I don't think the parking tickets are the problem, but the all seeing eye in the sky that smites you from a distance the moment it thinks you've broken its rules. As soon as people are fully acclimated to this sort of regime, and that may be generations from now, who knows what sort of new laws such a system will be used to enforce -- and people won't even know any better.
Let's make it illegal to walk around the city without smiling! France is the happiest place on earth -- just look at how happy everyone is here!
The DMCA stuff was merely the tip of the iceberg. There's still a lot wrong with this document -- like, making just linking to illegal content illegal, the conflation of counterfeiting (trademark law) with copyrights, internet "copyrights" and patents, the way infringement penalties are calculates (as lost sales), border controls on medicines and other products in transit, and let's not forget the despicable way in which the entire thing was written in total secrecy without input from the public (the stakeholders).
I personally refuse to allow ACTA to pass into law (i.e., member countries' laws will need to change, despite earlier claims to the opposite), because not only does it bring even more draconian enforcement of intellectual monopolies (which I disagree with at a philosophical level), but because it sets a terrible precedent that gives politicians and lobbyists even more freedom to take away our freedoms.
It will take nothing less than some serious anti-trust lawsuits to bring the Microsoft OS monopoly into check, because they are so deep-rooted and have so damn much control of the market in so many different ways.. Only to think they are paying large OEMs to quietly "disappear" the option of no OS (i.e., forcing the consumer to choose between their product and the highway) is a frightening demonstration of their power.
Perhaps Canonical is not the right company to initiate the anti-trust investigations, but Google will very likely be. I certainly look forward to the day when I won't need to pay the Microsoft tax every time I buy a laptop.
The Bodleian library consists of a complex of several buildings (I should know, I studied in Oxford). Some of the library scenes in the Harry Potter movies were actually shot in the older buildings of the Bodleian..
With digital storage, they could fit their entire collection in a single room, and they save things in a totally generic format such as numbered jpgs or even raw bmps. Think raid arrays, and perhaps synced copies at multiple sites in the country. The costs would be negligible compared to physical storage and preservation, and all that money could be put to better use -- like digitising the books and recordings that time hasn't been so kind to.
The real cost is scanning (and particularly getting permission from the copyright holders to scan), and that could be avoided if publishers were legally required to submit digital copies of the books from the start. Today pretty much all books are typeset on computers, so digital versions already exist -- why are the laws still so far behind the times?? Oh, wait we're talking about copyright laws, so nvm.
If developers are encouraged to use HTML5 in its present form, which has inconsistencies across browsers, some websites will not work properly on some brand new, modern browsers -- not necessarily because the browsers are not standards compliant, but because the websites had to choose to be compliant with the unfinished standard implemented within a particular browser.
While most developers would normally choose the common factor and make their websites work on all browsers, other interests may prevent them from doing so. We've already seen Microsoft pay off certain popular websites to make their pages use HTML5 that only IE9 supports, as a marketing technique to make others look bad. While you could argue that all marketing is fair game (lies and subterfuge; smoke and mirrors), this sort of thing makes the job of the standards authority much more difficult, because some things may become defacto standards, thus undermining their efforts and ultimately making compatibility across browsers more difficult.
Remember the last time this sort of thing happened? Don't forget that Microsoft still has a good chunk of market share, and could invent new ways of making history repeat itself.
It's a very long procedure that requires rights holders to go through a huge number of hoops, including becoming "qualified copyright holders" (for an undisclosed fee -- don't know who decides who's "qualified" and who's not, but I can take a guess), to register their copyrights with the ISPs, to specify a bunch of details about the work, the notices, to give painstaking details about the data collection processes, and of course the technical details of the infringement as well as legal statements certifying everything is accurate and the infringement is real (oh jolly trolly). Most non-technically-minded artists won't know where to begin with all this, so if they want to participate they are forced to depend on third parties... And guess who the third parties will be! ACS-style lawyer firms and record labels! Yay for making them legit. Hooray for democracy~!
Afaik, the copyrights that can be asserted need to be registered with Ofcom. Which iirc means only large corporations will be able to use the DEA's provisions, while individuals (incl. artists) won't be able to do a thing without a lot of hassle and some legal fees (of course). The whole thing was made by corporations, for corporations (thanks Mandy).
What this process will undoubtedly lead to, however, are completely fake letters sent through the mail to random people by (unofficial) scammers demanding cash payments or else!
In a matter of months, the practice of harvesting the details of possibly innocent individuals based on accusations generated using unreliable methods will be the norm and sanctioned by law. The Digital Economy Act is all a-drafted by the Rights Holders and assented by Her Majesty, and the Slimiest Lawyers in all Her Kingdom are all a-primed and ready to litigate and make lots of money off the unsuspecting public.
