In my opinion, SACD never got off the ground because the licensing fees made it too much of a chicken-egg proposition. The hardware manufacturers didn't want to pay to add a useless SACD chip to their equipment, and the record companies don't want to pay the added expense of licensing SACD from Sony/Philips.
The whole thing could've been handled better from the perspective of the record companies and from the SACD if they had done the following when the format originally came out.
For the first five years, no-fee licensing of the SACD format.
Sony put an SACD chip in the PSX/PS2, as well as in all its other consumer CD products. Philips do the same.
Phase out the CD compatibility layer in SACDs after 5-7 years.
That would've left them with a DRM-strong format with good fidelity, and due to PS2 ubiquity, they'd have enough market penetration to phase out the production of CDA altogether.
Fortunately for us, Sony/Philips aren't as smart as I am.;-)
And it wouldn't really be too hard to program a robot that could recognise itself in a mirror.
Really? Such a thing appears to be capital-h Hard. If you put a little daub of paint on a chimp, it will rub at the spot in the mirror. I don't know of any robots who go about cleaning themselves off when a little paint has spilled on an arm or a tread. Do you? And that's just for starters. A true chimp-equivalent robot would still have to come recognize "that's me" if it's completely covered with paint, or partially covered with a tarp, or if it's been bent or under low lighting. Of course, even humans can be briefly fooled by their own reflections, but not for very long at all.
There is no current test for self-awareness.... Dolphins and gorillas... Well, I'm not too convinced...Though I'll admit that this is mainly due to no-one having inventing a convincing self-awareness test, yet.
The problem here isn't a lack of a self-awareness test per se. The problem is that human beings are not entirely rational. Therefore there is no test that one can use to reliably convince anyone of anything. Mountains of evidence exist that evolution is a real phenomenon, yet many people are still "not too convinced." What would ever convince them? When you get down to it, nothing. They will never be convinced.
Similarly, it seems clear that you can never be convinced that animals are sentient. You seemingly have a mystical belief in the unique status of the human soul (what you call "id"). And there's nothing wrong with that position. Plenty of philosophers, including Penrose who you refer to in all but name, would agree. But don't pretend that the problem is lack of a good definition. Definitions are a dime a dozen, and as good as you want them to be.
For instance, I'd define "self-aware" as the ability to understand, on some level, that others have consciousness, and that you can manipulate their perception of truth. Hence, when my cat ducks out of the way thinking I can't see him, he's aware that there is an I who is looking at him, and aware there is a he, who is being concealed from me. Others would define it in either more or less strictly. (On the lenient side, maybe scurrying cockroaches are borderline self-aware. Or the stricter side, maybe not even human toddlers count as sentient.) But nobody can define it for everyone because it's ultimately a matter of faith.
Naturally, if a computer were capable of judging a "Turing test" for art, a computer would be capable of creating that art
Why? That certainly doesn't hold true for human Art Competition judges.
(And on a more serious note, a computer neural network can be trained to recognize certain patterns without having to "know" anything about how to create those patterns. E.g. a face recognition program doesn't have to know how to make faces. Although it would be really cool if it did, and made scowls at the ugly suspected terrorists and winks at the cute ones.)
"Here's the birth certificate, the hospital bill, the fee for his initial Windows license and the fee for the first year of his right-to-listen-to-music license. We can combine those into the second mortgage loan amount or do you want to use your credit card?"
Funny? No, that's not funny at all. In our parents generation it would've been freaky to graduate college with $10,000 or more in credit card debt hanging over your head. Now it's the norm. It used to be common law for contracts to be unenforceable against minors. Now, minors can be bound to contracts for "necessities." It really won't be a surprise if in a generation or so, toddlers are held to promises to pay their monthly RIAA user fees.
When Microsoft tempts these organizations and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts.
