You would think so, but it actually seems that people are getting used to longer and longer copyrights and more and more restrictions. A "Boiling the frog" phenomenon, most likely. (Put in quotes because "boiling a frog" itself isn't true, but the story does describe a real effect.) I have arguments with people whenever the subject of copyright comes up. They don't understand why copyright shouldn't be forever. After all, they say, it's the artist's property just the same as your house is. Should the government step in 20 years after you buy a house, kick you out, and give it to someone else? (Their argument, not mine.)
I struggle to explain how Intellectual Property differs from physical property, how we started off with limited copyright terms designed to foster innovation, and the value of a strong Public Domain, but I fear that the argument falls on deaf ears. These folks just see Public Domain as some alien concept and a tool designed to yank property away from the rightful owners. They don't even see anything wrong with passing intellectual property on to heirs after the artist dies. My "who owns Shakespeare's works" arguments don't make a dent. (If copyright is forever, how do you track down ownership of Romeo and Juliet? Heck, even copyright ownership on works 50 years old can get murky.)
I don't think ridiculous copyright laws are something to be celebrated with an expectation of a citizen's revolt. They are to be fought tooth and nail because the citizens will just wind up accepting each little step further and further away from what copyright is supposed to be about.
I agree. It's the fault of the planes, trains, and automobiles. We need to immediately ban all 80's adventure/comedies by John Hughes lest they wreck further havoc on our fair society! Better also ban all films starring Steve Martin and John Candy just to be on the safe side.;-)
If they thought they could get away with it, I'm sure they would do that. As it stands now they either: 1) have one small toe grounded in reality enough to let them know that this wouldn't be allowed, or 2) have this as a future step in their master plan.
Honestly, Muslims around the world need to shut the fuck up.
Actually, I think that moderate Muslims around the world need to speak up more. The extremists loudly proclaim their hatred of all things not-extreme-Islam and their desire to destroy all such things. It paints a negative view of the religion if the moderate Muslims don't stand up, tell the extremists to sit down and shut up, and tell the rest of the world that those nut cases don't speak for every Muslim out there.
I happen to be Jewish and have an admittedly limited knowledge of Islam. Still, I think that Islam and Judaism actually have more in common than Judaism and Christianity do. Dietary laws are similar, for example, to the point that Muslims often rely on meat marked as Kosher. I can even see why some would find the depictions of Muhammad as blasphemous. There's a prohibition against graven images that strict Judaism and Islam follow that Christianity really doesn't follow in the same way. It's really a shame that Muslims and Jews don't get along better as I think we have quite a lot in common and (in a perfect world) would probably make for really good allies.
The authors of the white paper paint a dreary future where "copyright trolls" file lawsuits in order to rake in massive amounts of statutory damages
It's not widespread yet as a means for profit, but copyright protection laws are being already being (mis-)used to silence critics and competitors. There was the Lexmark DMCA case where they argued that a competitor's ink replacement system was a violation of the DMCA. There are the widespread Scientology claims of copyright on items they don't own, but want offline. In general, anyone who wants a site offline quickly can just file a DMCA claim on it You can sort out those messy perjury issues later (if they come up at all). Attach a financial reward for filing DMCA claims and suddenly copyright trolls will appear everywhere.
You think that's bad, try buying some Sudafed for your very young child. Your kid is cranky with a cold and you need to sign these papers to "prove" that you're not going to take the low dose sudafedrin and turn it into crystal meth. Now, I'm not knowledgeable about sudafedrin => meth production (never did it, never plan to), but I would think that it would take a whole lot of children's sudafedrin melting strips (the things that go on the tongue and melt) to make even a small amount of meth. And I don't see signing one piece of paper as being much of a deterrent to people who really want to make meth. Couldn't they just pharmacy hop until they have enough?
As a followup to my own post, SCOX really didn't fall much today. (From 6.5 cents to 6.25 cents.) My two theories are that:
1. Everyone pretty much knows they're boned anyway. So SCO saying "we're boned" doesn't have much of an impact. It's being greeted with a "Well, Duh!" response rather than a "AAHHH! SELL NOW!" response.
2. People want to sell, but can't. After all, to sell a share of stock, don't you need to find someone who wants to *buy* that share?
