I switched to an "All Access Pass" system and Voila!
My problem with subscription web sites is that they often charge a person who wants to read only one article $99.95 for a 365 day subscription. This is why we need a system such as BitPass that allows payments between $0.01 and $0.99 for a single article.
What do those "You're a winner!", "Punch the monkey!", "You have 1 new emails" ads actually sell, anyway?
Some "You're a winner" ads I've seen sell ad-supported lottery tickets. But, in general, do not click on something that says "Spank the monkey and win 20 Banabux" unless you want to see something really dirty.
Yet if everyone co-operated by not blocking banner ads
Unless the entire web moves to interstitials *cough*IGN-orance*cough*, facts of cognitive psychology make cooperation in not blocking banner ads impossible. If boxes shaped like banners hold unwanted content, human beings will block such boxes at the subconscious level.
Your scenario would last for about 2 days, before someone hacked Mozilla so that it appeared to be IE6.
What if the web site relies on an ActiveX plug-in that does all sorts of lock-in checks analogous to the Windows 3 AARD code? Last time I checked, Mozilla didn't grok ActiveX.
What if the web site relies on Microsoft IE 7 Palladium Edition?
What if the only bank with ATMs located in your town offered only a Flash interface to online banking, claiming that visually impaired users should use the telephone banking interface instead?
come back to the site a month later and still have that stuff in their cart
No. What happens if the store runs out of stock of an item between when he adds it to the cart and when he pays? In brick and mortar retail, would you let a cart sit for a month without reshelving the items?
I pay $15 a month to get on the internet, why should I have to pay to watch adverts for crap I don't want
If $15 per month goes to fund production of the works (analogous to the networks' share of your cable bill), then what funds distribution of works to your home (the cable company's share)?
But then aren't you again relying on the user to read a dialouge box?
Apple's iTunes is an audio player. It could come with a low-bitrate recording of a person reading the text "Do you want to move your audio files back to where they were before you installed iTunes?" (:06, 24 KBytes at 32 kbps) and pause the uninstaller until iTunes has finished reading the text aloud.
The Finding Nemo game is already available for Game Boy Advance.
However, I'd suggest that you get a copy of Little Nemo the Dream Master for NES (90 percent less fishy than Disney's version) and run that in PocketNES instead.
I'd like to see a game for PSP based on Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
You asked for an example of something legal that iTunes overtly and purposefully restricts you from doing, and I gave it.
I agree that there are restrictions. Here's another restriction: The Pentium 4 processor doesn't let a program access the processor's microcode directly. And here's a similar example: iTunes prohibits the user from buying music unless the user owns his own computer. But what problems does iTunes Music Store introduce that burning purchased tracks to a CD doesn't solve, other than for those few iTMS customers without a CD burner (which the System Requirements recommend)?
Whether an algorithm is patented has absolutely nothing to do with whether a program using it can be implemented as open source. It might affect what license can legally be used to distribute the software
The owners of the patents on the algorithms I mentioned have maintained emphatically that they are not willing to license the algorithms royalty-free. Royalty-free licensing is one of the requirements for OSI Certified(tm) open source software.
This isn't about fair use: I never even used the word.
Most DRM opponents claim that DRM is bad primarily because DRM gets in the way of fair use.
ITMS users have decided on the former
You seem to have implied throughout this discussion that choosing to ignore iTMS entirely is not an option.
When all Microsoft and Apple operating systems will not talk to computers that serve their users
For one thing, Microsoft has maintained that Palladium will be optional. For another, in the case you conjecture, such operating systems won't be able to talk to Yahoo!, whose servers run FreeBSD.
and most ISPs will not let others connect to the Internet.
Universities started the Internet. I know of no university that doesn't have at least one POSIX conforming machine used as a public server. Besides, what law prohibits private citizens from setting up their own parallel Internet?
Yes[, the Congress has the right to roadblock free speech in such a way].
How, specifically, would a ban on computing devices that serve the user pass judicial "strict scrutiny"? During the CBDTPA debate, the Federal Trade Commission (which administers most of the Commerce Clause regulations) stated that it didn't want to get involved with copyright issues.
or each pixel can be refreshed 5,000+ times a second
Rendering volumetric shadows, bump mapping, etc. sometimes requires multiple passes over the frame buffer. For example, Doom 3, each pixel is composed from up to seven texels. In addition, there is sometimes a compromise between transformation complexity and overdraw. Besides, console makers' advertised specs often refer to theoretical peaks, possibly with flat shading rather than Phong bump-mapping.
