I wrote an on-line education system as a project in College in '96-'97 based on hacking a security model into a perl based web board system. It actually worked surprisingly well until the server ran out of disk space and the forums ended up eating themselves (mmm, flat files for teh lose).
Sadly it sounds like Blackboard's system isn't a whole lot better as commercial software written a decade later. If it weren't for the patent trolling I might even consider redoing my original system. I had that multi-role capability which predates their patent. Anybody could make a classroom and anybody could be a student or a teacher, so I guess I beat them to that.
Actually the main reason there's been a shift to removing DRM is simply that the music labels realized they were losing control to Apple. With Apple's dominance in selling music on-line and their control of ipods, the use of DRM was a lock in to Apple's distribution network. The labels moved away from DRM so, ironically, they could better control the flow of their music (the same reason they presumably insisted on it in the first place).
The reality is that DRM or not, people who wanted to get music for free could get it and people who wanted to share their music could share it. So long as there existed a high quality non-DRM'd format (CD's) or some ability to remove decryption, then DRM was pointless.
I think there is some truth to your point though about on-line sales increasing. I know that I had been hesitant to buy a lot through iTunes for the risk that I'd not be able to play the music elsewhere (or just the hassle of having to license multiple computers with Apple). Now that I can get high quality DRM free tracks from iTunes and Amazon I am far more willing to buy music.
I don't see any negative effect because it's not like DRM was keeping the music off P2P networks in the first place.
Capitalism and the market economy does solve this problem. The article states that, at current usage levels, we will run out of Helium in nine years. But because it is market driven, we won't run out, as usage levels will be forced to decline because of higher prices. As the article points out, prices have already risen because of this.
So what will happen is that, next time you go to some kids birthday party, the balloons will be filled with old fashioned lung power because helium has become too expensive. Alternatives will be found where needed, and those places where they must use helium will either pay more or find ways to recycle. Invariably some uses that cannot find an alternative will simply increase the fundamental cost of those products and services.
So in truth, we will never run out of helium, it'll just be so expensive that it may as well not exist. Hooray for the invisible hand!:)
I started reading the article but when I got to this bit I realized they had nothing useful to say:
what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it.
Ummm, if you start a business thinking that simply hiring programmers to implement your clever idea would make a successful business, you've already failed. If you want to start a successful business, the first thing you have to do is actually know how to run a business. Having a clever ideas makes you clever, maybe, but it doesn't mean you know jack about managing a business. Hiring bad programmers is simply the natural conclusion of somebody that didn't know what they were doing in the first place.
In the end, it all comes down to a simple rule of thumb: it all depends on what somebody is willing to sue over. I mean at the end of the day copyright is a pretty ephemeral concept. Is google indexing my image commercial use? Probably not, but I could certainly try to sue them and find out (though I expect the court would rule against me).
If Johnson and Johnson used it as part of a free brochure I might still be able to sue because it's clearly a promotional item for them which has some tangible monetary value to them. Whether I'd win or not, hard to say. I mean at the end of the day, I probably don't have the resources to sue over something like that unless it's pretty egregious and I could get a lawyer to take the case for a cut of the loot.
I've had images of mine used in blogs before and the blogs run ads, so is that commercial use? I don't see it as such, but I suppose I could have. I can't say as I've read the CC license legalese version, nor could I understand it if I did I suspect, so it may address that fine point. Mostly my concern is if somebody came in and used my photo in an advertisement, or actually sold prints of it. That would bug me. Otherwise, have at.
Broadly speaking CC works well, but with photography, it's a particularly thorny issue because there's a lot more complexity in how copyright and other legal issues work with a photo. The problem you tend to run into with CC is that people use it pretty liberally without thinking about the consequences of it. The vast majority of people generating all this media under a CC license don't really understand all the ramifications of it. A case that recently came up was that somebody took a photo of a kid, and then that photo was picked up by a company that used it for commercial purposes. The child's parent never signed a release for the photo.
Now, this isn't a problem with CC per se, but people will often license content under CC without realizing that, technically they may not have all the rights to do what they are doing. When I take photos, I put them on Flickr under a CC license but I use the no commercial use clause. This simplifies matters because, given that it's not for money, there's far less implications for somebody using my images.
