Actually, it does matter. Even going beyond the question of "what if he didn't have a driver's license", the law specifically states (from the guy's blog):
"2921.29 (C) Nothing in this section requires a person to answer any questions beyond that person's name, address, or date of birth. Nothing in this section authorizes a law enforcement officer to arrest a person for not providing any information beyond that person's name, address, or date of birth or for refusing to describe the offense observed."
This means that an officer can ask for your license for a traffic offense, but not for anything else. The officer asked for the man's name and he gave it. If he asked for his address and date of birth, he would be compelled to supply that too. But that's it. For the officer to, on the spot, make up additional requirements is against the law.
TOAST KAPUT DEAD MLTDN NOCSE PWNED <---- I hated to put that last one in there, but after the way the judge ruled against them and given their current situation, I think it applies nicely.
I didn't mean that the courts could arbitrarily strike down laws they didn't like. Just that the courts have the ability to strike down laws passed by Congress and approved by the President. In fact, the courts have sort of an internal checks and balances system. If one court were to arbitrarily strike down a law, there's a good chance it would be overturned on appeal.
"I don't know whether the president quite shares that view, but to the degree that he does, he has the sworn duty to refuse to execute that law."
This is treading into dangerous waters. If a President feels a law is unconstitutional he can veto it. But then, if his veto is overridden, and the courts uphold the law, the President can just ignore the law and proceed as he sees fit? What use do we have for Congress and the court systems then?
Any Bush supporters out there? Ok, asking for a Bush supporter on Slashdot is probably like walking into a Microsoft board meeting and asking how many people run Linux.;-)
Still, every time this subject comes up, I ask the same series of question and I have yet to get a reply from any Bush supporters (even when there are Bush supporters replying to the topic). The question is: Would you like the next administration to have unsupervised warrant-less wiretapping capabilities? What if the administration was run by Hillary Clinton? Would you trust her to use it properly and not abuse it.
Even if you ignore any current abuses of the system (as I'm sure Bush supporters do) and assume that Bush just has our best interests at heart, you can't say the same about the next administration. Or the one after that. To give any branch of government unchecked power is extremely dangerous. It's not a matter of *will* it be abused, but *when will* it be abused. That's why the Constitution set up 3 houses of power (Congress, President, Courts) and gave them the ability to check each other's power. (e.g. Congress can make a law, President can veto it, Congress can override the veto, Courts can strike it down, Congress can pass it as a Constitutional Amendment.) Unsupervised warrant-less wiretapping is unconstitutional and the only way it's being pushed forward is through major FUD. (Americans *WILL DIE* if you don't let us do whatever we want to do!!!!)
Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending
Ok, let's assume for a second that this is true. I know, I know, it's likely very much false, but let's humor them on this point for a second. So there are relatively very few FireFox users. This means that they can't be using that much of the site's bandwidth. (Unless there's some Bandwidth Stealer extension I'm not aware of.) Since those of us with FireFox are few in number and using little bandwidth compared to those vast arrays of IE users, we represent a small cost to them. Right?
therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks
Ok, I'll accept this. This flows from the above assumptions. If you're not getting many orders from a source, then blocking that source won't result in much of a financial loss. Still, with the small number of FireFox users out there, FireFox user must equate to a small bandwidth cost.
whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers
Wait. So FireFox users both are small in number, yet large in bandwidth hit. Apparently, all we do all day is find sites like his and load them over and over to steal his bandwidth.
The problem with the "I don't like the RIAA therefore I'll stop buying music entirely" argument is that it assumes that all music is "RIAA music." Check out eMusic or Amie Street for a lot of great music from artists not affiliated with the RIAA. Since March, I've bought all of my music from Amie Street and I'm loving the artists that I've found. A lot of them deserve their own multi-platinum record deals... except that would lock them into the RIAA's anti-artist contracts. So I hope that they do what is unlikely right now (but becoming more likely each day) and get a huge hit without being signed to a large record label.
