What if Google is cooking the results algorithm to ensure a steady stream of income? "Your web page seems to be doing too good, let's bump you down a bit and sell you some extra ad space." Pretty convenient for Google don't you think?
Why don't you do a little research into the cost of recording equipment, even prosumer gear, instruments (mid-level guitars, bass guitars, drum kits, keyboards, etc), decent microphones, sound dampening material, cables, amps, effects processors, etc and tell me if you think that's "marginal". Then do the cost analysis of taking all this on the road day in and day out, taking into account the daily expenses of food and lodging, transportation costs (gas, maintenance, etc) and see how much you like the idea of making a living doing this, much less raising a family.
I'll only go for decriminalizing non-commercial copyright infringement if there is a mechanism in place to allow legal recourse to occur. Non-commercial infringement is not necessarily a lost sale but it is definitely not without its cost to the copyright holder. I don't mind the recommendation by U2's manager to cut off access to accounts who are found to be willfully infringing intellectual property rights. I also think courts, but only courts, should be used to grant rights holders access to logs to seek out those responsible for infringing intellectual property. To cut off this path to seek out legal recourse goes far beyond unreasonable because it not only takes away a copyright holders right to protect their intellectual property, it leaves them with NO legal solution to bring the infringer to trial. They would essentially no longer have ANY rights to protect their work.
It is not for me, however, to find a solution to your problem, you must develop a reasonable solution that satisfies ALL parties. So far all I hear coming from those who want copyright reform will basically make it impossible to determine non-commercial infringement even for the purposes of civil cases (apparently this is already happening in Europe).
Even if I gave you the ridiculous 5 year term (which isn't even the length of original copyright terms) people aren't illegally distributing music and that's five years old, they're illegally distributing stuff that's far more contemporary - movies that aren't even out in the theaters, TV shows from a coupe hours after they were aired (and which are available for free on the networks sites where the traffic for this stuff belongs), music and games that have just been released. How can you argue that copyright terms are too long when this is what makes up the bulk of the traffic on P2P and BitTorrent networks?
If you want rights revoked then frame the argument that way and work within the law until the law can be changed. So far no one has proven that the law is unreasonable or broken, they've merely pointed out that intellectual property cuts into their bank account. No one has been given any more rights, the terms have just been extended. Copyright holders have ALWAYS had the 5 basic rights of distribution, copying, public performance, public display, and making derivative works. Even the Sonny Bono Copyright extensions did not change this.
People like to harp on Disney for extending copyright to protect Mickey Mouse (which has no affect on the character as it's protected by trademark and will never fall in to public domain use), but I'd argue that they worked within the framework of copyright to create masterpieces of art and culture. People, for some odd reason, can't see this and even when it's pointed out they have no inclination to go out and do the same damn thing. The public domain is still out there, with the same ideas Disney used, ripe for the creative to pluck from. Until people do this and can still argue, with verifiable proof, that copyright is still hindering the flow of ideas then the law needs to be changed. Until then, anyone who argues for copyright reform is only doing so because they want the fruits of creative people's labors for free, damn the consequences to those industries which rely upon the protections provided by intellectual property.
"Copyright is not a natural right or a human right. It's a balance of interests, intended to better society as a whole, not to protect a business model. Especially if the business model involves record labels having the same relationship to their artists as a pimp has to a prostitute."
Or any other contract for that matter. Perhaps we should do away with contractual law as it's only a hindrance to people doing whatever they want to do anyway? If you, as a musician, want to retain sole distribution rights to your music then don't enter into a contract that gives this right away. if no label will sign you given this stipulation then perhaps you should either realize that to get something of value you need to offer something in value first or distribute your music on the internet. Everyone says it's teh next craze so you should be a zillionaire in no time with all these anecdotal asshats claing to give $5 here, $10 there to these mythical artists.
"Please explain how $0.99 per song is a reasonable price for a product who's marginal cost of production approaches zero."
