KCRW is observing the silence, which should be VERY good publicity, since they are a VERY big market in LA (for a public radio station) and get pretty good ratings during drive time hours.
Here's the "To the Point" episode talking about it.
Nice twist with "the product has value to you" mental gymnastics... so here's a few questions for you.
1) What if getting a copy the product required no effort on my part?
2) Are all things I get free of charge that are "of value to me" AND that somebody else sells piracy? For example, I hire somebody to clean my windows, I learn how they do it, then fire them and clean my windows myself. Is that piracy? Or shall we patent/copyright "a method for cleaning windows?"
Those people that constantly whinge and carry on about how somebody "stole" their idea or code, and then at the same time claim to believe the "information wants to be free" meme are arguably worse than Sen. Hollings (D-Disney).
Information still wants to be free, its just that deep down inside, they still wish it weren't true, despite their posturing.
I apologize for misunderstanding your post. There are indeed many/. readers who fall under this category; hopefully nowhere near a majority.
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote some code or found a flaw in zlib. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote some code, and it was good? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that code and not put your name in the README? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people."
If my code was useful to somebody else, and it helped their project, I am happy. I don't need credit. I already got credit for the code being used in the project it was intended for. I don't need payment. I already got it because my work was needed to complete the project it was intended for. I don't even care if he RESELLS my code for profit, as long as he does not prevent me from doing what I want with the code. Are you starting to catch on yet?
Does this suprise you? That people are actually willing to HELP OTHERS by offering them information that costs them nothing to share?
Go back, and "re-tailor" your post for the/. mindset, because you clearly don't grasp the concept yet.
As a practical proposition, the theory behind the Free Library is that, certainly in the long run, it benefits an author to have a certain number of free or cheap titles of theirs readily available to the public. By far the main enemy any author faces, except a handful of ones who are famous to the public at large, is simply obscurity. Even well-known SF authors are only read by a small percentage of the potential SF audience. Most readers, even ones who have heard of the author, simply pass them up.
Why? In most cases, simply because they don't really know anything about the writer and aren't willing to spend $7 to $28 just to experiment. So, they keep buying those authors they are familiar with.
Which is the whole point... "big" name authors (or musicians/bands/actors/screenwriters/songwriters) stay big name BECAUSE of this effect, NOT because they are inherently better.
That's why branding works so well in an inefficient market; it depends heavily on the consumers' imperfect information regarding what competitors exist.
I would argue that supporting the SMALLER guy and making it harder for the more established content producers to maintain their lock on the market is a happy side effect.
I know the RIAA/MPAA would disagree, but in this case, it helps both the producer and the consumer.
Oh, irrelevant ones, like function calls, variable substitution, for loops, while loops,/bin/test (or [) ,/bin/basename,/bin/find,/bin/eval, backquotes (or $()), grouping, globbing, job control. The list goes on and on. cmd.exe is a toy, almost no better than command.com
NOT crashing on a double free might be just as bad (or worse) than crashing on a double free, since it generally means somebody is accessing a free'd pointer for other reasons (prior to the second free). In *this* particular case, allowing a double free might be better than not allowing it, but in general, ANY program that does a double free probably has far more destructive bugs hiding in it.
If it is one thing all these cases seem to indicate it is that corporations are levering the law to prop up a faulty business model.
Blizzard should NOT be marketing their game as a shrink wrap product you buy at a store (like a toaster, or a pork loin) but rather as a SERVICE like EverQuest, WarBirds, Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, etc.
Why? Let's look at the competition. battle.net provides a service to people wishing to meet online and play Blizzard's games. bnetd does the same.
However, each cost money to run. Bandwidth to start, not to mention tech support, customer service, etc.
How is bnetd competing? At a loss, because presumably their overhead is low. They are on a limited connect. They don't have 24 service. They don't provide referees, or administered ladders, or tournaments etc.
So add VALUE to battle.net. Provide a reason for users to connect to battle.net rather than bnetd. Recoup your investment there, and forget about "selling" the game as a product. Charge for ISO downloads (providing enough bandwidth to allow people to download 700Megs at a time is NOT cheap). Allow pirates to do your work for them. *THEY* are providing Blizzard a service *FOR FREE*. Online distribution through mirroring costs Blizzard nothing.
