It is NOT illegal to sell or distribute burgulary tools.
So, I'll start distributing my digital works on floppy disks with little keyed padlocks through a hole in the corner of the disk. The padlock must be removed before the disk can be placed in a floppy drive. An internal steel strip will make it likely that removing the lock by force will damage the disk and data. Then I will simply sell the keys.
This will constitute an 'effective access control mechanism'.
THEN it will be illegal to sell or distribute - or, I expect, manufacture - the burglary tools described above. Anyone who does can be prosecuted under the DMCA.
So - instead of building a suitecase nuke or a truck nuke, you build a freighter nuke. You can get to New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and less commonly targtted places like Boston and New Orleans.
With a bit more patience, you can get to Cleveland. Detroit, and Chicago.
As long as your nuke doesn't weigh more than a hundred tons or so, it should fit on the boat, likely in just one hold. The rest of the holds can carry real cargo, so you can make some money while you're at it. With a little creativity, you can likley assemble at sea. I doubt there are many low-level air patrols in the South Atlantic.
As long as people stop being open-source developers the moment they become parents, the whole open-source idea is going to have difficulty getting to be a fully mainstream idea.
This has been discussed on/. before, but open-source development tends to center around open-source developers' interests. Children are even more demanding than open-source projects, though, leaving little time for that coding. If you checked the stats from this survey, you will discover that over 75% of open-source developers don't get paid for their work. If they're OK with this, then fine - but it strongly suggests they are doing it on their own time. That time tends to get eaten up when there are children in the family.
It's too bad - I had high hopes for this survey when I noticed the title... "Who Is Doing It?"
I notice that they don't provide backward compatibility for the Gameboy Color infrared port. This is too bad, since with the infrared port and the new higher speed processor, it would be possible to consider a GBA Wallet cartridge, usable as a security token.
I here ya! It's a cold country, my home heating bill is up 128% since this time last year, I was laid off - and they think I'm buying few CDs because of Napster?
(The difference in the heating bill would cover about 5 *expensive* CDs a month!)
I hear auto sales are down, too. Maybe that's Napster's fault, too - all those people using the net instead of driving.
Any company that doesn't properly safeguard people's personal information will suffer the same fate as a bank that doesn't safeguard people's money. It will go out of business.
The problem starts with this analogy. Although this might be true of the company, it is NOT true about what is being safeguarded. The bank will only lose the money the gave them, while if the personal information is lost, it the same as if every company you gave it to lost it. By analogy, the bank would have to lose all of your money forever.
What MacNealy and lots of others don't want to address is the downside risk and mitigation. From my point of view, it isn't enough for the company to go out of business. I want my "released information" to be restored to "unreleased information". This is impossible. In some cases, no amount of money is going to make up for the loss.
If he wants to follow this line of reasoning, he should think about what regulations and standards he would require if he had to put all his money in one bank forever, so that if that bank lost your money, you would lose it all forever. This, of course, isn't a perfect analogy either, but it's going to help the thinking process along more than his analogy.
What control signals? The article indicates they are intended to be as autonomous as possible,
which may mean that a controller is only needed to change the priority of the targets in the list.
Depending on how they do this, Amtrak could be in trouble in Canada.
Most recently, in Lebron, the Supreme Court relied on the confluence of a number of factors to conclude that Amtrak, a federally chartered for-profit corporation, is "part of the government"{114} for "the purpose of individual rights guaranteed against the Government by the Constitution."
This would suggest that for tests outside of this area, Amtrak continues to be a private corporation, as the United States Congress stated it's intent to be.
Now - there are Amtrak trains that run in Canada. They pick up passengers, and (presumably) gather some personal information on them. The difference would be that federal Canadian legislation covers train transportation, and thus any personal information gathered will be protected by Canadian privacy legislation.
There is a nice article on this at http://law.miningco.com/newsissues/law/library/bri efs/ucanadaprivacy.htm, which quite correctly raises more questions than it answers. However - it seems possible that Amtrak is opening itself to legal liability by disclosing this information without a specific request from a law enforcement official (which should include a warrant).
