Probably not, but so what? Is that going to change anything, or make the RIAA less powerful?
All that's happening with most/. posts about this issue is a bunch of pontificating about morality, as if that will have any affect on anyone who can actually improve the state of affairs.
You're parroting the same lame naive line that others trot out here with regularity.
First of all, by and large, musicians don't make CD's. Music companies make CD's. The CD business is a distribution business. Recording companies' interest in the contents of a CD is limited to whether or not you'll buy it. If they could make money selling white-noise CD's, they would. The Internet provides an opportunity for musicians to market their products directly to comsumers, by providing a substitute distribution system. Few are taking advantage of that fact (perhaps because that segment of the Internet market isn't as large as supposed), while the RIAA certainly recognizes the net's threat to the profits of the recording industry.
Second, there is no necessary relationship between creativity and income. The world is full of struggling musicians who live from hand to mouth, trying to eke out a living. Some of them are struggling because they make music no one wants to hear. Others are struggling because they haven't had a commercial break. Yes, if their sole motive was to make money, they'd probably be lawyers or dentists. But, just like everyone else, given a chance to make money, they'll take it. If they can make money as "crap artists", they'll do just that. It's human nature.
Thanks for resorting to the typical Know-Nothing Slashdot tactic of resorting to gratuitous insult and ad hominem attacks.
None of this has anything to do with legality or morality. It's only about tactics. It's just about cheap, throw-away music.
If you think "sharing" music will get you what you want, fine, go ahead. I think it will cause you to lose and simply get more draconian copyright restrictions placed on all of us, including people like me who don't really care a twit about whether some college student can afford to buy CD. That's the point I'm making. Morality and legality have nothing to do with it.
BTW, your equation of the civil rights struggle in the 60's to the music business is a gross and demeaning insult to the people who lived in that struggle.
>> it's no surprise that someone, like you...is upset...
I'm not upset, just amused that so many people think that pop music and the RIAA is so bloody important that they elevate the issue to this level.
Besides, you don't have a bloody clue about what I may or may not believe, or whether I support or don't support the "system".
>> Government is set up such that votes and candidates may be bought. Legal recourse in courts and through legislative action do nothing because of the economic differences in the lobbying effort.
If you believe that's true, then why aren't you buying votes and lobbying? Why hasn't the P2P community managed to organize?
>>..You can have a very valued and preferred choice lose out because of the political process. This puts question in the validity of that process and those that represent it
No, it doesn't put the validity of the process into question. It simply means you lost. You may value and prefer your choice, but others may not. At times, my success is dependent on your failure. Alleging that the process has failed because you didn't get what you want means only that you failed you to get what you wanted from the process. From others' perspective, the process may have succeeded quiet nicely.
Ummm...choosing the wrong word isn't a mistake of grammar.
Sure, the price of CD's is too high. And, sure, that's an incentive to get it elsewhere. People are still buying them, though. Someone paid cash for that CD they're "sharing".
The best way to force CD prices to drop is to stop buying CD's at those prices. Start putting some stores out of business.
Well, yes, that's right. The RIAA does think you're all a bunch of thieves.
Hyperbole is not justified. Hyperbole just strengthens the impression that people are simply trying to justify theft, rather than addressing the legitimate copyright and property issues that have surfaced via all this P2P noise.
This is a political and legal debate. It will be decided by votes in Congress and rulings from the Supreme Court.
Most of the U.S. public doesn't buy music often enough to care. Why should they care if it is legal for you to copy a track of music by some bar band that got a record deal? Talk to them about the price of food, electricty and health care and they might start paying attention.
Pick your fight. If you think copyright law needs to change, go for it. If you think CD prices are too high, stop buying CD's.
You don't "need" to steal anything, especially something as unimportant as popular music.
The price of a product has nothing to do with your own sense of ethics. If you aren't personally ashamed to be a thief, well, I guess you'll steal something.
If the price of CD's -- or any other product -- drops to zero, people will stop making CD's.
The music business is just that, a business whose purpose is to sell music. If the price of music drops below the cost of music production and distribution, the business will vanish.
>>...forcing prices to be artificially high is known as "Price Fixing.
So what? Pointing to high CD prices won't legalize counterfeiting.
This debate is not about the ability of college students to buy and copy music and movies as they see fit. The debate is about changing U.S. copyright law to ensure the interests of the public are addressed, rather than skewed in the interests of corporations with a lock on music distribution.
