Sure, other stores only offer windows-proprietary format for download which won't play on the iPod. So burn the songs to CD, then rip them via iTunes so that the iPod can play. Obviously a bizarre solution, but how many people actually prefer a different music store -vs- iTunes?
...wouldn't this mean that RIAA member companies should see their CD sales soar again. Afterall, every time you download an illegal MP3, you're taking away the money you would have spent on CDs from RIAA. With all those MP3s gone, people will have no choice but to go out and buy all those songs.
Just because you can't think of improvements does not mean improvements cannot be made. That's the beauty of a free market.
Sure, and I'm not arguing against the free market here. All I'm saying is that iTunes -- as a jukebox/download program -- has reached a high water mark. Additional features are just bloat bast this point, imo. Look at programs like ACDSee; a picture viewing program. It used to be the de-facto standard for most people to view images on their computer, but they just kept adding and adding to it until it bacame a pile of bloat that took forever to startup. Now, most people use something else.
The natural reaction to sales decreasing is by lowering prices to increase sales. Somewhere in the music business continuum, the current CD price has to break and drop, forcing all music sales down.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. When you buy that 0.99 track from iTunes, nearly 50% of the cost is eaten by credit card processing. This isn't a problem that goes away overnight, and it's the main reason micro-payments never really took off. There's no way around this fee, and it's not going to drop any time soon.
Then there's the licensing fee that paid to the copyright holders. After all is said an done, there's not a lot to do with the price. Maybe you'll see 5 cents knocked off the price eventually, but I doubt it.
Sure, competition is great in an emerging market, but at some point you'll reach that high water mark where adding more stuff just degrades the product. Honestly, I can't think of a single feature relating to digital music that I'd like to see in iTunes that isn't already there.
It's like MS Word. Most people are still using a pre-2000 version of Office because it does everything they could ask of it.
The only thing competition will do is drive price. At 0.99 per track, there's very little profit in there for digital downloads (most is eaten up by credit card fees and licensing). Competition will ensure that price doesn't go up in the near future, but I don't think it will see it go down at all.
An industry leader has already emerged in the digital music business -- Apple's iTunes. They've set the bar and I'm not sure how that bar can be raised.
Does this new Napster service offer anything better than iTunes? The article claims more songs are available using Napster, but then goes on to say that some are only available as streamed audio, and then only to those who pay the $10/month. Of the 500,000 songs, how many are truly available as downloadable tracks?
iTunes, without requiring any purchases, comes with a few hundred radio stations, all of them free. Napster radio stations are only available to those who pay the $10/month (according to the article).
So where's the innovation? The industry is struggling to catch up to Apple, and Apple has a huge lead. I can't think of any feature I'd like to see in iTunes that isn't already there, and what is there is done really well.
Reviews can make or break a company. Just look at the high-end graphics card market: their main customer base are the gamers who live and die by benchmark numbers.
Hell, I work with commercial billing systems, and I can tell you nightmare stories of benchmarks being run on "special" data.
"... significant willful infringements of copyrights... that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain shall be considered willful infringement on a commercial scale...."
Let me get this straight....there is no direct or indirect financial motivation, yet this is somehow equated with commercial infringement?
I'm all for throwing the real IP pirates in jail -- the ones who copy CDs and DVDs, press 1000's of counterfeits, then sell them for a huge profit. Making money like this really is piracy (in a newer, less-traditional use of the word anyway). But to equate that kind of crime to that of the college student sharing a few tunes on their computer for free....mind boggling!
...at least here in Alberta, this happens already. When I got my cell phone I had a telemarketer call the next day. When I called up my phone company to discuss this, I was told there's nothing preventing them from doing so.
However, I've had my phone for nearly a year and have received perhaps 5 calls in total. Obviously people aren't too happy about being called on their cell phones and are probably not going to buy anything. Even the people who would normally buy from a telemarketer aren't going to be in a mood to listen to a sales pitch when they're paying for it!
I don't understand why companies keep putting DRM on CDs and DVDs. Is it just ignorance, or do they honestly believe there's value there? I forget how much Macrovision protection on DVDs costs, but it's a significant piece of the total cost of the DVD -- I'm sure that SunnComm charges a similar price for each CD shipped with its "DRM" (I use quotes because this really is the most pathetic DRM I've heard of).
Where is the value for the producers of those DVDs and CDs? All it takes is a single MP3 to be leaked and all the copy protection on the CDs out there is useless. Back in the Napster days I ripped a fairly obscure song and made it available. Even today I can search DC Hubs or Kazaa and find my MP3 all over the place. Copy protection will only ever work if it prevents 100% of copying...which it never will.
