My terminology is probably a bit confused, as I'm trying to explain Finnish copyright law using American terminology taken from years of reading Slashdot (which is seldom accurate).
It is my understanding that international copyright law works like this, and DMCA-style legal protection of copy protection is irrelevant as no copy protection is used (the SWF is only used as documented and without DRM). I may, however, have been misusing the term "fair use"; I've only read Finnish copyright law in detail; my knowledge of US law is mostly based on Slashdot and Wikipedia.
No, the point of fair use is that you have rights to use material in certain ways, for purposes of backup or criticism.
And this doesn't fall under backup?
More to the point, you haven't been given a copy of a song through Imeem, you've been lent it for the explicit purpose of listening to it through Imeem.
Last time I checked, if you borrow a CD from the library, you're allowed to rip a copy for personal use (again, probably not in the US or wherever you are). In this case, Imeem is making the copies and is actually being paid for each one through advertising.
From my point of view, it's more a case of trying to teach these record companies not to dictate how I use their product, especially since copyright law is quite clear on the subject of fair use (at least where I come from, Finland). Besides, there are legal precedents in the form of recording radio and TV transmissions, even in the USA.
Considering that some people here on/. advocate abolishing copyright, I don't think making full use of existing rights is too extreme.
Why do you say that? The entire point of fair use is to allow you to decide yourself what to do, irrespective of the copyright holder's wishes, with copyrighted materials you have legally been given a copy of, which occurs when using imeem as intended by imeem. More to the point, why would it be a problem whether I listen to some music using Flash in a browser or a nice and comfy MP3 player?
You can get top 40 MP3s in higher quality simply by plugging your radio's headphone jack into your sound card, sampling a top-40 station for a couple of hours, then spending ten minutes making MP3s. Less trouble, better quality than this OR eDonkey.
You're assuming (incorrectly) that:
I actually care about current top 40 stuff.
I don't want to search for specific tunes instead of listening to a radio station's choices.
I have a radio that outputs a high-quality signal on a headphone jack.
Cutting up a recording by hand into MP3s is less trouble than extracting from a SWF.
Your quoting is a bit selective. The important parts you missed are:
Member Content identified as belonging to a third party can be transmitted on the Site or Service so long as you obtain permission first and the ownership and rights are clearly indicated.
This license does not grant imeem the right to sell Member Content or otherwise distribute it outside of imeem's Site or Service; provided, however that streaming of content on third party Web sites via embedded widgets shall not be deemed a distribution outside of imeem's Site or Service.
There are two reasons for a track to be limited to 30 seconds: either you're not logged in (easily corrected; creating an account is quick and free and the personal information required is minimal) or imeem has determined that they lack the rights to distribute the track even to members (in which case only the uploader can hear the full track).
There is no download and pass along a copy.. well not without some google searching on how to D/L a copy in violation of the DMCA. The songs are protected by streaming flash and maybe an identifying watermark.
First of all, it is unclear whether streaming audio is a form of copy protection in the legal sense; Streamripper, for example, seems to have survived an earlier DMCA takedown attempt. Depending on your browser's cache implementation, you may have a copy of the FLV file on your hard disk already. In any case, you've already downloaded the file when streaming it (from a HTTP perspective, and, presumably, therefore, a legal one).
How much personal information do you have to give to get an account? If it requires a CC number, you are pretty much a sitting duck if you D/L and post on Kazaa.
Name, gender, date of birth, email address. Only the email address in checked, and you have 10 days of use before you even have to finish that check. In any case, why would you even want to post any of this on Kazaa, when imeem already contains the material in a legal and accessible form?
if you must have lossy compression, use VBR or preferably vorbis (oggs). if it's decent quality you're after, use flac.
My perception goes something like: less than 64 kbps MP3 or 48 kbps Vorbis = awful, 64-112 kbps MP3 or 48-96 kbps Vorbis = bad, 128-192 kbps MP3 or 97-128 kbps Vorbis = decent, higher lossy rates = good, lossless = excellent. YMMV (although I'm curious as to what you'd call good quality if lossless audio is merely "decent", especially since FLAC goes up to 8 channels of 32 bit PCM at more than 600 kHz). In any case, the sound on imeem is better than, for example, Youtube. Of course, if the uploader is just re-encoding a 32 kbps WMA file...
I checked this out earlier when CNN pointed it out. While imeem doesn't make it easy for you to download music, they are streaming standard Flash video with MP3 soundtracks, which makes it easily downloadable e.g. using DownloadHelper. The MP3 files can then be extracted using e.g. MPlayer ("mplayer -dumpaudio -dumpfile foo.mp3 foo.flv").
