the fall of the Berlin wall. A US software company promised to bring this eastern european bank into the modern age on a level to compete with the systems of all the Western banks, but had vastly overstated their experience in the banking sector, and the project was basically a big money extraction operation that allowed the software company to develop expertise on the back of a gullible company.
Needless to say it went to court and things got settled, but the real cost was the delay in getting up to speed with western banks. By the time the bank finally got systems that could match the services of their newly arrived competitors, they'd lost huge amounts of market share.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, well then there are two real points I disagree with you on.
First, I like the entertainment industry, and I don't see why an entire industry should be brought crashing to the ground because new technology allows people to break the law without getting caught. It's still breaking the law.
Second, The entertainment industry has existed on these principles since it's inception. These are not old freedoms you're protecting, but new ones that have been acquired at someone else's expense. Nobody argued 20 years ago that people should be allowed to share any data they wanted in a completely unsupervised manner regardless of the owner or legal nature of that content.
The new technology that enables you to fast-forward through adverts is the forcible acquisition of a new right. This right had already been eroded by VCRs, but now it's acquired completely. There's absolutely no reason why the industry and those who can still exercise channel control shouldn't be allowed to exercise *their* rights to put whatever they want on the screen if you're going to use their technology or their content.
Think about the consequences. The removal of advertising breaks will result in inline advertising during the feature presentation - this is already happening occasionally. Just because it's the natural evolution of the medium doesn't mean it's heading to a better place, and I for one don't want them shoving adverts onto the screen while I'm trying to watch the latest episode of 24. Unfortunately, now that advertising breaks are becoming a thing of the past, it's the next logical step.
This protection of "rights" at whatever cost, and to hell with the consequences, seems a little narrow-minded and very short-sighted to me. But as you say, we'll just have to disagree on that. If we were to have a vote among viewers of whether they wanted to have to put up with advertising breaks, or they could have no advertising but a significant drop in the quality of the programming, my guess is that they'd agree to put up with the advertising - I know I would. This is why I'm glad your minority (in my opinion) isn't winning this argument in practice - although on Slashdot, I don't expect to have many agree with me.
Everything, taken to an extreme, is bad. But the blind and fanatical preservation of individual control over distribution channels is, viewed from the supplier side, a rot that gradually sets in to your revenue stream, compromising your ability to run a viable business. It's a tradeoff, and you have to be somewhere on it. Standing at one extreme and justifying that by claiming that any compromise on your position is "the thin end of the wedge" or a "slippery slope" is a form of denial. Ultimately, you reach the point where providers won't provide without some form of social contract that is enforceable. Without the ability to enforce revenues for services provided, large segments of consumers will take them for free - the honesty model is crap as any of my friends who tried the shareware model will attest to. Hence people will provide services and goods if they can be guaranteed at least some measure of control over the channel through which their product is distributed. In business today, especially in intangible goods (data/music/software/tv/movies) channel control is the only guarantee that you will be treated fairly by your end users. The slippery slope as far as they're concerned is when you start to turn a blind eye to the fact that some people can bypass the revenue model and effectively compromise the revenue-earning ability of your product through the *way* in which they consume your product. I don't have the answer, but resisting anyone's ability to present advertising removes the current revenue model, and it is isn't replaced by another, then the supply of movies/tv is also compromised. At what cost your right to bypass advertising?
Well, pick your two favourite actors, and assume they only make movies that cannot be distributed by media that is TiVo-able, because that way it protects their value.
Now do you care?
Don't get me wrong - I agree that it *shouldn't* be an issue, but we live in a world governed by economic realities, and much as that may suck at times, like democracy, it's the best system we have.
It's not a bad idea. Your cable may cost you money, but TiVo doesn't see that cash. They're building a business at the expense of advertisers, who represent the greatest income flow to the industry, so it stands to reason that they're under immense commercial pressure to not only remove advertising, but replace it with something.
Of course we don't want advertising, but we have to acknowledge that it's the revenues from advertising that pump money into the TV and Movie supply chain. Take that away, and there's less money to pay for the Gandolfinis and Nicholsons that most people want to watch.
Let's inject a dose of realism here...