I'm not sure about eMusic, but as far as the artist's cut on Amie Street goes, Amie Street gets the first $5 in sales of a song. After that, the artist gets 70% of the take. Using tools that Amie Street provides for their artists, I figured out that songs reach the $5 mark after only 41 sales. (This translates to a price of about 37 cents. So if a song is 38 cents or more, the song has broken even and the artist is now earning money from it.)
It's not really a pyramid scheme. First of all, you have a limited number of recommendations to use. So you can't just "REC" every free song you come upon hoping that one of them is a hit. People will use their RECs for only the best of the songs. And a pyramid scheme would imply that the people on the bottom of the pyramid get nothing for their money. Suppose I buy a song at 8 cents and recommend it. Then Jim buys the track after the price rises to 50 cents and recommends it as well. More people buy it and finally Mary buys it just after it rises to 98 cents. I get 45 cents (if I recall the formula correctly) to use for new music. Jim gets 24 cents for new music. Mary doesn't get any money for new music, but she doesn't leave empty handed. She gets the song that she bought (as do Jim and I). Any money you get for new music is icing on the cake. It's not a pyramid scheme, it's a promotion to help motivate people to find and recommend good music.
Send them a feature recommendation. They tend to respond quickly and might actually implement it. (Plus, they might reward you with additional RECs to use.)
Yes, just like everyone always complains when they buy something then find out that their friend bought it a week earlier and got it on sale. Or just like how stock market investors whine about having to buy shares of Google for more than their stock market investor friends did yesterday. (Second example is assuming that Google's shares are rising in price. If they aren't, feel free to substitute a stock symbol that is rising in price.)
This is really good news. There are some good songs to be had on Amie Street for not much money. So far, I've bought 91 songs and have only spent $6.29. That's about 7 cents per song. With no DRM at all. Beat that, iTunes!;-)
Definitely, they could go back to that. But I figured that Microsoft's lawyers would know about IE6 more. Plus, it still seems to be the number one browser out there (with IE7 and FireFox nipping at its heels more and more though). How can a program violate a patent when it was released 5 years before that patent was issued? (Not even getting into that it was built on IE5 which was built on IE4, etc. Or that those IEs were ultimately designed after Netscape and Mosaic before them.)
The patents in question are for Aloft's "Network Browser Graphical User Interface for Managing Web Content," US patent number 7,117,443, and "Network Browser Window with Adjacent Identifier Selector," US patent number 7,194,691 (the second of which doesn't appear to be available online). They were filed for in late 2003 and were granted in October of 2006 and March of 2007, respectively. They describe user interfaces in a network browsing window that display the content at a specific URL as well as the URL itself somewhere on or around the window.
Aloft claims to have invented the web browser! In 2003! Now let's search hard for "user interfaces in a network browsing window that display the content at a specific URL as well as the URL itself somewhere on or around the window" that were available in 2002 or earlier. Perhaps something that was available by Microsoft in that time.
Sure releasing your music on the Internet might mean that you don't always interact with your fans on a one-by-one local level, but it means that you can interact with many more fans on a national level.
To give an example, I recently purchased two songs from Enter the Haggis on AmieStreet.com. (The Barfly and No More Stones from http://amiestreet.com/enterthehaggis in case anyone's interested.) The band is based in Toronto and I would never have known that they existed had it not been for music fans on Amie Street posting recommendations (RECs) for their songs. I listened to the song previews, loved what I heard, and proceeded to buy a couple of their songs. I'll now be on the lookout for new music that they release and would even consider going to a concert that they played at if they came to my area. (Which, admittedly, is unlikely.)
I could easily take "Enter the Haggis" out of the paragraph above and replace it with any of the 18 other bands whose music I've bought from Amie Street. None of these bands had to go to the major RIAA labels and sell their musical souls in order to get their music to my ears. If that doesn't help music, I don't know what will.
