If you were offered the opportunity to sell your songs online, where listeners could pay $1 - $2 per song (and NOT have to but the entire album), and have the ability to preview them, and this was all done in a way that prevented unauthorized sharing, would you accept?
As a fan, I would not accept this. This is the line of reasoning that led to things like DIVX. I won't pay for intangible goods.[0] If I buy music, or software, I expect to get something I can hold in my hands (at least a CD that can be used as a backup in case my hard drive dies). I also won't accept "keyed media" (media that can only be played in one specific player, or on one specific computer). That's a recipe for disaster.
How about an online jukebox, where fans could pay, say, 25 cents to hear a song once?
That's even worse. (If you like reading my incoherent ravings, I just wrote about something much like this on technocrat.net. I won't repeat it here.)
[0]Services are another matter. As an information technology consultant, I'm actually in the service industry. I don't sell software -- I sell my skills. I sometimes write software for people, but in my own mind, I'm not selling those bytes -- I'm selling the time and effort I put into creating those bytes, and the service of helping them get it in place and running correctly.
Making it "available" does not constitute a violation. It would be the act of someone who doesn't own the CD downloading it that would be the violation.
I'd like to hear an expert legal opinion on this issue. My instincts tell me that both the person who offers it, and the person who downloads it, are equally guilty. But I don't think there is any legal precendent yet.
Cops go under cover as drunks with golds chains on and money coming out of their pockets in subways. Making it available is not the crime, it is the people that take what doesn't belong to them that is illegal.
There is a fundamental flaw in this argument. You're talking about two completely different crimes here: theft, and copyright infringement. The laws which govern physical property do not apply to intangibles (the so-called "intellectual property"), and vice versa.
Ah, but the fans they're "pissing off" are pirating the music ANYWAY. Pissing THEM off probably won't hurt their record sales....
This is so untrue.
The fans they're pissing off don't belong to any one specific category. Sure, it includes people who downloaded Metallica songs from Napster. But that's not the set of names that triggered this whole fiasco. That set of names belongs to the fans who offered Metallica songs for download. Those people probably bought the albums and ripped them to create the MP3 files in the first place. Just like I did.
Fortunately, I've been using the opennap servers lately and not the Napster servers, so I'm pretty sure my name's not on that list.
But just to be safe, I've "unshared" my Metallica songs.
So what has Metallica accomplished? Well, for one, they've reduced the number of people offering Metallica songs for download on the napster-like networks.
This means their music will be harder to get for anyone who may want to hear them. (There are places with no hard rock radio stations or MTV, believe it or not.)
This in turn will hurt their popularity and their bank accounts (less exposure -> fewer fans -> less money coming in from fans). At least in the long run.
Re:yes, rights are important
on
Pay Lars
·
· Score: 2
(I missed this story the first time around, so this is late. Sue me.)
No, I'm saying that a "right" is something that society grants an individual.
Nope. Society is simply a bunch of people trying to avoid killing each other. It has no power, and certainly it does not "grant" anything to individuals.
Your rights are yours. They are not given to you; but you can give them away. Most people give them away -- they let the government pry into their lives and take their money; they let people tell them what to do; etc.
For the most part, there's a trade-off. If nobody cooperated, then there'd be a perpetual state of violence among people. In order to avoid that, we surrender some of our rights.
You, however, have been blinded. You've been led to believe that the government is the source of power and that they deign to permit you to breathe so that they can tax you and occasionally make you kill people for them.
You've got the whole thing backwards.
the execution of the law effectively grants rights.
No. Governments have no right to exist unless we say so. People created the Constitution, which gave the government power to create laws (subject to limitations) in order to let us get on with our lives without constantly having to defend ourselves from our neighbors. People created the concept of intellectual property hundreds of years ago and made laws to define it. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. And up until about 30 years ago, it probably was a good idea.
But times have changed. The rights that we surrendered when we created intellectual property are becoming more important than the alleged benefits of intellectual property.
Among those rights is the right to share things with our friends. That's the big one for most of us. We no longer enjoy living without that right. We want it back.
This is a chnace to really talk to Metallica and not though some pr, media induced, marketing and legal BS.
