Excellent points, I think on a moral or at least "what we should be allowed to do" we pretty much agree. As for being able to download what you could encode yourself...well yes, the download should be legal, but it is still illegal to upload (and thus a big part of the p2p filesharing subculture is destroyed--if everyone was a leecher, no one would have anything to download anyway).
Things change. Millions of court cases and extra laws on the subject have changed the point of copyright. You can go all the way back to the constitution, but if you ignore everything but the basics then there are lots of things that don't make sense. Like the original founding fathers didn't want women to be able to vote. I guess that you feel the same way, since you think that only the original definition matters.
If you're talking about my "insightful" comment (the one that spurned this particular thread) then you need to learn to interpret better. For one, the article (which is solely composed of people's opinions on ROM collecting and seems to have little to no legal basis) discusses, among other things, obtaining roms that are difficult, if impossible to find cartridges for. As I said, copyright is about control. If you can't buy it legally, it doesn't make it legal to pirate it. That was the point of my post.
In fact, most of the time when people are talking about "downloading X intellectual property" they're almost always talking about copying content for which they have not paid. But even in cases where they are talking about downloading something they "already own", the law isn't clear on whether or not that is illegal. Lots of people say that it is legal, but there's no legal basis for that. It's something that doesn't come up much because copyright holders almost always focus on the uploaders rather than the downloaders. I absolutely don't think that it's morally wrong, but take the following example:
Suppose I buy a cassette tape of Metallica's Black album. Does that give me the right to download the mp3s, which are almost certainly of higher quality? What about if the RIAA actually did start selling mp3s. Does just owning the CD entitle me to bootlegging those mp3s? I don't think it's nearly as clear as many people try to make it.
A few opinions on the subject doesn't change the law. Copyright violations are illegal. Morality is a different issue.
Many people mistake copyright as being about money--it's not. It's about control. If a company doesn't want people playing their games anymore...well they can't stop those who have already purchased legitimate copies of those games, but they can stop future people from buying the games by stopping production. That doesn't give the public the right to pirate the games.
That said, I don't think anyone has any moral problem with pirating NES roms since, frankly, you can't get the games anymore. But older, classic games being included in newer products (the original Metroid on the Metroid Prime disc, for example) and even Atari games being bundled with a controller that plugs directly into a TV's AV inputs really prove that there is still money to be made with these old games, and it muddies the moral dilemma.
Except that they can be scanned without your knowledge, say, someone outside the store with a portable scanner can get the inventory of your entire bag.
It's a privacy issue because the scanning penetrates further than barcodes do.
It's helpful in understanding your mindset. Let me try that tactic.
You have no inherent right to "own" songs, period. If you don't like the pricing or the risk of buying songs that you don't like, you do not have to buy the CD.
Also, your disdain for the industry and the fact that you feel you have wasted money on music you don't like does not give you the right to infringe on copyrights. How'd I do?
There is no problem in my logic. If you don't think a product is worth your money, don't buy it. That is not a justification for copyright infringement.
Now I agree that the anti-copy techniques that interfere with normal playing of the CD are slimy, but that's not an excuse either.
Because if I wanted to buy the five or so good songs from an album, I also had to buy the five or so shit songs which were recorded not out of artistic integrity, but because it was stipulated in the contract that the artist had to produce X "full-length" albums per Y years. Are you still with me?
Yup. I still don't understand why you feel cheated. You may not know whether the tracks that you've never heard are any good before you buy the CD, but you certainly know that they are unknowns, and you certainly seem to think that the trend is for you to dislike them. If that's the case, you still have the option of not buying the CD. You do realize that you have that option, don't you? You don't have to have any tracks at all, but you apparently felt that that $15+ dollars was worth it for the 5 or so songs you wanted. You showed that you felt it was worth it by plonking down that cash at the register. If it wasn't worth it, why did you buy the CD? Still with me?
CDs were being burned on cheap media
If you bought burned media, it was either pirated or you're buying completely different music than I do. 99.999% of all commercial CDs are pressed, which is a much higher quality process than burning a CD onto even the best CDR media. But that's a nitpick I'll probably get flamed for pointing out.
On top of that, they recently started adding intentional errors to "prevent ripping". Still here?
