Sure, but it has the same effect of censorship, especially when it is digital. For example, a grocery store that doesn't carry porn takes a business risk if they were to have porn magazines, they would have to buy the stock and hope for a potential customer, if no customer was found within the one month period that the magazine was released for, they just lost money. Similarly with Best Buy and certain movies.
With Google it is completely different. These "inappropriate" books are not physical books, they do not need stocked and restocked, etc. There is no risk to them. This, effectively is corporate censorship especially considering how large Google is. Sure, its not legally wrong, but it sure goes against most people's beliefs.
It's best to avoid illegal acts. If you don't like a law, work to change it.
The problem with these laws, is they are essentially criminalizing everything. Its not that easy to say "Well, you uploaded X, X is copyrighted", no, the laws have gone to such extremes that if there is simply background music, or someone is lip syncing a certain song, it can be taken down. This isn't just about uploading Hannah_Montana_Song.mp3.
How do we change them? The entirety of the internet has been protesting against the DMCA since day one, yet I don't see a movement to change it. Heck, there have been many, many, many, letters sent to congressmen, and they don't do anything. Its not easy to change a law when those supporting the laws have million dollar worth of lobbyists.
Support alternatives to infringing activities. I don't like the music industry any more than most people here, and I like to support independent artists in any way I can. I use Linux on all my desktops and servers because I (a) it works well for me, and (2) I don't enjoy feeding Microsoft more money.
Sure, the example of using Linux works because MS is basically dependent on piracy to entrench Windows users in poorer countries. But for independent artists it just doesn't work. What happens is RIAA sees a drop of 10% in CD sales, now, having a basic monopoly on CDs have made them not think logically. They see the 10% of CDs not just as 10% that has gone to non-RIAA labels, or has gone to purchasing other things that aren't music, but rather because CD sales have dropped 10% that must be piracy!!! So because they think that they manage to convince a blind congress to passing more RIAA friendly bills and increasing DRM.
stay the f*** home from work/school when you are sick, that would help
If only it were that easy. Even when I'm ill with things that make me unable to work (such as vomiting every half hour) employers tend to be unsympathetic, even more so when its something where you feel miserable and are sick with something contagious (such as normal influenza), making staying at home little more than a dream. Schools aren't much better and sometimes much worse. For example, school nurses usually have a set fever number where they will not send kids home if they don't reach it (such as 100 degrees) and so even when you are visibly sick, feeling miserable but yet can't hit the magical 100 degree fever, you are stuck in school transmitting whatever you have. And most parents send students to school even with high fevers, when kids are visibly sick, and even when they are vomiting.
Um, honestly the earth isn't overpopulated in the least and can easily handle a few billion more. Then there is declining birthrates in most of the developed world, so a pandemic really isn't necessary to cut down on the population of the world.
There is the language barrier. While I do know some Spanish, I'm not going to import a Spanish game to save a few dollars. Similarly with Japanese games. Yes, I do own a few Japanese games, but these are games you can only get in Japan because the game's publisher decided not to sell it in the USA. I would much rather have the game in a language that I understand, but when the only way to get it is in a different language, well, you just do what you can. But seriously, no one (save for the minority that speaks Spanish more fluently than English), is going to buy a Spanish game (in the USA) to save a few bucks.
The problem is, this will end up being universal. Just think about all of the crappy services that governments provide like mail delivery. Here in the USA, Fed-Ex, UPS and DHL all provide a much better experience then using the USPS, but not by much. How much more will ISPs fail to innovate because they only now have a niche market? Whenever the widest used alternative is crappy, you only have to beat it by a bit to appear "competitive" and when the crappy service is government run, you can bet it will be crappy for its lifetime.
Technology changes things. Back before electronic attendance, and electronic grades, a teacher would be very suspicious if something didn't check out in their records. Today, most teachers believe that the technology is always right, even when it contradicts paper gradebooks. Common sense gets thrown out of the window whenever you have a bunch of technology illiterate people together with technology.
Any manned government mission. There is no doubt that Virgin Galactic and other similar companies will start doing things reminiscent of the golden days of NASA as soon as they can produce a few flyable spacecraft. It is rare to have government-based research that does anything that starts the flame for a better, cheaper, more effective version by a few competing private firms.
