Re:How to spam the web with links
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2
This tactic assumes you're never spotted and banned from posting to those weblogs again. You'd have to constantly provide relevant posts, or constantly update your list of comment URLs.
As for automated newsgroup posting, that's not part of a "normal" Google search, it's an entirely separate engine. So no worries there.
Re:Not as bad as all that
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, but what's the real significance? People aren't likely to go to Google and search for "dumb motherfucker" and laugh to see "George W. Bush" displayed, unless they're told to try it. They're going to search for "George W. Bush", and doing so spectacularly fails to produce a single result titled "dumb motherfucker".
It was a glitch, and a funny one, but it wasn't even remotely exploitable.
Re:Switzerland, bah
on
Patent Nonsense
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
It's not the banking system, but the currency that's important.
The banks are the ones that get the interest; the Swiss government is the one that gets income tax from the banks. So, yes, it is the banking system that's important, since they can always support another currency.
Not as bad as all that
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The users have found a way to "bomb" Google to improve the rankings of particular webpages, and ensure a site is near the top of the results for particular search phrases.
Well, yes, but it's not easy. The article describes several dozen to several hundred bloggers working together to drive a certain word or phrase toward a certain URL. In other words, it takes a large, concerted effort to deceive Google's engine, and this fact alone provides reassurance that Google is working according to plan.
Somewhere else, on this site, Scientology has been accused of using their large network of sites and members to do the same thing, driving searches for "Scientology" and related words to their own sites rather than those of debunkers. Again, this takes a large and concerted effort, which is a virtue of Google rather than a vice.
Is Google on the verge of breaking because such a thing is possible? Of course not. But there are people powering the search engine on the back end, making improvements constantly in response to issues like this. And their cross-linking approach to ranking pages, while not perfect, remains the most reliable way yet found to judge a match's relevance.
If it works correctly 99% of the time, and Google is constantly working on the last 1%, that still makes it better than anything else out there.
So don't support subscriptions. Take the ads and enjoy 'em. It's what I do, and so is most anyone else.
I found the title more funny than anything else, and it's certainly not Slashdot's fault you had a knee-jerk response to it before actually reading the paragraph.
Of those, several probably have speech recognition and microphones installed as well.
Therefore, this affects them and their daily performance.
This news isn't MS-bashing, it's useful information for PC users. If you're going to troll, do it with an article that actually helps you make your point.
As every good Tron fan knows, the grid bugs were almost entirely edited out of the movie (what was left was about two seconds of an animation of a grid bug creating itself). Grid bugs appear in the game because of pressures to develop the arcade game in time for the release of the movie (all part of Disney's sales strategy for the movie's launch -- posters and trailers ended with a tagline along the lines of: "See the movie. Play the game.") So, game programmers had to use whatever script elements they could from the movie before the film itself was actually completed. Light cycles, tanks, recognizers, and the MCP, of course, all made the final cut -- the grid bugs did not.
I guess the "grid bugs" were just mentioned to explain why they couldn't afford to jump out of their simulation/ship when they got attacked a few minutes later. But yeah, it would've been nice to see them mentioned more than once.
I have a bigger problem with "Bit", personally. It hangs around Flynn's program at the start of the film. Then it hangs around Flynn. At no point does it offer useful advice to either one. And then it's gone, poof. Why was it even there? Probably just to make the movie look cooler or more "computer-like". *shrug*
The fair-use clause has nothing to do with copy protection. Sure, you're entitled to use samples of the music for limited purposes, and you're entitled to make backups for your own use, but that doesn't mean the CD manufacturers have to make it easy for you. In fact, they don't have to make it possible for you to practice "fair use" at all -- the copyright laws only say what's legal, they don't require the copyright owners to make it possible.
But copy protection doesn't do that anyways. Preventing you from making perfect digital copies of your CDs or ripping MP3s to trade online in no way interferes with fair use using other technologies -- audio tape, for instance, is still perfectly practical toward those ends.
But, continuing upwards through your argument, the article doesn't even talk about that. It talks about the CD industry passing off copy-protected CDs as ordinary CDs, and if you read the article, you'll see that Rep. Boucher will be perfectly happy if the industry agrees to label all copy-protected CDs as such, so that purchasers who don't want to be fooled aren't. He's not opposed to copy protection per se, just copy protection used without notice.
Boucher's complaints are twofold: Americans may not know they're buying crippled discs, and that the new discs don't work on all players.... Boucher wouldn't give details on what approach he's considering -- obvious possibilities include ordering the music industry to stick labels on protected CDs, or an outright ban of that technology.