So if you buy a disc with errors, take it back. Say it was defective. Keep doing this until you have to talk to a manager and actually get your money back (since most cashiers or CSRs don't have the authority to give you your money back on CDs, you have to go through the manager). If you know ahead of time that the disc has these intentional errors and you buy it anyway, you've proven that you don't mind living with those errors, and so once again I ask, why did you buy the CD and then begin complaining about it?
albums that are not very good as a whole to replace the ones which self-destructed after being left out on a counter one night.
Man, you really are getting cheap CDs. I have never had a CD "self-destruct" after being left on a counter. Unless by counter you mean "stove". The closet I've come were when I laid a CD with the data side down and it got scratched up. Frankly, I don't call that self-destruction.
I hope that wasn't too difficult to follow.
Sorry mate, I guess I just don't follow. If you don't think something is worth your money, don't buy it. You don't have to have CDs. As for replacement, I've never had a CD go "bad" that wasn't directly through negligence on my own part. If I accidentally break it, shit, tough luck, I'll have to buy a new one.
The answer (at least for Dell) is in the forums that were linked to in the summary. Send it back. Get a new one. If the new one also burns in, do it again. Do it until you get an LCD that doesn't burn in. It's a major hassle, but it appears that all of their LCDs don't suffer from this problem, thus it's unlikely that "new" LCDs have this problem. Looks like a bad batch or poor construction somewhere in the laptop/LCD, since replacing the LCD will eventually get rid of the problem.
It's really amusing that you assume I'm an American. I am, in fact, but that's not necessarily a valid assumption on the internet anymore.
Anyway, interestingly, do a search for "Criminal Copyright Violations" on google. You don't need to tell me what you come up with, I already know.
And there are most certainly laws that don't involve criminal offenses. There are laws against libel and slander. They're civil laws. If you break them, you're likely to get penalized in court when you get sued.
It's really a shame that the article I read where the RIAA detailed exactly what was legal under fair use (from their perspective--since fair use isn't actually defined anywhere in US law, it would actually be up to the courts to decide for sure). They allowed basically unlimited copies of analog for backup and even trading on tape, but once you made the jump to digital (either from a digital source like a CD or converting an analog signal to digital) they considered you to be violating copyright. That's right, that means those "backup CDs" were considered illegal. Recording from the radio, digitizing to listen to it on your computer was illegal. Transcoding a CD to mp3 was illegal (although this wasn't specifically spread out because mp3 wasn't nearly as hot at this time--this was around 96, 97 maybe.)
You say that, but the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Verizon really was fighting hard. Maybe they were in bed with the RIAA all along in order to get this precedent set in the courts? Then other ISPs would all fall in line.
It is illegal both to download copyrighted material and to upload it. However there are a few uploaders out there that share literally thousands of files. If you shut those down, you shut down a huge portion of the downloaders. There's no reason for there to be bad press--these people are breaking the law. The bad press should come when people write a search engine and the RIAA takes away their life savings.
And actually, just sending a C&D letter is really rather lenient for the RIAA. Not long ago they would have been breaking down these people's doors and confiscating their equipment, suing them into oblivion, etc.
Sometimes the car in front of you decides to slam on its brakes just as you're fiddling with the radio, and it's nice to have someone else in the car say "holy shit, watch out!"
I'm glad that the person with the real "brain" is looking down at the radio when he should be looking at the road.
The license of the GPL is different from the "viral" copyright law. I would suggest that it would not lose any credibility as a solid license or in enforcability. The GPL doesn't claim that violations result in all derivative works transferring back to the original copyright holder, just that derivative works must also be GPL. That should be a lot easier to get past a judge than SCO's claims....we hope, at least.
Because they still knew what they were buying going into the game. If you don't (or can't) get XBL, you can't get the extra level. That's it. That's how it was advertised and that's how it works. It's not like Microsoft pulled a bait-and-switch.
This wouldn't have made the news if it wasn't from Microsoft. This story was simply an excuse to start MS bashing. In my opinion, the only even potential wrongdoing was the distinction between "unlockable" and "downloadable" and if you really feel that Microsoft is pulling some nasty tricks in using that particular phrasing, you're just looking for a fight.
Slot machines in Las Vegas work exactly the same way, however. When you put your money in,/then/ the win/loss is determined. Why put the handle or dials there if they are totally meaningless?