If Microsoft had been able to complete Longhorn a couple of years ago, this strategy might've worked. But now large portions of the web are outside the reach of Microsoft's potential ability to control them. China most prominently, but even in other places W3C standards will maintain enough of a foothold to fight off.NET to a stalemate. In the end, Longhorn will at most be able to lock down the United States and perhaps a few vassal states. Like DMCA and PATRIOT ACT, it'll be just one more buckle on the technological straitjacket that surrounds the USA.
I'd really hate it if the Cannes festival has become nothing more than a vehicle for politics.
You ever wonder why so many artists are leftists? It's because rightists like to imagine that art may be devoid of political bias. But artists know that what they produce is inherently political and propagandistic. So they veer leftward where there is sympathy for the transgressive thoughts placed into their art.
Others have already pointed out that "gas" is short for "gasoline." I just wanted to add that the word in Spanish is gasolina, in Japanese gasorin, in German gasolin, in Portuguese gasolina, so the Americans are hardly alone. In fact, the only major language that uses petrol besides British English is Afrikaans. Most European languages use the word "benzine" or a derivative thereof.
Point being that it appears "petrol" is the odd man out.
Okay, that's a relief. I mean, if letting pirates upgrade XP was actually a cynically evil plan to further MS dominance, then not letting pirates upgrade XP must be good, right?
I was going to just mod this back down but really, I'm genuinely curious. Could someone explain to me how "mind-numbingly obvious" to the first part and "exactly wrong" (in fact, xvid was actually named because it's "divx" backwards) to the second part becomes (Score:4, Interesting)?
DMCA Title 17, Chapter 12, Section 1201 (a) (1) (A) states " No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." If your network communictions...[are] not protected under the copyright law, then...[they are] not protected under the DMCA.
Eh? Original works are automatically protected by copyright. That includes network communications. Unless you are insinuating that if a work has been illegally copied, it somehow loses its protection under copyright law.
The fact that a given p2p network may have one or more infringing items on it does not mean that the original copyright holder has carte blanche to circumvent the "access control" provisions of the DMCA in order to reassert control over his own work. To suggest such would be ludicrous. In that case, all one would have to do to be legally able to defeat any technological copy-protection measure would be to arrange for a friend of yours to, without your express permission, load up a ditty you wrote onto a device or network, then, under the umbrella of accessing a non-protected work, crack the copy protection measures in place. (Yes, I know that the RIAA was at one point lobbying exactly for that "ludicrous" right. But as far as I know, it never got out of committee. I'm sure someone can enlighten us.)
If you want to really know how the DMCA works, then either consult a lawyer or enroll in law school yourself.
Having a law degree is neither a necessary nor sufficient means of understanding the DMCA, or any statute. Practicing law and having a full understanding of it are in principle orthogonal concepts, although in reality of course it helps to have been to school.
They do not allow you to download music in an MP3 format for convenient dumping into your Kazaa directory, but life is full of compromises.
See, here's the part that you music-industry shills can't seem to get right.
It's already easy as pie to get non-DRM encumbered music for free. It's already easy to rip songs and stick them in a Kazaa directory. Mp3's are out there, and there not going away. So iTunes really isn't protecting anything by wrapping their songs up in DRM. It only serves as a way to prevent their own customers from legally accessing music they've purchased. That's not a "compromise," that's a meaningless obstacle course.
If iTunes sold mp3s, the only possible outcome would be more people actually buying mp3s instead of getting them illegally.
If you publish and the PTO later declines to grant a Big Company a patent because of your prior art, their $$$ aren't going to change that. There's nothing for them to sue you about. Besides, their beef is with the PTO, not with you.
And by the way, moderators, the parent post was an opinion. If you liked the opinion, it should be modded insightful, not informative. "Informative" is best reserved for posts that reveal factual information which was previously unknown to you.
Unfortunately there is no "predictably cynical" moderation rating.
Only 3x. I'll take guesse here that most of what you store in png format is art/cartoon stuff and not photographic type pictures.
Actually, no, it's almost all photo-work, albeit usually with easily compressed digital manipulations. I did some additional testing with non-manipulated photos and I found that pngs don't compress them nearly as well, and so are 4 or 5x as large as comparable jpegs.