If you seriously want to change the status quo, get to work. Otherwise, understand that unthinking assertions do more harm than good.
This is an example of an unreasoned, apocalyptic extremism that plays into the hands of the forces the poster so adamantly attacks.
Playing word games with "piracy" is pointless. Producing unauthorized duplicates of commercial products is known as counterfeiting. Most countries have laws prohibiting the creation and distribution of counterfeit goods. It's as illegal to market a counterfeit CD of the current flavor-of-the-week pop band as it is to sell fake Rolex watches.
By glibly saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", all you've done is made more enemies: You have aligned yourself with counterfeiters, a tactic unlikely to draw support from the mainstream public.
The enemies of your new friend are now your enemies.
Get lots of people to write letters saying this one issue is so important to them that it will determine who they vote for next election.
Get lots of people to promise financial support if the representative supports your position.
Organize a political action committee around this issue. Find funding. Staff an office in Washington and lobby, lobby, lobby.
Hire lawyers. Tell the lawyers to prepare a draft bill reflecting your position. Convince your Congressperson to introduce it.
Start a PR campaign. Find people who have been adversely affected by the status quo re: this issue. Generate press releases about them, tied to the need for action on Capitol Hill. Coach the people to be effective on TV. Get them on TV.
At election time, make sure your people get out and vote the way they said they would.
The U.S. would have been negligent not to prosecute simply because he used computers in another country. I'm ignorant of U.S. and Russian laws regarding extradition, etc., but presumably they exist.
Perhaps a better question is why the Russians did not prosecute? Is it legal for Russians to break into networks in other countries?
Lindows is not packaging an AOL stack, dialer or related software. All they've done is use Netscape. With Netscape, you get IM and the ability to check AOL mail. Anyone who downloads Netscape has the same capabilities.
If you have an AOL account, Lindows will not allow you to dial in and log on to the account.
Lindows has scored a bit of a PR coup here, but that's all.
Graf one is based on the observation that many/. posts indicate an aversion to the organized political activity needed to thwart the legislation that angers them
Graf two is right out of Sociology 101, dealing with alienation and group identification.
Graf three is based on simple reading of many/. posts that exhibit the listed attributes.
I used AOL when it was just a startup, before they called themselves AOL. I've used it off and on since then, as circumstances and location warranted. It's just another ISP, except for: 1) Size (POP's everywhere and marketing to match); 2) use of propietary software and a non-tcp/ip stack (irrelevant to their target customers); 3) proprietary content (good when they have something you want).
The/. droids routinely give AOL a kneejerk response because someone told them it is "bad". They get a passing self-pleasured moment without needing to think for themselves.
Isn't the increasing involvement of geeks in political issues due to the success of the technology geeks have been creating for the last 20 years? The world changed in the early 1990's.(Specifically, I think, due to two events: the spread of dial-up ISP's suppporting Windows and the marketing of a browser that ran on Win 3.1)
If only geeks used computers and the Internet, the political ramifications would be insignificant. But, it's not 1986 anymore, and the technology created by geeks has become commoditized. Computers and the Internet have become mainstream components of Western culture, and, inevitably, also become political fodder.
This on-target editorial is in tune with Lawrence Lessig's question a few weeks ago: What Have You Been Doing About It? (Lessig's answer: not much, if anything.)
When identification with a community becomes more important to each community member than the goals or shared behaviors of the community, that community is well on the way to becoming an irrelevant cult. Why? Because an individual need only adopt the accoutrements of the community to claim membership. The need to actually make a substantive contribution to furthering the community's objectives, goes away. In fact, the community's objectives fade away until the sole objective becomes reinforcing each individual's association with the group. In other words, it dissolves into a "us versus them" scenario, where the only thing defining "us" is "not them" status.
The evidence is here on Slashdot every day: Few expressions of commitment to do anything about DMCA/RIAA/DRM except pen denunciatory posts; Use of "lusers" in reference to "users" (if your an admin, they're really your "customers"); assertions that Unix users are more intelligent than users of other operating systems; unwillingess to consider other points of view; readiness to censor dissenting voices (known as "moderation" around here); a dogmatic belief that everything the "enemy" says and does is a lie and, therefore, unworthy of a second's thought; and, in the obvious case of many posters, an adopted posture of cynicism lacking the credibility of real experience.
You did see this part, didn't you: "Seen from Microsoft's viewpoint (with which I am not concurring)...