My advice to RIAA and MPAA member companies: just drop the whole notion of DRM on your products. Trust your customers, give them what they want, treat them with respect. Most of us won't screw you...honest!
All DRM does is punish the honest user, spawn bizarre laws like the DMCA, and make a fun target for the release groups to crack.
I'm a bit late on my own story, and it's too bad since it seems to general concensus is "she shouldn't have thrown that personal information in the garbage." Obviously she realises this now, but I was hoping for advice on how to go after the company who did this.
In order to respond to these ongoing challenges and maintain a compelling service for our valued customers, EMusic will be making a number of significant changes in the coming weeks and months. As part of these changes, we will be discontinuing the current unlimited service plan and replacing it with a new service offering, as described above.
Wow! If they value their customer anymore, they may have to stop downloads alltogether!
"But part of the invention process involves coming up with the question in the first place (ie, realizing the utility of such a feature)"
You are blurring the line between inventing and patenting, I believe. Yes, the invention process generally starts with a question along the lines of "How can I...", but the patent process covers the answer to that question, not question itself.
I'm not so much bothered by the prior art issue -- I have a much bigger issue with this patent. I'm willing to bet that if you were to take an average programmer and ask them "how can I modify this IM program so that the person you are talking to knows that you are currently typing without actually sending each character as you type it?", they'd come up with the exact same solution as described by this patent.
Unlike many on slashdot, I actually believe there are some scenarios where software/algorithm patents are applicable. However, the standard questions still need to be asked: does this do something useful, and is the implementation non-obvious? Why (aside from purely financial reasons) are patents like this being granted?
You're talking to a group of people that does most of their shopping online.
While this is true, I'd say the #1 reason for buying things online is because they're typically cheaper. There's a certain element of convenience, and a certain element of laziness, but at the end of the day there's also a smaller price tag. I don't know how much movies cost to rent in the US, but in Canada I think a new release movie is around $4 at major chains (~2.50 US?) and can be had for much less at the independant rental places. That's a HUGE tradeoff between price and convenience.
Holy shit. Break it down...let's say I watch 7 movies a month (yeah right, I wish I had that much time).
$4 for movie + $1 rental + $.50 for activation fee (assuming roughly 70 movies a year, activation fee spread out over year) = $5.50 per movie, with more restrictions than you get with traditional rentals.
Where's the cost savings? Why on earth would people buy this...are they really so lazy that driving to the movie store is such an effort (please don't answer that!).
Well, I'm late to the discussion as usual, but hopefully this comment still gets seen by those that need to see it.
There's an awful lot of talk on/. about how it is now possible to build your own home recording studio on the cheap ($10,000 gets bandied about often). While this is certainly true, I'd like to point out that this doesn't mean professional recording can be done by the masses, just that amature recording is much more affordable.
My friend is a professional sound engineer. The stuff he does just can't be replicated by a cheap computer program or a $10,000 setup. He has built several different sound rooms in which he records bands, each at enormous expense. He's got one room that is covered in egg shell-like foam that seems to kill sound the second you step into the room (at a cost of $10,000 just for the special foam I believe). Another room has special wood on the walls and floor to simulate a different recording environment (again, very expensive).
Then there's the Mics. Even a single pro mic runs in the thousands. Don't think a little sound blaster mic plugged into your sound card is going to give you the same type of results.
All of this is without considering the fact that he's a trained sound engineer while Joe Homeuser is probably not. Since most people probably will say that they could do it themselves, let me try to provide an analogy here: the pro sound engineer is like a Java programmer who is an expert in their field, while the home amateur recorder is the equivalent of someone who's just read "learn Java in 21 days." To someone who doesn't know anything about programming at all they probably won't see much of a difference, but within the field the difference would be easily spotted. For a band trying to move past the "garage" image and pose themselves as professionals, it's worth considering this.
I think my friend bills around $80/hour now. At that rate you could probably record a few songs professionally for less than $5000. That seems like a pretty small amount of money in the grand scheme of things.
From the article, three ways to bring wealth creation back to the average person:
1. Write free software for individual industries
2. Make devices more responsive and easy to customize
3. Create a truly public key infrastructure
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't see those three things leading to "wealth for the common person." Certainly there are some businesses out there that would love to have free software, or not have to pay for basic encryption for POS systems. However, providing them with free software or no-cost encryption isn't going to "create wealth", just reduce the cost of business for those select businesses. Whooptee-doo.
