The author of this idea obviously didn't think it through more than five seconds.
As with Napster, the $5 a month is a subscription fee; the music is only playable while you stay subscribed. This isn't true of music that has been pirated over P2P networks or via another source.
Perhaps it would be valid to say the penalty would be $5 a month for the rest of your life. Payable in advance, of course.
Next, if you swap music via P2P, you're not just downloading, you're uploading-- you're contributing to and enabling others' infringements. The industry may well choose, instead of going after each download, to go after every upload. So if one hundred users downloaded a single song from you (or any combination of songs) then your penalty would be $5 a month for the rest of your life, times one hundred.
If you're twenty, and you expect to live until eighty, that's $360,000. Not millions of dollars, to be sure, but not anything that anyone would want to have to pay.
Oh, and burnable downloads? That costs extra. Since every pirated track is burnable, they'd probably try to assess that, too.
Apple has NOT asserted that freedom of the press applies only to "legitimate members of the press."
Those are not Apple's words. That is the wording of the California Shield Law cited by Think Secret. They are claiming that because of this shield law, they do not have to give up their sources. Apple and the judge in this case are stating that this law does not apply to Think Secret because the site is not a "legitimate member of the press".
Agree or disagree, this is an arguable point-- not whether or not websites should have such protection, but whether or not California Shield Law applies.
If I see another mention of the First Amendment in this thread from people who obviously have no concept of what it says, I think my eyes will start bleeding.
The First Amendment prevents Congress from making laws that restrict press freedom. The term is "prior restraint". If Apple was trying to legally prevent TS from publishing information it had, then the First Amendment would apply.
Apple has done no such thing. There are two actions against TS:
a subpoena for the names of sources; and allegations that TS induced and solicited parties to Apple NDAs to break those agreements
Under California law, as in many places, offering inducement (such as money) to people in return for them doing something that breaks a contract is itself illegal.
You can continue to use Apple with a clear conscience if you choose-- the company is not crusading against the First Amendment, since that amendment isn't even relevant to the cases currently being heard.
Halo was originally announced as a crossplatform game for a simultaneous release on MacOS and Windows-- just like Bungie's prior release, Myth. (We won't mention Oni in the context of this discussion.)
As such, the assertion that Microsoft bought Bungie to prevent Halo on the Mac from threatening Windows market share makes no sense at all. Bungie hasn't been a Mac-only developer for a long time now.
Microsoft bought Bungie to sell Xboxes, not to protect Windows.
Who's going to do graphics work on an iBook?
Anybody seriously doing design work is going to use a desktop system if they don't need portability and a PowerBook if they do. The iBook isn't meant for that market any more than the iMac is.
What seems to be missing in the discussion here is how essential being able to identify the phone number of the handset is in order for "m-commerce" to work at all.
Because Sprint is a non-GSM service that, like most American cellphone companies, focuses on contract accounts, any transactions generated by m-commerce on a Sprint handset are billed either to the contract or to a credit card entered on the handset.
This will not be the model used in the future in the US nor indeed the rest of the world. The world's dominant cellphone standard is GSM, and a large portion of the world's GSM users (the quickest-growing segment) are pre-paid cards.
There is *no* way to identify these customers other than their GSM number. Any m-commerce transactions generated from such a handset will have to be billed directly to the pre-paid SIM card; that's they way it's expected to work, and the only assurance vendors will have of being paid. That means identifying customers by phone number.
YOU aren't purchasing a perpetual right to the music. You're purchasing the right to listen to the music on the media you purchased it on. If your CD shatters or gets stuck in a microwave or somehting, you're not entitled to a new one.
Likewise, if you bought MS Word 5.1 for the Mac on floppies, that doesn't mean that you should be entitled to MS Word 2000 on CD due to the G4's lack of a floppy drive.
There's a subtler distinction to be made here. I may not be entitled to Word 2000 on CD... but I *might* be entitled to Word 5.1 on CD, if it still exists (depending on the nature of the EULA I agreed to when I open the software package).
When the iMac first came out, lots of buyers needed to re-install older software from floppy. Some companies *did* agree to ship software on CD to registered users who had bought it originally on floppy, and some did so for free.
Sure, if I microwave the media, that's my fault, and I'll probably be charged some kind of nominal fee for replacement media. But that's not the same situation as a format being made obsolete by technical advances.