I neither defended nor agreed with MS. I simply presented one possible explanation of their behavior. Although, perhaps, stating something in clear, direct lanaguage, prefaced by an explicit disclaimer, is a literary construction beyond your range.
Sure, you own your little box. If you want to build a chip and stick it in there, I doubt MS will come after you. After all, they went after a company, not individual owners.
Next time, try r-e-a-d-i-n-g a post before you jump to the wrong conclusion.
Have to admit that, for the life of me, I've never been able to sustain interest in any game for more than 30 seconds. They're all a big yawn to me.
The merits of a legal or political case won't do anyone any good unless someone has the willingness and the resources to argue those merits in the right places and at the right times. No matter how principled your own position, other people can take an opposing, but equally principled, position. Liekwise, many not-so-principled people will recognize the merits of your position but work to defeat you simply because your loss will be their gain.
Ranting about the evils of MS on Slashdot is preaching to the choir, pure and simple. Just noise without substance, Nothing will happen. Thwarting MS, or the RIAA, etc., requires the creation of countervailing legal, political and economic forces.
Beats me where it's going to stop. Pretty sure preventing it will take more than pseudonymous Slashdot posters giving their caps keys a workout.
The car analogy breaks down without much effort. Seen from Microsoft's viewpoint (with which I am not concurring), one's acquisition of software or hardware is more akin to renting than to purchase. Their analogy might be: You've rented a car from me. You signed a rental contract that prevents you from making any mechanical or cosmetic changes to the car.
The notion of "renting" rather than "buying and owning" seems to go hand-in-hand with the notion of licensing software. When possession of a software program transfers to you -- commercial, free, open source, etc. -- you acquire a license to use the recorded binary representation of the translated source code. You do not own the source code. Note that the program may be transferred on CD, on floppy, over the Internet, or in a chip in a game box.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not, but so what? Is that going to change anything, or make the RIAA less powerful?
/. posts about this issue is a bunch of pontificating about morality, as if that will have any affect on anyone who can actually improve the state of affairs.
All that's happening with most
Why would a singleton home user of a dialup or broadband ISP want to do this? What's the advantage?
I've done it on standalone Linux boxes. My mail went out and came in, just like I did when it wasn't running a mail server.
Is there a trade-off for the added complexity?
How about the struggle of Anonymous Cowards to develop coherent thought?
Your personal insights ought to be very revealing.
You're parroting the same lame naive line that others trot out here with regularity.
First of all, by and large, musicians don't make CD's. Music companies make CD's. The CD business is a distribution business. Recording companies' interest in the contents of a CD is limited to whether or not you'll buy it. If they could make money selling white-noise CD's, they would. The Internet provides an opportunity for musicians to market their products directly to comsumers, by providing a substitute distribution system. Few are taking advantage of that fact (perhaps because that segment of the Internet market isn't as large as supposed), while the RIAA certainly recognizes the net's threat to the profits of the recording industry.
Second, there is no necessary relationship between creativity and income. The world is full of struggling musicians who live from hand to mouth, trying to eke out a living. Some of them are struggling because they make music no one wants to hear. Others are struggling because they haven't had a commercial break. Yes, if their sole motive was to make money, they'd probably be lawyers or dentists. But, just like everyone else, given a chance to make money, they'll take it. If they can make money as "crap artists", they'll do just that. It's human nature.
Thanks for resorting to the typical Know-Nothing Slashdot tactic of resorting to gratuitous insult and ad hominem attacks.
None of this has anything to do with legality or morality. It's only about tactics. It's just about cheap, throw-away music.
If you think "sharing" music will get you what you want, fine, go ahead. I think it will cause you to lose and simply get more draconian copyright restrictions placed on all of us, including people like me who don't really care a twit about whether some college student can afford to buy CD. That's the point I'm making. Morality and legality have nothing to do with it.
BTW, your equation of the civil rights struggle in the 60's to the music business is a gross and demeaning insult to the people who lived in that struggle.
>> it's no surprise that someone, like you...is upset...
I'm not upset, just amused that so many people think that pop music and the RIAA is so bloody important that they elevate the issue to this level.
Besides, you don't have a bloody clue about what I may or may not believe, or whether I support or don't support the "system".
>> Government is set up such that votes and candidates may be bought. Legal recourse in courts and through legislative action do nothing because of the economic differences in the lobbying effort.
If you believe that's true, then why aren't you buying votes and lobbying? Why hasn't the P2P community managed to organize?