If the cost of business is so high that the business is not valid, then perhaps that should be your first clue to find another way to make money. Like credit card fees, debit fees, store rent, bar code readers, employees, etc., software costs are just another cost as part of your business. While I'm sure it would be nice to reduce those costs, it's hardly a barrier preventing the common person from opening their own business.
If anything, businesses that need custom software are a wealth-creating opportunity for those of us who create software.
There are several programs for the Mac that will connect to Kazaa, therefore that's not a defense.
I guess this begs the question: what is
No matter what you come up with, the RIAA could counter. "You own a Mac, but who says you don't also own a PC.", "You brought your PC to court to show that you don't have any songs, but we believe you just deleted them." etc etc. If it goes to court, the RIAA has to provide more proof than just an IP address and a list of shared songs! Otherwise, they could potentially fabricate a complaint against anyone in the US that at some point had an account with an ISP, and there's be no way to counter the claim!
That said, (and IANAL) the standard of proof for civil cases is not the familiar "beyond a reasonable doubt" of civil cases, but much lower. That is why the alleged victims of alleged crimes who didn't prevail in criminal cases sometimes attempt to sue, because, the rules being different, it is easier to get a judgment against someone in civil suit. But it works the other way around, too.
That's why I ask who is responsible for the proof here: the defendant or the plaintiff? In a civil case, I imagine the defendant must prove they didn't do it, but in these cases I think showing a Mac receipt should do the trick nicely. All the RIAA has on you is an IP address -- they can't prove anything beyond "we know IP X.Y.Z was offering these songs." Much as they'd probably like to barge into your home and sieze all your computers, they currently don't have that power.
For a civil trial the burden of proof is well below "beyond a reasonable doubt", but how much lower is it? The RIAA have only an IP address as their proof. That's pretty weak to start with, and I would hope that, even for a civil case, it wouldn't take much to tear apart their case.
What happens if they decide to persue her again?
on
RIAA Sues the Wrong Person
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Since RIAA reserved the right to file suit against her again, what happens if they do (or if others use the "I own a Mac, I couldn't possibly be using Kazaa" defense)? If she truly owns a Mac, then she couldn't possibly have installed Kazaa. If I don't own a Mac but claim I do, is the burden of proof on me to prove I own a Mac, or on RIAA to prove I don't?
If the burden of proof is on the RIAA, then what can they do without a true warrant to search my home? That would go well beyond the powers granted to them by the DMCA and would require law enforcement intervention. There's no way to say "we know you don't own a Mac" without coming into my home to prove it.
If the burden of proof is on me, couldn't I just borrow a Mac or a receipt of a friend's Mac (assuming I was lying) to prove I do, in fact, own a Mac? Since RIAA can't come storming into your house (yet...), this seems like it would be more than satisfactory to meet a civil suit requirement for dismissal doesn't it...?
I hope this is a viable idea, and everyone uses it to stick it to the RIAA.
isn't that all just from most standard web server log?
I already said this for the post below yours, but it bears repeating.
Yes, web sites keep logs of a lot of this stuff. I guess it's even possible that slashdot could store a bunch of info about logged in users with regards to links that they've clicked on, etc.
However, we are talking about Google here. For most people, Google is the starting point for any web traversing they'll do that doesn't involve bookmarked-sites. I'll try to provide a decent analogy that explains why I'd be more worried about Google tracking this stuff than/.: If you go to the grocery store and use their "club card", you are having personal information stored into a database about your purchases -- consider that the same as/. storing stuff about you. Now imagine that some company is tracking your car/bike/and walking habits. They know where you've travelled to, what you were looking for when you travelled there, and when you started your journey. That worries me far more than some grocery store keeping track of the fact I like fruit rollups.
And it's not just a simple matter of web logs. Why does google need a cookie on your computer with a unique ID? Why is that cookie set to (effectivly) never expire? What possible reason could Google have for linking your unique ID to your search terms....
If it's just web logs, then while do they need that cookie on your computer with the unique ID and an expiry set to 2038?
I can understand tracking search terms, but not when those searches are correlated to a unique cookie ID. What value is it to google be able to answer the question "what searches did the computer with cookie ID XYZ perform?" I don't think you'll find an answer to that question that doesn't make you want to buy reams of tin foil.
Slashdot Mirror
5. You want a choice in online music stores.
Sure, other stores only offer windows-proprietary format for download which won't play on the iPod. So burn the songs to CD, then rip them via iTunes so that the iPod can play. Obviously a bizarre solution, but how many people actually prefer a different music store -vs- iTunes?