You haven't been to any celebrity chats yet, have you?
You won't get to talk to Metallica. Metallica probably won't even be typing on a keyboard. Your questions will be filtered (in advance this time!) through moderators, and Metallica will give their answers, which someone else will type.
It seems to me the DMCA should *only* apply to the US of A territory.
Groups like the World Trade Organization are working hard to make sure that all the immoral, unjust and just plain stupid laws of the USA are enforceable around the world. Conversely, they are working to make sure that all of the immoral, unjust and stupid laws of the rest of the world are enforceable in the USA, too. Their vision is a unified world government, where they can exert their power in broad strokes without fear of local disturbances.
While I do think there is some merit in a "single nation of humanity", I think the harm would outweigh the benefits.
At the risk of sounding like Katz, we're fighting a war here. On our side (if you're reading this, you're almost certainly on the same side I'm on) we have consumers, individuals, artists, programmers, writers, poets, musicians -- in other words, people. We're small, and singly we're weak, but we have the advantages of creativity and cleverness, adaptability, flexibility and speed. We also have greater numbers, although most people are asleep. On the other side we have the multinational corporate giants. They're fucking huge. But they're slow and stupid, rigid, and static.
In this war, the terrain is the set of legal jurisdictions in which we (collectively) live. It's like a jungle, or a badlands, full of uneven terrain, obstacles and brush. People like us can dodge through it and evade the giants. The corporate behemoths get stuck in the sinkholes.
But the behemoths can flatten the terrain, slowly. They have enough power (money) to change laws in their favor. Wherever they stomp, the land becomes slightly more level, and the vegetation is ground into pulp. Soon, we'll have nowhere to hide, and the tanks will roll over us and crush us.
Question everything. Never take anything at face value. The world is full of lies. Don't believe what the media tell you. Don't believe what slashdot tells you. Don't believe what I tell you. Make up your own mind, and do what is right.
Hofstadter's book Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid has a discussion of this issue. (If you haven't read it yet, do so.)
He discusses this in terms of envelopes and inner messages. If I hand you a vinyl record, what is the message? You could use the record as a plate for eating from, but that's clearly not the message I was trying to give. If your understanding is a little better, you'll know that the record is a sound recording, and you'll be able to play it back. But you might not know how fast to rotate the disc, so your hearing may be at a lower or higher speed/pitch than the recording was made. Once you actually hear the sounds, there's another layer of meaning. Let's assume the record contains only human speech. It might be in a language you recognize, or it might not. You'd have to decode the langauge first, to translate the sounds into symbols (words). Then, finally you get to the innermost meaning -- the significance of the words. If the words are a poem or similarly complex communication, then simply understanding the individual words may not be enough to give you a full understanding of the communication. You'd have to be able to put the words together in the appropriate context; in other words, you'd have to be able to share some insight with the person who wrote the poem.
Imagine a poem from a hypothetical alien creature who lives on a gas giant. Perhaps the poet is eloquently singing the praises of a particularly rich methane stream. Even if you understood the individual words, would you necessarily be able to understand what the poet is talking about? We can't see or smell methane gas, after all -- so what reference points would we have in interpreting the words of a creature who can?
However, even if we fail to decode all the layers of meaning of any given communication, we still gain some understanding even from the physical envelope itself. In the case of a record, we know that there is someone out there who is capable of communcation; that this person can produce sound; that this person can engrave an analog version of these sounds into vinyl; that this person can then deliver a vinyl record over long distances; etc.
This is a bit incoherent (sorry), but I hope you get the point. And that you read the book -- it's much better than my poor little/. post would indicate.:-)
A couple years ago this was true. But under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) they are now illegal in the United States. Hell, I think even MS-DOS may be illegal under the DMCA, because it includes DEBUG.COM which can be used to circumvent copyright-enforcement technology.
The DMCA is evil. I don't really care whether Napster wins, but I want the DMCA to lose. It's unConstitutional and immoral.
When I do a search for certain bands, I will sometimes get hits for MP3s that are good hits for songs by that band, but which do not in themselves have the name of the band in title.