Sure, you can still charge for the CD in stores (charge what you want, $50, $30, whatever; MOST people can't afford to dload/burn an ISO anyway).
I really don't understand why this is so hard for PHBs to grasp. Distribution COSTS money; why are they so set on keeping a monopoly on a business model that is a loss?
I found this thread after reading this article on K5. Yes, it is yet another variation on the "imminent death of/. predicted, film at 11" rant, but the many pointers to bitchlapped threads piqued my interest.
Most readers *would* no doubt be very interested in this thread, but for some reason the whole thing got downmodded by the editors.
I was willing to give/. the benifit of the doubt (I had always felt the k5 readership to be pedantic and elitist FAR beyond even the worst/. poster) but this really takes the cake.
I have karma to burn, so I'm interested in seeing how fast this post gets moderated down.
Quote, since it got modded down, and it is informative too:
"Hence, I said: (click here to download the adkiller javascript code and put it on your own webspace, in case you don't trust me:-) There was no other way I could get this code working; the User Slashbox's size limit was too small to fit the entire code into. I don't want people freeloading my bandwidth if I can help it, and I'm not the sort of person who would pull a bait-and-switch like that. You'll have to take my word on that, which is a bad thing to do for anyone on the Internet, so I say to everyone interested in this code, COPY IT TO YOUR OWN MACHINE and then run it. Save yourself from my dirty, evil self, and save me some bandwidth too! Everybody wins! Thank you Jamie for bring this issue to the front."
Not really that cold. But then if you consider that it has a pretty hot on board heat source (i.e. reactor), and the ONLY means for dissippating it is black body radiation (yup, its a hard vaccuum)... This means its pretty dark (i.e. cold, since its a vaccuum, the only external heat source would be incident radiation).
Some light reading for your naive ideas of IP and morality....
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition,seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
- Robert A. Heinlein, "Life Line"
"Is The Net At Fault For Illegal Filesharing?"
In a word: YES!
The internet is "disruptive technology". Previously publishers added economic value to the stream of commerce that flows from authors and artists to consumers. Suddenly, nearly all creative works can be represented in a digital form (usually with higher quality to boot), reproduced at virtually no cost, and distributed at virtually no cost.
The entire business model of most publishers is now non-value added waste. The market knows it, the people know it, and the publishers even know it.
Unfortunately, our form of government is not geared to be responsive to the public or the market. Free markets and the public demand the elimination of waste, but our form of government is optimized to achieve a different goal: to create a regulatory paradigm where Congress grants regulatory favors to those who are able to contribute the funds needed to assure the reelection of the people in the system.
Our legislators have gone through a vigorous natural selection process that ensures they truly believe it is important to ignore the wishes of the people, indeed even the rights of the people, so as to perpetuate the unnatural power base of a cartel created not by competition, but by regulation even after the very service that it provides can be accomplished on demand by any 10 year old with no out of pocket expense.
The internet was designed precisely to acheive what it does acheive: a radically better way to distribute files. People should see this for what it is and also dispel any feelings of guilt they have for using it to its fullest capabilities to destroy those industries that survive only by misuse of government to protect revenue streams based on turning waste into value based on corrupt regulation.
In fact, EVEN IF a few poor starving millionare artists have to suffer unfairly to achieve it, I recommend that people feel no guilt about sharing files instead of feeding the cartels. It is far better to kill a little skin burning off the leach than to allow it to feed off of you unchecked.
Ok not many of you may know, but I am the host and admin for the bnetd.org server. I am also an ISP and the one who hosts the server here at no cost to anyone. I also have been known from time to time to help with development and ideas on the bnetd server, but I am not even close to one of the main developers. I have also been know from time to time to hack on the web pages for the site as well.
I have talked with the lawyers at EFF. They are interested in taking on the case, both for us as a small local/rural ISP and to help defend the developers as well. So for now the web site is sort of closed down to keep Vivendi/Blizzard lawyers from suing us as a small ISP and to help prevent them from suing each of the developers. They could still sue both of us, and say that they will at least sue the developers and owners of the website (which I guess would techincally be me personally).
