Yes, there are people who pirate even when the non-pirated version is available for a fair price and without DRM. In most cases, you can write those people off as customers. You could charge a penny for your product and they'd still pirate and say it was because it was too expensive. If you make your product available in a widely acceptable format (e.g. DRM-free MP3 in music's case) at a price widely accepted as reasonable (say, $0.99 per song) and easily accessed (don't design your music buying site with tons of flash ads and 500 clicks needed to buy one song), then people will stop pirating and will start buying. There's a happy medium between "I pirate all of my music/movies" and "Let's lock everything down and charge them more money at every opportunity."
The problem with the RIAA/MPAA is they don't think "how can we convince these pirates to purchase instead?" They think "how can we sue these pirates into oblivion and stop all technology either out now or in development which might, somehow, in any set of circumstances be used to aid pirates?"
I can't believe this was modded [Insightful]. You're obviously another rabid [DOS] fanboy worshiping at the feet of [Steve Jobs]. The summary was horribly written, but what do you expect from [CmdrTaco]? Why is this even filed under [Your Rights Online]? I should have been filed under [Idle]. While IANA[X], I do know about [geology] from reading [XKCD.com] and you'll notice I have a [42] Slashdot ID. What needs to be done is [visit Disney World]. Of course, it'll never work because [Bigfoot is really an alien who abducted Elvis]. Finally, in [communist] [Puerto Rico], [picture frame] [distills] YOU!
Worst case, they go scorched earth and quit selling that label's albums for a week. Every artist on the label's roster will freak. Investors will panic. Blood in the streets.
One more point. Unlike some pure-music shop, Amazon's revenue comes from a variety of sources. If Sony told Amazon "You can't sell Sony music anymore", it would be a hit in revenue, but Amazon has enough other revenue sources that it would be a small one. Meanwhile, if Amazon told Sony, "We're not stocking Sony music anymore", your scenario above would result. The labels are trying a power play on a player with more power than them. Pass the popcorn, this should be fun to watch.
"10000010100000101001001001001010? That's just jibberish." (Looks in mirror.) "01010010010010010100000101000001?!!! AAAAAHHH!!!!!" (Runs from room screaming.)
No, the difference between MP3.com and Amazon is that MP3.com did the ripping themselves. It might seem like a trivial distinction to you and me, but essentially what MP3.com did was create a copy of a CD and then distribute that copy to anyone who put the same CD in their computer's CD player. That was "legally grey" enough (and the RIAA-MP3.com legal difference was big enough) that MP3.com was forced to stop.
What Amazon is doing is letting people upload their own MP3s. You take a CD you bought, rip it yourself (fair use) and upload it to your account on Amazon's servers. The files are kept accessible to just you (unless you share your Username/Password which Amazon could make a violation of their TOS and grounds for kicking the person off the servers) so sharing/distribution isn't an issue. If the RIAA wants to claim that uploading fair use ripped music is a violation, then all web hosting providers would need licenses from all of the recording labels since their products *could* be used to store music files. (Of course, the RIAA's wet dream is the complete ban of not only hosting music online in any format, but making ripping your CDs to MP3 illegal as well. Luckily for us, though, they don't have laws of that nature in place yet.)
If I were to take a newspaper's investigative report and re-report the facts on my blog making it seem like I did the investigating personally, that would be plagiarism. In the beginning we had a blogger and a newspaper which may or may not have been guilty of plagiarism. Their actions afterwards, though, seemed like the actions of a guilty party, not an innocent one.
Thanks for the correction. I thought that $1,000 per month seemed pricey. Still, you can get a 1TB hard drive for about the price of 1 month of 1TB storage from Amazon.
I said "many different IP addressed" but the "general account being used for piracy" warning signs could be (and should be) more complex than just "this account was accessed by 4 different IP addresses." The main point would be that, once a flag was raised on the account, the flag itself would have no effect on the account. Instead, it would only mean that a human should look at the usage to decide whether this was a sign of piracy or of normal usage triggering the alert. If the human decided that the account was being used for piracy, there should be an appeals system to account for human error as well. I don't pretend to have the experience to personally design this system, but I think that people with the appropriate experience should be able to design such a system should be able to do so.
Actually, I don't think the RIAA types would like this system at all since it would allow for normal users to use the system fairly while providing checks and balances to keep from unfairly kicking people off. Instead, they'd probably want a "You Can Only Get To It From 3 Devices, Exceed This And You're Out" system with no chance for appeal.