Given that, SCOXQ's price may have hit a bottom for the foreseeable future.
Ron Paul is a licensed gynecologist. I'd love to see him greeting a foreign dignitary from one of those backwards countries where women remain veiled at all times and have no rights at all (you know the places). Then, as he shakes their hand and leans in for the photos, he smiles and whispers "By the way, I'm a gynecologist by trade. Guess where my hands have been!" It would make for some really fun photos.
It doesn't even have to be an open access point. Joe User tries out a screen saver that her found online. He gets infected with a trojan that turns his computer into a spambot. His computer spews two million spam e-mails in a month's time. At ~3K per mail message, this winds up being 6GB in extra traffic. He has now gone over his monthly traffic limit and he hasn't even really used his computer. Meanwhile, I'm sure that Time Warner hasn't notified him that his computer is sending tons of e-mails, nor have they taken any actions to stop it as it is within their financial best interest to allow him to run up his bill. (Sure, it is within their long term best interest to keep their network clean, but most companies don't look at the long term.)
We have filed a post-effective amendment to a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), which has been declared effective, covering the potential resale by two of our stockholders of up to 923,019 shares of common stock, or 4.3% of our outstanding common stock. The selling stockholders are bound by certain selling limitations, which limit the number of shares of our common stock that may be sold at one time.
In other words: "Our outlook reeks to high heaven and we are afraid that people will dump their stock as quickly as possible. In order to slow this down, we're limiting shareholders in how much they can sell at once. Hopefully, this helps keep our stock from going to worthless (instead of the near-worthless that it is right now)."
The share price right now is 6 cents. It should be interesting to see how low it falls today.
You know, this whole thing might make more sense if the RIAA and Media Sentry were performing a silly walk while they talked about how they catch P2P'ers.
If I understand it correctly, they want the individual songs treated separately. So instead of one album copy being one infringement and thus open to $750 - $150,000 in fines, one album would be 12 infringements (one per song, 12 songs on the average record), and thus a couple million dollars.
Of course, if we were to use their "separate songs" model, then the actual damages would be $1.30 per song (price on iTunes for non-DRMed copy) times 12 times 3 (3x actual damages). This gives the RIAA $46.80. I might even be willing to accept 10x actual damages for sharing a song online (under the assumption that one uploader could be responsible for lots of downloads) and up the "per album" fines to $156.
Of course, they won't really try to get $1.5 million from anyone.... so long as people accept their "generous" $3-4K settlement package, admit to being a dirty, stinking pirate, and keep quiet when the RIAA publicly insults them. If you have the nerve to fight to prove your innocence, though, you're going down. (As far as the RIAA's concerned, that is.)
It's worse than that. If a city wants to clear out your homes to build something that's not really vital, just more profitable (say, some expensive condominiums), they can claim eminent domain and force you out. But, as you said, mention taking away Intellectual Property to save lives and you get a huge uproar as if the very building blocks of American life are being violated. In my opinion, it should be very difficult for the government to enact eminent domain and eminent domain should apply to both physical property (e.g. homes) and Intellectual Property (e.g. AIDS drugs). If anything, enacting eminent domain should be a bit easier when it comes to Intellectual Property than physical property.
Thanks. That's pretty much what I thought. It would be more time, energy, and money for their lawyers as well as more time spent by judges (who would be more likely to get annoyed by RIAA vs John Doe #200).
So, if I'm reading this properly, the RIAA would be forced to do one of two things:
1 - Sue the batches of people as a group. This wouldn't stand long as it would be easy to prove that their alleged wrongdoings weren't connected in nature.
2 - Submit the John Doe suits separately. This would backfire as judges wouldn't be too happy to see a giant stack of individual lawsuits being added to their docket. The RIAA would quickly see their lawsuits getting tossed out by judges and perhaps even fines issued for wasting the court's time.
NewYorkCountryLawyer, if you're reading this, can you verify whether I'm reading this right?
According to this Ars Technica article ( http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060505-6761.html ), the $6.1 billion that the MPAA claims is lost to piracy is a highly inflated number. Ok, I'll pause while everyone says "Well, DUH!"....... done?... ok, good. Let's proceed.