Are there any handheld systems that don't use proprietary storage?
No. Flash memory is patented. If, on the other hand, you're looking for handhelds that use published-but-patented media, many PDAs can use MMC or SmartMedia flash.
continuous motion would make their game loads more responsive, but would also drain the battery faster. Even with a smaller diameter, the spin-up for an optical drive is measured in seconds.
Here's how to spin up an optical drive. When the player enters the room before the game is about to load something (such as in the room before the boss, or in the victory celebration at the end of a level), begin to spin up the disc. That way, the disc is spun up by the time the "now loading" screen shows.
"Fair use does not guarantee pristine fidelity." That's definitely one way to interpret it.
It's also the way the Second Circuit has interpreted it. You're going to need a lot of money to bring cases in other circuits to get the Universal v. Reimerdes precedent ultimately reversed in the Supreme Court, and there's no way to guarantee that the Supremes will see things the way you do.
Even better, we can have iTunes leaving programs on your computer after you unintall it.
OK, I admit that was a bad suggestion. Replace it with recognizing that Windows users typically understand that an "uninstall" function cannot be undone and that such feature would be a checkbox: "Do you want to undo all reorganizations that iTunes has made to your audio files?"
And you still didn't answer the practical questions about what to do with files you add after the first reorganization etc.
Add those to the log file.
I'm sorry that Apple assumed that you would read a dialouge box before you clicked OK
Easy. Microsoft Windows and popular Windows applications display more trivial "Are you sure?" alerts than Mac OS apps do, giving Windows users a more ingrained "just click OK" reflex. For example, Windows asks for confirmation both for "move file to trash" (Delete) and for "empty trash" (right-click recycle bin and choose Empty), while Mac OS skips the confirmation for "move file to trash" (Cmd+Backspace) and gives useful information (namely the total amount of disk space that trashed items take up, in addition to the number of items that Windows displays) in the "empty trash" alert.
if we ever had the balls to undertake a sea change in copyright law here, who's going to stop us?
The European Union, or a hypothetical Euro-Japanese Union.
Most of the copyrighted works we like here are domestic, but we export them to every corner of the world.
If the United States gets kicked out of the WTO, will it still be able to import necessities of life other than entertainment products? Look at what happened to Turkey when it ignored one or more provisions of TRIPS.
There are obviously plenty of examples of such things (play the files on Linux machines without having to go through the bother...
The fair use defenses to copying of sound recordings, as defined in 17 USC 107 and 17 USC 1008, does not guarantee a lack of "bother."
... of burning, reripping, setting all the id3s manually)
Why would it have to be manual? Couldn't a Windows program automate making 74-minute playlists of purchased tracks, telling iTunes to burn tracks to CD-RW, and then running CD audio extraction?
My point is that one should not run software that does not act in ones own interest.
Then choose not to run iTunes Music Store.
There is a simple way to see whether software is acting in your interest: _could_ it be implemented as open source on normal hardware.
Do you claim that programs that perform one-click ordering, LZW compression in Europe and Canada, MP3 compression, and accurate transformations to output devices' color spaces, and other patented algorithms do not act in the user's interest? Free software implementing those algorithms would violate subsisting patents on those algorithms, making them just as unlawful to distribute as DeCSS or any other DRM-breaking program. Even if there were no DMCA, and even if iTunes used no DRM, it would still be unlawful to write an AAC decoder and publish it as free software because AAC is patented.
But you people are so busy trying to convince yourself that this DRM somehow isn't DRM because the rules are less bad.
I agree that iTunes fits the definition of digital restrictions management, but the rules it implements are so thin that they do not get in the way of fair use.
Like people arguing that a dictatorship isn't a dictatorship because the dictator is a nice guy.
Have you shown that near-absolute rule always produces violations of human rights? If a dictator does a good job, then she's still a dictator, and the government is a dictatorship, but it's not a tyranny.
The encryption keys and algorithms used on the m4p files [are secrets].
