That's a poor use of the word "license" as indicated by this topic. Here, let's try this rephrase:
OK, last week I went down to the bookstore and bought a book. Now I have the "right" to read this book. This week I decide I don't want to read any more so I sell the book to Joe Blow down the street.
Does Joe Blow now have the "right" to read this book?
Software licenses work exactly the same way. You have the right to use, but not to transfer the right to use.
I don't have the right to use or transfer the book I bought to Joe Blow? That's cockamamie!
Remember, software companies might try to "license" their goods to you, but the courts have *repeatedly* made it clear that if you bought the source media, you own the right to sell or transfer the original media. That's one reason why.Net is so big - no source media, no ownership, no issues for Microsoft on this end. You don't own anything because you never got the CD.
you will notice that the Slashdot editors *did* leave the (D-S.C.) reference in the story abstract. Perhaps they didn't this time because they forgot, or maybe because it's true that they really are part of a big liberal conspiracy to hoodwink you.
Now that you know Hollings is a Democrat, what are you going to do besides surf the web some more?
Exactly. When laws are passed that make this sort of activity illegal, it is merely driven underground to avoid prosecution. When it's free and legal, it's much easier for the state/government police to potentially infiltrate it and prevent it from being useful in the long run.
How many people didn't see this coming? Don't be shy, raise your hand if you actually BELIEVED FOR A SECOND that this copy-protection scheme would work...
Sorry, but it still *does* work unless you're among the 1% of the population who are comfortable with hacking this problem away or even know about Slashdot or CDFreaks.com. If you're my parents, aunt and uncle, or other non-techies, this copy protection works perfectly in denying you your Fair Use rights. Remember, the labels know they cannot stop hackers, but they don't care - they're trying to stop the 95-99% of their customer base who aren't remotely techie.
I think it's funny that they introduced these special CDs onto the market in the first place. People buy CDs for the high-quality music, and then they go and release this "copy-protection" scheme that purposly screws up the data so bad people can't copy the music to their computers.
I can see your point, and I agree. Again, the record industry isn't concerned about those 1-2% of us who can hack or use someone else's hack to restore Fair Use to our music - they just want to make sure they can stop 98-99% of the general, non-techie public from making copies. They've still won.
Instead of trying to find a way to prevent people from using the CDs that they've bought at a normal store, how about figuring out a way to encourage online users to support the bands who actually make the music....
Because that runs contrary to the general business practices of the RIAA. It is not their job "to encourage online users to support the bands who actually make the music," it is their job to maximize revenue while ensuring that their costs are minimized (production costs, loss to theft, artist royalties, etc).
It doesn't matter whether the source is in your hands or not, only whether you can use it. The real shame is that Adobe has stripped away your fair use rights even after you buy their product.
Per your quote: "Personally, I believe that this is open ground for a civil lawsuit between Adobe and Elcomsoft, and Adobe would be in the right: Elcomsoft has no right to *sell* products whose purpose is to disable Adobe's encryption, esp. when such knowledge was gained through reverse-engineering," you are mistaken. Adobe's product strips your fair use to use your personal eBook copy as you see fit. Any product that restores your or my fair use rights that were taken away by a company is both ethical and totally defendable, regardless of what the DMCA says.
Last, remember, Adobe never tells you what you and can't do with your legally purchased eBook copy, which is extremely unethical when they've gone and taken away some of your consumer rights.
Thank God the DMCA doesn't exist in Russia, where the decryption program was legally written by a Russian citizen. I find it ironic that a Russian has to restore our fair use rights, whether for money or not.
Furtive,
And remember that while you're ripping your CD collection to mp3 that Freunhofer owns the patent on that technology and is as likely as Microsoft to embrace and extend that format in the future (MP4 is coming out soon). Do yourself a favor - when you're ripping, rip to Ogg Vorbis (www.xiph.org), the completely free (free to you, free to music developers, free of patents) digital music format that you won't have to worry about being screwed over down the road.
From the article, it's apparent that AOL/Warner is adhering to the letter of the agreement if not the spirit by allowing national ISPs like "EarthLink, Juno Online Services Inc. and High Speed Access Corp. to meet the merger conditions, (but) most small and regional ISPs have felt frozen out of open access." While this is clearly wrong, I don't know if it is illegal since after all it was the FCC who said AOL/TW had to open their lines to competitors and they have done so.
More troublesome is the fact that AOL/TW is blocking content from Joe User because Joe User's sponsor is barred by AOL/TW. "Last fall, Time Warner refused to let Westlake High use one of its channels to rebroadcast football games if Texas.Net continued as an advertiser (for Westlake High). Texas.net had advertised with Time Warner for several years prior to the fall of 2000 only to be told that Time Warner would not renew Westlake High School's TV contract if Texas.net was a sponsor."