When you download a song from someone's computer, you're actually seeing the entire pathname to the file (e.g., \My Music\Rock and Roll\Led Zeppelin\Kashmir.mp3). This pathname is sent to the Napster server when you login (if you're running the Linux nap client, read through your shared.dat file sometime). My suspicion is that the search engine is scanning this whole pathname, and thus you may be getting a hit on a part of the pathname that simply isn't showing up in your client's output.
I list my box on Napster as a 56k conection. It keeps my get requests down to a low number
I list my 56k modem as a 56k modem and it does not help. I still max out the number of outgoing requests (10) relatively quickly whenever I'm on it. (Of course, a lot of people abort those transfers when they discover that my advertised 56k modem connection really is a 56k modem....)
Recently, anything I try to download from Napster gives me a "cannot access file" error.
Keep in mind that you aren't downloading "from Napster". You're downloading from some other Napster user -- most likely a non-technical Windows 95 or Windows 98 user.
If you get that message when downloading one of my tracks, there are two probable reasons:
my modem just disconnected from my ISP, or
my wife just rebooted the box that serves the MP3 files into Windows 98.
I saw this in meta-moderation. Nobody is likely to see my response, but I'll write it anyway!:-P
Please enlighten me...just HOW is this MP3 craze really helping artists?
Like many other people, you've been misled. You think that "MP3" must always mean "copyright infringement". It does not mean this. Or at least not always.
So how does MP3 benefit the artist today?
Legally distributed MP3 files on mp3.com give exposure to new artists who aren't played on what passes for radio stations these days. I've bought music from mp3.com artists. I'll continue to do so.
It's free advertisement. I've downloaded files over Napster for artists who I've heard of but not heard. Sometimes I find that the music does nothing for me. Other times, I find that I really like it. If I like it, I'll probably go buy an album. (I have yet to do so myself, but I've only been using Napster a short time.)
From where I'm sitting, MP3 is just another word for WAREZ, plain and simple.
Is that bad?
I used to be a "software pirate" when I was younger. (The term "warez" wasn't in vogue back then.) I played a "pirated" version of Sid Meier's Civilization on lab PCs. I couldn't have afforded to buy a copy of it, and I didn't have an x86 box to play it on (I was an Atari ST user). But it was a great game.
Later, I graduated from college, got a job, etc. I bought a copy of Civilization. And Civilization II. And Civ:CTP (for Linux). If/when Loki finishes the rumored SMAC port I'll probably buy that.
Sid Meier (and Brian Reynolds, and their companies, and Activision, and Loki) are slightly richer because I played a "pirated" copy of Civilization when I was in college.
What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that warez kids grow up. We become engineers, scientists, techies, lawyers, doctors, and so on. We're generally on the right-hand side of the IQ bell curve, so we have money. (No, I'm not rich, but I make enough money to buy my fill of music and software when I think it's worth buying.)
When the warez and MP3 kids of today (or the DVD kids of tomorrow?) grow up, what do you think they're going to do with all of their discretionary disposable income?
But when I encode my MP5, if I want to make money off it, I register it with a public database with my public key...
Digital signature. The artist would have a keypair, and sign the work with her private key. The artist's public key would verify the signature, ensuring the consumer that this really is the artist's work, and that the royalties will go to the person who deserves them.
First we gotta educate the masses about public key cryptography. Which reminds me, I need to contact someone....
The software I use to playback the MP5 stream sends a private key to this database, unlocks the stream and hits a counter for it.
Private keys are never sent across the wire. In the ideal scheme the consumer doesn't need a keypair at all. The request itself is sufficient to trigger the counters so that the accountants know where to send the royalties.
Of course, we won't get the ideal scheme, because the human race resists that. We may end up with some sort of compromise in which consumers send digitally signed requests (the electronic equivalent of "Dear Atlantic Records, I want to listen to Tori Amos's From the Choirgirl Hotel right now. Signed, Greg."). That way, the people who run this can track us more closely. They get off on that.