Further, in acknowledgment of what another poster said - it's true, I wasn't considering the predicament of webmasters. Under such circumstances, I can understand why every byte saved would be important.
This bill is a good start, but as many people have already pointed out, it is easy for someone to unwittingly "consent" to spyware by speed-clicking through EULAs.
I'd like to see a couple more changes, something similar to the following:
1)Any GUI program which has the ability to transmit information over the internet without explicit action being taken by the user should have a standardized graphic warning dialog box, similar in appearance to the "US Surgeon General's Warning." This warning should say:
WARNING: The program you are about to install will transmit information over the internet without any enabling action being taken by you. Do you accept? {I DO NOT ACCEPT | I ACCEPT | I WANT MORE INFORMATION}
The program must also include a WARNING.TXT file as described below.
If the software is run through a command-line interface or other interface which precludes the production of the standardized graphic, then it shall be sufficient for it to include in its installation package a file called "WARNING.TXT" which states, "The program you are about to install will transmit information over the internet without any enabling action being taken by you. Installation or usage of this program is deemed acceptance." This text file should preferably, but optionally, also explain the reason for needing an internet connection in plain language.
If the software included as part of a package or operating system, then it would be sufficient for there to be one standardized graphic warning which is produced at the installation of the package and one WARNING.TXT file which names the individual files with internet capabilities.
Note, programs which only send information over the internet when expressly commanded to do so by the user are not required to have a warning of any kind.
Second: All EULAs should have their terms spelled out in a separate text file called "EULA.TXT" which can be read or printed as a standard text file on the target system. If the program comes with a hard-copy instruction manual which is over four pages in length, then the EULA must also be printed in the manual.
Any software which should have the standardized graphic warning dialog box, WARNING.TXT and/or EULA.TXT and doesn't would automatically be deemed in violation of the law.
Here's the thing. Even without such a law being passed, responsible coders in the OSS world could start to institute similar provisions. Eventually, one would hope that people would come to expect the appropriate warning image or file in their software, and would be wary of software which didn't have it. Of course, I wouldn't expect my exact suggestions to be implemented, but it would be better, in my lay opinion, for coders to organize a reasonable standard than to have the government impose something unreasonable upon them.
I find that my pngs are about 3x the size of my jpgs.
On the other hand, I also find that I have vastly more than 3x the disk space, processor speed, and bandwidth than I had back when jpegs were first coming into wide use. So, all things considered, relatively speaking, pngs aren't really huge at all.
You're arguing that "music has become a utility." Okay, so when did this happen? What was music before it was a utility? Was it less useful before or moreso? Wasn't it always something that the rich could afford a lot of and the poor rather less of?
And anyway, since when is a "utility" the opposite of a "necessity"? Water's a utility but it's also a necessity by any measure. A "utility" is just something provided by a public service company, gas, heat, telephone, etc. Along the sliding scale of wants and needs, most utilities are closer to needs than wants. So your argument really doesn't hold any, er, water.
I think what happened is that you meant to argue the point that music has become a commodity (a mass-produced unspecialized product). But somewhere along the line you got the words commodity and utility mixed up, and things just went downhill from there.
How did the parent get modded as "insightful"? In fact, it seems the very opposite of insightful since he fails to realize that the post he was replying to was just a joke. One fscking obvious clue being that Edison's patent portfolio expired a long time ago.
Anyway, Venus in transit...booooring...wake me up when they find Percival Lowell's time-lapse photos of the green men taking down their Martian canals.
You agree that you will not attempt to, or encourage or assist any other person to, circumvent or modify any security technology or software that is part of the Service or used to administer the Usage Rules.
OK, that's in the contract, but so what? IANAL, but when someone breaks the terms of a EULA, it seems to me that you have to sue them for breach of contract. When you go to court, the judge would doubtless pass judgment in favor of the plaintiff (Apple), but then, damages have to be assessed. And the question is, how was Apple damaged by the breach, if Joe Shmoe happens to unlock some iTunes for his own private personal use?
