This may set a precedent for allowing big companies to define something as "stealing" and then send a bill.
Except in this case, it really *is* stealing. There is a long jump from a fairly cut and dried legal issue to a company whining that less profits == stealing.
Of course, at some time in the future, enough money might change hands so that the things you mention really would be illegal. In my opinion, that is the real issue that we need to worry about instead of freting becuase you can no longer steal music on the internet.
Is the concept of "pay me for work" completely dead? Must everything be "pay me for work, and keep paying me for years later too?"
Why do you not just simply charge them for getting a job accomplished, and then, if they want you to come back, tell them it will cost them more money?
In a business situation, its never about just paying for software, and you are done. Nobody wants to pay $100,000 dollars for a chunk of software, have a CD arrive in the mail, and have that be it. They want the peace of mind of knowing that bugs will be fixed, support will be offered, and most importantly, that the expertise of the developers will be available to them if they choose.
No offense, but this isn't just a report or some finite amount of data that you provided. This sort of thing always goes way beyond just delivering a binary.
Well, for one thing, the model of selling a product doesn't work in the software development industry. Programmers are morally obligated to give the code to their users and allow their users to freely modify and redistribute the code.
Mod +1 Funny! Oh,wait....
You are morally obligated to do exactly jack, diddly, and squat with your code. If the company has the reputation and resources to handle services and do it correctly, more power to them, but for the average small time shop, selling the code may mean the difference between sucess and failure. What good is it it going to be for a client if you give away your code, and then go belly up two months later?
I think if i have to pay almost full price for an album that i have to make myself then i damn well better be able to do what i want with it without trying to sidestep the built in copy protection.
There is *no* copy protection. None, nada zilch. Your fair use is completely entact. But if you somehow start distributing the music (like P2P or burning CDs and selling them on the street), the watermark will lead back to you. Which, in my opinion is just fine because when you distribute the music you are breaking the law!
So, just to repeat - its not copy protection, its copyright protection. Personally, I could care less, because I'm not stealing music.
A few months ago, ALbertsons began giving away free discount cards that track your purchases. If you don't use the card, you pay 30% more for many items. You must be from the same household to use the same card.
Thats easy to remedy. As far as Albertsons is concerned my name is Phil McKrackin from 1324 Main Street, Anytown, MA 98765
Thanks for postiny my thoughts exactly. The problem is that schools (and training seminars, and employee training, and those CDs that you buy on infomercials), simply teach people to memorize the motions.
Once, when I was a teenager, I was written up a job for daring to do a DOS copy command differently than what the cheat sheet mentioned (I think I transposed options or something). Because the supervisor had always been taught to do it one way, she felt that any other way was wrong.
I know its boring, and not much fun to have to sit down and listen to an lecture of *why* things work, instead of just finding out *how* to do a certain task. But it almost always pays off in the long run.
Teach someone about spreadsheets, and they will be comfortable in any environment. Teach someone about Excel, and they will only be comfortable if there is a start button on the bottom right of the screen.
A judge can reject a case if she thinks it is frivolous, *plus* a defendant can counter-sue for any bills incurred. It's not perfect, but it does work pretty well.
If you think any of these cases will ever see the inside of a courtroom, you're nuts. Any corporate lawyer worth his salt can drain the resources of his comptetitor (especially a small one) long before the matter ever comes to a judge.
This isn't like criminal justice, where the defendant has a the right to come before a judge in a timely manner. This is a time, resource and paper consuming process that kills all but the very big fish in corporate America.
Once again, I'm reminded that I can't escape the megacorps and their relentless marketing teams.
You know, therre is this great place called the outdoors. And, if you keep driving, past the buildings, you run into something people call wilderness. And unless, you live in Iowa, there are things out there called mountains. And believe it or not, people are allowed to walk around in those mountains. That is called escaping the "megacorps and their relentless marketing teams".
And even if you live in a city, there are things called books that you can look at. I don't ever recall seeing an ad in "The Hobbit", but maybe I should read it again just to be sure. If you really want to get away, there are big quiet buildings called libraries that you can go to.
