Yep. MPAA, RIAA, DVD-CCA, AOL-TW, it's all really very simple. The more hoops people have to jump through, the more fear in having anything to do with a business, the less money they're willing to spend.
The media megacorps should heed the customer service of businesses such as MacDonalds - you go in, you buy a burger, you walk out. It's fast and easy:
No TOS to sign at the door or drivethrough.
No demand for your email address and demographic data before you can buy the burger.
No EULA to click before you unwrap the burger.
No DMCA that gets you sued/arrested if a friend lets you taste their burger or you decide to put your burger in the fridge to eat later.
No CCS that requires you to use only a licensed pair of hands to eat the burger.
No RPC scheme that insists you can only eat Region One burgers in America and Region Four burgers in Australia.
Etcetera.
And MacDonalds boasts more customers than any media corporation on the planet. Possibly, more than all of them. It's even used as a metric of a region's economic prosperity. Go figure.
Some http proxies (like the one my ISP uses) support a transparent(?) IP address header field, which relays the address of the machine utilising the proxy. Don't automatically assume that a proxy renders your address anonymous.
Jerry Pournelle's column:... "His wife and children, offered the chance to come to the U.S. to visit him, declined on the grounds that they did not want to come to such a fearfully unfree place as the United States of America."...
As many wonderful people and scenery as the USA has (hi Toofolk!), lately their government scares me too.
As it joins the United States in the list of corporate states, ah, "democratic" nations blatantly demonstrating the power they now wield.
Remember back during the Cold War, when Soviet Russia was the Great Enemy of Democracy and Freedom? Its government closely monitored all copying equipment, and you could go to prison (or worse) for owning an unlicensed photocopier - let alone actually using the thing.
I'm dumbfounded by the number of people posting to slashdot about how "they pirated/stole music so they should go to jai" - bloody hell, read the damn article, they're NOT being arrested for stealing books, they're being arrested for the equivalent of building a photocopier and letting anyone use it!
*That* is what you tell Joe American Sixpack. That the US government arrested a guy for making photocopier software, just like the Soviet Union used to do during the Cold War, because the corporations don't want anyone using anything without paying a corporation for the privilege.
(yeah, so not all corporations are like that - but the corporate profit mentality is one of the biggest field demonstrations of abuse-of-power::power that I've ever seen)
And now South Korea is following suit. Oh, and by the way - Happy Korean Liberation Day! *choke*
Nope, and the silliest thing about the whole "you can't remove gems" idea is that the Diablo 2 manual states the reason you can find these items with empty sockets lying around is because thieves stole and then dumped them after taking the gems out!
If Above.net wants to block an address for spam, that's their choice - but if they really want to stand up for what they believe in, and are going the extra step to kill associated websites, they should darn well SAY SO.
Route so we get 'Error - SPAM Not Found! Why? Click here. Who? Click here.' or at least *some* explanation when we try www.spammysite.com!
Blocking people who spam your network is a choice. Not telling your customers that you're blocking is pathetic (and possibly censorship and denial of service as well).
PS. There was a crack about Jamie automatically losing because of Godwin's Law. Nice try, no kudos. First, this isn't Usenet; second, Jamie was quoting someone else. However, it has demonstrated the codicil - intentionally trying to trigger GL will be unsuccessful.:)
6 or 290, it's still a farce. The govt's own statistics reckon about six million aussie adults used the internet May 1999 to May 2000. That's just adults, so you could add a few more for children, but anyway - even if each and every complaint of the 290 was by a different person, it means less than 0.0049% (yeah, that's two zeroes in there after the decimal point) of aussie users bothered to get off their bums and complain to the government about something they didn't like on the internet.
Now I know we aussies are a laid-back bunch, but two-and-a-half million dollars just for that?! Our road system can't cope with our population, the GST we had to have has ripped through our economy like a case of diarrhoea, retired federal pollies are snorting their 69% superannuation while joe average citizen gets 8% if he's lucky, (blah whinge grumble), and the government spends two-and-a-half million dollars so a committee can tell the police there are six naughty aussie sites they should, er, take a look at...