Analogy: The algorithms used for branch prediction in the Pentium 4 processor are secrets as well, but I haven't read any complaints about them on Slashdot.
My point is that eventually they will not have a choice. For "security reasons."
Does the Congress have the right to roadblock free speech in such a way?
It would either eat memory, or create a huge log file.
Assuming that each pair of paths could be stored in 200 bytes after deflation, a 10,000-move log file could be stored in 2 MB. This is smaller than the stereotypical MP3 file (4 minute recording, 128 kbps).
should it undo the organization if you uninstall?
Checkbox, and possibly leave a small (16 KB or so) program behind whose sole purpose is to replay the log file to revert iTunes's reorganization of MP3 files.
Doesn't it seem more sensable to assume your user is intelligent enough to process the question "Do you want iTunes to organize your music?"
if [computer programming] was such a hard matalic science, there would be programs that could program better or as good as people.
These are called "compilers." Once you've written a first program that can write a second program, what do you call the specifications that you give to the first program? They're called "source code," and the rules for how to write a specification are called a "programming language."
"But compilers don't count!" Maybe the language you are used to is just too low-level. Have you tried something functional such as Haskell or Ocaml?
If I was to write a program that accessed and converted M4P files directly, I would be sued under the DMCA.
Define "directly". What, specifically, do you want to do with a purchased track that 1. iTunes won't let you do, 2. you can't do by recording the audio to a CD, and 3. you may otherwise do under copyright law notwithstanding 17 USC chapter 12?
You are installing a program on your computer that that then conspires against you to keep things secret.
What "things"? The audio itself is no secret once you've recorded it to a completely DRM-free CD.
The point is that the common protocols will be enhanced to add the ability to attest that one is communicating with a trusted client (like good old ITMS).
And my point is that a good number of people will still be willing to publish works that can be viewed with attestation turned off.
Slashdot Mirror
I switched to an "All Access Pass" system and Voila!
My problem with subscription web sites is that they often charge a person who wants to read only one article $99.95 for a 365 day subscription. This is why we need a system such as BitPass that allows payments between $0.01 and $0.99 for a single article.
What do those "You're a winner!", "Punch the monkey!", "You have 1 new emails" ads actually sell, anyway?
Some "You're a winner" ads I've seen sell ad-supported lottery tickets. But, in general, do not click on something that says "Spank the monkey and win 20 Banabux" unless you want to see something really dirty.
Or every web comic would suddenly have a character named Cisco
Let me see that thong... Better yet, don't.
Yet if everyone co-operated by not blocking banner ads
Unless the entire web moves to interstitials *cough*IGN-orance*cough*, facts of cognitive psychology make cooperation in not blocking banner ads impossible. If boxes shaped like banners hold unwanted content, human beings will block such boxes at the subconscious level.
Your scenario would last for about 2 days, before someone hacked Mozilla so that it appeared to be IE6.
What if the web site relies on an ActiveX plug-in that does all sorts of lock-in checks analogous to the Windows 3 AARD code? Last time I checked, Mozilla didn't grok ActiveX.
What if the web site relies on Microsoft IE 7 Palladium Edition?
Install the Flash plug-in, and you'll be able to see the cartoon you'd never heard of, ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!1!1
What if the only bank with ATMs located in your town offered only a Flash interface to online banking, claiming that visually impaired users should use the telephone banking interface instead?
come back to the site a month later and still have that stuff in their cart
No. What happens if the store runs out of stock of an item between when he adds it to the cart and when he pays? In brick and mortar retail, would you let a cart sit for a month without reshelving the items?
I pay $15 a month to get on the internet, why should I have to pay to watch adverts for crap I don't want
If $15 per month goes to fund production of the works (analogous to the networks' share of your cable bill), then what funds distribution of works to your home (the cable company's share)?
But then aren't you again relying on the user to read a dialouge box?
Apple's iTunes is an audio player. It could come with a low-bitrate recording of a person reading the text "Do you want to move your audio files back to where they were before you installed iTunes?" (:06, 24 KBytes at 32 kbps) and pause the uninstaller until iTunes has finished reading the text aloud.
The Finding Nemo game is already available for Game Boy Advance.
However, I'd suggest that you get a copy of Little Nemo the Dream Master for NES (90 percent less fishy than Disney's version) and run that in PocketNES instead.
