This. I, too, post a fair amount of videos, mainly game walk-throughs and reviews, and I can't even tell you how often I get hit with a takedown notice even though I am clearly immune under Fair Use. I'm one of those people that actually pursues the matter because I know that my use of the material is protected under Fair Use, by that certainly doesn't stop them from yanking it down first and putting the burden on me to get it reinstated.
Of course, if any of the rights holders were to actually decide that I was becoming too much of an annoyance to them and decided to squash my like an insect, I would be well squashed in a matter of days. I don't have the monetary or legal resources to fight these guys in court and they are well aware of this fact. Without having a penalty in place for abuse of the Copyright Claim procedure (which they all abuse, Warner Music is especially bad) the burden is already on the uploader to prove that their use falls under Fair Use doctrines.
I did that, I voted for Nader in 2000. You see what that accomplished...
Call it political PTSD if you want to, but I'm trying to be realistic about our choices. We all knew that Nader didn't have a hope in hell, we were just trying to get him the 5% or whatever he needed to get the Green Party formally recognized and supported by the Federal Government for the 2004 election and not only did we fail to accomplish that, we handed W. the election.
If we had some form of Alternate voting or something it would certainly be a lot more conscionable, but like I said, it could also just hand the Presidency to someone even worse than Obama, as amazing as that sounds.
But it still doesn't really matter much when the only realistic choices for office are chosen for us ahead of time by the kingmakers at the GOP and DNC.
Yes, I know that anyone can technically run for office, but we all know that the only way to compete with the GOP and the DNC is to have their monetary resources so as to plaster your face and message on every billboard and television screen and radio within your voting district. I actually follow politics pretty closely in my corner of the country and every time there's a vote there are still people on the ballot I've never even heard of, have no website, have no information about them or their platforms at all.
Plus, after Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 and we ended up with that idiot George W. Bush as President a lot of people started really voting for the lesser of two evils in earnest. What other choice do the people have? Support a fringe candidate that is just not going to win, period? Or throw your hat in with the guy you disagree with the least that may actually win the election?
I say this, of course, because I'm sitting here wondering what the hell I'm going to do in 2012. I'm severely pissed off at Obama for all the campaign promises he reneged on (Gitmo, the wars, campaign reform, regulatory reform...I could go on and on and on) but what am I supposed to do if he's up against someone like Michele Bachmann or Rick Santorum, that want to roll back civil rights to the 50's and start throwing gays into reeducation centers? I can vote for a third party, but we all know that is throwing your vote away, especially as regards a Presidential Election. Ross Perot and Ralph Nader got a whopping 18.9% and 2.7% of the popular vote, respectively. Neither won any electoral votes at all. You have to go back 100 years to the election of 1912 to find a third party candidate that got more than 20% of the vote, and that was Teddy fucking Roosevelt, one of the greatest President's this country has ever had in history, beloved by almost everyone. He managed to get a whole 27% of the vote running under the Bull Moose party, and this is one of four people on Mount Rushmore for Christ's sake...
So what do I do? Vote my conscience and throw my vote away on a third party? Or do my part to try and make sure that we don't turn into a fucking Christian Theocracy where abortion is murder, even in cases of rape, vaccines cause autism and are therefore banned, no mosques within 1000 feet of a government building, ridiculous shit like that? I'm heartily sick of voting for the lesser of two evils, but short of pulling an Egypt and overthrowing our government, I see no other recourse. We need to sever the ties between wealth and politics in this country, but I see no legal way to do so. There won't ever be one, there is no incentive for any of our sitting reps to change these things, and the only way one can even achieve these offices is by allowing yourself to be corrupted by this system in the first place.
So what do we do? Seriously, someone tell me how the hell we can solve these problems without plunging our country into anarchy, because I just see no other way at all...
Fuck it, just start spamming every congressional website with content-infringing links and then report them.
Hell, much mirth is going to be had with political candidate websites. Time to use this bullshit as a weapon to take down everyone. We don't need weapons, all we need is links to the pirate bay and a place to post a comment.
Totally off-topic, but I wonder why the trees/bushes are growing predominately on the remains of the runways? It's almost like an agar plate with the way they follow it.
Turbine's earnings skyrocketed once they went F2P with LOTRO.
I fully expect the F2P with a cash store model to be the prevailing type of MMO in a couple years at the most. Zynga has demonstrated that micro-transactions can be enormously profitable, and there are many games that are seeing new life through F2P. As long as there isn't an obnoxious paywall, it seems to be only beneficial to a games popularity, and at the end of the day, an MMO without a good community behind it is going to fail regardless of what type of model they use.
