The maximum liability you have on fraudulent credit card transactions (by law in the US) is $50 per card. For a debit card it is $500 and possibly the entire balance of the account if the bank can show that you failed to report the activity in a timely manner. By using the debit card you are actually exposing yourself to greater liability. Furthermore, the credit card companies will almost never even charge you the $50 because it's kind of like shooting themselves in the foot by discouraging use.
Anyone who has ever programmed an e-commerce system should realize what is going on here...
Card companies charge a varying percentage of the purchase price to the merchant for handling the transaction. Long ago, catalog and phone sales scenarios prompted credit card companies to charge a different rate for transactions of this nature than they do for traditional over-the-counter sales. The reasoning is that there was an increased risk of fraud when the card and cardholder were not actually present at the time of sale. This is, of course, known as (wait for it!) a "Card Not Present" transaction.
Obviously, the website is trying to pay the lower rate by producing this ridiculous photo which would make it just as good as if you and the card were present! Don't give it to them...they are obviously morons trying to squeeze an extra 0.5%...:-)
If people pay $15 for a CD, technically, they should be willing to pay $14 for the content without the CD, since the value of the artifact is $1.
What are you economically-challenged or an RIAA mouthpiece? Out of the remaining $14 would you like to guess how much of that cost could be eliminated if:
No "artifacts" have to be shipped to retail locations
No shoplifting occurs
No waste write-offs(i.e., copies of the cd that don't ever sell in every store around the world get thrown away eventually because it's cheaper than shipping them back)
No cost of excessive packaging to help prevent theft (not to mention the lessened environmental impact)
Not being the prez at Sony I can't be sure, but based on what I know about other retail stores (apparel, food, liquor, etc.) try somewhere around $5-7...So forget your $14 theory and go post on a subject you know something about
According to the latest goverment study this year, the Stamford, CT area (which includes Greenwich, Norwalk, Darien, Westport and New Canaan) has a median household income of over $106,000 which means that $50,000 and a family of four is definitely poverty line
...my last rental (2 years ago) was a tiny little house with three tiny bedrooms and 1 and 1/2 baths for $2100 a month including absolutely nothing...you even have to pay for water and garbage pick-up as well as mandatory renter's insurance...you do the math...that means you need close to $40,000 a year just to pay housing and utilities costs and there ain't no public trans to get to work...
"the team says it could potentially link 4,000 towns and 100,000 households to the internet within the next two years." wooooooooooo....100,000?!? that's a lot, huh? at that rate the whole world should have access in another century or so...what are you on the pr list or something?
first of all, Yahoo is a directory, not a search engine; they don't spider sites to rank them in case none of you noticed
secondly, the issue here is that one site is trying to make a profit by doing nothing but taking the information off another site and presenting it in a different form...the fact that ebay won the case by using the cpu cycle tactic is irrelevant to the real reason for the lawsuit
this has absolutely no implications to search engines unless they try to get into the business of providing a complete synopsis of everything on your site when someone runs a search, which i think everyone who runs a web site for profit would be against, hmmm?
the game and concept are excellent, but thief is one of the buggiest, crappiest pieces of game code released since daggerfall...that's what happens when you reach for the stars and fall off the ladder
Legoboy started by mentioning how the most vocal supporters of copyright dissolution are the young at heart and he clearly has a point. Here's a funny thing I've noticed over all these years of mellowing and getting too tired to be an angry young man...
Our capitalist (free market, laissez-faire, insert your favorite term here) system actually does a pretty good job of deciding these issues. Forget about congressional legislation, DMCAs or whatever else...the almighty dollar continues to reign supreme, and while many of you might deride such a selfish system, experience shows that it actually works pretty well in most cases like this.
If music sharing continues to be incredibly popular, then someone will figure out how to make money from it, and that someone will eventually have competitors because nothing attracts investment money like more money. Then competitors will fight over special deals with special artists whether it be for online chat sessions, special secret encrypted stuff or whatever and eventually the money will begin to trickle down to the musicians themselves. Which is of course, a good thing.
