No, I just don't think there's any legal basis for a challenge. There's no law saying software has to be guaranteed, and even if there was, you would waive all rights to its protection by signing the license agreement. There arguably *should* be a law saying software has to be guaranteed, but it's unlikely, given the old argument that it's impossible to guarantee software to work on diverse platforms (hint: if it's impossible, you shouldn't be taking money for doing it)
Now, I agree this would be a good thing throughout law: beefing up the concept of rights so that some rights can never be waived, even by agreement. Otherwise you get the stupid situation you get nowadays, where you technically have rights, but in order to achieve anything you invariably need to liase with someone who has something you need and can make you sign your rights away in order to get it. It's not just software that does this, by the way. Look at the bottom of many restaurant menus and supermarket foods and you'll see "All products may contain nut traces." The tacit message: If you have a nut allergy, either suck the problem down yourself if you have a reaction, or give up eating. Same thing with Windows (in the perception of many firms): do what MS says or your computers are just lumps of plastic and silicon.
> What I don't get is why these companies just
> don't make it impossible to item farm. Make the
> big ticket items nodrop (can't be dropped or
> given to another character). Want the Slothful
> Sword of Everslaying? get it yourself, or not
> at all. Poof, item farmers get day jobs.
Nope. Item farmers instead just:
a) sell the item;
b) meet the buyer;
c) put the buyer in their party;
d) go kill the thing that drops the item;
e) let the buyer loot the corpse instead of them.
Ta-daa. Better yet, you can't sue 'em, because they sold the service rather than the item, which is clearly not the IP of the game company.
> As for character trading, why not have
> a "master" account that is tied to your credit
> card number? This master account can create any
> number of "game" characters. But the master
> account can only play as it's own game
> characters. Poof, no more character trading,
> unless you are also willing to trade your ccard
> number in the transaction. Poof, character
> ranchers get day jobs.
Nope, unless you are going to display the credit card number when the master account logs on, nobody will care which master account the characters they play are joined to...
> wonderful new concept where you can CREATE
> SOMETHING and then SELL IT HOWEVER YOU WANT
> WITHIN REASON CAUSE YOU OWN THE DAMN THING.
Except they didn't really create anything, did they? They just flipped some bits, which were inside some memory chips. The designers of the memory knew that they'd be flipped and the designers of the CPU knew exactly what every combination of bits that passed through it would do. They haven't really created anything, have they?
> "Nope. No can do. Virtual items have no
> legitimacy and cannot be bartered for or
> against."
Which could have some very scary repercussions on the sale of downloadable software and subscriptions.
After all, when you subscribe to a MMORPG or similar online subscription service, all that happens is that the owner of the site sets a flag on the server to say you should be let on; ie, you are paying for a bunch of bytes on a server, which is exactly the same as what you're paying for if you buy some GP off somebody else in a MMORPG. In every real sense, they are *both* "virtual items".
Yes, TOS's banning the sale of items are quite common. The problem is that the EQ case showed that there's a way around it: sell the service of handing the item over (not "$25 for this sword" but "$25 for my time in logging in, meeting your character, and transferring a sword to them"), or the service of obtaining the item for them ("$25 for my time in logging in, adding you to my party, going to kill the R0X0R DRA60N where I deal 99% of the damage, then letting you have first pick from the loot window").
I think the copyright argument is rather vague, too, especially for selling characters. It would be entirely reasonable to argue that the series of actions that a player chooses for their character to take in the game is the PLAYER's copyright, which is tangibly fixed in the character's logs and present statistics. Also, it is not clear if the sale of the server owner's intellectual property is an issue because after all the server owner does not lose it as a result of the sale (it is still on the server)
But, at the end of the day, it really just shows that 90% of MMORPGs stink at the moment. Playing them is not fun; the only fun is in the reward you get for enduring the boring stuff for a while. Allegiance and Shattered Galaxy were quite playable, but every other MMORPG I've played has sucked rocks.
Oh, and one other thing. It's been reported (do a search on Google Groups) that a person who used a registry fudge to change the password _has_ successfully logged in as Helpassistant without a support request being sent. Since that person was apparantly the person who wrote the registry tool what they say has some authenticity to it.
Yes, the page is convincing, but if this is the case why is the account hidden?
If the account is only enabled/disabled in response to these cases, why not show it on the user list and let the user see that it is disabled, so they know what it is and what it's used for?
Actually, Gridrunner is already publically released. The author (Jeff Minter) has all his ROMs available for download on his own homepage and allows them to be used freely.
The Blitz Basic release of Gridrunner is still (I think) licensed by Llamasoft, but if you want the original version you can just get it straight from Yak.
In XP, go to your user manager, and go to "Create Account".
When asked for the name of the account, type "Helpassistant".
Give the account limited access and press OK... XP will report that THE ACCOUNT ALREADY EXISTS!
