How about limiting damages to thrice the MSRP value of the infringed content for the first offense, and subsequently doubling (6 times the MSRP for second offense, 12 times the MSRP for third offense, and so on...)
This way, people's lives won't be ruined the first time they get caught infringing.
So, if the MSRP is $29.95 for a given movie (think how expensive Blu-Ray is), then on the first offense, that's $89.85. Or, maybe multiple movies were pirated on the first offense. Well, that is 3 times total MSRP sum.
This is actually one of the most reasonable suggestions for piracy on slashdot. Piracy is already widespread but only randomly prosecuted and when it is, you're destroying someones life. This style would be great for actually hitting the problem without destroying people and giving them a change to learn and not do it again.
While I don't even know what to say about this UK law proposal, laws are generally made to protect the general goodness of society. Lets not kid ourself, warez is a problem and the creators need to be compensated for their work just like everyone else. But the thing is, technicality here isn't an issue - it's only about practicality. The old "but I'm only downloading it, I'm not giving anything to anyone" probably worked before internet age, but world develops. It's clear that the laws need to adjust, just like they need to adjust for email spammers. World changes, and has been changing rapidly in the last 20 years.
That being said, an year ago I said UK really likes to challenge US in the most draconian country in the world, and it looks like they were just foreplaying before.
Then how do you play online games or use chat features on social sites? Currently I have 4 Ultima Online tabs open and the game continues on the background, and Facebook with a few chat windows open. The participants know I'm online since the script continues to execute.
Security is great, but you really need to think about what your suggestions will do before making them.
I'm not so sure it would be great for YouTube for that reason. Maybe for the 360p videos, but at least I always watch 720p or 1080p version if it's available. This will be even more important when YouTube starts to have movies and TV shows that you can rent.
Most of the web video content will be moving towards 720p or 1080p too, so you should really compare future codec candidates towards those.
The part where anyone that wants to can just connect to isohunt through a proxy, or that 2000 other sites both better and worse have/will pop up to replace it.
That still doesn't say anything about if the judge is clueless. If there is a proxy or someone is actively trying to circumvent the country restriction, it's not isohunt's problem anymore. And what mostly matters is that majority of users, especially casual ones, won't go for the trouble just to access isohunt, and it might make them think what they're doing might be illegal because you have to use proxies and all other tricks just to access the site.
Other sites might pop up but that doesn't mean it's useless to do something about one site. Just like if you're driving drunk you can't say that "but there are 2000 other drunk drivers in this country, why you punish me!". There's also a limit of people wanting to create such sites, especially if it carries harsh punishments.
Not that I agree with the injunction, but I don't think they're clueless. They're just concentrating on the things that matter most and not going to the single details like possibility of proxies and circumvent.
Again, this proves just how utterly clueless judges (and politicans) are of how the Internet actually works.
Uh, which part actually proves that? Actually:
The verdict states that they have to cease 'hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any (torrent) or similar files' that can be used to download the studios' movies and TV shows.
I think they know really well that the site isn't actually hosting anything but providing torrent files "that can be used to download the studios movies and tv shows".
It really doesn't matter that they're only hosting the.torrent files and the files are being transferred by users. I thought it would be quite clear to everyone already.
Well, at least IsoHunt can introduce ban for certain movie names that studios need to tell them. Swedish courts made three injunctions yesterday which,
1) Took OpenBitTorrent tracker completely down 2) Banned TPB (ex-)admins from working with the site or any other torrent related site in the future 3) Ordered the upstream provider of TPB to stop serving bandwidth to them.
With ACTA and all of these recent developments, I don't think piracy will be so widespread for many more years. It's great theres good services like Spotify and Steam now though - just need similar for TV shows and movies now (and Voddler is coming).
Well, you don't even need to travel to US. Just travel to one of the countries (95% of the world) that has extradition treaty with US and they send you there right away, without even having a change to fight against extradition in Canadian court. You better not travel anywhere then.
A total of 11 employees have tried to kill themselves this year - two have survived.