Yay to technology making the world a better place.
Would that make this technology less valuable?
If he's going to be political about it, he's trading off angry nerds against the industry lobby, and making a definitive statement of any kind will completely alienate at least one of the two parties, which given the nature of the race so far, he can't afford to do.
One side of the argument interprets that question as "Are you going to scandalously and unjustifiably infringe our rights to use technology freely and exchange information without constraint?". The other side hears, "Are you going to allow people to freely copy intellectual property as an alternative to purchasing it, thus creating a huge risk for us to mitigate in the coming years, turning back decades or intellectual rights protection?".
It would take a moron to say, "Yeah, I'm gonna totally let you copy anything you want, any time you want, regardless of what it is or who made it or whether its yours to copy, by nobbling the only law that was written to protect the technology that protects the intellectual property". So if you want an answer that dumb, go ask the other candidate (although it'll probably be equally dumb, but in the other direction).
The DMCA is horribly constrictive, but its supporters fear its removal because without it they have no defense against illicit copying and channel control (upon which large percentages of their revenues depend) other than trying to incentivise people to buy it rather than get it for free.
And given the choice, people will always take it for free. (cue the "but i download music and pay for it later" rebuttal that's utter rubbish).
In my opinion, the answer was so predictable that the question was a waste of breath (ink?).
In the EU, they're trying to make M$ take Media Player out of XP because they say it unfairly competes against Realplayer and others since it's bundled with the OS and people have it by default. They're not a long way from forcing M$ to take out their SP2 firewall, or their TCP/IP layer, or M$ networking functionality. From there it will only be a short step to forcing M$ to *distribute* other people's software in order to level the playing field.
From time to time, that seventh is a band we all like. From time to time, it's a singer that only 15-year-old girls like, but what's important is that they've finally got a product they can sell for a few years, and the revenue stream keeps them going.
Essentially, they're the risk-takers, the only people willing to invest in lots of maybe artists, and lend them enough money to record an album, such that these artists get a chance at national or international success. It's because they are the only organizations willing to take this risk that artists are so keen to get "signed".
Start taking chunks out of their revenue streams, start creating even more variability and uncertainty in their revenue predictions, and they will - automatically, logically and with good business sense - scale down the risks of their investments in order to compensate. That means more Britney, more Christina, more N'Sync and Backstreet Boys and reliable packaged products, and fewer David Grays, Jewels and other singer-songwriters that are great when they succeed, but more often than not fail, and therefore represent a huge risk.
These companies will adapt, they already are. They change their investment strategy to avoid the risky but potentially brilliant artists and focus more on the "crap" that happens to appeal to the incredibly wealthy 13-16 year old demographic and that the radio stations love to play.
In the end, the losers are the public, because the companies sure as hell aren't going to eat a loss just to produce music - they'd be bankrupt in a couple of years, they just pass the damage on to us in the form of worse music.
Finally, I'm sorry if you didn't like my tone, but I've been reading slashdot for years, and while it's always been biased in some ways, the way the article was originally phrased, and the quality of the replies, this particular time, really had me gagging for breath.
If you seriously think that the size of the revenues of an industry is in any way a measure of how much money is being lost through copyright infringement, then your logical abilities are clearly limited to hardware and software, and you should leave economics and finance to others.
If you also happen to think that the fact that a company makes profits (no matter how large or small) in any way justifies people with camcorders uploading copies to filesharing networks, or ripped DVDs being shared over the internet, then once again your logic has failed you, and I'm glad legislation is suggested and passed by others.
Finally, a load of articles said something to the tune of, "If they stop making shit films, they'll stop getting them stolen because people will actually pay to go see them". It's hard to grace a comment that immature and idiotic with an answer, but let's try: The quality of a service/product or lack thereof is not a valid justification for its theft, and to suggest that it is, even in passing, is morally and ethically bankrupt. If you don't like it, don't watch it, if you were willing to spend time watching it, such that you know if was bad, then there was clearly value to you in doing that, so stop moaning that it wasn't good enough. Yes Gigli was crap: I read the reviews, so I didn't watch it. If it was *that* crap, however, people wouldn't have taken the time to copy it, share it, download it, watch it, and then discuss how bad it was.