They're there to give the user a feeling of control. It's more obvious in the fruit machine situation, because the player is offered a choice. But the choice doesn't matter, and pulling the arm on a normal slot machine doesn't matter either. The choice is made. Pulling the arm or pressing the button just alerts the machine that you are ready to know which choice was made.
Actually, the user is offered two choices. They can continue gambling with the money they've already won (here is where the random choice is made) or they can stop and cash out. If they continue gambling, they've already won or lost, which is why the machine seems to have pre-determined whether or not they will win or lose. In truth, it has. But from reading the article, I see no evidence that the machine actually calculates whether to let the person win or lose based on anything but a random number. The random number is just being calculated at a different time than people think, and so they thought there was a story in it.
Now if it was determined that the fruit machine actually used different odds if the player was on a "winning streak" I'd probably have to think harder about whether what they are doing is fair, but just from what I've read, it's merely dubious, not flat out fraud.
But does the machine say what the odds of winning on that particular guess are? To put it another way, if the machine says "Will I pick a number between 1 and 10 or 10 and 12?" is it stating that the number it chooses will be truly random, that is, there is an even 1 in 12 chance that i twill pick any given number? Random numbers can still be weighted, and that weight need not even be the same from one iteration to the next. There may be an implied even chance, but that assumption is the fault of the player.
The article doesn't clearly state whether there is an/actual/ predetermined order to the wins or whether the win/loss chance is randomly calculated (based on another percentage) before the player presses the button. If the latter is the case, it's all semantics, and certainly trickery, but not clearly fraud.
But remakes can be more impressive than the original. The new intpretation can be quite interesting and... frankly... ingenious. But when you re-shoot something scene by scene with nearly identical actions, dialogue, etc. it's just not interesting.
Anyway, I'd be far more interested in seeing a documentary on how these kids remade the film than actually watching it.
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Excellent points, I think on a moral or at least "what we should be allowed to do" we pretty much agree. As for being able to download what you could encode yourself...well yes, the download should be legal, but it is still illegal to upload (and thus a big part of the p2p filesharing subculture is destroyed--if everyone was a leecher, no one would have anything to download anyway).
:)
But that's a point for another discussion
Not true, you're thinking of trademarks. Copyrights and patents can be selectively enforced.
Things change. Millions of court cases and extra laws on the subject have changed the point of copyright. You can go all the way back to the constitution, but if you ignore everything but the basics then there are lots of things that don't make sense. Like the original founding fathers didn't want women to be able to vote. I guess that you feel the same way, since you think that only the original definition matters.
If you're talking about my "insightful" comment (the one that spurned this particular thread) then you need to learn to interpret better. For one, the article (which is solely composed of people's opinions on ROM collecting and seems to have little to no legal basis) discusses, among other things, obtaining roms that are difficult, if impossible to find cartridges for. As I said, copyright is about control. If you can't buy it legally, it doesn't make it legal to pirate it. That was the point of my post.
In fact, most of the time when people are talking about "downloading X intellectual property" they're almost always talking about copying content for which they have not paid. But even in cases where they are talking about downloading something they "already own", the law isn't clear on whether or not that is illegal. Lots of people say that it is legal, but there's no legal basis for that. It's something that doesn't come up much because copyright holders almost always focus on the uploaders rather than the downloaders. I absolutely don't think that it's morally wrong, but take the following example:
Suppose I buy a cassette tape of Metallica's Black album. Does that give me the right to download the mp3s, which are almost certainly of higher quality? What about if the RIAA actually did start selling mp3s. Does just owning the CD entitle me to bootlegging those mp3s? I don't think it's nearly as clear as many people try to make it.
A few opinions on the subject doesn't change the law. Copyright violations are illegal. Morality is a different issue.
Many people mistake copyright as being about money--it's not. It's about control. If a company doesn't want people playing their games anymore...well they can't stop those who have already purchased legitimate copies of those games, but they can stop future people from buying the games by stopping production. That doesn't give the public the right to pirate the games.
That said, I don't think anyone has any moral problem with pirating NES roms since, frankly, you can't get the games anymore. But older, classic games being included in newer products (the original Metroid on the Metroid Prime disc, for example) and even Atari games being bundled with a controller that plugs directly into a TV's AV inputs really prove that there is still money to be made with these old games, and it muddies the moral dilemma.