Personally, I could live with that compromise, but it's probably going to be a dilemma for people who like to watch "adult" videos. They will quickly realize that there's a database somewhere that contains their entire viewing history... and that this information is available to some humans somewhere, and could conceivably be revealed to other humans who might have a motive and sufficient bribe money to obtain that information. And unless my guess is wrong, aspiring politicians are right up near the top of the adult video demographic. (Successful politicians no longer need the videos; they can get the real thing. See Clinton, Bill; Kennedy, John; etc., ad nauseum.)
Because RSA was patented, replacement algorithms were developed and used instead. GNU Privacy Guard as well as PGP 5.0 and later use Diffie-Hellman, DSA and/or ElGamal instead of RSA.
Besides, PGP doesn't use public-key encryption for the whole message. It uses RSA (or equivalent) only to encrypt a random "session key", which is then applied to the whole message using a symmetric cipher. PGP 2.x uses the IDEA cipher, which is also patented, and which is patented more widely than in just the USA.
Because of all the patent nonsense, I urge everyone who still uses PGP 2.x to upgrade to PGP 5.0 or higher, or to switch to GnuPG.
If you don't use any encryption tools yet, I recommend GnuPG.
"Yet a child can log on to the library computer and surf the Web for some of the most degrading and shocking pornography available."
I suppose Mr. McCain has personal knowledge of this pornography.
I have two children at home, and the older is old enough to use Netscape with very little assistance. I give him free reign -- no proxy, no filter.
Know what he looks at? Dinosaurs. And animals.
Why does Mr. McCain think that children are even remotely interested in "shocking pornography"? As far as I can tell, only adults and adolescents are interested in that.
Slashdot Mirror
If you were offered the opportunity to sell your songs online, where listeners could pay $1 - $2 per song (and NOT have to but the entire album), and have the ability to preview them, and this was all done in a way that prevented unauthorized sharing, would you accept?
As a fan, I would not accept this. This is the line of reasoning that led to things like DIVX. I won't pay for intangible goods.[0] If I buy music, or software, I expect to get something I can hold in my hands (at least a CD that can be used as a backup in case my hard drive dies). I also won't accept "keyed media" (media that can only be played in one specific player, or on one specific computer). That's a recipe for disaster.
How about an online jukebox, where fans could pay, say, 25 cents to hear a song once?
That's even worse. (If you like reading my incoherent ravings, I just wrote about something much like this on technocrat.net. I won't repeat it here.)
[0]Services are another matter. As an information technology consultant, I'm actually in the service industry. I don't sell software -- I sell my skills. I sometimes write software for people, but in my own mind, I'm not selling those bytes -- I'm selling the time and effort I put into creating those bytes, and the service of helping them get it in place and running correctly.
Making it "available" does not constitute a violation. It would be the act of someone who doesn't own the CD downloading it that would be the violation.
I'd like to hear an expert legal opinion on this issue. My instincts tell me that both the person who offers it, and the person who downloads it, are equally guilty. But I don't think there is any legal precendent yet.
Cops go under cover as drunks with golds chains on and money coming out of their pockets in subways. Making it available is not the crime, it is the people that take what doesn't belong to them that is illegal.
There is a fundamental flaw in this argument. You're talking about two completely different crimes here: theft, and copyright infringement. The laws which govern physical property do not apply to intangibles (the so-called "intellectual property"), and vice versa.
Ah, but the fans they're "pissing off" are pirating the music ANYWAY. Pissing THEM off probably won't hurt their record sales....
This is so untrue.
The fans they're pissing off don't belong to any one specific category. Sure, it includes people who downloaded Metallica songs from Napster. But that's not the set of names that triggered this whole fiasco. That set of names belongs to the fans who offered Metallica songs for download. Those people probably bought the albums and ripped them to create the MP3 files in the first place. Just like I did.
Fortunately, I've been using the opennap servers lately and not the Napster servers, so I'm pretty sure my name's not on that list.
But just to be safe, I've "unshared" my Metallica songs.
So what has Metallica accomplished? Well, for one, they've reduced the number of people offering Metallica songs for download on the napster-like networks.
This means their music will be harder to get for anyone who may want to hear them. (There are places with no hard rock radio stations or MTV, believe it or not.)