So don't use GNOME. The nice thing about Linux is, you have choice in your GUI. In Windows you don't, in OS X you don't, in Linux you do. Don't like GNOME? Use KDE, XFCE, IceWM, Fvwm, heck use obscure ones like Ion, or Afterstep. You are bound to find a WM that fits your needs or can be customized to fit your needs.
I think that's a pipe dream which doesn't take human nature ("why pay when I can take it for free?") into account.
But a lot of money being made on copyright with the exception of games is for business use or things that can never be emulated. For example, most bands make their money through live shows, no matter how advanced of video technology we get, you can never really successfully recreate the atmosphere of a concert. Similarly, if movie theaters could provide a great experience many people would go there rather then at home, but sadly the ordinary movie theater experience has technical glitches, loud children, overpriced (crappy) food and drinks, and AV equipment that wasn't that great. Its no wonder people would rather torrent movies then watch them in the theaters. Books similarly cannot be faithfully replicated (e-readers are close, but I still find reading a book much more enjoyable) with current technology. Games also would be protected by use of specialty hardware, sure, you can't sue someone for cracking your console, but you can make your console hard to crack.
So the solution is to not criminalize personal filesharing for no commercial gain, decrease copyright to a sane 20 or less years, repeal things such as the DMCA and make a law with safe harbor provisions without the draconian things of the DMCA, make jailbreaking, breaking of DRM, etc. expressly legal so long as they do not make a profit. Make trackers and torrent sites expressly legal. Allow the remixing of such things for non-profit use. Then we will see progress.
Most OSS projects don't offer precompiled RPMs or DEBs. Its much easier to outsource it to the distro managers who can better add it into the next release. Think about it this way, you offer a DEB for Ubuntu, that DEB gets installed on a Debian based system that isn't Ubuntu... Unfortunately, it doesn't really resolve dependencies nicely and it requires either A) A newer version of a library B) Some obscure library that doesn't have an easy to use DEB thus killing the entire point C) Dependencies that depend on other dependencies that either have problem A or B.
A) The default skin is ugly for some WMs. While the default look of GNOME and KDE and even XFCE look good, other, lighter WMs look plain ugly when on their default themes.
B) Licensing issues with some custom themes. Some custom themes may be released under the GPL... But the artwork is proprietary or something so, while its no big deal for an individual, for a company looking to make a profit on them, this is a potential landmine.
C) People these days seem to think like this: XP like theme == Windows XP == familiar, while Grey and blue == Windows 9X == outdated, and Black or other dark colors == Vista == Unstable and new. So XP-like themes are going to get the most positive first looks for potential computer illiterate buyers. And really, its not that hard to change the theme to something more appealing if you know how to use Linux
But assuming you are transmitting all needed information over HTTPS, there really isn't that much that can be detected from the script kiddy with a packet sniffer.
I think though that those who use P2P simply to get free music even though there are loads of ways to get it legally would not buy the legal music. Its similar to if I walked into Wal-Mart and they had a 50 inch plasma on sale for $50, I would buy it. Was I in the market for a 50 inch plasma, no, but because it was so cheap and it would be a nice thing to have, I got it. There are a lot of artists that people tolerate, but don't really like, so they pirate the music. If the only way to get the music was to buy it, they wouldn't listen to the artist. Similar to if that 50 inch plasma cost $1300 I wouldn't have bought it.
Then we have the issues of "consumable" music. Music that is popular one day then the next becomes unlistenable to because its "old". These are the most heavily downloaded songs because they are "in fashion" for a brief period of time where everybody (everybody meaning the masses) then a few days later the song never gets brought up again, they are merely status symbols.
The lesser-known bands (and not just indie bands, but signed bands that just aren't that popular, at least in the country you live in) seem to have a more timeless quality to them that people listen to them more over time. While the latest song by Hannah Montana (or whatever kids are listening to today) might be almost unheard of 6 months from now, a lesser-known song will still seem as good because its not really "consumable".