Now many of you have argued that it is impossible to protect copyright online and you are correct...it is also impossible to protect copyright offline in the sense you mean. I can buy a pen and paper and write the whole thing down in the case of text or record you singing live at a club in the case of music. Yes, a technology-capable person can always break whatever copyright protection encryption because the decryption source code has to be somewhere.
However, that means the copyright is undefendable for about 0.1% of the population. So what? If 99.9% can't hack the protection then, in effect, it is perfectly protected. Now you (or any other of the 0.1%) can give your friends a copy and that's ok too. But, if you try to distribut it en masse, via a gnutella-like app, you will become a big enough revenue attack that someone will be knocking on your door and hauling you off to jail (concentration camp, whatever). Note that this is exactly what happened before mp3...you made copies of music for your friends and nobody cared. You made thousands of copies and set up a stand in Times Square to sell them, the police arrested you. Same thing with videos. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually they get you because money is involved.
And that's actually a pretty good solution...So don't be so angry...it'll probably work out quite well in the end. This is just the growing pains phase as Mr. Katz so eloquently pointed out.
the latest version of the bill DOES tie the agreement to various human rights issues...which is something you would know if you were paying attention
this a republican-sponsored issue as well
on
Censorship In China
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· Score: 1
blame it on clinton if you wish, but the republican party (including george jr.) are 100% behind this legislation...it is the unions (somewhat socialist orgs themselves) and the dems who are from union states (michigan, ohio, etc.) that are dead set against it
perhaps you should do some reading before placing these wild conspiracy theories up as posts, hmmm? the reason you can't back any of this up is because there are no facts to support it...or did the chinese contribute to all the repubs election campaigns as well?
the/. geniuses moderated it a 5...yes very insightful! let me see what kind of creative math i can come up with for a 5...surgical technologist??? what is that the guy who flips the light switch on? lol - this guy is obviously a politician since they are the only people i know who can come up with bogus statistics like that
yo moderator! did you pass junior high math?moderate this crap down please
boo is the finest, best-known example of how naive it is to think that just because a site is really hip, uses cool dynamic elements and flash animations, it will be able to move product...let this serve as a lesson to the rest of you clothing retailers/manufacturers who are so caught up in building award-winning websites that you haven't noticed none of them work
just take a glance at the top 50 traffic sites or the top 20 in e-sales and see how many of these hip designs are on the list...
i've contracted this kind of work for two firms from many developers...while it is impossible to definitively say what will happen in court, in order to be safe, any intelligent company that hires out for this sort of work will directly stipulate that "all source code, design, graphics and copy" become the property of the company upon completion of the project or termination of the project in progress
as someone else mentioned, most agencies charge extra for this ownership -- anywhere from 20% to 200% extra. the reason for this is that many agencies developed a website for someone, only to have that someone decide that the logo, etc. were da bomb! and then use it on their company letterhead, biz cards, and other marketing materials...the creative people then believe they are due additional fees for such usage (rightly so).
so...if the company you're working for didn't contract that way, you have a prob...fortunately, you can turn around and sue them for leading you to believe that they owned the materials:-)
everytime someone carries off a stunt like this, all I hear from/.ers is..."he/she/it couldn't have done it. anyone who would have done this would never get caught because they would be too smart to leave any trace"
reality check in 5 seconds 5...4...3...2...1 NOT! whether this schmuck in the phillipines or his girlfriend is the perpetrator I don't know, but I do know that stupidity is just as likely (more likely in fact) to be the source of any of these attacks as anything else. the only intelligence required to pull off this stunt was to copy an idea that's been used already and expand on it maliciously to destroy some files. big deal -- no genius required.
