How long until Verizon Wireless decides to pre-install this on all their phones and lock it in. They already force me to keep a bunch of apps on my phone (including Facebook's app but also including ones like NFL Mobile) which I have no interest in using. I can't remove these apps without unlocking my phone which is "illegal" now. It's not like I'd leave them if they let me remove these apps. After all, they have me locked into a contract and are, quite frankly, the best carrier in my area. I might even be able to see keeping on the apps directly related to their Verizon Wireless services. I just want to delete these third party apps that I never use.
Step 1: Create a cool new Twitter application that everyone wants to use Step 2: Store auth_token strings from users. Step 3: When a few mega-popular users have tried your service, use the auth_token/cookie method to begin Tweeting as them. Step 4: Profit.
There are also real-life protections for kids against bad parenting. If my child won't stop talking and I beat him up to keep him quiet, Child Protective Services would quickly see to it that he is kept safely away from me.
What is needed isn't new laws, but better technology training for police departments. When my identity was stolen, the police department was able to obtain a copy of the online form that was submitted for the credit card the thieves took out under my name. However, even with the IP address and the timestamp of when it was submitted right there, they were clueless as to what their next step should be. Police departments need to be able to keep pace with online actions. If someone is being harassed online, you can use existing laws to stop them, but it doesn't help if the police department doesn't know how to find the person doing the harassing.
In defense of the "no smoking in public" bans, the point of that wasn't stopping people from smoking, but stopping people's smoking from affecting others. Before the ban, my wife (who has asthma) and I would go to a restaurant, be seated in a non-smoking section, and have smoke waft over from the smoking section 2 tables over. It wasn't even a matter of stopping going to those locations either because this was a problem in virtually EVERY restaurant. (A few might have been big enough to have completely separate areas with decent enough ventilation, but they were rarities.) In addition, workers in the restaurant were being subjected to second hand smoke on a daily basis.
If you want to smoke in your house, by all means go ahead, but it isn't your right to subject others to the byproducts of your bad habits. For the record, while I support posted calorie counts (as a method to give people more information to make better eating choices), I don't support "bad food bans". Someone drinking a 32oz soda next to me isn't affecting me at all. I don't get "second hand cholesterol" if he's pounding KFC Double-Downs while I eat a salad.
I still think that the best thing the RIAA could have done to hurt piracy back in the Napster days would have been to 1) buy Napster, 2) put a limit on the quality of shared MP3s (e.g. at most radio quality), 3) offer high quality, non-DRMed MP3s for purchase at reasonable prices through the same system. They would have created the first major online music shop and would have a built-in way for music to spread from person to person while still giving people an incentive to pay for their music.
Instead they tried the "sue them into the ground" approach. This worked to stop Napster, but it didn't stop piracy. Instead, it lead to a global game a whack-a-mole.
If you walk into Wal-Mart, see an interesting product, use your smartphone to look it up online, and see many negative reviews about it, you might decide not to buy the product.
Therefore, smartphones and review websites cause lost sales and should be banned!
I usually don't consider making copies that only you are accessing to be file sharing. An example of legal file sharing would be if a musician released a song for free under a license that encouraged people to share it. Then, if you e-mailed that song to a friend (or put it on a file sharing network), it would be both file sharing AND legal.
Of course, ripping a DVD for your personal use isn't copyright infringement but it is against the DMCA's DRM anti-circumvention laws. So ripping a CD for your use is fine but doing the exact same thing with a DVD isn't. (I disagree with this and hope this law gets changed, but it is the current law.)
Supply and demand are still useful for gauging economic reactions. The problem is that Supply and demand are like Newtonian Physics: Very useful in the simplified case, but there's more going on there. In physics it's relativity. In economics, there are various other forces at work (e.g. lobbying, government action, and, yes, even piracy). Those other forces have an effect on price, though each case varies (and can even vary from purchase to purchase within the same market). Still, supply and demand are still useful metrics to use.
There's something ironic in communicating that writing is on the way out by writing a comment on a forum where you read the stories (or at least the summaries) and then write comments. Now if Slashdot institutes video comments... Then again, it could open up a whole new realm of moderation!
