"Creators of intellectual property deserve to be paid for their work."
What intellectual property do you mean? A trade secret? A trade marked logo? A patented way of combing your hair to cover the bald spot (no kidding, it *is* a USPTO patent)? Maybe music?
I guess you mean copyright. In that case, they do. However, the corporations that sell you the creators' work eat most of what you pay. In addition, I understand that it may take a long time for an artist to create a work, thus you want to guarantee that (s)he gets income after the work is released. Fair enough, you need some incentive to make the artist to create more work. But tell me, how exactly will the fact that whenever you say Mickey Mouse the till opens in a big Co help the corpse of Mr. Walter Disney to create more funny cartoons? What incentive can an artist get 95 years after his/her death?
Furthermore, why do you not pay a football or whatever else player? You can have videos of famous matches, great shots, big events. The players are the actors *as well as the authors* of what you see on the screen. Do you pay copyright fees for *them*? Nope. You pay for them to run around on the field. If they don't run any more, they don't get money. The copyright for a match is owned by whoever made/released the footage. They created nothing, they merely recorded it yet it is their property, after 95 years of *their* death. It is like a music band being paid as long as they play on stage. If they don't concert any more, that's it. If anyone listens to their stuff later, well, so what. They don't get money. What is the difference between watching a famous match and watching Mickey Mouse?
When a master chef creates a new delicious dish the consumption of named food can give you just as much pleasure as listening to a song. I am not necessarily referring to "Burger a la McDonald" here, but possibly something with a slightly higher culinary value. Anyway, that dish is just as much of a product of a mental process as a song. If you can have the ingredients you can reproduce it (just like if you have a blank CD you can reproduce a music one or if you can play or sing, you can reproduce it live) and if you want to give the recipe to your friend, nobody stops you writing it down and giving it to him. So why does not the chef get money every time anyone on Earth cooks that dish?
I am not advocating piracy. I do not download music or video either. (Except one MP3: I wanted a song and I was willing to buy the CD. Unfortunately, the guy who created the music (the artist) was long dead and the inheritor of the copyright decided that the song is not for consumption any more. No CD, full stop. Now, I've downloaded that one.)
I do not support piracy in general. However, I do not support the special status of a group of entertainers either. Most of what comes from Holywood or from the big music firms is entertainment, not art. I guess it would be hard to find deep artistic meaning in the Terminator or in Spice Girls. It is their job to entertain you and they should be duly compensated for it. Just like any other service provider. So why should you pay their (legal) heirs, who had nothing to do with the "artistic" process, for almost a century after their death? Do you pay the guy who designed your house? Do you pay the guy who designed your clothes? Can someone legally build a house that looks the same as yours or tailor clothes looking the same as yours? Sure he can. Yet, those designs are just as much of intellectual works as a Spice Girls song. In fact, a nice house design probably has a lot more artistic and intellectual value than the song. Yet you are not worried about the architect's income after his death.
I agree with you, entertainment should not be free. It is a service, like any other. It should also be treated as a service. If your stock broker gets you a very profitable portfolio, you pay him a fee. If he drops dead the next day and your stock keeps earning money for the rest of your life, you don't give a ho
> What we need to do is hit them with a class action lawsuit on > the grounds that region codes are artificially (and perhaps illegally) inflating the prices.
Duh, I wrote the same thing a week ago and I haven't scored anything! I need a lawyer, now!:-)
Anyway, class action by hackers is not good, IMHO. The media can twist it around and can paint a picture of the evil underground anarchist hackers wanting to kill honest and beloved corporations like Disney. Sidebars about family values, corporates helping to build a better future, little brainspills about inventions and protecting one's investment in research sprinkled with recitation of all computer crime ever commited could tune the public against the hacker community.
If, however, we could forget about the technical stuff for a while and campaign, using absolutely untechnical terms, to educate the public on the financial effect of zoning, it might help. If you tell people that they could buy a $25 disk for $15 by e-mail order from some other country but they can not play it because Holywood fatcats unlawfuly make their DVD players not to play those disks *then* you can think about a class action lawsuit, I think.
> Does Judge Lewis Kaplan think that some agency has rights to dictate > what code a well minded individual can write?
Well, it does not really matter what he believes. Law is not about justice, it is about money. As long as the individuals represent less money than the corportaion, the individuals, with all of their amandments and rights and rubbish like that are squashed. Law is a *business* which works for profit and not for ideas.
> If he does, then said agency can also dictate how one can > write books, make sculptures, build furnature, and bake cakes.