I and I believe most of the developers plan on fighting this as much as we can given the support that we are able to get from EFF and others. It remains to be seen what kind of legal advice we get in the next few days and up comming week as to when the site will return. The site was taken down in its current form by concensus amoung all the developers that could be reached at the given time that action was required. I, as an ISP, did not force anyone to do anything. As an ISP I plan to fight this as much as I can, as a developer (the little developing that I have done) plan to fight this as well.
I plan to fight this and return the site back to its "normal state" (whatever that may be), it is just a question of when and how long at this point.
Vivendi/Blizzard's main complaint, as was voice to me in an hour long call with them yelling and threating me, the ISP to hurry and take it down "why do you need to wait and figure all this out?" was that the bnetd program/server does not impliment the online CD-KEY checking and thus allowed pirate copies to play online, and that the true battle.net server have this code as an anti-piracy protection. Since bnetd doesn't have this feature, it was circumventing the piracy/copy protection and thus was in violation of the DMCA. It was at this point that Vivendi/Blizzard just wanted me, the ISP, to shut the whole site down, not remove the offending files but shut the whole site down or risk having them sue me along with the "owners" of bnetd.org. They were very unhappy that I want to talk with a lawyer to see what my options were, and said if they didn't hear back from me by the next day one way or they other they would start proceedings to sue me and the "owners" of bnetd.org who were refusing to respond to their messages. Now who they were contacting as the "owner" of bnetd.org is beyond me, and the lawyers were unable to tell me who they tried to contact and said "its beside the point anyway", which happens to seem to be their favorite phrase.
If you want to support this fight, I suggest you email Blizzard and Vivendi letting them know how displeased you are that they didn't even contact us first or try to work anything out, but rather just hammered us with legal threats and the DMCA. I also suggest that you get an EFF membership to help them fight cases like this. If you want to donate to a defense fund for our court costs I would assume that you could contact EFF and they could work something out.
If you have any other questions let me know. I will try to answer them as best I can.
And September 11 was nothing more than his plot to get what he wanted.
You are so stupid...
Eh, waste of my time.
I knew the instant it happened he would be milking it for all it was worth. Sept 11 was a conservative hawk's wet dream... Carte blanche to do all those nasty things abroad necessary to clean house.
If anything else should happen (god forbid) you know it will be leveraged to the hilt.
Homeland defense? What for? We are already losing 41000 people to traffic fatalities per YEAR. Its a huge barrel of pork unlikely to stop any single (already very improbable) disaster.
No matter what you do, a sufficiently deranged/motivated individual can easily kill thousands of people in one shot. Deal with it.
Up at the top is that new huge barrel of pork known as "Homeland Defense". Waaaaay down at the bottom is stuff like highways, education, aids research, stem cell research, and other completely useless things unrelated to the infrastructure which makes the US possible.
Face it, most of these cuts are to supplement Bush's militant vision of the new world order - A puppet dictator in every foreign despotism, and a soldier with an M-16 on every domestic city block.
This shouldn't be a new argument to you; the same one applies to drug companies. Patents on drugs are a good thing because it encourages companies to develop new drugs that improve the quality of life for all.
If you actually WORKED at a drug company, you would know that you are being terribly naive. When a drug company gets a patent, what do you think it does for the next 20 years? Work on new drugs? HELL no, that is far too risky.
What they end up doing is slowly price gouging as much as the market will bear to make the balance sheet look good. R&D works on a NEW and IMPROVED version of the existing drug, to be released when the 20 years is up. A team of lawyers an order of MAGNITUDE larger than the R&D team is then paid handsomely (again, from the profits of their monopoly) to make sure that 1) nobody violates their current valid patents 2) negotiate crosslicensing deals from other corporations if they *DO* have overlapping IP 3) work diligently to stomp out competitors that have similar (but not enough to violate the patent) products and 4) make sure the wording for the new patent (on the new and improved drug) is iron clad to make the next cycle less expensive. If you look at the balance sheet of the typical drug company, you will see that the LEGAL dept's budget is scary compared to R&D.
I like the old saying: capitalism is the second-worst economic system yet devised. The worst economic system is... everything else.