Comment Moderated: -1 Screaming Baby In Background Comment Moderated: -50 Commenter Not Wearing Clothing Comment Moderated: +5000 Commenter Not Wearing Clothing (This one's theoretical but never actually applied) Comment Moderated: -1 Mumbles Comment Moderated: -1 Thick Accent
If you buy them, you can do with them whatever you wish... Just as long as you aren't breaking the DMCA anti-circumvention laws. Same applies for a DVD you buy from your own region but would like to view on an internal home network.
In many ways, the legal system reminds me of my time spent growing up in an Orthodox temple. The people there would study every word of the Torah (and various other writings held in high regard) and would make arguments based on words used or even how the words were written. ("This letter here is pointed on top just like that other letter there so therefore it means this.") Meanwhile, lawyers, especially when dealing with matters involving the Constitution, seem to frequently argue over wording or even punctuation. (Second amendment arguments will frequently take the form of "The comma is here which means that." "No, but this word here means that this is true.")
Along the same lines: You buy a DVD disc. It should now be legal to do whatever you want with that video short of making copies for others. You can sell it, give it away, rip it for your personal electronic collection (deleting it if you sell/give away the disc), or use it for target practice. The publisher has no say in your use of the DVD.
That'd make for an interesting Doctor Who episode. The Doctor sees something wrong with New New York's governing body, investigates, and finds that they've all been replaced by aliens. As the election approaches, he exposes them to the populace and sits back to watch them be voted out of office... only they're all re-elected because they're still better than the politicians they replaced. End with The Doctor leaving in the TARDIS muttering about "those stupid apes."
Plus, suspending first sale doctrine on imports would basically be putting a "Not Welcome" mat out for businesses located in America. Why would a business be located here when they could relocate to another country, import their products to the US, and have total control of the products post-sale thanks to no first sale doctrine on imports?
Me personally, I would be happy to pay that $2 per episode to get a decent quality mkv or even mp4 and be able to store it on my server and watch it via my WD media player.
This would probably even make more money for content owners. The first season of Big Bang Theory can be purchased on DVD for about $20. Alternatively, those 17 episodes would cost $34 to buy via a theoretical "$2 per episode in MKV/MP4 format" service. Yes, some of that money would go to the service, but much would still go to the content owners and they wouldn't need to create/ship physical discs.
I have similar views, but disagree with your first point. Suppose I take a photo and post it online in a blog post. Under your first rule, my photo wouldn't be considered to be copyrighted and thus would be free for anyone to take for any reason. In today's world of smartphone cameras and instant posting, having to file an application is a lengthy step that few would take.
I'd also argue that one year terms would be ridiculously short. Again, if you are requiring me to register all of my photos, and if I've taken 100 photos, I could be spending all of my time filling out renewal forms. (Or I could assign that to a company in which case you get one of the problems we have today: Big Copyright Companies forming and using their might to alter copyright law.)
My four changes to the system would be:
1) Unregistered copyrights would last for 14 years from publication date. (Just like they did when the Founding Fathers were around, but minus the registration requirement.)
2) If you wanted more time after 14 years, you could pay a fee to renew it for an additional 14 years. You could only do this once, however.
3) Removing the DRM circumvention provisions of the DMCA. Ripping a DVD (still covered by copyright) and sharing that out with others would still be illegal, but only because the "sharing" part was illegal. Ripping that same DVD for your own use (or for other Fair Use situations like parody) would be fine.
4) Penalties would be split between "for profit" and "home" infringement. Rip a DVD to make a thousand copies and sell them on the street corner? Face the current $750 - $150,000 penalties. Share a DVD rip online without charging anyone for it? Face much smaller penalties. Something that would still act as a deterrent, but without bankrupting individuals. Say, 10 times the selling price of the item. So Jammie Thomas' 24 shared songs ($0.99 each) would being a fine of about $240 instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If this doesn't seem like much of a deterrent, remember that it isn't many songs. Had Jammie Thomas shared 1,000 songs, the fine would have been around $1,000.
You are modded funny, but I seriously cringe when I think of some of my early 90's Usenet posts.
As for "I needed the money", I seriously considered an offer from a potential employer at one point until I decided I just couldn't do it. The job? Post photos of declothed women to a Usenet group. Had I accepted the job, my career might have gone along a completely different path!
Exactly. I can take the dozens of CDs that I own, rip them into MP3 format, and put them on a large hard drive on a network in my house in such a way that my kids could easily select which song they want to listen to. Penalty for doing this? Nothing. It's fair use.