This seems to be illegal because now AOL/TW are telling User X that their sponsors have to first be subject to AOL/TW approval. Talk about a present and long-term potential abuse of monopoly power. What other roadblocks will AOL/TW impose on people/organizations who want to use their network when they're the only game in town?
All in all, not surprising - is anyone surprised when large companies do this sort of thing?
Bluntly, I've used Napster to download hundreds of albums that I didn't own, and I'm not willing to bother to justify it. Sure, there's an ice cube's chance in hell that if I had legally bought the albums that any of the artists would have seen dime one, but that's not the point - I care more about me than artists or the RIAA.
That said, I noticed that the other major vendor in this deal is Real. I suspect they're going to kill mp3s and try to shove secured RealAudio streams down Napster's users' throats. Sure, you'll have these RealAudio clips on your desktop that you've paid for via subscription, but am I wrong in thinking that RealAudio sucks compared to mp3, which isn't even that good compared to regular.wav audio? I wonder how that'll fly with Napster's userbase.
Next, since quitting Napster, I've been ripping CDs from both the local library (in Cincinnati) and my friends to mp3, and have recently started using Bearshare (de-spywared) to grab the occasional track I don't have. If the Record Industry believes non-techie people will shell out bucks for RealAudio via Napster when they can freely use BearShare or AudioGalaxy, I believe they're mistaken.
Last, as an observation, the desire to download tons of free music from Napster starting in early 2000 has resulted in benefit to the following industries, if not totally the RIAA:
Internet Service Provider - $22 extra a month for upgrade from 56K to ADSL, x 17 months as of June (total=$374 to date).
Yamaha - $170 for an 8424 CD burner.
~$160 in Music bought from Columbia House and BMG via their clubs because it was a b*tch getting the music from Napster. Feel bad about that because artists get -0- royalties from these RIAA-endorsed "clubs," while the RIAA gets 100% of whatever the clubs don't take.
Extra 15gb, 7200rpm hard drive - $110.
Rio Volt mp3 player - $170.
Money spent on non-RIAA artists after I could hear a few samples of them through Napster/MP3.com on friends' recommendations - ~$300.
Tax or shipping on all of the above at a general 6% rate - $70.
Total - ~$1354 and counting. Irony - if the RIAA and its member labels didn't treat artists like cow dung and produce shit, I'd have spent 90% of this money on their artists.
Last, the RIAA has earned my eternal emnity, so voting with my dollars, I will not buy from them ever again unless you count checking out library copies.
Of course I realize I'm a hypocrite on many counts, but I'll live with that (no one else has to).
Pardon me, but does anyone consider Real Audio a viable substitute for regular CD or MP3 music? Real sucks, and while they're good for getting the gist of a song you're considering downloading, they otherwise suck.
My $.02
Your perception of the RAM market intrigues me if only because I've perceived that the only way RDRAM has a chance to make it is through litigation (win cases, drive the price of DDRAM up, making RDRAM more palatable). I haven't seen any articles from Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, or other reliable tech review sources that says RDRAM can compete with 'regular' RAM on either performance or cost.
Last, you say "Intel IS going to ship DDR product with the P4, but at a later date, conceiveably after RDRAM is reaching mass acceptance." I'm not trying to be mean-spirited, but you're sniffing glue. RDRAM will never reach mass acceptance because of its prohibitive cost, crappy performance compared to DDR, and bad reputation in association with Rambus, the Litigator Innovator.
This is really ancient by tech standards. This 12/11/99 Constellation 3D article describing their FMD storage technology (more vaporware) cites the Keele storage as competition:
Startup C3D Demos multilayer optical storage.
Here's another article from 8/23/99 from the EDTN Network:
EDTN Network
And for a completely ad nauseuous rehash of this vaporware from UGeek Geek News, 8/99:
Go and be astounded!
Remember - if you haven't seen it before, it's new to you!
Cheers, Chuck
Napster isn't just a program, it's a widespread-and-popular method for moving data or information from B to C without needing to store it in location A first. So, we're not talking *just* about Napster, but anything else that is similiar to it - Gnutella, FreeNet, etc. Napster is merely the catchword for all these programs.
Napster the word is also a metaphor for personal freedom from the corporate state - do what you want even if the Big Guys don't want you to.
"If you want to protest, call the company, or at least include a letter asking them to switch to a 'solicited mailings only' scheme. Otherwise you're just wasting your own (and others' like you) money." HAHAHAHAAHHAHAAAHA!
Yeah, right, when's the last time any of these inconsiderate companies changed their business practices to suit the requests of people who had self-selectedly removed themselves from being customers? Funny guy.
The fastest and surest way to affect change in spam companies is to hit them where it hurts - in the wallet (which neither of your proposals does). Sending back junk mail stuffed with more junk mail is actually profitable for the USPS because they get the spam company coming and going. How does this waste my and others' money when I'm helping the USPS generate a profit based on the spammers' budgets?