This in turn will hurt their popularity and their bank accounts (less exposure -> fewer fans -> less money coming in from fans). At least in the long run.
(I missed this story the first time around, so this is late. Sue me.)
No, I'm saying that a "right" is something that society grants an individual.
Nope. Society is simply a bunch of people trying to avoid killing each other. It has no power, and certainly it does not "grant" anything to individuals.
Your rights are yours. They are not given to you; but you can give them away. Most people give them away -- they let the government pry into their lives and take their money; they let people tell them what to do; etc.
For the most part, there's a trade-off. If nobody cooperated, then there'd be a perpetual state of violence among people. In order to avoid that, we surrender some of our rights.
You, however, have been blinded. You've been led to believe that the government is the source of power and that they deign to permit you to breathe so that they can tax you and occasionally make you kill people for them.
You've got the whole thing backwards.
the execution of the law effectively grants rights.
No. Governments have no right to exist unless we say so. People created the Constitution, which gave the government power to create laws (subject to limitations) in order to let us get on with our lives without constantly having to defend ourselves from our neighbors. People created the concept of intellectual property hundreds of years ago and made laws to define it. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. And up until about 30 years ago, it probably was a good idea.
But times have changed. The rights that we surrendered when we created intellectual property are becoming more important than the alleged benefits of intellectual property.
Among those rights is the right to share things with our friends. That's the big one for most of us. We no longer enjoy living without that right. We want it back.
And we will take it back.
Additionally Napster should put in place filters that block files based on artist/title strings at the request of the copyright holders.
That would not be good. What if the band The The told Napster to ban every song with the word The in its filename?
This is a chnace to really talk to Metallica and not though some pr, media induced, marketing and legal BS.
You haven't been to any celebrity chats yet, have you?
You won't get to talk to Metallica. Metallica probably won't even be typing on a keyboard. Your questions will be filtered (in advance this time!) through moderators, and Metallica will give their answers, which someone else will type.
It's like a press release.
My, that was a yummy slime mold!
To me I see no difference between Scientologists and Satanists.
Read both. In my opinion, you've just insulted the Satanists by comparing them to the Scientologists.
It seems to me the DMCA should *only* apply to the US of A territory.
Groups like the World Trade Organization are working hard to make sure that all the immoral, unjust and just plain stupid laws of the USA are enforceable around the world. Conversely, they are working to make sure that all of the immoral, unjust and stupid laws of the rest of the world are enforceable in the USA, too. Their vision is a unified world government, where they can exert their power in broad strokes without fear of local disturbances.
While I do think there is some merit in a "single nation of humanity", I think the harm would outweigh the benefits.
At the risk of sounding like Katz, we're fighting a war here. On our side (if you're reading this, you're almost certainly on the same side I'm on) we have consumers, individuals, artists, programmers, writers, poets, musicians -- in other words, people. We're small, and singly we're weak, but we have the advantages of creativity and cleverness, adaptability, flexibility and speed. We also have greater numbers, although most people are asleep. On the other side we have the multinational corporate giants. They're fucking huge. But they're slow and stupid, rigid, and static.
In this war, the terrain is the set of legal jurisdictions in which we (collectively) live. It's like a jungle, or a badlands, full of uneven terrain, obstacles and brush. People like us can dodge through it and evade the giants. The corporate behemoths get stuck in the sinkholes.
But the behemoths can flatten the terrain, slowly. They have enough power (money) to change laws in their favor. Wherever they stomp, the land becomes slightly more level, and the vegetation is ground into pulp. Soon, we'll have nowhere to hide, and the tanks will roll over us and crush us.
Question everything. Never take anything at face value. The world is full of lies. Don't believe what the media tell you. Don't believe what slashdot tells you. Don't believe what I tell you. Make up your own mind, and do what is right.
Hell, those damned pop-up windows on exit from the sites are far more annoying than the content!
Turn off Javascript! Especially if you're using Netscape 4.x and have cookies enabled -- there are known security exploits.
It should all be illegal! Immoralizing filth, obscenity, child molesting filth, woman demoralizing. [...]
Bravo! That is, without a doubt, the best troll I've seen in many a year.