The cost of production most certainly does not approach zero, it comes nowhere near when yo consider time, instruments, hardware, etc. required to produce an album. What I think you meant was the cost or reproduction approaches zero but you're wrong even there as bandwidth and internet connections do in deed cost money.
"The elephant in the room is, as the labels lose their stranglehold on music distribution, the price per track or price per album will inevitably decrease."
So, you're ok with revoking people's rights or just the ones you don't like others having?
"Y'know, when you increase the supply of something, the price falls?"
Only if demand also decreases in this case. If demand stays the same, it only means you make more in profits due to your infinite supply.
"Why has the cost of bandwidth, infrastructure, and technology in general plummeted while the price of SMS messages have risen so egregiously? How can carriers continue to justify the high cost of their apparent super-premium data transmission?"
Because people pay for it...by the millions (both numbers of people and total amount of cash). Where's the incentive to reduce the cost to the customer?
Every Apple store I've been into doesn't have boxes of many of their products lining the shelves. You have to ask someone to "place an order" so a runner can go in the back and get whatever it is you are buying. I might also add that the handhelds they use to place these orders runs Windows CE. Funny how the Apple store requires a Microsoft product to function properly. The point is, you won't likely see boxes of anything piled up at any Apple store because this is not how they promote their products and create that "Apple store ambience".
"She pointed out that it was an almost gratuitous manner in which they used curses and was probably unnecessary to tell the story. That could probably be arguable but she likened that swearing to people using the bathroom. Everyone does it but we don't see it in movies unless it's got an important plot point (see Pulp Fiction or Unforgiven)."
Isn't using that kind of language gratuitously helping sell the audience on the illusion that these actors are portraying real-life mobsters? Sanitizing their language makes the characters seem less believable thus making the its gratuitous nature necessary to the film's realism.
"If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta> element. Aaron gives more details on this in his article."
I realize that Slashdotters take not RTFA to a whole new art form but please tell me what is 'non-standard' about a <meta> tag? This is EXACTLY what the <meta> tag was designed for. So, once again, I ask what were those myriad of possibilities that were alluded to by the OP without resorting to breaking currently developed web sites?
"There are other ways MS could address this issue rather than continuing their embrace extend destroy strategies. There is no reason IE specific tags should be required to make a page display according to an international standard."
Please enlighten us as to these myriad possibilities hat you allude to. Keep in mind that you have to keep existing web sites from breaking.
I always thought Apple killing the Cube was a bad idea. I'd love to see a new Cube sized Mac that has the basic innards of a Mac Mini but that allows me to swap the hard drive and video card if I want. Oh, and give ma a wireless keyboard with the numeric keypad. What the hell were they thinking when they axed the keypad on their new wireless keyboards?
One could reasonably assume that Scrabulous is associated with Scrabble, perhaps an internet version of the game. Should they find Scrabulous lacking in anyway they could associate this poor quality with Scrabble as well, thus harming the trademark. The test isn't to set two boxes side by side and try to pick which one is the original, there are nuances that need to be considered and apparently you are either too stupid to do so or purposefully ignoring them which just makes you an ass.
I agree. I was responding to the "thought crime" title in the OP's post. It IS possible to be held responsible for merely contemplating the act of committing a crime, such as in the case of a conspiracy, without it being a "thought crime".
Ever hear of "conspiracy to [commit some crime]"? You can be held responsible for actions that would have led to a more serious crime. Just because no one downloads the files does not mean his intent was to illegally distribute intellectual property for which he did not have the rights to do so.
"b) The punishment matches the crime - If you share a electronic copy of a CD, the retail price is about $8-10, as determined by the market. That would be the maximum punishment. If this is someone who has never been convicted of sharing copyrighted materials, there would be no punishment for a "first offense"."
The penalty is not to cover the cost of the goods, it's to deter infringement. Beyond that, the cost of licensing intellectual property for the purposes of commercial use is A LOT more than the cost of procuring the goods for personal listening.