face it - if i had outlined this scheme to you beforehand, you would have called me an idiot. "I'm gonna send an email with a script attached and millions of idiots will open it because it says it's from someone they know and it says I LOVE YOU." ROFLMAO! people in my dot-com opened this message -- the first source was the ceo (male) and a male opened it...did they really think the ceo was in love with them? could you have predicted this would work as a lure? no - only a moron would have expected it to work, which is exactly my point...
so before you go dredging up conspiracy theories think about it...i mean after all, the whole country is so stupid that they couldn't even get a search warrant for his apartment on a saturday. this guy, his girlfriend, his mother and everyone else they know could, and in fact probably ARE that stupid
absolutely right on most counts...that's why the only dickheads suing are mega-money bands who OWN their record labels. I don't see any bands with lousy contracts hopping on the litigation trail yet...no unsigned bands either...no lesser known blues stars...no jazz combos with 10 records under their belt...just big money businessmen who like to pretend they are still "artists"
OK, mr. i-have-a-six-year-old-daughter-who-i-want-to-be-a- fascist, since you consider this to be an "anarcho-hippie-communiterrorist" ruling, how about offering us a workable alternative.
Do you propose that before an ISP can open an account under the name John Smith, John has to physically show up at their offices with two forms of picture id? And even then, what's to prevent John from masquerading as the other John Smith who lives down the street? or in the next town?
Before you go spouting off nonsense, try coming up with a sensible alternative that you can offer people so that they can at least see some value in your viewpoint. And to top it off, you have the nerve to post this anonymously...
Forget piracy, open source, copyright...this isn't about any of that anymore and hasn't been for at least six months.
To wit:
(1) To all the people who keep talking about lost revenues from CDs -- it's bogus. Most of the music being exchanged would never have been purchased anyway. The college market is the biggest user of Napster because they can't afford to buy CDs and if there wasn't a Napster they would still rather spend their money on beer. CD revenues are up.
(2) Copyright is under more danger from AOL, Yahoo and the various other portal companies than it is from a few million powerless individuals with Napster or Gnutella. AOL has been systematically shredding copyright law wherever it wants content for the last three years and it has been attacking its roots in congress with the help of lobbyists. If you don't believe that, talk to some of the information companies like Claritas and D&B that have had their businesses raped by things like free demographic data, yellow pages, etc. The way all these guys got started was to take someone else's database, repackage it, and then claim it as their own. That's a lot bigger threat to copyright than some college kid copying a song.
(3) Kids were making tape copies of albums and music on the radio 25 years ago before there ever was a Napster.
(4) Look at the suing bands and you will see that every one of them is in actuality a record label that makes a lot more money than the band/artist representing them does. I.E., McCartnety, Metallica, Dre all OWN their record labels! Also note that they have been cleverly selected to appeal to as broad a cross-section of the music-listening public as possible. Paul McCartney, Metallica, Dr. Dre -- coming up next it will be Goo Goo Dolls, Wynton Marsalis, etc. HMMMM...could they be trying to get fans to side up with their favorite artists? Crap...they aren't artists...all three of those guys are businessmen first and foremost.
(5) The lawsuit against Napster will continue, but look for the RIAA and MP3.com to settle this summer and be best buddies shortly thereafter. This isn't about law -- it's about jockeying for position so they can try to negotiate a better contract (read higher percentage of revenues) when they finally do jump in bed together. Even the recording industry now realizes that mp3s are here to stay -- problem is they are way behind the tech curve and they need to stall for a few months to get their shit together.
So...forget about all that freedom/open source crap and get a grip on the program. The recording industry will survive quite well thank you and THEY will be the ones who continue to steal from the artists by owning the marketing and merchandising for music. The only thing that's going to change is that a few other guys like mp3.com are going to get a piece of the pie by having been smart early.
OK, I'm sick of the legal issue too, but your analysis is too simple because as someone else said in an earlier post, fair use allows you to quote from a copyrighted text, not take it in its entirety. While there is certainly IP in the compilation, I could say the same thing you are saying if I took entire poems by 20 different poets and published them in a collection. Wouldn't my compilation be unique and my own work? Wouldn't the selection be my IP? Does that allow me to void every one of those poets' copyrights?
