Someone needs to point out to Lars that there is NOT any good way for Napster to guarantee that Metallica is not being traded on their servers. It's like the old Pink Floyd bootlegs which were by "the screaming abdabs". All the community has to do if they can't trade tracks with names or artist names of "Metallica" or any Metallica title, is come up with a way to encode the names. If they do checksums on the digital data, all you have to do is edit the data little and you still pretty much have the same song with a different signature. Etc. Relatively trivial measures to evade. Unless Lars' is a lot smarter than most of the folks here, I don't think he can think of a system that would guarantee no one could trade Metallica MP3's through Napster. Beyond that, Lars' contention that Napster is the provider of the data is flat wrong. Napster is the provider of storage. Users of the service upload to it, and users of the service download from it. Napster didn't say "Hey, let's put Metallica on our servers." Users are the pirates if they download music they don't own. I wonder how many of the 300,000 users actually own some if not all of the MP3's they downloaded from Napster? Wouldn't that make Metallica look like an idiot if a few of them came forward and proved that they had legal right to be listening to the music.
Unfortunately it doesn't look like there's a free link, but I had to laugh when I saw Slashdot dismissed as "a Web site popular among younger Linux buffs". Basically it was a regurgitation of the ZDNet article, quoting Linus & Larry Wall, etc. What I really want to know is "younger than what?" I mean, I'm 34 and most of the people I know who read Slashdot are my age or older.....
The site at Midway claims that the shockwave play is emulation from the original ROMs. So if they're distributing the ROMs, can't you just peel them out of shockwave somehow, and shouldn't that be legal? (ok, so they say "exclusively", but....)
Why didn't Metallica go after all the fans that trade tapes, record bootlegs, etc. when those technologies were the current thing? Because it wasn't easy to trace. Why is this any different for their bottom line? It isn't, really. BOYCOTT 'EM!
First, I don't think that you can necessarily say that it's not libertarian to advocate some limits on corporate power. Maybe not Libertarian (i.e. part of the official position held by the Libertarian party), but I think you can be in favor of liberty and suspicious of government while at the same time being suspicious of corporations.
After all, being an advocate of liberty seems likely to put you into conflict with ANY large conglomeration of power. Just because governments traditionally are the largest brokers of group power doesn't mean that the modern corporate form of the same thing isn't just as suspect.
As a libertarian (note no big L) I don't want ANYONE trying to curb my liberty if I'm not harming others. That means I don't want governments telling me it's illegal to do certain things in the privacy of my home, and it also means I don't want corporations using the power of their enormous money pools to prevent me from being able to see entertainments that interest me, or spamming me with advertising, or whatever. If one of these groups can be turned to curbing the other, so be it, I'll be pragmatic and let them try to balance against each other, and good things can come from that. That doesn't mean I'm not a libertarian. Nor does it mean that Diffie, Stephenson, Zimmerman, et.al. aren't still libertarians as well, even if they aren't classical big-L Libertarians (which I'm not sure they ever were).
I'm another St. Louisan appalled by this ridiculous policy (BTW, yes the Galleria is the biggest of the upscale malls in town; only one more upscale is more of a Stepford place than a "normal" mall). I'd say you ought to take your guests to the Galleria in commercial web t-shirts. If the stores can't have 'em, why can't the customers?
Slashdot Mirror
Someone needs to point out to Lars that there is NOT any good way for Napster to guarantee that Metallica is not being traded on their servers. It's like the old Pink Floyd bootlegs which were by "the screaming abdabs". All the community has to do if they can't trade tracks with names or artist names of "Metallica" or any Metallica title, is come up with a way to encode the names. If they do checksums on the digital data, all you have to do is edit the data little and you still pretty much have the same song with a different signature. Etc. Relatively trivial measures to evade. Unless Lars' is a lot smarter than most of the folks here, I don't think he can think of a system that would guarantee no one could trade Metallica MP3's through Napster. Beyond that, Lars' contention that Napster is the provider of the data is flat wrong. Napster is the provider of storage. Users of the service upload to it, and users of the service download from it. Napster didn't say "Hey, let's put Metallica on our servers." Users are the pirates if they download music they don't own. I wonder how many of the 300,000 users actually own some if not all of the MP3's they downloaded from Napster? Wouldn't that make Metallica look like an idiot if a few of them came forward and proved that they had legal right to be listening to the music.
Unfortunately it doesn't look like there's a free link, but I had to laugh when I saw Slashdot dismissed as "a Web site popular among younger Linux buffs". Basically it was a regurgitation of the ZDNet article, quoting Linus & Larry Wall, etc. What I really want to know is "younger than what?" I mean, I'm 34 and most of the people I know who read Slashdot are my age or older.....
The site at Midway claims that the shockwave play is emulation from the original ROMs. So if they're distributing the ROMs, can't you just peel them out of shockwave somehow, and shouldn't that be legal? (ok, so they say "exclusively", but....)
Why didn't Metallica go after all the fans that trade tapes, record bootlegs, etc. when those technologies were the current thing? Because it wasn't easy to trace. Why is this any different for their bottom line? It isn't, really. BOYCOTT 'EM!
First, I don't think that you can necessarily say that it's not libertarian to advocate some limits on corporate power. Maybe not Libertarian (i.e. part of the official position held by the Libertarian party), but I think you can be in favor of liberty and suspicious of government while at the same time being suspicious of corporations.
After all, being an advocate of liberty seems likely to put you into conflict with ANY large conglomeration of power. Just because governments traditionally are the largest brokers of group power doesn't mean that the modern corporate form of the same thing isn't just as suspect.
As a libertarian (note no big L) I don't want ANYONE trying to curb my liberty if I'm not harming others. That means I don't want governments telling me it's illegal to do certain things in the privacy of my home, and it also means I don't want corporations using the power of their enormous money pools to prevent me from being able to see entertainments that interest me, or spamming me with advertising, or whatever. If one of these groups can be turned to curbing the other, so be it, I'll be pragmatic and let them try to balance against each other, and good things can come from that. That doesn't mean I'm not a libertarian. Nor does it mean that Diffie, Stephenson, Zimmerman, et.al. aren't still libertarians as well, even if they aren't classical big-L Libertarians (which I'm not sure they ever were).
Except that if they assigned rights to the code to Micorsystems, then you're probably going to be legitimately outside the law by mirroring it.
April 1st?
Give me a break.....
I'm another St. Louisan appalled by this ridiculous policy (BTW, yes the Galleria is the biggest of the upscale malls in town; only one more upscale is more of a Stepford place than a "normal" mall). I'd say you ought to take your guests to the Galleria in commercial web t-shirts. If the stores can't have 'em, why can't the customers?