I'm not quite as optimistic as you. While there are areas where this
is a win (such as books that were previously unavailable because the
only copies were buried in an unknown used bookstore), it is also
cutting into the revenue for the book publishers. That's the same
money that is used to encourage authors to spend their time writing
books instead of writing advertising copy, flipping burgers, or
working in a factory.
There are a number of ways the book industry can try and adapt. They
can adjust the initial purchase price to reflect the larger average
number of people reading each copy. They can cut costs through
cheaper materials. They can use cheap materials to make the books
fall apart sooner, making it harder to resell the books. They can
focus only on the mainstream authors who always sell big
numbers.
Now I'm not saying that reselling books is evil, immoral, or illegal.
But it does have a potentially negative effect on the book industry,
and I believe there's a good chance that that negative effect will get
transferred back to the consumer.
"Both of these categories are in violation of MS EULA"
There's a third category of people installing retail copies of Windows that've been removed from the previous machine. That's 100% legitimate, as far as I know.
The question is whether or not there are many people like that out there. Retail boxes of Windows tend to get decent placement in computer stores, so theoretically there are people buying them. Also, for a novice user (which I suspect includes a lot of the Walmart PC customers), it's generally easier to buy a new PC rather than upgrade pieces. So it's not unreasonable for there to be a number of legitimate purchases of the system for Windows use.
"There is one difference, the skip is not instant on a VCR."
There's another difference in that it's much less practical to use a VCR as a ubiquitous recording device. You've got limitations relating to programability, capacity, and access.
When I got my Tivo, I went from recording a show every 6+ months (on the odd occasion that I wasn't home when something I really wanted to watch was on) to recording everything. Even shows that I don't always watch get recorded, just because it's so damn easy.
"the word "skipping" implies a complete lack of interaction with
the thing being skipped"
It may imply that, but that hasn't stopped several Slashdot readers
from confusing this form of automatic commercial skipping with the
regular notion of fast-forwarding on a VCR or non-ReplayTV 4000 PVR.
Besides, even your examples of skipping require the user to make a
conscious decision to skip the material versus the ReplayTV 4000's
autonomous/preprogrammed ad skipping.
"How can you even bitch about product placement as a way for
companies to make money? It's completely non-intrusive."
Spoken like someone who hasn't seen the Josie and the Pussycats
movie. Despite being a somewhat formulaic teen friendship comedy with
a predictable "evil corporate empire" plot, it manages to serve as an
excellent satire and example of over-the-top product placement.
While the product placement in the movie is intended to be absurd, I
can't help but imagine television latching on to similar practices
when/if product placement becomes their primary source of revenue.
"Rather than wasting timewatching boring ads, I'd rather see
companies pay to have actual products placed on sets in television
shows."
Except that they aren't just stopping there. Lately, there's been a
revival of "product integration". Instead of ordinary product
placement, the actors in the show actually begin hawking products.
Personally, I refuse to listen to Paul Harvey on the radio due to his
obnoxious tendency of underhandedly segueing into ads. Just imagine
if stuff like that becomes standard for television.
The EFF summary fails to make it clear that we're talking about a feature the automatically and completely skips ads -- no user intervention required, no fast-forwarding shown on the screen. That's why it's just the ReplayTV 4000 that's receiving all the extra flak (versus Tivos, other ReplayTV units, and other PVRs). It's essentially commercial removal rather than commercial skipping.
So we're talking about something that means that no matter how clever, relevant, and eye-catching an ad is, the user still won't stop and rewind to check it out since they didn't even receive the briefest of notification.
Anyway, this issue may or may not affect your opinion on the ReplayTV unit's acceptability, but it's worth keeping in mind as to why people are singling out this unit. (There's also the other controversial feature of built-in capability to share files, which the networks aren't happy about, either.)
"I don't mean to flame but I hate reading an interesting story only
to be filled up with comments from people who don't care about
it."
Try reading the comment you replied to a little more closely. The
person explicitly supported the notion of publishing these things
if there's an actual story we can read. But in a case like
this, all we have is a Slashdot summary that boils down to, "So I, uh,
installed the prepackaged webserver and stuff on my iPAQ."
I hate the people who mindlessly bash every interesting project, but
in this case, there's nothing to actually read about here. It isn't
even an interesting hack, in that the webserver was apparently already
packaged and ready to go. All this guy did was install it. And if he
actually did more, we wouldn't know since there's no link to a
robustly hosted story of what was done.