In other words, he not necessarily advocating blocking all copy-protection on CDs. He just wants to stop the music industry from passing off copy-protected CDs as regular copyable CDs. If the music industry agrees to label all copy-protected CDs as such, he'll still be happy.
Quote: Jobs suggested that recording labels need to make it easier for consumers to use their own music however they want. "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own," said Jobs.
People can create pirate copies of music with this computer, but they can do that with most modern computers. Why pick on Apple?
Especially since Apple was long scolded for being pretty much the last computer manufacturer to ship CD-R drives with their machines. I can only assume Apple's legendary ease-of-use has finally caught up to them, despite the prominent "Don't Steal Music" disclaimer.
How would sites written in Flash be accessible to disabled users of the internet, that rely on alt-tags and other items to navigate a site successfully.
They're not. Simple as that.
If you're developing using Flash, then you're assuming your client has a graphical operating system and a graphical browser. Granted, it's a minority of the web-surfing world that relies on Braille displays or text-to-speech readers or keyboard-only access, but they do exist.
However, it's not really fair to shoot the messenger. Developers have been demanding this sort of thing from Flash, because clients have been demanding it from developers. Macromedia is simply giving people what they've asked for.
It's the clients that are the problem, clients and underexperienced developers. Too many people don't realize that "universal accessibility" is something that should be built into every Web site, or at least taken into account. The example site cited in the News.com article understands this perfectly -- they include a link to a low-bandwidth version which provides the same functionality using ordinary Web-based forms, and of course the home page lists the phone number for information and reservations. Those who have Flash are treated to a dynamically-updated reservation system stored entirely on one Web page; the rest have ready access to non-Flash or phone-based methods. Good developers; much praise and approval from self.
Of course, there will be developers who create their sites using Flash and nothing but, and they'll eventually get complaints and either address them or ignore them. But there have always been developers who ignore accessibility; I'm still the only guy at my company who uses ALT tags universally. But it's not fair to say "Macromedia shouldn't be offering this tool" when it's the developers and clients, not Macromedia, who need to consider accessibility.
Software like Linux also inherently has more appeal to many non-English speaking countries than software generated and controlled by big American firms, Raymond pointed out, which is becoming a significant issue as PC growth outside the US becomes the industry's main driver. "Countries like South Korea are finding that open source is a precondition to their economic and cultural autonomy," he said.
The reason pitifully few films are legitimately available on the Internet is not producer hoarding. It is that those valuable creative works can't be adequately protected from theft.
He's right, you know. That's also the reason Napster got shut down and KazAA is trying to be: the movie and music industries will not put out their own copies of their media. I want freely-downloadable media for pennies a copy as much as anyone, but I can't get it because the owners won't put it out without copy protection.
What am I stuck with instead? P2P software that gets me assorted copies of pirated media, some of which is at an unusable quality, all of which is subject to interruptions and highly variable download speeds. I've been saying for years that I would gladly pay a single site $10 a month if it meant I could download my heart's content of music (or movies) of reliable quality, at reliable speeds over a reliable connection, with a useable search engine giving me complete results.
If having MS install copy-protection at the OS level means the media companies will finally make this available, then I can stomach it. They don't have to eliminate MP3s or AVIs, they just have to include something that will play files that are copy-protected enough to satisfy the media owners. If they don't want me copying it to recordable media, then it should be free or pennies apiece. If they don't mind me making copies for myself, then I'll pay more. And they can quote me on that.
The entire superhero population of the MU is already blacklisted from all NYC-area companies providing auto insurance, home insurance, and fire insurance, while the life insurance companies are investigating about half of them for fraud in light of their various resurrections.
- Marvel writers (and writers of other comics, book and television universes) begin clustering their characters more, instead of letting them encounter each other more or less randomly, to increase the subconscious sense of realism.
- Software developers creating "artificial universes" apply the study to increase the clustering, and hence the underlying realism, of their creations -- for instance, Non-Player Characters in EverQuest or The Sims.
- Practical implementation for Marvel: LAY OFF THE CROSSOVERS and let characters who know each other already keep in touch each other instead.
IMO, there are two types of people who trade tv shows
...and a third: people who don't get the channels, or can't rent or afford to buy the DVDs, but want to watch the shows all their friends are raving about.