Terrorism, by the contemporary meaning of the word at least, involves blowing shit up. Thankfully, other than a prank bomb threat, that is not the case here.
4chan's goal is not to terrorise, but to harass in order to be heard. In other words, it's no different than a real-world protest, where they stand outside the company's building and throw eggs and yogurt at everyone who dares come out, thus disrupting their business. It's a sad truth today that if consumers don't organise and hurt a company's wallet, they'll be totally ignored -- tell me that isn't true.
I would normally feel bad about the companies that are at the sharp end of all this, but I don't. At all. They totally deserve everything they get.
Actually, there are ALREADY more Android users than iPhone users. And the number is just going to grow. However, you are absolutely correct about the fact that iPhone users are more affluent.
I don't believe that's true. According to CNET, the iPhone still has over three times more market share than Android. Also, we are interested in how the two systems have performed over time (as the sales counts have been accumulating over several years), and the iPhone has had upwards of 50% share at the times when Android was still languishing around 0%.
This is a bullshit answer that people fighting against piracy always come up against. You can't EVER prove this statement one way or another.
It goes both ways. Piracy advocates (or sympathisers like me) can't prove that piracy is NOT harmful, either. I often don't use that argument as a real argument, but as a way to highlight meaningless stats and generally the faith- or entitlement-based stance most anti-pirates take ("I sold 10000 copies, but there were 30000 illegal copies, OMG I must be losing millions! -- even though I made millions, too." "If I don't control it, it must be bad!" etc)..
I strongly believe, although I can't call this a "fact", that the iPhone marketplace is evidence otherwise.
This is one of those things where we have to agree to disagree. For the reasons I've given in this and my previous post, I think the iPhone market has little in common with the Android market.
In a way, it's like comparing the commercial application markets for Windows and Linux, where it's quite clear that if someone wants to invest in software development, Windows is where the money is -- regardless of whether the piracy rate for Windows software is many times more than for Linux software!
And although it isn't relevant to the conversation, I think it would be fair to admit that I myself have pirated software on a PC for various reasons, although I would no longer do so now (I'm 29). (well, I guess just one reason: money. Maybe one could argue that the times that I download pirated software to circumvent DRM on games that I have validly purchased... hello E.A.... is legally piracy, but that doesn't kill the economy of the games market)
I've been there before in my time. While I don't really care to make time for anything other than books these days (the paper kind, mind you), I too have pirated a few things before. Mainly movies and some Windows games from the olden days.
My reasons were often very different from yours, however. I would pirate before buying, to make sure I was buying something that was worth it. I would start watching/playing the pirated version, and would buy based on the quality on the product, rather than the quality of the marketing.
I have to admit, I'm not so much pro-piracy, as much as I am anti-anti-piracy. I think walled gardens/braindead devices, stupid DRM, draconian copyright laws, internet censorship, the loss of internet privacy and so on are all the result of creators that are panicking without any evidence that it's a time to panic (and are being taken advantage of by some of their middlemen). All those things are WAY more dangerous to a much larger number of people than piracy. I just don't want my kids to grow up in a world where everything has been torn apart for such a lame reason, so I'm happier to tolerate some piracy (and any unwanted side-effects it might or might not have) than to accept the "solutions" we are being presented with.
Incidentally, the "Home Taping is Killing Music" campaign from the 80s comes to mind. Music is still alive, even though home taping is still with us. It's "music" that almost killed home taping, not the other way around!
Firstly, I feel great about all the software I pirate, except I'm a linux user who doesn't own a smartphone. Funny that.
Apart from Apple's powerful marketing, the fact the iPhone has tens of times more market share than Android, and the fact that iPhone users are likely from wealthier backgrounds than Android users, I'm sure the iPhone market is a perfect control group to compare the Android market to.
Finally, there is no indication that illegal copies equal to lost sales -- let me say that in a different way: there is no indication that piracy equals to even one lost sale. Unless someone can provide some evidence that piracy has any negative effect on the market, then it's a molehill as far as I can see (and as far as legislators etc should see, but that's a different story).
Instead of looking at how many pirated copies there are, how about looking at how many non-pirated copies there are? Is your product making a profit, in spite of these figures?
Not every pirated copy is a lost sale. I can't stress that enough. Make the most of what you have instead of making mountains out of molehills.
Slashdot Mirror
Extrapolating from how #2 smells relative to #1, NUMBER TEN must smell really awful.
I don't think the parking tickets are the problem, but the all seeing eye in the sky that smites you from a distance the moment it thinks you've broken its rules. As soon as people are fully acclimated to this sort of regime, and that may be generations from now, who knows what sort of new laws such a system will be used to enforce -- and people won't even know any better.
Let's make it illegal to walk around the city without smiling! France is the happiest place on earth -- just look at how happy everyone is here!