If your writing a book or baking a cake would challenge the monopoly of a multi-billion dollar industry and lessen their control over millions of people and thousands of manufacturers, then that agency will restrict your rights, confiscate your pen and oven and chisel, sue you and get you convicted in no time at all.
In this particular case, you are allowed to watch a DVD if you bought it in the porper zone (i.e. you paid the maximum you can predictably afford) and you play it on an authorised player, that is, you paid the license fee to the DVD consortium (the fee was originally paid by the player manufacturer but it was passed to you).
If you can play DVDs on Linux, on a zone-free drive, using free software, the DVD consortium would loose some of that second part of their income and would make manufacturers reluctant to pay the license fees when apparently one can make a player without paying a cent. In addition, circumvening the zone protection would allow an individual to pay less for a DVD by buying it from a zone other than his/her nominated one.
You said that you wrote some humour and we can have a laugh and stuff. I went there but there wasn't any humour only a precise, factual and descriptive report on the current state of affairs:-(
It's quite interesting that the MPAA is involved in this suit too - actually, the complaint itself can be read on *their* website and the article refers to "7 major movie studios". I think those guys in Holywood start to believe that it should be renamed Holywood D.C., capital of the World or something like that. Kocsonya s.k.
The media does not listen until you can provide something sensational that will fix Joe Sixpack in his chair during the commercial before the actual news article or make him read the frontpage before the sport one.
As long as the community tries to come up with technical terms, the greater public will not listen. Most people could not care less about whether you can watch a DVD with Linux or not. They will not understand the need for decoding to watch but not for copying a DVD and they don't care either. I believe that the non-technical community's perception is that a Norwegian hacker, who is a member of an underground cell tried to rip off Holywood and ruin the Great American Dream singlehandedly. Fortunately, the police managed to stop him in his evil doings before all Holywood studios were about to close for good.
Public listens to tales, not technical arguments. The more dramatic tales, the better. There's no drama in a crappy encryption scheme that was designed to generate extra profit by a bunch of cryptographically challenged engineer. Who cares ? On teh other hand, The Scandinavian Terminator Who Wants To Kill The Whole Movie Industry, now that's drama for you.
Public attention can be achieved when the public is explained that it was ripped off, media attention can be achieved by the above public going mad.
I'm probably dreaming but I would envision a campaing in which the "DVD consumer community" in the US (and maybe in Europe) is informed that they could mail-order the same film from any developing country half the price but they can't play it on their DVD player because the MPA made the US DVD players not to play the same movie if it was not sold in the US. If the fact that this is actually against the law is also published, with much emphasis being placed on the extra profit the movie industry makes, the dramatic explanation of designing technology to rip off customers would cause quite some stir. You can also get immigrant groups into the picture explaining them that although they have a DVD player in the US, they could not order (zone locked) films from their country of birth because it would not play on the zone-1 locked player.
After all that stir and public outrage there would be lawyers out there who would smell some money - a class action lawsuit might be in order. If zoning is indeed against the law and easily provable to unlawfully generate profit at the customers' cost, with defendants capable of paying billions in damages - well, I'm sure there would be cases. Now *that* would give as much media attention as it gets.
IANAL, so I might very well be off course. Maybe it's just a geekish wet dream, all those bad boys sweating in the courtroom and hackers grinning all around:-) Nevertheless, I do believe that technological explanations will not gain public sympathy, nor attention for that matter, regardless of the form. Tell them that the whole DeCSS lawsuit thing is to cover up that they are continually ripped off, then they'll listen.
I agree with the need of the webpage and the idea it showing the type of support the vendor provides. IMHO it should also contain a little educational corner to explain Linux users what the whole thing is about.
Recently someone on USENET started a petition for printer drivers for Linux (Winprinter stuff). Lots of commotion, much rejoycing. The scary thing was that very few people expressed that the petition should be for *documentation* and not (or not exclusively) for binary-only drivers.
I would not ask for source of a HW vendor's drivers as long as they publish the HW specs. If they have "10+ years of software development invested in these drivers", I understand that they don't want to publish their code. However, if they publish the HW specs there can be the usual open-source alternative. If their drivers are so much better than what the programmer community can crank up, so be it. If I need the extra edge I can decide to use their binary driver, they can even ask for money for it. If I'm happy with the open stuff, I use that one. If I use my own homemade OS, I can still use their HW because I have the specs.
That's my standpoint, of course. I do not consider myself as hardcode as RMS but current trends in Linux user circles seem to shift the emphasis from the "open" operating system to the "alternative to Windows" which is worrysome, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
"Creators of intellectual property deserve to be paid for their work."