Don't pretend that third group doesn't exist. The article mentions "Sex in the City" and "Friends," but if you go online you don't have to look far to find shows and movies that are only available in recorded format. People wouldn't be swapping ripped copies of anime imports or "Shrek" -- not available on TV but expensive on tape/DVD -- if that was the case.
The TV networks should be flattered that anyone would want to "pirate" their crap.
You're willfully missing the point. It's not popularity that makes money for the networks, it's advertising, which online pirates strip out, or VHS/DVD purchases, which *probably* aren't being made.
Unlike MP3 swapping, there's a HUGE difference between watching a quarter-screen pixelated copy of a show and seeing it on my 32" television, but that's clearly not a big deal for many viewers, and in any case, it WILL change as technology and bandwidth progresses.
The networks are losing money on this, and that's why they're upset. They don't care if you watch it, they only care if you watch it with the commercials in.
Depends on where you live. Remember, in the UK guns are outlawed for precisely this reason.
To rehash the old argument: You're right about crowbars, because crowbars are intended to be used for opening things, and that's still their primary use. However, when a tool's intended and primary purpose is to commit illegal acts, its legality becomes dubious.
In the USA, the argument goes that guns' primary use is for self-defense and hunting, so they should be legal. In the UK, that doesn't hold up. In the case of the Flash Advance, its primary purpose is to duplicate licensed GBA games from your friends or play downloaded ROMs from the Internet. That puts it in the "dubious" category.
Frankly, I have little sympathy for Zophar's Domain. They should have seen this coming.
Some Chinese and Korean systems administrators said documentation for the software they use is often available only in English, which complicates securing their systems.
This is an honest problem, because it's not the the ISP's fault that they can't get native-language documentation for the software. But if they're running the software at all, it becomes their problem. Why would any responsible system administrator install software when he can't read the documentation? Educated English speakers aren't such a minority in the far East. It's the ISP's responsibility to hire them, or else get software documented in their own language.
Cultural issues also contribute to the problem. Many spammers in Asia say they do not understand why spam is a problem. "It's a sign of respect that someone sends you an electric business card. It means he wants you as a customer."
This is just willful naivete on their part. If they think that sending an electronic business card is a "sign of respect", that's fine. But they need to understand that in the West, unsolicited advertising is an overwhelming inconvenience and is not welcome by the vast majority. Cultural relativism swings both ways.
Piracy is free and open and common in the far East, which irritates Western corporations and makes poor Western college students and hackers giggle with glee. It's rampant and unpoliced because the notion of information ownership and copyright just don't exist over there. But here's the flip side to that coin: unrestricted dataflow from the West into the East also means unrestricted dataflow from the East to the West. As music, movies and software comes in, spam goes out. Like it or not, they're both travelling through the same door.
If the Chinese ISPs want to provide their people a gateway to the free world, then it's their responsibility to cooperate with how the free world works and act responsibly within that setting. If they don't, then they get blacklisted like this and lose their right to be a gateway.
Setting up barriers like this is regrettable, but when the originating ISPs refuse to take responsibility for the actions of their users or close their open mail servers, there would seem to be no other choice.
A good thing when you're trying to stop spam, a bad thing when the MPAA is trying to stop piracy. Depends on what you do for a living, I guess.
Although Pressplay and MusicNet license the music, the bands are not paid a licensing fee. Instead, the labels pay their artists a standard royalty for each song accessed by a fan, as they would for a CD sold. This means that the artist gets on average less than 15 percent instead of 50 percent. But, out of that, 35 to 45 percent is deducted for standard CD expenses like packaging and promotional copies -- expenses that obviously don't exist in the online world.
And:
To try to avoid future protests, most major labels have added a clause to their standard recording contracts allowing the label to sell an act's songs on the Internet, including all subscription and pay-per-use services. It is very difficult, said Mr. Stiffelman, for a new band to have enough leverage to remove this clause from its contract.
In other words, the bands' lawyers are arguing that the music label contracts give a royalty for each copy of the song sold, and a license payment for each instance of the song used but not sold. Future contracts will probably alter this, but the bands feel they deserve a higher license fee instead of a tiny royalty -- which is cut further by CD packaging expenses which the online world doesn't have.
Bands do not "sign away" all the rights to their songs when they record with a label. They retain the right to a cut of the profits. The argument here is that the cut they're getting is unfairly and possibly illegally small.
Slashdot Mirror
This tactic assumes you're never spotted and banned from posting to those weblogs again. You'd have to constantly provide relevant posts, or constantly update your list of comment URLs.