Unless, you simply can't pry yourself away from your TV and computer - and then, yeah, I guess you can escape reality for a few hours by logging into a game (oddly, produced by those same megacorps). I just wouldn't be too surprised if you found an ad or two in there. After all, since you have proved your willingness to listen, they will talk to you.
I already do everything in my power to eliminate my exposure to mind numbing advertising. If it starts getting put into video games, I won't be able to go for popcorn until the previews start, or to go grab a snack until my show comes back on.
The makers of the game have chosen to do this. That is their right, because it is their game. But I just looked at the Bill of Rights and nowhere does it say anything about your right to play video games (and I read it twice to make sure). But apparently, you do have the right to not purchase the game, and nobody compells you to give your time, money or eyeballs to anybody.
But if you feel that it must be a life or death requirement to play these games, you must accept the fact that they may have advertisments.
Either play the games and endure the advertisments, or don't give them your business. There is no third thing.
But it's EA's game, and if they want to ruin it by giving points for hitting yourself on the head with a duck, well, either get a duck or spend your gaming budget somewhere else.
Well worded. I hope you don't mind if I add that line to my regular rotation of quotes I didn't invent.
Thanks for the common sense.
Re:Other event will make viewing difficult
on
Meet The Leonids
·
· Score: 1
For those in the MST, this says that the moon will be in the west, while Leo is in the east. Now, I might be smoking crack, but that probably means I can look toward Leo for optimal viewing with little or no moon.
I've always wanted to go to Comdex, on company dollar of course, if for no other reason than to meet and hangout with a bunch of my fellow geeks in Las Vegas.
Um, I'm not sure what Comdex you're talking about, but every Comdex I've seen has been chock full of suits and marketing types that don't know anything remotely technical or geeky about the particular product they are trying to sell.
Oh, sure, there are geeks there, but they are all walking around scoring free crap from other booths, and generally enjoying a free trip to Vegas. Which is of course, why I go...:)
For technical comradery, you are much better off at any number of other shows - at least pick a show where there is cooler stuff being shown (like the Consumer Electronics Show).. Comdex generally tends to be proof of concept devices.
1) You know publicity about your break-ins will cost you reputation.
Hiding the fact that your customers personal data was compromised will cost you reputation. And it will get out - you can't hide it forever.
2) You know that there really isn't any way to 100% secure your site from every niggling little security hole, no matter how much money you spend.
Nobody will not hit 100% of the companies in America at the same time with a new exploit. If you monitor the community and mailing lists, the odds of finding and fixing an hole before gets exploited are in your favor.
If you wanna build a case for the immorality of copying content without paying for it, at least respect that a majority of peoples' behaviours dictate the morality.
250 years ago, the majority agreed that slavery was decent and moral.
400 years ago, the majority thought it would be ok to light people on fire because they thought that they were witches.
2000 years ago, the majority thought it was lots of fun to toss people into a pit and watch them get eaten by lions.
If you want to convince anybody that copying movies and music is bad, you might start with explaining why the amount of people stealing music and movies is so much higher than people who steal ungaurded physical objects.
Do you have any number to back that up? What percentage of American's are arrested for theft? What percentage actively use a P2P service? And better yet, what percentage continue to do so even after somebody points out that they are breaking the law?
Just because every l33t geek boy you know downloads gigs and gigs of music, doesn't mean thats the majority of the people in the world.
You'd probably also want to make sure that you viewed the rampant cassette copying of the 80s as highly immoral as well for consistancy (in addition to recording TV, recording the radio, etc).
Copying cassettes is very similar (and just as illegal), however I make three points:
A) You couldn't achieve the massive individual quanitites as you can today.
B) You would actually ahve had to known a person with the tape, no anonymous copying from the internet.
C) Analog, analog, Analog.
As for the TV and the radio, everybody long ago acknowleged the legality of time shifting. You show me where you have any sort of legal right to anonymously take music from a stranger on the Internet, and I will eat my hat.