End result: free, often decent quality (128 kbps), legal MP3s of music from major labels (where fair use applies; the usual disclaimer about not being a lawyer also applies).
I'm pretty sure Doom and Doom II used MIDI music (although having a decent sound card saved you from having to listen to the OPL2/OPL3 FM interpretation of this).
Similarly, Rastan uses an FM synth (the Yamaha YM2151 a.k.a. OPM). Gauntlet also has one of these, but adds a speech synth and one of Atari's Pokey chips (square waves and noise). Frogger is AY-3-8910, again, square waves and noise.
In other words, in your list, the only one that doesn't use FM synthesis or simpler is Command & Conquer; what you heard at VGL was a bunch of remixes.
For Command & Conquer music (and more great game music), in many cases in higher quality than in the games themselves, check out composer Frank Klepacki's site. The jukebox may be Flash, but with a little creative poking around, you can extract the MP3 files (the list of tunes, in something similar to XML, is here), the actual files are Flash files named http://www.frankklepacki.com/music/[id].fk and you can use SWFExtract to unpack the files.
Scripting an automated solution for the download is left as an exercise for the hive-mind.
Yes, and the same thing is not possible with Qt; if I fork Qt and build up a big developer base around it, I can't possibly compete with Troll Tech because my version, no matter how good it may be, wouldn't be usable by commercial developers.
This is a good point; the LGPL (e.g. GTK) allows forking without loss of freedom for application developers, while the Qt commercial/GPL combination seems to force forks into GPL. Thanks for spelling that out.
Correct, and that fact has caused problems for gcc over the years.
And how was it resolved? Developers discontent with the FSF gcc team formed EGCS (although there admittedly was some confusion with multiple forks first), everyone started using that instead, the FSF saw it was wrong and made EGCS the new gcc. Problem solved. This is the sort of thing projects run into when respected maintainers can't handle it anymore; the same thing happened to XFree86 (which doesn't require copyright reassignment).
you know full well that a GPL-only version of Qt would not be sustainable.
Isn't that an argument for dual-licensing, not against? If Trolltech is getting developers of proprietary software to fund the development of Free code, isn't that a win for Free as in Stallman?
Mono, however, does not use any proprietary code, so none of those concerns apply.
This is an amusing comment in the context of our discussion, since Mono is "Copyright (C) 2002-2007 Novell, Inc and Contributors", and the AUTHORS file just contains a bunch of Ximian (now owned by Novell) people. In other words, Novell seems to me to control Mono like Trolltech controls Qt (i.e. as long as people want them to). That said, the AUTHORS list seems incomplete to me.
To finish this sparring quicker, could you please explain:
What does a developer lose in Trolltech's model compared to GNOME's or whatever you think is preferable? What does a user lose?
How do you see developers being screwed by Trolltech that couldn't happen in any other project with a single strong maintaining group?
What exactly do you mean by "proprietary" and why is it so bad?
Qt is exclusively owned by Troll Tech. Troll Tech requires copyright assignment for contribution.
True. So does the FSF, for several of their projects, such as gcc. You don't need to contribute back to Trolltech if the possibility of someone using your code under a non-GPL licence bothers you; the GPL lets you fork Qt any time you please.
The rest of your argument isn't coherent enough to argue against.
Yes, Qt is licensed under the GPL; however, it is owned by Troll Tech.
Right. Similarly, gcc is licensed under the GPL and owned by the FSF (check the copyright notice and note that the FSF requires copyright reassignments for changes to their "official" gcc). In both cases, one single firm owns the copyright, has released the software under GPL and maintains the option to release it under another licence. Why are you holding the fact that Trolltech is giving you more options against them? Because they're making money from it and the FSF has sort of said it won't? Because people can use Qt in non-Free software?
With analog and a poor signal, it may have been grainy but was still watchable to a certain extent.
In many cases, the error correction on the digital signal (at various levels in the protocol stack) may be sufficient to mask pretty much everything. DVB-T, at least, as far as I can tell, does a lot of trickery to compensate for typical terrestrial TV distortions like multipath effects (which causes ghosting on analogue TV), and, by its digital nature, is resistant (up to a point) against noise. I'm happily receiving essentially perfect digital TV (DVB-T) with a tiny indoor antenna at a place where you could consider yourself lucky (with a decent rooftop antenna) if you could watch a whole show in colour on analogue and seeing double didn't require alcohol. Naturally, YMMV.