Ah, got a bit heated there. Either they're engaged in buck-passing or they're being pedants. Even if it's not the job, it comes with the job anyway, whether they like it or not.
It is not the job of the schools to teach morality.
BUT THEY ALREADY DO.
Haven't you noticed that schools have rules about cheating, about bullying, about being disruptive in a group, about doing what is expected of you, about playing fair in sport, about obeying your elders, etc, etc... all of these, both written and unwritten, plus the manner in which they are enforced (or not enforced), create a moral framework which is impressed upon students as How Life Works.
Anyone who believes schools don't help shape the morals of the young is totally ignorant of the reality. Any school official who claims "it is not the job of the schools to teach morality" is engaged in cowardly buck-passing to avoid the responsibility they know is implicit in the school system, no matter how much they'd like to wish it away.
what I thought was funny about First Contact was that the vulcans were totally technical about their prime directive just like the federation. ie. The human race had just gotten warp technology no longer than 20 minutes ago when the vulcans showed up. How exactly is that honouring the spirit of the prime directive. We were not a space faring race when the vulcans showed up, we had just been lucky enough to have a nut job who wanted to try out his experimental rocket around the same time the vulcans were in the neighbourhood.
The 'Prime Directive' was a Federation rule, and there was no Federation back then (dunno if the Vulcans had a similar rule).
Anyways, I'd rather the first aliens we meet be a bunch of peaceful logicians 20 minutes after we discovered warp, than their aggressively militant neighbours (the Klingons, the Romulans, the Gorn, etc) 20 months down the track just as we're getting cocky with our squeaky new tech.:)
Yawn. Yet another flatscreen tech that costs more than both a CRT of comparable size and a modestly decent computer system to go with that CRT.
I far prefer cheap and reliable over huge and fast. It's why I have a CRT for home despite the bulk. Cheap+reliable CRT = more money to spend on the rest of my machine. What's the point of 30" flatscreens if you're running them on a 30MHz machine?
Anyone mapped the price comparison between CRT and flatscreen for given sizes over time? Have a url for such?
So what happens in 'life plus 70 years' (or, if 'work for hire', 120 years) when the copyright on these protected files runs out? Not that it matters to most folks reading this. Chances ae you'll be dead. But anyway:
Are the corporations going to hand over the keys to the public so we can copy the music freely? Are they going to fulfill their side of the social contract that copyright is supposed to be - a limited period of monopoly in return for the public good? If their past exploits are any indication, they'll just keep buying politicans to extend the "limited" term of copyright in perpetuity, and if you choose to listen to the music of your ancient forebears you'll pay whatever they demand.
In Britain in 1534, as the printing press became more available, the Crown made it illegal for anyone to publish without a license. In 1557, the Crown granted a monopoly to the Stationers' Company - only one guild had sole right to publish books, by royal decree, in return for censoring any works the Crown disapproved of. It didn't matter if the authors had been dead for a thousand years, only the guild could publish their work. It didn't matter if the authors were alive and well either!
See any similarities in where we're heading? It's congress instead of royalty, and corporations instead of a guild, but only the names have changed.
I found it interesting to discover that the Stationers' Company still exists today, more than four hundred years since its incorporation. Maybe if I manage to live that long, I'll be able to listen to music created today without having to pay a corporation for the privilege. Oh, wait. I'll still need the decryption keys.
Fourth, Apple puts significant effort into GUI research and development. Read the Apple Human Interface Guidelines if you want an idea of how seriously they take the matter. To rip them off of all their hard, expensive work against their will is just plain wrong.
I just wish they'd paid attention to their own research and development when they dreamt up the GUI for Quicktime 4. Is it as tacky and awkward under the Mac OS as it is under the Windows OS?
but you're seriously comparing restraints on your ability to copy Apple's industrial designs to slavery?