Files will become hot-property, school currency, and the kids with the most on offer will become the most popular.
This. I had the good fortune of being in school when Napster launched, as well as being one of the very few kids with a high speed connection and a CD burner. I made a decent amount of money selling custom mix discs to kids I went to school with, their parents, even a few teachers were buying discs from me. It got to the point where I was getting so many orders that I was literally spending all of my free time burning CD's.
Yes, because one could go buy mix discs filled with different songs by artists across multiple record labels that are personally tailored to the listener in any record store...
Just as today, the vast majority of people back then wanted to listen to specific songs by specific artists without having to skip through their entire catalog. This was particularly lucrative for me as portable MP3 players were barely coming to market and generally sucked ass, meaning that they were going to be listening to CDs on their Discman or car stereo, and like you said, CD burners were expensive and hardly anyone had them.
I was in school at the time, so I had no shortage of people asking me for stuff, believe me. Once word got out that I could make CDs for people, I was making stuff for students, teachers, and parents alike. Nobody even cared, because the technology was so new nobody even understood what the legality of the whole situation was, not until the labels started going apeshit, and by the point Napster started filtering stuff by name and the results got more and more obfuscated (when people started uploading stuff like 'Metttaallllliccaaaa' to get around the filters), I pretty much quit doing it for other people because the amount of time it took to verify each track to make sure it wasn't BS or recorded off the radio made it take a lot longer than it used to (like when Madonna uploaded what looked like the tracks of her newest album but was actually rants about people stealing her music labeled as such and the millions of tracks that were missing the beginning).
Anyway, it paid for my school clothes, which is all that mattered to me...when DVD burners came around I did the same thing but by that point I just didn't have the time for it so I focused on my own collection and close family and usually did it gratis...
After Citizen's United vs. FEC, I completely lost my faith in the court's ability to interpret the spirit of our Constitution...very little would surprise me at this point, to be honest.
Because criminals are entitled to a complete and proper defense?
When it comes to privacy, every inch we give results in another mile taken by the government. Consider how the Patriot act evolved from where it began back in 2001 to where it is today, the way the TSA began and the way it is being pushed out beyond it's original boundaries with people advocating and supporting random vehicle searches on Interstates, shipping, busing, backscatter X-ray being used for major sporting events which will eventually trickle down to every public building and who knows how far beyond that...
The Fourth Amendment exists because privacy is necessary for liberty and a free society.
Don't let your parent or grandparent rot in a nursing home, abandoned by their own family. This may not apply to the OP, but I bet it applies to some of the people reading this.
This. I bet all the gadgets in the world don't mean nearly as much as a visit from loved ones...
Exactly, they just want you buying the same album over and over again. I bought Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl back in the 80's, on cassette twice (car ate the first one), and on CD three times (the regular CD released way back when I got my first CD player, a remastered one at some point in the late 90's, and a 5.1 SACD of it).
I'm not buying it again, I absolutely refuse. Any new releases of this damn album come out, I'm downloading them with a clean conscience. They've already gotten over $150 out of me on a single album that was released 40 years ago, and that's just one example, there are many others in my collection that I bought multiple times, Ozzy-era Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, The Who....
Add all the movies I've had to buy multiple times (VHS, replacement VHS, DVD, Bluray...) and it's hard for me to feel bad downloading stuff like Star Wars when I've already paid for it three times over by now...
Why the fuck are e-books so expensive? Many of them are just slightly less than the actual book! Why the hell am I going to spend almost as much money buying the e-book, but not actually get anything physical out of the deal?
This is my thoughts on the matter, as well. I just can't see the justification for what most of the big publishers price their eBooks at.
It seems like they are saving a metric shit-ton of production costs but not passing any of those savings along to the consumer whatsoever. Plus, with eBooks, there's no paperback you can wait for...
Yeah, I think I'll wait until I'm being charged a price for a product more in line with the actual cost of producing and distributing it...
Slashdot Mirror
Okay.
So, are we just going to run any old article with Apple in the title now?
So now a location-based reminder is a fucking patentable thing? What's next, a patent on something that remembers phone numbers for you?
This shit has got to stop...
This. I, too, post a fair amount of videos, mainly game walk-throughs and reviews, and I can't even tell you how often I get hit with a takedown notice even though I am clearly immune under Fair Use. I'm one of those people that actually pursues the matter because I know that my use of the material is protected under Fair Use, by that certainly doesn't stop them from yanking it down first and putting the burden on me to get it reinstated.