EVERY copy of XP contains this account hardwired. It can't be edited because it never appears as an option on the list of users. It may not be possible to locally log in with it, but it certainly can be logged on with remotely.
Nobody knows the password yet (except MS) - or even if the password is the same or varies with the Windows version - but if I was a hacker I know what I'd be working on.
(Oh, and as for "it's just for helpers to fix your machine for you".. of course it is. Yes, and if it was a backdoor account it'd obviously be called "Backdoor", wouldn't it?:) )
Yea, Windows is unreliable.. although Win2K, I will admit, *is* pretty reliable.
XP reliable? Ahem.. well, it's less reliable than any OS which *doesn't* deliberately crash itself after 90 days (WPA). I won't even get into the stories about spyware, the mysterious unauthorized Bandwidth usage, or the Helpassistant account (because I don't know if they're true or not). Reliable means it reliably does WHAT THE USER WANTS IT TO DO, not anything else.
The point is, though, that this is what users *want*. Gasps of shock? Users want an unreliable, slow operating system with lots of extra baggage. It lets them feel like they're using a really impressive computer, lets them blame the computer for not being able to get work done, etc. You can see this in modern UIs, where the UI has stopped trying to be friendly to the user and instead concentrated on adding fluff to make the user feel "wow, I'm using a computer!".
Apart from finding (!) the source code, I don't quite see this myself.
Remove the protection? Why bother? With the source code at hand removing it wouldn't be too difficult. Besides, most copy protection is just done by buying a copy protection library (now SafeDisk, Elan, V-Box.. then Prolok, Lenslok(!), Rob Northern..) and inserting a few calls to it at critical points.
The copyright duration ("life of author plus the number of years since the death of Walt Disney") is a rather thorny point, but moving that around affects a *huge* number of things, and removing the "life of author" provision is a massive hit too.. furthermore, it doesn't guarantee source availability. Lapsed copyright would just mean you could copy what they'd released, it wouldn't mean they'd have to release material (source) they hadn't released before.
> Then why doesn't Linux (*BSD, etc) own 95% of
> the desktop market?
Because, from the perception of an awful lot of the desktop market, Windows is free too - it comes with their PC.
> Sure you can. Just don't copy it.
The problem is that this isn't quite enough. In software, there is usually just one particular set of instructions to do what you want to do in the most optimal way. If you happen to be looking at some GPL'd source for hints on how to do something, and you see that optimal code, then you are left with a big problem: if you use the code you will have copied it (or at least you will have no way of proving that you didn't) and if you don't use the code you are putting suboptimal code in your product.
This is why so many implementations insist on "clean room development". It is also one of the strongest arguments for open source.
> *laugh* Really... Microsoft continues
> to "compete" with Linux, KOffice, etc. Eudora
> competes with mutt.
The competitors were not failures in this case, and these are "core" applications.
Actually, a *far* better question would be: why pay a yearly subscription which allows me to have my bandwidth used by others, and to obtain a random selection of music, which I may not like, from unreliable servers that my subscription does not go to maintain or run, and then find that my use of that music is seriously retrict when I could just **go buy the damn CD**?
It's highly portable, it's very reliable, the artist gets their money, it has a great range and I can easily get the music I want without paying for music I don't want.
Giving little bands a break? Unlikely. If it's all search based, like most of these things seem to be, nobody will search for the little guys if they haven't heard of them.
If places really wanted to give little bands a break, they'd just abolish Parallel Development so that artists would have more control over publishers.. ("I sent you my tape, I won't sign your restrictive contract.. fine, you won't listen to the tape, but with no Parallel Development I can still sue your asses if you publish music that's too similar to it (especially since it was your choice not to listen) so wouldn't you rather know what you have to avoid?")
Re:It's probably the DVD thing..
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 1
> If you boycott them and resfuse to buy a PS2,
> they lose all the money it took to produce the > game, the game makers start to lose money
No, they don't, because if you don't buy the PS2, someone else does.
This is why consumer protests of this kind fail - because usually there are so many non-protestors or "sheep" (loosely defined as "the people on whom advertising works") in the market that the company doesn't care about people who don't buy its products. If the product has network effect (as consoles, and platforms in general, tend to) they worry even less as the effective loss to the people who refuse to buy the product will increase over time.
If you buy and destroy stock, others can't buy it. If enough people did this, places would start running out of stock, and the firms would make more to compensate. Then the protestors suddenly stop destroying it, meaning they now have an overproduction surplus which drives down the prices.
And - is the PS2 *REALLY* not subsidised!? They're selling in the UK for about 150 quid a pop, which is cheap compared to a plain DVD player! Of course, the *retailers* might be subsidising it, in which case the buy-and-smash would still be effective (retailers lose money so they stop buying PS2s and the distribution chain is cut, or they stop subsidising them but still subsidise the competitors, giving the competitors a price advantage)
> this is a free society and a free market.