Because every other pimply faced 14 year old in your chess club does it too? Please......
I remember having a game (was it SimCity?) that had a lookup sheet that was dark red, making it impossible to copy (in those days - before good scanners and digital copy machines).
I don't see anyone, not indy labels, not bands selling their own music, who sells CDs for a few bucks each.
The fact that you miss is that the precious independent labels that/. loves so much engages in just as much profit taking as the RIAA. If they can get a 75% margin by selling their music, then they will. No matter the level, if you are willing to pay a price for a CD, thats what they'll sell it for.
But nobody has been able to prove to me that the $20 price on a commercially produced CD contains anything less than a 50% profit margin. Show me where the CD actually costs more than $10 to make, and I'll eat my hat.
Wait? You haven't heard? All music published after January 1, 2003 will be encoded to sound like Al Gore singing songs from John Tesh's Greatest Hits album. But if you buy now (only $399.99, plus shiping and handling), you can get your very own pair of Rosen3000 (TM) ear implants that will filter the noise and let you listen to your favorite RIAA sponsored artists.
Supplies are limited, so order now... (N' Sync and Inglesias brothers modules extra).
When over 97% percent of the internet using population uses one browser, it BECOMES the standard.
This is very troll, but he is right, folks. No matter how hard I try to convince her, my fiance thinks that Mozilla isn't any good because it can't upload attachments in Hotmail. It doesn't matter how WC3 compliant I am, the sites that she cares about are not.
In the software world, its not about the standard, its about implementation. So majority rules, and we all know who has the majority.
Bzzt. PDF Viewer is free. Additionally, the format for PDF is published so that people can write both viewers and creators for free.
Wrong - PDF viewers have the hidden cost of having to be downloaded, installed and configured - which though trival for greeks, it isn't exactly intuitive for the lusers of the world - and like it or not, thats Microsoft's largest market segment. Free or not, the PDF viewers won't be able to hold a candle to a product that already arrives configured and ready for use when the user turns on the machine.
Bzzt. Again wrong. You have PDF which is still free versus a feature that will be included in the latest version of Office, which isn't free.
Well, IIRC, the Adobe Composer isn't exactly free either. And remember that everybody is already buying Office anyway, which means that the XDocs isn't so much a purchased item, but rather a bonus feature.
So flash forward a few years, and look at a major company that currently pays extra money to compose in PDF. They look at their new Office 2004 that they just rolled out, and see that it handles the XDocs feature. And since Microsoft has already release the XDocs viewer in its last two operating system updates, then the odds are pretty good that 90% of the people in the target market can read the new format. Buh, bye PDF, hello XDocs.
And all of this without spending a single penny more than then would have spent otherwise. So Microsoft can use its superior (and illgotten) market share to muscle out the competition, which is now legal thanks to Mr. John Ashcroft and friends.
Why don't you call George W. "Shrub" Bush and thank him?
Most companies when publishing in PDF format do so, not for openness but to preotect against copying or modification.
Ironically, you think that PDF protects against copying, because it is difficult to modify them in Windows. By the same token, you may think that.DOC files are less secure, due to the fact that they are easy to read and modify in Windows.
Which of course, is the opposite for any *NIX system running Ghostscript (where a PDF -> ASCII conversion is trival, but.DOCs require much more work).
I guess you do have to play to your users strengths and weaknesses, it just seems funny to me, somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
This may set a precedent for allowing big companies to define something as "stealing" and then send a bill.
Except in this case, it really *is* stealing. There is a long jump from a fairly cut and dried legal issue to a company whining that less profits == stealing.
Of course, at some time in the future, enough money might change hands so that the things you mention really would be illegal. In my opinion, that is the real issue that we need to worry about instead of freting becuase you can no longer steal music on the internet.
Is the concept of "pay me for work" completely dead? Must everything be "pay me for work, and keep paying me for years later too?"