However, if I take the dozens of DVDs that I own, rip them and put them on a large hard drive on a network in my house in such a way that my kids could easily select which movie they want to watch, I could (theoretically) be sued for thousands of dollars (if not more). I could find myself bankrupt over it.
Note that in neither example did I put the ripped CDs or DVDs on the Internet or give them to anyone else. Neither did I borrow CDs/DVDs (from Netflix, the Library, a friend, etc) and rip them. I legally own a CD and a DVD. I bought them from a store with my own money. Why can I copy one set of those bits to a format/medium that works better for me but not another set? Especially because ripping DVDs to a hard drive in this purely theoretical manner would make owning DVDs a lot more desirable (because it would be easier to watch them) and thus would lead to more DVD purchases.
Years back... I mean decades ago (now I feel old), there was a text-only "game" for the Atari called Abuse. The computer would spout insults at you and you would type insults right back. There was no scoring or "winning", the game lasted until you shut off the program. I quickly found that I didn't have a big talent for tossing insults, but I did come upon a tactic that seemed to "infuriate" the computer. I'd type kind statements into it. The program would keep upping its game, becoming more and more "frustrated" that I wasn't responding in kind.
It almost makes me wonder if some trolls could be defeated in this manner. Trolls who come into a forum looking to generate waves of angry responses, but who are met with kind remarks instead might get frustrated and leave. NOTE: You don't need to agree with the troll's view. Just express your disagreement in a nice manner. Don't give them the reaction they are looking for.
I'd argue that it's not a matter of being nice to everyone, but not being rude by default. Too many people will enter a discussion with the viewpoint of "I'm right and you're wrong and you're an idiot if you even try to argue against my obviously right view." Once you enter with that mindset, you're not going to treat the other person with respect. You're going to get quickly frustrated that they aren't joining "your side" just based on your say-so and you'll descend into name-calling, personal attacks, and other rude tactics. I can't speak for others, but those tactics usually turn me off and make me disagree with the person even more. (Or, if I happen to agree with their opinion, cringe that someone like that is on the same side as me.)
By all means, be confident when arguing your position, but being confident isn't the same as being rude.
The question is: Were the "$300... $200... $150" price figures actual prices that competitors use or just figures plucked out of the air. If the former, then they might be valid comparison prices. (However, I'd caution about features included in that price. Comparing the price of a full-size, latest generation iPad with 3G data access versus a tiny, no-name, 7" wi-fi only tablet isn't valid.) If it is the latter, however, then any price points could be used.
"You won't pay $3,000, or $2,000, or $1,500 for this product, but it's yours today for 3 low payments of $29.99!"
There, now it's a 94% savings.
"You won't pay $300,000, or $200,000, or $150,000 for this product, but it's yours today for 3 low payments of $29.99!"
And now it's a 99.94% savings. They're practically giving it away for nothing. (Of course, the psychological phenomenon that b4dc0d3r pointed out breaks down at this point and it just looks ridiculous. That's why they pick closer values.)
Pseudonyms and rude behavior are separable issues, and should be treated as such.
I completely agree.
I'm dealing with an on-off cyber-stalker/troll. She harasses me on my Twitter account and, at times, my blog. Both of those I write under a pseudonym. She, on the other hand, uses her real name. (The town in which she lives is even known to those she has harassed over the years.) My pseudonym has been a bit of protection as it helped to keep her from finding out just where I live and what my real name is. (It also helps that she's not "all there." Exhibit A: She thinks she's a prophet of god and that god is telling her to expose people for "crimes" that she pieces together based on sheer coincidence. Such as that two people share similar names or hobbies.)
So while pseudonyms can be used by trolls, they can also be used as protection AGAINST trolls (or against an oppressive regime that would kill you if they found out your real name). Tossing out pseudonyms in order to hurt trolls would be a very BAD idea.
Oh great. Now all of Slashdot is exposed to Windfarm Sickness. Good thing there's a vaccine available for it. (Goes by the brand name Reason, Logic, And Science.)
I'm not sure if it can kill you directly, but it can push you down a quick path to death. My grandmother one day decided she was going to die. She was sick but had a good chance of recovery. Sure enough, she took a turn for the worse and soon passed away. She decided she was going to die and just gave up fighting.