And just to cover one item quickly - the Canadian legislation covers Canadians even outside of Canada. They don't lose the protection
when they leave the country.
This might explain a lot. The site has been taken out, so I can't read the details, but I kept wondering why this case wasn't taken on contingency if it was so great. If you have a really good case, you can often get a lawyer who will take the chance for a chunk of the proceeds.
But just because you have a good case doesn't mean you have a good change to get money! If the company is on the way out, you would only be getting in line to fight over the leftovers.
This also means, of course, that there is no longer anyone distributing his intellectual property, right?
By your standards, Harlan Ellison has earned the right to complain loud and long. He does make his work available in electronic form - go look under Harlan's section at fictionwise.com - located at http://www.fictionwise.com/mindwise/authors/30.htm.
Nothing there is over $2. You can buy individual stories, or load up on the whole Ellison bundle for under $10. There are ratings on the individual stories from other readers to help reduce the risk you take when you drop a dollar on a story.
There's lots of people here objecting, but it's quite possible that a 'blank media levy' works a lot better than trying to run the charges on the online end.
There's a great legal summary, which includes this quote from the Copyright Board:
Section 80 does not legalize (a) copies made for the use of someone other than the person making the copy; and (b) copies of anything else than sound recordings of musical works. It does legalize making a personal copy of a recording owned by someone else.
Yes, this means what you think it means! If someone loans you their CD, you can legally make your own personal copy on another CD!
There are exemptions for various institutional users, so musicians don't end up paying other musicians to record their own music.
And - interestingly - the U.S. could simply start charging, because the relevant piece of law simply says 'digital audio recording medium'. That means that hard drives could qualify today. The levy would be extremely low, I expect, because there is a lot of evidence that a small fraction of data on hard drives is music - mostly it's some bloated OS code!
At the current levy of CAD $0.21, I can burn a CD-R with audio tracks at a typical rate of $0.02 per track. There isn't a payment system on the planet that can afford to charge that and not eat it all up in processing!
Finally - it's not a tax. Nobody is taxing free speech. It's a levy. The difference matters. Beyond that, though, new musicians likely have a greater chance of reaching audiences through this mechanism than through lots of the traditional mechanisms - they have greater access to the mechanisms of publishing than if everyone was paying for each individual transfer and copy.
It's times like this that I think people in the U.S. do themselves a disservice. It seems like they only want those mechanisms that provide a benefit to all by providing the benefit to each individual. If the mechanism more directly benefits 'all' and people can't see their individual benefit, they throw out the whole thing as unworkable.
The problem you'll run into is that nobody wants energy to be a perfect free market. Doing that would require accepting that someone is going to freeze to death in the dark (I'm in Canada) because the market didn't have enough supply to satisfy demand, and the poor frozen stiff got outbid.
It's ok to consider the electricity to run your computer and special high-power outdoor lights to be subject to a free market. But the electricity to provide basic lighting, keep your food cold and then cook it, and the natural gas to keep your dwelling warm enough to avoid freezing you? All of these may be wished by the majority to be an essential service - one that should be priced affordably, not efficiently.
Of course, the electrons don't actually care, which makes it difficult to separate the two types of economic structures.
So - what do you do?
P.S. Is this the same NZ that dropped Auckland's central into a blackout for several weeks when all the supply cables failed? Is this an acceptable consequence of truly unregulated market?
That's not the only limitation - there are lots of times I figure WAP would be just fine if I wasn't paying by the minute just to find out if the server is ever going to respond. I've been using WAP for about 18 months now, and this is still the biggest reason to mostly ignore it.
Also, IMHO, WAP is partly an answer to the wrong question. I have, and on occasion use, WAP features on my phone. But I also have, and use A LOT, the text messaging features. The big difference is, like DoCoMo, the 'always connected' effect. This is sufficiently useful that my cell phone usually is on 24 hours a day - a message beep means 'check it out, might be useful email'.