Except that they can be scanned without your knowledge, say, someone outside the store with a portable scanner can get the inventory of your entire bag.
It's a privacy issue because the scanning penetrates further than barcodes do.
It's helpful in understanding your mindset. Let me try that tactic.
You have no inherent right to "own" songs, period. If you don't like the pricing or the risk of buying songs that you don't like, you do not have to buy the CD.
Also, your disdain for the industry and the fact that you feel you have wasted money on music you don't like does not give you the right to infringe on copyrights. How'd I do?
There is no problem in my logic. If you don't think a product is worth your money, don't buy it. That is not a justification for copyright infringement.
Now I agree that the anti-copy techniques that interfere with normal playing of the CD are slimy, but that's not an excuse either.
Got a little anger problem there?
Because if I wanted to buy the five or so good songs from an album, I also had to buy the five or so shit songs which were recorded not out of artistic integrity, but because it was stipulated in the contract that the artist had to produce X "full-length" albums per Y years. Are you still with me?
Yup. I still don't understand why you feel cheated. You may not know whether the tracks that you've never heard are any good before you buy the CD, but you certainly know that they are unknowns, and you certainly seem to think that the trend is for you to dislike them. If that's the case, you still have the option of not buying the CD. You do realize that you have that option, don't you? You don't have to have any tracks at all, but you apparently felt that that $15+ dollars was worth it for the 5 or so songs you wanted. You showed that you felt it was worth it by plonking down that cash at the register. If it wasn't worth it, why did you buy the CD? Still with me?
CDs were being burned on cheap media
If you bought burned media, it was either pirated or you're buying completely different music than I do. 99.999% of all commercial CDs are pressed, which is a much higher quality process than burning a CD onto even the best CDR media. But that's a nitpick I'll probably get flamed for pointing out.
On top of that, they recently started adding intentional errors to "prevent ripping". Still here?
So if you buy a disc with errors, take it back. Say it was defective. Keep doing this until you have to talk to a manager and actually get your money back (since most cashiers or CSRs don't have the authority to give you your money back on CDs, you have to go through the manager). If you know ahead of time that the disc has these intentional errors and you buy it anyway, you've proven that you don't mind living with those errors, and so once again I ask, why did you buy the CD and then begin complaining about it?
albums that are not very good as a whole to replace the ones which self-destructed after being left out on a counter one night.
Man, you really are getting cheap CDs. I have never had a CD "self-destruct" after being left on a counter. Unless by counter you mean "stove". The closet I've come were when I laid a CD with the data side down and it got scratched up. Frankly, I don't call that self-destruction.
I hope that wasn't too difficult to follow.
Sorry mate, I guess I just don't follow. If you don't think something is worth your money, don't buy it. You don't have to have CDs. As for replacement, I've never had a CD go "bad" that wasn't directly through negligence on my own part. If I accidentally break it, shit, tough luck, I'll have to buy a new one.
Why did you buy the inferior music on inferior media?
Why do you want to download music that you obviously feel is crappy?
The answer (at least for Dell) is in the forums that were linked to in the summary. Send it back. Get a new one. If the new one also burns in, do it again. Do it until you get an LCD that doesn't burn in. It's a major hassle, but it appears that all of their LCDs don't suffer from this problem, thus it's unlikely that "new" LCDs have this problem. Looks like a bad batch or poor construction somewhere in the laptop/LCD, since replacing the LCD will eventually get rid of the problem.
It's really amusing that you assume I'm an American. I am, in fact, but that's not necessarily a valid assumption on the internet anymore.
Anyway, interestingly, do a search for "Criminal Copyright Violations" on google. You don't need to tell me what you come up with, I already know.
And there are most certainly laws that don't involve criminal offenses. There are laws against libel and slander. They're civil laws. If you break them, you're likely to get penalized in court when you get sued.