Apparently, "bootlegging" costs them $2.4 million. This is typically "hard piracy" or a guy on a street corner selling a copied DVD for $5. Let's give the MPAA this figure.
The next portion is $1.4 billion "lost" to illegal copying. Now this isn't someone putting Star Wars up on a P2P network. This is someone taking their Star Wars DVD and making a backup copy of it. Apparently, the MPAA feels that you should pay for backup copies and not doing so is costing them money. This is likely just a load of horse manure, but let's leave it be for now because the next one is what really interests me.
Finally, they claim $2.3 billion in losses to "internet piracy". Since they claim that most of the losses are overseas (say, 40%) and 15% of the US Internet piracy happens on campuses, that's $138 million ($2.3 Billion * 0.4 * 0.15). Now, they also are claiming that each P2P copy downloaded is a lost sale. I disagree with that and think that the real "lost sales" figures are far lower. I'm willing to grant them a compromise, though, and assume that a one in three downloaded copies is a lost sale. This takes the losses figure down to $46 million. Finally, some of those "lost sales" would have been used copies, rentals, or other legal "reduced cost" methods. So let's assume that this takes reduces their revenue by 20% (again, being generous)*. This takes their Internet Piracy loss down to just under $37 million.
So for $37 million lost annually, the MPAA wants severe Federal laws that would deny students a college education if someone else on the campus pirates a movie?
* Ok, I pulled a lot of the numbers out of my behind, but so did the MPAA. At least my numbers are likely to be closer to reality.
So, to contact them about Zango's abusive business practices, I have to install Zango's abusive software to interact with their server, or it generates an error?
No, that's a server side error. Which means that their server is trying to load some object which it is expecting to be installed on the server, but isn't finding it. The client side (your computer) has nothing to do with it. Theoretically, you could install Zango and go through their Contact Us form again and have it happen again. (I say "theoretically" because I don't know why anyone would willingly install Zango to complain about Zango.)
I just tried submitting a comment to them via their Contact Us form and it went through just fine.
From TFA, the rationale is because they're worried that a bunch of shoddy devices will throw tons of false positives, and cause havok amongst emergency responders who would have to run around town constantly trying to weed out false leads.
Frankly, it's crap.
I agree. My BS detector is going off like crazy. Uh... I mean, my BS detector *would* be going off like crazy if I owned one.... which I don't... because owning a device that can measure the atmospheric content of BS is quite illegal and I wouldn't do anything like that.... *glances over shoulder nervously*
In addition to money mules, there are also "goods" mules who help transfer fraudulently obtained goods overseas. The typical situation is: ID thief uses stolen card information to buy electronics from a "cardable" website (one which doesn't do a lot of checks on whether the person using the card is the real cardholder). The thief is based overseas, but knows that having goods shipped there might (at best) raise red flags and (at worst) lead the police right to them. So they convince some poor, greedy saps that they are helping out a small overseas company. The goods mules gets paid small sums to receive goods and then reship them.
The particulars might differ based on situation, of course. I've heard of the scammers using images taken from Google Images to convince the mules that they (the scammers) are really a highly attractive woman who just so happened to have fallen in love with them and needs their help with her struggling business. Yes, people fall for this. Partly because the scammers are good at what they do and partly because some people are just greedy idiots. They mentally block out any red flags because of the promise of money.
On one hand, the mules are really sad and pathetic. On the other hand, they get me mad because without them much of the identity theft/eBay fraud/stolen credit card purchases, wouldn't be possible (or at least would be much easier to track).
MR: What I typically download is country music as well as 1960's music. I'm a baby boomer, so the Beatles and the Stones and some of the old groups from the 1960's are my favorites, I listen to them and I listen to country. I might have some inspirational music as well, but those are the highlights for me.
So he downloads music, but he doesn't mention paying for it. Is he a dirty, rotten music pirate? Perhaps the RIAA should sue him to find out!
Just kidding, of course, though I'd love to see one of the Presidential candidates wind up somehow accidentally involved in a RIAA lawsuit just to see the RIAA squirm.