"Is that a big deal anymore, even if it runs on "exotic" hardware?"
I have to agree with you on this not being anything noteworthy. Slashdot has had a number of interesting wacky webserver postings over the years (including the one that was supposedly potato powered and one running off a pinball machine), but the iPAQ one just can't compete on pure novelty. Hell, the platform isn't even particularly underpowered -- I'm sure there are quite a few traditional Linux boxes that've run webservers with less memory and processor speed.
I could understand if it had some sort of actual feature on the site that related to its handheld nature (such as tying it to a GPS and allowing people to track the server), but that doesn't seem to be the case here (though it's slashdotted, so I can do little more than guess).
I don't. Since Archos is selling the hardware, it's doubtful that it's worth the time and effort to pursue a claim. In the bnetd case, on the other hand, people were using an off-shoot of the software to play pirated copies of the Warcraft 3 beta.
Furthermore, this project has nothing to do with bypassing a copy protection device. That's the major part of the DMCA that most people seem to be worried about, and it just doesn't apply. Even better, the DMCA explicitly allows reverse engineering for interoperability purposes.
"Everything Jesus did was illegal.
The Boston Tea Party was illegal and involved stealing."
Sure, and everything that Albert Fish, Ed Gein, and Paul Bernardo did
was illegal, too. That doesn't mean it was right.
In this case of copyright law, there's this great notion that if you
don't agree, you can just refuse to play the game. Just as Richard
M. Stallman takes a strong position against commercial software
without resorting to piracy, you can elect to only download
music from artists who make it freely available. Even better is the
fact that you don't have to worry about the interoperability concerns
that plague the software realm of this issue -- there's no real
equivalent to someone emailing you an MSWord document.
"Say they made it completely P2P, where the users ran their own
hubs. Would you look at it in the same light then?"
I'm not sure if I'd consider them to be completely in the clear
(especially given that there are legal implications for someone who
designs a product primarily for copyright violation), but it'd
definitely be a different case. Keep in mind that the interaction
between Napster, the RIAA, and the courts generally related to killing
user accounts and performing server-side filtering. The existence of
the servers were a big part of the on-going problem.
As things get more and more P2P, the situation gets murkier and
murkier. Fortunately, there seems to be a fixed trade-off between
centralized servers and easy accessibility. While I'm still not
exactly happy with the piracy that a DIY P2P solution like Direct
Connect provides, it at least helps prevent the case of a single,
massive piracy clearing house instead forcing people into smaller
communities that're harder to stop but also which have less content.
That analogy falls a little flat in that the gun manufacturer is not
party to the event every time a gun is fired. Napster both wrote the
software and continued to run the servers.
"I own my music, and I wanted to give it away free. That is my
right. Are you telling me that this argument doesn't matter? Also,
Napster didn't break "a law"."
You're allowed to give your music away. However, the reason Napster was so popular was because of the illegal mp3 trading. There were and are venues (such as mp3.com) that try and keep things constrained to legal mp3s. Furthermore, the filtering imposed on Napster (which is a big part of what killed it) should've theoretically had a minimal impact on legitimate trading (but unfortunately, the filtering was overly broad). So in reality, the only reason why Napster was a good venue for legitimate trading was because it was using illegitimate trading as a form of marketing/bundling.
Also, it's my understanding that Napster did get nailed for breaking laws relating to contributory and/or vicarious copyright infringement. These issues were hashed out on Slashdot awhile back. It basically boiled down to Napster being aware of the copyright infringement going on and unwilling take means to stop it when confronted on the issue.
"As for 'robbing the world of future discoveries..' I may not be interpreting that 100% correctly, but it seems to me that when it publically known how to build something, that isn't the end of that product. Lots of companies make network cards, they're still doing fine."
You're focusing too much on the current product, and you're mixing too much of a non-IP analogy into it. Consider this example, instead:
If the data that was burned to a CD to create Video Game X was completely public/free knowledge, several people would go into the business of selling Video Game X for slightly above media cost. It sounds good until the company that spent a few hundred thousand dollars on Video Game X decides not to spend a few hundred thousand dollars on Video Game Y.
Piracy is essentially circumventing the legally created compensation mechanism that the government created in order to entice people into making IP in the first place.