Read abe's post again. It mentions Apple, but is not only about Apple. Abe is indeed making a serious comparison, and IMO it's one worthy of attention.
Yeah, so Foo copies Apple's designs, and gets in trouble - no biggie, right? But if Foo came up with those designs entirely by itself, Apple can still use the law to have Foo stomped on!
Quick recap of copyright origins: In 1557, Queen Mary I gave total control of printing and book sales to the Stationers Company. This guild bought works from writers, and had sole rights to print and sell them. They also had sole rights to the works of dead writers. In return, the guild refused to print anything the Crown disapproved of. Freedom of written speech in those days was only the 'freedom' to be tossed into the royal dungeon. It took another hundred and fifty years before this changed.
There was a bloody good reason why the original US copyright act of 1790 was set at twenty-eight years maximum, just like the British statute of 1710. And I do mean bloody. Slavery isn't limited to bodies, and the Founders of the US knew that; the newly-formed United States of America had just fought the War of Independence.
IP law doesn't give a damn about independent creativity. All that matters to IP law is who shouts "dibs" first. It was a good short-term solution, as kludges go, but if you can't recognise how it extrapolates over time you're in for a nasty surprise.
Hmmm. He's worth $72,273,900,000 right now, and his $100,000,000 is spread out over the next five years, so his yearly donation of $20,000,000 is worth a whopping 0.02767% of his net worth.
If you're going to argue with facts, at least do it properly! Say I own a house and land worth $100,000. Say I make $10,000 a year. I donate $2,000. I've only donated 2% of my wealth (net worth), but I've donated 20% of my income. Not that Gates is lacking in income either, but sheesh, you also neglect to include (and thus miss an opportunity to downplay) his total donations - try not to give your opponents free ammo for their counter-arguments!
First, the greatest obstacle to a perpetual term of copyright protection is the U.S. Constitution, which clearly precludes Congress from granting unlimited protection for copyrighted works.
Pardon my Australian, but *bullshit*. This is totally enenforceable so long as Congress can make the claim 'X plus another 20 years is still less than unlimited', where X is the current period and X plus 20 is being sought - which is exactly what they have done. *Repeatedly*.
Second, the emerging international standard, to which the bill purports to adhere, and the movement of international copyright law in general are not toward perpetual protection, but to a fixed term of protection based on the death of the author.
Ah, so the very Committee - which has just agreed to change the term of protection - claims that it is actually fixed. Damn, imagine if banks could do that with fixed interest loans. "Oh, did we say five percent? I'm sorry, we meant fifteen percent. Just change that little bit of the contract we signed with you."
Third, the principle behind the U.S. copyright term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains unchanged by the bill. The 20-year extension proposed by the bill merely modifies the length of protection in nominal terms to reflect the scientific and demographic changes that have rendered the life-plus-50 term insufficient to meet this aim.
Ah. I see. So as scientific progress continues to improve our lifespans, copyright should be extended similarly? Yeah, I can't wait to see all the millenia-old geezers hoarding their royalty cheques. NOT!
These legal tricks are total and utter bullshit, and it's a pity that the founders of the U.S. didn't state a specific number of years when they wrote the Constitution. At least then it'd require an Amendment to pass this crud. If the committee was truly concerned about an author's kids, they'd fix the term at twice the age of legal adulthood or something (36 years, in Australia): time enough for raising a family and seeing your kids become independant adults, even if you haven't started that family yet.
Finally, if anyone thinks I'm biased - heck yes. My mum's a successful author, but I don't want to bludge off her success for the rest of my life. I want to grow up to make my own contribution to the world!
Nonsense. In a high profile rape case in Australia (an elderly woman was raped and savagely bashed), the entire adult male population of the town where the crime occured volunteered to provide DNA samples. Except one... I believe he tried to flee, but was arrested and eventually convicted.
The rapist did not flee (from the sampling). He was indeed arrested and convicted.