I wonder if Steve Jobs feels proud of himself. Every Mac, iPhone and iPad is seriously overpriced and makes great profit for Apple. If Apple wanted to they could offer their manufacturers and workers a lot better working conditions, but it looks like Apple just wants to abuse it's customers, developers and workers, so much that it ultimately leads them to kill themself.
Can you even think of a working conditions where you would rather end your life than continue working there? We are talking about people who feel the need to kill themselves because of Apple's manufacturers.
Apple will just continue asking overpriced sums for their products and turn their back when their workers kill themself. Good job Apple - not only you abuse the industry, you make people kill themself.
The thing is; I like to eat meat. And pizza. And hamburgers. And hot dogs. And sausages. On a sunny day I love to grill some good beef and take a sip of my beer.
Besides, all plants are living things too. Why is it more right to eat them than the good old mmmmm grilled beef.
Bing and Google actually both give pretty much the same results. Bing itself was innovative from Microsoft, even so far that Google copied Bing's sidebar from them, and Bing was the first one to demonstrate and introduce real-time 3D video mapped into street view.
As far as for the GP;
They are excellent at marketing their products and at keeping a healthy business although.
But this is true for every large corporation. Actually even more so for Apple, who haven't actually done much else than polished BSD and open source projects. Microsoft still spends millions into R&D while Apple does nothing like that. Google isn't really that innovative either. They're different, sure, but any larger "innovation" they've done has come from smaller companies they have bought (Maps, Earth, YouTube and so on).
I think Courier was quite innovative. Visual Studio per se probably isn't innovative, but it's a really stable product and better than anything else on the market. Microsoft also used to publish great and also innovative games (why not anymore?)
While some large corporations do R&D, it's almost always the small startups that are the most innovative ones. It's also obvious why - they can take some risks, and while most of them fail, some of them come out with a great idea. Large companies cant afford taking that kind of risks and losing.
They could also be just waiting for Theora to become widespread and attack then. It wouldn't make much sense to sue now if theres a possibility you can get a lot more money in the future.
They don't need to go after Google first. Google has explicitly stated they don't ensure you don't get patent litigation, so you are on your own to fight it.
This has been the tactic forever - attack the small guy first, so you get backing up to attack the big guys later if you want to.
The thing is, MPEG-LA ensures that H.264 and you are free from any patent violations. Google doesn't offer anything such, they actually say they don't take responsibility on any such tthing, so it's a patent bomb waiting to happen and any company that uses it takes risks. That's why it might make more sense to just use H.264 and save yourself from future problems.
That and the fact that H.264 is already on every device on the planet.
While I've "closed" my Facebook (seriously, why there isn't a true close account option?) for privacy reasons, lets look at it on technical terms. It's a problem with the referrer field being sent by browsers, nothing intentional on Facebook's part. If you have referrer sending disabled you aren't affected by this.
It's a bad combination of browsers sending referrer, Facebook using real names for everything and Facebook not providing enough privacy options to hide your profile, and Facebook not using https or iframing the ad box (in that case referrer would just show something like http://www.facebook.com/ads/ ).
I guess those ad networks don't actually have something that gets the personal info for clicks, but it's a possibility and I bet the referrer is saved, at least in logs and statistics.
Of course, majority of people don't care so business will continue as usual.
Germany's privacy laws generally restrict photographs of people and property without a person's consent, except in very public situations, such as a sporting event.
There has also been investigations in Sweden, Finland and UK about this and they will decide later if it requires criminal charges. It's good that Germany is doing that already, as it's clearly violating privacy and European laws.
If they combine it with a similarly good API as XNA is and get hardware support, that's great.
Coding robotics has previously required a lot of low level coding. Who of us haven't though how great it would be code your own robot easily, and make it work just like you want it to, without going to all the low level details?
Seems like they need a great big kick in the democratic ass.
Isn't free speech allowed unless you're directly threating someone? From the stories I've read this person might be corrupted. Why is he threating with arrests instead of responding to those claims? Unless of course, he is corrupted person.