Apple can't claim that Joe cost them lost income -- they already sold the song, and so long as Joe doesn't redstribute his rip, he's not interfering with potential earnings.
OTOH, they most assuredly would have a good case against the author of PlayFair for unfairly diminishing the value of their FairPlay asset, and against SourceForge for hosting it after C&D has been served. But that's not breach of K, it's a straightforward tort.
These dark ages you speak of will, like the first one, only exist in the Western world. Eastern nations are wisely disregarding this last-gasp attempt by Western industry to monopolize knowledge. So in a generation or so, the US and Western Europe will be crippled by their own enforced ignorance.
Despite what you often hear on slashdot, anecdotal evidence is not always useless. It's exactly in a case like this when it is useful. If it's alleged that downloading does not have any affect on purchases at all, then all it does is take one person's counterexample to prove the allegation wrong. All it took was one Moroccan mule to disprove that a mare and a donkey can never produce fertile offspring.
Now perhaps a more reasonable hypothesis might be: "In the aggregate, downloading can be shown to have a minimal effect on purchases. That's a horse of a different color, and certain studies seem to support that position. Although since music retail sales have never been a constant, I'm not exactly sure such conclusions can be considered ironclad.
That could serve a purpose as well, but the point of an infinite camera is that things you don't know are important (yet) would be saved. See how this would've come in handy for either Kobe Bryant or his alleged victim? Of course, one could argue that a person probably wouldn't commit adultery in the first place with the possibility of a camera recording his every move. The answer to that, though, is to go somewhere where nobody knows you and there is virtually no possibility for blackmail even with a record kept. With quadrillions of hours of mostly boring permanent history being recorded worldwide, the chances of your sex junket to Cuba finding its way back to you are minuscule.
Keep up, fella. Sure, last week DVD+R was second in compatibility. But this week, it turns out that DVD-R will be incompatible with itself. I'd say that at least ties it for last place.:)
In any event, the article you were so kind to link to is essentially telling us that the pissing match (read: patent royalty war) is over. From now on drives will be expected to read and write both disk formats.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole thing could've been handled better from the perspective of the record companies and from the SACD if they had done the following when the format originally came out.
That would've left them with a DRM-strong format with good fidelity, and due to PS2 ubiquity, they'd have enough market penetration to phase out the production of CDA altogether.
Fortunately for us, Sony/Philips aren't as smart as I am.
And it wouldn't really be too hard to program a robot that could recognise itself in a mirror.
Really? Such a thing appears to be capital-h Hard. If you put a little daub of paint on a chimp, it will rub at the spot in the mirror. I don't know of any robots who go about cleaning themselves off when a little paint has spilled on an arm or a tread. Do you? And that's just for starters. A true chimp-equivalent robot would still have to come recognize "that's me" if it's completely covered with paint, or partially covered with a tarp, or if it's been bent or under low lighting. Of course, even humans can be briefly fooled by their own reflections, but not for very long at all.
There is no current test for self-awareness....
Dolphins and gorillas... Well, I'm not too convinced...Though I'll admit that this is mainly due to no-one having inventing a convincing self-awareness test, yet.
The problem here isn't a lack of a self-awareness test per se. The problem is that human beings are not entirely rational. Therefore there is no test that one can use to reliably convince anyone of anything. Mountains of evidence exist that evolution is a real phenomenon, yet many people are still "not too convinced." What would ever convince them? When you get down to it, nothing. They will never be convinced.
Similarly, it seems clear that you can never be convinced that animals are sentient. You seemingly have a mystical belief in the unique status of the human soul (what you call "id"). And there's nothing wrong with that position. Plenty of philosophers, including Penrose who you refer to in all but name, would agree. But don't pretend that the problem is lack of a good definition. Definitions are a dime a dozen, and as good as you want them to be.