The rape and bashing happened on New Years Day 1999, to a woman in her nineties (media sources vary on her exact age). Sixteen months later, the police still hadn't been able to solve the case. The town's male population (~600) was asked to volunteer DNA samples in a public call for help. About 420 were actually sampled, about 20 refused (media sources again vary on exact numbers). The rapist was not one of those who refused, and turned himself in to the police before his sample had even been tested.
Five months later all but one set of samples (the rapist's) were incinerated under independant witness.
(data compiled via www.google.com search, a suggested article is http://www.smh.com.au/news/0009/20/text/national16.html)
As a sidenote, I hope the UK's genetic database is nowhere near as prone to error and inaccuracy as the news reports I looked at for this post.
Might have commented a little too quickly - I guess it might be to stop the generic possibility of revenge. On the other hand, I would hope that there'd be some mechanism by which legal action could be taken against judges who authorise specious warrants.
So the police presented you with an unsigned search warrant, claiming it gave them the right to enter and search your premises? Surely that in itself is illegal?
Scenario: Wolfram goes out of business. I get a new computer. Even if I wanted to tell Wolfram that I've got a new computer so need a new key, I can't. Oops. Now what?
You can get pretty paranoid about these things, but IMHO smartcards are quite safe when you are trying to extract data from them. They can be easily destroyed, or overwritten - but that's no big deal: you just get a new one.
Person: "Hi, I lost my smartcard that identifies me, I'd like to get a new one."
Robot: "Of course, citizen. Please insert your card for verification purposes."
Person: "Uh oh..."
Seriously, with the troubles I had recently proving I am who I am with the "100 point primary and secondary ID system" that some banks, phone companies and other Big (and not so big) Business/Government organisations are using over here in Australia, I can see something this stupid happening. It's amazing the number of places that stare helplessly at when you tell them you don't have a driver's licence (which is Really Important in the aussie 100pt system).
Some nerfherding bureaucrats forgot there are not only people in the world who don't drive, some *can't* drive. One video store refused to let me become a member without a driver's license. Sheesh, I need to be able to drive to rent a $3 video? And when I went to buy a mobile phone, one company suggested that they'd accept a valid passport in lieu of the license. Hello? I want to buy a mobile phone, not leave the country! In the end I got my video and my phone from other companies.
I just hope ten years from now I can still do that.
Well, that's the risk one takes for speculating on a market. For you the risk didn't pay off, and $20K went down the drain. Or maybe not. Hopefully you actually bought music that you *enjoyed*, and got at least some benefit.
Though I am rather surprised that there's nobody out there who'd buy at least some of your CDs for 10% of their original value. Perhaps you need to keep looking. Six billion people on the planet, should be someone who likes what you bought.:)
Me, I buy music because I *like* it. I wish we could download any music we wanted, any piece of music that has ever been made, in glorious lossless original quality, and click a button to give the artist a dollar if we liked it. Click over more dollars if we like it a lot. And have the choice of not clicking if we don't like it. Same with books, same with video. There's nothing innately wrong with downloading music and text and video, after all. Internet or CD, tape or LP, it's all just a transportation method.
We just need to make sure we pay for what we get and we get what we pay for. That's the tricky part.
Re:Small towns and geographic monopoly
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MAPS Sued Again
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· Score: 1
"MAPS isn't forcing MAPS on ISPs, but often the only ISP whose modem is a local call in your town forces MAPS on its customers."
In which case your complaint should be with the ISP, not MAPS. The key word is "force". MAPS isn't applying force to ISPs.
If the people who ran your local TV station decided to broadcast PAL instead of NTSC, and your television only displayed NTSC signals, complaining to the people who created the PAL format would only annoy them, not do any good.
Currently, anyone can share song files on Napster, both artists and fans. And you can't enforce a royalty every time a song's downloaded, because there's no way to tell if the user has downloaded the song before and is just making 'fair use' of the service. And it should be kept that way (do you *want* some central database keeping tabs on when and what and how often you listen to music for your entire lifetime? I sure don't!)
But what you can have is a central, voluntary, verification/micropayment registry, that you can ask to identify the artist who created a song (various methods left as a thought exercise).