Except that IP laws are CLEARLY socialist in nature, establishing monopolies in areas that are in danger of becoming a "common good" by virtue of the commoditization of information.
That is their purpose. Pretending that a GOVERNMENT enforced monopoly is capitalism is laugable. IP is corporate welfare, and it serves its purpose perfectly if implemented correctly. In our case, however, it is a royal clusterfuck.
Actually, the purpose of intellectual property rules and laws is to encourage innovation
And this is disagreeing with me?
Again, it is SUPPOSED to encourange innovation by promising the developer he won't have competition. Which is exactly what I said.
Currently, IP does the first (preventing competitors from entering a market), but it completely fails at the real goal, which is to spur innovation.
What it does is STIFLE innovation (in that market) AFTER the patent is granted, UNTIL it expires. In this day and age, 20 years is simply far too long. Deny it all you want, but all that happens now is patent portfolio disputes, usually ending in some nice crosslicensing deals. Typically, the corporation with the fatter portfolio ends up with the sweeter deal. The "small" inventor usually ends up with the short end of the stick, and a hefty legal bill to boot. You need to check your naivete at the door before trolling on a topic you obviously don't have much first hand experience in.
If you don't want to pay the toll, don't drive on the MPEG-4 parkway. It's that simple.
No its not. Eventually, there WILL be no other parkways, because just about any menthod to compete with them will be covered by patents and/or copyrights. After all, this is the PURPOSE of IP, is it not? To prevent competition so you can make money?
Its a stupid meme, and you know it. At least yell "slippery slope", but don't hide your head in the sand and pretend how great patents have been at "promoting the useful sciences" lately.
Corporations have a tendency to seek monopolies. Indiviudals who want to have the ABILITY to choose between competitors have to constantly struggle against this tendency.
We are much closer to a serfdom than you think, especially with people like you cheering the local lords on.
You can't buy what you aren't ALLOWED to buy. Soon everything will be illegal except what the MPAA and RIAA allow you to buy. This is why they call it a "monopoly". Dig?
Yes, you are. Enron collapsed because they made a HUGE bet on continued deregulation. When the California energy market imploded, deregulation went bye bye, and Enron lost big. REAL big. Deregulation was allowing Enron to cash in on the massive price gouging going on in the energy market, and they were hiding their debts with this huge amount of cash flow.
The "entertainment lifestyle" phrase is a very common one in Japanese marketing. It doesn't translate well into US marketing speak, so it feels a bit disengenous to non-Japanese.
Just one of those things people take for granted, since cultural identity has long been substituted by marketing techniques... not just in the US, but everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
KCRW is observing the silence, which should be VERY good publicity, since they are a VERY big market in LA (for a public radio station) and get pretty good ratings during drive time hours.
Here's the "To the Point" episode talking about it.
Nice twist with "the product has value to you" mental gymnastics... so here's a few questions for you.
1) What if getting a copy the product required no effort on my part?
2) Are all things I get free of charge that are "of value to me" AND that somebody else sells piracy? For example, I hire somebody to clean my windows, I learn how they do it, then fire them and clean my windows myself. Is that piracy? Or shall we patent/copyright "a method for cleaning windows?"
I don't mind if they take GPL'd code.
I don't even mind if they RESELL GPL'd.
I MIND when they stop me from redistributing GPL based code however I damn well please.
.. making Ad-Aware a circumvention device. Somebody should turn them in. I'd pay to see that trial.
Those people that constantly whinge and carry on about how somebody "stole" their idea or code, and then at the same time claim to believe the "information wants to be free" meme are arguably worse than Sen. Hollings (D-Disney).
/. readers who fall under this category; hopefully nowhere near a majority.
Information still wants to be free, its just that deep down inside, they still wish it weren't true, despite their posturing.
I apologize for misunderstanding your post. There are indeed many
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote some code or found a flaw in zlib. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote some code, and it was good? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that code and not put your name in the README? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people."
/. mindset, because you clearly don't grasp the concept yet.
If my code was useful to somebody else, and it helped their project, I am happy. I don't need credit. I already got credit for the code being used in the project it was intended for. I don't need payment. I already got it because my work was needed to complete the project it was intended for. I don't even care if he RESELLS my code for profit, as long as he does not prevent me from doing what I want with the code. Are you starting to catch on yet?