Now why is this different from using the default copyright license? Because in that case, the areas that tend to get you into trouble are not permitted by default. If you go to my site and take a copyrighted image and use it commercially, you've clearly broken the law. If you go and take my CC licensed image, you're okay with me, but it doesn't mean I was okay in the first place. Nobody's likely to sue you for just showing an image on your Flickr account, but it's very different when you're talking about using an image in marketing materials, etc.
The big difference is that they made it easy to switch. Back in the day, going over to Mac was an all or nothing thing. You had to buy new hardware and new software and hope it all worked. Today you could buy a Mac, totally hate Mac's operating system and software and put Windows or Linux on it instead. But more to the point, you can run your Mac, mostly as a Mac, but still have access to what you need to do in windows at any time.
Ever since OSX came out I'd been interested in getting a Mac. I didn't actually make the leap though until they moved to Intel. Now with parallels and boot camp I run the Windows stuff when I have no choice, but can spend 95% of my time on the Mac side happy as a clam.
Next I think we should have an in depth discussion of how many gold bars the RIAA should be required to give each and every one of us. I think it could be interesting and nearly as likely to actually happen.
The simple truth is that there is no moneyed interest that is seeking to reduce copyright terms. In many political issues you'll find lobbyist dollars being put out on both sides of an issue and that you can find politicians friendly to your cause. There's a lot of people who profit from the current arrangement and nobody who directly profits from it's destruction.
1) People who are pissed off and drunk are more likely to shoot somebody than one who is happy and sober 2) Airplanes have a much higher concentration of pissed off and drunk people than most locations
In the real world people do get drunk and angry and pull out guns and kill people.
Yeah it'd be really funny until some drunk passenger that had missed several flights and was in a truly foul mood whipped out his.38 and started taking out flight attendants. Yeah thanks, pack your guns in your checked bags.
For perspective, the cost estimate to expand Ohare airport to handle more traffic was $7.5 billion. So you aren't building a whole lot of runways for $20 billion.
I think the real problem Google faces is that they aren't planning to make an actual device but merely define a platform for other device makers. The problem you run into is that you end up having to cripple yourself to make it work for the least powerful, smallest device and thus make it suck ass on a more powerful bigger device. Windows Mobile 6 proves this in spades.
The advantage Apple has with the iPhone is that they control the entire platform. They've got custom built hardware running a custom operating system with their custom software. It is all built from the ground up to work as an integrated phone, and thus it works pretty damn well. It also does a lot to mitigate some of the major form factor issues that make most smart phones a pain to use. But mostly it's good because it's all meant to work together.
I've got a Blu-Ray player (PS3) and I bought it figuring that I get a HD video player plus I can play games. In the end if HD-DVD becomes more popular, then I'll just pick up a player for $100 and be done with it.
A player that will play both formats and make this entire "war" irrelevant. They'll start off pricier, but in a year or two they'll be down to $100 like the single format players, and the game will be over. The result will be that the manufacturers of those players will pay a royalty to both Toshiba and Sony, and then some combination of royalty rates and features will determine what studios release on what formats.
Macs are finally becoming competitive in features and pricing and once they are adopted in the corporate world, the home user market can follow
First of all Macs have been competitive in features and pricing for a long while, but they've always deliberately tried to compete in the mid to upper segment of the market. Sure I can't get a Mac for $400, but if I drop $1000 on a Mac versus $1000 on a Dell, I'm probably getting a nicer product from Apple.
Also, now that Mac hardware can run Windows software, there's a bridge that allows people to try a mac without totally jumping on board. I was interested in OSX and Apple hardware, but it was a difficult choice to leap to that and have no way to go back. But now with Bootcamp, parallels, etc, a moderately savvy user can run both with relative ease. So it's a far more reasonable choice for somebody that runs windows at the office.
But I think my statement and yours go hand in hand. Now that it's easier to go back, a corporate environment that favors the Apple hardware, can be secure in the knowledge that, if they try an Apple roll out and it's a problem, they can always go back to Windows. IT departments are naturally risk adverse, but given that flexibility, in time, there's definitely going to be growth there.
And now you know why the "Linux on the desktop" bit has yet to happen after repeated prognostications of its ascendancy. It's not about ease of use, or any of that clap trap. It's about network effects. Why write software for 2% of the market when you can write software for 90% of the market?