But it arguably has the greatest overall loss to society, if you consider intellectual achievements and discoveries to be superior to physical and materialistic ones. Just as normal theft acts as a disincentive toward regular commerce, piracy works as a disincentive toward developing IP that requires a substantial amount of time/effort/money. I could see why potentially robbing the world of future discoveries might be considered the worst form of theft.
Yes, insightful. Regardless of the perpetuation of the RMS misquote
from the article summary, the actual content of the message is still
somewhat relevant. There seem to be a number of people who understand
the situation (RMS is pushing the GPL, as typical; UL is presumably
only doing the per-seat license on the parts of the distribution they
develop from scratch) who are still upset because they feel it's
exploiting a loophole in the GPL to build a semi-proprietary gestalt
off of free components.
The comment you responded to essentially points out that this is one
of the few cases where the GPL could be seen as having a similar
degree of commercial exploitability as the BSD license. The BSD camp
is used to accepting this issue in their quest for freedom of the end
user, but it's just odd seeing it with the GPL camp and their quest
for freedom of the code.
"The industry shouldn't treat its customers like criminals in the first place..."
Oddly enough, I don't remember there being much talk of CD copy-protection schemes before P2P mp3 trading services became popular. They stopped trusting their customers after a large number of customers started engaging in criminal activity.
"this is a really good thing we need to support these open
standards to avoid the Information Nazi's."
Open standard? Who said anything about an open standard? The article mentions that the companies involved are trying to secure patents for things related to their new standard. I suspect the "royalty-free" phrase that's being thrown about applies only to the 19 companies that're working on producing the standard. To draw a computer analogy, this isn't like the BSD software developers vs. Microsoft or the GPL software developers vs. Microsoft, but more like Oracle vs. Microsoft.
Personally, I'd like to see perjury charges brought against the
individuals who lied under oath ("All our addresses are opt-in.
Honest!") in order to obtain the infamous injunction that prevented
Paetec from TOSing Monsterhut.
On a sidenote (with regard to the quest for the email address source),
it's fairly common knowledge (enough so that Paetec mentioned it
somewhere on litigation.paetec.net back
when they were soliciting affidavits from spammed parties) that a
number of the addresses used came from WHOIS records.
"I am aware of Linus's recent compromises, but I suspect his
philosophy on this is more nuanced than you imagine."
That may be, but all I was originally doing was attempting to
differentiate myself from Stallman's "free software above all else, no
matter what" crowd. You used Linus as a counter-example, but his
recent behavior (nuanced or not) indicates he's not a dyed-in-wool,
GNU-waving FSF fanatic.
"Surely you're not going to say they should go to prison for using an implement designed to kill someone if they didn't kill someone with it."
Except that in the Napster case, they built a hammer to kill people and used it to kill 99 people for every house they built with it.
Napster was designed to facilitate copyright infringement. Napster was marketed as being a tool for copyright infringement. Napster was primarily used for copyright infringement.
"How much time would you say the freedom of software is worth, compared with the freedom of speech. If you didn't have the freedom of speech would you spend your life fighting for it?"
I honestly don't know. I, fortunately, live in a country that's mostly free enough to make me happy. As such, I have the luxury of being able to play armchair political activist rather than actually doing anything.
Still, I'd like to think I'd be willing to devote the rest of my life towards fighting for such important ideals. But I just don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not quite as optimistic as you. While there are areas where this is a win (such as books that were previously unavailable because the only copies were buried in an unknown used bookstore), it is also cutting into the revenue for the book publishers. That's the same money that is used to encourage authors to spend their time writing books instead of writing advertising copy, flipping burgers, or working in a factory.
There are a number of ways the book industry can try and adapt. They can adjust the initial purchase price to reflect the larger average number of people reading each copy. They can cut costs through cheaper materials. They can use cheap materials to make the books fall apart sooner, making it harder to resell the books. They can focus only on the mainstream authors who always sell big numbers.
Now I'm not saying that reselling books is evil, immoral, or illegal. But it does have a potentially negative effect on the book industry, and I believe there's a good chance that that negative effect will get transferred back to the consumer.
There's a third category of people installing retail copies of Windows that've been removed from the previous machine. That's 100% legitimate, as far as I know.
The question is whether or not there are many people like that out there. Retail boxes of Windows tend to get decent placement in computer stores, so theoretically there are people buying them. Also, for a novice user (which I suspect includes a lot of the Walmart PC customers), it's generally easier to buy a new PC rather than upgrade pieces. So it's not unreasonable for there to be a number of legitimate purchases of the system for Windows use.