There may be good points lurking in the background of all this, along the lines of the tradeoffs between essential freedoms and the rights of companies to defend the revenue streams arising from their products through technology control or through legislation and lobbying activities, but the discussion is so incredibly one-sided and extreme, that it's hard to respect many of the comments enough to take the time to read between the lines, and it gets so nauseating reading through a lot of the rubbish that I end up abandoning the attempt before I get to anyone who posts anything reasonable.
Sorry about that, but I needed to vent.
What's more is that when I tried for some typical email addresses, they were already gone - I would assume that GMail employees got to invite their friends before the Beta was opened to the likes of me.
Last week, GMail gave every current subscriber (at least I think it was everyone) the ability to invite 2 more people to use the system, I think that's how they're growing their crowd at the moment, and it's kind of nice, because it makes sure that most of the people who get accounts aren't the kind of jerks that would deliberately register a cool name so that they could sell it ... oh... hang on. Damn. Human nature acts up again. If I were google, and I saw that EBay advertisement, I'd cancel the account, then cancel the account from which the invitation to become a Beta tester was sent. Then classify the address as permanently unusable, just to be bitchy.
It is, however, a kick-ass system, and I highly recommend it to anyone out there once it goes live or if they know someone who can invite them in during the beta.
Only problem is that on Outlooks that are connected to MS Exchange servers like mine, it slows it down to a crawl. I've no idea what it's doing with so much bandwidth - I think it checks my entire address book against the 300 addresses I have in Plaxo every time I open a new email. I think the software needs some tweaking - anyway, I uninstalled it because of the delays.
Let's not assume we know how they got the data, since in reality we can only guess.
Right, but with my WinXP computer, launch random app., wait for crash, realize computer is now running really slowly and lacking system resources. Check running processes and realize there's a whole load of junk in there and you've no idea where it came from (along with many many instances of svchost and others), watch system gradually come to almost a grinding halt, try to manually end useless processes, realize that most of your system resources are neither in use nor free and that every time you type a single character into word, the entire swap file needs to be swapped through the memory, and reboot the piece of junk yourself because it's become slower than a 386 running Windows 3.1.
If you buy the disney movie from the disney site, the license you're going to receive is going to be pretty precise - it's going to say that you've been granted the right to watch the movie as many times as you like within a 24-hour window, and that's the agreement you're going to sign/click.
If you find a way to transform a document that was intended to be a temporary copy of something into a permanent copy of something, you're not exercising fair use, you're forcibly acquiring a copy of the material that allows you to do more than was originally intended, and more than the license you paid for and signed for gives you right right to. Therefore it is perceived as the "theft" of rights that were not granted to you in the first place. Were you to want to own the material indefinitely, there are ways of acquiring that right legally, by purchasing the DVD or video, or by entering into a contract that grants you those rights, were the other party also willing to enter into that contract (at present, Disney are unwilling to do this over the internet).
Also, I believe that recording movies that were broadcast is still subject (at least in theory) to regulations that state that you shouldn't be allowed to keep it indefinitely. Now obviously everyone flaunts that, but were you to hack into their digitally protected files, keep a copy of that, and then claim it was fair because they actually broadcast "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" way back in 1987, I don't think the judge would be very sympathetic, because (a) you're not on the right side of the law anyway, because you never paid for a permanent license, and (b) you're playing silly buggers with the letter of the law, and despite popular depictions of legal proceedings, judges seem to really hate it when you do that.
Here's a question though : if they managed to protect DVDs such that it was impossible to copy them, and the DVD got damaged, I would still own the right to the material contained on the DVD. Theoretically therefore, the production house that created the DVD would be legally obliged to help me recover a new copy of that material, since I have a license to it, and their protection systems prevent me from getting it without their help. I wonder what happens then? Would they be forthcoming with a new copy if you handed them back the damaged DVD/media?
If this catches on, it's going to kick an awful lot of small DVD/Video rental stores out of business.
Why is it that the second a company tries to release it's hold over it's own copyright content, the first thought that crosses your mind is how to rip it off?
Your message is like a poster-advert for end-to-end DRM.