It's the business equivalent of the RIAA's copyright lawsuits. Find 1,000 small businesses. Send them letters claiming that they are violating a patent that you hold the rights to. Demand $X payment or you will sue. Many businesses will get scared and pay up. The ones that don't you can either sue (in a different district than they are in so as to make it prohibitively expensive for them to defend themselves) or you can ignore. Use the money towards Threat Round 2 (and towards a new car for yourself).
I still download music (and rip CDs to MP3) and don't think I'll use it either. My backup method is 2 1TB external hard drives. I back up all of our files to Drive 1 and then back up Drive 1 to Drive 2. Drive 2 then gets stored "off site" (not in my house) so my data will be safe in the event of fire/theft/etc. The cost of this is much less than Amazon's service. Even 50GB space is $50 a month. 1TB of space (like I have with my USB drives) is $1,000 a month. (I can think of a lot of things I'd do with $1,000 and none of them involve Amazon.com.) Besides, upload/download times are faster to a local USB drive than to the web. I'd hate to think of how long my upload would take to move 400GB of files to Amazon's servers.
And those people can be rooted out and banned. It should be easy to find accounts that are being logged into from many different IP addresses. If the number of IP addresses passes a certain point, the account could be flagged for review and (if it turns out to be a "generic sharing account") banning.
Besides, this is only 5GB of storage. You could get a cheap web hosting account and store a lot more music on it for under $10 a month. (Share the cost with your friends and your monthly payment drops.) I'm not saying people *should* do this mind you (I don't condone copyright infringement), just that they could and music pirates probably won't flock to such a limited (for their purposes) service.
There's a small, yet significant, difference between Amazon Cloud Drive and MP3.com. MP3.com was ripping tons of CDs. They then had you insert your CD in the drive so you could get access to their ripped version online. Amazon is letting users upload their own files. Yes, these could be pirated files or files that the user owns, but this is the user's responsibility. Plus, unless the user shares their Amazon login information with others, they will be the only ones able to access those music files. It should be easy to weed out TOS violators (people who store pirated MP3s and then let others log in to retrieve them) without shutting down the entire service.
Besides, if this becomes MP3.com vs RIAA: Round 2, I hope that Amazon points out that their Cloud Music service could be replicated by anyone with a web hosting account and FTP software. My hosting account has unlimited storage. (I know, it's really not "unlimited", but I can store more than the 5GB that Amazon is offering.) If I made a folder called "My Music", which I didn't tell anyone about, and uploaded my MP3s there, they would be backed up the same as with Amazon Cloud Drive. For additional security, I could password protect the folder so if someone stumbled upon mysite.com/My Music/, they wouldn't be able to get in. For even more security, if the host so offered it, I could put the files outside of the website's root so they would only be available over FTP.
Basically, if Sony is allowed to say that Amazon's Cloud Storage is illegal, than so is any web hosting service. After all, just because I'm not uploading MP3s of Sony music to my web space doesn't mean I *can't*. And since I theoretically could do this, why would a web hosting service be legal while Amazon Cloud Drive would be illegal. (Especially since web hosting services are specifically designed to share files out and you need to take action to prevent this.)
Speak for yourself. I have a fear of falling. Not heights, mind you, but falling. I'm fine looking out the (closed) window on the 20th floor. Put me on a 2nd floor balcony, however, and I slowly inch backwards and get very nervous when anyone approaches the edge. Sometimes even driving over bridges sets me off. (Never so bad that I can't make it over the bridge, but enough that I can't talk and have to focus solely on the road ahead.)
The problem is (and has been for a while now) that, if you are sued, it takes a lot of time and money to defend yourself. Best case scenario: You win, get paid attorney fees and are only out the time that you spent in your defense. Worst case: You lose and have to pay the full, bankrupting-for-life fine plus your attorney's fees. Middle-of-the-road case: You win, but don't get attorney's fees paid and thus are out time and money.
Now you have all those possibilities going through your head when you're offered a $3,000 settlement. $3K and it all goes away. Sure, it's a lot of money, but you'd spend more in legal fees (with only a small chance at getting it back). Whether you were guilty or innocent, there would be a great temptation to just pay the settlement fee and make it all go away. Of course, this is what Righthaven (and the RIAA) are hoping for. They don't want to actually fight court cases (where they might lose and have precedents set against them). They just want to milk some easy money from copyright infringement allegations.