Everyone seems to be focusing on Notes, but I have some big gripes with Symphony. I loaded it thinking that it would be a good way of going with an "OpenOffice.org" application that supported Lotus WordPro imports (as my company currently is standardized on WordPro). I quickly found out that Symphony takes over the file extensions for OpenDocument and OpenOffice files. There's no setting to turn this off either. Every time you start the application, it changes your file associations. This behavior was a show stopper for me. Even in an beta, file association changes should be optional, not forced onto the user at each application start.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see it now:
"Grandpa, why won't you stop running?"
"Can't Junior. If I stop, my pacemaker will shut down. I shouldn't even stop to talk to y-... *urk*"
*thud*
You would think so, but it actually seems that people are getting used to longer and longer copyrights and more and more restrictions. A "Boiling the frog" phenomenon, most likely. (Put in quotes because "boiling a frog" itself isn't true, but the story does describe a real effect.) I have arguments with people whenever the subject of copyright comes up. They don't understand why copyright shouldn't be forever. After all, they say, it's the artist's property just the same as your house is. Should the government step in 20 years after you buy a house, kick you out, and give it to someone else? (Their argument, not mine.)
I struggle to explain how Intellectual Property differs from physical property, how we started off with limited copyright terms designed to foster innovation, and the value of a strong Public Domain, but I fear that the argument falls on deaf ears. These folks just see Public Domain as some alien concept and a tool designed to yank property away from the rightful owners. They don't even see anything wrong with passing intellectual property on to heirs after the artist dies. My "who owns Shakespeare's works" arguments don't make a dent. (If copyright is forever, how do you track down ownership of Romeo and Juliet? Heck, even copyright ownership on works 50 years old can get murky.)
I don't think ridiculous copyright laws are something to be celebrated with an expectation of a citizen's revolt. They are to be fought tooth and nail because the citizens will just wind up accepting each little step further and further away from what copyright is supposed to be about.
I agree. It's the fault of the planes, trains, and automobiles. We need to immediately ban all 80's adventure/comedies by John Hughes lest they wreck further havoc on our fair society! Better also ban all films starring Steve Martin and John Candy just to be on the safe side. ;-)
If they thought they could get away with it, I'm sure they would do that. As it stands now they either: 1) have one small toe grounded in reality enough to let them know that this wouldn't be allowed, or 2) have this as a future step in their master plan.
Actually, I think that moderate Muslims around the world need to speak up more. The extremists loudly proclaim their hatred of all things not-extreme-Islam and their desire to destroy all such things. It paints a negative view of the religion if the moderate Muslims don't stand up, tell the extremists to sit down and shut up, and tell the rest of the world that those nut cases don't speak for every Muslim out there.
I happen to be Jewish and have an admittedly limited knowledge of Islam. Still, I think that Islam and Judaism actually have more in common than Judaism and Christianity do. Dietary laws are similar, for example, to the point that Muslims often rely on meat marked as Kosher. I can even see why some would find the depictions of Muhammad as blasphemous. There's a prohibition against graven images that strict Judaism and Islam follow that Christianity really doesn't follow in the same way. It's really a shame that Muslims and Jews don't get along better as I think we have quite a lot in common and (in a perfect world) would probably make for really good allies.
It's not widespread yet as a means for profit, but copyright protection laws are being already being (mis-)used to silence critics and competitors. There was the Lexmark DMCA case where they argued that a competitor's ink replacement system was a violation of the DMCA. There are the widespread Scientology claims of copyright on items they don't own, but want offline. In general, anyone who wants a site offline quickly can just file a DMCA claim on it You can sort out those messy perjury issues later (if they come up at all). Attach a financial reward for filing DMCA claims and suddenly copyright trolls will appear everywhere.
You think that's bad, try buying some Sudafed for your very young child. Your kid is cranky with a cold and you need to sign these papers to "prove" that you're not going to take the low dose sudafedrin and turn it into crystal meth. Now, I'm not knowledgeable about sudafedrin => meth production (never did it, never plan to), but I would think that it would take a whole lot of children's sudafedrin melting strips (the things that go on the tongue and melt) to make even a small amount of meth. And I don't see signing one piece of paper as being much of a deterrent to people who really want to make meth. Couldn't they just pharmacy hop until they have enough?