Why do you not just simply charge them for getting a job accomplished, and then, if they want you to come back, tell them it will cost them more money?
In a business situation, its never about just paying for software, and you are done. Nobody wants to pay $100,000 dollars for a chunk of software, have a CD arrive in the mail, and have that be it. They want the peace of mind of knowing that bugs will be fixed, support will be offered, and most importantly, that the expertise of the developers will be available to them if they choose.
No offense, but this isn't just a report or some finite amount of data that you provided. This sort of thing always goes way beyond just delivering a binary.
...although bear in mind that a lawyer engaged in copulation may not have his/her mind completely on the job.
Not a problem - screwing is part of their job description.
Well, for one thing, the model of selling a product doesn't work in the software development industry. Programmers are morally obligated to give the code to their users and allow their users to freely modify and redistribute the code.
Mod +1 Funny! Oh,wait....
You are morally obligated to do exactly jack, diddly, and squat with your code. If the company has the reputation and resources to handle services and do it correctly, more power to them, but for the average small time shop, selling the code may mean the difference between sucess and failure. What good is it it going to be for a client if you give away your code, and then go belly up two months later?
I think if i have to pay almost full price for an album that i have to make myself then i damn well better be able to do what i want with it without trying to sidestep the built in copy protection.
There is *no* copy protection. None, nada zilch. Your fair use is completely entact. But if you somehow start distributing the music (like P2P or burning CDs and selling them on the street), the watermark will lead back to you. Which, in my opinion is just fine because when you distribute the music you are breaking the law!
So, just to repeat - its not copy protection, its copyright protection. Personally, I could care less, because I'm not stealing music.
A few months ago, ALbertsons began giving away free discount cards that track your purchases. If you don't use the card, you pay 30% more for many items. You must be from the same household to use the same card.
Thats easy to remedy. As far as Albertsons is concerned my name is Phil McKrackin from 1324 Main Street, Anytown, MA 98765
I get the card, they get jack diddly squat.
Thanks for postiny my thoughts exactly. The problem is that schools (and training seminars, and employee training, and those CDs that you buy on infomercials), simply teach people to memorize the motions.
Once, when I was a teenager, I was written up a job for daring to do a DOS copy command differently than what the cheat sheet mentioned (I think I transposed options or something). Because the supervisor had always been taught to do it one way, she felt that any other way was wrong.
I know its boring, and not much fun to have to sit down and listen to an lecture of *why* things work, instead of just finding out *how* to do a certain task. But it almost always pays off in the long run.
Teach someone about spreadsheets, and they will be comfortable in any environment. Teach someone about Excel, and they will only be comfortable if there is a start button on the bottom right of the screen.
A judge can reject a case if she thinks it is frivolous, *plus* a defendant can counter-sue for any bills incurred. It's not perfect, but it does work pretty well.
If you think any of these cases will ever see the inside of a courtroom, you're nuts. Any corporate lawyer worth his salt can drain the resources of his comptetitor (especially a small one) long before the matter ever comes to a judge.
This isn't like criminal justice, where the defendant has a the right to come before a judge in a timely manner. This is a time, resource and paper consuming process that kills all but the very big fish in corporate America.
Sad, but true.....
Once again, I'm reminded that I can't escape the megacorps and their relentless marketing teams.
You know, therre is this great place called the outdoors. And, if you keep driving, past the buildings, you run into something people call wilderness. And unless, you live in Iowa, there are things out there called mountains. And believe it or not, people are allowed to walk around in those mountains. That is called escaping the "megacorps and their relentless marketing teams".
And even if you live in a city, there are things called books that you can look at. I don't ever recall seeing an ad in "The Hobbit", but maybe I should read it again just to be sure. If you really want to get away, there are big quiet buildings called libraries that you can go to.
Unless, you simply can't pry yourself away from your TV and computer - and then, yeah, I guess you can escape reality for a few hours by logging into a game (oddly, produced by those same megacorps). I just wouldn't be too surprised if you found an ad or two in there. After all, since you have proved your willingness to listen, they will talk to you.