It's going to be open sourced, but I seriously hope they can include drivers for the TV hardware or even some generic drivers. Android for mobile phones being open source is useless because you cannot get drivers for any of the hardware, so you cannot actually use your modifications with your device. That defeats the purpose.
I hope it also doesn't integrate too much with Google's or anyone else's Internet services. Make it work with those, but also provide an easy way to disable all such things.
Other than that, it could be a really interesting TV. Currently I have to stream content from my PC to my PS3 which then shows it in the TV. My PS3 media center has to transcode most of the content on-the-fly. Since this is linux-based Android it means you could have xmbc-like application and everything along those lines directly on your TV, with great networking capabilities. If you can also make your own changes and builds of the Android OS for it, we can install even more suitable OS for us geeks.
Well, it's just the never-ending story of Apple wanting to control everything. This is what she said:
"Mr. Jobs, give a sister a break," said Campbell. "I'm not going to go sell my iPad."
Not only controlling all the applications and what you can do with the device, but controlling if you are allowed sell your device too? Everyone always says Apple is not a monopoly, but exactly how is this good for the market or people? You don't need to be a monopoly to abuse customers.
windows 7 is nice, but the cool things now are cell phones and tablets. for that you need a mobile OS with a footprint of under 1GB. Windows Phone 7 is still months away and a few years behind iPhone OS and Android.
Are you saying they should stop making Windows 7 and PC's just because cell phones and tablets are somehow "cool" things now? I'd like to keep my computer, if you don't mind.
However it also did change peoples expectations towards security in Windows, which was an important step. People complained about it first, mainly because of the old poorly designed programs. Now all those programs had time to patch up or new ones came to market, so they finally work with the new security model and people aren't saying that Windows broke their programs.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, I don't live in the UK.
How about limiting damages to thrice the MSRP value of the infringed content for the first offense, and subsequently doubling (6 times the MSRP for second offense, 12 times the MSRP for third offense, and so on...)
This way, people's lives won't be ruined the first time they get caught infringing.
So, if the MSRP is $29.95 for a given movie (think how expensive Blu-Ray is), then on the first offense, that's $89.85. Or, maybe multiple movies were pirated on the first offense. Well, that is 3 times total MSRP sum.
This is actually one of the most reasonable suggestions for piracy on slashdot. Piracy is already widespread but only randomly prosecuted and when it is, you're destroying someones life. This style would be great for actually hitting the problem without destroying people and giving them a change to learn and not do it again.
While I don't even know what to say about this UK law proposal, laws are generally made to protect the general goodness of society. Lets not kid ourself, warez is a problem and the creators need to be compensated for their work just like everyone else. But the thing is, technicality here isn't an issue - it's only about practicality. The old "but I'm only downloading it, I'm not giving anything to anyone" probably worked before internet age, but world develops. It's clear that the laws need to adjust, just like they need to adjust for email spammers. World changes, and has been changing rapidly in the last 20 years.
That being said, an year ago I said UK really likes to challenge US in the most draconian country in the world, and it looks like they were just foreplaying before.
Then how do you play online games or use chat features on social sites? Currently I have 4 Ultima Online tabs open and the game continues on the background, and Facebook with a few chat windows open. The participants know I'm online since the script continues to execute.
Security is great, but you really need to think about what your suggestions will do before making them.
I'm not so sure it would be great for YouTube for that reason. Maybe for the 360p videos, but at least I always watch 720p or 1080p version if it's available. This will be even more important when YouTube starts to have movies and TV shows that you can rent.
Most of the web video content will be moving towards 720p or 1080p too, so you should really compare future codec candidates towards those.
Uh, which part actually proves that? Actually:
The part where anyone that wants to can just connect to isohunt through a proxy, or that 2000 other sites both better and worse have/will pop up to replace it.
That still doesn't say anything about if the judge is clueless. If there is a proxy or someone is actively trying to circumvent the country restriction, it's not isohunt's problem anymore. And what mostly matters is that majority of users, especially casual ones, won't go for the trouble just to access isohunt, and it might make them think what they're doing might be illegal because you have to use proxies and all other tricks just to access the site.
