"How do you feel about fire trucks running red lights?"
That's a piss-poor analogy. A fire truck is being operated by people who have been trained and certified to use it in a manner contrary to regular traffic laws.
"So they don't run any software on people's computers, just some people have installed (intentionally or otherwise) a program that chooses to download and run this executable."
Except that they went out of their way to delibrately place this executable where they knew an automated process (which was almost certainly installed without user consent) would execute it from. While I agree with the notion of trying to clean up the Fizzer worm, it's possible they may be going about in a way that's less than legal (despite a lack of harm being done).
"With online sites such as the Baen Free Library (Link: http://www.baen.com/library/) or MP3.com as well as online projects such as the Linux operating system showing that unrestricted distrobution of a work does not always diminish the monetary value and may instead increase that value,"
I think your premise here is a bit flawed. The Baen Free Library and mp3.com do not represent the unrestricted distribution of a work. In Baen's case, the work is being released in a format that's often noticeably inferior, as many people are more comfortable reading novels on paper than on screen. Furthermore, it's not unrestricted -- I'm sure, for example, that they've got restrictions prohibiting someone from redistributing the online works in paperback form.
In mp3.com's case, the stuff being given away is only a small portion of the retail work. For a CD with 12+ songs, an artist may only make 1-4 of those available. Even the most generous case means they're only giving away ~25% of what they're trying to sell. That's pretty far from the "unrestricted distribution" picture that you're attempting to paint.
As for Linux, that's a completely different case. There you have a diverse set of people working in the free-time on a collaborative effort to produce a technologically-complex product. Linux benefits from being free simply because it wouldn't have been created without its liberal licensing model. Such a system doesn't really compare to books or music -- the people downloading a random mp3 aren't likely to help produce the next album for free.
Overall, I think you're attempting to overgeneralize things. Using free samples (in the Baen and mp3.com cases) to promote a product is nothing revoluntionary. In and of themselves, they don't constitute a case for changing copyright.
"Yes, they may 'burn throught a whole lot of clock cycles' to get the spam out, but so would we do in decrypting it and the rest of our mail. And since the spammer is likely to be able to afford mewer, better, faster hardware than Joe Blow (or Ola Dunk for that matter) are..."
Yes, but there's still the balancing factor of the scale of spam. A given spammer may be trying to send out millions messages per day while a given user may be dealing with only hundreds of messages in their inbox. That's a difference on the magnitude of 10,000 times, which means even newer, better, and faster hardware isn't going to significantly bridge that gap.
"Second off, perhaps you can tell me how the RIAA knows whose copyrights apply to the files on grandparent's hard drive without first looking at the files?"
That's a tough one. In normal cases, it'd involve certain assumptions based on the fact that the person distributing those files is implying by their actions that they have permission to distribute them. If I were to rename GTAViceCity.zip to RedHatv9.zip and share it on KaZaA, you couldn't bust people who downloaded the zipfile in good faith, thinking that it was full of GPL'd software.
However, this is a bit different, due to the unlinked directory factor. I suppose it really boils down to how the RIAA were to stumble across the directory. If it was because a random third-party linked to the formerly unlinked directory, then it's that third-party that did all the circumvention. The directory has ceased to be protected by its unlinked status, even before the RIAA enters the picture. At that point, you could also argue that it's the third-party that's primarily responsible for making the potentially copyright infringing, but given the absurdly weak protections inherent in just using unlinked directories for security, the person who put the mp3s in that unlinked directory would probably still have some contributory infringement liability as per my original response to petecarlson.
"even then it's not like they go and say "Hey Brittany do you think it is okay if I crack petecarlson's computer?""
Well, first off, cracking and circumventing a security device (as per the DMCA) are two separate beasts. The first one will get you in trouble regardless of what you find on the computer you crack. The second one only applies if there's copyrighted material being protected, and thus is covered by my arguments above.