As for automated newsgroup posting, that's not part of a "normal" Google search, it's an entirely separate engine. So no worries there.
Yes, but what's the real significance? People aren't likely to go to Google and search for "dumb motherfucker" and laugh to see "George W. Bush" displayed, unless they're told to try it. They're going to search for "George W. Bush", and doing so spectacularly fails to produce a single result titled "dumb motherfucker".
It was a glitch, and a funny one, but it wasn't even remotely exploitable.
It's not the banking system, but the currency that's important.
The banks are the ones that get the interest; the Swiss government is the one that gets income tax from the banks. So, yes, it is the banking system that's important, since they can always support another currency.
The users have found a way to "bomb" Google to improve the rankings of particular webpages, and ensure a site is near the top of the results for particular search phrases.
Well, yes, but it's not easy. The article describes several dozen to several hundred bloggers working together to drive a certain word or phrase toward a certain URL. In other words, it takes a large, concerted effort to deceive Google's engine, and this fact alone provides reassurance that Google is working according to plan.
Somewhere else, on this site, Scientology has been accused of using their large network of sites and members to do the same thing, driving searches for "Scientology" and related words to their own sites rather than those of debunkers. Again, this takes a large and concerted effort, which is a virtue of Google rather than a vice.
Is Google on the verge of breaking because such a thing is possible? Of course not. But there are people powering the search engine on the back end, making improvements constantly in response to issues like this. And their cross-linking approach to ranking pages, while not perfect, remains the most reliable way yet found to judge a match's relevance.
If it works correctly 99% of the time, and Google is constantly working on the last 1%, that still makes it better than anything else out there.
Well, that and the most stable and widely-used banking system on the planet. Gotta give 'em credit for that.
;-)
Good quote, though.
So don't support subscriptions. Take the ads and enjoy 'em. It's what I do, and so is most anyone else.
I found the title more funny than anything else, and it's certainly not Slashdot's fault you had a knee-jerk response to it before actually reading the paragraph.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175108.html
Many Slashdot readers use Microsoft Windows.
Many of those also use word processors.
Of those, several probably have speech recognition and microphones installed as well.
Therefore, this affects them and their daily performance.
This news isn't MS-bashing, it's useful information for PC users. If you're going to troll, do it with an article that actually helps you make your point.
More details, from that same URL:
As every good Tron fan knows, the grid bugs were almost entirely edited out of the movie (what was left was about two seconds of an animation of a grid bug creating itself). Grid bugs appear in the game because of pressures to develop the arcade game in time for the release of the movie (all part of Disney's sales strategy for the movie's launch -- posters and trailers ended with a tagline along the lines of: "See the movie. Play the game.") So, game programmers had to use whatever script elements they could from the movie before the film itself was actually completed. Light cycles, tanks, recognizers, and the MCP, of course, all made the final cut -- the grid bugs did not.
I guess the "grid bugs" were just mentioned to explain why they couldn't afford to jump out of their simulation/ship when they got attacked a few minutes later. But yeah, it would've been nice to see them mentioned more than once.
I have a bigger problem with "Bit", personally. It hangs around Flynn's program at the start of the film. Then it hangs around Flynn. At no point does it offer useful advice to either one. And then it's gone, poof. Why was it even there? Probably just to make the movie look cooler or more "computer-like". *shrug*
The fair-use clause has nothing to do with copy protection. Sure, you're entitled to use samples of the music for limited purposes, and you're entitled to make backups for your own use, but that doesn't mean the CD manufacturers have to make it easy for you. In fact, they don't have to make it possible for you to practice "fair use" at all -- the copyright laws only say what's legal, they don't require the copyright owners to make it possible.
But copy protection doesn't do that anyways. Preventing you from making perfect digital copies of your CDs or ripping MP3s to trade online in no way interferes with fair use using other technologies -- audio tape, for instance, is still perfectly practical toward those ends.
But, continuing upwards through your argument, the article doesn't even talk about that. It talks about the CD industry passing off copy-protected CDs as ordinary CDs, and if you read the article, you'll see that Rep. Boucher will be perfectly happy if the industry agrees to label all copy-protected CDs as such, so that purchasers who don't want to be fooled aren't. He's not opposed to copy protection per se, just copy protection used without notice.
Boucher's complaints are twofold: Americans may not know they're buying crippled discs, and that the new discs don't work on all players.... Boucher wouldn't give details on what approach he's considering -- obvious possibilities include ordering the music industry to stick labels on protected CDs, or an outright ban of that technology.