There have been a lot of artists that I have supported that I wouldn't have bought if I hadn't listened to them through a copyright-infringing YouTube video. For example, Nightwish. They aren't a mainstream band really here in the US, you can buy some of their CDs at specialty stores, but if it wasn't for a YouTube video that technically violated copyright, I wouldn't have known they have existed. Since then, I have bought several of their CDs both physical and digital. While a lot of people look at P2P to solve all problems, YouTube and other streaming services actually help more.
iPods/iTunes are crippled by design. For example, I own an iPod touch, I bought it with the full knowledge that it wouldn't work with Linux (excluding getting iTunes to work with WINE or sudden improvements in various iPod libraries), not a problem, I had a laptop that had a Vista partition. So I installed iTunes, didn't really mind it (save for the fact it enjoyed sucking up system resources like crazy), but then the laptop's HD managed to crash. I had a bunch of MP3s that I either ripped off of CDs or downloaded from other sites such as Amazon MP3 along with a handful of iTunes bought content such as apps and the odd song or two. So after I resized a partition on my desktop to put Windows XP on there and installed it, and then put on iTunes and after "authorizing" my account (DRM sucks) I thought I would be ready to sync music off there and with no problem get it all on the computer with no problem, after all none of the files (minus applications) were DRM-free. So I plugged in my iPod and transfered purchases off of it... and all the apps synced perfectly and so did the iTunes downloaded songs.... But the MP3s I had gotten elsewhere did not transfer! Now, assuming that the iPod worked about as well as the other 2 generic MP3 players I had, I didn't feel the need to back up my entire music collection, after all, it was all on my iPod (and it being new and using flash memory I didn't have to worry about a HD crash), yet it didn't retrieve my songs something that every, single, other MP3 play could! So after a forum post in the Apple support forums, someone gave me a link to an application that worked for it and so I didn't have to re-rip CDs, but this is an obvious, easy, fix for iTunes.
I didn't mind using iTunes except for that fact. Fix that clear limitation and all will be good, but its things like that, features that are so obvious to anyone who has ever had that problem that could be added.
And if you actually read some of the articles or the comments. The "pirated" versions had no multiplayer mode! All the server issues was caused by a simple HTTP request of looking to see if there were updates or news something that just about every other game does. The only reason it caused a slow down is because they did not have a decent webserver running it because they were waiting for the real release. Heck, Tap Tap Revenge 2 for my iPod touch had the same issue when you downloaded it in the first week of its release, their webserver couldn't handle the traffic so online play wasn't possible.
Yah, the minimal cost of putting up a webserver that searches for updates.
Those who did not have a CD key (those who "pirated" the game) could not play online. They only pinged the server to look for news/updates. The only thing is, their server was not ready to deal with the people who connected before the official release. Saying that is losing them profits is similar to if a beta gets a lot of traffic and is hosted on crappy server that because some people couldn't access it because it was down due to traffic that because you went on there you are to blame if it doesn't catch on.
For anything online, that really isn't going to make people happy. For example, if person A is able to afford super-ninja-1337 weapons that are able to destroy any other player in one hit because person A happens to be rich in real-life currency, then everyone else is going to feel that the game is unbalanced.
Please Canada take a look at the USA and see how between software patents, the DMCA, and other draconian legislation, our tech sector has been quickly crumbling.
Well, what I was meaning was how lets say each state had ~2% of people who were libertarians and voted libertarian. That number would be too small to elect any representatives for the state, but there are still 2% of people who have no representation in congress. Whereas in Sweden there would be directly 2% of the parliament made up of libertarians.
Um, in most bookstores I have been to (including large chain stores like Barnes and Nobel), no one cares if you take a book from the shelf, sit down in one of the comfortable chairs and read as much of the book as you like. It is stealing whenever you take a book out of a bookstore without paying because the store lost a physical book that cost real money to print, etc. What "piracy" is doing is simply reading the book in the store, no loss of the book and someone is perfectly free to read the same book. Only, "piracy" is a bit less damaging because while a bookstore has a finite amount of a certain book, anything digital can make a copy in less than a second with no loss by either side. So not only are you reading a book, but hundreds to millions of others can read the book too.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but it has the same effect of censorship, especially when it is digital. For example, a grocery store that doesn't carry porn takes a business risk if they were to have porn magazines, they would have to buy the stock and hope for a potential customer, if no customer was found within the one month period that the magazine was released for, they just lost money. Similarly with Best Buy and certain movies.