Anyway, it's all too complicated to be decided by less than 50 lawyers and 9 justices, so the legal point is moot. What does matter is that this site has made a statement: "Comments are owned by the Poster" They have failed to live up to that promise. This is unfortunate because I still agree that this information should be widely disseminated instead of being seen only by slashdot readers. Nonetheless, the ends do not justify the means...
Why would anyone assume that they just agreed to a legal paragraph like the one that you just wrote when you just made it up?
Here's an idea: everyone should assume that whenever they call me on the phone I am taping the conversation for later use as a movie soundtrack. What do you think - can I get away with that legally or do I have to tell everyone on the phone immediately at the start of the conversation that I am taping them?
In order for me to agree to that they have to add it to the registration process -- not make it up after the fact whenever it suits them.
Mendax is correct on all counts...copyright is owned whether the actual language is published and filed at the Library of Congress or not. This is known as an unpublished copyright. Doing the paperwork is a formality which simply makes it easier to defend your right to the document in court since it establishes the date it was produced. If slashdot (Andover) has stated that the comments are the property of the poster (and they have) then the poster owns copyright.
Personally, I think the book concept is a good one and I agree that the information is screaming to get out to the world at large. Nonetheless, slashdot set the language at the bottom of the page and they are clearly in violation of the covenant they themselves established. Sorry guys, but you made the rules.
Slashdot Mirror
The maximum liability you have on fraudulent credit card transactions (by law in the US) is $50 per card. For a debit card it is $500 and possibly the entire balance of the account if the bank can show that you failed to report the activity in a timely manner. By using the debit card you are actually exposing yourself to greater liability. Furthermore, the credit card companies will almost never even charge you the $50 because it's kind of like shooting themselves in the foot by discouraging use.
Card companies charge a varying percentage of the purchase price to the merchant for handling the transaction. Long ago, catalog and phone sales scenarios prompted credit card companies to charge a different rate for transactions of this nature than they do for traditional over-the-counter sales. The reasoning is that there was an increased risk of fraud when the card and cardholder were not actually present at the time of sale. This is, of course, known as (wait for it!) a "Card Not Present" transaction.
Obviously, the website is trying to pay the lower rate by producing this ridiculous photo which would make it just as good as if you and the card were present! Don't give it to them...they are obviously morons trying to squeeze an extra 0.5%... :-)
What are you economically-challenged or an RIAA mouthpiece? Out of the remaining $14 would you like to guess how much of that cost could be eliminated if:
- No "artifacts" have to be shipped to retail locations
- No shoplifting occurs
- No waste write-offs(i.e., copies of the cd that don't ever sell in every store around the world get thrown away eventually because it's cheaper than shipping them back)
- No cost of excessive packaging to help prevent theft (not to mention the lessened environmental impact)
Not being the prez at Sony I can't be sure, but based on what I know about other retail stores (apparel, food, liquor, etc.) try somewhere around $5-7...So forget your $14 theory and go post on a subject you know something about...my last rental (2 years ago) was a tiny little house with three tiny bedrooms and 1 and 1/2 baths for $2100 a month including absolutely nothing...you even have to pay for water and garbage pick-up as well as mandatory renter's insurance...you do the math...that means you need close to $40,000 a year just to pay housing and utilities costs and there ain't no public trans to get to work...
who gives a shit? here's their big goal
"the team says it could potentially link 4,000 towns and 100,000 households to the internet within the next two years." wooooooooooo....100,000?!? that's a lot, huh? at that rate the whole world should have access in another century or so...what are you on the pr list or something?
secondly, the issue here is that one site is trying to make a profit by doing nothing but taking the information off another site and presenting it in a different form...the fact that ebay won the case by using the cpu cycle tactic is irrelevant to the real reason for the lawsuit
this has absolutely no implications to search engines unless they try to get into the business of providing a complete synopsis of everything on your site when someone runs a search, which i think everyone who runs a web site for profit would be against, hmmm?