I already do everything in my power to eliminate my exposure to mind numbing advertising. If it starts getting put into video games, I won't be able to go for popcorn until the previews start, or to go grab a snack until my show comes back on.
The makers of the game have chosen to do this. That is their right, because it is their game. But I just looked at the Bill of Rights and nowhere does it say anything about your right to play video games (and I read it twice to make sure). But apparently, you do have the right to not purchase the game, and nobody compells you to give your time, money or eyeballs to anybody.
But if you feel that it must be a life or death requirement to play these games, you must accept the fact that they may have advertisments.
Either play the games and endure the advertisments, or don't give them your business. There is no third thing.
But it's EA's game, and if they want to ruin it by giving points for hitting yourself on the head with a duck, well, either get a duck or spend your gaming budget somewhere else.
Well worded. I hope you don't mind if I add that line to my regular rotation of quotes I didn't invent.
Thanks for the common sense.
For those in the MST, this
says that the moon will be in the west, while Leo is in the east. Now, I might be smoking crack, but that probably means I can look toward Leo for optimal viewing with little or no moon.
Right?
I don't wanna be a dick, but according to this:
h tm l
http://starryskies.com/leonids/star-charts-mst.
The moon will be directly opposite Leo in the sky. Seems like its the optimal viewing position (at least given the circumstances).
But then again, IANAA (I am Not An Astronomer).
I've always wanted to go to Comdex, on company dollar of course, if for no other reason than to meet and hangout with a bunch of my fellow geeks in Las Vegas.
:)
.. Comdex generally tends to be proof of concept devices.
Um, I'm not sure what Comdex you're talking about, but every Comdex I've seen has been chock full of suits and marketing types that don't know anything remotely technical or geeky about the particular product they are trying to sell.
Oh, sure, there are geeks there, but they are all walking around scoring free crap from other booths, and generally enjoying a free trip to Vegas. Which is of course, why I go...
For technical comradery, you are much better off at any number of other shows - at least pick a show where there is cooler stuff being shown (like the Consumer Electronics Show)
Hey, right now all MS has to do to compile a page of reasons to switch is type "linux bugs" into Google:
(Yeah, I know this is a troll - but hey, I'm bored).
Look at it this way...
1) You know publicity about your break-ins will cost you reputation.
Hiding the fact that your customers personal data was compromised will cost you reputation. And it will get out - you can't hide it forever.
2) You know that there really isn't any way to 100% secure your site from every niggling little security hole, no matter how much money you spend.
Nobody will not hit 100% of the companies in America at the same time with a new exploit. If you monitor the community and mailing lists, the odds of finding and fixing an hole before gets exploited are in your favor.
If you wanna build a case for the immorality of copying content without paying for it, at least respect that a majority of peoples' behaviours dictate the morality.
250 years ago, the majority agreed that slavery was decent and moral.
400 years ago, the majority thought it would be ok to light people on fire because they thought that they were witches.
2000 years ago, the majority thought it was lots of fun to toss people into a pit and watch them get eaten by lions.
If you want to convince anybody that copying movies and music is bad, you might start with explaining why the amount of people stealing music and movies is so much higher than people who steal ungaurded physical objects.
Do you have any number to back that up? What percentage of American's are arrested for theft? What percentage actively use a P2P service? And better yet, what percentage continue to do so even after somebody points out that they are breaking the law?
Just because every l33t geek boy you know downloads gigs and gigs of music, doesn't mean thats the majority of the people in the world.
You'd probably also want to make sure that you viewed the rampant cassette copying of the 80s as highly immoral as well for consistancy (in addition to recording TV, recording the radio, etc).
Copying cassettes is very similar (and just as illegal), however I make three points:
A) You couldn't achieve the massive individual quanitites as you can today.
B) You would actually ahve had to known a person with the tape, no anonymous copying from the internet.
C) Analog, analog, Analog.