...and it's called diesel. However, we have politicians too stupid to see that diesel powered vehicles can get the gas mileage consumers demand while burning cleaner than gasoline combustion engines can like environmentalists want. Stupid states like California and Massachusetts outright ban these vehicles for new car sales. If diesel is so awful, I saw no evidence of that on a recent trip to Paris where diesel cars are everywhere. Diesel also offers a path to biodiesel through conversion kits which could ultimately smooth the transition to a renewable energy source that a)helps the U.S. economy and b)helps lower carbon emissions dramatically.
"And I'm pretty sure, they'll continue blocking port 80, etc."
I've been running my web server (IIS7 with DNS2GO) on ports 80, using 5150 as a automatic fall back should 80 be blocked. So far all my traffic has been going through 80 for quite some time now.
...the student was punished for failing to follow instructions, not for using Firefox. Whether the student was right or not about Firefox being a "better" browser, it appears that there were numerous requests to stop using it, period. Maybe the school had an IT policy in place that prohibits the use of any other browsers then the one provided. We aren't given enough information to come to this or any other conclusion, however, and given the hoax letter all we do know is the student was being an ass. He was instructed to do something and ignored those instructions.
With the rise of "internet justice" it is becoming increasingly more important to improve one's reading comprehension skills and actually note what's being said without interjecting your own biases into the issue. Far too many people read a summary in a blog, the headline of an article or just the first few sentences and are unable to make a reasonable assertion as evidenced by this incident. Too many people want to see Firefox become THE gold standard of web browsers and when they read that some random student is being denied the ability to use said browser, they fly off the handle regardless of having all the facts or not, regardless of understanding the actual complaint or not. if you're going to be a bunch of self-righteous pricks, at least be educated self-righteous pricks.
I want to replace webkit on OS X with Gecko. What do you think the odds are of me being able to do that? Same thing goes for IE. IE isn't just the web browser, it's the web browser controls used by the OS for things like Help and Windows Update. Windows Vista no longer requires IE the web browser to download updates but it does require IE the web browser components.
I know you're just trying to be snarky but your comment really highlights the problem with people wanting copyright reform, they simply do not understand copyright, or intellectual property for that matter, enough to comment on it at all. if you did you 'd know that you cannot copyright a name, you can only trademark them.
This all feeds back into Groklaw. We've seen here with SCO's apologists and elsewhere that there's a conspiracy theory out there that PJ doesn't exist, that Groklaw is in fact the PR wing of IBM's legal team.
And you of course know for a fact that PJ can't possibly have gotten things wrong. If you believe Kimball then paralegals are not trustworthy, or at least not as trustworthy as actual lawyers so if you believe PJ then you have to give SCO's paralegals the same consideration. If you believe Kimball then you must believe that paralegals, including PJ, clearly don't fully understand legal proceedings and cannot be as believable as lawyers.
Who can read the mind of a judge? If it isn't in the ruling, then we'll never know, unless he chooses to discuss it, which is extremely unlikely.
Apparently you did not RTFA. What am I saying, this is Slashdot, of course you didn't RTFA. The judge's decision is reading his mind as he clearly states why he did what he did. If he meant something else then perhaps he should have written the decision better but the article doesn't try to read his mind, the author picks apart the decision itself.
Yeah, because Sony isn't encouraging Blu-Ray exclusives. I sure enjoy watching Ratatouille on my HD-DVD player. Oh, wait, what's that you say? I can't possibly be watching Ratatouille on my HD-DVD player because Disney, along with Sony Pictures Entertainment and MGM (20% of MGM's stake is owned by Sony), 20th Century Fox, and Lionsgate are exclusive distributors of their media on Blu-Ray. I'm sure MGM is doing it because they truly believe the format to be superior and not because Sony is pulling the purse strings.
Slashdot Mirror
What if Google is cooking the results algorithm to ensure a steady stream of income? "Your web page seems to be doing too good, let's bump you down a bit and sell you some extra ad space." Pretty convenient for Google don't you think?