Both Pepsi and McDonald's are paying Apple's retail price of 99 cents per song, sources say.
...wouldn't this mean that RIAA member companies should see their CD sales soar again. Afterall, every time you download an illegal MP3, you're taking away the money you would have spent on CDs from RIAA. With all those MP3s gone, people will have no choice but to go out and buy all those songs.
Just because you can't think of improvements does not mean improvements cannot be made. That's the beauty of a free market.
Sure, and I'm not arguing against the free market here. All I'm saying is that iTunes -- as a jukebox/download program -- has reached a high water mark. Additional features are just bloat bast this point, imo. Look at programs like ACDSee; a picture viewing program. It used to be the de-facto standard for most people to view images on their computer, but they just kept adding and adding to it until it bacame a pile of bloat that took forever to startup. Now, most people use something else.
The natural reaction to sales decreasing is by lowering prices to increase sales. Somewhere in the music business continuum, the current CD price has to break and drop, forcing all music sales down.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. When you buy that 0.99 track from iTunes, nearly 50% of the cost is eaten by credit card processing. This isn't a problem that goes away overnight, and it's the main reason micro-payments never really took off. There's no way around this fee, and it's not going to drop any time soon.
Then there's the licensing fee that paid to the copyright holders. After all is said an done, there's not a lot to do with the price. Maybe you'll see 5 cents knocked off the price eventually, but I doubt it.
Sure, competition is great in an emerging market, but at some point you'll reach that high water mark where adding more stuff just degrades the product. Honestly, I can't think of a single feature relating to digital music that I'd like to see in iTunes that isn't already there.
It's like MS Word. Most people are still using a pre-2000 version of Office because it does everything they could ask of it.
The only thing competition will do is drive price. At 0.99 per track, there's very little profit in there for digital downloads (most is eaten up by credit card fees and licensing). Competition will ensure that price doesn't go up in the near future, but I don't think it will see it go down at all.
An industry leader has already emerged in the digital music business -- Apple's iTunes. They've set the bar and I'm not sure how that bar can be raised.
Does this new Napster service offer anything better than iTunes? The article claims more songs are available using Napster, but then goes on to say that some are only available as streamed audio, and then only to those who pay the $10/month. Of the 500,000 songs, how many are truly available as downloadable tracks?
iTunes, without requiring any purchases, comes with a few hundred radio stations, all of them free. Napster radio stations are only available to those who pay the $10/month (according to the article).
So where's the innovation? The industry is struggling to catch up to Apple, and Apple has a huge lead. I can't think of any feature I'd like to see in iTunes that isn't already there, and what is there is done really well.
Reviews can make or break a company. Just look at the high-end graphics card market: their main customer base are the gamers who live and die by benchmark numbers.
Hell, I work with commercial billing systems, and I can tell you nightmare stories of benchmarks being run on "special" data.
"... significant willful infringements of copyrights ... that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain shall be considered willful infringement on a commercial scale. ..."
Let me get this straight....there is no direct or indirect financial motivation, yet this is somehow equated with commercial infringement?
I'm all for throwing the real IP pirates in jail -- the ones who copy CDs and DVDs, press 1000's of counterfeits, then sell them for a huge profit. Making money like this really is piracy (in a newer, less-traditional use of the word anyway). But to equate that kind of crime to that of the college student sharing a few tunes on their computer for free....mind boggling!
It's going to power the phantom.
...at least here in Alberta, this happens already. When I got my cell phone I had a telemarketer call the next day. When I called up my phone company to discuss this, I was told there's nothing preventing them from doing so.
However, I've had my phone for nearly a year and have received perhaps 5 calls in total. Obviously people aren't too happy about being called on their cell phones and are probably not going to buy anything. Even the people who would normally buy from a telemarketer aren't going to be in a mood to listen to a sales pitch when they're paying for it!
I don't understand why companies keep putting DRM on CDs and DVDs. Is it just ignorance, or do they honestly believe there's value there? I forget how much Macrovision protection on DVDs costs, but it's a significant piece of the total cost of the DVD -- I'm sure that SunnComm charges a similar price for each CD shipped with its "DRM" (I use quotes because this really is the most pathetic DRM I've heard of).
Where is the value for the producers of those DVDs and CDs? All it takes is a single MP3 to be leaked and all the copy protection on the CDs out there is useless. Back in the Napster days I ripped a fairly obscure song and made it available. Even today I can search DC Hubs or Kazaa and find my MP3 all over the place. Copy protection will only ever work if it prevents 100% of copying...which it never will.