Does this suprise you? That people are actually willing to HELP OTHERS by offering them information that costs them nothing to share?
Go back, and "re-tailor" your post for the
From the article:
As a practical proposition, the theory behind the Free Library is that, certainly in the long run, it benefits an author to have a certain number of free or cheap titles of theirs readily available to the public. By far the main enemy any author faces, except a handful of ones who are famous to the public at large, is simply obscurity. Even well-known SF authors are only read by a small percentage of the potential SF audience. Most readers, even ones who have heard of the author, simply pass them up.
Why? In most cases, simply because they don't really know anything about the writer and aren't willing to spend $7 to $28 just to experiment. So, they keep buying those authors they are familiar with.
Which is the whole point... "big" name authors (or musicians/bands/actors/screenwriters/songwriters) stay big name BECAUSE of this effect, NOT because they are inherently better.
That's why branding works so well in an inefficient market; it depends heavily on the consumers' imperfect information regarding what competitors exist.
I would argue that supporting the SMALLER guy and making it harder for the more established content producers to maintain their lock on the market is a happy side effect.
I know the RIAA/MPAA would disagree, but in this case, it helps both the producer and the consumer.
"a few other features"?
/bin/test (or [) , /bin/basename, /bin/find, /bin/eval,
Oh, irrelevant ones, like function calls, variable substitution, for loops, while loops,
backquotes (or $()), grouping, globbing, job control. The list goes on and on. cmd.exe is a toy, almost no better than command.com
NOT crashing on a double free might be just as bad (or worse) than crashing on a double free, since it generally means somebody is accessing a free'd pointer for other reasons (prior to the second free). In *this* particular case, allowing a double free might be better than not allowing it, but in general, ANY program that does a double free probably has far more destructive bugs hiding in it.
If it is one thing all these cases seem to indicate it is that corporations are levering the law to prop up a faulty business model.
Blizzard should NOT be marketing their game as a shrink wrap product you buy at a store (like a toaster, or a pork loin) but rather as a SERVICE like EverQuest, WarBirds, Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, etc.
Why? Let's look at the competition. battle.net provides a service to people wishing to meet online and play Blizzard's games. bnetd does the same.
However, each cost money to run. Bandwidth to start, not to mention tech support, customer service, etc.
How is bnetd competing? At a loss, because presumably their overhead is low. They are on a limited connect. They don't have 24 service. They don't provide referees, or administered ladders, or tournaments etc.
So add VALUE to battle.net. Provide a reason for users to connect to battle.net rather than bnetd. Recoup your investment there, and forget about "selling" the game as a product. Charge for ISO downloads (providing enough bandwidth to allow people to download 700Megs at a time is NOT cheap). Allow pirates to do your work for them. *THEY* are providing Blizzard a service *FOR FREE*. Online distribution through mirroring costs Blizzard nothing.
Sure, you can still charge for the CD in stores (charge what you want, $50, $30, whatever; MOST people can't afford to dload/burn an ISO anyway).
I really don't understand why this is so hard for PHBs to grasp. Distribution COSTS money; why are they so set on keeping a monopoly on a business model that is a loss?
I found this thread after reading this article on K5. Yes, it is yet another variation on the "imminent death of /. predicted, film at 11" rant, but the many pointers to bitchlapped threads piqued my interest.
/. the benifit of the doubt (I had always felt the k5 readership to be pedantic and elitist FAR beyond even the worst /. poster) but this really takes the cake.
Most readers *would* no doubt be very interested in this thread, but for some reason the whole thing got downmodded by the editors.
I was willing to give
I have karma to burn, so I'm interested in seeing how fast this post gets moderated down.
Quote, since it got modded down, and it is informative too:
:-)
"Hence, I said:
(click here to download the adkiller javascript code and put it on your own webspace, in case you don't trust me
There was no other way I could get this code working; the User Slashbox's size limit was too small to fit the entire code into. I don't want people freeloading my bandwidth if I can help it, and I'm not the sort of person who would pull a bait-and-switch like that. You'll have to take my word on that, which is a bad thing to do for anyone on the Internet, so I say to everyone interested in this code, COPY IT TO YOUR OWN MACHINE and then run it. Save yourself from my dirty, evil self, and save me some bandwidth too! Everybody wins!