the game and concept are excellent, but thief is one of the buggiest, crappiest pieces of game code released since daggerfall...that's what happens when you reach for the stars and fall off the ladder
Our capitalist (free market, laissez-faire, insert your favorite term here) system actually does a pretty good job of deciding these issues. Forget about congressional legislation, DMCAs or whatever else...the almighty dollar continues to reign supreme, and while many of you might deride such a selfish system, experience shows that it actually works pretty well in most cases like this.
If music sharing continues to be incredibly popular, then someone will figure out how to make money from it, and that someone will eventually have competitors because nothing attracts investment money like more money. Then competitors will fight over special deals with special artists whether it be for online chat sessions, special secret encrypted stuff or whatever and eventually the money will begin to trickle down to the musicians themselves. Which is of course, a good thing.
Now many of you have argued that it is impossible to protect copyright online and you are correct...it is also impossible to protect copyright offline in the sense you mean. I can buy a pen and paper and write the whole thing down in the case of text or record you singing live at a club in the case of music. Yes, a technology-capable person can always break whatever copyright protection encryption because the decryption source code has to be somewhere.
However, that means the copyright is undefendable for about 0.1% of the population. So what? If 99.9% can't hack the protection then, in effect, it is perfectly protected. Now you (or any other of the 0.1%) can give your friends a copy and that's ok too. But, if you try to distribut it en masse, via a gnutella-like app, you will become a big enough revenue attack that someone will be knocking on your door and hauling you off to jail (concentration camp, whatever). Note that this is exactly what happened before mp3...you made copies of music for your friends and nobody cared. You made thousands of copies and set up a stand in Times Square to sell them, the police arrested you. Same thing with videos. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually they get you because money is involved.
And that's actually a pretty good solution...So don't be so angry...it'll probably work out quite well in the end. This is just the growing pains phase as Mr. Katz so eloquently pointed out.
the latest version of the bill DOES tie the agreement to various human rights issues...which is something you would know if you were paying attention
perhaps you should do some reading before placing these wild conspiracy theories up as posts, hmmm? the reason you can't back any of this up is because there are no facts to support it...or did the chinese contribute to all the repubs election campaigns as well?
yo moderator! did you pass junior high math?moderate this crap down please
just take a glance at the top 50 traffic sites or the top 20 in e-sales and see how many of these hip designs are on the list...
as someone else mentioned, most agencies charge extra for this ownership -- anywhere from 20% to 200% extra. the reason for this is that many agencies developed a website for someone, only to have that someone decide that the logo, etc. were da bomb! and then use it on their company letterhead, biz cards, and other marketing materials...the creative people then believe they are due additional fees for such usage (rightly so).
so...if the company you're working for didn't contract that way, you have a prob...fortunately, you can turn around and sue them for leading you to believe that they owned the materials :-)
reality check in 5 seconds 5...4...3...2...1 NOT! whether this schmuck in the phillipines or his girlfriend is the perpetrator I don't know, but I do know that stupidity is just as likely (more likely in fact) to be the source of any of these attacks as anything else. the only intelligence required to pull off this stunt was to copy an idea that's been used already and expand on it maliciously to destroy some files. big deal -- no genius required.
face it - if i had outlined this scheme to you beforehand, you would have called me an idiot. "I'm gonna send an email with a script attached and millions of idiots will open it because it says it's from someone they know and it says I LOVE YOU." ROFLMAO! people in my dot-com opened this message -- the first source was the ceo (male) and a male opened it...did they really think the ceo was in love with them? could you have predicted this would work as a lure? no - only a moron would have expected it to work, which is exactly my point...
