Not only can purchases from the iTunes Music Store be recorded in Red Book format to Compact Disc Digital Audio Recordable media, but a given playlist can be burned three times.
iTunes Music Store is currently in a beta test and is scheduled for full deployment in December.
if people were only willing to pay those stupid high rates in only a few years CD's would be less expensive... I think CD's costed something like $20 a piece.
Since the introduction of the Compact Disc format, the U.S. dollar has dropped in value relative to the value of a loaf of bread. For example, a 3 percent (figure pulled out of ass) annual inflation rate would mean that over 20 years, the cost of living measured in current dollars has increased over 80 percent (1.030^20 = 1.806), while CDs remained constant at $18 in current dollars. Converting to constant dollars (83$) shows that CDs did drop in real price from 83$18 to 83$10.
P2P networks are encouraging and helping individuals to distribute perfect digital copies of NEAR-PERFECT digital copies of original recordings to millions of strangers simultaneously.
Subtract "to millions of strangers simultaneously" and you have exactly described pawn shops that carry Compact Disc titles. Even a CD is not a perfect digital copy of the recording; it usually has a lot of dither noise, hopefully noise-shaped into the 16-22 kHz range that grown-ups can't hear. The "perfect digital recording" is the 24-bit master, locked away in a label's vault.
no he has a license to the CONTENT of the 8 track edition.
He has a license to the content of the 8-track version, which includes all the noise of the 8-track version. He does not have a license to the extra bits of dynamic range included on the CD version.
And if you bought T2 on VHS, you should be entitled to reencode it and record it on DVD
Exactly. You have a license to the content of your VHS tape, but you don't have a license to the extra bits of dynamic range included on the DVD version.
The RIAA representative's position may look like cow manure to some readers, but I think I know where he's coming from.
Then "someone" will get sued by the owner(s) of the musical work(s) that "someone" accidentally copied.
I'm putting finishing touches on a somewhat rigorous argument that uses copyright statutes, case law, music theory, and combinatorics to prove that it's nearly impossible to write a completely original song nowadays. See an early draft here; if you want to see the next draft, please reply to remind me to give you the URL when it's up.
You went out and stole something that was NOT RIGHTFULLY YOURS, and when you get called on the carpet for it, YOU are the one who's being infringed upon?
What if you wrote a song and recorded it, but then as soon as your song hit airwaves, you realized what you had unconsciously copied when writing the song? A Beatle lost $1.6 million over exactly that case.
However, society decides which laws are just and unjust. You'd better get convincing society.
Unfortunately, the big copyright owners control what American society decides because American society seems to base its mores on the content of news and entertainment programs broadcast by big copyright owners. For example, I don't think ABC (a division of DisneyCo, which led lobbying for the Bono Act) would let me advertise an anti-Disney activist site such as Losing Nemo. Heck, I don't think I could even mention Eldred.cc on ABC.
Like most modern codecs, MPEG-4 Video and Audio codecs are almost certainly subject to patent royalities [sic]. This project does not remove any responsiblity [sic] or liability from developers or users of this kit.
I don't see many people crying over the GIF patent, especially when M$IE has yet to implement support for PNG.
Microsoft Internet Explorer supports PNG images at least as well as it supports still GIF images. It correctly displays all indexed PNGs that I've thrown at it, whether non-transparent or binary-transparent.
The only thing GIF can do in IE that PNG and its cousins can't do in IE is animate. IE lacks support entirely for MNG animations. (Mozilla.org has temporarily removed the MNG decoder from the Mozilla trunk, but it'll be restored once it's cleaned up; see bug 18574 in b.m.o.)
Patent license terms prohibit use in OSS
on
AAC Put To The Test
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Why doesn't some enterprising individual buy a license, write an open source player, and then sell it (source and binary) to Linux users?