Why don't you do a little research into the cost of recording equipment, even prosumer gear, instruments (mid-level guitars, bass guitars, drum kits, keyboards, etc), decent microphones, sound dampening material, cables, amps, effects processors, etc and tell me if you think that's "marginal". Then do the cost analysis of taking all this on the road day in and day out, taking into account the daily expenses of food and lodging, transportation costs (gas, maintenance, etc) and see how much you like the idea of making a living doing this, much less raising a family.
I'll only go for decriminalizing non-commercial copyright infringement if there is a mechanism in place to allow legal recourse to occur. Non-commercial infringement is not necessarily a lost sale but it is definitely not without its cost to the copyright holder. I don't mind the recommendation by U2's manager to cut off access to accounts who are found to be willfully infringing intellectual property rights. I also think courts, but only courts, should be used to grant rights holders access to logs to seek out those responsible for infringing intellectual property. To cut off this path to seek out legal recourse goes far beyond unreasonable because it not only takes away a copyright holders right to protect their intellectual property, it leaves them with NO legal solution to bring the infringer to trial. They would essentially no longer have ANY rights to protect their work.
It is not for me, however, to find a solution to your problem, you must develop a reasonable solution that satisfies ALL parties. So far all I hear coming from those who want copyright reform will basically make it impossible to determine non-commercial infringement even for the purposes of civil cases (apparently this is already happening in Europe).
Even if I gave you the ridiculous 5 year term (which isn't even the length of original copyright terms) people aren't illegally distributing music and that's five years old, they're illegally distributing stuff that's far more contemporary - movies that aren't even out in the theaters, TV shows from a coupe hours after they were aired (and which are available for free on the networks sites where the traffic for this stuff belongs), music and games that have just been released. How can you argue that copyright terms are too long when this is what makes up the bulk of the traffic on P2P and BitTorrent networks?
If you want rights revoked then frame the argument that way and work within the law until the law can be changed. So far no one has proven that the law is unreasonable or broken, they've merely pointed out that intellectual property cuts into their bank account. No one has been given any more rights, the terms have just been extended. Copyright holders have ALWAYS had the 5 basic rights of distribution, copying, public performance, public display, and making derivative works. Even the Sonny Bono Copyright extensions did not change this.
People like to harp on Disney for extending copyright to protect Mickey Mouse (which has no affect on the character as it's protected by trademark and will never fall in to public domain use), but I'd argue that they worked within the framework of copyright to create masterpieces of art and culture. People, for some odd reason, can't see this and even when it's pointed out they have no inclination to go out and do the same damn thing. The public domain is still out there, with the same ideas Disney used, ripe for the creative to pluck from. Until people do this and can still argue, with verifiable proof, that copyright is still hindering the flow of ideas then the law needs to be changed. Until then, anyone who argues for copyright reform is only doing so because they want the fruits of creative people's labors for free, damn the consequences to those industries which rely upon the protections provided by intellectual property.
"Copyright is not a natural right or a human right. It's a balance of interests, intended to better society as a whole, not to protect a business model. Especially if the business model involves record labels having the same relationship to their artists as a pimp has to a prostitute."
Or any other contract for that matter. Perhaps we should do away with contractual law as it's only a hindrance to people doing whatever they want to do anyway? If you, as a musician, want to retain sole distribution rights to your music then don't enter into a contract that gives this right away. if no label will sign you given this stipulation then perhaps you should either realize that to get something of value you need to offer something in value first or distribute your music on the internet. Everyone says it's teh next craze so you should be a zillionaire in no time with all these anecdotal asshats claing to give $5 here, $10 there to these mythical artists.
"Please explain how $0.99 per song is a reasonable price for a product who's marginal cost of production approaches zero."
The cost of production most certainly does not approach zero, it comes nowhere near when yo consider time, instruments, hardware, etc. required to produce an album. What I think you meant was the cost or reproduction approaches zero but you're wrong even there as bandwidth and internet connections do in deed cost money.