>>..You can have a very valued and preferred choice lose out because of the political process. This puts question in the validity of that process and those that represent it
No, it doesn't put the validity of the process into question. It simply means you lost. You may value and prefer your choice, but others may not. At times, my success is dependent on your failure. Alleging that the process has failed because you didn't get what you want means only that you failed you to get what you wanted from the process. From others' perspective, the process may have succeeded quiet nicely.
Ummm...choosing the wrong word isn't a mistake of grammar.
Sure, the price of CD's is too high. And, sure, that's an incentive to get it elsewhere. People are still buying them, though. Someone paid cash for that CD they're "sharing".
The best way to force CD prices to drop is to stop buying CD's at those prices. Start putting some stores out of business.
Well, yes, that's right. The RIAA does think you're all a bunch of thieves.
Hyperbole is not justified. Hyperbole just strengthens the impression that people are simply trying to justify theft, rather than addressing the legitimate copyright and property issues that have surfaced via all this P2P noise.
This is a political and legal debate. It will be decided by votes in Congress and rulings from the Supreme Court.
Most of the U.S. public doesn't buy music often enough to care. Why should they care if it is legal for you to copy a track of music by some bar band that got a record deal? Talk to them about the price of food, electricty and health care and they might start paying attention.
Pick your fight. If you think copyright law needs to change, go for it. If you think CD prices are too high, stop buying CD's.
You don't "need" to steal anything, especially something as unimportant as popular music.
The price of a product has nothing to do with your own sense of ethics. If you aren't personally ashamed to be a thief, well, I guess you'll steal something.
If the price of CD's -- or any other product -- drops to zero, people will stop making CD's.
The music business is just that, a business whose purpose is to sell music. If the price of music drops below the cost of music production and distribution, the business will vanish.
Poof, no more CD's to buy or "share".
>> ...forcing prices to be artificially high is known as "Price Fixing.
So what? Pointing to high CD prices won't legalize counterfeiting.
This debate is not about the ability of college students to buy and copy music and movies as they see fit. The debate is about changing U.S. copyright law to ensure the interests of the public are addressed, rather than skewed in the interests of corporations with a lock on music distribution.
If you seriously want to change the status quo, get to work. Otherwise, understand that unthinking assertions do more harm than good.
This is an example of an unreasoned, apocalyptic extremism that plays into the hands of the forces the poster so adamantly attacks.
Playing word games with "piracy" is pointless. Producing unauthorized duplicates of commercial products is known as counterfeiting. Most countries have laws prohibiting the creation and distribution of counterfeit goods. It's as illegal to market a counterfeit CD of the current flavor-of-the-week pop band as it is to sell fake Rolex watches.
By glibly saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", all you've done is made more enemies: You have aligned yourself with counterfeiters, a tactic unlikely to draw support from the mainstream public.
The enemies of your new friend are now your enemies.
For starters:
Get lots of people to write letters.
Get lots of people to write letters saying this one issue is so important to them that it will determine who they vote for next election.
Get lots of people to promise financial support if the representative supports your position.
Organize a political action committee around this issue. Find funding. Staff an office in Washington and lobby, lobby, lobby.
Hire lawyers. Tell the lawyers to prepare a draft bill reflecting your position. Convince your Congressperson to introduce it.
Start a PR campaign. Find people who have been adversely affected by the status quo re: this issue. Generate press releases about them, tied to the need for action on Capitol Hill. Coach the people to be effective on TV. Get them on TV.
At election time, make sure your people get out and vote the way they said they would.
Be prepared to stick with it for years.
>> ...US law is above Russian law.
The U.S. would have been negligent not to prosecute simply because he used computers in another country. I'm ignorant of U.S. and Russian laws regarding extradition, etc., but presumably they exist.
Perhaps a better question is why the Russians did not prosecute? Is it legal for Russians to break into networks in other countries?
Lindows is not packaging an AOL stack, dialer or related software. All they've done is use Netscape. With Netscape, you get IM and the ability to check AOL mail. Anyone who downloads Netscape has the same capabilities.
If you have an AOL account, Lindows will not allow you to dial in and log on to the account.
Lindows has scored a bit of a PR coup here, but that's all.
Graf one is based on the observation that many /. posts indicate an aversion to the organized political activity needed to thwart the legislation that angers them
/. posts that exhibit the listed attributes.
Graf two is right out of Sociology 101, dealing with alienation and group identification.