As a followup to my own post, SCOX really didn't fall much today. (From 6.5 cents to 6.25 cents.) My two theories are that:
1. Everyone pretty much knows they're boned anyway. So SCO saying "we're boned" doesn't have much of an impact. It's being greeted with a "Well, Duh!" response rather than a "AAHHH! SELL NOW!" response.
2. People want to sell, but can't. After all, to sell a share of stock, don't you need to find someone who wants to *buy* that share?
Given that, SCOXQ's price may have hit a bottom for the foreseeable future.
Ron Paul is a licensed gynecologist. I'd love to see him greeting a foreign dignitary from one of those backwards countries where women remain veiled at all times and have no rights at all (you know the places). Then, as he shakes their hand and leans in for the photos, he smiles and whispers "By the way, I'm a gynecologist by trade. Guess where my hands have been!" It would make for some really fun photos.
It doesn't even have to be an open access point. Joe User tries out a screen saver that her found online. He gets infected with a trojan that turns his computer into a spambot. His computer spews two million spam e-mails in a month's time. At ~3K per mail message, this winds up being 6GB in extra traffic. He has now gone over his monthly traffic limit and he hasn't even really used his computer. Meanwhile, I'm sure that Time Warner hasn't notified him that his computer is sending tons of e-mails, nor have they taken any actions to stop it as it is within their financial best interest to allow him to run up his bill. (Sure, it is within their long term best interest to keep their network clean, but most companies don't look at the long term.)
In other words: "Our outlook reeks to high heaven and we are afraid that people will dump their stock as quickly as possible. In order to slow this down, we're limiting shareholders in how much they can sell at once. Hopefully, this helps keep our stock from going to worthless (instead of the near-worthless that it is right now)."
The share price right now is 6 cents. It should be interesting to see how low it falls today.
You know, this whole thing might make more sense if the RIAA and Media Sentry were performing a silly walk while they talked about how they catch P2P'ers.
Not to mention the embarrassment if you need to use the invisible bathroom. (Cue Family Guy quote.)
If I understand it correctly, they want the individual songs treated separately. So instead of one album copy being one infringement and thus open to $750 - $150,000 in fines, one album would be 12 infringements (one per song, 12 songs on the average record), and thus a couple million dollars.
Of course, if we were to use their "separate songs" model, then the actual damages would be $1.30 per song (price on iTunes for non-DRMed copy) times 12 times 3 (3x actual damages). This gives the RIAA $46.80. I might even be willing to accept 10x actual damages for sharing a song online (under the assumption that one uploader could be responsible for lots of downloads) and up the "per album" fines to $156.
Of course, they won't really try to get $1.5 million from anyone.... so long as people accept their "generous" $3-4K settlement package, admit to being a dirty, stinking pirate, and keep quiet when the RIAA publicly insults them. If you have the nerve to fight to prove your innocence, though, you're going down. (As far as the RIAA's concerned, that is.)
It's worse than that. If a city wants to clear out your homes to build something that's not really vital, just more profitable (say, some expensive condominiums), they can claim eminent domain and force you out. But, as you said, mention taking away Intellectual Property to save lives and you get a huge uproar as if the very building blocks of American life are being violated. In my opinion, it should be very difficult for the government to enact eminent domain and eminent domain should apply to both physical property (e.g. homes) and Intellectual Property (e.g. AIDS drugs). If anything, enacting eminent domain should be a bit easier when it comes to Intellectual Property than physical property.
Thanks. That's pretty much what I thought. It would be more time, energy, and money for their lawyers as well as more time spent by judges (who would be more likely to get annoyed by RIAA vs John Doe #200).
So, if I'm reading this properly, the RIAA would be forced to do one of two things:
1 - Sue the batches of people as a group. This wouldn't stand long as it would be easy to prove that their alleged wrongdoings weren't connected in nature.
2 - Submit the John Doe suits separately. This would backfire as judges wouldn't be too happy to see a giant stack of individual lawsuits being added to their docket. The RIAA would quickly see their lawsuits getting tossed out by judges and perhaps even fines issued for wasting the court's time.
NewYorkCountryLawyer, if you're reading this, can you verify whether I'm reading this right?
Have you tried Amie Street.com or EMusic.com?