"The elephant in the room is, as the labels lose their stranglehold on music distribution, the price per track or price per album will inevitably decrease."
So, you're ok with revoking people's rights or just the ones you don't like others having?
"Y'know, when you increase the supply of something, the price falls?"
Only if demand also decreases in this case. If demand stays the same, it only means you make more in profits due to your infinite supply.
"Why has the cost of bandwidth, infrastructure, and technology in general plummeted while the price of SMS messages have risen so egregiously? How can carriers continue to justify the high cost of their apparent super-premium data transmission?"
Because people pay for it...by the millions (both numbers of people and total amount of cash). Where's the incentive to reduce the cost to the customer?
Every Apple store I've been into doesn't have boxes of many of their products lining the shelves. You have to ask someone to "place an order" so a runner can go in the back and get whatever it is you are buying. I might also add that the handhelds they use to place these orders runs Windows CE. Funny how the Apple store requires a Microsoft product to function properly. The point is, you won't likely see boxes of anything piled up at any Apple store because this is not how they promote their products and create that "Apple store ambience".
"She pointed out that it was an almost gratuitous manner in which they used curses and was probably unnecessary to tell the story. That could probably be arguable but she likened that swearing to people using the bathroom. Everyone does it but we don't see it in movies unless it's got an important plot point (see Pulp Fiction or Unforgiven)."
Isn't using that kind of language gratuitously helping sell the audience on the illusion that these actors are portraying real-life mobsters? Sanitizing their language makes the characters seem less believable thus making the its gratuitous nature necessary to the film's realism.
"If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta> element. Aaron gives more details on this in his article."
I realize that Slashdotters take not RTFA to a whole new art form but please tell me what is 'non-standard' about a <meta> tag? This is EXACTLY what the <meta> tag was designed for. So, once again, I ask what were those myriad of possibilities that were alluded to by the OP without resorting to breaking currently developed web sites?
"There are other ways MS could address this issue rather than continuing their embrace extend destroy strategies. There is no reason IE specific tags should be required to make a page display according to an international standard."
Please enlighten us as to these myriad possibilities hat you allude to. Keep in mind that you have to keep existing web sites from breaking.
I always thought Apple killing the Cube was a bad idea. I'd love to see a new Cube sized Mac that has the basic innards of a Mac Mini but that allows me to swap the hard drive and video card if I want. Oh, and give ma a wireless keyboard with the numeric keypad. What the hell were they thinking when they axed the keypad on their new wireless keyboards?
...Windows SideShow and get true instant on to files, e-mails, appointments, etc. on their PC.
One could reasonably assume that Scrabulous is associated with Scrabble, perhaps an internet version of the game. Should they find Scrabulous lacking in anyway they could associate this poor quality with Scrabble as well, thus harming the trademark. The test isn't to set two boxes side by side and try to pick which one is the original, there are nuances that need to be considered and apparently you are either too stupid to do so or purposefully ignoring them which just makes you an ass.
Unless you run your own mail server then there will always be a place that is open to this sort of "attack".
I agree. I was responding to the "thought crime" title in the OP's post. It IS possible to be held responsible for merely contemplating the act of committing a crime, such as in the case of a conspiracy, without it being a "thought crime".
Ever hear of "conspiracy to [commit some crime]"? You can be held responsible for actions that would have led to a more serious crime. Just because no one downloads the files does not mean his intent was to illegally distribute intellectual property for which he did not have the rights to do so.
"b) The punishment matches the crime - If you share a electronic copy of a CD, the retail price is about $8-10, as determined by the market. That would be the maximum punishment. If this is someone who has never been convicted of sharing copyrighted materials, there would be no punishment for a "first offense"."
The penalty is not to cover the cost of the goods, it's to deter infringement. Beyond that, the cost of licensing intellectual property for the purposes of commercial use is A LOT more than the cost of procuring the goods for personal listening.