In other words, he not necessarily advocating blocking all copy-protection on CDs. He just wants to stop the music industry from passing off copy-protected CDs as regular copyable CDs. If the music industry agrees to label all copy-protected CDs as such, he'll still be happy.
Record companies should loosen their grip
Quote: Jobs suggested that recording labels need to make it easier for consumers to use their own music however they want. "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own," said Jobs.
People can create pirate copies of music with this computer, but they can do that with most modern computers. Why pick on Apple?
Especially since Apple was long scolded for being pretty much the last computer manufacturer to ship CD-R drives with their machines. I can only assume Apple's legendary ease-of-use has finally caught up to them, despite the prominent "Don't Steal Music" disclaimer.
How would sites written in Flash be accessible to disabled users of the internet, that rely on alt-tags and other items to navigate a site successfully.
They're not. Simple as that.
If you're developing using Flash, then you're assuming your client has a graphical operating system and a graphical browser. Granted, it's a minority of the web-surfing world that relies on Braille displays or text-to-speech readers or keyboard-only access, but they do exist.
However, it's not really fair to shoot the messenger. Developers have been demanding this sort of thing from Flash, because clients have been demanding it from developers. Macromedia is simply giving people what they've asked for.
It's the clients that are the problem, clients and underexperienced developers. Too many people don't realize that "universal accessibility" is something that should be built into every Web site, or at least taken into account. The example site cited in the News.com article understands this perfectly -- they include a link to a low-bandwidth version which provides the same functionality using ordinary Web-based forms, and of course the home page lists the phone number for information and reservations. Those who have Flash are treated to a dynamically-updated reservation system stored entirely on one Web page; the rest have ready access to non-Flash or phone-based methods. Good developers; much praise and approval from self.
Of course, there will be developers who create their sites using Flash and nothing but, and they'll eventually get complaints and either address them or ignore them. But there have always been developers who ignore accessibility; I'm still the only guy at my company who uses ALT tags universally. But it's not fair to say "Macromedia shouldn't be offering this tool" when it's the developers and clients, not Macromedia, who need to consider accessibility.
Software like Linux also inherently has more appeal to many non-English speaking countries than software generated and controlled by big American firms, Raymond pointed out, which is becoming a significant issue as PC growth outside the US becomes the industry's main driver. "Countries like South Korea are finding that open source is a precondition to their economic and cultural autonomy," he said.
I thought we'd already seen that countries like South Korea find open source to be a convenient excuse for serving as a spam gateway. Win some, lose some, I guess....
The reason pitifully few films are legitimately available on the Internet is not producer hoarding. It is that those valuable creative works can't be adequately protected from theft.
He's right, you know. That's also the reason Napster got shut down and KazAA is trying to be: the movie and music industries will not put out their own copies of their media. I want freely-downloadable media for pennies a copy as much as anyone, but I can't get it because the owners won't put it out without copy protection.
What am I stuck with instead? P2P software that gets me assorted copies of pirated media, some of which is at an unusable quality, all of which is subject to interruptions and highly variable download speeds. I've been saying for years that I would gladly pay a single site $10 a month if it meant I could download my heart's content of music (or movies) of reliable quality, at reliable speeds over a reliable connection, with a useable search engine giving me complete results.
If having MS install copy-protection at the OS level means the media companies will finally make this available, then I can stomach it. They don't have to eliminate MP3s or AVIs, they just have to include something that will play files that are copy-protected enough to satisfy the media owners. If they don't want me copying it to recordable media, then it should be free or pennies apiece. If they don't mind me making copies for myself, then I'll pay more. And they can quote me on that.
The entire superhero population of the MU is already blacklisted from all NYC-area companies providing auto insurance, home insurance, and fire insurance, while the life insurance companies are investigating about half of them for fraud in light of their various resurrections.
- Marvel writers (and writers of other comics, book and television universes) begin clustering their characters more, instead of letting them encounter each other more or less randomly, to increase the subconscious sense of realism.
- Software developers creating "artificial universes" apply the study to increase the clustering, and hence the underlying realism, of their creations -- for instance, Non-Player Characters in EverQuest or The Sims.
- Practical implementation for Marvel: LAY OFF THE CROSSOVERS and let characters who know each other already keep in touch each other instead.
IMO, there are two types of people who trade tv shows
...and a third: people who don't get the channels, or can't rent or afford to buy the DVDs, but want to watch the shows all their friends are raving about.