Thank you Jamie for bring this issue to the front."
Not really that cold. But then if you consider that it has a pretty hot on board heat source (i.e. reactor), and the ONLY means for dissippating it is black body radiation (yup, its a hard vaccuum)... This means its pretty dark (i.e. cold, since its a vaccuum, the only external heat source would be incident radiation).
;)
So, ya, its cold out in deep space
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
- Robert A. Heinlein, "Life Line"
- /.
bwt, from
Paste, from here
Ok not many of you may know, but I am the host and admin for the bnetd.org
server. I am also an ISP and the one who hosts the server here at no cost to
anyone. I also have been known from time to time to help with development and
ideas on the bnetd server, but I am not even close to one of the main
developers. I have also been know from time to time to hack on the web pages for
the site as well.
I have talked with the lawyers at EFF. They are interested in taking on the
case, both for us as a small local/rural ISP and to help defend the developers
as well. So for now the web site is sort of closed down to keep Vivendi/Blizzard
lawyers from suing us as a small ISP and to help prevent them from suing each of
the developers. They could still sue both of us, and say that they will at least
sue the developers and owners of the website (which I guess would techincally be
me personally).
I and I believe most of the developers plan on fighting this as much as we can
given the support that we are able to get from EFF and others. It remains to be
seen what kind of legal advice we get in the next few days and up comming week
as to when the site will return. The site was taken down in its current form by
concensus amoung all the developers that could be reached at the given time that
action was required. I, as an ISP, did not force anyone to do anything. As an
ISP I plan to fight this as much as I can, as a developer (the little developing
that I have done) plan to fight this as well.
I plan to fight this and return the site back to its "normal state" (whatever
that may be), it is just a question of when and how long at this point.
Vivendi/Blizzard's main complaint, as was voice to me in an hour long call with
them yelling and threating me, the ISP to hurry and take it down "why do you
need to wait and figure all this out?" was that the bnetd program/server does
not impliment the online CD-KEY checking and thus allowed pirate copies to play
online, and that the true battle.net server have this code as an anti-piracy
protection. Since bnetd doesn't have this feature, it was circumventing the
piracy/copy protection and thus was in violation of the DMCA. It was at this
point that Vivendi/Blizzard just wanted me, the ISP, to shut the whole site
down, not remove the offending files but shut the whole site down or risk having
them sue me along with the "owners" of bnetd.org. They were very unhappy that I
want to talk with a lawyer to see what my options were, and said if they didn't
hear back from me by the next day one way or they other they would start
proceedings to sue me and the "owners" of bnetd.org who were refusing to respond
to their messages. Now who they were contacting as the "owner" of bnetd.org is
beyond me, and the lawyers were unable to tell me who they tried to contact and
said "its beside the point anyway", which happens to seem to be their favorite
phrase.
If you want to support this fight, I suggest you email Blizzard and Vivendi
letting them know how displeased you are that they didn't even contact us first
or try to work anything out, but rather just hammered us with legal threats and
the DMCA. I also suggest that you get an EFF membership to help them fight cases
like this. If you want to donate to a defense fund for our court costs I would
assume that you could contact EFF and they could work something out.
If you have any other questions let me know. I will try to answer them as best I
can.
Tim Jung
System Admin
Internet Gateway Inc.
Show me a news source that ISN'T filled with propoganda, overt, or covert... why should /. hide its biases behind a facade of "balance"
And September 11 was nothing more than his plot to get what he wanted. ...
You are so stupid
Eh, waste of my time.
I knew the instant it happened he would be milking it for all it was worth. Sept 11 was a conservative hawk's wet dream... Carte blanche to do all those nasty things abroad necessary to clean house.
If anything else should happen (god forbid) you know it will be leveraged to the hilt.
Homeland defense? What for? We are already losing 41000 people to traffic fatalities per YEAR. Its a huge barrel of pork unlikely to stop any single (already very improbable) disaster.
No matter what you do, a sufficiently deranged/motivated individual can easily kill thousands of people in one shot. Deal with it.