Between email notifications, voice mail notifications, earthquake and aurora notifications, the simple text messaging features are serving as a highly valuable communication centre. Add in 'home to cell forwarding', and the average low cost digital phone - with just a few hundred bps of permanent bandwidth - is a tremendously useful device. Maybe this isn't for everyone, but I've always figured that a wireless 300 bps permanent packet connection is way more useful than even 100 kbps of circuit-switched wireless 'dialup' bandwidth.
From a filesystem point of view, you're perfectly correct. If building an inefficient filesystem or network protocol was a chargeable offence, you'd have a case against mp3.com if they did it the hard way.
In fact, if my.mp3.com had actually used something like rsync instead of clearly just streaming a copy they already had, they might have actually had a solid defence against the RIAA. Also, in that case, they would have allowed customers to send up any CD at all. They needed to construct the system so that the lack of licenses was a feature, not a problem, and so that if two people send up the same file, the system automatically takes advantage of this, without the knowledge or intervention of the system owner on a file-by-file basis.
The problem is that all of this is irrelevant in this particular case. mp3.com's problem started when they bought thousands of CDs and made copies which they sent to other people without having purchased a license for that purpose.
The difference is entirely legal. It's so "legal" that mp3.com might have been better off to run it the inefficient way, and get their customers to complain to Congress about the legal silliness. This would have potentially forced the RIAA to defend the oddities of copyright to Congress. Congress certainly pays attention to the corporate elites, but they also pay attention to thousands of people complaining about legal silliness, because corporations don't vote!
There's just no way that I'm going to pay good money to listen to my own CDs on those terms.
But you're not listening to your own CDs - you're listening to my.mp3.com's CDs, and that makes all the difference. If MP3.COM had provided a solution that had every user rip and encode the tracks on their machine, and then send the resulting MP3 to a my.mp3.com locker, they wouldn't have been hammered in court.
Hunt down a provider that uses that method, and you'll have all the good features back again. Just to be safe, I'd prefer a service that lets me do some simple encryption before uploading, so that I can ensure they can't actually look at the content. They can ensure that only one stream is generated per locker at any given time. Then I can stream the results down to me, and listen almost anywhere.
Is there any way to do this securely w/o a physical record of the vote?
Maybe, but it's likely easier, less costly, and more transparent to go with the physical.
We've just finished a municipal election in Toronto, with what appears to be a reasonably successful machine counted system. The biggest different against Florida appears to be that your ballot is "machine checked" BEFORE YOU LEAVE! If you goofed and completed a ballot that is rejected, then they destroy your original and you vote again. The 'checking machine' apparently doesn't count the ballots, it just ensures that only legitimate ballots (letter or legal size) get into the ballot box. The ballots themselves are a simple mark-sense, where every candidate has a separated arrow next to their name, and you complete the arrow next to the candidate(s) you are voting for.
Having the ballot checked immediately seems to get around the worst difficulties in Florida. This is still a secret ballot, and it still leaves a paper trail for recounts. But, like edit checking the fields at entry time, it saves you a lot of errors at final processing time.
The problem, as the post-Napster environment will show, is that the only people left to sue are your preferred customers.
*This* is the bind - you don't need to protect the music from those who don't really care about the music, and you can't protect it from the people you want to please. And last time I checked, suing people doesn't usually make them happy.
They want the impossible technical solution because they see it being practically impossible to protect it legally.
What they've really got is that there will be no effective and usable protection either legally or technically.
Congratulations for giving this way more thought than most people.
I did especially note two points from your post:
You didn't actually find a definitive statement that what you wanted to do was either legal or illegal. (Right?)
You are reasonably certain you will attract the attention of the RIAA if you 'make any kind of revenue' - you don't actually have to do anything illegal (see the Rio court case).
This situation is tailor-made for the RIAA. Because there are no explicit statements covering your situation, you probably have to fall back on the de facto rules - who seems likely to sue you, essentially. You know you can't afford to challenge the RIAA, so you make a risk assessment; end result, you do nothing.
Legalities aside (a big thing to consider, I know), as long as the RIAA can outfund potential competitors in the legal arena, they will stay away from the marketplace in exactly the same way that you did.
