I heard once that there's some special signal that the buried in the video signal to let local station's know when to insert geographically-local ads into national shows. I also heard that "they" made some kind of deal with manufacturers that this signals wouldn't be used to make VCRs that wouldn't record ads. I don't know how true this story was, and I would expect that the local stations would strip the signal out when they broadcast progarms anyway.
Would there be any speed advantage to useing a reconfigurable chip vs. a programmable DSP for a very processor intensive task, like MPEG encoding or real-time full-screen graphics rendering? (think Fractal Flames as a music visualization plug-in) Assume that all your algorithm code can fit in on-chip cache or high-speed L2 so you don't clog up the memory bus)
> advertising executives realize that no one is watching their adds anymore?
Who's to say that people are watching their ads now?! I think most gen-X-Y-ers probably screen out 90% of the advirtising they see on TV. They go and heat up their pizza, or get a pop, or go to the watercloset, or whatever. Now maybe that 10% is important, but as I see it, the only really useful thing about ads is to let you know a place exists. That rules out about 60% of the ads on TV these days (Walmart, Sears, the major Pizza places [donatos is a toss up as to whether it's major yet..], DQ) And people who buy a lot of stuff and eat out will continue to do so, whether or not they see a lot of ads, and people who are generally miserly with their disposable income (we spend it on $3000 computers instead) will continue to do so, even if subjected to a barage of ads (unless they are computer ads, maybe not even then).
I sometimes wonder what would happen to consumer spending, both in volume and in distribution, if everyone stopped running ads for a week. I don't think much would change. Those of us who like pizza know where we like to get it from, those of us who like to get groceries (anyone?) know where we like to go to get them.
There is the argument that "ads target the young and impressionable" who I suppose don't know about these places. Ah yes, some ad-agency paradise - where the ONLY source of information for those impressionable young'uns is TV - no friends, no billboards on the highway, no magazines, and God forbid, no parents to get in the way of the 'tube's influence..
There has been at least one documentary (Frontline I think it was) a few years back about the Neilson ratings and how they basically don't work. People don't log themselves with the system correctly or consistantly, channel flipping behavior is sketchy, and they can't tell if the person is watching the ad, or getting a coke. They hinted about people trying to come up with totally passive sensing devices - laser scanners that will tell whose in the room, etc. The program ended with a judgement that whether or not Neilson's work well, they are some form of "currency" that networks and ad agencies can use to judge shows. I think as long as people continue to buy stuff (which I think they will with or without ads), the ad agencies don't really care that much about how accurate the Neilson's really are.
But as I'm not an ad-executive, and I'd love to hear from someone who is.
What's ironic is that the current corporate views and laws about copyright are shaped by the economic incentive theory of copyright, the idea that copyright is no longer about a balance between the public domain and "rewarding" creators, but a way to squeeze every last dollar out of everything.
That being said, it's odd that a lot of the current legal threats (CueCat, this, Mp3.com's beam-it) is that there is no economic loss to the company! I've never gone to AiboPet, but from the letter, it sounded like a person would need a memory stick to use downloaded programs. The only way Sony could lose money is if either different Aibo program memory sticks were sold for different prices (buy a low priced one, the replace it with a higher-priced program), or if a 'non-Aibo' memory-stick could be used that cost a lot less than the 'Aibo-program' memory sticks.
> It depends on the idea that everyone is equally qualified to make any type of decision. [...] was invented, that assumption was mostly true
I'm not saying that I neccessarily disagree with this, but I'd like some backup evidence. You could very well be right; I haven't studied the history of democracy closely (or at all, beyond the oh-so-general crap you get in HS history). It also depends on what historical context you're talking about. If you're talking about the "birth of democracy" in Greece, this might have been true. If you're talking about what the U.S. Constitution Framers were thinking (which was partly a reaction to the British legislative system), it's a different ballgame.
OK. So this will have all internet traffic travelling through centralized pipes so the FBI/other snoops can snoop it more easily. Brilliant! A new terrorist target! Let them take down the iNet easier. Of course, even now, they could probably just take down the Hancock building in Chicago (?) and take out a large chunk of the bandwidth available.
Re:People should try as hard to stop the SSSCA
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LOTR Campout Begins
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Yes, it would be nice. Unfortunately, camping out for 2 months to see a monie is a lot easier than successfully lobbying over 300 politicians, working against thousands if not millions of dollars of lobbying money by well-organized corporations. Does anyone know what Ralph Nader is doing about SSSCA?
The root problem is, copyright enforcement and fair use of digital material are now mutually exclusive concepts.