What intellectual property do you mean? A trade secret? A trade marked logo? A patented way of combing your hair to cover the bald spot (no kidding, it *is* a USPTO patent)? Maybe music?
I guess you mean copyright. In that case, they do. However, the corporations that sell you the creators' work eat most of what you pay. In addition, I understand that it may take a long time for an artist to create a work, thus you want to guarantee that (s)he gets income after the work is released. Fair enough, you need some incentive to make the artist to create more work. But tell me, how exactly will the fact that whenever you say Mickey Mouse the till opens in a big Co help the corpse of Mr. Walter Disney to create more funny cartoons? What incentive can an artist get 95 years after his/her death?
Furthermore, why do you not pay a football or whatever else player? You can have videos of famous matches, great shots, big events. The players are the actors *as well as the authors* of what you see on the screen. Do you pay copyright fees for *them*? Nope. You pay for them to run around on the field. If they don't run any more, they don't get money.
The copyright for a match is owned by whoever made/released the footage. They created nothing, they merely recorded it yet it is their property, after 95 years of *their* death. It is like a music band being paid as long as they play on stage. If they don't concert any more, that's it. If anyone listens to their stuff later, well, so what. They don't get money.
What is the difference between watching a famous match and watching Mickey Mouse?
When a master chef creates a new delicious dish the consumption of named food can give you just as much pleasure as listening to a song. I am not necessarily referring to "Burger a la McDonald" here, but possibly something with a slightly higher culinary value. Anyway, that dish is just as much of a product of a mental process as a song. If you can have the ingredients you can reproduce it (just like if you have a blank CD you can reproduce a music one or if you can play or sing, you can reproduce it live) and if you want to give the recipe to your friend, nobody stops you writing it down and giving it to him. So why does not the chef get money every time anyone on Earth cooks that dish?
I am not advocating piracy. I do not download music or video either. (Except one MP3: I wanted a song and I was willing to buy the CD. Unfortunately, the guy who created the music (the artist) was long dead and the inheritor of the copyright decided that the song is not for consumption any more. No CD, full stop. Now, I've downloaded that one.)
I do not support piracy in general. However, I do not support the special status of a group of entertainers either. Most of what comes from Holywood or from the big music firms is entertainment, not art. I guess it would be hard to find deep artistic meaning in the Terminator or in Spice Girls. It is their job to entertain you and they should be duly compensated for it. Just like any other service provider. So why should you pay their (legal) heirs, who had nothing to do with the "artistic" process, for almost a century after their death? Do you pay the guy who designed your house? Do you pay the guy who designed your clothes? Can someone legally build a house that looks the same as yours or tailor clothes looking the same as yours? Sure he can. Yet, those designs are just as much of intellectual works as a Spice Girls song. In fact, a nice house design probably has a lot more artistic and intellectual value than the song. Yet you are not worried about the architect's income after his death.
I agree with you, entertainment should not be free. It is a service, like any other. It should also be treated as a service. If your stock broker gets you a very profitable portfolio, you pay him a fee. If he drops dead the next day and your stock keeps earning money for the rest of your life, you don't give a ho
because the server now responds with a 404. Zoltan
> What we need to do is hit them with a class action lawsuit on
:-)
> the grounds that region codes are artificially (and perhaps illegally) inflating the prices.
Duh, I wrote the same thing a week ago and I haven't scored anything! I need a lawyer, now!
Anyway, class action by hackers is not good, IMHO. The media can twist it around and can paint a picture of the evil underground anarchist hackers wanting to kill honest and beloved corporations like Disney. Sidebars about family values, corporates helping to build a better future, little brainspills about inventions and protecting one's investment in research sprinkled with recitation of all computer crime ever commited could tune the public against the hacker community.
If, however, we could forget about the technical stuff for a while and campaign, using absolutely untechnical terms, to educate the public on the financial effect of zoning, it might help. If you tell people that they could buy a $25 disk for $15 by e-mail order from some other country but they can not play it because Holywood fatcats unlawfuly make their DVD players not to play those disks *then* you can think about a class action lawsuit, I think.
Kocsonya s.k.
> Does Judge Lewis Kaplan think that some agency has rights to dictate
> what code a well minded individual can write?
Well, it does not really matter what he believes. Law is not about justice, it is about money. As long as the individuals represent less money than the corportaion, the individuals, with all of their amandments and rights and rubbish like that are squashed. Law is a *business* which works for profit and not for ideas.
> If he does, then said agency can also dictate how one can
> write books, make sculptures, build furnature, and bake cakes.