Up at the top is that new huge barrel of pork known as "Homeland Defense". Waaaaay down at the bottom is stuff like highways, education, aids research, stem cell research, and other completely useless things unrelated to the infrastructure which makes the US possible.
Face it, most of these cuts are to supplement Bush's militant vision of the new world order - A puppet dictator in every foreign despotism, and a soldier with an M-16 on every domestic city block.
They have very little do with infrastructure.
This shouldn't be a new argument to you; the same one applies to drug companies. Patents on drugs are a good thing because it encourages companies to develop new drugs that improve the quality of life for all.
If you actually WORKED at a drug company, you would know that you are being terribly naive. When a drug company gets a patent, what do you think it does for the next 20 years? Work on new drugs? HELL no, that is far too risky.
What they end up doing is slowly price gouging as much as the market will bear to make the balance sheet look good. R&D works on a NEW and IMPROVED version of the existing drug, to be released when the 20 years is up. A team of lawyers an order of MAGNITUDE larger than the R&D team is then paid handsomely (again, from the profits of their monopoly) to make sure that 1) nobody violates their current valid patents 2) negotiate crosslicensing deals from other corporations if they *DO* have overlapping IP 3) work diligently to stomp out competitors that have similar (but not enough to violate the patent) products and 4) make sure the wording for the new patent (on the new and improved drug) is iron clad to make the next cycle less expensive. If you look at the balance sheet of the typical drug company, you will see that the LEGAL dept's budget is scary compared to R&D.
I like the old saying: capitalism is the second-worst economic system yet devised. The worst economic system is... everything else.
Except that IP laws are CLEARLY socialist in nature, establishing monopolies in areas that are in danger of becoming a "common good" by virtue of the commoditization of information.
That is their purpose. Pretending that a GOVERNMENT enforced monopoly is capitalism is laugable. IP is corporate welfare, and it serves its purpose perfectly if implemented correctly. In our case, however, it is a royal clusterfuck.
Actually, the purpose of intellectual property rules and laws is to encourage innovation
And this is disagreeing with me?
Again, it is SUPPOSED to encourange innovation by promising the developer he won't have competition. Which is exactly what I said.
Currently, IP does the first (preventing competitors from entering a market), but it completely fails at the real goal, which is to spur innovation.
What it does is STIFLE innovation (in that market) AFTER the patent is granted, UNTIL it expires. In this day and age, 20 years is simply far too long. Deny it all you want, but all that happens now is patent portfolio disputes, usually ending in some nice crosslicensing deals. Typically, the corporation with the fatter portfolio ends up with the sweeter deal. The "small" inventor usually ends up with the short end of the stick, and a hefty legal bill to boot. You need to check your naivete at the door before trolling on a topic you obviously don't have much first hand experience in.
If you don't want to pay the toll, don't drive on the MPEG-4 parkway. It's that simple.
No its not. Eventually, there WILL be no other parkways, because just about any menthod to compete with them will be covered by patents and/or copyrights. After all, this is the PURPOSE of IP, is it not? To prevent competition so you can make money?
Its a stupid meme, and you know it. At least yell "slippery slope", but don't hide your head in the sand and pretend how great patents have been at "promoting the useful sciences" lately.
Corporations have a tendency to seek monopolies. Indiviudals who want to have the ABILITY to choose between competitors have to constantly struggle against this tendency.
We are much closer to a serfdom than you think, especially with people like you cheering the local lords on.
You can't buy what you aren't ALLOWED to buy. Soon everything will be illegal except what the MPAA and RIAA allow you to buy. This is why they call it a "monopoly". Dig?
Yes, you are. Enron collapsed because they made a HUGE bet on continued deregulation. When the California energy market imploded, deregulation went bye bye, and Enron lost big. REAL big. Deregulation was allowing Enron to cash in on the massive price gouging going on in the energy market, and they were hiding their debts with this huge amount of cash flow.
Bye bye deregulation, hello reality for Enron.
The "entertainment lifestyle" phrase is a very common one in Japanese marketing. It doesn't translate well into US marketing speak, so it feels a bit disengenous to non-Japanese.
Just one of those things people take for granted, since cultural identity has long been substituted by marketing techniques... not just in the US, but everywhere.