I would say that there're not completely exlusive, but they're very close. In The Demonization of Piracy, Jessica Litman says that all sorts of things we are used to doing with media that like sharing music with friends, singing "Happy Birthday", etc., always used to be simply "legal but unauthorized uses" (a paraphrase, her original words make more since) I take this to mean that the two concepts are not mutually exclusive as long as the copyright cops only go after the big infringers. It used to be that the line here was well-defined (the "big infringers" were publishing houses making money off someone else's work, the small people were college kids), but now the line is extremely gray, if not nonexistant. This echos what RMS said in his rant on copyright that got Slashdotted a while back.
In my view, the problem is not mainly whether the two are exclusive, but in codifying in law how that exclusivity will play out. There is a paper by Jonathan Rouch called The Rise of Antisocial Law which talks about this problem of trying to codify everything, which is pervading the legal and governmental system today (I think that's a lot of what causes all the stupid-patent stuff that shows up here). It used to be that fair use was not codified, but that people generally respected the traditional intent of copyright (to provide a time-limited incentive for authors, scientists, etc to create. Under that model (and in the pre-Napster world), fair use (small scale infringement) was tolerated and generally left alone. But now, in the post-Napster world, the dominant copyright model has moved to an economic basis, of squeezing every last bit of revenue out of the consumer as possible.(although it doesn't work for most of us - I don't particularly want to pay $18 for a CD that's 5 years old, but if the price were $6, I'd probably sure as hell buy more than 3 times the amount of music)
In addition to this shift, there has been a shift toward more and more finely codified, explicit laws (see above), and the "copyrighted industries" have become much more agressive, no doubt becase they see their IP protections primarily as monetary assets, and not in the way the Founding Fathers did, as incentives, but not neccessarily as permanent "lock-boxes" (to use an over-used phrase from the 2000 campaign)
I'm playing devil's advocate here a little. Something that occurred to me about this is that one way that it could be made compatible with open software is to use a Secure Audio Path (Microsoft thing) type solution: Have the audio/video data encrypted at all times except on the audio/video card. The only non-encrypted data would exist in the circuitry between the firmware decode and the analog output (or display hardware).
This could possibly allow open-source software to continue to be developed, if they released drivers for feeding encrypted data to the card, which is unlikely considering how eager (?) the OSS community is at cracking encryption algorithms (witness the MSDRM 2 story earlier). However, this would undoubtedly put an enourmous burden on hardware developers, there would surely be large licensing fees involved (does anyone know what the licensing fee for producing MSDRM-protected content is?), and if it was cracked, it would just be an absolute mess (firmware upgrades, making new firmware that could work with existing content [oh heck, just make everyone buy their old DRM-CDs again - all $2000 worth of them..]), etc, etc..
If this gets passed, could the EFF and a bunch of other tech interests have a federal court place an immediate injuction on it (within the 12 month period before the standard is implemented), for judicial review?
How anout Lynn Rivers, who was mentioned in the article a while back about the anti-terrorist legislation. She might take a stand, although on the cynical sie, I'm not sure how any congressperson could opose this legislation and not risk nasty reprecussions.
Can Disney allowed to make attack ads? That would be truely scary (although it's functinally no different from Disney just donating a billion dollars to the opposition candidates to anyone who dares oppose them.
Hmm, does this mean that the Slashdot readership and other tech lobbies are actually having a (gasp!) effect on American politics? I myself wrote a five-page letter (by MS Word's reckoning; breaking the first rule of writing to representative: keep it short), based on the EFF template, detailing why encryption restrictions won't work, and then faxed it to all the members of the Antiterrorism Bill confernence committee. You can find the letter here.
I haven't gotten any responses back from any congresscritters, save for one form letter from Sen. Inouye of Hawaii. I don't really pretend that my lobbying had any great "straw" effect, but I wonder if Judd's apparent reversal of his stance means that Congress is beginning to react?
But, IMO, the damage is already done. The proposal has been floated, and the idea is still out there. Of course, it's been out there for the last five years or so, ever since the NSA tried to silence R, S, and A from publishing their article in Scientific American (see Levy's Crypto for a full account)
Hard-coded applications for documents is the wrong way to go, and it is built into Creator/Type
Who said anything about being built in? It's only "built in" to previous MacOS's because the Finder has no way to change them. Unless you have one of those hacks that puts type/creator edit boxes in the file info. True, you can't see it automatically like a file extension, but isn't that why the Mac uses icons?