I purchased a USB Data Cable from eBay (about $7 including shipping) and then downloaded BitPIM ( http://www.bitpim.org/ ). The cable connects my phone to my PC. BitPIM then reads my phone's data and can upload MP3 files to it for me to use as ringtones. Since phones have a limited amount of storage and you don't need a high bitrate for ringtones, I use Audacity to reduce the bitrate of the ringtone before I upload it to my phone.
My current default ringtone is the entire Muppet Show theme. I'm thinking of using the AT&T Labs Text-To-Speech website ( http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php ) to generate some spoken ringtones. (e.g. "Incoming Communication. Caller Identified As Beth.")
I buy my music online from Amie Street. They give me my music with no DRM and it should work on any platform. (Their website works in FireFox, so I don't see why FF-on-Linux shouldn't work and the songs themselves are plain MP3 format.) The no credit card thing would be an issue almost anywhere you shop online though. And no, Amie Street isn't "big name celebrity singers" (except for Barenaked Ladies), but they have a bunch of smaller groups who have great sounds. Personally, I'd recommend Beats Working, Filthy Teddy, Foregone, and Seth Kallen & The Reaction. Your musical tastes may vary, of course, but there's a huge number of songs to choose from.
(No, I don't work for Amie Street in any way, shape, or form. I just really like their service.)
I'm going to sue Media Rights Technologies for not DRMing their Cease and Desist letters using my patent-pending "09F9" DRM technology. I sell each license for $10 million (or would have if I ever sold a license), therefore I should be entitled to $10 million times the number of letters that they sent!
I've never really been interested in online music as I didn't want my legally purchased music to be locked down on me. What little music I bought was mostly obtained via used CDs. My first online music purchases were four Barenaked Ladies songs when I found that they were selling their music online without DRM. Then I found AmieStreet.com. For those who don't know, their model is that the songs start out free and rise in price (up to 98 cents) as people buy them. A song I bought at 23 cents (Hoku's Perfect Day) is now up at 47 cents (when last I checked). The advantage to this model is that you can experiment on new songs for little cost (or even for free), or you can buy the 98 cent stuff assured that it must be pretty good.
Add in the extended previews and the excellent recommendation system that can earn you money back when songs that you like rise in price and you have a system that encourages people to find and buy new music. So far in the about 2 weeks that I've been using their service, I've bought 10 songs, spent 89 cents, and been exposed to tons of bands that I otherwise wouldn't have even known existed.
Shameless plug: I happened to do a decent sized review about Amie Street on my blog just the other day. It includes a promotional code for $2 and 4 free RECs in your account as well as a link to the 10 songs I've bought. (Preview versions, of course.) Here's the URL: http://www.jasons-toolbox.com/?p=94
Basically, some miners were striking to improve living conditions so they and their families were evicted from their company owned homes. When they took up residence in the hills and continued to strike, they were fired upon by private detectives hired by Rockefeller. When that didn't work, Rockefeller got the governor of Colorado to send in the National Guard who fired on the camp. The women and children hid in ditches dug in the tents to stay safe from the bullets.
One of the strike leaders headed out to negotiate with the mining company but was shot dead instead. Then, under the cover of darkness, the National Guard snuck in set fire to the tents. More troops on the hilltops fired upon the people who fled from the burning tents. Sixty six men, women and children died and not a single person was charged with a crime.
I'd call that a pretty big abuse of government power.
I'm a Crazy Browser user as well. Love the tabbed interface and the pop-up stopping (32 pop-ups killed and counting). Plus I like being able to save a "group" of web sites (such as the group I visit every morning) and load them all up at once. It's become my primary browser. And since it uses IE's rendering engine, I know whether the site I'm designing will look good for IE users. (Since IE users account for about 95% of my traffic, it is important to me. I try to have the site degrade nicely for other browsers though.)
And I see no reason to believe that that example is correct. The purpose of a watermark is to "verify that a phonorecord, a copy of a computer program, a copy of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or documentation or packaging is not counterfeit or otherwise infringing of any copyright." If the copy is not counterfeit or otherwise infringing of any copyright, as in, you own the copyright, then the watermark is genuine, and you havne't broken the law.