Other sites might pop up but that doesn't mean it's useless to do something about one site. Just like if you're driving drunk you can't say that "but there are 2000 other drunk drivers in this country, why you punish me!". There's also a limit of people wanting to create such sites, especially if it carries harsh punishments.
Not that I agree with the injunction, but I don't think they're clueless. They're just concentrating on the things that matter most and not going to the single details like possibility of proxies and circumvent.
Again, this proves just how utterly clueless judges (and politicans) are of how the Internet actually works.
Uh, which part actually proves that? Actually:
The verdict states that they have to cease 'hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any (torrent) or similar files' that can be used to download the studios' movies and TV shows.
I think they know really well that the site isn't actually hosting anything but providing torrent files "that can be used to download the studios movies and tv shows".
It really doesn't matter that they're only hosting the .torrent files and the files are being transferred by users. I thought it would be quite clear to everyone already.
Well, at least IsoHunt can introduce ban for certain movie names that studios need to tell them. Swedish courts made three injunctions yesterday which,
1) Took OpenBitTorrent tracker completely down
2) Banned TPB (ex-)admins from working with the site or any other torrent related site in the future
3) Ordered the upstream provider of TPB to stop serving bandwidth to them.
With ACTA and all of these recent developments, I don't think piracy will be so widespread for many more years. It's great theres good services like Spotify and Steam now though - just need similar for TV shows and movies now (and Voddler is coming).
Well, you don't even need to travel to US. Just travel to one of the countries (95% of the world) that has extradition treaty with US and they send you there right away, without even having a change to fight against extradition in Canadian court. You better not travel anywhere then.
A total of 11 employees have tried to kill themselves this year - two have survived.
I wonder if Steve Jobs feels proud of himself. Every Mac, iPhone and iPad is seriously overpriced and makes great profit for Apple. If Apple wanted to they could offer their manufacturers and workers a lot better working conditions, but it looks like Apple just wants to abuse it's customers, developers and workers, so much that it ultimately leads them to kill themself.
Can you even think of a working conditions where you would rather end your life than continue working there? We are talking about people who feel the need to kill themselves because of Apple's manufacturers.
Apple will just continue asking overpriced sums for their products and turn their back when their workers kill themself. Good job Apple - not only you abuse the industry, you make people kill themself.
The thing is; I like to eat meat. And pizza. And hamburgers. And hot dogs. And sausages. On a sunny day I love to grill some good beef and take a sip of my beer.
Besides, all plants are living things too. Why is it more right to eat them than the good old mmmmm grilled beef.
Bing and Google actually both give pretty much the same results. Bing itself was innovative from Microsoft, even so far that Google copied Bing's sidebar from them, and Bing was the first one to demonstrate and introduce real-time 3D video mapped into street view.
As far as for the GP;
They are excellent at marketing their products and at keeping a healthy business although.
But this is true for every large corporation. Actually even more so for Apple, who haven't actually done much else than polished BSD and open source projects. Microsoft still spends millions into R&D while Apple does nothing like that. Google isn't really that innovative either. They're different, sure, but any larger "innovation" they've done has come from smaller companies they have bought (Maps, Earth, YouTube and so on).
I think Courier was quite innovative. Visual Studio per se probably isn't innovative, but it's a really stable product and better than anything else on the market. Microsoft also used to publish great and also innovative games (why not anymore?)
While some large corporations do R&D, it's almost always the small startups that are the most innovative ones. It's also obvious why - they can take some risks, and while most of them fail, some of them come out with a great idea. Large companies cant afford taking that kind of risks and losing.
They could also be just waiting for Theora to become widespread and attack then. It wouldn't make much sense to sue now if theres a possibility you can get a lot more money in the future.
They don't need to go after Google first. Google has explicitly stated they don't ensure you don't get patent litigation, so you are on your own to fight it.