As for getting permission from the artists, the RIAA is presumably only going after infringement cases involving works that they've already received permission from the copyright holder to protect. It makes more sense to say, "Okay, Britney, Metallica, and Usher are on our 'protect it' list -- let's scan KaZaA for things listed as being by those artists" rather than "Let's look at every single mp3 and then try and figure out whether or not we can get permission."
Also, as a side-note, it's worth pointing out that the copyright holder isn't always the artist. When a multi-billion dollar corporation offers to spend the money to turn "that cute girl on that Disney show" into "Britney Spears, international superstar and house-hold name", you can bet they're going to push to get the copyright transferred to them.
"Anyway, that's how I think with crimes, use flatfoot 101, "who profits?"."
I prefer using common sense 101, which reminds us that there's plenty of acts of vandalism (both online or otherwise) that have nothing to do with a profit motive. I don't look at a piece of graffiti on the side of the road and instantly assume that it's most likely the handiwork of a local paint salesman. Sure, there may be cases of vandalism-for-profit, but those are more likely to be the exception, rather than the rule.
Hooray. Yet another post that ignorantly cites the circumvention provisions of the DMCA without bothering to understand what they mean. Here's the definition of "circumvent a technological measure" from the appropriate part of the law:
"
`(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and"
[emphasis is mine]
So the $30,000 question is: Does the RIAA have the authority of the copyright owner of the work on petecarlson's server to circumvent technological measures protecting that work? Considering that the copyright holder is still either an RIAA artist or an RIAA artist's record label (even though petecarlson was the one who added the protection), then the answer is almost assuredly "Yes".
"What we have here is an employer (RIAA) unwilling to take full responsibility for the actions of an employee."
They explained how the problem occurred, they explained the safeguards in place to prevent the problem, they publically apologized, and they offered some gifts along with that apology. Short of damages being claimed by Penn State (which is unlikely, given that the university accepted the apology), what more responsibility is there for them to take?
"Just because I put my mp3s, that I legaly own, in an un-linked directory on my web server does not mean that I want anyone else to download them. They are there for my personal use so that I can listen to my music from anywhere. It is not my responsibility to make sure no one steals copies of them."
Actually, depending on the circumstances, it could be considered contributory copyright infringement.
To use this example, here you're addressing the possibility that you have mp3s (that you may legally use but may not legally broadcast or duplicate) in an unlinked directory on your webserver. Furthermore, the name of your webserver is listed in the header of the message. Now, if someone were to put 2 and 2 together and check to see if the directory/mp3 existed on your webserver, and if that someone were to commit copyright infringement by downloading the material there, then your hands wouldn't be clean in this matter.
So why's it contributory copyright infringement? It's pretty straightforward -- you knew or should have known that your actions were inducing, causing, or materially contributing to the commission of direct infringement.
A more reasonable alternative to your particular case would be to use the authentication mechanisms built into HTTP to protect the mp3 directory on your server. It doesn't have to be Fort Knox, but it should be something that someone isn't going to guess (so using 'cpete' or 'mp3' as the password isn't a good idea).
I once did this with an automated recording. I discovered by chance that hitting '7' on my phone caused the recording to start over, so I spent a bored afternoon hitting 7 and tying up their system for a little over an hour. I was watching TV at the time, so pressing a button on the phone every minute or two wasn't that much of an inconvenience.
"If I rip my CD collection to that directory, am I distributing it???...No! The fact that it's the same directory I use for other P2P stuff, shouldn't matter."
This logic is severely divorced from reality. Just as a drug dealer can't claim that he was merely holding out a bag full of cocaine, which someone else just happened to take and leave money in his hand, you can't claim that ripping a CD and throwing it into your shared directory isn't distributing it. Hell, under your system, it would be impossible for anyone to be accused of distributing anything via a client-server model on the Internet -- instead, they would just be happening to have coincidentally stored the files in their public_html directory. That's absurd, and no judge is going to buy it.