For instance, I'd define "self-aware" as the ability to understand, on some level, that others have consciousness, and that you can manipulate their perception of truth. Hence, when my cat ducks out of the way thinking I can't see him, he's aware that there is an I who is looking at him, and aware there is a he, who is being concealed from me. Others would define it in either more or less strictly. (On the lenient side, maybe scurrying cockroaches are borderline self-aware. Or the stricter side, maybe not even human toddlers count as sentient.) But nobody can define it for everyone because it's ultimately a matter of faith.
Naturally, if a computer were capable of judging a "Turing test" for art, a computer would be capable of creating that art
Why? That certainly doesn't hold true for human Art Competition judges.
(And on a more serious note, a computer neural network can be trained to recognize certain patterns without having to "know" anything about how to create those patterns. E.g. a face recognition program doesn't have to know how to make faces. Although it would be really cool if it did, and made scowls at the ugly suspected terrorists and winks at the cute ones.)
"Here's the birth certificate, the hospital bill, the fee for his initial Windows license and the fee for the first year of his right-to-listen-to-music license. We can combine those into the second mortgage loan amount or do you want to use your credit card?"
Funny? No, that's not funny at all. In our parents generation it would've been freaky to graduate college with $10,000 or more in credit card debt hanging over your head. Now it's the norm. It used to be common law for contracts to be unenforceable against minors. Now, minors can be bound to contracts for "necessities." It really won't be a surprise if in a generation or so, toddlers are held to promises to pay their monthly RIAA user fees.
When Microsoft tempts these organizations and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts.
.NET to a stalemate. In the end, Longhorn will at most be able to lock down the United States and perhaps a few vassal states. Like DMCA and PATRIOT ACT, it'll be just one more buckle on the technological straitjacket that surrounds the USA.
If Microsoft had been able to complete Longhorn a couple of years ago, this strategy might've worked. But now large portions of the web are outside the reach of Microsoft's potential ability to control them. China most prominently, but even in other places W3C standards will maintain enough of a foothold to fight off
I'd really hate it if the Cannes festival has become nothing more than a vehicle for politics.
You ever wonder why so many artists are leftists? It's because rightists like to imagine that art may be devoid of political bias. But artists know that what they produce is inherently political and propagandistic. So they veer leftward where there is sympathy for the transgressive thoughts placed into their art.
Art without an opinion is known as craftwork.
Others have already pointed out that "gas" is short for "gasoline." I just wanted to add that the word in Spanish is gasolina, in Japanese gasorin, in German gasolin, in Portuguese gasolina, so the Americans are hardly alone. In fact, the only major language that uses petrol besides British English is Afrikaans. Most European languages use the word "benzine" or a derivative thereof.
Point being that it appears "petrol" is the odd man out.
No SP2 For Pirated XP Copies
Okay, that's a relief. I mean, if letting pirates upgrade XP was actually a cynically evil plan to further MS dominance, then not letting pirates upgrade XP must be good, right?
I was going to just mod this back down but really, I'm genuinely curious. Could someone explain to me how "mind-numbingly obvious" to the first part and "exactly wrong" (in fact, xvid was actually named because it's "divx" backwards) to the second part becomes (Score:4, Interesting)?
three ring binders are useless here in the UK
Somehow, that's the funniest part of the entire affair.
DMCA Title 17, Chapter 12, Section 1201 (a) (1) (A) states " No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." If your network communictions...[are] not protected under the copyright law, then...[they are] not protected under the DMCA.
Eh? Original works are automatically protected by copyright. That includes network communications. Unless you are insinuating that if a work has been illegally copied, it somehow loses its protection under copyright law.
The fact that a given p2p network may have one or more infringing items on it does not mean that the original copyright holder has carte blanche to circumvent the "access control" provisions of the DMCA in order to reassert control over his own work. To suggest such would be ludicrous. In that case, all one would have to do to be legally able to defeat any technological copy-protection measure would be to arrange for a friend of yours to, without your express permission, load up a ditty you wrote onto a device or network, then, under the umbrella of accessing a non-protected work, crack the copy protection measures in place. (Yes, I know that the RIAA was at one point lobbying exactly for that "ludicrous" right. But as far as I know, it never got out of committee. I'm sure someone can enlighten us.)