The DMCA stuff was merely the tip of the iceberg. There's still a lot wrong with this document -- like, making just linking to illegal content illegal, the conflation of counterfeiting (trademark law) with copyrights, internet "copyrights" and patents, the way infringement penalties are calculates (as lost sales), border controls on medicines and other products in transit, and let's not forget the despicable way in which the entire thing was written in total secrecy without input from the public (the stakeholders).
I personally refuse to allow ACTA to pass into law (i.e., member countries' laws will need to change, despite earlier claims to the opposite), because not only does it bring even more draconian enforcement of intellectual monopolies (which I disagree with at a philosophical level), but because it sets a terrible precedent that gives politicians and lobbyists even more freedom to take away our freedoms.
Could somebody please draw me a diagram for Mr Ogawa you have too much free time on your hands? Much appreciated.
If they call themselves that, I'll gladly switch back to Windows and buy Photoshop. That would probably render me homeless, however...
It will take nothing less than some serious anti-trust lawsuits to bring the Microsoft OS monopoly into check, because they are so deep-rooted and have so damn much control of the market in so many different ways.. Only to think they are paying large OEMs to quietly "disappear" the option of no OS (i.e., forcing the consumer to choose between their product and the highway) is a frightening demonstration of their power.
Perhaps Canonical is not the right company to initiate the anti-trust investigations, but Google will very likely be. I certainly look forward to the day when I won't need to pay the Microsoft tax every time I buy a laptop.
The Bodleian library consists of a complex of several buildings (I should know, I studied in Oxford). Some of the library scenes in the Harry Potter movies were actually shot in the older buildings of the Bodleian..
Man, that so made me lol!
With digital storage, they could fit their entire collection in a single room, and they save things in a totally generic format such as numbered jpgs or even raw bmps. Think raid arrays, and perhaps synced copies at multiple sites in the country. The costs would be negligible compared to physical storage and preservation, and all that money could be put to better use -- like digitising the books and recordings that time hasn't been so kind to.
The real cost is scanning (and particularly getting permission from the copyright holders to scan), and that could be avoided if publishers were legally required to submit digital copies of the books from the start. Today pretty much all books are typeset on computers, so digital versions already exist -- why are the laws still so far behind the times?? Oh, wait we're talking about copyright laws, so nvm.
Works on the students, too.
If developers are encouraged to use HTML5 in its present form, which has inconsistencies across browsers, some websites will not work properly on some brand new, modern browsers -- not necessarily because the browsers are not standards compliant, but because the websites had to choose to be compliant with the unfinished standard implemented within a particular browser.
While most developers would normally choose the common factor and make their websites work on all browsers, other interests may prevent them from doing so. We've already seen Microsoft pay off certain popular websites to make their pages use HTML5 that only IE9 supports, as a marketing technique to make others look bad. While you could argue that all marketing is fair game (lies and subterfuge; smoke and mirrors), this sort of thing makes the job of the standards authority much more difficult, because some things may become defacto standards, thus undermining their efforts and ultimately making compatibility across browsers more difficult.
Remember the last time this sort of thing happened? Don't forget that Microsoft still has a good chunk of market share, and could invent new ways of making history repeat itself.
Fossilised coal is pretty clean. But Windows 7 is actually methane-based.
Sarkozy's "Hadopi" monstrosity is already sending out notices...
It's a very long procedure that requires rights holders to go through a huge number of hoops, including becoming "qualified copyright holders" (for an undisclosed fee -- don't know who decides who's "qualified" and who's not, but I can take a guess), to register their copyrights with the ISPs, to specify a bunch of details about the work, the notices, to give painstaking details about the data collection processes, and of course the technical details of the infringement as well as legal statements certifying everything is accurate and the infringement is real (oh jolly trolly). Most non-technically-minded artists won't know where to begin with all this, so if they want to participate they are forced to depend on third parties... And guess who the third parties will be! ACS-style lawyer firms and record labels! Yay for making them legit. Hooray for democracy~!
Afaik, the copyrights that can be asserted need to be registered with Ofcom. Which iirc means only large corporations will be able to use the DEA's provisions, while individuals (incl. artists) won't be able to do a thing without a lot of hassle and some legal fees (of course). The whole thing was made by corporations, for corporations (thanks Mandy).
What this process will undoubtedly lead to, however, are completely fake letters sent through the mail to random people by (unofficial) scammers demanding cash payments or else!
In a matter of months, the practice of harvesting the details of possibly innocent individuals based on accusations generated using unreliable methods will be the norm and sanctioned by law. The Digital Economy Act is all a-drafted by the Rights Holders and assented by Her Majesty, and the Slimiest Lawyers in all Her Kingdom are all a-primed and ready to litigate and make lots of money off the unsuspecting public.
It's gonna be a hoot!
