But they don't need to do anything complicated for that. Fishing equipment companies just need to advertise during fishing shows.
And they've been using this sort of demographic information for years. The Nielsen ratings track the ages and sex of viewers as well as absolute numbers.
You're not. You're paying for the channels you watch. You agree to pay that price for those channels and the cable company is happy to provide the channels you don't want for free.
If they didn't provide these channels why would they charge you less? They already know how much you're willing to pay.
Hollywood makes movies for the big screen and DVD. The others are just extra perks.
Movies make the vast bulk of their money in the first year.
The general public isn't as concerned about movie stars as they once were.
Games really aren't that unique in terms of software engineering - I'd expect a rigger has a comparable level of technical skill to a software developer.
True. For porn to really work you need better porn. Video worked because people didn't need to go out to watch it. DVD was substantially better quality. The internet just provided so much. e-books offer a certain amount of convenience but it's not exactly a disruptive technology.
Why? Most of the software developers I know are pretty abysmal at arithmetic.
There's really not a lot of mathematics involved in most software development. The main exceptions are statistical software, cryptography, compression, graphics and physics simulations. Even then we've often let someone else do the hard work and wrapped it up in a library for us.
Is disk access time really the limiting factor for development time? I'd suggest what you really need is heaps of RAM and a big disk cache.
The primary advantage of an SSD is that it's cool. This is a good enough reason to buy any piece of tech but the thing will possibly wear out in a year or so, which will probably outweigh the cool factor.
No it does not. A ".torrent" file contains no data other than that which is needed to join the correct swarm, and initiate communication.
I'd urge you to learn about the bittorrent metafile format.
As well as a reference to a tracker, there's a list of piece identifiers which comprises a 20 byte SHA1 for each piece, and a list of files. Each SHA1 can only represent a single piece of a single set of files. It's unlikely that there are two identical hashes anywhere on bitorrent. There is a 1:1 correlation between the hash and the piece. A hash is a reference to an element in a table.
Change the data and it no longer works. This is true, but the same applies to changing the filter bank on an mp3 player, or changing from ASCII to a different character representation.
A URL is content neutral. Slashdot.org could contain a discussion forum, or the declaration of independence without any changes to the URL. A torrent can only refer to the specific set of files used to create it. Change the data and the torrent can not be used to download it. Remove the table of ASCII glyphs and a text file becomes useless.
There is a difference in that the lookup table itself is derived from a copyrighted work. I don't see why it should be considered non-infringing just because its lookup table is infringing.
But there's still the difference of permission. The retailer had explicit permission. You don't have. Hence however you redefine it, there's a difference.
There's an expectation that people will make reasonable measures to prevent crime. This is nothing new.
If you have an organisation that exists entirely for criminal activities, then you can expect to be prosecuted as an accessory, and while you can often claim ignorance, there will be a highly skilled prosecutor trying to prove beyond reasonable doubt (and extremely unlikely explanations are not reasonable doubt) that you did knowingly assist.
Not that I think Craigslist is doing this, but this is the basic principle this prosecution falls under.
They cross licence the patents and then switch to a different OS. Perhaps BSD would be unsuitable for some inexplicable reason. This is far from their only option. QNX is desiigned for devices like Tomtom, and it's likely to be a lot easier to get Linux software to work on that than Windows. Tomtom have the level of sales that would allow them to get a pretty sweet licensing deal from them.
Even if Tomtom do switch to Windows. Is there really a major gain for Microsoft here? It's useful for every PC in the world to be running their software, but that's because you need cross-compatibility. Tomtom just needs to be compatible with the software tomtom produce.
We did try something like that. Detecting beats is a little tricky. A firm whack on a drum is quite easily detectable. A quiet section is also quite easy to spot. Trouble is you get the vague uncertainties. Is that a soft beat or just a well emphasised consonant or abrupt change in tempo?
Changing the thresholds up to filter out the noise means quite a few beats get lost. Some songs it works pretty well, but not all of them.
Warner have no obligation to Harmonix. Their entire aim is to maximise their profits.
Harmonix have wildly different aims. They want to maximise their own profits.
Harmonix have in their favour the knowledge that Warner will make a profit through extra sales even if they get zero royalties. Warner have in their favour the knowledge that Harmonix will make a profit if they only keep a cent from each download.
This has nothing to do with the morality behind it. Both sides want to maximise profits. Both sides only have the one negotiating option of threatening to walk away.
100% of PS3 owners have a Blu-Ray drive. I imagine it will be standard on the next generation of consoles as well. Those are the platforms that really drive game development.