The reason Linux has done well in server environments is because it doesn't have the same market share problem. There, you've got a far more diverse environment, and Linux, sharing much in common with Unix, was naturally at home in those established markets.
Not only that but the complexity of supporting Linux users is substantially higher than Windows or Mac. There's many more permutations of what a "Linux" system is than a Mac or Windows system.
1) I find a band I like 2) I look for the band on iTunes 3) If not on iTunes, I go buy the CD and rip it, never touching the CD again
As for label, except for some bands on the Metropolis label, I have ZERO idea what label any of the bands are with. The only reason I know that label is that it's small and specific to a type of music I like. Big labels cover so many different types of music that I would not know, nor care who they were.
This is such a waste of time and money by Universal. Most of the MP3 player market is iPods. If they really want to focus on the Zune market, more power to them, but I don't see that going much of anywhere.
I would have much more confidence in a cryptographic scheme that makes it effectively impossible for a voting machine to cheat.
How do you know that the cryptographic scheme makes it effectively impossible?
The problem with such systems is less that they can be hacked, but rather that people BELIEVE they can be hacked. Democracy cannot function properly if the fundamental mechanics of Democracy are not trustworthy. No matter how good the security mechanisms are, so long as they are obscure and little understood by the majority of the public, there will be a belief that those machines are rigged. That belief is a serious threat to our government.
When people believe their vote won't be counted, they won't waste the time to go vote. This drives down voter turnout, and invariably perpetuates an environment where corruption becomes rampant and borderline accepted. The best crypto in the world will not change this because ultimately because it's the appearance of impropriety that kills it, not the impropriety itself.
A common practice is for call center workers to be rated on their call times. People who are able to turn over more phone calls in a shorter period of time make more money for the call center. Why? Because call centers are paid based on volume of calls, not duration of calls.
So, if the tech support guy can come up with any excuse to get you off the phone quickly, he's more apt to get a promotion and raise.
Net neutrality doesn't prevent a network provider from providing service sensitive networking. They can prioritize the network however they want to maximize their bandwidth utilization. What they would not be able to do is provide different levels of service based on who was paying them money. If they want to make sure that VOIP, or video is as lossless as possible and lower the priority of say file sharing traffic, that's fine.
Where it becomes a problem is when they start saying, "well since Google paid more, they get higher priority." Or more specifically the problem is they'd prioritize their own services over everybody else and make them seem cheaper and faster by comparison when really it would be them crippling the competition,
Even if there was prior art, we're dependent on the overworked Patent clerk investigating and uncovering that. Once the patent is put into effect, it's very difficult to get it undone.
What I would suggest is that before a patent lawsuit can be initiated, the holder of the patent must pay for a more detailed patent review. At the initiation of that review process, they would be required to give notice to any organizations they felt might be infringing on their patent. Those potential infringers would be given an opportunity to submit evidence of why the patent is invalid.
Then, at the conclusion of that process, if the patent is ruled to be valid, they can only sue: * Companies that were on the initial list * Companies that have infringed since the review process started
If they want to sue a company that was violating the patent prior to that review process that wasn't on their list, then they could but the following limitations would be imposed: * There would be no injunctive relief possible * Damages would be capped
So basically it's like this. If you have a solid patent, you can readily go through this review process and protect yourself, no problem. However, if you don't, this process is very much stacked against you. Also, I believe this would strongly discourage the patent trolls.
The reality is that PC support is inherently more complex. There are more moving parts in a PC. The end user has far more ability to alter the proper operation of the system but changing software and components. There's a hell of a lot more that can go wrong in a PC, it's much harder to diagnose, and that is why customer satisfaction is low.
When was the last time you installed more memory on your cable box, or upgraded the operating system? Cell phones are getting more complex, but by and large they are self contained systems that don't get modified much either. I'm sure that customer satisfaction will decline, the more phones become like PC's.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote an on-line education system as a project in College in '96-'97 based on hacking a security model into a perl based web board system. It actually worked surprisingly well until the server ran out of disk space and the forums ended up eating themselves (mmm, flat files for teh lose).