Type/creator codes DO perhaps overemphasize the importance of 'immutable metadata', but even with a file extension, the user who wants to open his html file with a text editor instead of a web browser still has to know how to change the extension. (And Apple's new texedit won't open HTML files as raw text, it will render them, even if you don't want it to). Why is changing a file extension any more or less difficult than using a contextual menu to get to an 'open with' menu (which should have a list of USER SELECTED choices, set in a central control panel for that file's extension/metadata/whatever. The advantage for me of type/creator (or specifically, of not having extensions) is that they don't clutter my desktop or column views (see next paragraph). OS 10.1 does have an option to 'hide file extension', but no way I see to set that automatically, or set my web broswer to 'always save with no file extension' or change the option quickly if I need to change it (maybe click on a little square on the icon to toggle perhaps? That's probably a bad idea, but that's the point)
The main think I don't like about file extensions and OS 10.1 is the way the OS puts the ellipsis of a 'too-long' name in the middle ("ThisFileIs...ndFile.txt") This is just silly. Most people (home users) don't need to see the extension (they can see the icon), and those that do can change an option in the 'Finder' control panel. I also can't get the 'change default applicaton' item in the info window to work, and the 'open with' popup shouldn't include ALL the available applications ("do YOU want to open an html file with Apple System Profiler? No, me neither!")
I've been thinking of setting up a CD club in my town, basically a bunch of people who put what CDs they own (probably aided by cddb [ironic]/freedb) on the internet, and then do the rest with hand-to-hand swaps. No MP3s, no CDRs. No copies either, except for audio tape. It should be completely legal and protected by AHRA. Unless posing a list of CDs you own on a public forum is illegal (might be stretched out by a court).
As I asked one person in a email, can "ordinary citizens" lobby Congress (the U.S. one) to open congressional hearings? Oh, wait, they already have opened congressional hearings..
It seems to me the main reason the major player in the recording industry exist anymore is to provide advances - which they then back-end out of the artists' royalties (though I have no hard proof, only Courtney Love's manifesto, and big-name artists may be able to negotiate this).
If artists could find ways to get advances without having to go through a record company, this would be a real alternative to the current system. One band I read about did this by pre-selling albums for a year, did their own recording, then paid a big distributor like BMG to do just that - distribute - and only that. They have their copyrights, can put their music anywhere they want, and I assume get a bigger portion of the purchase price of their CDs (though the CDs themselves probably still cost a nutrageous amount, maybe even more as BMG probably doesn't particularly want to "promote" them against their own contract-bound artsists.).
The other day on the local country radio station, the DJ person was commenting that the group Lone Star is now getting more good songs than they could ever record. Whatever you think about country, Lone Star as a group has achieved a certain level of success, and I am personally appalled that a group that achieves that level of success and I presume a certain level of financial success as well, doesn't turn around, figure out a way to raise their own advance, and go it alone, without a record contract. I thought the same thing when I read that Whitney Huston had signed a $50 million dollar, 5-album contract. Why, oh why, doesn't she just tell the big-five to stuff it? Of course, she has the clout to negotiate a probably unheard-of-for-a-small-band 25% royalty rate.
Yes, it does require monopolies. But monopolies don't always have to be bad things. 99% of the time they are, but I think that's just becuase there's a often-greedy capitalist at the other end of them. I am a capitalist, but it's a system that can be abused far too easily. However, if the government too control of licensing copyrighted materials for a reasonable fee, I think it could work.
Give the recording studios a limited time to have exclusive rights (to recoup expenses and make a reasonable amount of profit if they can (otherwise they just need to run a tighter artistic ship and not hide behind the "only 5 out of 100 artists make it" crap - well, choose better artists!). These regs should be rigidly enforced, not subject to change by less than a 95% vote of Congress, and a time-period based on the size of the advance given to the artist, and have the accounting independently audited by different firms regularly to avoid "creative accounting" ("Hmm, what's this - a $10 million advance to pay for popcorn?")
I agree with this, although I wouldn't say the record companies should be completely excluded from distribution online, they just shouldn't have a monopoly either, or have laws designed to promote monopoly (compyright extension, some of the anti-piracy bills, etc). Compulsory licensing, as the MOCA proposes, would be nice. (What's happening with MOCA anyway?) Copyright reform, to disallow corporations from holding indefinately copyrights to music that really should be held by their artists, federal limits on contract law (indentured servitude?), and maybe anti-trust action would be nice too. IMO, the Big Five have not only almost completely sown up the market from the consumers end of the market with 90-95% dominance, they've also sown up the market from the "labor" (artists) end too, by standardizing their Draconian contract terms and maybe other practices they'd rather us not know about.
I'm always suprised that while both copyrights and patents are on about equal footing as far as their (U.S.) Constitutional basis goes, the courts (AFAIK) regularly extend copyrights, but more rarely extend patents. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this. I also don't how the less-than-recent case-law is different concerning copyrights vs. patents.