It's really a shame that the article I read where the RIAA detailed exactly what was legal under fair use (from their perspective--since fair use isn't actually defined anywhere in US law, it would actually be up to the courts to decide for sure). They allowed basically unlimited copies of analog for backup and even trading on tape, but once you made the jump to digital (either from a digital source like a CD or converting an analog signal to digital) they considered you to be violating copyright. That's right, that means those "backup CDs" were considered illegal. Recording from the radio, digitizing to listen to it on your computer was illegal. Transcoding a CD to mp3 was illegal (although this wasn't specifically spread out because mp3 wasn't nearly as hot at this time--this was around 96, 97 maybe.)
What part of Copyright Law don't you understand?
You say that, but the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Verizon really was fighting hard. Maybe they were in bed with the RIAA all along in order to get this precedent set in the courts? Then other ISPs would all fall in line.
What's your point?
It is illegal both to download copyrighted material and to upload it. However there are a few uploaders out there that share literally thousands of files. If you shut those down, you shut down a huge portion of the downloaders. There's no reason for there to be bad press--these people are breaking the law. The bad press should come when people write a search engine and the RIAA takes away their life savings.
And actually, just sending a C&D letter is really rather lenient for the RIAA. Not long ago they would have been breaking down these people's doors and confiscating their equipment, suing them into oblivion, etc.
I'm the one with a real brain
Sometimes the car in front of you decides to slam on its brakes just as you're fiddling with the radio, and it's nice to have someone else in the car say "holy shit, watch out!"
I'm glad that the person with the real "brain" is looking down at the radio when he should be looking at the road.
The license of the GPL is different from the "viral" copyright law. I would suggest that it would not lose any credibility as a solid license or in enforcability. The GPL doesn't claim that violations result in all derivative works transferring back to the original copyright holder, just that derivative works must also be GPL. That should be a lot easier to get past a judge than SCO's claims....we hope, at least.
Again, I'm not positive that this is a dirty trick, but that's another debate entirely.
Because they still knew what they were buying going into the game. If you don't (or can't) get XBL, you can't get the extra level. That's it. That's how it was advertised and that's how it works. It's not like Microsoft pulled a bait-and-switch.
This wouldn't have made the news if it wasn't from Microsoft. This story was simply an excuse to start MS bashing. In my opinion, the only even potential wrongdoing was the distinction between "unlockable" and "downloadable" and if you really feel that Microsoft is pulling some nasty tricks in using that particular phrasing, you're just looking for a fight.
For the GCC modification, they don't have to release the code if they don't distribute it.
Slot machines in Las Vegas work exactly the same way, however. When you put your money in, /then/ the win/loss is determined. Why put the handle or dials there if they are totally meaningless?
They're there to give the user a feeling of control. It's more obvious in the fruit machine situation, because the player is offered a choice. But the choice doesn't matter, and pulling the arm on a normal slot machine doesn't matter either. The choice is made. Pulling the arm or pressing the button just alerts the machine that you are ready to know which choice was made.
Actually, the user is offered two choices. They can continue gambling with the money they've already won (here is where the random choice is made) or they can stop and cash out. If they continue gambling, they've already won or lost, which is why the machine seems to have pre-determined whether or not they will win or lose. In truth, it has. But from reading the article, I see no evidence that the machine actually calculates whether to let the person win or lose based on anything but a random number. The random number is just being calculated at a different time than people think, and so they thought there was a story in it.
Now if it was determined that the fruit machine actually used different odds if the player was on a "winning streak" I'd probably have to think harder about whether what they are doing is fair, but just from what I've read, it's merely dubious, not flat out fraud.
But does the machine say what the odds of winning on that particular guess are? To put it another way, if the machine says "Will I pick a number between 1 and 10 or 10 and 12?" is it stating that the number it chooses will be truly random, that is, there is an even 1 in 12 chance that i twill pick any given number? Random numbers can still be weighted, and that weight need not even be the same from one iteration to the next. There may be an implied even chance, but that assumption is the fault of the player.
/actual/ predetermined order to the wins or whether the win/loss chance is randomly calculated (based on another percentage) before the player presses the button. If the latter is the case, it's all semantics, and certainly trickery, but not clearly fraud.
The article doesn't clearly state whether there is an
But remakes can be more impressive than the original. The new intpretation can be quite interesting and ... frankly ... ingenious. But when you re-shoot something scene by scene with nearly identical actions, dialogue, etc. it's just not interesting.
Anyway, I'd be far more interested in seeing a documentary on how these kids remade the film than actually watching it.