There's another difference in that it's much less practical to use a VCR as a ubiquitous recording device. You've got limitations relating to programability, capacity, and access.
When I got my Tivo, I went from recording a show every 6+ months (on the odd occasion that I wasn't home when something I really wanted to watch was on) to recording everything. Even shows that I don't always watch get recorded, just because it's so damn easy.
It may imply that, but that hasn't stopped several Slashdot readers from confusing this form of automatic commercial skipping with the regular notion of fast-forwarding on a VCR or non-ReplayTV 4000 PVR. Besides, even your examples of skipping require the user to make a conscious decision to skip the material versus the ReplayTV 4000's autonomous/preprogrammed ad skipping.
Spoken like someone who hasn't seen the Josie and the Pussycats movie. Despite being a somewhat formulaic teen friendship comedy with a predictable "evil corporate empire" plot, it manages to serve as an excellent satire and example of over-the-top product placement.
While the product placement in the movie is intended to be absurd, I can't help but imagine television latching on to similar practices when/if product placement becomes their primary source of revenue.
Except that they aren't just stopping there. Lately, there's been a revival of "product integration". Instead of ordinary product placement, the actors in the show actually begin hawking products.
Personally, I refuse to listen to Paul Harvey on the radio due to his obnoxious tendency of underhandedly segueing into ads. Just imagine if stuff like that becomes standard for television.
So we're talking about something that means that no matter how clever, relevant, and eye-catching an ad is, the user still won't stop and rewind to check it out since they didn't even receive the briefest of notification.
Anyway, this issue may or may not affect your opinion on the ReplayTV unit's acceptability, but it's worth keeping in mind as to why people are singling out this unit. (There's also the other controversial feature of built-in capability to share files, which the networks aren't happy about, either.)
Try reading the comment you replied to a little more closely. The person explicitly supported the notion of publishing these things if there's an actual story we can read. But in a case like this, all we have is a Slashdot summary that boils down to, "So I, uh, installed the prepackaged webserver and stuff on my iPAQ."
I hate the people who mindlessly bash every interesting project, but in this case, there's nothing to actually read about here. It isn't even an interesting hack, in that the webserver was apparently already packaged and ready to go. All this guy did was install it. And if he actually did more, we wouldn't know since there's no link to a robustly hosted story of what was done.
I have to agree with you on this not being anything noteworthy. Slashdot has had a number of interesting wacky webserver postings over the years (including the one that was supposedly potato powered and one running off a pinball machine), but the iPAQ one just can't compete on pure novelty. Hell, the platform isn't even particularly underpowered -- I'm sure there are quite a few traditional Linux boxes that've run webservers with less memory and processor speed.
I could understand if it had some sort of actual feature on the site that related to its handheld nature (such as tying it to a GPS and allowing people to track the server), but that doesn't seem to be the case here (though it's slashdotted, so I can do little more than guess).
I don't. Since Archos is selling the hardware, it's doubtful that it's worth the time and effort to pursue a claim. In the bnetd case, on the other hand, people were using an off-shoot of the software to play pirated copies of the Warcraft 3 beta.
Furthermore, this project has nothing to do with bypassing a copy protection device. That's the major part of the DMCA that most people seem to be worried about, and it just doesn't apply. Even better, the DMCA explicitly allows reverse engineering for interoperability purposes.
The Boston Tea Party was illegal and involved stealing."
Sure, and everything that Albert Fish, Ed Gein, and Paul Bernardo did was illegal, too. That doesn't mean it was right.
In this case of copyright law, there's this great notion that if you don't agree, you can just refuse to play the game. Just as Richard M. Stallman takes a strong position against commercial software without resorting to piracy, you can elect to only download music from artists who make it freely available. Even better is the fact that you don't have to worry about the interoperability concerns that plague the software realm of this issue -- there's no real equivalent to someone emailing you an MSWord document.
I'm not sure if I'd consider them to be completely in the clear (especially given that there are legal implications for someone who designs a product primarily for copyright violation), but it'd definitely be a different case. Keep in mind that the interaction between Napster, the RIAA, and the courts generally related to killing user accounts and performing server-side filtering. The existence of the servers were a big part of the on-going problem.