so before you go dredging up conspiracy theories think about it...i mean after all, the whole country is so stupid that they couldn't even get a search warrant for his apartment on a saturday. this guy, his girlfriend, his mother and everyone else they know could, and in fact probably ARE that stupid
absolutely right on most counts...that's why the only dickheads suing are mega-money bands who OWN their record labels. I don't see any bands with lousy contracts hopping on the litigation trail yet...no unsigned bands either...no lesser known blues stars...no jazz combos with 10 records under their belt...just big money businessmen who like to pretend they are still "artists"
Do you propose that before an ISP can open an account under the name John Smith, John has to physically show up at their offices with two forms of picture id? And even then, what's to prevent John from masquerading as the other John Smith who lives down the street? or in the next town?
Before you go spouting off nonsense, try coming up with a sensible alternative that you can offer people so that they can at least see some value in your viewpoint. And to top it off, you have the nerve to post this anonymously...
To wit:
(1) To all the people who keep talking about lost revenues from CDs -- it's bogus. Most of the music being exchanged would never have been purchased anyway. The college market is the biggest user of Napster because they can't afford to buy CDs and if there wasn't a Napster they would still rather spend their money on beer. CD revenues are up.
(2) Copyright is under more danger from AOL, Yahoo and the various other portal companies than it is from a few million powerless individuals with Napster or Gnutella. AOL has been systematically shredding copyright law wherever it wants content for the last three years and it has been attacking its roots in congress with the help of lobbyists. If you don't believe that, talk to some of the information companies like Claritas and D&B that have had their businesses raped by things like free demographic data, yellow pages, etc. The way all these guys got started was to take someone else's database, repackage it, and then claim it as their own. That's a lot bigger threat to copyright than some college kid copying a song.
(3) Kids were making tape copies of albums and music on the radio 25 years ago before there ever was a Napster.
(4) Look at the suing bands and you will see that every one of them is in actuality a record label that makes a lot more money than the band/artist representing them does. I.E., McCartnety, Metallica, Dre all OWN their record labels! Also note that they have been cleverly selected to appeal to as broad a cross-section of the music-listening public as possible. Paul McCartney, Metallica, Dr. Dre -- coming up next it will be Goo Goo Dolls, Wynton Marsalis, etc. HMMMM...could they be trying to get fans to side up with their favorite artists? Crap...they aren't artists...all three of those guys are businessmen first and foremost.
(5) The lawsuit against Napster will continue, but look for the RIAA and MP3.com to settle this summer and be best buddies shortly thereafter. This isn't about law -- it's about jockeying for position so they can try to negotiate a better contract (read higher percentage of revenues) when they finally do jump in bed together. Even the recording industry now realizes that mp3s are here to stay -- problem is they are way behind the tech curve and they need to stall for a few months to get their shit together.
So...forget about all that freedom/open source crap and get a grip on the program. The recording industry will survive quite well thank you and THEY will be the ones who continue to steal from the artists by owning the marketing and merchandising for music. The only thing that's going to change is that a few other guys like mp3.com are going to get a piece of the pie by having been smart early.
you're not really gonna' let him put up more of this drivel, are you?
Anyway, it's all too complicated to be decided by less than 50 lawyers and 9 justices, so the legal point is moot. What does matter is that this site has made a statement: "Comments are owned by the Poster" They have failed to live up to that promise. This is unfortunate because I still agree that this information should be widely disseminated instead of being seen only by slashdot readers. Nonetheless, the ends do not justify the means...
Here's an idea: everyone should assume that whenever they call me on the phone I am taping the conversation for later use as a movie soundtrack. What do you think - can I get away with that legally or do I have to tell everyone on the phone immediately at the start of the conversation that I am taping them?
In order for me to agree to that they have to add it to the registration process -- not make it up after the fact whenever it suits them.
Personally, I think the book concept is a good one and I agree that the information is screaming to get out to the world at large. Nonetheless, slashdot set the language at the bottom of the page and they are clearly in violation of the covenant they themselves established. Sorry guys, but you made the rules.
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.