> Success isn't a right, you have to prove your
> worth to society.
Right.
And what I would demand is the ability of everyone to have a chance at proving their worth to society.
That means that everyone has to be able to construct a piece of work, which then has to be attended to by those who have the power to grant success, which means CONSUMERS - *not* publishing companies who apply arbitary filtering standards which are often wrong (just ask The Beatles)
Unfortunately, to change society to allow that would require a near-revolution.
Thus, please do not believe that those who prove their worth to society succeed. Those who get the chance to prove their worth usually succeed. (The problem is that in present society, to get the chance, you usually have to have worth already proven.)
> Perhaps we need a Federal oversight comittee to
> manage the national Intellectual Property and
> Copyright issues for the benefit
That would be a very good idea, but it would have to be seperate from government.
It's the government connection which has led to a lot of the silliness in copyright these days, such as patenting ideas that are never used to stop competitors using them ("inspire innovation.."), and of course the age-old tradition that the duration of copyright is author's life plus the number of years since the death of Walt Disney rounded to the nearest 25.
The problem is that creator's rights are being *weakened* by the same legislation that's supposed to protect them.
Firstly, there's the right to create in the first place, which is slowly but surely being killed, the logic being that if you can't create anything (or if you can't consume anything you've created), you can't create (or consume) something that's a copy of someone else's work. The fact that you can't create anything of your own means nothing, of course. What do the content firms care? If you had "talent" you'd already be working for them, right?
Creating something, and putting the "sweat and thought" into it, also does not make it sell. To do that, you have to get it distributed and advertised. This likely takes money that you don't have, and in many cases money isn't enough - it also requires REPUTATION for being a good seller, which you don't have and (since you can't sell w/o reputation and you can't earn reputation w/o selling) can never get. (So much for capitalism being about taking risks to get reward. All the big firms have already taken their risks and they are *still* getting the reward, so they have no real motive for taking further ones.)
To get distribution, you have to sell up your work to a firm, which usually involves signing away all your creator's rights and leads to the type of examples you come up with.
And there's the problem. Most of the time, the creator *doesn't* have the choice to give up rights or not - they *have* to give them up, because if they don't, their creative work will forever be a little file on their hard disk or a lost manuscript. Even internet distribution doesn't help because it doesn't include effective advertising, without which yer average consumer won't notice it. And if you can't shift yer average consumer, you'll never make any of the big firms give a damn because they'll always be plenty of sheep to prop them up.
So, if we're going to fight for creator's rights, let's fight for the right for creators to *have* their work distributed and sold if they wish, instead of having it filtered out after a 2-second listening, left on the bottom of a slushpile for months, or being told they can't have a game console SDK because they haven't written a console game yet.
I don't see what everyone here is arguing about so much.
The article appears to be RMS defending the viral aspect of the GPL by saying that nobody should be able to grab power over a GPL'd program by creating a closed fork.
I don't think he ever said anything about having to publish everything you write under the GPL. If you write something, you can choose how to publish it, or not to publish it at all; nothing in the article conflicted with that. And - as far as I know - if you publish it under the GPL, you yourself aren't affected by the terms of the GPL, because you're the author of the work and thus don't need a license to use/copy it. (On the other hand, the moment somebody sends you a bugfix or feature upgrade and you incorporate it into the code you wrote, you are affected by the GPL on *THEIR* code, unless they explicitly transferred their IP rights in their code to you which they probably did not)
However, if you obtain GPL'd software and change it, then it is _not_ your work: it's the work of others. If you change it, then your changes are your work, but if they don't stand alone then you still derived benefit from the work of others which you obtained for free.
The only one thing that people might find objectionable about Open Source is that giving something away is an devastating competitive move in a capitalist world, because it's impossible to compete on price without making a loss. (Witness MS's tactics at giving away IE.) The irony is that the main reason most Open Source developers can still eat while they give stuff away, is that they have day jobs, usually either in the IT industry or in academia. Ergo, Open Source is actually being subsidised by commercial software, and as Open Source competes more strongly it is sabotaging its own bedrock.
How is this controller supposed to work? You need both hands to hold it to use the stick and buttons - what do you type with, your nose? If you want to type, you have to put the controller down in a typable position, change your hand position, and then type on it, which is MORE bother than a regular controller change (because when you drop a regular joypad, you don't have to put it in a position where you can then type on it).
Why don't they just do away with a joypad and let you play PSO with the w/a/s/d/return/space/shift buttons?
(Although, if it's yer typical MMORPG, it really only needs about three gameplay buttons anyway: "Kill" "Buy" and "Stop")
> It just serves as an example of how you can
> still make money after the collapse of the
> recording industry. And after all, creativity
> does not require revenue at all.
No. You do, however, need to make money to EAT while you're writing music. So get a job? Well, yes, you can do that, but then you've got a lot less time to write music, so you're going to write less music or worse music.