"One question for anyone who knows the rules...if I own the CDs, and rip the songs I like to make my own favorite songs CDs, am I in technical violation of the copyright since I purchased the music?"
I believe that that falls under fair use. Provided that both the original CD and the mp3s stay within your possession, you're just format-shifting the medium for more convenient listening. (And I'm using possession in an extended sense of being in your control; the CD can be safely locked in your room while you're listening to mp3s on your iPod while at work.)
As an interesting aside, I've heard that Australian law does not support this fair use provision, and so it would be a violation there.
"I believe that when you talk about free products given away to generate sales, you are talking about songs played on radio? Or is there another angle I am not seeing here?"
Actually, I was referring to www.mp3.com, which is a lot more analogous to Baen's free library. There are plenty of RIAA acts on the site with mp3s up for download. There are also some mp3s that only allow you to stream it from the site, rather than supporting a plain download.
Compared to file sharing, the available music is extremely limited. On the other hand, compared to the typical Slashdot characterization of the RIAA, it's pretty damn good. And it's legal.
As for your other points, I agree. Record labels should really do more to utilize their older material that they aren't otherwise making money off of. They should offer mix-and-match kiosks. I honestly don't know if we'll ever see it, but they're good ideas.
You're right in that what I stated got a little far afield of reality. However, I still stand by part of the point that I was trying to make -- the RIAA does understand the value of giving away products to generate sales, and everyone acts as if they don't do this. As for their often overly zealous efforts to crack down on copyright infringement, I believe that's rooted in the simple fact that the severity of music-based copyright infringement beats book-based copyright infringement on all levels -- its scope, its convenience to the person with a copied work, and the ease of generating the first digital duplicate.
"Would the RIAA people please look at the sales figure of Baen and get a freakin' clue?"
Baen gives away many items for free (via the Baen free library), but doesn't give away everything. Result: Slashdot-types love them.
RIAA members give away many items for free (via www.mp3.com), but don't give away everything. Result: Slashdot-types vilify them.
Besides, there's also a larger difference between an e-book and a real book versus a properly encoding mp3 and the corresponding original CD track. Reading an e-book is noticeably more awkward than its dead paper equivalent, yet many casual music listeners don't notice the difference between an mp3 and a CD unless they're looking for it.
"Isn't Darth Vader supposed to symbolise redemption rather than simply evil?"
I'd attribute the actual redemption to Anakin Skywalker. Darth Vader represented the dark side that Anakin had to ultimately conquer to achieve his final redemption. This is further supported by his final removal of the mask, and his subsequent return as a glowing blue Anakin.
"How, in the scheme of the whole freaking universe, does it matter if there is a duplicate post??????"
When I read Slashdot, I scroll down to the last article that I recognize and then start reading up from there. If there's a duplicate, I'm likely to wind up missing articles because I incorrectly assume that there are no articles I haven't previously read below it.
"Find a figurehead of somewhere and submit a request for the account information on whoever and claim they infringed on your copyright."
Making an intentionally false DMCA claim strikes me as a real easy way to get yourself in trouble. I'd suggest seeking competent legal advice even before filing a claim that you're positive is legitimate, much less one based on the tenuous notion that someone could potentially have infringed on a copyright you hold.
"Surely morst of those who benefitted from the information were not foreign."
DirecTV hacking is fairly big in Canada. From the Register article:
Each successive generation of DirecTV cards has become more technically advanced, but each has eventually been cracked by sophisticated hackers, largely based in Canada where the company is not licensed to provide service, and where until recently selling hacked access cards and equipment was not a crime.
"The core idea is that by taking this item, you deprive the rightful owner of the item of its use and value. Now, assuming point one is true -- that I'd never buy music -- then my downloading mp3s is taking nothing from anyone."
You're still partially depriving them of the use and value of the copyright itself. In exchange for producing a creative work, the government awards the creator a time-limited (in theory), exclusive right to control the distribution of that work and derivative works. That government granted right, while intangible, has a very real value based solely on the notion of exclusive control.
