"Without copyrights (rights for the person who created the work to retain it) there would be a serious elitist imbalance of information access. "
That's silly. You're pointing so some strawman where people are creating works, but not allowing them to be seen or heard. That doesn't make any sense.
"Copyrights (even to the extreme that they have been taken to today) are the lesser evil in this matter."
Again, a strawman. Its not a question of "Copyright versus No Copyright". Its "Today's Copyright" versus "Sensible Copyright".
Imagine if copyright was 24 years long. Then DCMA would make sense, because after 24 years, its fair game for everybody. But in today's environment, copyrighted works are effectively protected forever, and the only people who seem to benefit are a narrow slice of society at the expense of everybody else.
I haven't heard anyone say "Lets get rid of copyright!". I have heard lots of people say "Copyrights are broken, lets fix them."
Lets be practical. SCO is a tiny business compared with IBM.
Even in Utah, they are dwarfed by Novell.
So while MS might not like GPL'd software (they like OSS; there's a lot of BSD in every MS operating system), they're not likely to lobby for something that they know is impractical and moreover would not be good for them in the long run.
So you have Darl versus IBM. SCO versus Novell. Versus Red Hat, and lots of tech companies that effectively use Linux in commercial products that make money. Just because SCO says its bad, what does that mean? Not much. Especially when you have IBM saying, "No, this is not bad, this is good".
This is SCO's diversion from the truth. Its the equivalent of flares that planes drop to avoid anti-aircraft missles.
"They could charge less for licenses than they do now"
Actually, the could, but they wouldn't. Economics say you don't charge less for what you charge more; its essentially giving away money.
If there was a system in place that forced people to pay a "tax" to artists for used CD's, it might even force the price of new CD's *up*, because they no longer had to compete with inexpensive used CD's.
Price of goods and services is based on what the market is willing to pay, not the cost of production.
Its pretty clear the only conclusion this "summit" will come to is that computers need to be regulated, the same way we regulate cars.
Only moreso!
Microsoft will point out Palladium will solve these problems, and that if the government would mandate Palladium, then these problems would all but disappear.
And no, I don't think I'm being too cynical at all. In fact, I think my scenario is likely.
I know little about embedded OS's, but the article is a bit self-serving in that the author, Dan O'Dowd is president and CEO of Green Hills Software, (http://www.ghs.com) that makes "Integrity", an...you guessed it... embedded OS.
Take a look. http://www.ghs.com/products/safety_critical/integr ity-do-178b.html
So while he may be right, the information is coming from the wrong person to be trustworthy.
"This kind of thing is exactly why we DO need Palladium. "
It shows just the opposite.
If anything, it demonstrates that Hollywood on their own has the means to correct the sources of piracy without the government mandating a chip designed to extend the MPAA's and the RIAA's monopoly basically forever.
I don't understand why you think the Academy and Hollywood's problem is justification to change every computer in the United States.
" WMA is supported on more devices and players than Apple's AAC (w/DRM)"
Yeah, but so what?
MP3 support is on every player, so why would you get music in a format that locks you into a handful of players.
We can argue all day about what sounds better than what, but MP3's have the capability of sounding excellent if you crank up the bit rate high enough, but more importantly, they'll be playable for as long as anybody cares about them, since they aren't dependent on the permission to play.
"I mean... does this actually present a threat to the movie industry?"
No, but I think its because the MPAA (and RIAA to the same extent) are looking to shift blame away from certain facts.
People filming in the theater is so absurd that you'd have to be pretty hard pressed for entertainment to watch it.
The real trouble is coming from people ripping films distributed on DVD (I seem to remember an article on the Washington Post about this a few months ago). The trouble is, they won't do anything about the actual source of the leaks, so they blame their own customers.
Same with the RIAA...the big source of problem is organized crime making illegal copies by the thousands and millions. But those guys have guns and will kill you if you screw with them. Catching 12 year-old brittany is safer and makes better headlines and makes it look like they're doing something for their shareholders.
Its all a game, and the only ones fooled seem to be our congressmen and women.