My advice to RIAA and MPAA member companies: just drop the whole notion of DRM on your products. Trust your customers, give them what they want, treat them with respect. Most of us won't screw you...honest!
All DRM does is punish the honest user, spawn bizarre laws like the DMCA, and make a fun target for the release groups to crack.
I'm a bit late on my own story, and it's too bad since it seems to general concensus is "she shouldn't have thrown that personal information in the garbage." Obviously she realises this now, but I was hoping for advice on how to go after the company who did this.
In order to respond to these ongoing challenges and maintain a compelling service for our valued customers, EMusic will be making a number of significant changes in the coming weeks and months. As part of these changes, we will be discontinuing the current unlimited service plan and replacing it with a new service offering, as described above.
Wow! If they value their customer anymore, they may have to stop downloads alltogether!
"But part of the invention process involves coming up with the question in the first place (ie, realizing the utility of such a feature)"
You are blurring the line between inventing and patenting, I believe. Yes, the invention process generally starts with a question along the lines of "How can I...", but the patent process covers the answer to that question, not question itself.
I'm not so much bothered by the prior art issue -- I have a much bigger issue with this patent. I'm willing to bet that if you were to take an average programmer and ask them "how can I modify this IM program so that the person you are talking to knows that you are currently typing without actually sending each character as you type it?", they'd come up with the exact same solution as described by this patent.
Unlike many on slashdot, I actually believe there are some scenarios where software/algorithm patents are applicable. However, the standard questions still need to be asked: does this do something useful, and is the implementation non-obvious? Why (aside from purely financial reasons) are patents like this being granted?
You're talking to a group of people that does most of their shopping online.
While this is true, I'd say the #1 reason for buying things online is because they're typically cheaper. There's a certain element of convenience, and a certain element of laziness, but at the end of the day there's also a smaller price tag. I don't know how much movies cost to rent in the US, but in Canada I think a new release movie is around $4 at major chains (~2.50 US?) and can be had for much less at the independant rental places. That's a HUGE tradeoff between price and convenience.
$7/month rental fee for set-top box.
$4/movie
$30.00 activation fee in some areas.
Holy shit. Break it down...let's say I watch 7 movies a month (yeah right, I wish I had that much time).
$4 for movie + $1 rental + $.50 for activation fee (assuming roughly 70 movies a year, activation fee spread out over year) = $5.50 per movie, with more restrictions than you get with traditional rentals.
Where's the cost savings? Why on earth would people buy this...are they really so lazy that driving to the movie store is such an effort (please don't answer that!).
Well, I'm late to the discussion as usual, but hopefully this comment still gets seen by those that need to see it.
/. about how it is now possible to build your own home recording studio on the cheap ($10,000 gets bandied about often). While this is certainly true, I'd like to point out that this doesn't mean professional recording can be done by the masses, just that amature recording is much more affordable.
There's an awful lot of talk on
My friend is a professional sound engineer. The stuff he does just can't be replicated by a cheap computer program or a $10,000 setup. He has built several different sound rooms in which he records bands, each at enormous expense. He's got one room that is covered in egg shell-like foam that seems to kill sound the second you step into the room (at a cost of $10,000 just for the special foam I believe). Another room has special wood on the walls and floor to simulate a different recording environment (again, very expensive).
Then there's the Mics. Even a single pro mic runs in the thousands. Don't think a little sound blaster mic plugged into your sound card is going to give you the same type of results.
All of this is without considering the fact that he's a trained sound engineer while Joe Homeuser is probably not. Since most people probably will say that they could do it themselves, let me try to provide an analogy here: the pro sound engineer is like a Java programmer who is an expert in their field, while the home amateur recorder is the equivalent of someone who's just read "learn Java in 21 days." To someone who doesn't know anything about programming at all they probably won't see much of a difference, but within the field the difference would be easily spotted. For a band trying to move past the "garage" image and pose themselves as professionals, it's worth considering this.
I think my friend bills around $80/hour now. At that rate you could probably record a few songs professionally for less than $5000. That seems like a pretty small amount of money in the grand scheme of things.
From the article, three ways to bring wealth creation back to the average person:
1. Write free software for individual industries
2. Make devices more responsive and easy to customize
3. Create a truly public key infrastructure
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't see those three things leading to "wealth for the common person." Certainly there are some businesses out there that would love to have free software, or not have to pay for basic encryption for POS systems. However, providing them with free software or no-cost encryption isn't going to "create wealth", just reduce the cost of business for those select businesses. Whooptee-doo.