By illegally ignoring that exclusive control, you've reduced the value of that right. A copyright that 100% of the population respects has some value to it. A copyright that 50% of the population respects has less value to it. A copyright that none of the population respects is worthless, short of being able to go after the violators.
"Actually, I'm not sure if at that point it was strictly determined whether Napster was engaged in illegal activity or not. There was a time when fair use laws let me copy a tape for a friend, as long as I didn't make money off it."
Even if we assume that fair use provision was valid (an issue that others have questioned), it's still a big stretch trying to apply that to Napster. First, you've got the involvement of a multi-million dollar company. Second, you've redefined "friend" to be any of the millions of strangers using the same Napster service. Finally, the notion of copying a tape is being turned into producing a limitless number of digital duplicates that have no loss in quality beyond the initial CD rip.
"Still, I think it's odd that almost no noone considers the posibilty that distributing mp3s for non profit (with perhaps a small royalty added in) counts as fair use."
It goes back to the notion of copyright. In order to encourage people to invest the effort in creating various works, the creator is granted time-limited, exclusive control of the duplication of that work and the creation of derivative works. This allows the creator to profit in a fairly capitalistic manner while also allowing the work to eventually become part of the public good (and before someone mentions the crazy extensions to copyright, keep in mind that I'm discussing the idealized theory).
So if you allow people to ignore copyright as long as there's no money changing hands, you're still greatly reducing the usefulness of copyright. Copyright isn't directly about preventing [i]other[/i] people from profiting off a work. Instead, it's about providing the work's creator with the opportunity to reasonably profit. Whether I send out a billion copyright-infringed copies of the work for free or for a profit, I'm doing damage to the underlying value of the copyright of the original work either way.
As for your mention of a potential small royalty, that sounds like having the government assign an arbitrary price to a good. For a luxury item like music, it's hard to argue that people are being harmed by high prices and that government intervention is necessary for the public good. The only price-related government involvement should be in the case of investigating price fixing and similar illegal practices.
"The only problem would be that using a markup language to indicate emotions could introduce subtle changes in the meaning of the text (ie/ bias of the transcriber)."
As I see it, there are two possibilites:
1. Read the work in a clinical, unemotional tone with nothing besides the grammatically appropriate inflection. This would be unbiased, boring, and only marginally more useful than an automated text-to-speech translation.
2. Treat the audio version of the work as a partially subjective performance. Yes, this introduces outside bias into the mix. However, as long as we don't get rid of the original text and as long as we don't assert that any given performance is the definitive interpration of the work, I don't see the problem.
I think it can best be summed up by a quote from the movie Young Guns II. As William H. "Billy the Kid" Bonney put it, "I'll make you famous." The unspoken implication is that that fame will come at the cost of being Billy the Kid's next victim. Some would argue that the price demanded by RIAA members isn't too much different than that demanded by Billy.
Anyway, as long as the RIAA members control the hype machine, that's the way things will be. They're the ones who theoretically take talented musicians and transform them into superstars and household names. And, for better or worse, they set things up so that they own as much of that finished product as possible.
Now some of the hype control they wield is legitimate. Some isn't. Spending money to put up a billboard promoting a new act? That's just plain old capitalistic advertising. Using independent promotion as a thinly disguised payola to get radio play? Now they're subverting a limited resource (the radio spectrum) that should be better serving the public good.
However, even if you remove the "bad" means of hype that they have, you've still a system that's biased toward money. A 30 second primetime commercial showing Billy Corgan's distinctive bald head that informs people about his new band Zwan is going to do more than a couple lines out on the web somewhere. The Internet provides an new and wonderful outlet for many of the smaller guys, but it isn't the panacea to the advertising/marketing problem that you're making it out to be.
Now I'm not completely pessimistic. I do believe there will be some Internet success stories. I just don't think it will completely blow the middlemen out of the water.