Did you read the part of my reply where I mentioned how all of the folks who worked on the last Moon landings were retired or close to retiring? We don't have the talent in place to perform anything other than low Earth orbit manned missions. A set of Moon landings would be practice runs for bigger projects. We should definitely have plans (and funding) in place before starting out (yet, make those plans flexible enough to adapt to what we learn from new Moon landings). A new set of Moon landings wouldn't just be for publicity, but would provide our current generation of engineers/astronauts/etc experience with dealing with Lunar conditions.
I wouldn't call it just a publicity stunt (though that has its merit as NASA has to play the "get funding from Congress" game and Congress likes publicity stunts). It has been over 35 years since we've gone to the Moon. Many of the people who worked for NASA then have retired or are close to retiring. We pulled back to Low Earth Orbit and now just don't have the technological capability ready to go back to the Moon. We would need to work out getting a man there and back first before we move heavy equipment in to set up a permanent residence.
I think the reason the first time didn't work out was because those walks on the Moon didn't lead anywhere. Send a man back to the Moon. Broadcast his walking on the Lunar surface live in HD. Have a big publicity stunt where he answers questions from back on Earth. Then send a second man. Then a third. With those two, begin scouting and practising for establishing a permanent base. Then begin building it. The spectacular will lead to experience and substance instead of a few moon rocks brought back to Earth.
I guess I wasn't the cliche college student who was just looking to get laid. I was looking for an actual relationship. To get an actual relationship you can't just avoid emotional entanglement while casually asking every woman you see if she wants to have sex. You need to invest emotionally into the woman you are approaching and be prepared to do things other than sleep with her.
When I was in college, my father suggested I use that approach (walk up to them, ask them to sleep with me) on women. I told him that 1) No woman would say yes to a random stranger walking up and asking for sex and 2) If a woman did say yes, I wouldn't want to sleep with her because chances are she had every STD known to man!
Going to the stars? I'd be satisfied if we went to the Moon in our lifetime. I was born after the last Moon landing. Since then, we've only gone into orbit. Low Earth orbit. I want to watch TV and see a live broadcast of a man stepping out of a lunar lander and walking on the Moon. We could do it 30 years ago, why can't we do it now? In fact, given how technology has advanced, why can't we do it better? First HD broadcast from the Moon. First Tweet from the Moon or FourSquare Moon check-in. Whatever it takes to get men walking on the Moon again and get people excited about Lunar travel again! Then, once we're going to the Moon on a semi-regular basis, we can discuss a more permanent settlement.
Oh great. Now we're going to have Subway and McDonald's complaining about Internet pirates offering subs and cheeseburgers for free download which costs them sales. Then KFC will declare that Open Source Fried chicken is a copyright violation of their Original Recipe and they have proof (which will only be seen at trial and which will eventually be revealed to be similar ingredients like "chicken" and "breadcrumbs").
Yes and infringing on your freedoms while gathering evidence is inevitable. To prevent abuse, though, law enforcement is traditionally required to obtain a warrant. This means they've gone in front of a judge, argued why infringing on this person's rights is so important and got the judge to agree. In practice, it is a rubber-stamp in many cases, but at least it is some form of a check and balance system. Recently, however, law enforcement has been whining that getting warrants are too hard and take too long and we'd all be safer if we'd just let them do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it. After all, like the old saying goes: Absolute power guarantees absolute safety doesn't corrupt at all. (That *is* the saying, right?)
Papers are too old school. My initial thought was to force everyone to get a barcode tatoo, but even better would be to RFID chip every citizen. It could store your Citizen ID Number which would link up to your name, address, watch lists you're on, current surveilance status, favorite type of cereal, twitter username, last 10 stores you visited and more. Then agents could remotely RFID-scan you without needing to go through the law-enforcement-limiting process of asking for your papers. Think of the security improvements! Surely surrendering some of your personal freedoms* is worth a tiny increase in your safety**, right?
* Where "some of" equals "all of". ** Tiny increase in safety might only be perceived and not real. YMMV. Results may not be typical.
The combination literally means everyone on earth has earned a Nobel prize.