The question is: Who determines the format for the watermark and how is it licensed? If the RIAA determines it (ala a "Son of SDMI" format), expect the licensing price to be very high. High enough that independents will encounter serious financial hurdles. So the hypothetical garage band won't be breaking the law by applying the watermark to their music, but by trying to circumvent having to pay the RIAA a ton of cash just so they (the garage band) can distribute their own music. (Ok, technically they'll be breaking the law by distributing the music with the cracked watermark code.)
The article gives the example of a garage band wanting to distribute their music via MP3 and having to fake a watermark to make it playable on certain MP3 players.
Suppose the RIAA actually got their act together with SDMI and forced hardware manufacturers to only allow SDMI-licensed material on their MP3 players (probably via more legislation knowing how the RIAA works). Now Garage Band #5 wants to distribute their songs, but they know they won't be able to be played if they aren't SDMI-licensed. Of course, doing this would cost a lot of $$$ (more than they can afford) but would be included in any standard record industry contract. So GB#5 now has three options:
1. Sign up with a major record label. Upside: Their MP3s can be played. Downside: They are now basically slaves to the RIAA.
2. "Fake" the licensing and distribute the MP3s on their own. Upside: Their MP3s can be played and they don't owe the RIAA money/songs. Downside: They can be arrested for illegally distributing their own music!
3. Forget about making music, split up the band, and do something else. Upside: They don't owe the RIAA anything and they stay out of jail. Downside: Another independent band squished by the RIAA.
If this passes, eventually it might be used by the RIAA (and other similar companies) to squash competition and independents.
Since the DCMA has provisions disallowing reverse engineering, might MS sue Real under the DCMA? Could we have a DCMA showdown between the two companies? Might prove interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it does matter. Even going beyond the question of "what if he didn't have a driver's license", the law specifically states (from the guy's blog):
"2921.29 (C) Nothing in this section requires a person to answer any questions beyond that person's name, address, or date of birth. Nothing in this section authorizes a law enforcement officer to arrest a person for not providing any information beyond that person's name, address, or date of birth or for refusing to describe the offense observed."
This means that an officer can ask for your license for a traffic offense, but not for anything else. The officer asked for the man's name and he gave it. If he asked for his address and date of birth, he would be compelled to supply that too. But that's it. For the officer to, on the spot, make up additional requirements is against the law.
If so, I have some suggestions:
TOAST
KAPUT
DEAD
MLTDN
NOCSE
PWNED <---- I hated to put that last one in there, but after the way the judge ruled against them and given their current situation, I think it applies nicely.
I didn't mean that the courts could arbitrarily strike down laws they didn't like. Just that the courts have the ability to strike down laws passed by Congress and approved by the President. In fact, the courts have sort of an internal checks and balances system. If one court were to arbitrarily strike down a law, there's a good chance it would be overturned on appeal.
"I don't know whether the president quite shares that view, but to the degree that he does, he has the sworn duty to refuse to execute that law."
This is treading into dangerous waters. If a President feels a law is unconstitutional he can veto it. But then, if his veto is overridden, and the courts uphold the law, the President can just ignore the law and proceed as he sees fit? What use do we have for Congress and the court systems then?
Any Bush supporters out there? Ok, asking for a Bush supporter on Slashdot is probably like walking into a Microsoft board meeting and asking how many people run Linux. ;-)
Still, every time this subject comes up, I ask the same series of question and I have yet to get a reply from any Bush supporters (even when there are Bush supporters replying to the topic). The question is: Would you like the next administration to have unsupervised warrant-less wiretapping capabilities? What if the administration was run by Hillary Clinton? Would you trust her to use it properly and not abuse it.