The typical license for LZW data compression patents (the foreign counterparts to U.S. Patent 4,558,302 owned by Unisys, which expires in just over a week) do not allow redistribution of the encoder's source code and binaries. I'd guess that the typical licenses for software implementations of audio codec patents have similar terms; otherwise, somebody would probably have already donated an MP3 patent license to the LAME project.
Palmtops should run PalmOS.
That's like saying "Desktop computers should run BeOS." Palm OS is not the only PDA platform. For instance, Sharp Zaurus handheld computers do not ship with Palm OS; instead, they ship with a Linux OS.
iBooks and iMacs should run OS X.
What if the fastest available GUI for Linux runs more responsively on Linux than Quartz runs on Mac OS X on a given piece of Mac hardware?
There's no Ogg support in QuickTime.
I beg to differ, unless you're talking only about those QuickTime components shipped by Apple Computer.
Storage != transit; consumer != enterprise
on
AAC Put To The Test
·
· Score: 1
Gigs are cheap.
Gigabytes of local storage at consumer reliability may be cheap. Gigabytes of storage at enterprise reliability are not cheap, and gigabytes of Internet transit are not cheap, which is why Apple sells recordings encoded at a 128 kbps data rate rather than 700 kbps like FLAC produces.
In addition, gigabytes of silicon ROM are not cheap, which is why most Game Boy Advance programs use sequenced music (such as MIDI with a sound font) rather than live recordings.
Send would translate into "give", if you really want to use a different word. Steal is the word for "take away".
If a government has granted a limited monopoly to the author of a vector of bits, then reproducing and "giving" the bits to another party may constitute "taking away" from the author.
ObTopic: Likewise, if a government has granted a limited monopoly to the inventor of a method of audio analysis and data reduction, then performing such a method may constitute "taking away" from the inventor. That's why binaries of free MP3 and AAC encoders cannot be distributed openly in the United States, Germany, Japan, and other countries where Fraunhofer holds such a monopoly.
For instance a cymbal actually has much of it's energy in frequencies that we can not hear, but studies have shown the recording that contains the high frequency information sounds more real to the listener. Some how we percieve the information that we can't hear.
Could this have something to do with the slight nonlinearity of air? Would a subtle distortion function mimicking air's nonlinearity applied before the Nyquist brick wall give the same result?
people can mix together all sorts of different versions, all having an equal claim to being a "master recording". Hence my comment "whatever that may be".
A Red Book CD uses 16-bit PCM, which is not the same as a "master recording". It has 18 apparent bits of resolution given good dithering techniques such as MegaBitMax that push dither noise into 16-22 kHz where grown-ups can't hear it. The record label, on the other hand, has access to a 24-bit master.
In fact, every time I have tried to save anything but the most trivial OOo doc in word format, it has failed horribly.
The binary Microsoft Word document (.doc) format was never meant to be an exchange format between Microsoft Word and other applications. Microsoft Rich Text Format (RTF), on the other hand, is a textual encoding of the information in a Microsoft Word document (.doc). It's a lot easier to write an exporter of valid RTF than an exporter of valid.doc. In fact, some programs that write "Microsoft Word documents" actually write RTF with a.doc extension, which Microsoft Word accepts gladly.
In short: If you want Microsoft Word to Read The File correctly, use Rich Text Format.
It made files that hung Word upon opening.
That's Microsoft's fault for not performing appropriate sanity checks in its.doc parser. No program should hang on untrusted input.
And no, you don't NEED any special permission to use something just because it happens to have copyrights attached to it.
In the United States, you do. "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" (17 USC 1201). And no, I don't have the money to move my family out of the United States.
it's about a 110% certainty that they won't be legally enforceable anyway.
It's also a 99.odd% certainty that an individual user whose income lies in the working class will not be able to defend his actions in a court of law. Unlike courts in some countries, where the loser pays the other side's legal fees, courts in the United States seem to have a history of denying allegations of barratry, even when the parties' net worths differ by orders of magnitude.