Graf three is based on simple reading of many
I used AOL when it was just a startup, before they called themselves AOL. I've used it off and on since then, as circumstances and location warranted. It's just another ISP, except for: 1) Size (POP's everywhere and marketing to match); 2) use of propietary software and a non-tcp/ip stack (irrelevant to their target customers); 3) proprietary content (good when they have something you want).
/. droids routinely give AOL a kneejerk response because someone told them it is "bad". They get a passing self-pleasured moment without needing to think for themselves.
The
Isn't the increasing involvement of geeks in political issues due to the success of the technology geeks have been creating for the last 20 years? The world changed in the early 1990's.(Specifically, I think, due to two events: the spread of dial-up ISP's suppporting Windows and the marketing of a browser that ran on Win 3.1)
If only geeks used computers and the Internet, the political ramifications would be insignificant. But, it's not 1986 anymore, and the technology created by geeks has become commoditized. Computers and the Internet have become mainstream components of Western culture, and, inevitably, also become political fodder.
It's all death. The rest is just nomenclature we invent to justify our actions.
This on-target editorial is in tune with Lawrence Lessig's question a few weeks ago: What Have You Been Doing About It? (Lessig's answer: not much, if anything.)
When identification with a community becomes more important to each community member than the goals or shared behaviors of the community, that community is well on the way to becoming an irrelevant cult. Why? Because an individual need only adopt the accoutrements of the community to claim membership. The need to actually make a substantive contribution to furthering the community's objectives, goes away. In fact, the community's objectives fade away until the sole objective becomes reinforcing each individual's association with the group. In other words, it dissolves into a "us versus them" scenario, where the only thing defining "us" is "not them" status.
The evidence is here on Slashdot every day: Few expressions of commitment to do anything about DMCA/RIAA/DRM except pen denunciatory posts; Use of "lusers" in reference to "users" (if your an admin, they're really your "customers"); assertions that Unix users are more intelligent than users of other operating systems; unwillingess to consider other points of view; readiness to censor dissenting voices (known as "moderation" around here); a dogmatic belief that everything the "enemy" says and does is a lie and, therefore, unworthy of a second's thought; and, in the obvious case of many posters, an adopted posture of cynicism lacking the credibility of real experience.
You did see this part, didn't you: "Seen from Microsoft's viewpoint (with which I am not concurring)...
I neither defended nor agreed with MS. I simply presented one possible explanation of their behavior. Although, perhaps, stating something in clear, direct lanaguage, prefaced by an explicit disclaimer, is a literary construction beyond your range.
Sure, you own your little box. If you want to build a chip and stick it in there, I doubt MS will come after you. After all, they went after a company, not individual owners.
Next time, try r-e-a-d-i-n-g a post before you jump to the wrong conclusion.
Come on! What's off-topic? If you don't like someone challenging the sacred shibboleths of Slashdot, respond to it. Don't try to censor it.
Have to admit that, for the life of me, I've never been able to sustain interest in any game for more than 30 seconds. They're all a big yawn to me.
The merits of a legal or political case won't do anyone any good unless someone has the willingness and the resources to argue those merits in the right places and at the right times. No matter how principled your own position, other people can take an opposing, but equally principled, position. Liekwise, many not-so-principled people will recognize the merits of your position but work to defeat you simply because your loss will be their gain.
Ranting about the evils of MS on Slashdot is preaching to the choir, pure and simple. Just noise without substance, Nothing will happen. Thwarting MS, or the RIAA, etc., requires the creation of countervailing legal, political and economic forces.
Beats me where it's going to stop. Pretty sure preventing it will take more than pseudonymous Slashdot posters giving their caps keys a workout.
The car analogy breaks down without much effort. Seen from Microsoft's viewpoint (with which I am not concurring), one's acquisition of software or hardware is more akin to renting than to purchase. Their analogy might be: You've rented a car from me. You signed a rental contract that prevents you from making any mechanical or cosmetic changes to the car.
The notion of "renting" rather than "buying and owning" seems to go hand-in-hand with the notion of licensing software. When possession of a software program transfers to you -- commercial, free, open source, etc. -- you acquire a license to use the recorded binary representation of the translated source code. You do not own the source code. Note that the program may be transferred on CD, on floppy, over the Internet, or in a chip in a game box.
If games are so bloody important to so many people who loathe Microsoft, how come there isn't a viable Linux game industry?
Any chance some people hate paying for games more than they hate MS?