If your writing a book or baking a cake would challenge the monopoly of a multi-billion dollar industry and lessen their control over millions of people and thousands of manufacturers, then that agency will restrict your rights, confiscate your pen and oven and chisel, sue you and get you convicted in no time at all.
In this particular case, you are allowed to watch a DVD if you bought it in the porper zone (i.e. you paid the maximum you can predictably afford) and you play it on an authorised player, that is, you paid the license fee to the DVD consortium (the fee was originally paid by the player manufacturer but it was passed to you).
If you can play DVDs on Linux, on a zone-free drive, using free software, the DVD consortium would loose some of that second part of their income and would make manufacturers reluctant to pay the license fees when apparently one can make a player without paying a cent. In addition, circumvening the zone protection would allow an individual to pay less for a DVD by buying it from a zone other than his/her nominated one.
Kocsonya s.k.
You said that you wrote some humour and we can have a laugh and stuff. :-(
I went there but there wasn't any humour only a precise, factual and descriptive report on the current state of affairs
Kocsonya s.k.
It's quite interesting that the MPAA is involved in this suit too - actually, the complaint itself can be read on *their* website and the article refers to "7 major movie studios". I think those guys in Holywood start to believe that it should be renamed Holywood D.C., capital of the World or something like that. Kocsonya s.k.
The media does not listen until you can provide something sensational that will fix Joe Sixpack in his chair during the commercial before the actual news article or make him read the frontpage before the sport one.
:-) Nevertheless, I do believe that technological explanations will not gain public sympathy, nor attention for that matter, regardless of the form. Tell them that the whole DeCSS lawsuit thing is to cover up that they are continually ripped off, then they'll listen.
As long as the community tries to come up with technical terms, the greater public will not listen. Most people could not care less about whether you can watch a DVD with Linux or not. They will not understand the need for decoding to watch but not for copying a DVD and they don't care either. I believe that the non-technical community's perception is that a Norwegian hacker, who is a member of an underground cell tried to rip off Holywood and ruin the Great American Dream singlehandedly. Fortunately, the police managed to stop him in his evil doings before all Holywood studios were about to close for good.
Public listens to tales, not technical arguments. The more dramatic tales, the better. There's no drama in a crappy encryption scheme that was designed to generate extra profit by a bunch of cryptographically challenged engineer. Who cares ? On teh other hand, The Scandinavian Terminator Who Wants To Kill The Whole Movie Industry, now that's drama for you.
Public attention can be achieved when the public is explained that it was ripped off, media attention can be achieved by the above public going mad.
I'm probably dreaming but I would envision a campaing in which the "DVD consumer community" in the US (and maybe in Europe) is informed that they could mail-order the same film from any developing country half the price but they can't play it on their DVD player because the MPA made the US DVD players not to play the same movie if it was not sold in the US. If the fact that this is actually against the law is also published, with much emphasis being placed on the extra profit the movie industry makes, the dramatic explanation of designing technology to rip off customers would cause quite some stir. You can also get immigrant groups into the picture explaining them that although they have a DVD player in the US, they could not order (zone locked) films from their country of birth because it would not play on the zone-1 locked player.
After all that stir and public outrage there would be lawyers out there who would smell some money - a class action lawsuit might be in order. If zoning is indeed against the law and easily provable to unlawfully generate profit at the customers' cost, with defendants capable of paying billions in damages - well, I'm sure there would be cases. Now *that* would give as much media attention as it gets.
IANAL, so I might very well be off course. Maybe it's just a geekish wet dream, all those bad boys sweating in the courtroom and hackers grinning all around
Kocsonya s.k.
I agree with the need of the webpage and the idea it showing the type of support the vendor provides. IMHO it should also contain a little educational corner to explain Linux users what the whole thing is about.
Recently someone on USENET started a petition for printer drivers for Linux (Winprinter stuff).
Lots of commotion, much rejoycing. The scary thing was that very few people expressed that the petition should be for *documentation* and not (or not exclusively) for binary-only drivers.
I would not ask for source of a HW vendor's drivers as long as they publish the HW specs. If they have "10+ years of software development invested in these drivers", I understand that they don't want to publish their code. However, if they publish the HW specs there can be the usual open-source alternative. If their drivers are so much better than what the programmer community can crank up, so be it. If I need the extra edge I can decide to use their binary driver, they can even ask for money for it. If I'm happy with the open stuff, I use that one. If I use my own homemade OS, I can still use their HW because I have the specs.
That's my standpoint, of course. I do not consider myself as hardcode as RMS but current trends in Linux user circles seem to shift the emphasis from the "open" operating system to the "alternative to Windows" which is worrysome, IMHO.
Kocsonya s.k.