Keep it up and one day you may be able to play with the negative-karma boys.
Hofstadter's book Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid has a discussion of this issue. (If you haven't read it yet, do so.)
He discusses this in terms of envelopes and inner messages. If I hand you a vinyl record, what is the message? You could use the record as a plate for eating from, but that's clearly not the message I was trying to give. If your understanding is a little better, you'll know that the record is a sound recording, and you'll be able to play it back. But you might not know how fast to rotate the disc, so your hearing may be at a lower or higher speed/pitch than the recording was made. Once you actually hear the sounds, there's another layer of meaning. Let's assume the record contains only human speech. It might be in a language you recognize, or it might not. You'd have to decode the langauge first, to translate the sounds into symbols (words). Then, finally you get to the innermost meaning -- the significance of the words. If the words are a poem or similarly complex communication, then simply understanding the individual words may not be enough to give you a full understanding of the communication. You'd have to be able to put the words together in the appropriate context; in other words, you'd have to be able to share some insight with the person who wrote the poem.
Imagine a poem from a hypothetical alien creature who lives on a gas giant. Perhaps the poet is eloquently singing the praises of a particularly rich methane stream. Even if you understood the individual words, would you necessarily be able to understand what the poet is talking about? We can't see or smell methane gas, after all -- so what reference points would we have in interpreting the words of a creature who can?
However, even if we fail to decode all the layers of meaning of any given communication, we still gain some understanding even from the physical envelope itself. In the case of a record, we know that there is someone out there who is capable of communcation; that this person can produce sound; that this person can engrave an analog version of these sounds into vinyl; that this person can then deliver a vinyl record over long distances; etc.
This is a bit incoherent (sorry), but I hope you get the point. And that you read the book -- it's much better than my poor little /. post would indicate. :-)
freshmeat.net has several listing for rich text.
Software cracks are not illegal generally
A couple years ago this was true. But under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) they are now illegal in the United States. Hell, I think even MS-DOS may be illegal under the DMCA, because it includes DEBUG.COM which can be used to circumvent copyright-enforcement technology.
The DMCA is evil. I don't really care whether Napster wins, but I want the DMCA to lose. It's unConstitutional and immoral.
When I do a search for certain bands, I will sometimes get hits for MP3s that are good hits for songs by that band, but which do not in themselves have the name of the band in title.
When you download a song from someone's computer, you're actually seeing the entire pathname to the file (e.g., \My Music\Rock and Roll\Led Zeppelin\Kashmir.mp3). This pathname is sent to the Napster server when you login (if you're running the Linux nap client, read through your shared.dat file sometime). My suspicion is that the search engine is scanning this whole pathname, and thus you may be getting a hit on a part of the pathname that simply isn't showing up in your client's output.
I list my box on Napster as a 56k conection. It keeps my get requests down to a low number
I list my 56k modem as a 56k modem and it does not help. I still max out the number of outgoing requests (10) relatively quickly whenever I'm on it. (Of course, a lot of people abort those transfers when they discover that my advertised 56k modem connection really is a 56k modem....)
Recently, anything I try to download from Napster gives me a "cannot access file" error.
Keep in mind that you aren't downloading "from Napster". You're downloading from some other Napster user -- most likely a non-technical Windows 95 or Windows 98 user.
If you get that message when downloading one of my tracks, there are two probable reasons:
most MP3s that people have are indeed illegal.
I must be abnormal then. The overwhelmingly vast majority of my collection is still self-ripped.
The LAST thing America needs right now is an all powerful police state.
Too late.
I haven't read Walker's book, but it sounds like it has a great deal in common with Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.
I saw this in meta-moderation. Nobody is likely to see my response, but I'll write it anyway! :-P
Please enlighten me...just HOW is this MP3 craze really helping artists?
Like many other people, you've been misled. You think that "MP3" must always mean "copyright infringement". It does not mean this. Or at least not always.
So how does MP3 benefit the artist today?
Legally distributed MP3 files on mp3.com give exposure to new artists who aren't played on what passes for radio stations these days. I've bought music from mp3.com artists. I'll continue to do so.