This has been the tactic forever - attack the small guy first, so you get backing up to attack the big guys later if you want to.
The thing is, MPEG-LA ensures that H.264 and you are free from any patent violations. Google doesn't offer anything such, they actually say they don't take responsibility on any such tthing, so it's a patent bomb waiting to happen and any company that uses it takes risks. That's why it might make more sense to just use H.264 and save yourself from future problems.
That and the fact that H.264 is already on every device on the planet.
While I've "closed" my Facebook (seriously, why there isn't a true close account option?) for privacy reasons, lets look at it on technical terms. It's a problem with the referrer field being sent by browsers, nothing intentional on Facebook's part. If you have referrer sending disabled you aren't affected by this.
It's a bad combination of browsers sending referrer, Facebook using real names for everything and Facebook not providing enough privacy options to hide your profile, and Facebook not using https or iframing the ad box (in that case referrer would just show something like http://www.facebook.com/ads/ ).
I guess those ad networks don't actually have something that gets the personal info for clicks, but it's a possibility and I bet the referrer is saved, at least in logs and statistics.
Of course, majority of people don't care so business will continue as usual.
They should worry about international market.
Google is now facing criminal investigation in Germany. Collecting that kind of data is against the law there, as is
Germany's privacy laws generally restrict photographs of people and property without a person's consent, except in very public situations, such as a sporting event.
There has also been investigations in Sweden, Finland and UK about this and they will decide later if it requires criminal charges. It's good that Germany is doing that already, as it's clearly violating privacy and European laws.
If they combine it with a similarly good API as XNA is and get hardware support, that's great.
Coding robotics has previously required a lot of low level coding. Who of us haven't though how great it would be code your own robot easily, and make it work just like you want it to, without going to all the low level details?
Seems like they need a great big kick in the democratic ass.
Isn't free speech allowed unless you're directly threating someone? From the stories I've read this person might be corrupted. Why is he threating with arrests instead of responding to those claims? Unless of course, he is corrupted person.
It's going to be open sourced, but I seriously hope they can include drivers for the TV hardware or even some generic drivers. Android for mobile phones being open source is useless because you cannot get drivers for any of the hardware, so you cannot actually use your modifications with your device. That defeats the purpose.
I hope it also doesn't integrate too much with Google's or anyone else's Internet services. Make it work with those, but also provide an easy way to disable all such things.
Other than that, it could be a really interesting TV. Currently I have to stream content from my PC to my PS3 which then shows it in the TV. My PS3 media center has to transcode most of the content on-the-fly. Since this is linux-based Android it means you could have xmbc-like application and everything along those lines directly on your TV, with great networking capabilities. If you can also make your own changes and builds of the Android OS for it, we can install even more suitable OS for us geeks.
The policy was mean to discourage people from purchasing a lot of iPads and then reselling them for profit
What's wrong with that? Shouldn't a person be allowed to sell his device at the price he wants to?
Well, it's just the never-ending story of Apple wanting to control everything. This is what she said:
"Mr. Jobs, give a sister a break," said Campbell. "I'm not going to go sell my iPad."
Not only controlling all the applications and what you can do with the device, but controlling if you are allowed sell your device too? Everyone always says Apple is not a monopoly, but exactly how is this good for the market or people? You don't need to be a monopoly to abuse customers.
windows 7 is nice, but the cool things now are cell phones and tablets. for that you need a mobile OS with a footprint of under 1GB. Windows Phone 7 is still months away and a few years behind iPhone OS and Android.
Are you saying they should stop making Windows 7 and PC's just because cell phones and tablets are somehow "cool" things now? I'd like to keep my computer, if you don't mind.
However it also did change peoples expectations towards security in Windows, which was an important step. People complained about it first, mainly because of the old poorly designed programs. Now all those programs had time to patch up or new ones came to market, so they finally work with the new security model and people aren't saying that Windows broke their programs.
It also says "a regular stream".
Because porn is bad and it will melt your eyes. In fact we should ban sex too. No more sex in marriage either.