Gosh, two stories in one day about Europe: Germany considering switching to Linux, and the EU proposing blocking music sites. What was that little voice I heard saying that the 21st century wouldn't be an "American century"?
Seriously thought, I wonder what kind of a shit-fit the RIAA would have if someone invented a way to download audio directly out of the audio cortex. One reason I don't think 35 minutes of music is worth $18 is that after I've heard a song 10 times, I can recall it perfectly, assuming no other music is being played in the area..
I ran into a usenet references and webpages about a device called a "Neurophone" a while ago that purports to be able to send audio signals directly to the audio cortex by applying electrical voltage to the skin. I have no idea whether this is a hoax (it may well be, this site also sold Crystal Energy Devices(TM) and other things allegedly derived from alien technology..) And at $500 a box, I'm not ready to experiment until I see (or hear) proof.
But a natural extension of this technology is to extract audio from the brain (which would make realy cool facilitated telepathy scheme). Assuming all sorts of other audio mind-garbage could be kept out of the recording, this would essentially make poential "piracy" (yes, yes, RIAA usage of the word) and fair use (remembering music) the same thing.
The FAA is just going to love this. From all reports, they can just barely keep the current hub system from totally breaking, are centralization demons, can't get their heads screwed on right about letting small airports have cheap TARDIS radar (favoring instead a humongously expensive, overbudget, and behind-scedule grandiose system of their own, there was an article in Wall Street Journal about this recently). Yep, they're really going to love this..
There was a colloquium given here at Indiana University (Bloomington) by Gregory Wilson (he was a contributing editor to dr. Dobb's Journel) called Open Source, Open Science which touched on this question. He suggested using CVS for class projects, and said "if seven people submit their code at about the same time five minutes after the first person did, you can be pretty sure whose cheating."
I agree with the argument that an obvious idea at time x may not have been obvious at time x-10, so was worthy of a patent then. But AFAIK, Tivo didn't use Pause Technologie's implementation of the "compressed-video-FIFO" of whatever they called it. Tivo reinvented the same idea again, probably without knowing about Pause's patent (this alone makes it sound like a submarine patent). IMO, independent invention, if not being totally illegal.
The idea of patents is to reward people (for a limited period of time) for the work of creating useful inventions/ideas by being able to charge people money to use them. If I come up with a nify way to make a magnet out of cerium and boron somehow (not magnetic AFAIK, but if it is, I get first dibs;-), I should be allowed to patent it and sell that implementation. If someone else comes up with the same idea, and it turns out they stole it from me (trade secret for instance), I should be able to sue them. But if they work for 10 years and come up with the same formula, without ever knowing that I had, I shouldn't be able to ay anything.
Of course, pantents are public record (at least some parts of them are), so it could be very difficult to prove that Tivo "had no knowledge of Pause's patent" prior to coming up with the Tivo machine. This would always be a problem with patents, more so when the idea is a 'simple one' ("gee, I was browsing the patent database one day and saw this one about pausing live tv. I didn't look at it, but that could make a lot of money" Does that constitute "knowledge of the patent? I don't know)
There was a colloquium here at Indiana University (Bloomington) given by Gregory Wilson (a contributing author to Doctor Dobb's Journel) entitled Open Source, Open Science which touched upon this question. He suggested using CVS to submit assignments (I think this was meant for upper-level projects, not for little six-line Scheme programs). He said, "if you have seven people submit code at about the same time five minutes after the first person does, you have a pretty good idea of whose cheating."
I agree with the argument that an obvious idea at time x may not have been obvious at time x-10, so was worthy of a patent then. But AFAIK, Tivo didn't use Pause Technologie's implementation of the "compressed-video-FIFO" of whatever they called it. Tivo reinvented the same idea again, probably without knowing about Pause's patent (this alone makes it sound like a submarine patent). IMO, independent invention, if not being totally illegal.
The idea of patents is to reward people (for a limited period of time) for the work of creating useful inventions/ideas by being able to charge people money to use them. If I come up with a nify way to make a magnet out of cerium and boron somehow (not magnetic AFAIK, but if it is, I get first dibs;-), I should be allowed to patent it and sell that implementation. If someone else comes up with the same idea, and it turns out they stole it from me (trade secret for instance), I should be able to sue them. But if they work for 10 years and come up with the same formula, without ever knowing that I had, I shouldn't be able to ay anything.