Everyone has literally won a Nobel prize? Do we each get the prize money or is it split among everyone on Earth? I'm guessing split. So about $1.4 million split between about 6 billion people... Less than a penny each. Actually, forget my prize money. I just want a little statue or plaque to hang on my wall. Baring that, can I at least put "Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize" on my resume?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there are people who pirate even when the non-pirated version is available for a fair price and without DRM. In most cases, you can write those people off as customers. You could charge a penny for your product and they'd still pirate and say it was because it was too expensive. If you make your product available in a widely acceptable format (e.g. DRM-free MP3 in music's case) at a price widely accepted as reasonable (say, $0.99 per song) and easily accessed (don't design your music buying site with tons of flash ads and 500 clicks needed to buy one song), then people will stop pirating and will start buying. There's a happy medium between "I pirate all of my music/movies" and "Let's lock everything down and charge them more money at every opportunity."
The problem with the RIAA/MPAA is they don't think "how can we convince these pirates to purchase instead?" They think "how can we sue these pirates into oblivion and stop all technology either out now or in development which might, somehow, in any set of circumstances be used to aid pirates?"
Ooh, Slashdot madlibs!
I can't believe this was modded [Insightful]. You're obviously another rabid [DOS] fanboy worshiping at the feet of [Steve Jobs]. The summary was horribly written, but what do you expect from [CmdrTaco]? Why is this even filed under [Your Rights Online]? I should have been filed under [Idle]. While IANA[X], I do know about [geology] from reading [XKCD.com] and you'll notice I have a [42] Slashdot ID. What needs to be done is [visit Disney World]. Of course, it'll never work because [Bigfoot is really an alien who abducted Elvis]. Finally, in [communist] [Puerto Rico], [picture frame] [distills] YOU!
One more point. Unlike some pure-music shop, Amazon's revenue comes from a variety of sources. If Sony told Amazon "You can't sell Sony music anymore", it would be a hit in revenue, but Amazon has enough other revenue sources that it would be a small one. Meanwhile, if Amazon told Sony, "We're not stocking Sony music anymore", your scenario above would result. The labels are trying a power play on a player with more power than them. Pass the popcorn, this should be fun to watch.
To misquote Futurama:
"10000010100000101001001001001010? That's just jibberish."
(Looks in mirror.)
"01010010010010010100000101000001?!!! AAAAAHHH!!!!!"
(Runs from room screaming.)
No, the difference between MP3.com and Amazon is that MP3.com did the ripping themselves. It might seem like a trivial distinction to you and me, but essentially what MP3.com did was create a copy of a CD and then distribute that copy to anyone who put the same CD in their computer's CD player. That was "legally grey" enough (and the RIAA-MP3.com legal difference was big enough) that MP3.com was forced to stop.
What Amazon is doing is letting people upload their own MP3s. You take a CD you bought, rip it yourself (fair use) and upload it to your account on Amazon's servers. The files are kept accessible to just you (unless you share your Username/Password which Amazon could make a violation of their TOS and grounds for kicking the person off the servers) so sharing/distribution isn't an issue. If the RIAA wants to claim that uploading fair use ripped music is a violation, then all web hosting providers would need licenses from all of the recording labels since their products *could* be used to store music files. (Of course, the RIAA's wet dream is the complete ban of not only hosting music online in any format, but making ripping your CDs to MP3 illegal as well. Luckily for us, though, they don't have laws of that nature in place yet.)
If I were to take a newspaper's investigative report and re-report the facts on my blog making it seem like I did the investigating personally, that would be plagiarism. In the beginning we had a blogger and a newspaper which may or may not have been guilty of plagiarism. Their actions afterwards, though, seemed like the actions of a guilty party, not an innocent one.
Thanks for the correction. I thought that $1,000 per month seemed pricey. Still, you can get a 1TB hard drive for about the price of 1 month of 1TB storage from Amazon.
I said "many different IP addressed" but the "general account being used for piracy" warning signs could be (and should be) more complex than just "this account was accessed by 4 different IP addresses." The main point would be that, once a flag was raised on the account, the flag itself would have no effect on the account. Instead, it would only mean that a human should look at the usage to decide whether this was a sign of piracy or of normal usage triggering the alert. If the human decided that the account was being used for piracy, there should be an appeals system to account for human error as well. I don't pretend to have the experience to personally design this system, but I think that people with the appropriate experience should be able to design such a system should be able to do so.
Actually, I don't think the RIAA types would like this system at all since it would allow for normal users to use the system fairly while providing checks and balances to keep from unfairly kicking people off. Instead, they'd probably want a "You Can Only Get To It From 3 Devices, Exceed This And You're Out" system with no chance for appeal.