The caution for the RIAA should be that they appear to be putting all their eggs in the legal basket. All it takes is one clear-cut case to lay down exactly what they rules really are (something we don't have at the moment), and competitors will know exactly where they can compete without worrying about legal concerns.
So - back to your example. If you had a clear cut court case that said 'it is OK for the CD owner or their designated agent to make a digital copy for the purposes of providing it to the CD owner' - would you reconsider the business?
Try a slight tweak and see what happens. As I understand it, I could set up a 'backup shop' where I sell blank CDs and allow an individual to bring in a CD and I make one copy. I then return both the original and the backup to them. AND - I charge them for the service.
As I understand it, it's legal for the individual to copy their own CD in this manner, and it is legal for them to pay for a service that acts to fulfill this function. In other words, I can make a profit from copying others work.
Now - if MP3.com actually had the users rip, encode, and send the files to mymp3, then this would be exactly the same situation as above.
This is the reason that MP3.com truly believed that they were not violating copyright. They simply took advantage of an industry-standard compression algorithm that 'compresses' a CD down to its identity. From the point of view of the end users, there is simply a performance difference between the 'perfect legal' way and the 'violates copyright' way of getting the CDs into MP3.com.
As noted earlier, try to get CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Sports Olympic coverage - that link is their planned 15-day television schedule (and it's 18 hours a day), so you could work out what to watch. They appear to have live coverage every night from 11:30PM to 8AM EDT - even the opening and closing ceremonies go out live around 4AM, plus the usual prime time coverage.
Usually, CBC is really good about posting stuff as-it-goes on the web site. So, if they already ran it live on TV at 4AM, my bet is that the results will be web-available. Their radio feeds (from several time zones) are RealAudio'd - too bad they don't do that to the television audio feed as well!
The point about them not being picked up in the States (particularly for season 3) was partly the cause of the improved storyline and plotting for season 3. The staff of the show had long felt that they were being unduly cramped by BS&P - Broadcast Standards & Practices - and felt they had a chance to cover more ground without that restriction.
A more important and less noticably point is that the Canadian episodes were 'censored down' for U.S. viewing. There was consistent pressure to control language and imagery, but there were also apparently post-production cuts. If you watched it in the U.S., missing bits may contribute to plot inconsistencies.
Although "YRO" may not be the original reason this item made it to/., it's a good thing to note here; if you are getting the originals on DVD, then there is one less snipping layer between you and the creators of the work...
I think they're close in concept, but not in execution. I would say, don't chuck a piece of audio in, make it a piece of graphic. We always think of graphics as high-bandwidth, but that's only compared to text. Put a few banner ads in there instead. Less revenue - yes. But way less intrusive, and you can easily get a nice little sponsor area of 32KB or 64KB - the equivalent of less than 5 seconds of audio. Efficient. Make the extraction an one-page (simple!) open standard. Forget about any encryption part, because Napster et al is effectively a broadcast model, where encryption doesn't work unless its also subscription. The catch is - you'll need a WinAmp plugin to see the 'ads'. But if there is useful stuff in there (like URLs to band sites) then you might readily choose to run the plugin. With a simple, open, extraction standard, there's no big impediment to most of the players - on any platform - adding it as an option. Finally - put it near the front, and it can be a type of digital signature. This makes it quick to find non-legit versions (meaning any files without the ads). Sources of legit files will tend to outweigh the bad sources - you could post a stripped version, but far more people are likely to post the good version. Some stripping will occur, but it isn't going to kill the business model. Last point - add some text-only stuff so that sponsors get a scrolling message even on the MP3 portables without big graphic capability. (Now I've just got to hunt down the URLs of the places where I've explained this idea before...)
1. Compress the entire CD to a single code, likely using asymmetric crypto and a hash function.
2. Send the compressed information to My.MP3.com
3. My.MP3.com decompresses the code back to the original CD. [1]
4. They compress the CD down to MP3 and store it for you to retrieve at a later date.
[1] This is a very special decompression technology. The first time it is asked to decompress a CD, it also needs the CD information. But, being an adaptive algorithm, all future attempts to decompress the same information run a lot faster.