"IF there were no IP laws, then there would be little incentive for anyone to produce anything that was easily copyable. "
Its not black and white. The middle ground is where you go back closer to the original definitions of copyright and patents as defined by the original US Constituion.
The notion that copyrights and patents form something equal to physical property is at best a bad analogy and at worst a selective way for large corporations to unfairly exploit a well-meaning, but wrong congress and executive branch.
No, what killed the Amiga for "business" use was it could do 640x400, but only in an interlaced mode that was impossible to look at without going blind.
Because of this, you had to do text editing in 320x200. This was far worse than text mode on an IBM PC, and made it seem like a toy.
A normal company would have addressed this obvious flaw in the Amiga 2000, but Irving Gould was too busy ducking the IRS in the Bahamas to worry about the company.
Also, the Mac was better suited to the entire text/desktop publishing because apple had the money to full develop the API's that made it possible to do WYSIWYG; the Amiga OS simply didn't have the tools to do the job.
I remember going to an Amiga developer convetion in the late 80's and sat through a 2 hour presentation where Commodore showed how they were going to become a force in Desktop Publishing. They didn't actually want to spend any money on it; they thought if they just pointed out to the developers that Desktop Publishing was a "big market" the developers would start coding.
Yikes.
Oh yea, a lot of the famous people in the Amiga community (non-Commodore) were complete flakes. Imagine the spookiest D&D player you've met and then multiply that effect by 10.
The -R's are available in most places for well under a dollar.
The +R's are harder to find and they cost in some cases 25-50% more. I have found only 1 place selling the +R's for $1/blank. Contrast that with -R prices.
As to compatibility, I've found no difference in my unscientific survey between burned +R and -R.
Frankly, the difference in blanks is significant enough that I'm thinking seriously of upgrading. But virtually every new DVD recorder these days supports both formats.
Now the RW format is a different story.... virtually no compatibility in any drive, expensive, and slower. RW is doomed.
Yeah..the XLR just looks weird; certainly the corvette engine makes it interesting.
The concept care are interesting, but they don't have anything that really grabs me at the moment.
Plus, GM has a couple of decades to live down on reliability and resale. I hope they can pull it off, and the new cars are a step in the right direction.
...at least not the way you're describing it. Its intended to control distribution channels in various regions. It has nothing to do with your ability to copy the DVD.
In fact, there's nothing on a DVD that prohibits you from copying it; all of "anti-piracy" measures are about controlling legitimate distribution channels, not stopping piracy.
I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania that had cable TV in the 50's. Much of the area was in valleys deep enough and they were far enough away from transmitters that it was impossible to get TV with an antenna.
It only had 3 or 4 stations, but back then, that was your choice.
"Apple's software is one way only...copy to the ipod or delete it. You can't copy from it. "
Apple's software, yes. But XPlay lets you drag and drop music either to or from the iPod; I find its a more elegant solution than iTunes, because it lets you use the pieces you like for downloading, ripping, managing ID3 tags. Then when you connect an iPod, it shows a special music folder that you drag and drop your music.
Yeah...you charge it, the battery shows full, and 10 minutes of playing it goes down to half. So you run it for a couple of hours, the battery shows empty, and it runs a few more hours.
My friends 10G has the same issue.
Not sure why a realiable battery indicator is so hard in 2003.
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"Without copyrights (rights for the person who created the work to retain it) there would be a serious elitist imbalance of information access. "
That's silly. You're pointing so some strawman where people are creating works, but not allowing them to be seen or heard. That doesn't make any sense.
"Copyrights (even to the extreme that they have been taken to today) are the lesser evil in this matter."
Again, a strawman. Its not a question of "Copyright versus No Copyright". Its "Today's Copyright" versus "Sensible Copyright".
Imagine if copyright was 24 years long. Then DCMA would make sense, because after 24 years, its fair game for everybody. But in today's environment, copyrighted works are effectively protected forever, and the only people who seem to benefit are a narrow slice of society at the expense of everybody else.
I haven't heard anyone say "Lets get rid of copyright!". I have heard lots of people say "Copyrights are broken, lets fix them."
They might, but not because of this letter
Lets be practical. SCO is a tiny business compared with IBM.