So if you like a song, you can click a button and it 'tips' the artist a dollar from your account (whether your main bank account, an escrow account, or whatever). Click as often as you like - or not at all if you don't like the song. Combined with word of mouth, good artists will get money, bad artists won't - which is what is supposed to happen now, but minus the excessive middlemen.
So how does Napster Inc make money out of this? Well, I can see various ways. They could take a percentage of the tip. They could manage the escrow micropayment accounts and run on the interest generated by the collective stored amount. They could offer banner advertising space at the top of their client program's interface to people. And so on.
Eventually, what we could end up with are napster-esque services for every conceivable artistic form of digital media, relying on the collective wealth and honesty of earth's five-billion-plus population to support those who create this art. And since, really, our society is built upon such mutual support, I'd think this isn't far-fetched at all.
Re:PGPing your email?
on
GPG vs. PGP?
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· Score: 1
Er, no. It means "This did come from your buddy Tom, or somebody else who has his key."
With a paper signature, you can try to determine if it was forged by examining the characteristics of the writing (if you're familiar with Tom's style). An electronic signature is identical whether Tom or somebody else typed it - no amount of studying the sans serif font (or whatever) will tell you who sent it.
Slashdot Mirror
The media megacorps should heed the customer service of businesses such as MacDonalds - you go in, you buy a burger, you walk out. It's fast and easy:
- No TOS to sign at the door or drivethrough.
- No demand for your email address and demographic data before you can buy the burger.
- No EULA to click before you unwrap the burger.
- No DMCA that gets you sued/arrested if a friend lets you taste their burger or you decide to put your burger in the fridge to eat later.
- No CCS that requires you to use only a licensed pair of hands to eat the burger.
- No RPC scheme that insists you can only eat Region One burgers in America and Region Four burgers in Australia.
Etcetera.And MacDonalds boasts more customers than any media corporation on the planet. Possibly, more than all of them. It's even used as a metric of a region's economic prosperity. Go figure.
Some http proxies (like the one my ISP uses) support a transparent(?) IP address header field, which relays the address of the machine utilising the proxy. Don't automatically assume that a proxy renders your address anonymous.
As many wonderful people and scenery as the USA has (hi Toofolk!), lately their government scares me too.
Remember back during the Cold War, when Soviet Russia was the Great Enemy of Democracy and Freedom? Its government closely monitored all copying equipment, and you could go to prison (or worse) for owning an unlicensed photocopier - let alone actually using the thing.
I'm dumbfounded by the number of people posting to slashdot about how "they pirated/stole music so they should go to jai" - bloody hell, read the damn article, they're NOT being arrested for stealing books, they're being arrested for the equivalent of building a photocopier and letting anyone use it!
*That* is what you tell Joe American Sixpack. That the US government arrested a guy for making photocopier software, just like the Soviet Union used to do during the Cold War, because the corporations don't want anyone using anything without paying a corporation for the privilege.
(yeah, so not all corporations are like that - but the corporate profit mentality is one of the biggest field demonstrations of abuse-of-power::power that I've ever seen)
And now South Korea is following suit. Oh, and by the way - Happy Korean Liberation Day! *choke*
Nope, and the silliest thing about the whole "you can't remove gems" idea is that the Diablo 2 manual states the reason you can find these items with empty sockets lying around is because thieves stole and then dumped them after taking the gems out!
Route so we get 'Error - SPAM Not Found! Why? Click here. Who? Click here.' or at least *some* explanation when we try www.spammysite.com!
Blocking people who spam your network is a choice. Not telling your customers that you're blocking is pathetic (and possibly censorship and denial of service as well).