What is key here is that you do NOT identify the CD and then attempt to authenticate the presence of the CD. You must provide the compressed information that you wish to store and hear later.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I'll start distributing my digital works on floppy disks with little keyed padlocks through a hole in the corner of the disk. The padlock must be removed before the disk can be placed in a floppy drive. An internal steel strip will make it likely that removing the lock by force will damage the disk and data. Then I will simply sell the keys.
This will constitute an 'effective access control mechanism'.
THEN it will be illegal to sell or distribute - or, I expect, manufacture - the burglary tools described above. Anyone who does can be prosecuted under the DMCA.
So - instead of building a suitecase nuke or a truck nuke, you build a freighter nuke. You can get to New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and less commonly targtted places like Boston and New Orleans.
With a bit more patience, you can get to Cleveland. Detroit, and Chicago.
As long as your nuke doesn't weigh more than a hundred tons or so, it should fit on the boat, likely in just one hold. The rest of the holds can carry real cargo, so you can make some money while you're at it. With a little creativity, you can likley assemble at sea. I doubt there are many low-level air patrols in the South Atlantic.
Which is...
As long as people stop being open-source developers the moment they become parents, the whole open-source idea is going to have difficulty getting to be a fully mainstream idea.
This has been discussed on /. before, but open-source development tends to center around open-source developers' interests. Children are even more demanding than open-source projects, though, leaving little time for that coding. If you checked the stats from this survey, you will discover that over 75% of open-source developers don't get paid for their work. If they're OK with this, then fine - but it strongly suggests they are doing it on their own time. That time tends to get eaten up when there are children in the family.
It's too bad - I had high hopes for this survey when I noticed the title ... "Who Is Doing It?"
I notice that they don't provide backward compatibility for the Gameboy Color infrared port. This is too bad, since with the infrared port and the new higher speed processor, it would be possible to consider a GBA Wallet cartridge, usable as a security token.
I here ya! It's a cold country, my home heating bill is up 128% since this time last year, I was laid off - and they think I'm buying few CDs because of Napster?
(The difference in the heating bill would cover about 5 *expensive* CDs a month!)
I hear auto sales are down, too. Maybe that's Napster's fault, too - all those people using the net instead of driving.
Any company that doesn't properly safeguard people's personal information will suffer the same fate as a bank that doesn't safeguard people's money. It will go out of business.
The problem starts with this analogy. Although this might be true of the company, it is NOT true about what is being safeguarded. The bank will only lose the money the gave them, while if the personal information is lost, it the same as if every company you gave it to lost it. By analogy, the bank would have to lose all of your money forever.
What MacNealy and lots of others don't want to address is the downside risk and mitigation. From my point of view, it isn't enough for the company to go out of business. I want my "released information" to be restored to "unreleased information". This is impossible. In some cases, no amount of money is going to make up for the loss.
If he wants to follow this line of reasoning, he should think about what regulations and standards he would require if he had to put all his money in one bank forever, so that if that bank lost your money, you would lose it all forever. This, of course, isn't a perfect analogy either, but it's going to help the thinking process along more than his analogy.
What control signals? The article indicates they are intended to be as autonomous as possible, which may mean that a controller is only needed to change the priority of the targets in the list.
Depending on how they do this, Amtrak could be in trouble in Canada.
This would suggest that for tests outside of this area, Amtrak continues to be a private corporation, as the United States Congress stated it's intent to be.
Now - there are Amtrak trains that run in Canada. They pick up passengers, and (presumably) gather some personal information on them. The difference would be that federal Canadian legislation covers train transportation, and thus any personal information gathered will be protected by Canadian privacy legislation.
There is a nice article on this at http://law.miningco.com/newsissues/law/library/bri efs/ucanadaprivacy.htm, which quite correctly raises more questions than it answers. However - it seems possible that Amtrak is opening itself to legal liability by disclosing this information without a specific request from a law enforcement official (which should include a warrant).
And just to cover one item quickly - the Canadian legislation covers Canadians even outside of Canada. They don't lose the protection when they leave the country.