...and it's called diesel. However, we have politicians too stupid to see that diesel powered vehicles can get the gas mileage consumers demand while burning cleaner than gasoline combustion engines can like environmentalists want. Stupid states like California and Massachusetts outright ban these vehicles for new car sales. If diesel is so awful, I saw no evidence of that on a recent trip to Paris where diesel cars are everywhere. Diesel also offers a path to biodiesel through conversion kits which could ultimately smooth the transition to a renewable energy source that a)helps the U.S. economy and b)helps lower carbon emissions dramatically.
"And I'm pretty sure, they'll continue blocking port 80, etc."
I've been running my web server (IIS7 with DNS2GO) on ports 80, using 5150 as a automatic fall back should 80 be blocked. So far all my traffic has been going through 80 for quite some time now.
...the student was punished for failing to follow instructions, not for using Firefox. Whether the student was right or not about Firefox being a "better" browser, it appears that there were numerous requests to stop using it, period. Maybe the school had an IT policy in place that prohibits the use of any other browsers then the one provided. We aren't given enough information to come to this or any other conclusion, however, and given the hoax letter all we do know is the student was being an ass. He was instructed to do something and ignored those instructions.
With the rise of "internet justice" it is becoming increasingly more important to improve one's reading comprehension skills and actually note what's being said without interjecting your own biases into the issue. Far too many people read a summary in a blog, the headline of an article or just the first few sentences and are unable to make a reasonable assertion as evidenced by this incident. Too many people want to see Firefox become THE gold standard of web browsers and when they read that some random student is being denied the ability to use said browser, they fly off the handle regardless of having all the facts or not, regardless of understanding the actual complaint or not. if you're going to be a bunch of self-righteous pricks, at least be educated self-righteous pricks.
I think you really need to change your domain name to vomit.com. It would be far more fitting given your web design skills.
I want to replace webkit on OS X with Gecko. What do you think the odds are of me being able to do that? Same thing goes for IE. IE isn't just the web browser, it's the web browser controls used by the OS for things like Help and Windows Update. Windows Vista no longer requires IE the web browser to download updates but it does require IE the web browser components.
I know you're just trying to be snarky but your comment really highlights the problem with people wanting copyright reform, they simply do not understand copyright, or intellectual property for that matter, enough to comment on it at all. if you did you 'd know that you cannot copyright a name, you can only trademark them.
This all feeds back into Groklaw. We've seen here with SCO's apologists and elsewhere that there's a conspiracy theory out there that PJ doesn't exist, that Groklaw is in fact the PR wing of IBM's legal team.
And you of course know for a fact that PJ can't possibly have gotten things wrong. If you believe Kimball then paralegals are not trustworthy, or at least not as trustworthy as actual lawyers so if you believe PJ then you have to give SCO's paralegals the same consideration. If you believe Kimball then you must believe that paralegals, including PJ, clearly don't fully understand legal proceedings and cannot be as believable as lawyers.
Who can read the mind of a judge? If it isn't in the ruling, then we'll never know, unless he chooses to discuss it, which is extremely unlikely.
Apparently you did not RTFA. What am I saying, this is Slashdot, of course you didn't RTFA. The judge's decision is reading his mind as he clearly states why he did what he did. If he meant something else then perhaps he should have written the decision better but the article doesn't try to read his mind, the author picks apart the decision itself.
Yeah, because Sony isn't encouraging Blu-Ray exclusives. I sure enjoy watching Ratatouille on my HD-DVD player. Oh, wait, what's that you say? I can't possibly be watching Ratatouille on my HD-DVD player because Disney, along with Sony Pictures Entertainment and MGM (20% of MGM's stake is owned by Sony), 20th Century Fox, and Lionsgate are exclusive distributors of their media on Blu-Ray. I'm sure MGM is doing it because they truly believe the format to be superior and not because Sony is pulling the purse strings.