But there's an even finer distinction to be made here. Audiophiles who prefer finely-balanced tone-arm turntables and vacuum-tube amplifiers notwithstanding, I think most people would agree that the CD format had certain inherent technical advantages (size, durability, sound quality that doesn't degrade like LP or cassette) and it is this increase in quality that made a distinction between what legal rights you purchased with your LP or cassette and those you purchased when you bought your CDs.
This legal distinction was enforced by the fact that at the time, CD was a read-only format, so there was no feasible way to transfer audio from LPs or cassettes to CDs, even assuming you'd wish to do so.
However, this same distinction really doesn't hold for MP3. MP3 files are *not* of higher quality than CD recordings. They *can* be freely copies from other media.
If you approach it from the perspective that what I've bought is a right to listen to a given recording *at CD quality* then of course I should be allowed to make MP3s of music I legally own rights to so that I can take them with me on my laptop or portable MP3 player.
This legal right *has* been upheld in the past. You're not legally required to purchase commercial cassette tapes of music you already own LPs of just because you want to play them in your car.
The relative difficulty and limited distribution of such copies were enough to counter the industry's arguments the possibility for "piracy" represented a threat to their legal rights.
This is where the argument for MP3 is weak; the ease of recording and the possibility for cheap and widespread distribution is a credible threat to the music sales, either on CD or in MP3 format, in a way that no previous format has been.
Do some more research. The WAP spec was developed by the WAP Forum, of which Phone.com is only one member. Others include Nokia and other handset manufacturers. WAP may not be an open standard like HTML, although it is a subset of XML, but it's ridiculous to dismiss it as the work of a single company when it has nearly every major handset manufacturer and cellular carrier supporting it. Phone.com is not the only company that is making WAP developer kits and servers available; Nokia does as well, I am running it right here. The thing many people forget about WAP when arguing about open standards and the Web is that computer penetration in Europe and other countries around the world is not nearly what it is in the US, although the penetration of GSM phones worldwide is nothing short of stunning. Ten-year-olds here in British Gibraltar have GSM phones; everybody does. The market is huge. And developing WAP as a "wedge" to get those phones on the Internet isn't just a money-grabbing scam; it's a way of getting services to customers faster instead of waiting until faster wireless speeds are reached.
Slashdot Mirror
The author of this idea obviously didn't think it through more than five seconds.
As with Napster, the $5 a month is a subscription fee; the music is only playable while you stay subscribed. This isn't true of music that has been pirated over P2P networks or via another source.
Perhaps it would be valid to say the penalty would be $5 a month for the rest of your life. Payable in advance, of course.
Next, if you swap music via P2P, you're not just downloading, you're uploading-- you're contributing to and enabling others' infringements. The industry may well choose, instead of going after each download, to go after every upload. So if one hundred users downloaded a single song from you (or any combination of songs) then your penalty would be $5 a month for the rest of your life, times one hundred.
If you're twenty, and you expect to live until eighty, that's $360,000. Not millions of dollars, to be sure, but not anything that anyone would want to have to pay.
Oh, and burnable downloads? That costs extra. Since every pirated track is burnable, they'd probably try to assess that, too.
Apple has NOT asserted that freedom of the press applies only to "legitimate members of the press."
Those are not Apple's words. That is the wording of the California Shield Law cited by Think Secret. They are claiming that because of this shield law, they do not have to give up their sources. Apple and the judge in this case are stating that this law does not apply to Think Secret because the site is not a "legitimate member of the press".
Agree or disagree, this is an arguable point-- not whether or not websites should have such protection, but whether or not California Shield Law applies.
If I see another mention of the First Amendment in this thread from people who obviously have no concept of what it says, I think my eyes will start bleeding.
The First Amendment prevents Congress from making laws that restrict press freedom. The term is "prior restraint". If Apple was trying to legally prevent TS from publishing information it had, then the First Amendment would apply.
Apple has done no such thing. There are two actions against TS:
a subpoena for the names of sources;
and allegations that TS induced and solicited parties to Apple NDAs to break those agreements
Under California law, as in many places, offering inducement (such as money) to people in return for them doing something that breaks a contract is itself illegal.
You can continue to use Apple with a clear conscience if you choose-- the company is not crusading against the First Amendment, since that amendment isn't even relevant to the cases currently being heard.
The Mac Mini does have a fan.
Of course, that doesn't mean that overheating isn't an issue; I'm sure the "mini condo" image on the aforementioned site is not a good idea.
Halo was originally announced as a crossplatform game for a simultaneous release on MacOS and Windows-- just like Bungie's prior release, Myth. (We won't mention Oni in the context of this discussion.)