Its not like it interferes with the broadcast spectrum.
True. However, converting from digital to analogue may require permission from copyright holders, which your cable operator may not be able to get. For example, in Finland, cable operators were threatened with legal action for converting digital-only TV channels to analogue for rebroadcast in cable networks. Just before the terrestrial analogue TV network went off-line on 2007-09-01, leaving only digital transmissions, a lot of people were concerned about their continued ability to receive analogue TV by cable. After some negotiations, cable operators were permitted to convert the channels that were previously (also) transmitted in analogue form into analogue for a few more months (ending 2008-02-29).
C&C Gold runs on XP; the instructions for patching it to run on XP are included on the download page. Apparently, the IPX networking code on the CDs doesn't work on XP, so they provide a patch that removes the offending code entirely. The other net play options (including TCP/IP) seem to be unaffected, although I haven't verified this myself (don't have XP on this machine, so I can't test this right now).
You may also experience problems with the default screen resolution of 640x400 (graphics driver lock-ups on start in my case); use the supplied configuration program to change it to a more compatible 640x480 (and fiddle with vertical size on your monitor to fix the aspect ratio if you need to).
Slashdot Mirror
My terminology is probably a bit confused, as I'm trying to explain Finnish copyright law using American terminology taken from years of reading Slashdot (which is seldom accurate).
It is my understanding that international copyright law works like this, and DMCA-style legal protection of copy protection is irrelevant as no copy protection is used (the SWF is only used as documented and without DRM). I may, however, have been misusing the term "fair use"; I've only read Finnish copyright law in detail; my knowledge of US law is mostly based on Slashdot and Wikipedia.
From my point of view, it's more a case of trying to teach these record companies not to dictate how I use their product, especially since copyright law is quite clear on the subject of fair use (at least where I come from, Finland). Besides, there are legal precedents in the form of recording radio and TV transmissions, even in the USA.
/. advocate abolishing copyright, I don't think making full use of existing rights is too extreme.
Considering that some people here on
There are two reasons for a track to be limited to 30 seconds: either you're not logged in (easily corrected; creating an account is quick and free and the personal information required is minimal) or imeem has determined that they lack the rights to distribute the track even to members (in which case only the uploader can hear the full track).
I checked this out earlier when CNN pointed it out. While imeem doesn't make it easy for you to download music, they are streaming standard Flash video with MP3 soundtracks, which makes it easily downloadable e.g. using DownloadHelper. The MP3 files can then be extracted using e.g. MPlayer ("mplayer -dumpaudio -dumpfile foo.mp3 foo.flv").
End result: free, often decent quality (128 kbps), legal MP3s of music from major labels (where fair use applies; the usual disclaimer about not being a lawyer also applies).
I'm pretty sure Doom and Doom II used MIDI music (although having a decent sound card saved you from having to listen to the OPL2/OPL3 FM interpretation of this).
Similarly, Rastan uses an FM synth (the Yamaha YM2151 a.k.a. OPM). Gauntlet also has one of these, but adds a speech synth and one of Atari's Pokey chips (square waves and noise). Frogger is AY-3-8910, again, square waves and noise.
In other words, in your list, the only one that doesn't use FM synthesis or simpler is Command & Conquer; what you heard at VGL was a bunch of remixes.
That would be "Some Things Never Change", from the album Total Devo.
For Command & Conquer music (and more great game music), in many cases in higher quality than in the games themselves, check out composer Frank Klepacki's site. The jukebox may be Flash, but with a little creative poking around, you can extract the MP3 files (the list of tunes, in something similar to XML, is here), the actual files are Flash files named http://www.frankklepacki.com/music/[id].fk and you can use SWFExtract to unpack the files.
Scripting an automated solution for the download is left as an exercise for the hive-mind.
To finish this sparring quicker, could you please explain:
The rest of your argument isn't coherent enough to argue against.
For updated Strife, consider Vavoom.
Back in the early days (1991 to early 1994), Blizzard was "Silicon & Synapse".
C&C Gold runs on XP; the instructions for patching it to run on XP are included on the download page. Apparently, the IPX networking code on the CDs doesn't work on XP, so they provide a patch that removes the offending code entirely. The other net play options (including TCP/IP) seem to be unaffected, although I haven't verified this myself (don't have XP on this machine, so I can't test this right now).
You may also experience problems with the default screen resolution of 640x400 (graphics driver lock-ups on start in my case); use the supplied configuration program to change it to a more compatible 640x480 (and fiddle with vertical size on your monitor to fix the aspect ratio if you need to).