This, of course, is a big clanger the record industry makes: by glamorising its stars, it makes people think "well, writing music isn't work, so why do we need to guarantee them money for it?".
If the industries want people to stop copying simply because it's wrong to do so, they'll have to make musicians look like people again. (But, as I mentioned elsewhere, they don't, because as long as a large number of people will copy whatever it is possible to copy, companies can use controlled distribution of the copy prevention technologies as a further barrier to new music publishers.)
> Some people just love to make good music
> because it pleases them. Basically aside from
> the past 75 years, throughout history there was
> no way to distribute copies of music.
Yes, they made money from live performances because there was NO ALTERNATIVE if you wanted to hear the music. (And there was no piracy.)
To anyone who says musicians should make their money from live performances - how many concerts/gigs have you been to recently?
> Still people like Mozart and Beethoven
> delivered some very fine music so it is not the
> end of the world.
Uhm, classical musicians not only got paid for performances, they got sponsored _to write pieces to perform_. Ok, there's some exceptions for the classical prodigies (stuff Mozart wrote at age under 10, Faure handing in the Cantique De Jean Racine as his composition homework at a school, etc.), but even then they were being supported.
Unless you were a noble or a king, you probably wouldn't have heard their original performances.
You have to watch out with the "individual freedoms" claim.
First of all, the "uncopyable" CDs are a laugh. Unless they're going to start banning the sale of short gold-plated analogue audio cables and digital audio cables. They've tried to stop people playing the CDs on computers, but have ignored the fact that the computer doesn't need to play the CD - it just needs to get at the audio stream somehow.
But second, the simple reason you have to be careful is that if you DO triumph over all these rights protection businesses, then the owners of the content can just Take Their Ball And Go Home. If the DeCSS case had crushed the DMCA early in DVD's life, they just wouldn't have made any more DVDs. Of course, what their big fear is that sooner or later somebody will say We've Got Our Own Ball Now.
Unfortunately in the case of music this is pretty unlikely, as long as they can tie up all methods for making money by distributing music that way. Piracy is a (relatively) minor issue because it'll always happen anyway (and it can help - see below); distribution of free music is a relatively minor issue because you can't do free work forever.
But, try writing a piece of music and finding out how much it'll cost (or even if it'll be possible) for you to distribute it with DRM. Try making a film and find out what it'll involve to get it CSSed. Most of these don't bother with money - they just won't sell to you unless you can prove you can be trusted - by already being a music/film firm. And if you aren't one now, you can never meet that, because you can't become a firm if you can't make money because you have no protection.
And that's another side: as long as people are not pirating because it's technologically impossible for them to do so, rather than because it's wrong, no attitudes will change. The moment something gets released without protection, many will say "What a goof!" and copy it to the skies. This neatly prevents people who can't get the protection from making money, as discussed above, and thus is actually beneficial to the existing companies who can afford protection. Using piracy to wipe competitors off the map is well-established by now, although it's unusual in music (although pretty frequent in IT)
And yet another: people are used to judging the quality of a musician by the fact they got commercially released. Many famous musicians are famous *before* their first song gets released. Moving to a non-publisher model, in which all qualities of music are distributed and you just choose the ones you like, would probably be rejected, because it would require people to actually think about what they were buying.
As for whether the RIAA could ban it - they could argue that it breached the DMCA, by allowing copy protection to be broken. Of course, this brings in the issue of whether a technology which applies no protection but which is compatible with a format which does specify protection constitutes "a device which bypasses technological means to prevent copying" (arguably in this case the techological means are never applied and therefore can't be being bypassed).
But, if they could ban programmable MP3 players, they'd also have to ban programmable palmtops, which would be a lot stickier.
Actually, there's a specific GPL variant (GLPL) which covers libraries and similar and reduces the viral effect, precisely so that this bifurcation doesn't arise.
It might be a private company for you, but it isn't in many places. Cable in the UK, for example, is (I think) being affected by government legislation with regard to the local loop. So don't assume that anyone who doesn't have cable just can't handle the free market, cos it isn't the case.
The cable company gives the users the right to use more of THEIR outgoing bandwidth than modem users, and they pay extra for that. THAT'S fine.
But NOTHING gives cable users the right to use more bandwidth and CPU load on the SERVERS THEY CONNECT TO. The server operators, game maintainers, etc., don't get any extra money from cable users.
This is actually strange, because a lot of places used to do this. Back in the BBS days I recall a number of boards that varied their subscription level with the bips rating of your modem, so 9600 would be more expensive than 2400, and 14.4k would be more expensive still, etc. If you logged on at a higher bips than you'd paid for, the front-end would kick you off again.
(Even if servers throttled the incoming bandwidth per user, having cable would still be an advantage - you could do more things at once. THAT would be fair, as you're using the outgoing you're paying for, but not taking up more incoming on each server you connect to.)