Sorry to be so unhumorous, but read the posts above.
"Furthermore, for all you people "strap a brick to the BRM and throw it in a mail box... yeah that will get them"
p. 913 S922 1.6 BRM may not be used for any purpose other than that intended by the permit holder, even if postage is affixed. In cases where a BRM card or letter is used improperly as a label, the USPS treats the item as waste."
You've just made the postman's life a lot harder for no reason, because that brick will not be charged to the spammer, it will just be thrown away - something you could have done in the first place.
As Oscar Wilde stated, "A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." I use this to illustrate that while you are absolutely correct about what the Internet was originally created for, it has since assumed a much different character of its own ( do you mind if I personify?).
The Economist did not say "The Internet was originally supposed to be all about freedom." Well, it is very much that now, and many other things as well. Is the desire not to be beholden to short-sighted laws like those in the U.S., China and Islamic countries "Leftist mind-rot?" Few have stated or assumed that the Internet is "being some kind of utopian Libertarian commune," but am I amiss in saying people want their privacy and to be treated like adults, not money holes or little children? Or is this nonsense in your view?
Well, two things would be different. First, assuming I decided to store someone else's (read: RIAA, MPAA, Software industry) copyrighted material in this CR-Free zone, they could easily employ bribery or threats by themselves or through the U.S. government to have this stash killed. At that point it's in the hands of the local authorities (see Norway + the DeCSS creator).
Two, as in other CR-Free zones, I think the remaining distribution would be pretty much the same as in Thailand or other non-CR havens.
Whether it's for MP3, MP4 or any other non-free multimedia medium, developing new software in support of monopolistic or patented file types is like taking another step back from freeing ourselves from "can't see past the ends of our dollar bills" companies. Why do we continuously support companies that will eventually (if not now, later) pull the same sort of crap that Microsoft or Freunhofer or CDDB did?
Want to make a permanent difference? Help develop free as in beer and speech solutions that none of us will ever have to "illegally" hack to do what we want them to do. For example: Ogg Vorbis Audio and Soon to Be Video Encoder, and FreeDB.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a poor use of the word "license" as indicated by this topic. Here, let's try this rephrase:
.Net is so big - no source media, no ownership, no issues for Microsoft on this end. You don't own anything because you never got the CD.
OK, last week I went down to the bookstore and bought a book. Now I have the "right" to read this book. This week I decide I don't want to read any more so I sell the book to Joe Blow down the street.
Does Joe Blow now have the "right" to read this book?
Software licenses work exactly the same way. You have the right to use, but not to transfer the right to use.
I don't have the right to use or transfer the book I bought to Joe Blow? That's cockamamie!
Remember, software companies might try to "license" their goods to you, but the courts have *repeatedly* made it clear that if you bought the source media, you own the right to sell or transfer the original media. That's one reason why
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/08/02382
you will notice that the Slashdot editors *did* leave the (D-S.C.) reference in the story abstract. Perhaps they didn't this time because they forgot, or maybe because it's true that they really are part of a big liberal conspiracy to hoodwink you.
Now that you know Hollings is a Democrat, what are you going to do besides surf the web some more?
My $.02.
Sorry, but it still *does* work unless you're among the 1% of the population who are comfortable with hacking this problem away or even know about Slashdot or CDFreaks.com. If you're my parents, aunt and uncle, or other non-techies, this copy protection works perfectly in denying you your Fair Use rights. Remember, the labels know they cannot stop hackers, but they don't care - they're trying to stop the 95-99% of their customer base who aren't remotely techie.
I think it's funny that they introduced these special CDs onto the market in the first place. People buy CDs for the high-quality music, and then they go and release this "copy-protection" scheme that purposly screws up the data so bad people can't copy the music to their computers.
I can see your point, and I agree. Again, the record industry isn't concerned about those 1-2% of us who can hack or use someone else's hack to restore Fair Use to our music - they just want to make sure they can stop 98-99% of the general, non-techie public from making copies. They've still won.
Instead of trying to find a way to prevent people from using the CDs that they've bought at a normal store, how about figuring out a way to encourage online users to support the bands who actually make the music....
Because that runs contrary to the general business practices of the RIAA. It is not their job "to encourage online users to support the bands who actually make the music," it is their job to maximize revenue while ensuring that their costs are minimized (production costs, loss to theft, artist royalties, etc).
Cheers,
Chuck
Yes.
Per your quote: "Personally, I believe that this is open ground for a civil lawsuit between Adobe and Elcomsoft, and Adobe would be in the right: Elcomsoft has no right to *sell* products whose purpose is to disable Adobe's encryption, esp. when such knowledge was gained through reverse-engineering," you are mistaken. Adobe's product strips your fair use to use your personal eBook copy as you see fit. Any product that restores your or my fair use rights that were taken away by a company is both ethical and totally defendable, regardless of what the DMCA says.