Of course, if any of the rights holders were to actually decide that I was becoming too much of an annoyance to them and decided to squash my like an insect, I would be well squashed in a matter of days. I don't have the monetary or legal resources to fight these guys in court and they are well aware of this fact. Without having a penalty in place for abuse of the Copyright Claim procedure (which they all abuse, Warner Music is especially bad) the burden is already on the uploader to prove that their use falls under Fair Use doctrines.
I did that, I voted for Nader in 2000. You see what that accomplished...
Call it political PTSD if you want to, but I'm trying to be realistic about our choices. We all knew that Nader didn't have a hope in hell, we were just trying to get him the 5% or whatever he needed to get the Green Party formally recognized and supported by the Federal Government for the 2004 election and not only did we fail to accomplish that, we handed W. the election.
If we had some form of Alternate voting or something it would certainly be a lot more conscionable, but like I said, it could also just hand the Presidency to someone even worse than Obama, as amazing as that sounds.
But it still doesn't really matter much when the only realistic choices for office are chosen for us ahead of time by the kingmakers at the GOP and DNC.
Yes, I know that anyone can technically run for office, but we all know that the only way to compete with the GOP and the DNC is to have their monetary resources so as to plaster your face and message on every billboard and television screen and radio within your voting district. I actually follow politics pretty closely in my corner of the country and every time there's a vote there are still people on the ballot I've never even heard of, have no website, have no information about them or their platforms at all.
Plus, after Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 and we ended up with that idiot George W. Bush as President a lot of people started really voting for the lesser of two evils in earnest. What other choice do the people have? Support a fringe candidate that is just not going to win, period? Or throw your hat in with the guy you disagree with the least that may actually win the election?
I say this, of course, because I'm sitting here wondering what the hell I'm going to do in 2012. I'm severely pissed off at Obama for all the campaign promises he reneged on (Gitmo, the wars, campaign reform, regulatory reform...I could go on and on and on) but what am I supposed to do if he's up against someone like Michele Bachmann or Rick Santorum, that want to roll back civil rights to the 50's and start throwing gays into reeducation centers? I can vote for a third party, but we all know that is throwing your vote away, especially as regards a Presidential Election. Ross Perot and Ralph Nader got a whopping 18.9% and 2.7% of the popular vote, respectively. Neither won any electoral votes at all. You have to go back 100 years to the election of 1912 to find a third party candidate that got more than 20% of the vote, and that was Teddy fucking Roosevelt, one of the greatest President's this country has ever had in history, beloved by almost everyone. He managed to get a whole 27% of the vote running under the Bull Moose party, and this is one of four people on Mount Rushmore for Christ's sake...
So what do I do? Vote my conscience and throw my vote away on a third party? Or do my part to try and make sure that we don't turn into a fucking Christian Theocracy where abortion is murder, even in cases of rape, vaccines cause autism and are therefore banned, no mosques within 1000 feet of a government building, ridiculous shit like that? I'm heartily sick of voting for the lesser of two evils, but short of pulling an Egypt and overthrowing our government, I see no other recourse. We need to sever the ties between wealth and politics in this country, but I see no legal way to do so. There won't ever be one, there is no incentive for any of our sitting reps to change these things, and the only way one can even achieve these offices is by allowing yourself to be corrupted by this system in the first place.
So what do we do? Seriously, someone tell me how the hell we can solve these problems without plunging our country into anarchy, because I just see no other way at all...
Fuck it, just start spamming every congressional website with content-infringing links and then report them.
Hell, much mirth is going to be had with political candidate websites. Time to use this bullshit as a weapon to take down everyone. We don't need weapons, all we need is links to the pirate bay and a place to post a comment.
Totally off-topic, but I wonder why the trees/bushes are growing predominately on the remains of the runways? It's almost like an agar plate with the way they follow it.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
Turbine's earnings skyrocketed once they went F2P with LOTRO.
I fully expect the F2P with a cash store model to be the prevailing type of MMO in a couple years at the most. Zynga has demonstrated that micro-transactions can be enormously profitable, and there are many games that are seeing new life through F2P. As long as there isn't an obnoxious paywall, it seems to be only beneficial to a games popularity, and at the end of the day, an MMO without a good community behind it is going to fail regardless of what type of model they use.
I've been boycotting for two years, where've you been?
All the clowns are bought off by the MAFIAA so who do you suggest we vote for?
Files will become hot-property, school currency, and the kids with the most on offer will become the most popular.