Claiming that information about how to obtain a work is also a copy of the work is even more bizare.
It's information on how to produce the work. That's the point, and that's the difference. I think it's an important difference. It's like transcribed sheet music. Distributing the transcription can infringe the composer's copyright even if the composer never wrote it down, and nobody plays from the sheet. The transcription isn;t the work it's just instructions on how to reproduce it.
Of course, your example actually lacks an original copy which is what you in the end copy from directly when you go through a torrent file,
Yup. I'm assuming Charlie had the original copy and the software and words file are in the public domain. But you presumably see Pete as the infringer in this case. That's fair enough. Based on that analysis, I agree that a torrent isn't infringing. I don't have enough of an idea about Swedish copyright law to know if your analysis is correct:)
Not sure I follow you, but are you claiming that a torrent file is actually a copy of the work (or works) of the files it conatin info about?
Essentially, that's what it boils down to. It's a representation of the work. Whether representation and copy are the same thing or not I'm not so sure.
Dealing with a torrent file can't be infringing in any way unless you claim that the torrent file itself should be treated as a copy of the work which doesn't make sense.
Why not? A torrent file has no purpose other that to recreate the file from its various pieces. Used normally it will recreate the file. The difference between it and an ASCII file is that the individual pieces are larger and have less redundancy, but look at it another way.
If Alice provides Pete with a list of words (a file of all words in English), Bob provides Pete with a computer program to decode a data file, and Charlie provides Pete with a data file of indices into words.txt to be used with the computer program. Combining the three would give you a Harry Potter book. Who has infringed copyright?
A torrent file contains no copyrighted material. The algorithms generate a link to a named file on a given set of computers. Nothing more. Unless you can show me how an entire movie or album can be contained in a few bytes.
It contains a list of pieces that are stored on separate computers and detailed instructions on how these pieces are assembled into files. It's much more than just a link. It's a link that can only possibly ever be used to infringe copyright (assuming distributing the file is infringing copyright). It's even possible that none of the individual pieces actually infringe copyright.
Hell, a 1400 gigabytes of video data can be contained on a 9GB DVD, or even a 1GB h264. It's not the representation of the data that's copyrighted, but the data that it represents. A torrent file represents exactly the same thing as the file it's used to download. You can't say the same of a link.
I'm not totally convinced by my own argument either. But I certainly don't agree that a.torrent is simply a link. Nor do I accept it as a certainty that a link to copyrighted data should automatically be assumed to be non-infringing if the intent of the link is to knowingly infringe copyright.
Certainly, if I upload a torrent, there's no way the TPB admins have any idea what it is, nor can we expect them to, any more than we can expect youTube to know what video I've just uploaded.
Copyright infringing videos uploaded to youTube are certainly infringing. The question is whether the torrent files of infringing works are. I would argue that they are. If such an argument was accepted, it would then be up to the prosecution to prove that the Pirate Bay knew they were infringing, which would not be easy, but I think the argument that the torrents themselves are not infringing is flawed.
That link has no purpose other than to facilitate the distribution of the video, which is not there with the permission of the copyright holder.
Good question. The MPAA would certainly say yes (assuming it does - no youTube access here). It's a legal grey area
What about oHg5SJYRHA0? You could use that to get the video from YouTube.
On its own or in the context that it's made clear it's a youtube URL?
The.torrent file, just like the HTTP link, are of no use alone. They both require other people to provide you with the data
Almost all data files require someone else to provide you with additional data.
This is a large murky grey area. Arguing that something should be legal because it's analogous to something that's analogous to something that's analogous to something is a bit pointless. Half a file may well infringe copyright, so does half of a half a file? Enough halves and you're down to a couple of bytes. There's no hard cut-off between legal an illegal.
You are woefully mistaken. Like a hyperlink, a torrent file is only a digital address card.
It's more than that. slashdot.org today contains different data from slashdot.org did yesterday. If Taco had a mind to, he could replace the site with the text of Harry Potter. Watchmen.torrent (assuming it exists and refers to the new movie) has no purpose other than to distribute a copy of Watchmen. Change the data it points to and the tracker will ignore you and continue to distribute the same file.
The copyrighted information is not in the torrent file in any of the same sense that it is within an MP3.
Both can be converted to copyrighted data using publicly available generalised methods. Both have no other significant purpose than producing the output data.