Slashdot Mirror
How long until Verizon Wireless decides to pre-install this on all their phones and lock it in. They already force me to keep a bunch of apps on my phone (including Facebook's app but also including ones like NFL Mobile) which I have no interest in using. I can't remove these apps without unlocking my phone which is "illegal" now. It's not like I'd leave them if they let me remove these apps. After all, they have me locked into a contract and are, quite frankly, the best carrier in my area. I might even be able to see keeping on the apps directly related to their Verizon Wireless services. I just want to delete these third party apps that I never use.
Step 1: Create a cool new Twitter application that everyone wants to use
Step 2: Store auth_token strings from users.
Step 3: When a few mega-popular users have tried your service, use the auth_token/cookie method to begin Tweeting as them.
Step 4: Profit.
Also, relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/792/
There are also real-life protections for kids against bad parenting. If my child won't stop talking and I beat him up to keep him quiet, Child Protective Services would quickly see to it that he is kept safely away from me.
What is needed isn't new laws, but better technology training for police departments. When my identity was stolen, the police department was able to obtain a copy of the online form that was submitted for the credit card the thieves took out under my name. However, even with the IP address and the timestamp of when it was submitted right there, they were clueless as to what their next step should be. Police departments need to be able to keep pace with online actions. If someone is being harassed online, you can use existing laws to stop them, but it doesn't help if the police department doesn't know how to find the person doing the harassing.
In defense of the "no smoking in public" bans, the point of that wasn't stopping people from smoking, but stopping people's smoking from affecting others. Before the ban, my wife (who has asthma) and I would go to a restaurant, be seated in a non-smoking section, and have smoke waft over from the smoking section 2 tables over. It wasn't even a matter of stopping going to those locations either because this was a problem in virtually EVERY restaurant. (A few might have been big enough to have completely separate areas with decent enough ventilation, but they were rarities.) In addition, workers in the restaurant were being subjected to second hand smoke on a daily basis.
If you want to smoke in your house, by all means go ahead, but it isn't your right to subject others to the byproducts of your bad habits. For the record, while I support posted calorie counts (as a method to give people more information to make better eating choices), I don't support "bad food bans". Someone drinking a 32oz soda next to me isn't affecting me at all. I don't get "second hand cholesterol" if he's pounding KFC Double-Downs while I eat a salad.
I still think that the best thing the RIAA could have done to hurt piracy back in the Napster days would have been to 1) buy Napster, 2) put a limit on the quality of shared MP3s (e.g. at most radio quality), 3) offer high quality, non-DRMed MP3s for purchase at reasonable prices through the same system. They would have created the first major online music shop and would have a built-in way for music to spread from person to person while still giving people an incentive to pay for their music.
Instead they tried the "sue them into the ground" approach. This worked to stop Napster, but it didn't stop piracy. Instead, it lead to a global game a whack-a-mole.
If you walk into Wal-Mart, see an interesting product, use your smartphone to look it up online, and see many negative reviews about it, you might decide not to buy the product.
Therefore, smartphones and review websites cause lost sales and should be banned!
I usually don't consider making copies that only you are accessing to be file sharing. An example of legal file sharing would be if a musician released a song for free under a license that encouraged people to share it. Then, if you e-mailed that song to a friend (or put it on a file sharing network), it would be both file sharing AND legal.
Of course, ripping a DVD for your personal use isn't copyright infringement but it is against the DMCA's DRM anti-circumvention laws. So ripping a CD for your use is fine but doing the exact same thing with a DVD isn't. (I disagree with this and hope this law gets changed, but it is the current law.)
Supply and demand are still useful for gauging economic reactions. The problem is that Supply and demand are like Newtonian Physics: Very useful in the simplified case, but there's more going on there. In physics it's relativity. In economics, there are various other forces at work (e.g. lobbying, government action, and, yes, even piracy). Those other forces have an effect on price, though each case varies (and can even vary from purchase to purchase within the same market). Still, supply and demand are still useful metrics to use.
There's something ironic in communicating that writing is on the way out by writing a comment on a forum where you read the stories (or at least the summaries) and then write comments. Now if Slashdot institutes video comments... Then again, it could open up a whole new realm of moderation!