If the cost of business is so high that the business is not valid, then perhaps that should be your first clue to find another way to make money. Like credit card fees, debit fees, store rent, bar code readers, employees, etc., software costs are just another cost as part of your business. While I'm sure it would be nice to reduce those costs, it's hardly a barrier preventing the common person from opening their own business.
If anything, businesses that need custom software are a wealth-creating opportunity for those of us who create software.
There are several programs for the Mac that will connect to Kazaa, therefore that's not a defense.
I guess this begs the question: what is
No matter what you come up with, the RIAA could counter. "You own a Mac, but who says you don't also own a PC.", "You brought your PC to court to show that you don't have any songs, but we believe you just deleted them." etc etc. If it goes to court, the RIAA has to provide more proof than just an IP address and a list of shared songs! Otherwise, they could potentially fabricate a complaint against anyone in the US that at some point had an account with an ISP, and there's be no way to counter the claim!
That said, (and IANAL) the standard of proof for civil cases is not the familiar "beyond a reasonable doubt" of civil cases, but much lower. That is why the alleged victims of alleged crimes who didn't prevail in criminal cases sometimes attempt to sue, because, the rules being different, it is easier to get a judgment against someone in civil suit. But it works the other way around, too.
That's why I ask who is responsible for the proof here: the defendant or the plaintiff? In a civil case, I imagine the defendant must prove they didn't do it, but in these cases I think showing a Mac receipt should do the trick nicely. All the RIAA has on you is an IP address -- they can't prove anything beyond "we know IP X.Y.Z was offering these songs." Much as they'd probably like to barge into your home and sieze all your computers, they currently don't have that power.
For a civil trial the burden of proof is well below "beyond a reasonable doubt", but how much lower is it? The RIAA have only an IP address as their proof. That's pretty weak to start with, and I would hope that, even for a civil case, it wouldn't take much to tear apart their case.
Since RIAA reserved the right to file suit against her again, what happens if they do (or if others use the "I own a Mac, I couldn't possibly be using Kazaa" defense)? If she truly owns a Mac, then she couldn't possibly have installed Kazaa. If I don't own a Mac but claim I do, is the burden of proof on me to prove I own a Mac, or on RIAA to prove I don't?
If the burden of proof is on the RIAA, then what can they do without a true warrant to search my home? That would go well beyond the powers granted to them by the DMCA and would require law enforcement intervention. There's no way to say "we know you don't own a Mac" without coming into my home to prove it.
If the burden of proof is on me, couldn't I just borrow a Mac or a receipt of a friend's Mac (assuming I was lying) to prove I do, in fact, own a Mac? Since RIAA can't come storming into your house (yet...), this seems like it would be more than satisfactory to meet a civil suit requirement for dismissal doesn't it...?
I hope this is a viable idea, and everyone uses it to stick it to the RIAA.
Are you that paranoid? :)
;-)
Heh...I, too, have been at work for too long.
isn't that all just from most standard web server log?
/.: If you go to the grocery store and use their "club card", you are having personal information stored into a database about your purchases -- consider that the same as /. storing stuff about you. Now imagine that some company is tracking your car/bike/and walking habits. They know where you've travelled to, what you were looking for when you travelled there, and when you started your journey. That worries me far more than some grocery store keeping track of the fact I like fruit rollups.
I already said this for the post below yours, but it bears repeating.
Yes, web sites keep logs of a lot of this stuff. I guess it's even possible that slashdot could store a bunch of info about logged in users with regards to links that they've clicked on, etc.
However, we are talking about Google here. For most people, Google is the starting point for any web traversing they'll do that doesn't involve bookmarked-sites.
I'll try to provide a decent analogy that explains why I'd be more worried about Google tracking this stuff than
And it's not just a simple matter of web logs. Why does google need a cookie on your computer with a unique ID? Why is that cookie set to (effectivly) never expire? What possible reason could Google have for linking your unique ID to your search terms....
Oh my god!!!! Google keeps web server logs.
If it's just web logs, then while do they need that cookie on your computer with the unique ID and an expiry set to 2038?
I can understand tracking search terms, but not when those searches are correlated to a unique cookie ID. What value is it to google be able to answer the question "what searches did the computer with cookie ID XYZ perform?" I don't think you'll find an answer to that question that doesn't make you want to buy reams of tin foil.