With Google it is completely different. These "inappropriate" books are not physical books, they do not need stocked and restocked, etc. There is no risk to them. This, effectively is corporate censorship especially considering how large Google is. Sure, its not legally wrong, but it sure goes against most people's beliefs.
It's best to avoid illegal acts. If you don't like a law, work to change it.
The problem with these laws, is they are essentially criminalizing everything. Its not that easy to say "Well, you uploaded X, X is copyrighted", no, the laws have gone to such extremes that if there is simply background music, or someone is lip syncing a certain song, it can be taken down. This isn't just about uploading Hannah_Montana_Song.mp3.
How do we change them? The entirety of the internet has been protesting against the DMCA since day one, yet I don't see a movement to change it. Heck, there have been many, many, many, letters sent to congressmen, and they don't do anything. Its not easy to change a law when those supporting the laws have million dollar worth of lobbyists.
Support alternatives to infringing activities. I don't like the music industry any more than most people here, and I like to support independent artists in any way I can. I use Linux on all my desktops and servers because I (a) it works well for me, and (2) I don't enjoy feeding Microsoft more money.
Sure, the example of using Linux works because MS is basically dependent on piracy to entrench Windows users in poorer countries. But for independent artists it just doesn't work. What happens is RIAA sees a drop of 10% in CD sales, now, having a basic monopoly on CDs have made them not think logically. They see the 10% of CDs not just as 10% that has gone to non-RIAA labels, or has gone to purchasing other things that aren't music, but rather because CD sales have dropped 10% that must be piracy!!! So because they think that they manage to convince a blind congress to passing more RIAA friendly bills and increasing DRM.
stay the f*** home from work/school when you are sick, that would help
If only it were that easy. Even when I'm ill with things that make me unable to work (such as vomiting every half hour) employers tend to be unsympathetic, even more so when its something where you feel miserable and are sick with something contagious (such as normal influenza), making staying at home little more than a dream. Schools aren't much better and sometimes much worse. For example, school nurses usually have a set fever number where they will not send kids home if they don't reach it (such as 100 degrees) and so even when you are visibly sick, feeling miserable but yet can't hit the magical 100 degree fever, you are stuck in school transmitting whatever you have. And most parents send students to school even with high fevers, when kids are visibly sick, and even when they are vomiting.
Um, honestly the earth isn't overpopulated in the least and can easily handle a few billion more. Then there is declining birthrates in most of the developed world, so a pandemic really isn't necessary to cut down on the population of the world.
There is the language barrier. While I do know some Spanish, I'm not going to import a Spanish game to save a few dollars. Similarly with Japanese games. Yes, I do own a few Japanese games, but these are games you can only get in Japan because the game's publisher decided not to sell it in the USA. I would much rather have the game in a language that I understand, but when the only way to get it is in a different language, well, you just do what you can. But seriously, no one (save for the minority that speaks Spanish more fluently than English), is going to buy a Spanish game (in the USA) to save a few bucks.
The problem is, this will end up being universal. Just think about all of the crappy services that governments provide like mail delivery. Here in the USA, Fed-Ex, UPS and DHL all provide a much better experience then using the USPS, but not by much. How much more will ISPs fail to innovate because they only now have a niche market? Whenever the widest used alternative is crappy, you only have to beat it by a bit to appear "competitive" and when the crappy service is government run, you can bet it will be crappy for its lifetime.
Technology changes things. Back before electronic attendance, and electronic grades, a teacher would be very suspicious if something didn't check out in their records. Today, most teachers believe that the technology is always right, even when it contradicts paper gradebooks. Common sense gets thrown out of the window whenever you have a bunch of technology illiterate people together with technology.
Any manned government mission. There is no doubt that Virgin Galactic and other similar companies will start doing things reminiscent of the golden days of NASA as soon as they can produce a few flyable spacecraft. It is rare to have government-based research that does anything that starts the flame for a better, cheaper, more effective version by a few competing private firms.