Maybe an mp3 is a bad example because its algorithmic rather than a table reference. So how about an ASCII text file of Harry Potter? All it is is a list of references. #79 represents an 'O', #110 is an 'n', and so on. It's only when you decode it into visible graphical symbols that it actually becomes something tangible as copyrighted information, yet a long enough list of these numbers can violate copyright. How are bitTorrent pieces substantially different from ASCII characters?
t is no different in essence than if people put music on their answering machines and then went to a cork bulletin board and pinned up their phone numbers. Pinning a phone number on a corkboard is not copyright violation, and to be illegal, there has to be law that prohibits pinning up phone numbers. The same is true of torrent files.
It is different. A phone number references a single source, the contents of which may change. A.torrent references hundreds of smaller sources, the contents of which are determined at the time the torrent is created, and dictate the format of the torrent file.
Yes, and you seem to be countering an argument that I didn't make. You're overgeneralising when I'm referring to specific files.
A torrent of a file, distribution of which infringes copyright, has no purpose other than distributing a file in a manner that infringes copyright. A torrent of a file that the author has given permission to distribute via bitorrent has no purpose other than to legally distribute a specific file that the author has given permission to distribute via bitorrent.
Because, entirely like BitTorrent it serves purposes that are not illegal.
What are the legal purpose of a torrent of the latest Hollywood blockbuster? I'm talking about specific torrents here, not the technology.
Here's the thing: a.torrent contains no data useful to anything but a BitTorrent client. It's just a pointer to the actual data. There's absolutely no proof that the actual content infringes anyone's copyrights.
But a specific torrent file has no purpose other than to facilitate distribution of a set of files. I think there's at least an argument that that makes it an infringing file. It's a set of data that when the correct algorithms are combined forms a copyright infringing file. An mp3 is a set of data that when the correct algorithms are combined forms some PCM audio data. They both have no purpose other than to generate some specific data. If the generated data infringes copyright, then why isn't the data generator also copyright infringing?
I see. Then either you're an idiot, or you have reliable evidence that religious people don't do as good a job as non-religious people.
What's the harm in hiring someone with religious beliefs? Would you also discriminate against someone with a phobia of clowns, or OCD? Or do you just want a cheap dig at religion because you're a proselytizing atheist who's every big as annoying as any other fanatic?
Slashdot Mirror
But they don't need to do anything complicated for that. Fishing equipment companies just need to advertise during fishing shows.
And they've been using this sort of demographic information for years. The Nielsen ratings track the ages and sex of viewers as well as absolute numbers.
You're not. You're paying for the channels you watch. You agree to pay that price for those channels and the cable company is happy to provide the channels you don't want for free.
If they didn't provide these channels why would they charge you less? They already know how much you're willing to pay.
Learn to read! I was talking about those mechanical things that dig holes!
Hollywood makes movies for the big screen and DVD. The others are just extra perks.
Movies make the vast bulk of their money in the first year.
The general public isn't as concerned about movie stars as they once were.
Games really aren't that unique in terms of software engineering - I'd expect a rigger has a comparable level of technical skill to a software developer.
True. For porn to really work you need better porn. Video worked because people didn't need to go out to watch it. DVD was substantially better quality. The internet just provided so much. e-books offer a certain amount of convenience but it's not exactly a disruptive technology.
Why? Most of the software developers I know are pretty abysmal at arithmetic.
There's really not a lot of mathematics involved in most software development. The main exceptions are statistical software, cryptography, compression, graphics and physics simulations. Even then we've often let someone else do the hard work and wrapped it up in a library for us.
Is disk access time really the limiting factor for development time? I'd suggest what you really need is heaps of RAM and a big disk cache.
The primary advantage of an SSD is that it's cool. This is a good enough reason to buy any piece of tech but the thing will possibly wear out in a year or so, which will probably outweigh the cool factor.
No it does not. A ".torrent" file contains no data other than that which is needed to join the correct swarm, and initiate communication.
I'd urge you to learn about the bittorrent metafile format.
As well as a reference to a tracker, there's a list of piece identifiers which comprises a 20 byte SHA1 for each piece, and a list of files. Each SHA1 can only represent a single piece of a single set of files. It's unlikely that there are two identical hashes anywhere on bitorrent. There is a 1:1 correlation between the hash and the piece. A hash is a reference to an element in a table.
Change the data and it no longer works. This is true, but the same applies to changing the filter bank on an mp3 player, or changing from ASCII to a different character representation.
A URL is content neutral. Slashdot.org could contain a discussion forum, or the declaration of independence without any changes to the URL. A torrent can only refer to the specific set of files used to create it. Change the data and the torrent can not be used to download it. Remove the table of ASCII glyphs and a text file becomes useless.