I'd like to see a game for PSP based on Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Atari Lynx. 160x96 pixel graphics. Even the original black and white Game Boy had a sharper display (160x144) and more battery life to boot.
You asked for an example of something legal that iTunes overtly and purposefully restricts you from doing, and I gave it.
I agree that there are restrictions. Here's another restriction: The Pentium 4 processor doesn't let a program access the processor's microcode directly. And here's a similar example: iTunes prohibits the user from buying music unless the user owns his own computer. But what problems does iTunes Music Store introduce that burning purchased tracks to a CD doesn't solve, other than for those few iTMS customers without a CD burner (which the System Requirements recommend)?
Whether an algorithm is patented has absolutely nothing to do with whether a program using it can be implemented as open source. It might affect what license can legally be used to distribute the software
The owners of the patents on the algorithms I mentioned have maintained emphatically that they are not willing to license the algorithms royalty-free. Royalty-free licensing is one of the requirements for OSI Certified(tm) open source software.
This isn't about fair use: I never even used the word.
Most DRM opponents claim that DRM is bad primarily because DRM gets in the way of fair use.
ITMS users have decided on the former
You seem to have implied throughout this discussion that choosing to ignore iTMS entirely is not an option.
When all Microsoft and Apple operating systems will not talk to computers that serve their users
For one thing, Microsoft has maintained that Palladium will be optional. For another, in the case you conjecture, such operating systems won't be able to talk to Yahoo!, whose servers run FreeBSD.
and most ISPs will not let others connect to the Internet.
Universities started the Internet. I know of no university that doesn't have at least one POSIX conforming machine used as a public server. Besides, what law prohibits private citizens from setting up their own parallel Internet?
Yes[, the Congress has the right to roadblock free speech in such a way].
How, specifically, would a ban on computing devices that serve the user pass judicial "strict scrutiny"? During the CBDTPA debate, the Federal Trade Commission (which administers most of the Commerce Clause regulations) stated that it didn't want to get involved with copyright issues.
or each pixel can be refreshed 5,000+ times a second
Rendering volumetric shadows, bump mapping, etc. sometimes requires multiple passes over the frame buffer. For example, Doom 3, each pixel is composed from up to seven texels. In addition, there is sometimes a compromise between transformation complexity and overdraw. Besides, console makers' advertised specs often refer to theoretical peaks, possibly with flat shading rather than Phong bump-mapping.
You feed them enough food to be able to eat them.
Are there any handheld systems that don't use proprietary storage?
No. Flash memory is patented. If, on the other hand, you're looking for handhelds that use published-but-patented media, many PDAs can use MMC or SmartMedia flash.
continuous motion would make their game loads more responsive, but would also drain the battery faster. Even with a smaller diameter, the spin-up for an optical drive is measured in seconds.
Here's how to spin up an optical drive. When the player enters the room before the game is about to load something (such as in the room before the boss, or in the victory celebration at the end of a level), begin to spin up the disc. That way, the disc is spun up by the time the "now loading" screen shows.
"Fair use does not guarantee pristine fidelity." That's definitely one way to interpret it.
It's also the way the Second Circuit has interpreted it. You're going to need a lot of money to bring cases in other circuits to get the Universal v. Reimerdes precedent ultimately reversed in the Supreme Court, and there's no way to guarantee that the Supremes will see things the way you do.
Even better, we can have iTunes leaving programs on your computer after you unintall it.
OK, I admit that was a bad suggestion. Replace it with recognizing that Windows users typically understand that an "uninstall" function cannot be undone and that such feature would be a checkbox: "Do you want to undo all reorganizations that iTunes has made to your audio files?"
And you still didn't answer the practical questions about what to do with files you add after the first reorganization etc.
Add those to the log file.
I'm sorry that Apple assumed that you would read a dialouge box before you clicked OK
Easy. Microsoft Windows and popular Windows applications display more trivial "Are you sure?" alerts than Mac OS apps do, giving Windows users a more ingrained "just click OK" reflex. For example, Windows asks for confirmation both for "move file to trash" (Delete) and for "empty trash" (right-click recycle bin and choose Empty), while Mac OS skips the confirmation for "move file to trash" (Cmd+Backspace) and gives useful information (namely the total amount of disk space that trashed items take up, in addition to the number of items that Windows displays) in the "empty trash" alert.
if we ever had the balls to undertake a sea change in copyright law here, who's going to stop us?