This might explain a lot. The site has been taken out, so I can't read the details, but I kept wondering why this case wasn't taken on contingency if it was so great. If you have a really good case, you can often get a lawyer who will take the chance for a chunk of the proceeds.
But just because you have a good case doesn't mean you have a good change to get money! If the company is on the way out, you would only be getting in line to fight over the leftovers.
This also means, of course, that there is no longer anyone distributing his intellectual property, right?
By your standards, Harlan Ellison has earned the right to complain loud and long. He does make his work available in electronic form - go look under Harlan's section at fictionwise.com - located at http://www.fictionwise.com/mindwise/authors/30.htm .
Nothing there is over $2. You can buy individual stories, or load up on the whole Ellison bundle for under $10. There are ratings on the individual stories from other readers to help reduce the risk you take when you drop a dollar on a story.
There's lots of people here objecting, but it's quite possible that a 'blank media levy' works a lot better than trying to run the charges on the online end.
There's a great legal summary, which includes this quote from the Copyright Board:
Yes, this means what you think it means! If someone loans you their CD, you can legally make your own personal copy on another CD!There are exemptions for various institutional users, so musicians don't end up paying other musicians to record their own music.
And - interestingly - the U.S. could simply start charging, because the relevant piece of law simply says 'digital audio recording medium'. That means that hard drives could qualify today. The levy would be extremely low, I expect, because there is a lot of evidence that a small fraction of data on hard drives is music - mostly it's some bloated OS code!
At the current levy of CAD $0.21, I can burn a CD-R with audio tracks at a typical rate of $0.02 per track. There isn't a payment system on the planet that can afford to charge that and not eat it all up in processing!
Finally - it's not a tax. Nobody is taxing free speech. It's a levy. The difference matters. Beyond that, though, new musicians likely have a greater chance of reaching audiences through this mechanism than through lots of the traditional mechanisms - they have greater access to the mechanisms of publishing than if everyone was paying for each individual transfer and copy.
It's times like this that I think people in the U.S. do themselves a disservice. It seems like they only want those mechanisms that provide a benefit to all by providing the benefit to each individual. If the mechanism more directly benefits 'all' and people can't see their individual benefit, they throw out the whole thing as unworkable.
The problem you'll run into is that nobody wants energy to be a perfect free market. Doing that would require accepting that someone is going to freeze to death in the dark (I'm in Canada) because the market didn't have enough supply to satisfy demand, and the poor frozen stiff got outbid.
It's ok to consider the electricity to run your computer and special high-power outdoor lights to be subject to a free market. But the electricity to provide basic lighting, keep your food cold and then cook it, and the natural gas to keep your dwelling warm enough to avoid freezing you? All of these may be wished by the majority to be an essential service - one that should be priced affordably, not efficiently.
Of course, the electrons don't actually care, which makes it difficult to separate the two types of economic structures.
So - what do you do?
P.S. Is this the same NZ that dropped Auckland's central into a blackout for several weeks when all the supply cables failed? Is this an acceptable consequence of truly unregulated market?
That's not the only limitation - there are lots of times I figure WAP would be just fine if I wasn't paying by the minute just to find out if the server is ever going to respond. I've been using WAP for about 18 months now, and this is still the biggest reason to mostly ignore it.
Also, IMHO, WAP is partly an answer to the wrong question. I have, and on occasion use, WAP features on my phone. But I also have, and use A LOT, the text messaging features. The big difference is, like DoCoMo, the 'always connected' effect. This is sufficiently useful that my cell phone usually is on 24 hours a day - a message beep means 'check it out, might be useful email'.
Between email notifications, voice mail notifications, earthquake and aurora notifications, the simple text messaging features are serving as a highly valuable communication centre. Add in 'home to cell forwarding', and the average low cost digital phone - with just a few hundred bps of permanent bandwidth - is a tremendously useful device. Maybe this isn't for everyone, but I've always figured that a wireless 300 bps permanent packet connection is way more useful than even 100 kbps of circuit-switched wireless 'dialup' bandwidth.