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No, I just don't think there's any legal basis for a challenge. There's no law saying software has to be guaranteed, and even if there was, you would waive all rights to its protection by signing the license agreement. There arguably *should* be a law saying software has to be guaranteed, but it's unlikely, given the old argument that it's impossible to guarantee software to work on diverse platforms (hint: if it's impossible, you shouldn't be taking money for doing it)
Now, I agree this would be a good thing throughout law: beefing up the concept of rights so that some rights can never be waived, even by agreement. Otherwise you get the stupid situation you get nowadays, where you technically have rights, but in order to achieve anything you invariably need to liase with someone who has something you need and can make you sign your rights away in order to get it. It's not just software that does this, by the way. Look at the bottom of many restaurant menus and supermarket foods and you'll see "All products may contain nut traces." The tacit message: If you have a nut allergy, either suck the problem down yourself if you have a reaction, or give up eating. Same thing with Windows (in the perception of many firms): do what MS says or your computers are just lumps of plastic and silicon.
> What I don't get is why these companies just
> don't make it impossible to item farm. Make the
> big ticket items nodrop (can't be dropped or
> given to another character). Want the Slothful
> Sword of Everslaying? get it yourself, or not
> at all. Poof, item farmers get day jobs.
Nope. Item farmers instead just:
a) sell the item;
b) meet the buyer;
c) put the buyer in their party;
d) go kill the thing that drops the item;
e) let the buyer loot the corpse instead of them.
Ta-daa. Better yet, you can't sue 'em, because they sold the service rather than the item, which is clearly not the IP of the game company.
> As for character trading, why not have
> a "master" account that is tied to your credit
> card number? This master account can create any
> number of "game" characters. But the master
> account can only play as it's own game
> characters. Poof, no more character trading,
> unless you are also willing to trade your ccard
> number in the transaction. Poof, character
> ranchers get day jobs.
Nope, unless you are going to display the credit card number when the master account logs on, nobody will care which master account the characters they play are joined to...
> wonderful new concept where you can CREATE
> SOMETHING and then SELL IT HOWEVER YOU WANT
> WITHIN REASON CAUSE YOU OWN THE DAMN THING.
Except they didn't really create anything, did they? They just flipped some bits, which were inside some memory chips. The designers of the memory knew that they'd be flipped and the designers of the CPU knew exactly what every combination of bits that passed through it would do. They haven't really created anything, have they?
> "Nope. No can do. Virtual items have no
> legitimacy and cannot be bartered for or
> against."
Which could have some very scary repercussions on the sale of downloadable software and subscriptions.
After all, when you subscribe to a MMORPG or similar online subscription service, all that happens is that the owner of the site sets a flag on the server to say you should be let on; ie, you are paying for a bunch of bytes on a server, which is exactly the same as what you're paying for if you buy some GP off somebody else in a MMORPG. In every real sense, they are *both* "virtual items".
Yes, TOS's banning the sale of items are quite common. The problem is that the EQ case showed that there's a way around it: sell the service of handing the item over (not "$25 for this sword" but "$25 for my time in logging in, meeting your character, and transferring a sword to them"), or the service of obtaining the item for them ("$25 for my time in logging in, adding you to my party, going to kill the R0X0R DRA60N where I deal 99% of the damage, then letting you have first pick from the loot window").
I think the copyright argument is rather vague, too, especially for selling characters. It would be entirely reasonable to argue that the series of actions that a player chooses for their character to take in the game is the PLAYER's copyright, which is tangibly fixed in the character's logs and present statistics. Also, it is not clear if the sale of the server owner's intellectual property is an issue because after all the server owner does not lose it as a result of the sale (it is still on the server)
But, at the end of the day, it really just shows that 90% of MMORPGs stink at the moment. Playing them is not fun; the only fun is in the reward you get for enduring the boring stuff for a while. Allegiance and Shattered Galaxy were quite playable, but every other MMORPG I've played has sucked rocks.
Oh, and one other thing. It's been reported (do a search on Google Groups) that a person who used a registry fudge to change the password _has_ successfully logged in as Helpassistant without a support request being sent. Since that person was apparantly the person who wrote the registry tool what they say has some authenticity to it.
Yes, the page is convincing, but if this is the case why is the account hidden?
If the account is only enabled/disabled in response to these cases, why not show it on the user list and let the user see that it is disabled, so they know what it is and what it's used for?
Actually, Gridrunner is already publically released. The author (Jeff Minter) has all his ROMs available for download on his own homepage and allows them to be used freely.
The Blitz Basic release of Gridrunner is still (I think) licensed by Llamasoft, but if you want the original version you can just get it straight from Yak.
I'd think a more serious one is this:
:) )
In XP, go to your user manager, and go to "Create Account".
When asked for the name of the account, type "Helpassistant".
Give the account limited access and press OK... XP will report that THE ACCOUNT ALREADY EXISTS!