This. I had the good fortune of being in school when Napster launched, as well as being one of the very few kids with a high speed connection and a CD burner. I made a decent amount of money selling custom mix discs to kids I went to school with, their parents, even a few teachers were buying discs from me. It got to the point where I was getting so many orders that I was literally spending all of my free time burning CD's.
The rebirth of Sneakernet is at hand...
We know who your president is, but I suspect at least 50% of UK citizens couldn't tell you which party he represents.
That's because they're pretty much the same fucking party in all but name...
Yeah but is getting the newest Harry Potter film for the kids really worth the 2 hour rant about governmental spies and the New World Order?
I don't think I can stomach another forced viewing of Loose Change...
Not the bees! Ah my eyes!!!
Oh come on, you know you would like to see Carla Bruni-Sarkozy use the toilet...
They could even double hack it!
I know, right? All they need to do is say "enhance" and it will be clear as day...
The more you tighten your grip, BREIN, the more star systems will slip through your fingers...
Yes, because one could go buy mix discs filled with different songs by artists across multiple record labels that are personally tailored to the listener in any record store...
Just as today, the vast majority of people back then wanted to listen to specific songs by specific artists without having to skip through their entire catalog. This was particularly lucrative for me as portable MP3 players were barely coming to market and generally sucked ass, meaning that they were going to be listening to CDs on their Discman or car stereo, and like you said, CD burners were expensive and hardly anyone had them.
I was in school at the time, so I had no shortage of people asking me for stuff, believe me. Once word got out that I could make CDs for people, I was making stuff for students, teachers, and parents alike. Nobody even cared, because the technology was so new nobody even understood what the legality of the whole situation was, not until the labels started going apeshit, and by the point Napster started filtering stuff by name and the results got more and more obfuscated (when people started uploading stuff like 'Metttaallllliccaaaa' to get around the filters), I pretty much quit doing it for other people because the amount of time it took to verify each track to make sure it wasn't BS or recorded off the radio made it take a lot longer than it used to (like when Madonna uploaded what looked like the tracks of her newest album but was actually rants about people stealing her music labeled as such and the millions of tracks that were missing the beginning) .
Anyway, it paid for my school clothes, which is all that mattered to me...when DVD burners came around I did the same thing but by that point I just didn't have the time for it so I focused on my own collection and close family and usually did it gratis...
After Citizen's United vs. FEC, I completely lost my faith in the court's ability to interpret the spirit of our Constitution...very little would surprise me at this point, to be honest.
Because criminals are entitled to a complete and proper defense?
When it comes to privacy, every inch we give results in another mile taken by the government. Consider how the Patriot act evolved from where it began back in 2001 to where it is today, the way the TSA began and the way it is being pushed out beyond it's original boundaries with people advocating and supporting random vehicle searches on Interstates, shipping, busing, backscatter X-ray being used for major sporting events which will eventually trickle down to every public building and who knows how far beyond that...
The Fourth Amendment exists because privacy is necessary for liberty and a free society.
Don't let your parent or grandparent rot in a nursing home, abandoned by their own family. This may not apply to the OP, but I bet it applies to some of the people reading this.
This. I bet all the gadgets in the world don't mean nearly as much as a visit from loved ones...
Exactly, they just want you buying the same album over and over again. I bought Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl back in the 80's, on cassette twice (car ate the first one), and on CD three times (the regular CD released way back when I got my first CD player, a remastered one at some point in the late 90's, and a 5.1 SACD of it).
I'm not buying it again, I absolutely refuse. Any new releases of this damn album come out, I'm downloading them with a clean conscience. They've already gotten over $150 out of me on a single album that was released 40 years ago, and that's just one example, there are many others in my collection that I bought multiple times, Ozzy-era Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, The Who....
Add all the movies I've had to buy multiple times (VHS, replacement VHS, DVD, Bluray...) and it's hard for me to feel bad downloading stuff like Star Wars when I've already paid for it three times over by now...
Why the fuck are e-books so expensive? Many of them are just slightly less than the actual book! Why the hell am I going to spend almost as much money buying the e-book, but not actually get anything physical out of the deal?
This is my thoughts on the matter, as well. I just can't see the justification for what most of the big publishers price their eBooks at.
It seems like they are saving a metric shit-ton of production costs but not passing any of those savings along to the consumer whatsoever. Plus, with eBooks, there's no paperback you can wait for...
Yeah, I think I'll wait until I'm being charged a price for a product more in line with the actual cost of producing and distributing it...