PS. There was a crack about Jamie automatically losing because of Godwin's Law. Nice try, no kudos. First, this isn't Usenet; second, Jamie was quoting someone else. However, it has demonstrated the codicil - intentionally trying to trigger GL will be unsuccessful. :)
6 or 290, it's still a farce. The govt's own statistics reckon about six million aussie adults used the internet May 1999 to May 2000. That's just adults, so you could add a few more for children, but anyway - even if each and every complaint of the 290 was by a different person, it means less than 0.0049% (yeah, that's two zeroes in there after the decimal point) of aussie users bothered to get off their bums and complain to the government about something they didn't like on the internet.
Now I know we aussies are a laid-back bunch, but two-and-a-half million dollars just for that?! Our road system can't cope with our population, the GST we had to have has ripped through our economy like a case of diarrhoea, retired federal pollies are snorting their 69% superannuation while joe average citizen gets 8% if he's lucky, (blah whinge grumble), and the government spends two-and-a-half million dollars so a committee can tell the police there are six naughty aussie sites they should, er, take a look at...
Flaming expensive bunch of complaints.
Ah, got a bit heated there. Either they're engaged in buck-passing or they're being pedants. Even if it's not the job, it comes with the job anyway, whether they like it or not.
BUT THEY ALREADY DO.
Haven't you noticed that schools have rules about cheating, about bullying, about being disruptive in a group, about doing what is expected of you, about playing fair in sport, about obeying your elders, etc, etc... all of these, both written and unwritten, plus the manner in which they are enforced (or not enforced), create a moral framework which is impressed upon students as How Life Works.
Anyone who believes schools don't help shape the morals of the young is totally ignorant of the reality. Any school official who claims "it is not the job of the schools to teach morality" is engaged in cowardly buck-passing to avoid the responsibility they know is implicit in the school system, no matter how much they'd like to wish it away.
The 'Prime Directive' was a Federation rule, and there was no Federation back then (dunno if the Vulcans had a similar rule).
Anyways, I'd rather the first aliens we meet be a bunch of peaceful logicians 20 minutes after we discovered warp, than their aggressively militant neighbours (the Klingons, the Romulans, the Gorn, etc) 20 months down the track just as we're getting cocky with our squeaky new tech. :)
I far prefer cheap and reliable over huge and fast. It's why I have a CRT for home despite the bulk. Cheap+reliable CRT = more money to spend on the rest of my machine. What's the point of 30" flatscreens if you're running them on a 30MHz machine?
Anyone mapped the price comparison between CRT and flatscreen for given sizes over time? Have a url for such?
Are the corporations going to hand over the keys to the public so we can copy the music freely? Are they going to fulfill their side of the social contract that copyright is supposed to be - a limited period of monopoly in return for the public good? If their past exploits are any indication, they'll just keep buying politicans to extend the "limited" term of copyright in perpetuity, and if you choose to listen to the music of your ancient forebears you'll pay whatever they demand.
In Britain in 1534, as the printing press became more available, the Crown made it illegal for anyone to publish without a license. In 1557, the Crown granted a monopoly to the Stationers' Company - only one guild had sole right to publish books, by royal decree, in return for censoring any works the Crown disapproved of. It didn't matter if the authors had been dead for a thousand years, only the guild could publish their work. It didn't matter if the authors were alive and well either!
See any similarities in where we're heading? It's congress instead of royalty, and corporations instead of a guild, but only the names have changed.
I found it interesting to discover that the Stationers' Company still exists today, more than four hundred years since its incorporation. Maybe if I manage to live that long, I'll be able to listen to music created today without having to pay a corporation for the privilege. Oh, wait. I'll still need the decryption keys.
I just wish they'd paid attention to their own research and development when they dreamt up the GUI for Quicktime 4. Is it as tacky and awkward under the Mac OS as it is under the Windows OS?
Read abe's post again. It mentions Apple, but is not only about Apple. Abe is indeed making a serious comparison, and IMO it's one worthy of attention.
Yeah, so Foo copies Apple's designs, and gets in trouble - no biggie, right? But if Foo came up with those designs entirely by itself, Apple can still use the law to have Foo stomped on!