EVERY copy of XP contains this account hardwired. It can't be edited because it never appears as an option on the list of users. It may not be possible to locally log in with it, but it certainly can be logged on with remotely.
Nobody knows the password yet (except MS) - or even if the password is the same or varies with the Windows version - but if I was a hacker I know what I'd be working on.
(Oh, and as for "it's just for helpers to fix your machine for you".. of course it is. Yes, and if it was a backdoor account it'd obviously be called "Backdoor", wouldn't it?
Yea, Windows is unreliable.. although Win2K, I will admit, *is* pretty reliable.
XP reliable? Ahem.. well, it's less reliable than any OS which *doesn't* deliberately crash itself after 90 days (WPA). I won't even get into the stories about spyware, the mysterious unauthorized Bandwidth usage, or the Helpassistant account (because I don't know if they're true or not). Reliable means it reliably does WHAT THE USER WANTS IT TO DO, not anything else.
The point is, though, that this is what users *want*. Gasps of shock? Users want an unreliable, slow operating system with lots of extra baggage. It lets them feel like they're using a really impressive computer, lets them blame the computer for not being able to get work done, etc. You can see this in modern UIs, where the UI has stopped trying to be friendly to the user and instead concentrated on adding fluff to make the user feel "wow, I'm using a computer!".
Apart from finding (!) the source code, I don't quite see this myself.
Remove the protection? Why bother? With the source code at hand removing it wouldn't be too difficult. Besides, most copy protection is just done by buying a copy protection library (now SafeDisk, Elan, V-Box.. then Prolok, Lenslok(!), Rob Northern..) and inserting a few calls to it at critical points.
The copyright duration ("life of author plus the number of years since the death of Walt Disney") is a rather thorny point, but moving that around affects a *huge* number of things, and removing the "life of author" provision is a massive hit too.. furthermore, it doesn't guarantee source availability. Lapsed copyright would just mean you could copy what they'd released, it wouldn't mean they'd have to release material (source) they hadn't released before.
> Then why doesn't Linux (*BSD, etc) own 95% of
> the desktop market?
Because, from the perception of an awful lot of the desktop market, Windows is free too - it comes with their PC.
> Sure you can. Just don't copy it.
The problem is that this isn't quite enough. In software, there is usually just one particular set of instructions to do what you want to do in the most optimal way. If you happen to be looking at some GPL'd source for hints on how to do something, and you see that optimal code, then you are left with a big problem: if you use the code you will have copied it (or at least you will have no way of proving that you didn't) and if you don't use the code you are putting suboptimal code in your product.
This is why so many implementations insist on "clean room development". It is also one of the strongest arguments for open source.
> *laugh* Really... Microsoft continues
> to "compete" with Linux, KOffice, etc. Eudora
> competes with mutt.
The competitors were not failures in this case, and these are "core" applications.
Actually, a *far* better question would be: why pay a yearly subscription which allows me to have my bandwidth used by others, and to obtain a random selection of music, which I may not like, from unreliable servers that my subscription does not go to maintain or run, and then find that my use of that music is seriously retrict when I could just **go buy the damn CD**?
It's highly portable, it's very reliable, the artist gets their money, it has a great range and I can easily get the music I want without paying for music I don't want.
Giving little bands a break? Unlikely. If it's all search based, like most of these things seem to be, nobody will search for the little guys if they haven't heard of them.
If places really wanted to give little bands a break, they'd just abolish Parallel Development so that artists would have more control over publishers.. ("I sent you my tape, I won't sign your restrictive contract.. fine, you won't listen to the tape, but with no Parallel Development I can still sue your asses if you publish music that's too similar to it (especially since it was your choice not to listen) so wouldn't you rather know what you have to avoid?")
> If you boycott them and resfuse to buy a PS2,
> they lose all the money it took to produce the > game, the game makers start to lose money
No, they don't, because if you don't buy the PS2, someone else does.
This is why consumer protests of this kind fail - because usually there are so many non-protestors or "sheep" (loosely defined as "the people on whom advertising works") in the market that the company doesn't care about people who don't buy its products. If the product has network effect (as consoles, and platforms in general, tend to) they worry even less as the effective loss to the people who refuse to buy the product will increase over time.
If you buy and destroy stock, others can't buy it. If enough people did this, places would start running out of stock, and the firms would make more to compensate. Then the protestors suddenly stop destroying it, meaning they now have an overproduction surplus which drives down the prices.
And - is the PS2 *REALLY* not subsidised!? They're selling in the UK for about 150 quid a pop, which is cheap compared to a plain DVD player! Of course, the *retailers* might be subsidising it, in which case the buy-and-smash would still be effective (retailers lose money so they stop buying PS2s and the distribution chain is cut, or they stop subsidising them but still subsidise the competitors, giving the competitors a price advantage)
> this is a free society and a free market.