Even in Utah, they are dwarfed by Novell.
So while MS might not like GPL'd software (they like OSS; there's a lot of BSD in every MS operating system), they're not likely to lobby for something that they know is impractical and moreover would not be good for them in the long run.
So you have Darl versus IBM. SCO versus Novell. Versus Red Hat, and lots of tech companies that effectively use Linux in commercial products that make money. Just because SCO says its bad, what does that mean? Not much. Especially when you have IBM saying, "No, this is not bad, this is good".
This is SCO's diversion from the truth. Its the equivalent of flares that planes drop to avoid anti-aircraft missles.
"They could charge less for licenses than they do now"
Actually, the could, but they wouldn't. Economics say you don't charge less for what you charge more; its essentially giving away money.
If there was a system in place that forced people to pay a "tax" to artists for used CD's, it might even force the price of new CD's *up*, because they no longer had to compete with inexpensive used CD's.
Price of goods and services is based on what the market is willing to pay, not the cost of production.
--Tom
" have yet to hear a good reason for not just banning p2p outright"
Because it would outlaw NFS and Samba shares?
We're going to outlaw an entire branch of computing simply because of record companies and movies studios?
Crazy world we live in.
Its pretty clear the only conclusion this "summit" will come to is that computers need to be regulated, the same way we regulate cars.
Only moreso!
Microsoft will point out Palladium will solve these problems, and that if the government would mandate Palladium, then these problems would all but disappear.
And no, I don't think I'm being too cynical at all. In fact, I think my scenario is likely.
I know little about embedded OS's, but the article is a bit self-serving in that the author, Dan O'Dowd is president and CEO of Green Hills Software, (http://www.ghs.com) that makes "Integrity", an ...you guessed it... embedded OS.
r ity-do-178b.html
Take a look. http://www.ghs.com/products/safety_critical/integ
So while he may be right, the information is coming from the wrong person to be trustworthy.
I think Dan needs to hire a PR flak.
"This kind of thing is exactly why we DO need Palladium. "
It shows just the opposite.
If anything, it demonstrates that Hollywood on their own has the means to correct the sources of piracy without the government mandating a chip designed to extend the MPAA's and the RIAA's monopoly basically forever.
I don't understand why you think the Academy and Hollywood's problem is justification to change every computer in the United States.
You are correct. AAC is a standard, but Apple has grafted on a proprietary DRM system called FairPlay.
The difference is non DRM AAC's are *.m4a, DRM AAC's are *.m4p.
" WMA is supported on more devices and players than Apple's AAC (w/DRM)"
Yeah, but so what?
MP3 support is on every player, so why would you get music in a format that locks you into a handful of players.
We can argue all day about what sounds better than what, but MP3's have the capability of sounding excellent if you crank up the bit rate high enough, but more importantly, they'll be playable for as long as anybody cares about them, since they aren't dependent on the permission to play.
"I mean... does this actually present a threat to the movie industry?"
No, but I think its because the MPAA (and RIAA to the same extent) are looking to shift blame away from certain facts.
People filming in the theater is so absurd that you'd have to be pretty hard pressed for entertainment to watch it.
The real trouble is coming from people ripping films distributed on DVD (I seem to remember an article on the Washington Post about this a few months ago). The trouble is, they won't do anything about the actual source of the leaks, so they blame their own customers.
Same with the RIAA...the big source of problem is organized crime making illegal copies by the thousands and millions. But those guys have guns and will kill you if you screw with them. Catching 12 year-old brittany is safer and makes better headlines and makes it look like they're doing something for their shareholders.
Its all a game, and the only ones fooled seem to be our congressmen and women.
"IF there were no IP laws, then there would be little incentive for anyone to produce anything that was easily copyable. "
Its not black and white. The middle ground is where you go back closer to the original definitions of copyright and patents as defined by the original US Constituion.
The notion that copyrights and patents form something equal to physical property is at best a bad analogy and at worst a selective way for large corporations to unfairly exploit a well-meaning, but wrong congress and executive branch.