Quick recap of copyright origins: In 1557, Queen Mary I gave total control of printing and book sales to the Stationers Company. This guild bought works from writers, and had sole rights to print and sell them. They also had sole rights to the works of dead writers. In return, the guild refused to print anything the Crown disapproved of. Freedom of written speech in those days was only the 'freedom' to be tossed into the royal dungeon. It took another hundred and fifty years before this changed.
There was a bloody good reason why the original US copyright act of 1790 was set at twenty-eight years maximum, just like the British statute of 1710. And I do mean bloody. Slavery isn't limited to bodies, and the Founders of the US knew that; the newly-formed United States of America had just fought the War of Independence.
IP law doesn't give a damn about independent creativity. All that matters to IP law is who shouts "dibs" first. It was a good short-term solution, as kludges go, but if you can't recognise how it extrapolates over time you're in for a nasty surprise.
If you're going to argue with facts, at least do it properly! Say I own a house and land worth $100,000. Say I make $10,000 a year. I donate $2,000. I've only donated 2% of my wealth (net worth), but I've donated 20% of my income. Not that Gates is lacking in income either, but sheesh, you also neglect to include (and thus miss an opportunity to downplay) his total donations - try not to give your opponents free ammo for their counter-arguments!
First, the greatest obstacle to a perpetual term of copyright protection is the U.S. Constitution, which clearly precludes Congress from granting unlimited protection for copyrighted works.
Pardon my Australian, but *bullshit*. This is totally enenforceable so long as Congress can make the claim 'X plus another 20 years is still less than unlimited', where X is the current period and X plus 20 is being sought - which is exactly what they have done. *Repeatedly*.
Second, the emerging international standard, to which the bill purports to adhere, and the movement of international copyright law in general are not toward perpetual protection, but to a fixed term of protection based on the death of the author.
Ah, so the very Committee - which has just agreed to change the term of protection - claims that it is actually fixed. Damn, imagine if banks could do that with fixed interest loans. "Oh, did we say five percent? I'm sorry, we meant fifteen percent. Just change that little bit of the contract we signed with you."
Third, the principle behind the U.S. copyright term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains unchanged by the bill. The 20-year extension proposed by the bill merely modifies the length of protection in nominal terms to reflect the scientific and demographic changes that have rendered the life-plus-50 term insufficient to meet this aim.
Ah. I see. So as scientific progress continues to improve our lifespans, copyright should be extended similarly? Yeah, I can't wait to see all the millenia-old geezers hoarding their royalty cheques. NOT!
These legal tricks are total and utter bullshit, and it's a pity that the founders of the U.S. didn't state a specific number of years when they wrote the Constitution. At least then it'd require an Amendment to pass this crud. If the committee was truly concerned about an author's kids, they'd fix the term at twice the age of legal adulthood or something (36 years, in Australia): time enough for raising a family and seeing your kids become independant adults, even if you haven't started that family yet.
Finally, if anyone thinks I'm biased - heck yes. My mum's a successful author, but I don't want to bludge off her success for the rest of my life. I want to grow up to make my own contribution to the world!
The rapist did not flee (from the sampling). He was indeed arrested and convicted.
The rape and bashing happened on New Years Day 1999, to a woman in her nineties (media sources vary on her exact age). Sixteen months later, the police still hadn't been able to solve the case. The town's male population (~600) was asked to volunteer DNA samples in a public call for help. About 420 were actually sampled, about 20 refused (media sources again vary on exact numbers). The rapist was not one of those who refused, and turned himself in to the police before his sample had even been tested.
Five months later all but one set of samples (the rapist's) were incinerated under independant witness.
(data compiled via www.google.com search, a suggested article is http://www.smh.com.au/news/0009/20/text/national16 .html)
As a sidenote, I hope the UK's genetic database is nowhere near as prone to error and inaccuracy as the news reports I looked at for this post.
Might have commented a little too quickly - I guess it might be to stop the generic possibility of revenge. On the other hand, I would hope that there'd be some mechanism by which legal action could be taken against judges who authorise specious warrants.