As for the TV and the radio, everybody long ago acknowleged the legality of time shifting. You show me where you have any sort of legal right to anonymously take music from a stranger on the Internet, and I will eat my hat.
Because every other pimply faced 14 year old in your chess club does it too? Please......
If you read every day then you get fast. Fact.
Same thing happens with TV. I'm so fast, I can watch "24" in 34 minutes.
I remember having a game (was it SimCity?) that had a lookup sheet that was dark red, making it impossible to copy (in those days - before good scanners and digital copy machines).
Ahhh, memories.....
Nice try Ms. Rosen.....
/. loves so much engages in just as much profit taking as the RIAA. If they can get a 75% margin by selling their music, then they will. No matter the level, if you are willing to pay a price for a CD, thats what they'll sell it for.
I don't see anyone, not indy labels, not bands selling their own music, who sells CDs for a few bucks each.
The fact that you miss is that the precious independent labels that
But nobody has been able to prove to me that the $20 price on a commercially produced CD contains anything less than a 50% profit margin. Show me where the CD actually costs more than $10 to make, and I'll eat my hat.
What's stopping people doing this?
Wait? You haven't heard? All music published after January 1, 2003 will be encoded to sound like Al Gore singing songs from John Tesh's Greatest Hits album. But if you buy now (only $399.99, plus shiping and handling), you can get your very own pair of Rosen3000 (TM) ear implants that will filter the noise and let you listen to your favorite RIAA sponsored artists.
Supplies are limited, so order now... (N' Sync and Inglesias brothers modules extra).
When over 97% percent of the internet using population uses one browser, it BECOMES the standard.
This is very troll, but he is right, folks. No matter how hard I try to convince her, my fiance thinks that Mozilla isn't any good because it can't upload attachments in Hotmail. It doesn't matter how WC3 compliant I am, the sites that she cares about are not.
In the software world, its not about the standard, its about implementation. So majority rules, and we all know who has the majority.
Congrats, you live up to your name...
Bzzt. PDF Viewer is free. Additionally, the format for PDF is published so that people can write both viewers and creators for free.
Wrong - PDF viewers have the hidden cost of having to be downloaded, installed and configured - which though trival for greeks, it isn't exactly intuitive for the lusers of the world - and like it or not, thats Microsoft's largest market segment. Free or not, the PDF viewers won't be able to hold a candle to a product that already arrives configured and ready for use when the user turns on the machine.
Bzzt. Again wrong. You have PDF which is still free versus a feature that will be included in the latest version of Office, which isn't free.
Well, IIRC, the Adobe Composer isn't exactly free either. And remember that everybody is already buying Office anyway, which means that the XDocs isn't so much a purchased item, but rather a bonus feature.
So flash forward a few years, and look at a major company that currently pays extra money to compose in PDF. They look at their new Office 2004 that they just rolled out, and see that it handles the XDocs feature. And since Microsoft has already release the XDocs viewer in its last two operating system updates, then the odds are pretty good that 90% of the people in the target market can read the new format. Buh, bye PDF, hello XDocs.
And all of this without spending a single penny more than then would have spent otherwise. So Microsoft can use its superior (and illgotten) market share to muscle out the competition, which is now legal thanks to Mr. John Ashcroft and friends.
Why don't you call George W. "Shrub" Bush and thank him?
Most companies when publishing in PDF format do so, not for openness but to preotect against copying or modification.
.DOC files are less secure, due to the fact that they are easy to read and modify in Windows.
.DOCs require much more work).
Ironically, you think that PDF protects against copying, because it is difficult to modify them in Windows. By the same token, you may think that
Which of course, is the opposite for any *NIX system running Ghostscript (where a PDF -> ASCII conversion is trival, but
I guess you do have to play to your users strengths and weaknesses, it just seems funny to me, somehow.
Additionally, last time I read the GPL, I don't recall it saying anything about e-mailing itself to everyone in my ~/.mailrc.
Thats only because it couldn't decide which of the 3 dozen e-mail clients that are installed with Red Hat 7.3 to infect.