If you want to really know how the DMCA works, then either consult a lawyer or enroll in law school yourself.
Having a law degree is neither a necessary nor sufficient means of understanding the DMCA, or any statute. Practicing law and having a full understanding of it are in principle orthogonal concepts, although in reality of course it helps to have been to school.
They do not allow you to download music in an MP3 format for convenient dumping into your Kazaa directory, but life is full of compromises.
See, here's the part that you music-industry shills can't seem to get right.
It's already easy as pie to get non-DRM encumbered music for free. It's already easy to rip songs and stick them in a Kazaa directory. Mp3's are out there, and there not going away. So iTunes really isn't protecting anything by wrapping their songs up in DRM. It only serves as a way to prevent their own customers from legally accessing music they've purchased. That's not a "compromise," that's a meaningless obstacle course.
If iTunes sold mp3s, the only possible outcome would be more people actually buying mp3s instead of getting them illegally.
Where's the downside?
If you publish and the PTO later declines to grant a Big Company a patent because of your prior art, their $$$ aren't going to change that. There's nothing for them to sue you about. Besides, their beef is with the PTO, not with you.
And by the way, moderators, the parent post was an opinion. If you liked the opinion, it should be modded insightful, not informative. "Informative" is best reserved for posts that reveal factual information which was previously unknown to you.
Unfortunately there is no "predictably cynical" moderation rating.
Me and my buddy Leonardo's contribution to juvenilia, sarcasm, deliberately bad jokes, and tasteless nonsense.
1) Invent auto 400 years early
2) ???
3) Prophet!!!
A real wise guy, that Leo. Pun intended.
Only 3x. I'll take guesse here that most of what you store in png format is art/cartoon stuff and not photographic type pictures.
Actually, no, it's almost all photo-work, albeit usually with easily compressed digital manipulations. I did some additional testing with non-manipulated photos and I found that pngs don't compress them nearly as well, and so are 4 or 5x as large as comparable jpegs.
Further, in acknowledgment of what another poster said - it's true, I wasn't considering the predicament of webmasters. Under such circumstances, I can understand why every byte saved would be important.
I'd like to see a couple more changes, something similar to the following:
1)Any GUI program which has the ability to transmit information over the internet without explicit action being taken by the user should have a standardized graphic warning dialog box, similar in appearance to the "US Surgeon General's Warning." This warning should say: The program must also include a WARNING.TXT file as described below.
If the software is run through a command-line interface or other interface which precludes the production of the standardized graphic, then it shall be sufficient for it to include in its installation package a file called "WARNING.TXT" which states, "The program you are about to install will transmit information over the internet without any enabling action being taken by you. Installation or usage of this program is deemed acceptance." This text file should preferably, but optionally, also explain the reason for needing an internet connection in plain language.
If the software included as part of a package or operating system, then it would be sufficient for
there to be one standardized graphic warning which is produced at the installation of the package and one WARNING.TXT file which names the individual files with internet capabilities.
Note, programs which only send information over the internet when expressly commanded to do so by the user are not required to have a warning of any kind.
Second: All EULAs should have their terms spelled out in a separate text file called "EULA.TXT" which can be read or printed as a standard text file on the target system. If the program comes with a hard-copy instruction manual which is over four pages in length, then the EULA must also be printed in the manual.
Any software which should have the standardized graphic warning dialog box, WARNING.TXT and/or EULA.TXT and doesn't would automatically be deemed in violation of the law.
Here's the thing. Even without such a law being passed, responsible coders in the OSS world could start to institute similar provisions. Eventually, one would hope that people would come to expect the appropriate warning image or file in their software, and would be wary of software which didn't have it. Of course, I wouldn't expect my exact suggestions to be implemented, but it would be better, in my lay opinion, for coders to organize a reasonable standard than to have the government impose something unreasonable upon them.
they'll be huge compared to JPEG
I find that my pngs are about 3x the size of my jpgs.