Of course, pantents are public record (at least some parts of them are), so it could be very difficult to prove that Tivo "had no knowledge of Pause's patent" prior to coming up with the Tivo machine. This would always be a problem with patents, more so when the idea is a 'simple one' ("gee, I was browsing the patent database one day and saw this one about pausing live tv. I didn't look at it, but that could make a lot of money" Does that constitute "knowledge of the patent? I don't know)
What exactly is on record about what the Framers (of the U.S. Constitution) intended for copyright/patent? I know that Ben Franklin was against it initially, but don't know any specifics. Did they have any idea that copyright would become the nightmare that it is now, where bascially all material is bound up in a few very powerful companies, to the detriment of (almost) all in the society? Did they intend for copyrights and patents to be help by companies (of any sort, big or small) at all, or just by individuals?
What exactly is known about what the Framers intended for copyright/patent? I know that Ben Franklin was against it initially, but don't know any specifics. Did the Framers have any idea that copyright would become the nightmare that it is now, where bascially all material is bound up in a few very powerful companies, to the detriment of (almost) all in the society? Did they intend for copyrights and patents to be help by companies (of any sort, big or small) at all, or just by individuals?
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I heard once that there's some special signal that the buried in the video signal to let local station's know when to insert geographically-local ads into national shows. I also heard that "they" made some kind of deal with manufacturers that this signals wouldn't be used to make VCRs that wouldn't record ads. I don't know how true this story was, and I would expect that the local stations would strip the signal out when they broadcast progarms anyway.
Would there be any speed advantage to useing a reconfigurable chip vs. a programmable DSP for a very processor intensive task, like MPEG encoding or real-time full-screen graphics rendering? (think Fractal Flames as a music visualization plug-in) Assume that all your algorithm code can fit in on-chip cache or high-speed L2 so you don't clog up the memory bus)
Who's to say that people are watching their ads now?! I think most gen-X-Y-ers probably screen out 90% of the advirtising they see on TV. They go and heat up their pizza, or get a pop, or go to the watercloset, or whatever. Now maybe that 10% is important, but as I see it, the only really useful thing about ads is to let you know a place exists. That rules out about 60% of the ads on TV these days (Walmart, Sears, the major Pizza places [donatos is a toss up as to whether it's major yet..], DQ) And people who buy a lot of stuff and eat out will continue to do so, whether or not they see a lot of ads, and people who are generally miserly with their disposable income (we spend it on $3000 computers instead) will continue to do so, even if subjected to a barage of ads (unless they are computer ads, maybe not even then).
I sometimes wonder what would happen to consumer spending, both in volume and in distribution, if everyone stopped running ads for a week. I don't think much would change. Those of us who like pizza know where we like to get it from, those of us who like to get groceries (anyone?) know where we like to go to get them.
There is the argument that "ads target the young and impressionable" who I suppose don't know about these places. Ah yes, some ad-agency paradise - where the ONLY source of information for those impressionable young'uns is TV - no friends, no billboards on the highway, no magazines, and God forbid, no parents to get in the way of the 'tube's influence..
There has been at least one documentary (Frontline I think it was) a few years back about the Neilson ratings and how they basically don't work. People don't log themselves with the system correctly or consistantly, channel flipping behavior is sketchy, and they can't tell if the person is watching the ad, or getting a coke. They hinted about people trying to come up with totally passive sensing devices - laser scanners that will tell whose in the room, etc. The program ended with a judgement that whether or not Neilson's work well, they are some form of "currency" that networks and ad agencies can use to judge shows. I think as long as people continue to buy stuff (which I think they will with or without ads), the ad agencies don't really care that much about how accurate the Neilson's really are.
But as I'm not an ad-executive, and I'd love to hear from someone who is.
That being said, it's odd that a lot of the current legal threats (CueCat, this, Mp3.com's beam-it) is that there is no economic loss to the company! I've never gone to AiboPet, but from the letter, it sounded like a person would need a memory stick to use downloaded programs. The only way Sony could lose money is if either different Aibo program memory sticks were sold for different prices (buy a low priced one, the replace it with a higher-priced program), or if a 'non-Aibo' memory-stick could be used that cost a lot less than the 'Aibo-program' memory sticks.
> It depends on the idea that everyone is equally qualified to make any type of decision. [...] was invented, that assumption was mostly true
I'm not saying that I neccessarily disagree with this, but I'd like some backup evidence. You could very well be right; I haven't studied the history of democracy closely (or at all, beyond the oh-so-general crap you get in HS history). It also depends on what historical context you're talking about. If you're talking about the "birth of democracy" in Greece, this might have been true. If you're talking about what the U.S. Constitution Framers were thinking (which was partly a reaction to the British legislative system), it's a different ballgame.