It would work if you had the "agreement" made online with sending of the agreement back to the company. I don't think most such "I agree"s are done that way though.
You mean like product activation in the Microsoft Windows XP operating system and the Microsoft Office suite?
However, nothing obligates the software publisher to provide a "full install" option at all. What if it's an archive of National Geographic magazine that comes on 25 dual-layer DVD-ROM discs at 8 GiB each? If you have enough hard disk drives to hold 200 GiB of data, then it's probably a RAID 0 or RAID 5 array, and if you have a RAID array, you probably have a server, and if you have a server, you're probably allowing multiple users to access the software, and if you're allowing multiple users to access the software, you should purchase multiple licenses.
You can set up your own rule weights for SA. See the documentation.
Can different sets of rule weights be assigned to different accounts in SpamAssassin? "The idea was rejected because of the difficulty implementing dual rule sets," wrote grandparent.
People compose a document, print it out on their inkjet and expect it to print out exactly the same on any other printer. (It almost never does.)
PDF is not printer dependent as long as your printer has the correct size paper (usually A4 or US Letter) loaded. Recent betas of OpenOffice.org Writer can export to PDF.
I can't buy a computer from a major manufacturer without being forced to license Microsoft Works Suite or Microsoft Office.
FrontPage (part of Office) didn't start at MS
Is FrontPage part of Office for Mac OS? If not, then it's not part of Office but part of the combination of Windows and Office.
not 100% of the population buys Dell.
Last time I checked, Dell, HP[1], and Gateway provided a choice of Microsoft Works Suite or Microsoft Office, with no discount for "neither". Not everybody is willing to buy a no-name custom computer; for example, my grandma has refused my suggestion to even consider it.
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itunes's format can't be burned to cd
Not only can purchases from the iTunes Music Store be recorded in Red Book format to Compact Disc Digital Audio Recordable media, but a given playlist can be burned three times.
iTunes Music Store is currently in a beta test and is scheduled for full deployment in December.
if people were only willing to pay those stupid high rates in only a few years CD's would be less expensive ... I think CD's costed something like $20 a piece.
Since the introduction of the Compact Disc format, the U.S. dollar has dropped in value relative to the value of a loaf of bread. For example, a 3 percent (figure pulled out of ass) annual inflation rate would mean that over 20 years, the cost of living measured in current dollars has increased over 80 percent (1.030^20 = 1.806), while CDs remained constant at $18 in current dollars. Converting to constant dollars (83$) shows that CDs did drop in real price from 83$18 to 83$10.
P2P networks are encouraging and helping individuals to distribute perfect digital copies of NEAR-PERFECT digital copies of original recordings to millions of strangers simultaneously.
Subtract "to millions of strangers simultaneously" and you have exactly described pawn shops that carry Compact Disc titles. Even a CD is not a perfect digital copy of the recording; it usually has a lot of dither noise, hopefully noise-shaped into the 16-22 kHz range that grown-ups can't hear. The "perfect digital recording" is the 24-bit master, locked away in a label's vault.
no he has a license to the CONTENT of the 8 track edition.
He has a license to the content of the 8-track version, which includes all the noise of the 8-track version. He does not have a license to the extra bits of dynamic range included on the CD version.
And if you bought T2 on VHS, you should be entitled to reencode it and record it on DVD
Exactly. You have a license to the content of your VHS tape, but you don't have a license to the extra bits of dynamic range included on the DVD version.
The RIAA representative's position may look like cow manure to some readers, but I think I know where he's coming from.
If someone spends a year writing music
Then "someone" will get sued by the owner(s) of the musical work(s) that "someone" accidentally copied.
I'm putting finishing touches on a somewhat rigorous argument that uses copyright statutes, case law, music theory, and combinatorics to prove that it's nearly impossible to write a completely original song nowadays. See an early draft here; if you want to see the next draft, please reply to remind me to give you the URL when it's up.