So the police presented you with an unsigned search warrant, claiming it gave them the right to enter and search your premises? Surely that in itself is illegal?
Scenario: Wolfram goes out of business. I get a new computer. Even if I wanted to tell Wolfram that I've got a new computer so need a new key, I can't. Oops. Now what?
Robot: "Of course, citizen. Please insert your card for verification purposes."
Person: "Uh oh..."
Seriously, with the troubles I had recently proving I am who I am with the "100 point primary and secondary ID system" that some banks, phone companies and other Big (and not so big) Business/Government organisations are using over here in Australia, I can see something this stupid happening. It's amazing the number of places that stare helplessly at when you tell them you don't have a driver's licence (which is Really Important in the aussie 100pt system).
Some nerfherding bureaucrats forgot there are not only people in the world who don't drive, some *can't* drive. One video store refused to let me become a member without a driver's license. Sheesh, I need to be able to drive to rent a $3 video? And when I went to buy a mobile phone, one company suggested that they'd accept a valid passport in lieu of the license. Hello? I want to buy a mobile phone, not leave the country! In the end I got my video and my phone from other companies.
I just hope ten years from now I can still do that.
Well, that's the risk one takes for speculating on a market. For you the risk didn't pay off, and $20K went down the drain. Or maybe not. Hopefully you actually bought music that you *enjoyed*, and got at least some benefit.
:)
Though I am rather surprised that there's nobody out there who'd buy at least some of your CDs for 10% of their original value. Perhaps you need to keep looking. Six billion people on the planet, should be someone who likes what you bought.
Me, I buy music because I *like* it. I wish we could download any music we wanted, any piece of music that has ever been made, in glorious lossless original quality, and click a button to give the artist a dollar if we liked it. Click over more dollars if we like it a lot. And have the choice of not clicking if we don't like it. Same with books, same with video. There's nothing innately wrong with downloading music and text and video, after all. Internet or CD, tape or LP, it's all just a transportation method.
We just need to make sure we pay for what we get and we get what we pay for. That's the tricky part.
"MAPS isn't forcing MAPS on ISPs, but often the only ISP whose modem is a local call in your town forces MAPS on its customers."
In which case your complaint should be with the ISP, not MAPS. The key word is "force". MAPS isn't applying force to ISPs.
If the people who ran your local TV station decided to broadcast PAL instead of NTSC, and your television only displayed NTSC signals, complaining to the people who created the PAL format would only annoy them, not do any good.
Currently, anyone can share song files on Napster, both artists and fans. And you can't enforce a royalty every time a song's downloaded, because there's no way to tell if the user has downloaded the song before and is just making 'fair use' of the service. And it should be kept that way (do you *want* some central database keeping tabs on when and what and how often you listen to music for your entire lifetime? I sure don't!)
But what you can have is a central, voluntary, verification/micropayment registry, that you can ask to identify the artist who created a song (various methods left as a thought exercise).
So if you like a song, you can click a button and it 'tips' the artist a dollar from your account (whether your main bank account, an escrow account, or whatever). Click as often as you like - or not at all if you don't like the song. Combined with word of mouth, good artists will get money, bad artists won't - which is what is supposed to happen now, but minus the excessive middlemen.
So how does Napster Inc make money out of this? Well, I can see various ways. They could take a percentage of the tip. They could manage the escrow micropayment accounts and run on the interest generated by the collective stored amount. They could offer banner advertising space at the top of their client program's interface to people. And so on.
Eventually, what we could end up with are napster-esque services for every conceivable artistic form of digital media, relying on the collective wealth and honesty of earth's five-billion-plus population to support those who create this art. And since, really, our society is built upon such mutual support, I'd think this isn't far-fetched at all.
Er, no. It means "This did come from your buddy Tom, or somebody else who has his key." With a paper signature, you can try to determine if it was forged by examining the characteristics of the writing (if you're familiar with Tom's style). An electronic signature is identical whether Tom or somebody else typed it - no amount of studying the sans serif font (or whatever) will tell you who sent it.