It's the business equivalent of the RIAA's copyright lawsuits. Find 1,000 small businesses. Send them letters claiming that they are violating a patent that you hold the rights to. Demand $X payment or you will sue. Many businesses will get scared and pay up. The ones that don't you can either sue (in a different district than they are in so as to make it prohibitively expensive for them to defend themselves) or you can ignore. Use the money towards Threat Round 2 (and towards a new car for yourself).
I still download music (and rip CDs to MP3) and don't think I'll use it either. My backup method is 2 1TB external hard drives. I back up all of our files to Drive 1 and then back up Drive 1 to Drive 2. Drive 2 then gets stored "off site" (not in my house) so my data will be safe in the event of fire/theft/etc. The cost of this is much less than Amazon's service. Even 50GB space is $50 a month. 1TB of space (like I have with my USB drives) is $1,000 a month. (I can think of a lot of things I'd do with $1,000 and none of them involve Amazon.com.) Besides, upload/download times are faster to a local USB drive than to the web. I'd hate to think of how long my upload would take to move 400GB of files to Amazon's servers.
And those people can be rooted out and banned. It should be easy to find accounts that are being logged into from many different IP addresses. If the number of IP addresses passes a certain point, the account could be flagged for review and (if it turns out to be a "generic sharing account") banning.
Besides, this is only 5GB of storage. You could get a cheap web hosting account and store a lot more music on it for under $10 a month. (Share the cost with your friends and your monthly payment drops.) I'm not saying people *should* do this mind you (I don't condone copyright infringement), just that they could and music pirates probably won't flock to such a limited (for their purposes) service.
There's a small, yet significant, difference between Amazon Cloud Drive and MP3.com. MP3.com was ripping tons of CDs. They then had you insert your CD in the drive so you could get access to their ripped version online. Amazon is letting users upload their own files. Yes, these could be pirated files or files that the user owns, but this is the user's responsibility. Plus, unless the user shares their Amazon login information with others, they will be the only ones able to access those music files. It should be easy to weed out TOS violators (people who store pirated MP3s and then let others log in to retrieve them) without shutting down the entire service.
Besides, if this becomes MP3.com vs RIAA: Round 2, I hope that Amazon points out that their Cloud Music service could be replicated by anyone with a web hosting account and FTP software. My hosting account has unlimited storage. (I know, it's really not "unlimited", but I can store more than the 5GB that Amazon is offering.) If I made a folder called "My Music", which I didn't tell anyone about, and uploaded my MP3s there, they would be backed up the same as with Amazon Cloud Drive. For additional security, I could password protect the folder so if someone stumbled upon mysite.com/My Music/, they wouldn't be able to get in. For even more security, if the host so offered it, I could put the files outside of the website's root so they would only be available over FTP.
Basically, if Sony is allowed to say that Amazon's Cloud Storage is illegal, than so is any web hosting service. After all, just because I'm not uploading MP3s of Sony music to my web space doesn't mean I *can't*. And since I theoretically could do this, why would a web hosting service be legal while Amazon Cloud Drive would be illegal. (Especially since web hosting services are specifically designed to share files out and you need to take action to prevent this.)
The true threat is Zach Weiner. If his sinister plan goes through, he'll publish Infinity papers!
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2198
Speak for yourself. I have a fear of falling. Not heights, mind you, but falling. I'm fine looking out the (closed) window on the 20th floor. Put me on a 2nd floor balcony, however, and I slowly inch backwards and get very nervous when anyone approaches the edge. Sometimes even driving over bridges sets me off. (Never so bad that I can't make it over the bridge, but enough that I can't talk and have to focus solely on the road ahead.)
The problem is (and has been for a while now) that, if you are sued, it takes a lot of time and money to defend yourself. Best case scenario: You win, get paid attorney fees and are only out the time that you spent in your defense. Worst case: You lose and have to pay the full, bankrupting-for-life fine plus your attorney's fees. Middle-of-the-road case: You win, but don't get attorney's fees paid and thus are out time and money.
Now you have all those possibilities going through your head when you're offered a $3,000 settlement. $3K and it all goes away. Sure, it's a lot of money, but you'd spend more in legal fees (with only a small chance at getting it back). Whether you were guilty or innocent, there would be a great temptation to just pay the settlement fee and make it all go away. Of course, this is what Righthaven (and the RIAA) are hoping for. They don't want to actually fight court cases (where they might lose and have precedents set against them). They just want to milk some easy money from copyright infringement allegations.