> Success isn't a right, you have to prove your
> worth to society.
Right.
And what I would demand is the ability of everyone to have a chance at proving their worth to society.
That means that everyone has to be able to construct a piece of work, which then has to be attended to by those who have the power to grant success, which means CONSUMERS - *not* publishing companies who apply arbitary filtering standards which are often wrong (just ask The Beatles)
Unfortunately, to change society to allow that would require a near-revolution.
Thus, please do not believe that those who prove their worth to society succeed. Those who get the chance to prove their worth usually succeed. (The problem is that in present society, to get the chance, you usually have to have worth already proven.)
> Perhaps we need a Federal oversight comittee to
> manage the national Intellectual Property and
> Copyright issues for the benefit
That would be a very good idea, but it would have to be seperate from government.
It's the government connection which has led to a lot of the silliness in copyright these days, such as patenting ideas that are never used to stop competitors using them ("inspire innovation.."), and of course the age-old tradition that the duration of copyright is author's life plus the number of years since the death of Walt Disney rounded to the nearest 25.
The problem is that creator's rights are being *weakened* by the same legislation that's supposed to protect them.
Firstly, there's the right to create in the first place, which is slowly but surely being killed, the logic being that if you can't create anything (or if you can't consume anything you've created), you can't create (or consume) something that's a copy of someone else's work. The fact that you can't create anything of your own means nothing, of course. What do the content firms care? If you had "talent" you'd already be working for them, right?
Creating something, and putting the "sweat and thought" into it, also does not make it sell. To do that, you have to get it distributed and advertised. This likely takes money that you don't have, and in many cases money isn't enough - it also requires REPUTATION for being a good seller, which you don't have and (since you can't sell w/o reputation and you can't earn reputation w/o selling) can never get. (So much for capitalism being about taking risks to get reward. All the big firms have already taken their risks and they are *still* getting the reward, so they have no real motive for taking further ones.)
To get distribution, you have to sell up your work to a firm, which usually involves signing away all your creator's rights and leads to the type of examples you come up with.
And there's the problem. Most of the time, the creator *doesn't* have the choice to give up rights or not - they *have* to give them up, because if they don't, their creative work will forever be a little file on their hard disk or a lost manuscript. Even internet distribution doesn't help because it doesn't include effective advertising, without which yer average consumer won't notice it. And if you can't shift yer average consumer, you'll never make any of the big firms give a damn because they'll always be plenty of sheep to prop them up.
So, if we're going to fight for creator's rights, let's fight for the right for creators to *have* their work distributed and sold if they wish, instead of having it filtered out after a 2-second listening, left on the bottom of a slushpile for months, or being told they can't have a game console SDK because they haven't written a console game yet.
I don't see what everyone here is arguing about so much.
The article appears to be RMS defending the viral aspect of the GPL by saying that nobody should be able to grab power over a GPL'd program by creating a closed fork.
I don't think he ever said anything about having to publish everything you write under the GPL. If you write something, you can choose how to publish it, or not to publish it at all; nothing in the article conflicted with that. And - as far as I know - if you publish it under the GPL, you yourself aren't affected by the terms of the GPL, because you're the author of the work and thus don't need a license to use/copy it. (On the other hand, the moment somebody sends you a bugfix or feature upgrade and you incorporate it into the code you wrote, you are affected by the GPL on *THEIR* code, unless they explicitly transferred their IP rights in their code to you which they probably did not)
However, if you obtain GPL'd software and change it, then it is _not_ your work: it's the work of others. If you change it, then your changes are your work, but if they don't stand alone then you still derived benefit from the work of others which you obtained for free.
The only one thing that people might find objectionable about Open Source is that giving something away is an devastating competitive move in a capitalist world, because it's impossible to compete on price without making a loss. (Witness MS's tactics at giving away IE.) The irony is that the main reason most Open Source developers can still eat while they give stuff away, is that they have day jobs, usually either in the IT industry or in academia. Ergo, Open Source is actually being subsidised by commercial software, and as Open Source competes more strongly it is sabotaging its own bedrock.
How is this controller supposed to work? You need both hands to hold it to use the stick and buttons - what do you type with, your nose? If you want to type, you have to put the controller down in a typable position, change your hand position, and then type on it, which is MORE bother than a regular controller change (because when you drop a regular joypad, you don't have to put it in a position where you can then type on it).
Why don't they just do away with a joypad and let you play PSO with the w/a/s/d/return/space/shift buttons?
(Although, if it's yer typical MMORPG, it really only needs about three gameplay buttons anyway: "Kill" "Buy" and "Stop")
> It just serves as an example of how you can
> still make money after the collapse of the
> recording industry. And after all, creativity
> does not require revenue at all.
No. You do, however, need to make money to EAT while you're writing music. So get a job? Well, yes, you can do that, but then you've got a lot less time to write music, so you're going to write less music or worse music.