Last, remember, Adobe never tells you what you and can't do with your legally purchased eBook copy, which is extremely unethical when they've gone and taken away some of your consumer rights. Thank God the DMCA doesn't exist in Russia, where the decryption program was legally written by a Russian citizen. I find it ironic that a Russian has to restore our fair use rights, whether for money or not.
Cheers,
Anon
More troublesome is the fact that AOL/TW is blocking content from Joe User because Joe User's sponsor is barred by AOL/TW. "Last fall, Time Warner refused to let Westlake High use one of its channels to rebroadcast football games if Texas.Net continued as an advertiser (for Westlake High). Texas.net had advertised with Time Warner for several years prior to the fall of 2000 only to be told that Time Warner would not renew Westlake High School's TV contract if Texas.net was a sponsor."
This seems to be illegal because now AOL/TW are telling User X that their sponsors have to first be subject to AOL/TW approval. Talk about a present and long-term potential abuse of monopoly power. What other roadblocks will AOL/TW impose on people/organizations who want to use their network when they're the only game in town?
All in all, not surprising - is anyone surprised when large companies do this sort of thing?
Cheers.
That said, I noticed that the other major vendor in this deal is Real. I suspect they're going to kill mp3s and try to shove secured RealAudio streams down Napster's users' throats. Sure, you'll have these RealAudio clips on your desktop that you've paid for via subscription, but am I wrong in thinking that RealAudio sucks compared to mp3, which isn't even that good compared to regular .wav audio? I wonder how that'll fly with Napster's userbase.
Next, since quitting Napster, I've been ripping CDs from both the local library (in Cincinnati) and my friends to mp3, and have recently started using Bearshare (de-spywared) to grab the occasional track I don't have. If the Record Industry believes non-techie people will shell out bucks for RealAudio via Napster when they can freely use BearShare or AudioGalaxy, I believe they're mistaken.
Last, as an observation, the desire to download tons of free music from Napster starting in early 2000 has resulted in benefit to the following industries, if not totally the RIAA:
Last, the RIAA has earned my eternal emnity, so voting with my dollars, I will not buy from them ever again unless you count checking out library copies.
Of course I realize I'm a hypocrite on many counts, but I'll live with that (no one else has to).
Cheers.
Pardon me, but does anyone consider Real Audio a viable substitute for regular CD or MP3 music? Real sucks, and while they're good for getting the gist of a song you're considering downloading, they otherwise suck. My $.02
Last, you say "Intel IS going to ship DDR product with the P4, but at a later date, conceiveably after RDRAM is reaching mass acceptance." I'm not trying to be mean-spirited, but you're sniffing glue. RDRAM will never reach mass acceptance because of its prohibitive cost, crappy performance compared to DDR, and bad reputation in association with Rambus, the Litigator Innovator.
Cheers, Chuck
Here's another article from 8/23/99 from the EDTN Network: EDTN Network
And for a completely ad nauseuous rehash of this vaporware from UGeek Geek News, 8/99: Go and be astounded!
Remember - if you haven't seen it before, it's new to you!
Cheers, Chuck
Napster the word is also a metaphor for personal freedom from the corporate state - do what you want even if the Big Guys don't want you to.
Hope this helps,
Chuck
Yeah, right, when's the last time any of these inconsiderate companies changed their business practices to suit the requests of people who had self-selectedly removed themselves from being customers? Funny guy.
The fastest and surest way to affect change in spam companies is to hit them where it hurts - in the wallet (which neither of your proposals does). Sending back junk mail stuffed with more junk mail is actually profitable for the USPS because they get the spam company coming and going. How does this waste my and others' money when I'm helping the USPS generate a profit based on the spammers' budgets?
Thanks, but no thanks.
Sorry to be so unhumorous, but read the posts above. "Furthermore, for all you people "strap a brick to the BRM and throw it in a mail box... yeah that will get them"
p. 913 S922 1.6 BRM may not be used for any purpose other than that intended by the permit holder, even if postage is affixed. In cases where a BRM card or letter is used improperly as a label, the USPS treats the item as waste."
You've just made the postman's life a lot harder for no reason, because that brick will not be charged to the spammer, it will just be thrown away - something you could have done in the first place.
The Economist did not say "The Internet was originally supposed to be all about freedom." Well, it is very much that now, and many other things as well. Is the desire not to be beholden to short-sighted laws like those in the U.S., China and Islamic countries "Leftist mind-rot?" Few have stated or assumed that the Internet is "being some kind of utopian Libertarian commune," but am I amiss in saying people want their privacy and to be treated like adults, not money holes or little children? Or is this nonsense in your view?
Cheers, Chuck
Two, as in other CR-Free zones, I think the remaining distribution would be pretty much the same as in Thailand or other non-CR havens.
Peace.