No, what killed the Amiga for "business" use was it could do 640x400, but only in an interlaced mode that was impossible to look at without going blind.
/desktop publishing because apple had the money to full develop the API's that made it possible to do WYSIWYG; the Amiga OS simply didn't have the tools to do the job.
Because of this, you had to do text editing in 320x200. This was far worse than text mode on an IBM PC, and made it seem like a toy.
A normal company would have addressed this obvious flaw in the Amiga 2000, but Irving Gould was too busy ducking the IRS in the Bahamas to worry about the company.
Also, the Mac was better suited to the entire text
I remember going to an Amiga developer convetion in the late 80's and sat through a 2 hour presentation where Commodore showed how they were going to become a force in Desktop Publishing. They didn't actually want to spend any money on it; they thought if they just pointed out to the developers that Desktop Publishing was a "big market" the developers would start coding.
Yikes.
Oh yea, a lot of the famous people in the Amiga community (non-Commodore) were complete flakes. Imagine the spookiest D&D player you've met and then multiply that effect by 10.
The -R's are available in most places for well under a dollar.
The +R's are harder to find and they cost in some cases 25-50% more. I have found only 1 place selling the +R's for $1/blank. Contrast that with -R prices.
As to compatibility, I've found no difference in my unscientific survey between burned +R and -R.
Frankly, the difference in blanks is significant enough that I'm thinking seriously of upgrading. But virtually every new DVD recorder these days supports both formats.
Now the RW format is a different story.... virtually no compatibility in any drive, expensive, and slower. RW is doomed.
This is not flamebait; its poorly worded, but its pretty much dead on.
I bought a 330i last year and it is a nice car; I would have bought an Acura, but the TL at the time just didn't have it.
Now the new TSX is nice, but I would have seriously considered the new TL.
Oh well, no GM cars on my horizion for probably 10 years. I'll be an old man by then, so maybe the cadillacs will impress .
I think he's doing a PR spin. This law is actually good news for spammers.
Yeah..the XLR just looks weird; certainly the corvette engine makes it interesting.
The concept care are interesting, but they don't have anything that really grabs me at the moment.
Plus, GM has a couple of decades to live down on reliability and resale. I hope they can pull it off, and the new cars are a step in the right direction.
Its mostly the older crowd buying Cadillacs; so perhaps this is hitting exactly the part of the market they want.
I suspect it isn't the BMW/Porsche crowd looking to be tracked by OnStar.
...at least not the way you're describing it. Its intended to control distribution channels in various regions. It has nothing to do with your ability to copy the DVD.
In fact, there's nothing on a DVD that prohibits you from copying it; all of "anti-piracy" measures are about controlling legitimate distribution channels, not stopping piracy.
I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania that had cable TV in the 50's. Much of the area was in valleys deep enough and they were far enough away from transmitters that it was impossible to get TV with an antenna.
It only had 3 or 4 stations, but back then, that was your choice.
The problem is that US Comics are fixated on "Superheros", which are interesting and cool, but you get bored with it after a while.
Nice FUD, but highly unlikely, and probably illegal to void a warranty just because you modded your car.
Adding aftermarket wheels is a bigger deal than modding your OnStar, and I've never heard of GM or anybody voiding warranties over aftermarket wheels.
"Apple's software is one way only...copy to the ipod or delete it. You can't copy from it. "
Apple's software, yes. But XPlay lets you drag and drop music either to or from the iPod; I find its a more elegant solution than iTunes, because it lets you use the pieces you like for downloading, ripping, managing ID3 tags. Then when you connect an iPod, it shows a special music folder that you drag and drop your music.
And yes music comes off as easily as it goes on.
"I will even support the removal of every piece of copyrighted code from linux. "
If you remove every piece of copyrighted code from Linux, wouldn't you effectively have nothing?
I was under the impression that GPL code is fully copyrighted. Or am I misunderstanding your point?
Yeah...you charge it, the battery shows full, and 10 minutes of playing it goes down to half. So you run it for a couple of hours, the battery shows empty, and it runs a few more hours.
My friends 10G has the same issue.
Not sure why a realiable battery indicator is so hard in 2003.