Sadly it sounds like Blackboard's system isn't a whole lot better as commercial software written a decade later. If it weren't for the patent trolling I might even consider redoing my original system. I had that multi-role capability which predates their patent. Anybody could make a classroom and anybody could be a student or a teacher, so I guess I beat them to that.
Actually the main reason there's been a shift to removing DRM is simply that the music labels realized they were losing control to Apple. With Apple's dominance in selling music on-line and their control of ipods, the use of DRM was a lock in to Apple's distribution network. The labels moved away from DRM so, ironically, they could better control the flow of their music (the same reason they presumably insisted on it in the first place).
The reality is that DRM or not, people who wanted to get music for free could get it and people who wanted to share their music could share it. So long as there existed a high quality non-DRM'd format (CD's) or some ability to remove decryption, then DRM was pointless.
I think there is some truth to your point though about on-line sales increasing. I know that I had been hesitant to buy a lot through iTunes for the risk that I'd not be able to play the music elsewhere (or just the hassle of having to license multiple computers with Apple). Now that I can get high quality DRM free tracks from iTunes and Amazon I am far more willing to buy music.
I don't see any negative effect because it's not like DRM was keeping the music off P2P networks in the first place.
Capitalism and the market economy does solve this problem. The article states that, at current usage levels, we will run out of Helium in nine years. But because it is market driven, we won't run out, as usage levels will be forced to decline because of higher prices. As the article points out, prices have already risen because of this.
:)
So what will happen is that, next time you go to some kids birthday party, the balloons will be filled with old fashioned lung power because helium has become too expensive. Alternatives will be found where needed, and those places where they must use helium will either pay more or find ways to recycle. Invariably some uses that cannot find an alternative will simply increase the fundamental cost of those products and services.
So in truth, we will never run out of helium, it'll just be so expensive that it may as well not exist. Hooray for the invisible hand!
I started reading the article but when I got to this bit I realized they had nothing useful to say:
what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it.
Ummm, if you start a business thinking that simply hiring programmers to implement your clever idea would make a successful business, you've already failed. If you want to start a successful business, the first thing you have to do is actually know how to run a business. Having a clever ideas makes you clever, maybe, but it doesn't mean you know jack about managing a business. Hiring bad programmers is simply the natural conclusion of somebody that didn't know what they were doing in the first place.
In the end, it all comes down to a simple rule of thumb: it all depends on what somebody is willing to sue over. I mean at the end of the day copyright is a pretty ephemeral concept. Is google indexing my image commercial use? Probably not, but I could certainly try to sue them and find out (though I expect the court would rule against me).
If Johnson and Johnson used it as part of a free brochure I might still be able to sue because it's clearly a promotional item for them which has some tangible monetary value to them. Whether I'd win or not, hard to say. I mean at the end of the day, I probably don't have the resources to sue over something like that unless it's pretty egregious and I could get a lawyer to take the case for a cut of the loot.
I've had images of mine used in blogs before and the blogs run ads, so is that commercial use? I don't see it as such, but I suppose I could have. I can't say as I've read the CC license legalese version, nor could I understand it if I did I suspect, so it may address that fine point. Mostly my concern is if somebody came in and used my photo in an advertisement, or actually sold prints of it. That would bug me. Otherwise, have at.
Broadly speaking CC works well, but with photography, it's a particularly thorny issue because there's a lot more complexity in how copyright and other legal issues work with a photo. The problem you tend to run into with CC is that people use it pretty liberally without thinking about the consequences of it. The vast majority of people generating all this media under a CC license don't really understand all the ramifications of it. A case that recently came up was that somebody took a photo of a kid, and then that photo was picked up by a company that used it for commercial purposes. The child's parent never signed a release for the photo.
Now, this isn't a problem with CC per se, but people will often license content under CC without realizing that, technically they may not have all the rights to do what they are doing. When I take photos, I put them on Flickr under a CC license but I use the no commercial use clause. This simplifies matters because, given that it's not for money, there's far less implications for somebody using my images.
Now why is this different from using the default copyright license? Because in that case, the areas that tend to get you into trouble are not permitted by default. If you go to my site and take a copyrighted image and use it commercially, you've clearly broken the law. If you go and take my CC licensed image, you're okay with me, but it doesn't mean I was okay in the first place. Nobody's likely to sue you for just showing an image on your Flickr account, but it's very different when you're talking about using an image in marketing materials, etc.