As such, the assertion that Microsoft bought Bungie to prevent Halo on the Mac from threatening Windows market share makes no sense at all. Bungie hasn't been a Mac-only developer for a long time now.
Microsoft bought Bungie to sell Xboxes, not to protect Windows.
Who's going to do graphics work on an iBook? Anybody seriously doing design work is going to use a desktop system if they don't need portability and a PowerBook if they do. The iBook isn't meant for that market any more than the iMac is.
What seems to be missing in the discussion here is how essential being able to identify the phone number of the handset is in order for "m-commerce" to work at all.
Because Sprint is a non-GSM service that, like most American cellphone companies, focuses on contract accounts, any transactions generated by m-commerce on a Sprint handset are billed either to the contract or to a credit card entered on the handset.
This will not be the model used in the future in the US nor indeed the rest of the world. The world's dominant cellphone standard is GSM, and a large portion of the world's GSM users (the quickest-growing segment) are pre-paid cards.
There is *no* way to identify these customers other than their GSM number. Any m-commerce transactions generated from such a handset will have to be billed directly to the pre-paid SIM card; that's they way it's expected to work, and the only assurance vendors will have of being paid. That means identifying customers by phone number.
YOU aren't purchasing a perpetual right to the music. You're purchasing the right to listen to the music on the media you purchased it on. If your CD shatters or gets stuck in a microwave or somehting, you're not entitled to a new one.
Likewise, if you bought MS Word 5.1 for the Mac on floppies, that doesn't mean that you should be entitled to MS Word 2000 on CD due to the G4's lack of a floppy drive.
There's a subtler distinction to be made here. I may not be entitled to Word 2000 on CD... but I *might* be entitled to Word 5.1 on CD, if it still exists (depending on the nature of the EULA I agreed to when I open the software package).
When the iMac first came out, lots of buyers needed to re-install older software from floppy. Some companies *did* agree to ship software on CD to registered users who had bought it originally on floppy, and some did so for free.
Sure, if I microwave the media, that's my fault, and I'll probably be charged some kind of nominal fee for replacement media. But that's not the same situation as a format being made obsolete by technical advances.
But there's an even finer distinction to be made here. Audiophiles who prefer finely-balanced tone-arm turntables and vacuum-tube amplifiers notwithstanding, I think most people would agree that the CD format had certain inherent technical advantages (size, durability, sound quality that doesn't degrade like LP or cassette) and it is this increase in quality that made a distinction between what legal rights you purchased with your LP or cassette and those you purchased when you bought your CDs.
This legal distinction was enforced by the fact that at the time, CD was a read-only format, so there was no feasible way to transfer audio from LPs or cassettes to CDs, even assuming you'd wish to do so.
However, this same distinction really doesn't hold for MP3. MP3 files are *not* of higher quality than CD recordings. They *can* be freely copies from other media.
If you approach it from the perspective that what I've bought is a right to listen to a given recording *at CD quality* then of course I should be allowed to make MP3s of music I legally own rights to so that I can take them with me on my laptop or portable MP3 player.
This legal right *has* been upheld in the past. You're not legally required to purchase commercial cassette tapes of music you already own LPs of just because you want to play them in your car.
The relative difficulty and limited distribution of such copies were enough to counter the industry's arguments the possibility for "piracy" represented a threat to their legal rights.
This is where the argument for MP3 is weak; the ease of recording and the possibility for cheap and widespread distribution is a credible threat to the music sales, either on CD or in MP3 format, in a way that no previous format has been.
Do some more research. The WAP spec was developed by the WAP Forum, of which Phone.com is only one member. Others include Nokia and other handset manufacturers. WAP may not be an open standard like HTML, although it is a subset of XML, but it's ridiculous to dismiss it as the work of a single company when it has nearly every major handset manufacturer and cellular carrier supporting it. Phone.com is not the only company that is making WAP developer kits and servers available; Nokia does as well, I am running it right here. The thing many people forget about WAP when arguing about open standards and the Web is that computer penetration in Europe and other countries around the world is not nearly what it is in the US, although the penetration of GSM phones worldwide is nothing short of stunning. Ten-year-olds here in British Gibraltar have GSM phones; everybody does. The market is huge. And developing WAP as a "wedge" to get those phones on the Internet isn't just a money-grabbing scam; it's a way of getting services to customers faster instead of waiting until faster wireless speeds are reached.