You went out and stole something that was NOT RIGHTFULLY YOURS, and when you get called on the carpet for it, YOU are the one who's being infringed upon?
What if you wrote a song and recorded it, but then as soon as your song hit airwaves, you realized what you had unconsciously copied when writing the song? A Beatle lost $1.6 million over exactly that case.
However, society decides which laws are just and unjust. You'd better get convincing society.
Unfortunately, the big copyright owners control what American society decides because American society seems to base its mores on the content of news and entertainment programs broadcast by big copyright owners. For example, I don't think ABC (a division of DisneyCo, which led lobbying for the Bono Act) would let me advertise an anti-Disney activist site such as Losing Nemo. Heck, I don't think I could even mention Eldred.cc on ABC.
Apple Music, the Beatles publishing company, no longer exists.
Then who owns the master recordings?
The Beatles music rights were purchased and AFAIK are still owned by Michael Jackson.
The rights to the musical works (embodied in sheet music) or the rights to the sound recordings (embodied in phonorecords such as tapes and CDs)?
For one thing, MPEG4IP does not distribute binaries.
According to the MPEG4IP FAQ:
there is an even better option 4. Buy from people like cdbaby
This helps precisely zero when I can't control the artist and song preferences of a family member who prefers major label teen pop.
I would prefer an option 5 though. A digital music service where I can download individual tracks with no DRM
Anything like eMusic?
I don't see many people crying over the GIF patent, especially when M$IE has yet to implement support for PNG.
Microsoft Internet Explorer supports PNG images at least as well as it supports still GIF images. It correctly displays all indexed PNGs that I've thrown at it, whether non-transparent or binary-transparent.
The only thing GIF can do in IE that PNG and its cousins can't do in IE is animate. IE lacks support entirely for MNG animations. (Mozilla.org has temporarily removed the MNG decoder from the Mozilla trunk, but it'll be restored once it's cleaned up; see bug 18574 in b.m.o.)
Why doesn't some enterprising individual buy a license, write an open source player, and then sell it (source and binary) to Linux users?
The typical license for LZW data compression patents (the foreign counterparts to U.S. Patent 4,558,302 owned by Unisys, which expires in just over a week) do not allow redistribution of the encoder's source code and binaries. I'd guess that the typical licenses for software implementations of audio codec patents have similar terms; otherwise, somebody would probably have already donated an MP3 patent license to the LAME project.
Palmtops should run PalmOS.
That's like saying "Desktop computers should run BeOS." Palm OS is not the only PDA platform. For instance, Sharp Zaurus handheld computers do not ship with Palm OS; instead, they ship with a Linux OS.
iBooks and iMacs should run OS X.
What if the fastest available GUI for Linux runs more responsively on Linux than Quartz runs on Mac OS X on a given piece of Mac hardware?
There's no Ogg support in QuickTime.
I beg to differ, unless you're talking only about those QuickTime components shipped by Apple Computer.
Gigs are cheap.
Gigabytes of local storage at consumer reliability may be cheap. Gigabytes of storage at enterprise reliability are not cheap, and gigabytes of Internet transit are not cheap, which is why Apple sells recordings encoded at a 128 kbps data rate rather than 700 kbps like FLAC produces.
In addition, gigabytes of silicon ROM are not cheap, which is why most Game Boy Advance programs use sequenced music (such as MIDI with a sound font) rather than live recordings.
Send would translate into "give", if you really want to use a different word. Steal is the word for "take away".
If a government has granted a limited monopoly to the author of a vector of bits, then reproducing and "giving" the bits to another party may constitute "taking away" from the author.
ObTopic: Likewise, if a government has granted a limited monopoly to the inventor of a method of audio analysis and data reduction, then performing such a method may constitute "taking away" from the inventor. That's why binaries of free MP3 and AAC encoders cannot be distributed openly in the United States, Germany, Japan, and other countries where Fraunhofer holds such a monopoly.