That having been said : Laura Bush is now of drinking age, if she wants to get trashed, she's free to, and given how many people who were not "born with silver spoons" do that on a daily basis, on either side of the drinking age, I think you can take your double-standards and shove them where the sun don't shine, thank you.
I decided a while ago not to download music anymore because I couldn't justify it to myself (hence my arguments on here), and either bought the CDs of, or deleted my MP3s, but now I'm a little frustrated at my inability to get my hands on one or two individual singles at short notice (usually at 3am, drunk, with an irrational desire to listen to a specific song). The service will appear soon - either Apple will expand their service to the PC, or someone else will pick up the flag and run with it - the problem, as always, is getting each individual studio and artist to sign on the dotted line to make the entire thing legal.
To be fair to the Bushes, when she got caught drinking underage, the secret service didn't get in the way of the police, and her dad let her take her punishment (community service as I recall) without intervening.
The political reality is that this is legal harassment by the RIAA, but it's "legal" legal harassment, if you get my meaning, and while it may cost them a fair bit of money to get going, that (a) goes to show how much money they must believe they are losing, and (b) is probably going to be quite effective in stopping many of the filesharers (IMO).
I think the RIAA is already smelling the economic equivalent - mass downloading.
I really don't see how this is going to help them. If someone hijacks the plane, it's not really going to be useful after the fact.
You're already filmed going through customs, then immigration, then at every stage of your trip through the terminal. Your passport is scanned (or entered) into a computer at both check-in and immigration on international flights and Sabre can be consulted for ever more to see if you did or didn't check in for that flight, so your anonymity is pretty screwed anyway.
But is this your privacy being threatened? I think not. You're not in a private place on board an aircraft. In fact, it's one of the least private places in the world, given how cramped together everyone is. It's also a space controlled by a company, used under contract by clients, and so the company sets the rules in that contract. My guess is they could probably have gotten away with not even telling people they were going to do this. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that there's anything wrong, legally or ethically, with recording the activities of passengers on a flight, and if you've nothing to hide today, why would you want to hide it in the future? 10 years seems a bit excessive, but it makes no difference if its 1, 10 or 100, apart from the cost of maintaining the archives of film footage. Why would anyone care? You can always fly with a different airline.
On a related subject, I flew across the Atlantic on BA last week and they have a CCTV camera recording everyone that approaches the flight deck. I was surprised at the camera at first, but then it occured to me that we're not allowed near the flight deck anyway, so theoretically it should only record the flight crew, assuming nobody tries anything naughty.
Well, given some recent legal decisions, I would think the courts are generally more in agreement with the RIAA than with the filesharers. From reading some of the judgements, I have to agree with them that there's a clear argument to be made that there's something being stolen.
But nobody ever said it was tangible property. They said it was (A) Usage rights, and (B) revenues.
Assuming it was found to be perfectly legal to take music off the internet without paying for it, based on the arguments here, then I would feel reasonably comfortable going downstairs in my building and taking a crowbar to the electricity meter, because my usage of a little more electricity here isn't going to be felt anywhere else, so where's the damage? Then I could build lots of arguments about how the electricity I was using over and above my previous consumption was electricity I wouldn't be using otherwise, and since there's surplus capacity in my part of the country, I'm not harming anybody. Am I?
The way new, custom-designed enterprise software gets created is on a project basis where payments are made in advance for the development of a system. As the company builds the system, interim progress reports make sure they're going in the right direction. The problem is that what's really happening is the purchaser is paying for the development of a new piece of software, and the expertise that's developed by the software company can then be sold on in numerous other projects, but the client won't see a penny of that.
I forget the case, but the one I studied was in the Eastern Europe banking sector a little after the fall of the Berlin wall. A US software company promised to bring this eastern european bank into the modern age on a level to compete with the systems of all the Western banks, but had vastly overstated their experience in the banking sector, and the project was basically a big money extraction operation that allowed the software company to develop expertise on the back of a gullible company.
Needless to say it went to court and things got settled, but the real cost was the delay in getting up to speed with western banks. By the time the bank finally got systems that could match the services of their newly arrived competitors, they'd lost huge amounts of market share.