Don't pretend that third group doesn't exist. The article mentions "Sex in the City" and "Friends," but if you go online you don't have to look far to find shows and movies that are only available in recorded format. People wouldn't be swapping ripped copies of anime imports or "Shrek" -- not available on TV but expensive on tape/DVD -- if that was the case.
The TV networks should be flattered that anyone would want to "pirate" their crap.
You're willfully missing the point. It's not popularity that makes money for the networks, it's advertising, which online pirates strip out, or VHS/DVD purchases, which *probably* aren't being made.
Unlike MP3 swapping, there's a HUGE difference between watching a quarter-screen pixelated copy of a show and seeing it on my 32" television, but that's clearly not a big deal for many viewers, and in any case, it WILL change as technology and bandwidth progresses.
The networks are losing money on this, and that's why they're upset. They don't care if you watch it, they only care if you watch it with the commercials in.
Depends on where you live. Remember, in the UK guns are outlawed for precisely this reason.
To rehash the old argument: You're right about crowbars, because crowbars are intended to be used for opening things, and that's still their primary use. However, when a tool's intended and primary purpose is to commit illegal acts, its legality becomes dubious.
In the USA, the argument goes that guns' primary use is for self-defense and hunting, so they should be legal. In the UK, that doesn't hold up. In the case of the Flash Advance, its primary purpose is to duplicate licensed GBA games from your friends or play downloaded ROMs from the Internet. That puts it in the "dubious" category.
Frankly, I have little sympathy for Zophar's Domain. They should have seen this coming.
The article says:
Some Chinese and Korean systems administrators said documentation for the software they use is often available only in English, which complicates securing their systems.
This is an honest problem, because it's not the the ISP's fault that they can't get native-language documentation for the software. But if they're running the software at all, it becomes their problem. Why would any responsible system administrator install software when he can't read the documentation? Educated English speakers aren't such a minority in the far East. It's the ISP's responsibility to hire them, or else get software documented in their own language.
Cultural issues also contribute to the problem. Many spammers in Asia say they do not understand why spam is a problem. "It's a sign of respect that someone sends you an electric business card. It means he wants you as a customer."
This is just willful naivete on their part. If they think that sending an electronic business card is a "sign of respect", that's fine. But they need to understand that in the West, unsolicited advertising is an overwhelming inconvenience and is not welcome by the vast majority. Cultural relativism swings both ways.
Piracy is free and open and common in the far East, which irritates Western corporations and makes poor Western college students and hackers giggle with glee. It's rampant and unpoliced because the notion of information ownership and copyright just don't exist over there. But here's the flip side to that coin: unrestricted dataflow from the West into the East also means unrestricted dataflow from the East to the West. As music, movies and software comes in, spam goes out. Like it or not, they're both travelling through the same door.
If the Chinese ISPs want to provide their people a gateway to the free world, then it's their responsibility to cooperate with how the free world works and act responsibly within that setting. If they don't, then they get blacklisted like this and lose their right to be a gateway.
Setting up barriers like this is regrettable, but when the originating ISPs refuse to take responsibility for the actions of their users or close their open mail servers, there would seem to be no other choice.
A good thing when you're trying to stop spam, a bad thing when the MPAA is trying to stop piracy. Depends on what you do for a living, I guess.
Although Pressplay and MusicNet license the music, the bands are not paid a licensing fee. Instead, the labels pay their artists a standard royalty for each song accessed by a fan, as they would for a CD sold. This means that the artist gets on average less than 15 percent instead of 50 percent. But, out of that, 35 to 45 percent is deducted for standard CD expenses like packaging and promotional copies -- expenses that obviously don't exist in the online world.
And:
To try to avoid future protests, most major labels have added a clause to their standard recording contracts allowing the label to sell an act's songs on the Internet, including all subscription and pay-per-use services. It is very difficult, said Mr. Stiffelman, for a new band to have enough leverage to remove this clause from its contract.
In other words, the bands' lawyers are arguing that the music label contracts give a royalty for each copy of the song sold, and a license payment for each instance of the song used but not sold. Future contracts will probably alter this, but the bands feel they deserve a higher license fee instead of a tiny royalty -- which is cut further by CD packaging expenses which the online world doesn't have.
Bands do not "sign away" all the rights to their songs when they record with a label. They retain the right to a cut of the profits. The argument here is that the cut they're getting is unfairly and possibly illegally small.