So don't use GNOME. The nice thing about Linux is, you have choice in your GUI. In Windows you don't, in OS X you don't, in Linux you do. Don't like GNOME? Use KDE, XFCE, IceWM, Fvwm, heck use obscure ones like Ion, or Afterstep. You are bound to find a WM that fits your needs or can be customized to fit your needs.
I think that's a pipe dream which doesn't take human nature ("why pay when I can take it for free?") into account.
But a lot of money being made on copyright with the exception of games is for business use or things that can never be emulated. For example, most bands make their money through live shows, no matter how advanced of video technology we get, you can never really successfully recreate the atmosphere of a concert. Similarly, if movie theaters could provide a great experience many people would go there rather then at home, but sadly the ordinary movie theater experience has technical glitches, loud children, overpriced (crappy) food and drinks, and AV equipment that wasn't that great. Its no wonder people would rather torrent movies then watch them in the theaters. Books similarly cannot be faithfully replicated (e-readers are close, but I still find reading a book much more enjoyable) with current technology. Games also would be protected by use of specialty hardware, sure, you can't sue someone for cracking your console, but you can make your console hard to crack.
So the solution is to not criminalize personal filesharing for no commercial gain, decrease copyright to a sane 20 or less years, repeal things such as the DMCA and make a law with safe harbor provisions without the draconian things of the DMCA, make jailbreaking, breaking of DRM, etc. expressly legal so long as they do not make a profit. Make trackers and torrent sites expressly legal. Allow the remixing of such things for non-profit use. Then we will see progress.
Most OSS projects don't offer precompiled RPMs or DEBs. Its much easier to outsource it to the distro managers who can better add it into the next release. Think about it this way, you offer a DEB for Ubuntu, that DEB gets installed on a Debian based system that isn't Ubuntu... Unfortunately, it doesn't really resolve dependencies nicely and it requires either A) A newer version of a library B) Some obscure library that doesn't have an easy to use DEB thus killing the entire point C) Dependencies that depend on other dependencies that either have problem A or B.
Yes, but there could be a few problems with it.
A) The default skin is ugly for some WMs. While the default look of GNOME and KDE and even XFCE look good, other, lighter WMs look plain ugly when on their default themes.
B) Licensing issues with some custom themes. Some custom themes may be released under the GPL... But the artwork is proprietary or something so, while its no big deal for an individual, for a company looking to make a profit on them, this is a potential landmine.
C) People these days seem to think like this: XP like theme == Windows XP == familiar, while Grey and blue == Windows 9X == outdated, and Black or other dark colors == Vista == Unstable and new. So XP-like themes are going to get the most positive first looks for potential computer illiterate buyers. And really, its not that hard to change the theme to something more appealing if you know how to use Linux
But assuming you are transmitting all needed information over HTTPS, there really isn't that much that can be detected from the script kiddy with a packet sniffer.
I think though that those who use P2P simply to get free music even though there are loads of ways to get it legally would not buy the legal music. Its similar to if I walked into Wal-Mart and they had a 50 inch plasma on sale for $50, I would buy it. Was I in the market for a 50 inch plasma, no, but because it was so cheap and it would be a nice thing to have, I got it. There are a lot of artists that people tolerate, but don't really like, so they pirate the music. If the only way to get the music was to buy it, they wouldn't listen to the artist. Similar to if that 50 inch plasma cost $1300 I wouldn't have bought it.
Then we have the issues of "consumable" music. Music that is popular one day then the next becomes unlistenable to because its "old". These are the most heavily downloaded songs because they are "in fashion" for a brief period of time where everybody (everybody meaning the masses) then a few days later the song never gets brought up again, they are merely status symbols.
The lesser-known bands (and not just indie bands, but signed bands that just aren't that popular, at least in the country you live in) seem to have a more timeless quality to them that people listen to them more over time. While the latest song by Hannah Montana (or whatever kids are listening to today) might be almost unheard of 6 months from now, a lesser-known song will still seem as good because its not really "consumable".