On the other hand, I also find that I have vastly more than 3x the disk space, processor speed, and bandwidth than I had back when jpegs were first coming into wide use. So, all things considered, relatively speaking, pngs aren't really huge at all.
Your thesis seems a bit confused.
You're arguing that "music has become a utility." Okay, so when did this happen? What was music before it was a utility? Was it less useful before or moreso? Wasn't it always something that the rich could afford a lot of and the poor rather less of?
And anyway, since when is a "utility" the opposite of a "necessity"? Water's a utility but it's also a necessity by any measure. A "utility" is just something provided by a public service company, gas, heat, telephone, etc. Along the sliding scale of wants and needs, most utilities are closer to needs than wants. So your argument really doesn't hold any, er, water.
I think what happened is that you meant to argue the point that music has become a commodity (a mass-produced unspecialized product). But somewhere along the line you got the words commodity and utility mixed up, and things just went downhill from there.
How did the parent get modded as "insightful"? In fact, it seems the very opposite of insightful since he fails to realize that the post he was replying to was just a joke. One fscking obvious clue being that Edison's patent portfolio expired a long time ago.
Anyway, Venus in transit...booooring...wake me up when they find Percival Lowell's time-lapse photos of the green men taking down their Martian canals.
Right. Following your own link to its Business Week article origins, we read:
You agree that you will not attempt to, or encourage or assist any other person to, circumvent or modify any security technology or software that is part of the Service or used to administer the Usage Rules.
OK, that's in the contract, but so what? IANAL, but when someone breaks the terms of a EULA, it seems to me that you have to sue them for breach of contract. When you go to court, the judge would doubtless pass judgment in favor of the plaintiff (Apple), but then, damages have to be assessed. And the question is, how was Apple damaged by the breach, if Joe Shmoe happens to unlock some iTunes for his own private personal use?
Apple can't claim that Joe cost them lost income -- they already sold the song, and so long as Joe doesn't redstribute his rip, he's not interfering with potential earnings.
OTOH, they most assuredly would have a good case against the author of PlayFair for unfairly diminishing the value of their FairPlay asset, and against SourceForge for hosting it after C&D has been served. But that's not breach of K, it's a straightforward tort.
These dark ages you speak of will, like the first one, only exist in the Western world. Eastern nations are wisely disregarding this last-gasp attempt by Western industry to monopolize knowledge. So in a generation or so, the US and Western Europe will be crippled by their own enforced ignorance.
So yeah, fight. Or move to China.
Despite what you often hear on slashdot, anecdotal evidence is not always useless. It's exactly in a case like this when it is useful. If it's alleged that downloading does not have any affect on purchases at all, then all it does is take one person's counterexample to prove the allegation wrong. All it took was one Moroccan mule to disprove that a mare and a donkey can never produce fertile offspring.
Now perhaps a more reasonable hypothesis might be: "In the aggregate, downloading can be shown to have a minimal effect on purchases. That's a horse of a different color, and certain studies seem to support that position. Although since music retail sales have never been a constant, I'm not exactly sure such conclusions can be considered ironclad.
That could serve a purpose as well, but the point of an infinite camera is that things you don't know are important (yet) would be saved. See how this would've come in handy for either Kobe Bryant or his alleged victim? Of course, one could argue that a person probably wouldn't commit adultery in the first place with the possibility of a camera recording his every move. The answer to that, though, is to go somewhere where nobody knows you and there is virtually no possibility for blackmail even with a record kept. With quadrillions of hours of mostly boring permanent history being recorded worldwide, the chances of your sex junket to Cuba finding its way back to you are minuscule.
Keep up, fella. Sure, last week DVD+R was second in compatibility. But this week, it turns out that DVD-R will be incompatible with itself. I'd say that at least ties it for last place. :)
In any event, the article you were so kind to link to is essentially telling us that the pissing match (read: patent royalty war) is over. From now on drives will be expected to read and write both disk formats.