Comment Moderated: -1 Screaming Baby In Background
Comment Moderated: -50 Commenter Not Wearing Clothing
Comment Moderated: +5000 Commenter Not Wearing Clothing (This one's theoretical but never actually applied)
Comment Moderated: -1 Mumbles
Comment Moderated: -1 Thick Accent
If you buy them, you can do with them whatever you wish... Just as long as you aren't breaking the DMCA anti-circumvention laws. Same applies for a DVD you buy from your own region but would like to view on an internal home network.
In many ways, the legal system reminds me of my time spent growing up in an Orthodox temple. The people there would study every word of the Torah (and various other writings held in high regard) and would make arguments based on words used or even how the words were written. ("This letter here is pointed on top just like that other letter there so therefore it means this.") Meanwhile, lawyers, especially when dealing with matters involving the Constitution, seem to frequently argue over wording or even punctuation. (Second amendment arguments will frequently take the form of "The comma is here which means that." "No, but this word here means that this is true.")
Along the same lines: You buy a DVD disc. It should now be legal to do whatever you want with that video short of making copies for others. You can sell it, give it away, rip it for your personal electronic collection (deleting it if you sell/give away the disc), or use it for target practice. The publisher has no say in your use of the DVD.
That'd make for an interesting Doctor Who episode. The Doctor sees something wrong with New New York's governing body, investigates, and finds that they've all been replaced by aliens. As the election approaches, he exposes them to the populace and sits back to watch them be voted out of office... only they're all re-elected because they're still better than the politicians they replaced. End with The Doctor leaving in the TARDIS muttering about "those stupid apes."
Plus, suspending first sale doctrine on imports would basically be putting a "Not Welcome" mat out for businesses located in America. Why would a business be located here when they could relocate to another country, import their products to the US, and have total control of the products post-sale thanks to no first sale doctrine on imports?
This would probably even make more money for content owners. The first season of Big Bang Theory can be purchased on DVD for about $20. Alternatively, those 17 episodes would cost $34 to buy via a theoretical "$2 per episode in MKV/MP4 format" service. Yes, some of that money would go to the service, but much would still go to the content owners and they wouldn't need to create/ship physical discs.
I have similar views, but disagree with your first point. Suppose I take a photo and post it online in a blog post. Under your first rule, my photo wouldn't be considered to be copyrighted and thus would be free for anyone to take for any reason. In today's world of smartphone cameras and instant posting, having to file an application is a lengthy step that few would take.
I'd also argue that one year terms would be ridiculously short. Again, if you are requiring me to register all of my photos, and if I've taken 100 photos, I could be spending all of my time filling out renewal forms. (Or I could assign that to a company in which case you get one of the problems we have today: Big Copyright Companies forming and using their might to alter copyright law.)
My four changes to the system would be:
1) Unregistered copyrights would last for 14 years from publication date. (Just like they did when the Founding Fathers were around, but minus the registration requirement.)
2) If you wanted more time after 14 years, you could pay a fee to renew it for an additional 14 years. You could only do this once, however.
3) Removing the DRM circumvention provisions of the DMCA. Ripping a DVD (still covered by copyright) and sharing that out with others would still be illegal, but only because the "sharing" part was illegal. Ripping that same DVD for your own use (or for other Fair Use situations like parody) would be fine.
4) Penalties would be split between "for profit" and "home" infringement. Rip a DVD to make a thousand copies and sell them on the street corner? Face the current $750 - $150,000 penalties. Share a DVD rip online without charging anyone for it? Face much smaller penalties. Something that would still act as a deterrent, but without bankrupting individuals. Say, 10 times the selling price of the item. So Jammie Thomas' 24 shared songs ($0.99 each) would being a fine of about $240 instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If this doesn't seem like much of a deterrent, remember that it isn't many songs. Had Jammie Thomas shared 1,000 songs, the fine would have been around $1,000.
You are modded funny, but I seriously cringe when I think of some of my early 90's Usenet posts.
As for "I needed the money", I seriously considered an offer from a potential employer at one point until I decided I just couldn't do it. The job? Post photos of declothed women to a Usenet group. Had I accepted the job, my career might have gone along a completely different path!
Exactly. I can take the dozens of CDs that I own, rip them into MP3 format, and put them on a large hard drive on a network in my house in such a way that my kids could easily select which song they want to listen to. Penalty for doing this? Nothing. It's fair use.