OK. So this will have all internet traffic travelling through centralized pipes so the FBI/other snoops can snoop it more easily. Brilliant! A new terrorist target! Let them take down the iNet easier. Of course, even now, they could probably just take down the Hancock building in Chicago (?) and take out a large chunk of the bandwidth available.
Yes, it would be nice. Unfortunately, camping out for 2 months to see a monie is a lot easier than successfully lobbying over 300 politicians, working against thousands if not millions of dollars of lobbying money by well-organized corporations. Does anyone know what Ralph Nader is doing about SSSCA?
I would say that there're not completely exlusive, but they're very close. In The Demonization of Piracy, Jessica Litman says that all sorts of things we are used to doing with media that like sharing music with friends, singing "Happy Birthday", etc., always used to be simply "legal but unauthorized uses" (a paraphrase, her original words make more since) I take this to mean that the two concepts are not mutually exclusive as long as the copyright cops only go after the big infringers. It used to be that the line here was well-defined (the "big infringers" were publishing houses making money off someone else's work, the small people were college kids), but now the line is extremely gray, if not nonexistant. This echos what RMS said in his rant on copyright that got Slashdotted a while back.
In my view, the problem is not mainly whether the two are exclusive, but in codifying in law how that exclusivity will play out. There is a paper by Jonathan Rouch called The Rise of Antisocial Law which talks about this problem of trying to codify everything, which is pervading the legal and governmental system today (I think that's a lot of what causes all the stupid-patent stuff that shows up here). It used to be that fair use was not codified, but that people generally respected the traditional intent of copyright (to provide a time-limited incentive for authors, scientists, etc to create. Under that model (and in the pre-Napster world), fair use (small scale infringement) was tolerated and generally left alone. But now, in the post-Napster world, the dominant copyright model has moved to an economic basis, of squeezing every last bit of revenue out of the consumer as possible .(although it doesn't work for most of us - I don't particularly want to pay $18 for a CD that's 5 years old, but if the price were $6, I'd probably sure as hell buy more than 3 times the amount of music)
In addition to this shift, there has been a shift toward more and more finely codified, explicit laws (see above), and the "copyrighted industries" have become much more agressive, no doubt becase they see their IP protections primarily as monetary assets, and not in the way the Founding Fathers did, as incentives, but not neccessarily as permanent "lock-boxes" (to use an over-used phrase from the 2000 campaign)
I'm playing devil's advocate here a little. Something that occurred to me about this is that one way that it could be made compatible with open software is to use a Secure Audio Path (Microsoft thing) type solution: Have the audio/video data encrypted at all times except on the audio/video card. The only non-encrypted data would exist in the circuitry between the firmware decode and the analog output (or display hardware).
This could possibly allow open-source software to continue to be developed, if they released drivers for feeding encrypted data to the card, which is unlikely considering how eager (?) the OSS community is at cracking encryption algorithms (witness the MSDRM 2 story earlier). However, this would undoubtedly put an enourmous burden on hardware developers, there would surely be large licensing fees involved (does anyone know what the licensing fee for producing MSDRM-protected content is?), and if it was cracked, it would just be an absolute mess (firmware upgrades, making new firmware that could work with existing content [oh heck, just make everyone buy their old DRM-CDs again - all $2000 worth of them..]), etc, etc..
If this gets passed, could the EFF and a bunch of other tech interests have a federal court place an immediate injuction on it (within the 12 month period before the standard is implemented), for judicial review?
How anout Lynn Rivers, who was mentioned in the article a while back about the anti-terrorist legislation. She might take a stand, although on the cynical sie, I'm not sure how any congressperson could opose this legislation and not risk nasty reprecussions.
Can Disney allowed to make attack ads? That would be truely scary (although it's functinally no different from Disney just donating a billion dollars to the opposition candidates to anyone who dares oppose them.
I haven't gotten any responses back from any congresscritters, save for one form letter from Sen. Inouye of Hawaii. I don't really pretend that my lobbying had any great "straw" effect, but I wonder if Judd's apparent reversal of his stance means that Congress is beginning to react?
But, IMO, the damage is already done. The proposal has been floated, and the idea is still out there. Of course, it's been out there for the last five years or so, ever since the NSA tried to silence R, S, and A from publishing their article in Scientific American (see Levy's Crypto for a full account)
Who said anything about being built in? It's only "built in" to previous MacOS's because the Finder has no way to change them. Unless you have one of those hacks that puts type/creator edit boxes in the file info. True, you can't see it automatically like a file extension, but isn't that why the Mac uses icons?