From a filesystem point of view, you're perfectly correct. If building an inefficient filesystem or network protocol was a chargeable offence, you'd have a case against mp3.com if they did it the hard way.
In fact, if my.mp3.com had actually used something like rsync instead of clearly just streaming a copy they already had, they might have actually had a solid defence against the RIAA. Also, in that case, they would have allowed customers to send up any CD at all. They needed to construct the system so that the lack of licenses was a feature, not a problem, and so that if two people send up the same file, the system automatically takes advantage of this, without the knowledge or intervention of the system owner on a file-by-file basis.
The problem is that all of this is irrelevant in this particular case. mp3.com's problem started when they bought thousands of CDs and made copies which they sent to other people without having purchased a license for that purpose.
The difference is entirely legal. It's so "legal" that mp3.com might have been better off to run it the inefficient way, and get their customers to complain to Congress about the legal silliness. This would have potentially forced the RIAA to defend the oddities of copyright to Congress. Congress certainly pays attention to the corporate elites, but they also pay attention to thousands of people complaining about legal silliness, because corporations don't vote!
There's just no way that I'm going to pay good money to listen to my own CDs on those terms.
But you're not listening to your own CDs - you're listening to my.mp3.com's CDs, and that makes all the difference. If MP3.COM had provided a solution that had every user rip and encode the tracks on their machine, and then send the resulting MP3 to a my.mp3.com locker, they wouldn't have been hammered in court.
Hunt down a provider that uses that method, and you'll have all the good features back again. Just to be safe, I'd prefer a service that lets me do some simple encryption before uploading, so that I can ensure they can't actually look at the content. They can ensure that only one stream is generated per locker at any given time. Then I can stream the results down to me, and listen almost anywhere.
Is there any way to do this securely w/o a physical record of the vote?
Maybe, but it's likely easier, less costly, and more transparent to go with the physical.
We've just finished a municipal election in Toronto, with what appears to be a reasonably successful machine counted system. The biggest different against Florida appears to be that your ballot is "machine checked" BEFORE YOU LEAVE! If you goofed and completed a ballot that is rejected, then they destroy your original and you vote again. The 'checking machine' apparently doesn't count the ballots, it just ensures that only legitimate ballots (letter or legal size) get into the ballot box. The ballots themselves are a simple mark-sense, where every candidate has a separated arrow next to their name, and you complete the arrow next to the candidate(s) you are voting for.
Having the ballot checked immediately seems to get around the worst difficulties in Florida. This is still a secret ballot, and it still leaves a paper trail for recounts. But, like edit checking the fields at entry time, it saves you a lot of errors at final processing time.
Yep - this is exactly right.
The problem, as the post-Napster environment will show, is that the only people left to sue are your preferred customers.
*This* is the bind - you don't need to protect the music from those who don't really care about the music, and you can't protect it from the people you want to please. And last time I checked, suing people doesn't usually make them happy.
They want the impossible technical solution because they see it being practically impossible to protect it legally.
What they've really got is that there will be no effective and usable protection either legally or technically.
Press release type details from AmExp ayments.asp
http://home3.americanexpress.com/corp/latestnews/
Congratulations for giving this way more thought than most people.
I did especially note two points from your post:
This situation is tailor-made for the RIAA. Because there are no explicit statements covering your situation, you probably have to fall back on the de facto rules - who seems likely to sue you, essentially. You know you can't afford to challenge the RIAA, so you make a risk assessment; end result, you do nothing.
Legalities aside (a big thing to consider, I know), as long as the RIAA can outfund potential competitors in the legal arena, they will stay away from the marketplace in exactly the same way that you did.
The caution for the RIAA should be that they appear to be putting all their eggs in the legal basket. All it takes is one clear-cut case to lay down exactly what they rules really are (something we don't have at the moment), and competitors will know exactly where they can compete without worrying about legal concerns.
So - back to your example. If you had a clear cut court case that said 'it is OK for the CD owner or their designated agent to make a digital copy for the purposes of providing it to the CD owner' - would you reconsider the business?