There is a difference in that the lookup table itself is derived from a copyrighted work. I don't see why it should be considered non-infringing just because its lookup table is infringing.
But there's still the difference of permission. The retailer had explicit permission. You don't have. Hence however you redefine it, there's a difference.
There's an expectation that people will make reasonable measures to prevent crime. This is nothing new.
If you have an organisation that exists entirely for criminal activities, then you can expect to be prosecuted as an accessory, and while you can often claim ignorance, there will be a highly skilled prosecutor trying to prove beyond reasonable doubt (and extremely unlikely explanations are not reasonable doubt) that you did knowingly assist.
Not that I think Craigslist is doing this, but this is the basic principle this prosecution falls under.
You're transferring the licence without express permission of the copyright holder.
Poor little fanboy, the DVD->BluRay transition easily out pacing the VHS->DVD transition must be killing you.
Have you any links that show the stats, preferably based on the price of players rather than the time available?
They cross licence the patents and then switch to a different OS. Perhaps BSD would be unsuitable for some inexplicable reason. This is far from their only option. QNX is desiigned for devices like Tomtom, and it's likely to be a lot easier to get Linux software to work on that than Windows. Tomtom have the level of sales that would allow them to get a pretty sweet licensing deal from them.
Even if Tomtom do switch to Windows. Is there really a major gain for Microsoft here? It's useful for every PC in the world to be running their software, but that's because you need cross-compatibility. Tomtom just needs to be compatible with the software tomtom produce.
We did try something like that. Detecting beats is a little tricky. A firm whack on a drum is quite easily detectable. A quiet section is also quite easy to spot. Trouble is you get the vague uncertainties. Is that a soft beat or just a well emphasised consonant or abrupt change in tempo?
Changing the thresholds up to filter out the noise means quite a few beats get lost. Some songs it works pretty well, but not all of them.
It's a negotiation.
Warner have no obligation to Harmonix. Their entire aim is to maximise their profits.
Harmonix have wildly different aims. They want to maximise their own profits.
Harmonix have in their favour the knowledge that Warner will make a profit through extra sales even if they get zero royalties. Warner have in their favour the knowledge that Harmonix will make a profit if they only keep a cent from each download.
This has nothing to do with the morality behind it. Both sides want to maximise profits. Both sides only have the one negotiating option of threatening to walk away.
100% of PS3 owners have a Blu-Ray drive. I imagine it will be standard on the next generation of consoles as well. Those are the platforms that really drive game development.
Claiming that information about how to obtain a work is also a copy of the work is even more bizare.
It's information on how to produce the work. That's the point, and that's the difference. I think it's an important difference. It's like transcribed sheet music. Distributing the transcription can infringe the composer's copyright even if the composer never wrote it down, and nobody plays from the sheet. The transcription isn;t the work it's just instructions on how to reproduce it.
Of course, your example actually lacks an original copy which is what you in the end copy from directly when you go through a torrent file,
Yup. I'm assuming Charlie had the original copy and the software and words file are in the public domain. But you presumably see Pete as the infringer in this case. That's fair enough. Based on that analysis, I agree that a torrent isn't infringing. I don't have enough of an idea about Swedish copyright law to know if your analysis is correct:)
Not sure I follow you, but are you claiming that a torrent file is actually a copy of the work (or works) of the files it conatin info about?
Essentially, that's what it boils down to. It's a representation of the work. Whether representation and copy are the same thing or not I'm not so sure.
Dealing with a torrent file can't be infringing in any way unless you claim that the torrent file itself should be treated as a copy of the work which doesn't make sense.
Why not? A torrent file has no purpose other that to recreate the file from its various pieces. Used normally it will recreate the file. The difference between it and an ASCII file is that the individual pieces are larger and have less redundancy, but look at it another way.
If Alice provides Pete with a list of words (a file of all words in English), Bob provides Pete with a computer program to decode a data file, and Charlie provides Pete with a data file of indices into words.txt to be used with the computer program. Combining the three would give you a Harry Potter book. Who has infringed copyright?
A torrent file contains no copyrighted material. The algorithms generate a link to a named file on a given set of computers. Nothing more. Unless you can show me how an entire movie or album can be contained in a few bytes.
.torrent is simply a link. Nor do I accept it as a certainty that a link to copyrighted data should automatically be assumed to be non-infringing if the intent of the link is to knowingly infringe copyright.
It contains a list of pieces that are stored on separate computers and detailed instructions on how these pieces are assembled into files. It's much more than just a link. It's a link that can only possibly ever be used to infringe copyright (assuming distributing the file is infringing copyright). It's even possible that none of the individual pieces actually infringe copyright.