Even if you ignore any current abuses of the system (as I'm sure Bush supporters do) and assume that Bush just has our best interests at heart, you can't say the same about the next administration. Or the one after that. To give any branch of government unchecked power is extremely dangerous. It's not a matter of *will* it be abused, but *when will* it be abused. That's why the Constitution set up 3 houses of power (Congress, President, Courts) and gave them the ability to check each other's power. (e.g. Congress can make a law, President can veto it, Congress can override the veto, Courts can strike it down, Congress can pass it as a Constitutional Amendment.) Unsupervised warrant-less wiretapping is unconstitutional and the only way it's being pushed forward is through major FUD. (Americans *WILL DIE* if you don't let us do whatever we want to do!!!!)
It's an underwater series of tubes!
Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending
x t=ad%20blocker&bcatid=834&&order=A ). Maybe he should block IE as well.
Ok, let's assume for a second that this is true. I know, I know, it's likely very much false, but let's humor them on this point for a second. So there are relatively very few FireFox users. This means that they can't be using that much of the site's bandwidth. (Unless there's some Bandwidth Stealer extension I'm not aware of.) Since those of us with FireFox are few in number and using little bandwidth compared to those vast arrays of IE users, we represent a small cost to them. Right?
therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks
Ok, I'll accept this. This flows from the above assumptions. If you're not getting many orders from a source, then blocking that source won't result in much of a financial loss. Still, with the small number of FireFox users out there, FireFox user must equate to a small bandwidth cost.
whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers
Wait. So FireFox users both are small in number, yet large in bandwidth hit. Apparently, all we do all day is find sites like his and load them over and over to steal his bandwidth.
Someone should tell him that there are Ad Blocking tools that are available for IE also ( http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/results.aspx?te
The problem with the "I don't like the RIAA therefore I'll stop buying music entirely" argument is that it assumes that all music is "RIAA music." Check out eMusic or Amie Street for a lot of great music from artists not affiliated with the RIAA. Since March, I've bought all of my music from Amie Street and I'm loving the artists that I've found. A lot of them deserve their own multi-platinum record deals... except that would lock them into the RIAA's anti-artist contracts. So I hope that they do what is unlikely right now (but becoming more likely each day) and get a huge hit without being signed to a large record label.
o .php
I'm not sure about eMusic, but as far as the artist's cut on Amie Street goes, Amie Street gets the first $5 in sales of a song. After that, the artist gets 70% of the take. Using tools that Amie Street provides for their artists, I figured out that songs reach the $5 mark after only 41 sales. (This translates to a price of about 37 cents. So if a song is 38 cents or more, the song has broken even and the artist is now earning money from it.)
And just to help those artists out a bit, here are samples of their music: http://www.jasons-toolbox.com/what-im-listening-t
It's not really a pyramid scheme. First of all, you have a limited number of recommendations to use. So you can't just "REC" every free song you come upon hoping that one of them is a hit. People will use their RECs for only the best of the songs. And a pyramid scheme would imply that the people on the bottom of the pyramid get nothing for their money. Suppose I buy a song at 8 cents and recommend it. Then Jim buys the track after the price rises to 50 cents and recommends it as well. More people buy it and finally Mary buys it just after it rises to 98 cents. I get 45 cents (if I recall the formula correctly) to use for new music. Jim gets 24 cents for new music. Mary doesn't get any money for new music, but she doesn't leave empty handed. She gets the song that she bought (as do Jim and I). Any money you get for new music is icing on the cake. It's not a pyramid scheme, it's a promotion to help motivate people to find and recommend good music.
Send them a feature recommendation. They tend to respond quickly and might actually implement it. (Plus, they might reward you with additional RECs to use.)
Yes, just like everyone always complains when they buy something then find out that their friend bought it a week earlier and got it on sale. Or just like how stock market investors whine about having to buy shares of Google for more than their stock market investor friends did yesterday. (Second example is assuming that Google's shares are rising in price. If they aren't, feel free to substitute a stock symbol that is rising in price.)