For instance a cymbal actually has much of it's energy in frequencies that we can not hear, but studies have shown the recording that contains the high frequency information sounds more real to the listener. Some how we percieve the information that we can't hear.
Could this have something to do with the slight nonlinearity of air? Would a subtle distortion function mimicking air's nonlinearity applied before the Nyquist brick wall give the same result?
people can mix together all sorts of different versions, all having an equal claim to being a "master recording". Hence my comment "whatever that may be".
A Red Book CD uses 16-bit PCM, which is not the same as a "master recording". It has 18 apparent bits of resolution given good dithering techniques such as MegaBitMax that push dither noise into 16-22 kHz where grown-ups can't hear it. The record label, on the other hand, has access to a 24-bit master.
In fact, every time I have tried to save anything but the most trivial OOo doc in word format, it has failed horribly.
The binary Microsoft Word document (.doc) format was never meant to be an exchange format between Microsoft Word and other applications. Microsoft Rich Text Format (RTF), on the other hand, is a textual encoding of the information in a Microsoft Word document (.doc). It's a lot easier to write an exporter of valid RTF than an exporter of valid .doc. In fact, some programs that write "Microsoft Word documents" actually write RTF with a .doc extension, which Microsoft Word accepts gladly.
In short: If you want Microsoft Word to Read The File correctly, use Rich Text Format.
It made files that hung Word upon opening.
That's Microsoft's fault for not performing appropriate sanity checks in its .doc parser. No program should hang on untrusted input.
And no, you don't NEED any special permission to use something just because it happens to have copyrights attached to it.
In the United States, you do. "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" (17 USC 1201). And no, I don't have the money to move my family out of the United States.
it's about a 110% certainty that they won't be legally enforceable anyway.
It's also a 99.odd% certainty that an individual user whose income lies in the working class will not be able to defend his actions in a court of law. Unlike courts in some countries, where the loser pays the other side's legal fees, courts in the United States seem to have a history of denying allegations of barratry, even when the parties' net worths differ by orders of magnitude.
It would work if you had the "agreement" made online with sending of the agreement back to the company. I don't think most such "I agree"s are done that way though.
You mean like product activation in the Microsoft Windows XP operating system and the Microsoft Office suite?
However, nothing obligates the software publisher to provide a "full install" option at all. What if it's an archive of National Geographic magazine that comes on 25 dual-layer DVD-ROM discs at 8 GiB each? If you have enough hard disk drives to hold 200 GiB of data, then it's probably a RAID 0 or RAID 5 array, and if you have a RAID array, you probably have a server, and if you have a server, you're probably allowing multiple users to access the software, and if you're allowing multiple users to access the software, you should purchase multiple licenses.
You can set up your own rule weights for SA. See the documentation.
Can different sets of rule weights be assigned to different accounts in SpamAssassin? "The idea was rejected because of the difficulty implementing dual rule sets," wrote grandparent.
People compose a document, print it out on their inkjet and expect it to print out exactly the same on any other printer. (It almost never does.)
PDF is not printer dependent as long as your printer has the correct size paper (usually A4 or US Letter) loaded. Recent betas of OpenOffice.org Writer can export to PDF.
They knew how to get 'around' [extension protection] and just renamed the file before launching it.
Cite them for attempted spreading of viruses.
Office isn't *bundled* with windows
I can't buy a computer from a major manufacturer without being forced to license Microsoft Works Suite or Microsoft Office.
FrontPage (part of Office) didn't start at MS
Is FrontPage part of Office for Mac OS? If not, then it's not part of Office but part of the combination of Windows and Office.
not 100% of the population buys Dell.
Last time I checked, Dell, HP[1], and Gateway provided a choice of Microsoft Works Suite or Microsoft Office, with no discount for "neither". Not everybody is willing to buy a no-name custom computer; for example, my grandma has refused my suggestion to even consider it.