Did you read the part of my reply where I mentioned how all of the folks who worked on the last Moon landings were retired or close to retiring? We don't have the talent in place to perform anything other than low Earth orbit manned missions. A set of Moon landings would be practice runs for bigger projects. We should definitely have plans (and funding) in place before starting out (yet, make those plans flexible enough to adapt to what we learn from new Moon landings). A new set of Moon landings wouldn't just be for publicity, but would provide our current generation of engineers/astronauts/etc experience with dealing with Lunar conditions.
I wouldn't call it just a publicity stunt (though that has its merit as NASA has to play the "get funding from Congress" game and Congress likes publicity stunts). It has been over 35 years since we've gone to the Moon. Many of the people who worked for NASA then have retired or are close to retiring. We pulled back to Low Earth Orbit and now just don't have the technological capability ready to go back to the Moon. We would need to work out getting a man there and back first before we move heavy equipment in to set up a permanent residence.
I think the reason the first time didn't work out was because those walks on the Moon didn't lead anywhere. Send a man back to the Moon. Broadcast his walking on the Lunar surface live in HD. Have a big publicity stunt where he answers questions from back on Earth. Then send a second man. Then a third. With those two, begin scouting and practising for establishing a permanent base. Then begin building it. The spectacular will lead to experience and substance instead of a few moon rocks brought back to Earth.
I guess I wasn't the cliche college student who was just looking to get laid. I was looking for an actual relationship. To get an actual relationship you can't just avoid emotional entanglement while casually asking every woman you see if she wants to have sex. You need to invest emotionally into the woman you are approaching and be prepared to do things other than sleep with her.
When I was in college, my father suggested I use that approach (walk up to them, ask them to sleep with me) on women. I told him that 1) No woman would say yes to a random stranger walking up and asking for sex and 2) If a woman did say yes, I wouldn't want to sleep with her because chances are she had every STD known to man!
Going to the stars? I'd be satisfied if we went to the Moon in our lifetime. I was born after the last Moon landing. Since then, we've only gone into orbit. Low Earth orbit. I want to watch TV and see a live broadcast of a man stepping out of a lunar lander and walking on the Moon. We could do it 30 years ago, why can't we do it now? In fact, given how technology has advanced, why can't we do it better? First HD broadcast from the Moon. First Tweet from the Moon or FourSquare Moon check-in. Whatever it takes to get men walking on the Moon again and get people excited about Lunar travel again! Then, once we're going to the Moon on a semi-regular basis, we can discuss a more permanent settlement.
Oh great. Now we're going to have Subway and McDonald's complaining about Internet pirates offering subs and cheeseburgers for free download which costs them sales. Then KFC will declare that Open Source Fried chicken is a copyright violation of their Original Recipe and they have proof (which will only be seen at trial and which will eventually be revealed to be similar ingredients like "chicken" and "breadcrumbs").
Yeah, well nobody'll ever find out who I am.
*checks the "by" line of my post*
Curse you Past Me for registering under my real name!!!
Yes and infringing on your freedoms while gathering evidence is inevitable. To prevent abuse, though, law enforcement is traditionally required to obtain a warrant. This means they've gone in front of a judge, argued why infringing on this person's rights is so important and got the judge to agree. In practice, it is a rubber-stamp in many cases, but at least it is some form of a check and balance system. Recently, however, law enforcement has been whining that getting warrants are too hard and take too long and we'd all be safer if we'd just let them do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it. After all, like the old saying goes: Absolute power guarantees absolute safety doesn't corrupt at all. (That *is* the saying, right?)
Papers are too old school. My initial thought was to force everyone to get a barcode tatoo, but even better would be to RFID chip every citizen. It could store your Citizen ID Number which would link up to your name, address, watch lists you're on, current surveilance status, favorite type of cereal, twitter username, last 10 stores you visited and more. Then agents could remotely RFID-scan you without needing to go through the law-enforcement-limiting process of asking for your papers. Think of the security improvements! Surely surrendering some of your personal freedoms* is worth a tiny increase in your safety**, right?
* Where "some of" equals "all of".
** Tiny increase in safety might only be perceived and not real. YMMV. Results may not be typical.
Everyone has literally won a Nobel prize? Do we each get the prize money or is it split among everyone on Earth? I'm guessing split. So about $1.4 million split between about 6 billion people... Less than a penny each. Actually, forget my prize money. I just want a little statue or plaque to hang on my wall. Baring that, can I at least put "Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize" on my resume?