"In the RIAA vs. Verizon case RIAA was suing to get the subscriber information without ever proving that there were specific incidences of copyright violation (instead charging that P2P is ONLY used to steal music)."
Huh? From my reading of this article, it sounds like the person whose information the RIAA was after had either shared or downloaded songs in violation of their copyright. Verizon's argument seems to revolve around the fact that the songs weren't being hosted on their servers, meaning that the DMCA should be inapplicable as a means of legally requiring the release of subscriber information.
I just don't see anything in the article that implies the RIAA was claiming "P2P always equals Piracy!" They were going after a specific person, and the article quantifies (although does not identify) the songs being shared. That's a far cry from the RIAA suing to find out the identities of anyone who runs KaZaA regardless of how they use it.
"there are not enough geeks in the world to make the high numbers for movies and games."
I like the alternate explaination -- that there are way more geeks in the world than we ever thought, and some of them are just better at hiding their geekiness. Maybe I'm a little too optimistic, but I think it's only a matter of time before geekiness is fully mainstream.
"Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Tivo have a 30 second skip feature? Isn't Tivo going to introduce file sharing soon?"
The 30 second skip is only available by a backdoor. Furthermore, the code to enable backdoors for the latest revision of the TiVo software is unknown -- thus enabling backdoors requires the user to actually login to the TiVo (over the serial port) and change the backdoor code to something that's known (as it's stored as an md5 hash that TiVo hackers were unable to brute-force).
As for the file sharing, I thought I saw something that mentioned it was only within a person's house. That's much more analgous to the VCR/video tape metaphor as opposed to ReplayTV's ability to transmit copies of a show to 15 (or was it 25?) different people over the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a piss-poor analogy. A fire truck is being operated by people who have been trained and certified to use it in a manner contrary to regular traffic laws.
Except that they went out of their way to delibrately place this executable where they knew an automated process (which was almost certainly installed without user consent) would execute it from. While I agree with the notion of trying to clean up the Fizzer worm, it's possible they may be going about in a way that's less than legal (despite a lack of harm being done).
I think your premise here is a bit flawed. The Baen Free Library and mp3.com do not represent the unrestricted distribution of a work. In Baen's case, the work is being released in a format that's often noticeably inferior, as many people are more comfortable reading novels on paper than on screen. Furthermore, it's not unrestricted -- I'm sure, for example, that they've got restrictions prohibiting someone from redistributing the online works in paperback form.
In mp3.com's case, the stuff being given away is only a small portion of the retail work. For a CD with 12+ songs, an artist may only make 1-4 of those available. Even the most generous case means they're only giving away ~25% of what they're trying to sell. That's pretty far from the "unrestricted distribution" picture that you're attempting to paint.
As for Linux, that's a completely different case. There you have a diverse set of people working in the free-time on a collaborative effort to produce a technologically-complex product. Linux benefits from being free simply because it wouldn't have been created without its liberal licensing model. Such a system doesn't really compare to books or music -- the people downloading a random mp3 aren't likely to help produce the next album for free. Overall, I think you're attempting to overgeneralize things. Using free samples (in the Baen and mp3.com cases) to promote a product is nothing revoluntionary. In and of themselves, they don't constitute a case for changing copyright.
Yes, but there's still the balancing factor of the scale of spam. A given spammer may be trying to send out millions messages per day while a given user may be dealing with only hundreds of messages in their inbox. That's a difference on the magnitude of 10,000 times, which means even newer, better, and faster hardware isn't going to significantly bridge that gap.
That's a tough one. In normal cases, it'd involve certain assumptions based on the fact that the person distributing those files is implying by their actions that they have permission to distribute them. If I were to rename GTAViceCity.zip to RedHatv9.zip and share it on KaZaA, you couldn't bust people who downloaded the zipfile in good faith, thinking that it was full of GPL'd software.