However, if I take the dozens of DVDs that I own, rip them and put them on a large hard drive on a network in my house in such a way that my kids could easily select which movie they want to watch, I could (theoretically) be sued for thousands of dollars (if not more). I could find myself bankrupt over it.
Note that in neither example did I put the ripped CDs or DVDs on the Internet or give them to anyone else. Neither did I borrow CDs/DVDs (from Netflix, the Library, a friend, etc) and rip them. I legally own a CD and a DVD. I bought them from a store with my own money. Why can I copy one set of those bits to a format/medium that works better for me but not another set? Especially because ripping DVDs to a hard drive in this purely theoretical manner would make owning DVDs a lot more desirable (because it would be easier to watch them) and thus would lead to more DVD purchases.
Years back... I mean decades ago (now I feel old), there was a text-only "game" for the Atari called Abuse. The computer would spout insults at you and you would type insults right back. There was no scoring or "winning", the game lasted until you shut off the program. I quickly found that I didn't have a big talent for tossing insults, but I did come upon a tactic that seemed to "infuriate" the computer. I'd type kind statements into it. The program would keep upping its game, becoming more and more "frustrated" that I wasn't responding in kind.
It almost makes me wonder if some trolls could be defeated in this manner. Trolls who come into a forum looking to generate waves of angry responses, but who are met with kind remarks instead might get frustrated and leave. NOTE: You don't need to agree with the troll's view. Just express your disagreement in a nice manner. Don't give them the reaction they are looking for.
I'd argue that it's not a matter of being nice to everyone, but not being rude by default. Too many people will enter a discussion with the viewpoint of "I'm right and you're wrong and you're an idiot if you even try to argue against my obviously right view." Once you enter with that mindset, you're not going to treat the other person with respect. You're going to get quickly frustrated that they aren't joining "your side" just based on your say-so and you'll descend into name-calling, personal attacks, and other rude tactics. I can't speak for others, but those tactics usually turn me off and make me disagree with the person even more. (Or, if I happen to agree with their opinion, cringe that someone like that is on the same side as me.)
By all means, be confident when arguing your position, but being confident isn't the same as being rude.
The question is: Were the "$300... $200... $150" price figures actual prices that competitors use or just figures plucked out of the air. If the former, then they might be valid comparison prices. (However, I'd caution about features included in that price. Comparing the price of a full-size, latest generation iPad with 3G data access versus a tiny, no-name, 7" wi-fi only tablet isn't valid.) If it is the latter, however, then any price points could be used.
"You won't pay $3,000, or $2,000, or $1,500 for this product, but it's yours today for 3 low payments of $29.99!"
There, now it's a 94% savings.
"You won't pay $300,000, or $200,000, or $150,000 for this product, but it's yours today for 3 low payments of $29.99!"
And now it's a 99.94% savings. They're practically giving it away for nothing. (Of course, the psychological phenomenon that b4dc0d3r pointed out breaks down at this point and it just looks ridiculous. That's why they pick closer values.)
I completely agree.
I'm dealing with an on-off cyber-stalker/troll. She harasses me on my Twitter account and, at times, my blog. Both of those I write under a pseudonym. She, on the other hand, uses her real name. (The town in which she lives is even known to those she has harassed over the years.) My pseudonym has been a bit of protection as it helped to keep her from finding out just where I live and what my real name is. (It also helps that she's not "all there." Exhibit A: She thinks she's a prophet of god and that god is telling her to expose people for "crimes" that she pieces together based on sheer coincidence. Such as that two people share similar names or hobbies.)
So while pseudonyms can be used by trolls, they can also be used as protection AGAINST trolls (or against an oppressive regime that would kill you if they found out your real name). Tossing out pseudonyms in order to hurt trolls would be a very BAD idea.
Oh great. Now all of Slashdot is exposed to Windfarm Sickness. Good thing there's a vaccine available for it. (Goes by the brand name Reason, Logic, And Science.)
I'm not sure if it can kill you directly, but it can push you down a quick path to death. My grandmother one day decided she was going to die. She was sick but had a good chance of recovery. Sure enough, she took a turn for the worse and soon passed away. She decided she was going to die and just gave up fighting.