The big difference is that they made it easy to switch. Back in the day, going over to Mac was an all or nothing thing. You had to buy new hardware and new software and hope it all worked. Today you could buy a Mac, totally hate Mac's operating system and software and put Windows or Linux on it instead. But more to the point, you can run your Mac, mostly as a Mac, but still have access to what you need to do in windows at any time.
Ever since OSX came out I'd been interested in getting a Mac. I didn't actually make the leap though until they moved to Intel. Now with parallels and boot camp I run the Windows stuff when I have no choice, but can spend 95% of my time on the Mac side happy as a clam.
Next I think we should have an in depth discussion of how many gold bars the RIAA should be required to give each and every one of us. I think it could be interesting and nearly as likely to actually happen.
The simple truth is that there is no moneyed interest that is seeking to reduce copyright terms. In many political issues you'll find lobbyist dollars being put out on both sides of an issue and that you can find politicians friendly to your cause. There's a lot of people who profit from the current arrangement and nobody who directly profits from it's destruction.
1) People who are pissed off and drunk are more likely to shoot somebody than one who is happy and sober
2) Airplanes have a much higher concentration of pissed off and drunk people than most locations
In the real world people do get drunk and angry and pull out guns and kill people.
Yeah it'd be really funny until some drunk passenger that had missed several flights and was in a truly foul mood whipped out his .38 and started taking out flight attendants. Yeah thanks, pack your guns in your checked bags.
Every application? http://handbrake.m0k.org/
Not so much...
For perspective, the cost estimate to expand Ohare airport to handle more traffic was $7.5 billion. So you aren't building a whole lot of runways for $20 billion.
I think the real problem Google faces is that they aren't planning to make an actual device but merely define a platform for other device makers. The problem you run into is that you end up having to cripple yourself to make it work for the least powerful, smallest device and thus make it suck ass on a more powerful bigger device. Windows Mobile 6 proves this in spades.
The advantage Apple has with the iPhone is that they control the entire platform. They've got custom built hardware running a custom operating system with their custom software. It is all built from the ground up to work as an integrated phone, and thus it works pretty damn well. It also does a lot to mitigate some of the major form factor issues that make most smart phones a pain to use. But mostly it's good because it's all meant to work together.
I've got a Blu-Ray player (PS3) and I bought it figuring that I get a HD video player plus I can play games. In the end if HD-DVD becomes more popular, then I'll just pick up a player for $100 and be done with it.
But really, here's where it all ends up:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/ricoh-announces-blurayhd-dvd-combo-player-186735.php
A player that will play both formats and make this entire "war" irrelevant. They'll start off pricier, but in a year or two they'll be down to $100 like the single format players, and the game will be over. The result will be that the manufacturers of those players will pay a royalty to both Toshiba and Sony, and then some combination of royalty rates and features will determine what studios release on what formats.
Macs are finally becoming competitive in features and pricing and once they are adopted in the corporate world, the home user market can follow
First of all Macs have been competitive in features and pricing for a long while, but they've always deliberately tried to compete in the mid to upper segment of the market. Sure I can't get a Mac for $400, but if I drop $1000 on a Mac versus $1000 on a Dell, I'm probably getting a nicer product from Apple.
Also, now that Mac hardware can run Windows software, there's a bridge that allows people to try a mac without totally jumping on board. I was interested in OSX and Apple hardware, but it was a difficult choice to leap to that and have no way to go back. But now with Bootcamp, parallels, etc, a moderately savvy user can run both with relative ease. So it's a far more reasonable choice for somebody that runs windows at the office.
But I think my statement and yours go hand in hand. Now that it's easier to go back, a corporate environment that favors the Apple hardware, can be secure in the knowledge that, if they try an Apple roll out and it's a problem, they can always go back to Windows. IT departments are naturally risk adverse, but given that flexibility, in time, there's definitely going to be growth there.
And now you know why the "Linux on the desktop" bit has yet to happen after repeated prognostications of its ascendancy. It's not about ease of use, or any of that clap trap. It's about network effects. Why write software for 2% of the market when you can write software for 90% of the market?