However, this is a bit different, due to the unlinked directory factor. I suppose it really boils down to how the RIAA were to stumble across the directory. If it was because a random third-party linked to the formerly unlinked directory, then it's that third-party that did all the circumvention. The directory has ceased to be protected by its unlinked status, even before the RIAA enters the picture. At that point, you could also argue that it's the third-party that's primarily responsible for making the potentially copyright infringing, but given the absurdly weak protections inherent in just using unlinked directories for security, the person who put the mp3s in that unlinked directory would probably still have some contributory infringement liability as per my original response to petecarlson.
"even then it's not like they go and say "Hey Brittany do you think it is okay if I crack petecarlson's computer?""
Well, first off, cracking and circumventing a security device (as per the DMCA) are two separate beasts. The first one will get you in trouble regardless of what you find on the computer you crack. The second one only applies if there's copyrighted material being protected, and thus is covered by my arguments above.
As for getting permission from the artists, the RIAA is presumably only going after infringement cases involving works that they've already received permission from the copyright holder to protect. It makes more sense to say, "Okay, Britney, Metallica, and Usher are on our 'protect it' list -- let's scan KaZaA for things listed as being by those artists" rather than "Let's look at every single mp3 and then try and figure out whether or not we can get permission."
Also, as a side-note, it's worth pointing out that the copyright holder isn't always the artist. When a multi-billion dollar corporation offers to spend the money to turn "that cute girl on that Disney show" into "Britney Spears, international superstar and house-hold name", you can bet they're going to push to get the copyright transferred to them.
I prefer using common sense 101, which reminds us that there's plenty of acts of vandalism (both online or otherwise) that have nothing to do with a profit motive. I don't look at a piece of graffiti on the side of the road and instantly assume that it's most likely the handiwork of a local paint salesman. Sure, there may be cases of vandalism-for-profit, but those are more likely to be the exception, rather than the rule.
So the $30,000 question is: Does the RIAA have the authority of the copyright owner of the work on petecarlson's server to circumvent technological measures protecting that work? Considering that the copyright holder is still either an RIAA artist or an RIAA artist's record label (even though petecarlson was the one who added the protection), then the answer is almost assuredly "Yes".
They explained how the problem occurred, they explained the safeguards in place to prevent the problem, they publically apologized, and they offered some gifts along with that apology. Short of damages being claimed by Penn State (which is unlikely, given that the university accepted the apology), what more responsibility is there for them to take?
Actually, depending on the circumstances, it could be considered contributory copyright infringement.
To use this example, here you're addressing the possibility that you have mp3s (that you may legally use but may not legally broadcast or duplicate) in an unlinked directory on your webserver. Furthermore, the name of your webserver is listed in the header of the message. Now, if someone were to put 2 and 2 together and check to see if the directory /mp3 existed on your webserver, and if that someone were to commit copyright infringement by downloading the material there, then your hands wouldn't be clean in this matter.
So why's it contributory copyright infringement? It's pretty straightforward -- you knew or should have known that your actions were inducing, causing, or materially contributing to the commission of direct infringement.
A more reasonable alternative to your particular case would be to use the authentication mechanisms built into HTTP to protect the mp3 directory on your server. It doesn't have to be Fort Knox, but it should be something that someone isn't going to guess (so using 'cpete' or 'mp3' as the password isn't a good idea).
I once did this with an automated recording. I discovered by chance that hitting '7' on my phone caused the recording to start over, so I spent a bored afternoon hitting 7 and tying up their system for a little over an hour. I was watching TV at the time, so pressing a button on the phone every minute or two wasn't that much of an inconvenience.
This logic is severely divorced from reality. Just as a drug dealer can't claim that he was merely holding out a bag full of cocaine, which someone else just happened to take and leave money in his hand, you can't claim that ripping a CD and throwing it into your shared directory isn't distributing it. Hell, under your system, it would be impossible for anyone to be accused of distributing anything via a client-server model on the Internet -- instead, they would just be happening to have coincidentally stored the files in their public_html directory. That's absurd, and no judge is going to buy it.