This, of course, is a big clanger the record industry makes: by glamorising its stars, it makes people think "well, writing music isn't work, so why do we need to guarantee them money for it?".
If the industries want people to stop copying simply because it's wrong to do so, they'll have to make musicians look like people again. (But, as I mentioned elsewhere, they don't, because as long as a large number of people will copy whatever it is possible to copy, companies can use controlled distribution of the copy prevention technologies as a further barrier to new music publishers.)
> Some people just love to make good music
> because it pleases them. Basically aside from
> the past 75 years, throughout history there was
> no way to distribute copies of music.
Yes, they made money from live performances because there was NO ALTERNATIVE if you wanted to hear the music. (And there was no piracy.)
To anyone who says musicians should make their money from live performances - how many concerts/gigs have you been to recently?
> Still people like Mozart and Beethoven
> delivered some very fine music so it is not the
> end of the world.
Uhm, classical musicians not only got paid for performances, they got sponsored _to write pieces to perform_. Ok, there's some exceptions for the classical prodigies (stuff Mozart wrote at age under 10, Faure handing in the Cantique De Jean Racine as his composition homework at a school, etc.), but even then they were being supported.
Unless you were a noble or a king, you probably wouldn't have heard their original performances.
You have to watch out with the "individual freedoms" claim.
First of all, the "uncopyable" CDs are a laugh. Unless they're going to start banning the sale of short gold-plated analogue audio cables and digital audio cables. They've tried to stop people playing the CDs on computers, but have ignored the fact that the computer doesn't need to play the CD - it just needs to get at the audio stream somehow.
But second, the simple reason you have to be careful is that if you DO triumph over all these rights protection businesses, then the owners of the content can just Take Their Ball And Go Home. If the DeCSS case had crushed the DMCA early in DVD's life, they just wouldn't have made any more DVDs. Of course, what their big fear is that sooner or later somebody will say We've Got Our Own Ball Now.
Unfortunately in the case of music this is pretty unlikely, as long as they can tie up all methods for making money by distributing music that way. Piracy is a (relatively) minor issue because it'll always happen anyway (and it can help - see below); distribution of free music is a relatively minor issue because you can't do free work forever.
But, try writing a piece of music and finding out how much it'll cost (or even if it'll be possible) for you to distribute it with DRM. Try making a film and find out what it'll involve to get it CSSed. Most of these don't bother with money - they just won't sell to you unless you can prove you can be trusted - by already being a music/film firm. And if you aren't one now, you can never meet that, because you can't become a firm if you can't make money because you have no protection.
And that's another side: as long as people are not pirating because it's technologically impossible for them to do so, rather than because it's wrong, no attitudes will change. The moment something gets released without protection, many will say "What a goof!" and copy it to the skies. This neatly prevents people who can't get the protection from making money, as discussed above, and thus is actually beneficial to the existing companies who can afford protection. Using piracy to wipe competitors off the map is well-established by now, although it's unusual in music (although pretty frequent in IT)
And yet another: people are used to judging the quality of a musician by the fact they got commercially released. Many famous musicians are famous *before* their first song gets released. Moving to a non-publisher model, in which all qualities of music are distributed and you just choose the ones you like, would probably be rejected, because it would require people to actually think about what they were buying.
As for whether the RIAA could ban it - they could argue that it breached the DMCA, by allowing copy protection to be broken. Of course, this brings in the issue of whether a technology which applies no protection but which is compatible with a format which does specify protection constitutes "a device which bypasses technological means to prevent copying" (arguably in this case the techological means are never applied and therefore can't be being bypassed).
But, if they could ban programmable MP3 players, they'd also have to ban programmable palmtops, which would be a lot stickier.
Actually, there's a specific GPL variant (GLPL) which covers libraries and similar and reduces the viral effect, precisely so that this bifurcation doesn't arise.
Oh, another thing I didn't mention:
It might be a private company for you, but it isn't in many places. Cable in the UK, for example, is (I think) being affected by government legislation with regard to the local loop. So don't assume that anyone who doesn't have cable just can't handle the free market, cos it isn't the case.
The cable company gives the users the right to use more of THEIR outgoing bandwidth than modem users, and they pay extra for that. THAT'S fine.
But NOTHING gives cable users the right to use more bandwidth and CPU load on the SERVERS THEY CONNECT TO. The server operators, game maintainers, etc., don't get any extra money from cable users.
This is actually strange, because a lot of places used to do this. Back in the BBS days I recall a number of boards that varied their subscription level with the bips rating of your modem, so 9600 would be more expensive than 2400, and 14.4k would be more expensive still, etc. If you logged on at a higher bips than you'd paid for, the front-end would kick you off again.
(Even if servers throttled the incoming bandwidth per user, having cable would still be an advantage - you could do more things at once. THAT would be fair, as you're using the outgoing you're paying for, but not taking up more incoming on each server you connect to.)