Terrorism, by the contemporary meaning of the word at least, involves blowing shit up. Thankfully, other than a prank bomb threat, that is not the case here.
4chan's goal is not to terrorise, but to harass in order to be heard. In other words, it's no different than a real-world protest, where they stand outside the company's building and throw eggs and yogurt at everyone who dares come out, thus disrupting their business. It's a sad truth today that if consumers don't organise and hurt a company's wallet, they'll be totally ignored -- tell me that isn't true.
I would normally feel bad about the companies that are at the sharp end of all this, but I don't. At all. They totally deserve everything they get.
Omg, that would be amazing -- ask them!!
Holy crap!
George Orwell, while researching one of his books, famously said "All animals are equal, but-- HOLY SHIT IS THAT CAR A FUCKING MOSQUITO?!?!!!!!11"
They'll probably integrate it with that annoying new Xbox gadget. The virtual whores in SL will be thrilled!
We should just censor half the internet and reclaim those IP addresses! That should solve the problem and give us plenty of time to move to IPv6!
Hey, it looks our "tech-aware" government is already trying that -- never mind!
Actually, there are ALREADY more Android users than iPhone users. And the number is just going to grow. However, you are absolutely correct about the fact that iPhone users are more affluent.
I don't believe that's true. According to CNET, the iPhone still has over three times more market share than Android. Also, we are interested in how the two systems have performed over time (as the sales counts have been accumulating over several years), and the iPhone has had upwards of 50% share at the times when Android was still languishing around 0%.
This is a bullshit answer that people fighting against piracy always come up against. You can't EVER prove this statement one way or another.
It goes both ways. Piracy advocates (or sympathisers like me) can't prove that piracy is NOT harmful, either. I often don't use that argument as a real argument, but as a way to highlight meaningless stats and generally the faith- or entitlement-based stance most anti-pirates take ("I sold 10000 copies, but there were 30000 illegal copies, OMG I must be losing millions! -- even though I made millions, too." "If I don't control it, it must be bad!" etc)..
I strongly believe, although I can't call this a "fact", that the iPhone marketplace is evidence otherwise.
This is one of those things where we have to agree to disagree. For the reasons I've given in this and my previous post, I think the iPhone market has little in common with the Android market.
In a way, it's like comparing the commercial application markets for Windows and Linux, where it's quite clear that if someone wants to invest in software development, Windows is where the money is -- regardless of whether the piracy rate for Windows software is many times more than for Linux software!
And although it isn't relevant to the conversation, I think it would be fair to admit that I myself have pirated software on a PC for various reasons, although I would no longer do so now (I'm 29). (well, I guess just one reason: money. Maybe one could argue that the times that I download pirated software to circumvent DRM on games that I have validly purchased... hello E.A. ... is legally piracy, but that doesn't kill the economy of the games market)
I've been there before in my time. While I don't really care to make time for anything other than books these days (the paper kind, mind you), I too have pirated a few things before. Mainly movies and some Windows games from the olden days.
My reasons were often very different from yours, however. I would pirate before buying, to make sure I was buying something that was worth it. I would start watching/playing the pirated version, and would buy based on the quality on the product, rather than the quality of the marketing.
I have to admit, I'm not so much pro-piracy, as much as I am anti-anti-piracy. I think walled gardens/braindead devices, stupid DRM, draconian copyright laws, internet censorship, the loss of internet privacy and so on are all the result of creators that are panicking without any evidence that it's a time to panic (and are being taken advantage of by some of their middlemen). All those things are WAY more dangerous to a much larger number of people than piracy. I just don't want my kids to grow up in a world where everything has been torn apart for such a lame reason, so I'm happier to tolerate some piracy (and any unwanted side-effects it might or might not have) than to accept the "solutions" we are being presented with.
Incidentally, the "Home Taping is Killing Music" campaign from the 80s comes to mind. Music is still alive, even though home taping is still with us. It's "music" that almost killed home taping, not the other way around!
Firstly, I feel great about all the software I pirate, except I'm a linux user who doesn't own a smartphone. Funny that.
Apart from Apple's powerful marketing, the fact the iPhone has tens of times more market share than Android, and the fact that iPhone users are likely from wealthier backgrounds than Android users, I'm sure the iPhone market is a perfect control group to compare the Android market to.
Finally, there is no indication that illegal copies equal to lost sales -- let me say that in a different way: there is no indication that piracy equals to even one lost sale. Unless someone can provide some evidence that piracy has any negative effect on the market, then it's a molehill as far as I can see (and as far as legislators etc should see, but that's a different story).
Instead of looking at how many pirated copies there are, how about looking at how many non-pirated copies there are? Is your product making a profit, in spite of these figures?
Not every pirated copy is a lost sale. I can't stress that enough. Make the most of what you have instead of making mountains out of molehills.