As things get more and more P2P, the situation gets murkier and murkier. Fortunately, there seems to be a fixed trade-off between centralized servers and easy accessibility. While I'm still not exactly happy with the piracy that a DIY P2P solution like Direct Connect provides, it at least helps prevent the case of a single, massive piracy clearing house instead forcing people into smaller communities that're harder to stop but also which have less content.
Venues for...
Television theme songs
High-quality bootlegs for bands that permit concert taping
That analogy falls a little flat in that the gun manufacturer is not party to the event every time a gun is fired. Napster both wrote the software and continued to run the servers.
You're allowed to give your music away. However, the reason Napster was so popular was because of the illegal mp3 trading. There were and are venues (such as mp3.com) that try and keep things constrained to legal mp3s. Furthermore, the filtering imposed on Napster (which is a big part of what killed it) should've theoretically had a minimal impact on legitimate trading (but unfortunately, the filtering was overly broad). So in reality, the only reason why Napster was a good venue for legitimate trading was because it was using illegitimate trading as a form of marketing/bundling.
Also, it's my understanding that Napster did get nailed for breaking laws relating to contributory and/or vicarious copyright infringement. These issues were hashed out on Slashdot awhile back. It basically boiled down to Napster being aware of the copyright infringement going on and unwilling take means to stop it when confronted on the issue.
You're focusing too much on the current product, and you're mixing too much of a non-IP analogy into it. Consider this example, instead:
If the data that was burned to a CD to create Video Game X was completely public/free knowledge, several people would go into the business of selling Video Game X for slightly above media cost. It sounds good until the company that spent a few hundred thousand dollars on Video Game X decides not to spend a few hundred thousand dollars on Video Game Y.
Piracy is essentially circumventing the legally created compensation mechanism that the government created in order to entice people into making IP in the first place.
But it arguably has the greatest overall loss to society, if you consider intellectual achievements and discoveries to be superior to physical and materialistic ones. Just as normal theft acts as a disincentive toward regular commerce, piracy works as a disincentive toward developing IP that requires a substantial amount of time/effort/money. I could see why potentially robbing the world of future discoveries might be considered the worst form of theft.
Yes, insightful. Regardless of the perpetuation of the RMS misquote from the article summary, the actual content of the message is still somewhat relevant. There seem to be a number of people who understand the situation (RMS is pushing the GPL, as typical; UL is presumably only doing the per-seat license on the parts of the distribution they develop from scratch) who are still upset because they feel it's exploiting a loophole in the GPL to build a semi-proprietary gestalt off of free components.
The comment you responded to essentially points out that this is one of the few cases where the GPL could be seen as having a similar degree of commercial exploitability as the BSD license. The BSD camp is used to accepting this issue in their quest for freedom of the end user, but it's just odd seeing it with the GPL camp and their quest for freedom of the code.
Oddly enough, I don't remember there being much talk of CD copy-protection schemes before P2P mp3 trading services became popular. They stopped trusting their customers after a large number of customers started engaging in criminal activity.
Open standard? Who said anything about an open standard? The article mentions that the companies involved are trying to secure patents for things related to their new standard. I suspect the "royalty-free" phrase that's being thrown about applies only to the 19 companies that're working on producing the standard. To draw a computer analogy, this isn't like the BSD software developers vs. Microsoft or the GPL software developers vs. Microsoft, but more like Oracle vs. Microsoft.
On a sidenote (with regard to the quest for the email address source), it's fairly common knowledge (enough so that Paetec mentioned it somewhere on litigation.paetec.net back when they were soliciting affidavits from spammed parties) that a number of the addresses used came from WHOIS records.
That may be, but all I was originally doing was attempting to differentiate myself from Stallman's "free software above all else, no matter what" crowd. You used Linus as a counter-example, but his recent behavior (nuanced or not) indicates he's not a dyed-in-wool, GNU-waving FSF fanatic.
Except that in the Napster case, they built a hammer to kill people and used it to kill 99 people for every house they built with it.
Napster was designed to facilitate copyright infringement. Napster was marketed as being a tool for copyright infringement. Napster was primarily used for copyright infringement.
I honestly don't know. I, fortunately, live in a country that's mostly free enough to make me happy. As such, I have the luxury of being able to play armchair political activist rather than actually doing anything.
Still, I'd like to think I'd be willing to devote the rest of my life towards fighting for such important ideals. But I just don't know.