The European Union, or a hypothetical Euro-Japanese Union.
Most of the copyrighted works we like here are domestic, but we export them to every corner of the world.
If the United States gets kicked out of the WTO, will it still be able to import necessities of life other than entertainment products? Look at what happened to Turkey when it ignored one or more provisions of TRIPS.
Devil's advocate:
There are obviously plenty of examples of such things (play the files on Linux machines without having to go through the bother...
The fair use defenses to copying of sound recordings, as defined in 17 USC 107 and 17 USC 1008, does not guarantee a lack of "bother."
Why would it have to be manual? Couldn't a Windows program automate making 74-minute playlists of purchased tracks, telling iTunes to burn tracks to CD-RW, and then running CD audio extraction?
My point is that one should not run software that does not act in ones own interest.
Then choose not to run iTunes Music Store.
There is a simple way to see whether software is acting in your interest: _could_ it be implemented as open source on normal hardware.
Do you claim that programs that perform one-click ordering, LZW compression in Europe and Canada, MP3 compression, and accurate transformations to output devices' color spaces, and other patented algorithms do not act in the user's interest? Free software implementing those algorithms would violate subsisting patents on those algorithms, making them just as unlawful to distribute as DeCSS or any other DRM-breaking program. Even if there were no DMCA, and even if iTunes used no DRM, it would still be unlawful to write an AAC decoder and publish it as free software because AAC is patented.
But you people are so busy trying to convince yourself that this DRM somehow isn't DRM because the rules are less bad.
I agree that iTunes fits the definition of digital restrictions management, but the rules it implements are so thin that they do not get in the way of fair use.
Like people arguing that a dictatorship isn't a dictatorship because the dictator is a nice guy.
Have you shown that near-absolute rule always produces violations of human rights? If a dictator does a good job, then she's still a dictator, and the government is a dictatorship, but it's not a tyranny.
The encryption keys and algorithms used on the m4p files [are secrets].
Analogy: The algorithms used for branch prediction in the Pentium 4 processor are secrets as well, but I haven't read any complaints about them on Slashdot.
My point is that eventually they will not have a choice. For "security reasons."
Does the Congress have the right to roadblock free speech in such a way?
would you guys really be bitching about the end of analog transmission if the digital ones weren't being locked down?
Yes. Even if there were no broadcast flag, the ATSC standard seems to require patented methods.
It would either eat memory, or create a huge log file.
Assuming that each pair of paths could be stored in 200 bytes after deflation, a 10,000-move log file could be stored in 2 MB. This is smaller than the stereotypical MP3 file (4 minute recording, 128 kbps).
should it undo the organization if you uninstall?
Checkbox, and possibly leave a small (16 KB or so) program behind whose sole purpose is to replay the log file to revert iTunes's reorganization of MP3 files.
Doesn't it seem more sensable to assume your user is intelligent enough to process the question "Do you want iTunes to organize your music?"
Given the discussion in threads such as this, no.
if [computer programming] was such a hard matalic science, there would be programs that could program better or as good as people.
These are called "compilers." Once you've written a first program that can write a second program, what do you call the specifications that you give to the first program? They're called "source code," and the rules for how to write a specification are called a "programming language."
"But compilers don't count!" Maybe the language you are used to is just too low-level. Have you tried something functional such as Haskell or Ocaml?
And how do you pay for Internet access at a copy shop or a cafe? Cash? "Let me see some I.D."
If I was to write a program that accessed and converted M4P files directly, I would be sued under the DMCA.
Define "directly". What, specifically, do you want to do with a purchased track that 1. iTunes won't let you do, 2. you can't do by recording the audio to a CD, and 3. you may otherwise do under copyright law notwithstanding 17 USC chapter 12?
You are installing a program on your computer that that then conspires against you to keep things secret.
What "things"? The audio itself is no secret once you've recorded it to a completely DRM-free CD.
The point is that the common protocols will be enhanced to add the ability to attest that one is communicating with a trusted client (like good old ITMS).
And my point is that a good number of people will still be willing to publish works that can be viewed with attestation turned off.