There have been a lot of artists that I have supported that I wouldn't have bought if I hadn't listened to them through a copyright-infringing YouTube video. For example, Nightwish. They aren't a mainstream band really here in the US, you can buy some of their CDs at specialty stores, but if it wasn't for a YouTube video that technically violated copyright, I wouldn't have known they have existed. Since then, I have bought several of their CDs both physical and digital. While a lot of people look at P2P to solve all problems, YouTube and other streaming services actually help more.
iPods/iTunes are crippled by design. For example, I own an iPod touch, I bought it with the full knowledge that it wouldn't work with Linux (excluding getting iTunes to work with WINE or sudden improvements in various iPod libraries), not a problem, I had a laptop that had a Vista partition. So I installed iTunes, didn't really mind it (save for the fact it enjoyed sucking up system resources like crazy), but then the laptop's HD managed to crash. I had a bunch of MP3s that I either ripped off of CDs or downloaded from other sites such as Amazon MP3 along with a handful of iTunes bought content such as apps and the odd song or two. So after I resized a partition on my desktop to put Windows XP on there and installed it, and then put on iTunes and after "authorizing" my account (DRM sucks) I thought I would be ready to sync music off there and with no problem get it all on the computer with no problem, after all none of the files (minus applications) were DRM-free. So I plugged in my iPod and transfered purchases off of it... and all the apps synced perfectly and so did the iTunes downloaded songs.... But the MP3s I had gotten elsewhere did not transfer! Now, assuming that the iPod worked about as well as the other 2 generic MP3 players I had, I didn't feel the need to back up my entire music collection, after all, it was all on my iPod (and it being new and using flash memory I didn't have to worry about a HD crash), yet it didn't retrieve my songs something that every, single, other MP3 play could! So after a forum post in the Apple support forums, someone gave me a link to an application that worked for it and so I didn't have to re-rip CDs, but this is an obvious, easy, fix for iTunes.
I didn't mind using iTunes except for that fact. Fix that clear limitation and all will be good, but its things like that, features that are so obvious to anyone who has ever had that problem that could be added.
Being a touch owner (and testing it on a friend's iPhone) I can assure you that it does not work on either the touch or the iPhone.
And if you actually read some of the articles or the comments. The "pirated" versions had no multiplayer mode! All the server issues was caused by a simple HTTP request of looking to see if there were updates or news something that just about every other game does. The only reason it caused a slow down is because they did not have a decent webserver running it because they were waiting for the real release. Heck, Tap Tap Revenge 2 for my iPod touch had the same issue when you downloaded it in the first week of its release, their webserver couldn't handle the traffic so online play wasn't possible.
Yah, the minimal cost of putting up a webserver that searches for updates.
Those who did not have a CD key (those who "pirated" the game) could not play online. They only pinged the server to look for news/updates. The only thing is, their server was not ready to deal with the people who connected before the official release. Saying that is losing them profits is similar to if a beta gets a lot of traffic and is hosted on crappy server that because some people couldn't access it because it was down due to traffic that because you went on there you are to blame if it doesn't catch on.
For anything online, that really isn't going to make people happy. For example, if person A is able to afford super-ninja-1337 weapons that are able to destroy any other player in one hit because person A happens to be rich in real-life currency, then everyone else is going to feel that the game is unbalanced.
Please Canada take a look at the USA and see how between software patents, the DMCA, and other draconian legislation, our tech sector has been quickly crumbling.
Well, what I was meaning was how lets say each state had ~2% of people who were libertarians and voted libertarian. That number would be too small to elect any representatives for the state, but there are still 2% of people who have no representation in congress. Whereas in Sweden there would be directly 2% of the parliament made up of libertarians.
Yes, rather than simply returning errors, this one shoots you whenever you make them.
Um, in most bookstores I have been to (including large chain stores like Barnes and Nobel), no one cares if you take a book from the shelf, sit down in one of the comfortable chairs and read as much of the book as you like. It is stealing whenever you take a book out of a bookstore without paying because the store lost a physical book that cost real money to print, etc. What "piracy" is doing is simply reading the book in the store, no loss of the book and someone is perfectly free to read the same book. Only, "piracy" is a bit less damaging because while a bookstore has a finite amount of a certain book, anything digital can make a copy in less than a second with no loss by either side. So not only are you reading a book, but hundreds to millions of others can read the book too.