Try a slight tweak and see what happens. As I understand it, I could set up a 'backup shop' where I sell blank CDs and allow an individual to bring in a CD and I make one copy. I then return both the original and the backup to them. AND - I charge them for the service.
As I understand it, it's legal for the individual to copy their own CD in this manner, and it is legal for them to pay for a service that acts to fulfill this function. In other words, I can make a profit from copying others work.
Now - if MP3.com actually had the users rip, encode, and send the files to mymp3, then this would be exactly the same situation as above.
This is the reason that MP3.com truly believed that they were not violating copyright. They simply took advantage of an industry-standard compression algorithm that 'compresses' a CD down to its identity. From the point of view of the end users, there is simply a performance difference between the 'perfect legal' way and the 'violates copyright' way of getting the CDs into MP3.com.
As noted earlier, try to get CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Sports Olympic coverage - that link is their planned 15-day television schedule (and it's 18 hours a day), so you could work out what to watch. They appear to have live coverage every night from 11:30PM to 8AM EDT - even the opening and closing ceremonies go out live around 4AM, plus the usual prime time coverage.
Usually, CBC is really good about posting stuff as-it-goes on the web site. So, if they already ran it live on TV at 4AM, my bet is that the results will be web-available. Their radio feeds (from several time zones) are RealAudio'd - too bad they don't do that to the television audio feed as well!
The point about them not being picked up in the States (particularly for season 3) was partly the cause of the improved storyline and plotting for season 3. The staff of the show had long felt that they were being unduly cramped by BS&P - Broadcast Standards & Practices - and felt they had a chance to cover more ground without that restriction.
Some specific examples come to mind - the "BS&P Approved liferaft", and Dot's monobreast (search on 'monobreast' inside the article).
A more important and less noticably point is that the Canadian episodes were 'censored down' for U.S. viewing. There was consistent pressure to control language and imagery, but there were also apparently post-production cuts. If you watched it in the U.S., missing bits may contribute to plot inconsistencies.
Although "YRO" may not be the original reason this item made it to /., it's a good thing to note here; if you are getting the originals on DVD, then there is one less snipping layer between you and the creators of the work...
Let's see ... (calculate) ... wow, that's nearly an entire week of MP3 files, 24 hours a day!
I think they're close in concept, but not in execution. I would say, don't chuck a piece of audio in, make it a piece of graphic. We always think of graphics as high-bandwidth, but that's only compared to text. Put a few banner ads in there instead. Less revenue - yes. But way less intrusive, and you can easily get a nice little sponsor area of 32KB or 64KB - the equivalent of less than 5 seconds of audio. Efficient. Make the extraction an one-page (simple!) open standard. Forget about any encryption part, because Napster et al is effectively a broadcast model, where encryption doesn't work unless its also subscription. The catch is - you'll need a WinAmp plugin to see the 'ads'. But if there is useful stuff in there (like URLs to band sites) then you might readily choose to run the plugin. With a simple, open, extraction standard, there's no big impediment to most of the players - on any platform - adding it as an option. Finally - put it near the front, and it can be a type of digital signature. This makes it quick to find non-legit versions (meaning any files without the ads). Sources of legit files will tend to outweigh the bad sources - you could post a stripped version, but far more people are likely to post the good version. Some stripping will occur, but it isn't going to kill the business model. Last point - add some text-only stuff so that sponsors get a scrolling message even on the MP3 portables without big graphic capability. (Now I've just got to hunt down the URLs of the places where I've explained this idea before...)
So, would this get around the problem?
1. Compress the entire CD to a single code, likely using asymmetric crypto and a hash function.
2. Send the compressed information to My.MP3.com
3. My.MP3.com decompresses the code back to the original CD. [1]
4. They compress the CD down to MP3 and store it for you to retrieve at a later date.
[1] This is a very special decompression technology. The first time it is asked to decompress a CD, it also needs the CD information. But, being an adaptive algorithm, all future attempts to decompress the same information run a lot faster.
What is key here is that you do NOT identify the CD and then attempt to authenticate the presence of the CD. You must provide the compressed information that you wish to store and hear later.