This is really good news. There are some good songs to be had on Amie Street for not much money. So far, I've bought 91 songs and have only spent $6.29. That's about 7 cents per song. With no DRM at all. Beat that, iTunes! ;-)
o .php
Oh, and if you happen to be interested in what I'm listening to, here's my playlist: http://www.jasons-toolbox.com/what-im-listening-t
Apparently, revealing the secret recipe for KFC chicken is on the same level as plotting to blow up buildings and/or kill people.
Definitely, they could go back to that. But I figured that Microsoft's lawyers would know about IE6 more. Plus, it still seems to be the number one browser out there (with IE7 and FireFox nipping at its heels more and more though). How can a program violate a patent when it was released 5 years before that patent was issued? (Not even getting into that it was built on IE5 which was built on IE4, etc. Or that those IEs were ultimately designed after Netscape and Mosaic before them.)
Microsoft: "Your honor. IE6. We rest our case."
Sure releasing your music on the Internet might mean that you don't always interact with your fans on a one-by-one local level, but it means that you can interact with many more fans on a national level.
To give an example, I recently purchased two songs from Enter the Haggis on AmieStreet.com. (The Barfly and No More Stones from http://amiestreet.com/enterthehaggis in case anyone's interested.) The band is based in Toronto and I would never have known that they existed had it not been for music fans on Amie Street posting recommendations (RECs) for their songs. I listened to the song previews, loved what I heard, and proceeded to buy a couple of their songs. I'll now be on the lookout for new music that they release and would even consider going to a concert that they played at if they came to my area. (Which, admittedly, is unlikely.)
I could easily take "Enter the Haggis" out of the paragraph above and replace it with any of the 18 other bands whose music I've bought from Amie Street. None of these bands had to go to the major RIAA labels and sell their musical souls in order to get their music to my ears. If that doesn't help music, I don't know what will.
You pay for your ringtones?
I purchased a USB Data Cable from eBay (about $7 including shipping) and then downloaded BitPIM ( http://www.bitpim.org/ ). The cable connects my phone to my PC. BitPIM then reads my phone's data and can upload MP3 files to it for me to use as ringtones. Since phones have a limited amount of storage and you don't need a high bitrate for ringtones, I use Audacity to reduce the bitrate of the ringtone before I upload it to my phone.
My current default ringtone is the entire Muppet Show theme. I'm thinking of using the AT&T Labs Text-To-Speech website ( http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php ) to generate some spoken ringtones. (e.g. "Incoming Communication. Caller Identified As Beth.")
It's obvious. The mystery team is Disney. They plan on opening a theme park on the moon. They already have their top fungineers working on the design.
I buy my music online from Amie Street. They give me my music with no DRM and it should work on any platform. (Their website works in FireFox, so I don't see why FF-on-Linux shouldn't work and the songs themselves are plain MP3 format.) The no credit card thing would be an issue almost anywhere you shop online though. And no, Amie Street isn't "big name celebrity singers" (except for Barenaked Ladies), but they have a bunch of smaller groups who have great sounds. Personally, I'd recommend Beats Working, Filthy Teddy, Foregone, and Seth Kallen & The Reaction. Your musical tastes may vary, of course, but there's a huge number of songs to choose from. (No, I don't work for Amie Street in any way, shape, or form. I just really like their service.)
I'm going to sue Media Rights Technologies for not DRMing their Cease and Desist letters using my patent-pending "09F9" DRM technology. I sell each license for $10 million (or would have if I ever sold a license), therefore I should be entitled to $10 million times the number of letters that they sent!
I've never really been interested in online music as I didn't want my legally purchased music to be locked down on me. What little music I bought was mostly obtained via used CDs. My first online music purchases were four Barenaked Ladies songs when I found that they were selling their music online without DRM. Then I found AmieStreet.com. For those who don't know, their model is that the songs start out free and rise in price (up to 98 cents) as people buy them. A song I bought at 23 cents (Hoku's Perfect Day) is now up at 47 cents (when last I checked). The advantage to this model is that you can experiment on new songs for little cost (or even for free), or you can buy the 98 cent stuff assured that it must be pretty good.