"One question for anyone who knows the rules...if I own the CDs, and rip the songs I like to make my own favorite songs CDs, am I in technical violation of the copyright since I purchased the music?"
I believe that that falls under fair use. Provided that both the original CD and the mp3s stay within your possession, you're just format-shifting the medium for more convenient listening. (And I'm using possession in an extended sense of being in your control; the CD can be safely locked in your room while you're listening to mp3s on your iPod while at work.)
As an interesting aside, I've heard that Australian law does not support this fair use provision, and so it would be a violation there.
Actually, I was referring to www.mp3.com, which is a lot more analogous to Baen's free library. There are plenty of RIAA acts on the site with mp3s up for download. There are also some mp3s that only allow you to stream it from the site, rather than supporting a plain download.
Compared to file sharing, the available music is extremely limited. On the other hand, compared to the typical Slashdot characterization of the RIAA, it's pretty damn good. And it's legal.
As for your other points, I agree. Record labels should really do more to utilize their older material that they aren't otherwise making money off of. They should offer mix-and-match kiosks. I honestly don't know if we'll ever see it, but they're good ideas.
You're right in that what I stated got a little far afield of reality. However, I still stand by part of the point that I was trying to make -- the RIAA does understand the value of giving away products to generate sales, and everyone acts as if they don't do this. As for their often overly zealous efforts to crack down on copyright infringement, I believe that's rooted in the simple fact that the severity of music-based copyright infringement beats book-based copyright infringement on all levels -- its scope, its convenience to the person with a copied work, and the ease of generating the first digital duplicate.
Baen gives away many items for free (via the Baen free library), but doesn't give away everything. Result: Slashdot-types love them.
RIAA members give away many items for free (via www.mp3.com), but don't give away everything. Result: Slashdot-types vilify them.
Besides, there's also a larger difference between an e-book and a real book versus a properly encoding mp3 and the corresponding original CD track. Reading an e-book is noticeably more awkward than its dead paper equivalent, yet many casual music listeners don't notice the difference between an mp3 and a CD unless they're looking for it.
I'd attribute the actual redemption to Anakin Skywalker. Darth Vader represented the dark side that Anakin had to ultimately conquer to achieve his final redemption. This is further supported by his final removal of the mask, and his subsequent return as a glowing blue Anakin.
When I read Slashdot, I scroll down to the last article that I recognize and then start reading up from there. If there's a duplicate, I'm likely to wind up missing articles because I incorrectly assume that there are no articles I haven't previously read below it.
Making an intentionally false DMCA claim strikes me as a real easy way to get yourself in trouble. I'd suggest seeking competent legal advice even before filing a claim that you're positive is legitimate, much less one based on the tenuous notion that someone could potentially have infringed on a copyright you hold.
DirecTV hacking is fairly big in Canada. From the Register article:
You're still partially depriving them of the use and value of the copyright itself. In exchange for producing a creative work, the government awards the creator a time-limited (in theory), exclusive right to control the distribution of that work and derivative works. That government granted right, while intangible, has a very real value based solely on the notion of exclusive control.
By illegally ignoring that exclusive control, you've reduced the value of that right. A copyright that 100% of the population respects has some value to it. A copyright that 50% of the population respects has less value to it. A copyright that none of the population respects is worthless, short of being able to go after the violators.
Even if we assume that fair use provision was valid (an issue that others have questioned), it's still a big stretch trying to apply that to Napster. First, you've got the involvement of a multi-million dollar company. Second, you've redefined "friend" to be any of the millions of strangers using the same Napster service. Finally, the notion of copying a tape is being turned into producing a limitless number of digital duplicates that have no loss in quality beyond the initial CD rip.
"Still, I think it's odd that almost no noone considers the posibilty that distributing mp3s for non profit (with perhaps a small royalty added in) counts as fair use."