Hell, a 1400 gigabytes of video data can be contained on a 9GB DVD, or even a 1GB h264. It's not the representation of the data that's copyrighted, but the data that it represents. A torrent file represents exactly the same thing as the file it's used to download. You can't say the same of a link.
I'm not totally convinced by my own argument either. But I certainly don't agree that a
Certainly, if I upload a torrent, there's no way the TPB admins have any idea what it is, nor can we expect them to, any more than we can expect youTube to know what video I've just uploaded.
Copyright infringing videos uploaded to youTube are certainly infringing. The question is whether the torrent files of infringing works are. I would argue that they are. If such an argument was accepted, it would then be up to the prosecution to prove that the Pirate Bay knew they were infringing, which would not be easy, but I think the argument that the torrents themselves are not infringing is flawed.
That link has no purpose other than to facilitate the distribution of the video, which is not there with the permission of the copyright holder.
.torrent file, just like the HTTP link, are of no use alone. They both require other people to provide you with the data
Good question. The MPAA would certainly say yes (assuming it does - no youTube access here). It's a legal grey area
What about oHg5SJYRHA0? You could use that to get the video from YouTube.
On its own or in the context that it's made clear it's a youtube URL?
The
Almost all data files require someone else to provide you with additional data.
This is a large murky grey area. Arguing that something should be legal because it's analogous to something that's analogous to something that's analogous to something is a bit pointless. Half a file may well infringe copyright, so does half of a half a file? Enough halves and you're down to a couple of bytes. There's no hard cut-off between legal an illegal.
You are woefully mistaken. Like a hyperlink, a torrent file is only a digital address card.
.torrent references hundreds of smaller sources, the contents of which are determined at the time the torrent is created, and dictate the format of the torrent file.
It's more than that. slashdot.org today contains different data from slashdot.org did yesterday. If Taco had a mind to, he could replace the site with the text of Harry Potter. Watchmen.torrent (assuming it exists and refers to the new movie) has no purpose other than to distribute a copy of Watchmen. Change the data it points to and the tracker will ignore you and continue to distribute the same file.
The copyrighted information is not in the torrent file in any of the same sense that it is within an MP3.
Both can be converted to copyrighted data using publicly available generalised methods. Both have no other significant purpose than producing the output data.
Maybe an mp3 is a bad example because its algorithmic rather than a table reference. So how about an ASCII text file of Harry Potter? All it is is a list of references. #79 represents an 'O', #110 is an 'n', and so on. It's only when you decode it into visible graphical symbols that it actually becomes something tangible as copyrighted information, yet a long enough list of these numbers can violate copyright. How are bitTorrent pieces substantially different from ASCII characters?
t is no different in essence than if people put music on their answering machines and then went to a cork bulletin board and pinned up their phone numbers. Pinning a phone number on a corkboard is not copyright violation, and to be illegal, there has to be law that prohibits pinning up phone numbers. The same is true of torrent files.
It is different. A phone number references a single source, the contents of which may change. A
which may or may not be infringing.
Yes, and you seem to be countering an argument that I didn't make. You're overgeneralising when I'm referring to specific files.
A torrent of a file, distribution of which infringes copyright, has no purpose other than distributing a file in a manner that infringes copyright. A torrent of a file that the author has given permission to distribute via bitorrent has no purpose other than to legally distribute a specific file that the author has given permission to distribute via bitorrent.
Because, entirely like BitTorrent it serves purposes that are not illegal.
What are the legal purpose of a torrent of the latest Hollywood blockbuster? I'm talking about specific torrents here, not the technology.
Here's the thing: a .torrent contains no data useful to anything but a BitTorrent client. It's just a pointer to the actual data. There's absolutely no proof that the actual content infringes anyone's copyrights.
But a specific torrent file has no purpose other than to facilitate distribution of a set of files. I think there's at least an argument that that makes it an infringing file. It's a set of data that when the correct algorithms are combined forms a copyright infringing file. An mp3 is a set of data that when the correct algorithms are combined forms some PCM audio data. They both have no purpose other than to generate some specific data. If the generated data infringes copyright, then why isn't the data generator also copyright infringing?
I see. Then either you're an idiot, or you have reliable evidence that religious people don't do as good a job as non-religious people.
What's the harm in hiring someone with religious beliefs? Would you also discriminate against someone with a phobia of clowns, or OCD? Or do you just want a cheap dig at religion because you're a proselytizing atheist who's every big as annoying as any other fanatic?