According to this Ars Technica article ( http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060505-6761.html ), the $6.1 billion that the MPAA claims is lost to piracy is a highly inflated number. Ok, I'll pause while everyone says "Well, DUH!".... ... done? ... ok, good. Let's proceed.
Apparently, "bootlegging" costs them $2.4 million. This is typically "hard piracy" or a guy on a street corner selling a copied DVD for $5. Let's give the MPAA this figure.
The next portion is $1.4 billion "lost" to illegal copying. Now this isn't someone putting Star Wars up on a P2P network. This is someone taking their Star Wars DVD and making a backup copy of it. Apparently, the MPAA feels that you should pay for backup copies and not doing so is costing them money. This is likely just a load of horse manure, but let's leave it be for now because the next one is what really interests me.
Finally, they claim $2.3 billion in losses to "internet piracy". Since they claim that most of the losses are overseas (say, 40%) and 15% of the US Internet piracy happens on campuses, that's $138 million ($2.3 Billion * 0.4 * 0.15). Now, they also are claiming that each P2P copy downloaded is a lost sale. I disagree with that and think that the real "lost sales" figures are far lower. I'm willing to grant them a compromise, though, and assume that a one in three downloaded copies is a lost sale. This takes the losses figure down to $46 million. Finally, some of those "lost sales" would have been used copies, rentals, or other legal "reduced cost" methods. So let's assume that this takes reduces their revenue by 20% (again, being generous)*. This takes their Internet Piracy loss down to just under $37 million.
So for $37 million lost annually, the MPAA wants severe Federal laws that would deny students a college education if someone else on the campus pirates a movie?
* Ok, I pulled a lot of the numbers out of my behind, but so did the MPAA. At least my numbers are likely to be closer to reality.
No, that's a server side error. Which means that their server is trying to load some object which it is expecting to be installed on the server, but isn't finding it. The client side (your computer) has nothing to do with it. Theoretically, you could install Zango and go through their Contact Us form again and have it happen again. (I say "theoretically" because I don't know why anyone would willingly install Zango to complain about Zango.)
I just tried submitting a comment to them via their Contact Us form and it went through just fine.
And people say the system doesn't work! ;-)
I agree. My BS detector is going off like crazy. Uh... I mean, my BS detector *would* be going off like crazy if I owned one.... which I don't... because owning a device that can measure the atmospheric content of BS is quite illegal and I wouldn't do anything like that.... *glances over shoulder nervously*
In addition to money mules, there are also "goods" mules who help transfer fraudulently obtained goods overseas. The typical situation is: ID thief uses stolen card information to buy electronics from a "cardable" website (one which doesn't do a lot of checks on whether the person using the card is the real cardholder). The thief is based overseas, but knows that having goods shipped there might (at best) raise red flags and (at worst) lead the police right to them. So they convince some poor, greedy saps that they are helping out a small overseas company. The goods mules gets paid small sums to receive goods and then reship them.
The particulars might differ based on situation, of course. I've heard of the scammers using images taken from Google Images to convince the mules that they (the scammers) are really a highly attractive woman who just so happened to have fallen in love with them and needs their help with her struggling business. Yes, people fall for this. Partly because the scammers are good at what they do and partly because some people are just greedy idiots. They mentally block out any red flags because of the promise of money.
On one hand, the mules are really sad and pathetic. On the other hand, they get me mad because without them much of the identity theft/eBay fraud/stolen credit card purchases, wouldn't be possible (or at least would be much easier to track).
So he downloads music, but he doesn't mention paying for it. Is he a dirty, rotten music pirate? Perhaps the RIAA should sue him to find out!
Just kidding, of course, though I'd love to see one of the Presidential candidates wind up somehow accidentally involved in a RIAA lawsuit just to see the RIAA squirm.
Everyone seems to be focusing on Notes, but I have some big gripes with Symphony. I loaded it thinking that it would be a good way of going with an "OpenOffice.org" application that supported Lotus WordPro imports (as my company currently is standardized on WordPro). I quickly found out that Symphony takes over the file extensions for OpenDocument and OpenOffice files. There's no setting to turn this off either. Every time you start the application, it changes your file associations. This behavior was a show stopper for me. Even in an beta, file association changes should be optional, not forced onto the user at each application start.