It goes back to the notion of copyright. In order to encourage people to invest the effort in creating various works, the creator is granted time-limited, exclusive control of the duplication of that work and the creation of derivative works. This allows the creator to profit in a fairly capitalistic manner while also allowing the work to eventually become part of the public good (and before someone mentions the crazy extensions to copyright, keep in mind that I'm discussing the idealized theory).
So if you allow people to ignore copyright as long as there's no money changing hands, you're still greatly reducing the usefulness of copyright. Copyright isn't directly about preventing [i]other[/i] people from profiting off a work. Instead, it's about providing the work's creator with the opportunity to reasonably profit. Whether I send out a billion copyright-infringed copies of the work for free or for a profit, I'm doing damage to the underlying value of the copyright of the original work either way.
As for your mention of a potential small royalty, that sounds like having the government assign an arbitrary price to a good. For a luxury item like music, it's hard to argue that people are being harmed by high prices and that government intervention is necessary for the public good. The only price-related government involvement should be in the case of investigating price fixing and similar illegal practices.
As I see it, there are two possibilites:
1. Read the work in a clinical, unemotional tone with nothing besides the grammatically appropriate inflection. This would be unbiased, boring, and only marginally more useful than an automated text-to-speech translation.
2. Treat the audio version of the work as a partially subjective performance. Yes, this introduces outside bias into the mix. However, as long as we don't get rid of the original text and as long as we don't assert that any given performance is the definitive interpration of the work, I don't see the problem.
I think it can best be summed up by a quote from the movie Young Guns II. As William H. "Billy the Kid" Bonney put it, "I'll make you famous." The unspoken implication is that that fame will come at the cost of being Billy the Kid's next victim. Some would argue that the price demanded by RIAA members isn't too much different than that demanded by Billy.
Anyway, as long as the RIAA members control the hype machine, that's the way things will be. They're the ones who theoretically take talented musicians and transform them into superstars and household names. And, for better or worse, they set things up so that they own as much of that finished product as possible.
Now some of the hype control they wield is legitimate. Some isn't. Spending money to put up a billboard promoting a new act? That's just plain old capitalistic advertising. Using independent promotion as a thinly disguised payola to get radio play? Now they're subverting a limited resource (the radio spectrum) that should be better serving the public good.
However, even if you remove the "bad" means of hype that they have, you've still a system that's biased toward money. A 30 second primetime commercial showing Billy Corgan's distinctive bald head that informs people about his new band Zwan is going to do more than a couple lines out on the web somewhere. The Internet provides an new and wonderful outlet for many of the smaller guys, but it isn't the panacea to the advertising/marketing problem that you're making it out to be.
Now I'm not completely pessimistic. I do believe there will be some Internet success stories. I just don't think it will completely blow the middlemen out of the water.
Huh? From my reading of this article, it sounds like the person whose information the RIAA was after had either shared or downloaded songs in violation of their copyright. Verizon's argument seems to revolve around the fact that the songs weren't being hosted on their servers, meaning that the DMCA should be inapplicable as a means of legally requiring the release of subscriber information.
I just don't see anything in the article that implies the RIAA was claiming "P2P always equals Piracy!" They were going after a specific person, and the article quantifies (although does not identify) the songs being shared. That's a far cry from the RIAA suing to find out the identities of anyone who runs KaZaA regardless of how they use it.
I like the alternate explaination -- that there are way more geeks in the world than we ever thought, and some of them are just better at hiding their geekiness. Maybe I'm a little too optimistic, but I think it's only a matter of time before geekiness is fully mainstream.
The 30 second skip is only available by a backdoor. Furthermore, the code to enable backdoors for the latest revision of the TiVo software is unknown -- thus enabling backdoors requires the user to actually login to the TiVo (over the serial port) and change the backdoor code to something that's known (as it's stored as an md5 hash that TiVo hackers were unable to brute-force).
As for the file sharing, I thought I saw something that mentioned it was only within a person's house. That's much more analgous to the VCR/video tape metaphor as opposed to ReplayTV's ability to transmit copies of a show to 15 (or was it 25?) different people over the Internet.