Add in the extended previews and the excellent recommendation system that can earn you money back when songs that you like rise in price and you have a system that encourages people to find and buy new music. So far in the about 2 weeks that I've been using their service, I've bought 10 songs, spent 89 cents, and been exposed to tons of bands that I otherwise wouldn't have even known existed.
Shameless plug: I happened to do a decent sized review about Amie Street on my blog just the other day. It includes a promotional code for $2 and 4 free RECs in your account as well as a link to the 10 songs I've bought. (Preview versions, of course.) Here's the URL: http://www.jasons-toolbox.com/?p=94
I recalled this from a History Channel show and dug up a link:
o ry=oldwest&month=10272956&day=10272985
http://www.historychannel.com/tdih/tdih.jsp?categ
Basically, some miners were striking to improve living conditions so they and their families were evicted from their company owned homes. When they took up residence in the hills and continued to strike, they were fired upon by private detectives hired by Rockefeller. When that didn't work, Rockefeller got the governor of Colorado to send in the National Guard who fired on the camp. The women and children hid in ditches dug in the tents to stay safe from the bullets.
One of the strike leaders headed out to negotiate with the mining company but was shot dead instead. Then, under the cover of darkness, the National Guard snuck in set fire to the tents. More troops on the hilltops fired upon the people who fled from the burning tents. Sixty six men, women and children died and not a single person was charged with a crime.
I'd call that a pretty big abuse of government power.
I'm a Crazy Browser user as well. Love the tabbed interface and the pop-up stopping (32 pop-ups killed and counting). Plus I like being able to save a "group" of web sites (such as the group I visit every morning) and load them all up at once. It's become my primary browser. And since it uses IE's rendering engine, I know whether the site I'm designing will look good for IE users. (Since IE users account for about 95% of my traffic, it is important to me. I try to have the site degrade nicely for other browsers though.)
And I see no reason to believe that that example is correct. The purpose of a watermark is to "verify that a phonorecord, a copy of a computer program, a copy of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or documentation or packaging is not counterfeit or otherwise infringing of any copyright." If the copy is not counterfeit or otherwise infringing of any copyright, as in, you own the copyright, then the watermark is genuine, and you havne't broken the law.
The question is: Who determines the format for the watermark and how is it licensed? If the RIAA determines it (ala a "Son of SDMI" format), expect the licensing price to be very high. High enough that independents will encounter serious financial hurdles. So the hypothetical garage band won't be breaking the law by applying the watermark to their music, but by trying to circumvent having to pay the RIAA a ton of cash just so they (the garage band) can distribute their own music. (Ok, technically they'll be breaking the law by distributing the music with the cracked watermark code.)
The article gives the example of a garage band wanting to distribute their music via MP3 and having to fake a watermark to make it playable on certain MP3 players.
Suppose the RIAA actually got their act together with SDMI and forced hardware manufacturers to only allow SDMI-licensed material on their MP3 players (probably via more legislation knowing how the RIAA works). Now Garage Band #5 wants to distribute their songs, but they know they won't be able to be played if they aren't SDMI-licensed. Of course, doing this would cost a lot of $$$ (more than they can afford) but would be included in any standard record industry contract. So GB#5 now has three options:
1. Sign up with a major record label. Upside: Their MP3s can be played. Downside: They are now basically slaves to the RIAA.
2. "Fake" the licensing and distribute the MP3s on their own. Upside: Their MP3s can be played and they don't owe the RIAA money/songs. Downside: They can be arrested for illegally distributing their own music!
3. Forget about making music, split up the band, and do something else. Upside: They don't owe the RIAA anything and they stay out of jail. Downside: Another independent band squished by the RIAA.
If this passes, eventually it might be used by the RIAA (and other similar companies) to squash competition and independents.
Since the DCMA has provisions disallowing reverse engineering, might MS sue Real under the DCMA? Could we have a DCMA showdown between the two companies? Might prove interesting.