Type/creator codes DO perhaps overemphasize the importance of 'immutable metadata', but even with a file extension, the user who wants to open his html file with a text editor instead of a web browser still has to know how to change the extension. (And Apple's new texedit won't open HTML files as raw text, it will render them, even if you don't want it to). Why is changing a file extension any more or less difficult than using a contextual menu to get to an 'open with' menu (which should have a list of USER SELECTED choices, set in a central control panel for that file's extension/metadata/whatever. The advantage for me of type/creator (or specifically, of not having extensions) is that they don't clutter my desktop or column views (see next paragraph). OS 10.1 does have an option to 'hide file extension', but no way I see to set that automatically, or set my web broswer to 'always save with no file extension' or change the option quickly if I need to change it (maybe click on a little square on the icon to toggle perhaps? That's probably a bad idea, but that's the point)
The main think I don't like about file extensions and OS 10.1 is the way the OS puts the ellipsis of a 'too-long' name in the middle ("ThisFileIs...ndFile.txt") This is just silly. Most people (home users) don't need to see the extension (they can see the icon), and those that do can change an option in the 'Finder' control panel. I also can't get the 'change default applicaton' item in the info window to work, and the 'open with' popup shouldn't include ALL the available applications ("do YOU want to open an html file with Apple System Profiler? No, me neither!")
I've been thinking of setting up a CD club in my town, basically a bunch of people who put what CDs they own (probably aided by cddb [ironic]/freedb) on the internet, and then do the rest with hand-to-hand swaps. No MP3s, no CDRs. No copies either, except for audio tape. It should be completely legal and protected by AHRA. Unless posing a list of CDs you own on a public forum is illegal (might be stretched out by a court).
As I asked one person in a email, can "ordinary citizens" lobby Congress (the U.S. one) to open congressional hearings? Oh, wait, they already have opened congressional hearings..
If artists could find ways to get advances without having to go through a record company, this would be a real alternative to the current system. One band I read about did this by pre-selling albums for a year, did their own recording, then paid a big distributor like BMG to do just that - distribute - and only that. They have their copyrights, can put their music anywhere they want, and I assume get a bigger portion of the purchase price of their CDs (though the CDs themselves probably still cost a nutrageous amount, maybe even more as BMG probably doesn't particularly want to "promote" them against their own contract-bound artsists.).
The other day on the local country radio station, the DJ person was commenting that the group Lone Star is now getting more good songs than they could ever record. Whatever you think about country, Lone Star as a group has achieved a certain level of success, and I am personally appalled that a group that achieves that level of success and I presume a certain level of financial success as well, doesn't turn around, figure out a way to raise their own advance, and go it alone, without a record contract. I thought the same thing when I read that Whitney Huston had signed a $50 million dollar, 5-album contract. Why, oh why, doesn't she just tell the big-five to stuff it? Of course, she has the clout to negotiate a probably unheard-of-for-a-small-band 25% royalty rate.
Give the recording studios a limited time to have exclusive rights (to recoup expenses and make a reasonable amount of profit if they can (otherwise they just need to run a tighter artistic ship and not hide behind the "only 5 out of 100 artists make it" crap - well, choose better artists!). These regs should be rigidly enforced, not subject to change by less than a 95% vote of Congress, and a time-period based on the size of the advance given to the artist, and have the accounting independently audited by different firms regularly to avoid "creative accounting" ("Hmm, what's this - a $10 million advance to pay for popcorn?")
I'm always suprised that while both copyrights and patents are on about equal footing as far as their (U.S.) Constitutional basis goes, the courts (AFAIK) regularly extend copyrights, but more rarely extend patents. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this. I also don't how the less-than-recent case-law is different concerning copyrights vs. patents.
Gosh, two stories in one day about Europe: Germany considering switching to Linux, and the EU proposing blocking music sites. What was that little voice I heard saying that the 21st century wouldn't be an "American century"?
Seriously thought, I wonder what kind of a shit-fit the RIAA would have if someone invented a way to download audio directly out of the audio cortex. One reason I don't think 35 minutes of music is worth $18 is that after I've heard a song 10 times, I can recall it perfectly, assuming no other music is being played in the area..
I ran into a usenet references and webpages about a device called a "Neurophone" a while ago that purports to be able to send audio signals directly to the audio cortex by applying electrical voltage to the skin. I have no idea whether this is a hoax (it may well be, this site also sold Crystal Energy Devices(TM) and other things allegedly derived from alien technology..) And at $500 a box, I'm not ready to experiment until I see (or hear) proof.