It's free advertisement. I've downloaded files over Napster for artists who I've heard of but not heard. Sometimes I find that the music does nothing for me. Other times, I find that I really like it. If I like it, I'll probably go buy an album. (I have yet to do so myself, but I've only been using Napster a short time.)
From where I'm sitting, MP3 is just another word for WAREZ, plain and simple.
Is that bad?
I used to be a "software pirate" when I was younger. (The term "warez" wasn't in vogue back then.) I played a "pirated" version of Sid Meier's Civilization on lab PCs. I couldn't have afforded to buy a copy of it, and I didn't have an x86 box to play it on (I was an Atari ST user). But it was a great game.
Later, I graduated from college, got a job, etc. I bought a copy of Civilization. And Civilization II. And Civ:CTP (for Linux). If/when Loki finishes the rumored SMAC port I'll probably buy that.
Sid Meier (and Brian Reynolds, and their companies, and Activision, and Loki) are slightly richer because I played a "pirated" copy of Civilization when I was in college.
What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that warez kids grow up. We become engineers, scientists, techies, lawyers, doctors, and so on. We're generally on the right-hand side of the IQ bell curve, so we have money. (No, I'm not rich, but I make enough money to buy my fill of music and software when I think it's worth buying.)
When the warez and MP3 kids of today (or the DVD kids of tomorrow?) grow up, what do you think they're going to do with all of their discretionary disposable income?
But when I encode my MP5, if I want to make money off it, I register it with a public database with my public key...
Digital signature. The artist would have a keypair, and sign the work with her private key. The artist's public key would verify the signature, ensuring the consumer that this really is the artist's work, and that the royalties will go to the person who deserves them.
First we gotta educate the masses about public key cryptography. Which reminds me, I need to contact someone....
The software I use to playback the MP5 stream sends a private key to this database, unlocks the stream and hits a counter for it.
Private keys are never sent across the wire. In the ideal scheme the consumer doesn't need a keypair at all. The request itself is sufficient to trigger the counters so that the accountants know where to send the royalties.
Of course, we won't get the ideal scheme, because the human race resists that. We may end up with some sort of compromise in which consumers send digitally signed requests (the electronic equivalent of "Dear Atlantic Records, I want to listen to Tori Amos's From the Choirgirl Hotel right now. Signed, Greg."). That way, the people who run this can track us more closely. They get off on that.
Personally, I could live with that compromise, but it's probably going to be a dilemma for people who like to watch "adult" videos. They will quickly realize that there's a database somewhere that contains their entire viewing history... and that this information is available to some humans somewhere, and could conceivably be revealed to other humans who might have a motive and sufficient bribe money to obtain that information. And unless my guess is wrong, aspiring politicians are right up near the top of the adult video demographic. (Successful politicians no longer need the videos; they can get the real thing. See Clinton, Bill; Kennedy, John; etc., ad nauseum.)
The correct term is "homosexual" cable.
No, that's ambiguous. It could refer to a male-to-male cable or a female-to-female cable.
Because RSA was patented, replacement algorithms were developed and used instead. GNU Privacy Guard as well as PGP 5.0 and later use Diffie-Hellman, DSA and/or ElGamal instead of RSA.
Besides, PGP doesn't use public-key encryption for the whole message. It uses RSA (or equivalent) only to encrypt a random "session key", which is then applied to the whole message using a symmetric cipher. PGP 2.x uses the IDEA cipher, which is also patented, and which is patented more widely than in just the USA.
Because of all the patent nonsense, I urge everyone who still uses PGP 2.x to upgrade to PGP 5.0 or higher, or to switch to GnuPG.
If you don't use any encryption tools yet, I recommend GnuPG.
"Yet a child can log on to the library computer and surf the Web for some of the most degrading and shocking pornography available."
I suppose Mr. McCain has personal knowledge of this pornography.
I have two children at home, and the older is old enough to use Netscape with very little assistance. I give him free reign -- no proxy, no filter.
Know what he looks at? Dinosaurs. And animals.
Why does Mr. McCain think that children are even remotely interested in "shocking pornography"? As far as I can tell, only adults and adolescents are interested in that.