The reason Linux has done well in server environments is because it doesn't have the same market share problem. There, you've got a far more diverse environment, and Linux, sharing much in common with Unix, was naturally at home in those established markets.
Not only that but the complexity of supporting Linux users is substantially higher than Windows or Mac. There's many more permutations of what a "Linux" system is than a Mac or Windows system.
So here's how I buy music:
1) I find a band I like
2) I look for the band on iTunes
3) If not on iTunes, I go buy the CD and rip it, never touching the CD again
As for label, except for some bands on the Metropolis label, I have ZERO idea what label any of the bands are with. The only reason I know that label is that it's small and specific to a type of music I like. Big labels cover so many different types of music that I would not know, nor care who they were.
This is such a waste of time and money by Universal. Most of the MP3 player market is iPods. If they really want to focus on the Zune market, more power to them, but I don't see that going much of anywhere.
I would have much more confidence in a cryptographic scheme that makes it effectively impossible for a voting machine to cheat.
How do you know that the cryptographic scheme makes it effectively impossible?
The problem with such systems is less that they can be hacked, but rather that people BELIEVE they can be hacked. Democracy cannot function properly if the fundamental mechanics of Democracy are not trustworthy. No matter how good the security mechanisms are, so long as they are obscure and little understood by the majority of the public, there will be a belief that those machines are rigged. That belief is a serious threat to our government.
When people believe their vote won't be counted, they won't waste the time to go vote. This drives down voter turnout, and invariably perpetuates an environment where corruption becomes rampant and borderline accepted. The best crypto in the world will not change this because ultimately because it's the appearance of impropriety that kills it, not the impropriety itself.
A common practice is for call center workers to be rated on their call times. People who are able to turn over more phone calls in a shorter period of time make more money for the call center. Why? Because call centers are paid based on volume of calls, not duration of calls.
So, if the tech support guy can come up with any excuse to get you off the phone quickly, he's more apt to get a promotion and raise.
If it's a choice between Windows and PMITA Prison, Windows is a slightly better option :)
Q: How many pirates get their music from web radio?
A: ZERO
Does anyone even bother trying to record web radio?
A: No
Hello RIAA. See that bag there. It has no cats in it. It will never have cats in it again. Get over it.
Net neutrality doesn't prevent a network provider from providing service sensitive networking. They can prioritize the network however they want to maximize their bandwidth utilization. What they would not be able to do is provide different levels of service based on who was paying them money. If they want to make sure that VOIP, or video is as lossless as possible and lower the priority of say file sharing traffic, that's fine.
Where it becomes a problem is when they start saying, "well since Google paid more, they get higher priority." Or more specifically the problem is they'd prioritize their own services over everybody else and make them seem cheaper and faster by comparison when really it would be them crippling the competition,
Even if there was prior art, we're dependent on the overworked Patent clerk investigating and uncovering that. Once the patent is put into effect, it's very difficult to get it undone.
What I would suggest is that before a patent lawsuit can be initiated, the holder of the patent must pay for a more detailed patent review. At the initiation of that review process, they would be required to give notice to any organizations they felt might be infringing on their patent. Those potential infringers would be given an opportunity to submit evidence of why the patent is invalid.
Then, at the conclusion of that process, if the patent is ruled to be valid, they can only sue:
* Companies that were on the initial list
* Companies that have infringed since the review process started
If they want to sue a company that was violating the patent prior to that review process that wasn't on their list, then they could but the following limitations would be imposed:
* There would be no injunctive relief possible
* Damages would be capped
So basically it's like this. If you have a solid patent, you can readily go through this review process and protect yourself, no problem. However, if you don't, this process is very much stacked against you. Also, I believe this would strongly discourage the patent trolls.
The reality is that PC support is inherently more complex. There are more moving parts in a PC. The end user has far more ability to alter the proper operation of the system but changing software and components. There's a hell of a lot more that can go wrong in a PC, it's much harder to diagnose, and that is why customer satisfaction is low.
When was the last time you installed more memory on your cable box, or upgraded the operating system? Cell phones are getting more complex, but by and large they are self contained systems that don't get modified much either. I'm sure that customer satisfaction will decline, the more phones become like PC's.
It's just the nature of the beast.