But a natural extension of this technology is to extract audio from the brain (which would make realy cool facilitated telepathy scheme). Assuming all sorts of other audio mind-garbage could be kept out of the recording, this would essentially make poential "piracy" (yes, yes, RIAA usage of the word) and fair use (remembering music) the same thing.
The FAA is just going to love this. From all reports, they can just barely keep the current hub system from totally breaking, are centralization demons, can't get their heads screwed on right about letting small airports have cheap TARDIS radar (favoring instead a humongously expensive, overbudget, and behind-scedule grandiose system of their own, there was an article in Wall Street Journal about this recently). Yep, they're really going to love this..
There was a colloquium given here at Indiana University (Bloomington) by Gregory Wilson (he was a contributing editor to dr. Dobb's Journel) called Open Source, Open Science which touched on this question. He suggested using CVS for class projects, and said "if seven people submit their code at about the same time five minutes after the first person did, you can be pretty sure whose cheating."
I agree with the argument that an obvious idea at time x may not have been obvious at time x-10, so was worthy of a patent then. But AFAIK, Tivo didn't use Pause Technologie's implementation of the "compressed-video-FIFO" of whatever they called it. Tivo reinvented the same idea again, probably without knowing about Pause's patent (this alone makes it sound like a submarine patent). IMO, independent invention, if not being totally illegal.
;-), I should be allowed to patent it and sell that implementation. If someone else comes up with the same idea, and it turns out they stole it from me (trade secret for instance), I should be able to sue them. But if they work for 10 years and come up with the same formula, without ever knowing that I had, I shouldn't be able to ay anything.
The idea of patents is to reward people (for a limited period of time) for the work of creating useful inventions/ideas by being able to charge people money to use them. If I come up with a nify way to make a magnet out of cerium and boron somehow (not magnetic AFAIK, but if it is, I get first dibs
Of course, pantents are public record (at least some parts of them are), so it could be very difficult to prove that Tivo "had no knowledge of Pause's patent" prior to coming up with the Tivo machine. This would always be a problem with patents, more so when the idea is a 'simple one' ("gee, I was browsing the patent database one day and saw this one about pausing live tv. I didn't look at it, but that could make a lot of money" Does that constitute "knowledge of the patent? I don't know)
There was a colloquium here at Indiana University (Bloomington) given by Gregory Wilson (a contributing author to Doctor Dobb's Journel) entitled Open Source, Open Science which touched upon this question. He suggested using CVS to submit assignments (I think this was meant for upper-level projects, not for little six-line Scheme programs). He said, "if you have seven people submit code at about the same time five minutes after the first person does, you have a pretty good idea of whose cheating."
I agree with the argument that an obvious idea at time x may not have been obvious at time x-10, so was worthy of a patent then. But AFAIK, Tivo didn't use Pause Technologie's implementation of the "compressed-video-FIFO" of whatever they called it. Tivo reinvented the same idea again, probably without knowing about Pause's patent (this alone makes it sound like a submarine patent). IMO, independent invention, if not being totally illegal.
;-), I should be allowed to patent it and sell that implementation. If someone else comes up with the same idea, and it turns out they stole it from me (trade secret for instance), I should be able to sue them. But if they work for 10 years and come up with the same formula, without ever knowing that I had, I shouldn't be able to ay anything.
The idea of patents is to reward people (for a limited period of time) for the work of creating useful inventions/ideas by being able to charge people money to use them. If I come up with a nify way to make a magnet out of cerium and boron somehow (not magnetic AFAIK, but if it is, I get first dibs
Of course, pantents are public record (at least some parts of them are), so it could be very difficult to prove that Tivo "had no knowledge of Pause's patent" prior to coming up with the Tivo machine. This would always be a problem with patents, more so when the idea is a 'simple one' ("gee, I was browsing the patent database one day and saw this one about pausing live tv. I didn't look at it, but that could make a lot of money" Does that constitute "knowledge of the patent? I don't know)
What exactly is on record about what the Framers (of the U.S. Constitution) intended for copyright/patent? I know that Ben Franklin was against it initially, but don't know any specifics. Did they have any idea that copyright would become the nightmare that it is now, where bascially all material is bound up in a few very powerful companies, to the detriment of (almost) all in the society? Did they intend for copyrights and patents to be help by companies (of any sort, big or small) at all, or just by individuals?
What exactly is known about what the Framers intended for copyright/patent? I know that Ben Franklin was against it initially, but don't know any specifics. Did the Framers have any idea that copyright would become the nightmare that it is now, where bascially all material is bound up in a few very powerful companies, to the detriment of (almost) all in the society? Did they intend for copyrights and patents to be help by companies (of any sort, big or small) at all, or just by individuals?