As a Lucas rep says, 'if in fact somebody is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.'
So remember, if you take the story the way it is and, say, change it so that Greedo shoots first, or Luke screams like a cartoon character, or suddenly increase the size of the Rebel fleet 10 fold, then that is not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about!
Mr. Lucas, it's tough to celebrate the story the way it is if you keep changing it.
While I don't agree with the logic on this, if it were to happen, could we do the same thing for the military?
Anybody who buys GI Joe's gets taxed. Anything camo. Man, they could have made a mint back in the 70s/80s off sales of "Better dead than red" shirts alone!
Don't know what money from Spawn figures would go to. Occult organizations?
You have received commodity goods at no cost that you would not otherwise have had access to. That's not a gain?
Where once you had nothing, you now have something, without the requirement that you give something in return.
0 + 1 = 1
Though your last sentence is equally valid.:) But that makes your friend a commercial pirate, and, thus, an outlaw. Most of the discussion here has been assuming that people are giving copies gratis to their friends.
Excellent points. I am especially enamored of the final paragraph because it touches upon why I defended Rosen's statement as valid: in the current model, what she says is valid. That's not an endorsement of the model, by any means.
Also, it should be noted that compensation in the current model is not as simple as a consumer to artist connection. There really are several layers deep of people who work to make sure an artist is represented publicly, because that is how the current model works. To reflect that, however, Rosen's statement would have to be modified to ask the students if they would be upset if the library assistant who helped them find the books to research the paper was not compensated for their contribution.
Thus, Rosen's statement is misleading, as has been most of her comments about how all this anti-piracy business is for the benefit of the artists. But taken to its simplest form, "Should somebody be compensated for work they do?" (which is the heart of Rosen's statement), the statement stands. We can argue about the form, method, or amount of compensation, but it seemed to me she was asking kids that if the shoe were on the other foot, if their work was being distributed and others were "unfairly" benefitting from it, would they like it? That's a leading question, certainly, because there are parameters missing (Would the benefit negatively affect me? Do I make money from my paper? Are there other repercussions from the appropriation of my work? Will its core meaning be changed but still attributed to me?), but...
Well, actually, I think I just argued myself into a corner.:)
So, in the context of the model and acknowleding the limited scope of the analogy, it's valid. But given a few tweaks, the answers could vary wildly. Rosen's assumption, though, can easily be seen to be "You would lose something if this happened.", without defining what that "something" would be. And the answers would differ dependant upon it.
And these are excellent points. I agree with them all.
But there's a scarcity element in there that has an effect on the rapidity of distribution. Libraries get a limited number of copies for a book. In smaller community libraries (like the ones around me), you can wait upwards of 4 months to read a popular book which, by then, will no longer be popular. Many opt to simply purchase the book instead of waiting in order to get around the resource scarcity.
Same for borrowing a book from a friend. If one person buys a book and lends it out, the lending period is sequential: friend 1 borrows it, then friend 2, then friend 3. This process could put friend 3 at the same four month waiting period as the library, and they may opt just to buy it. But even if they wait, by the end of a few months time, only 3 people other than the buyer have been exposed to the book. So, in order for 4 million people to read a book in 4 months time, 1 million have to buy it.
Now let's move to CDs. It takes 6 minutes to copy a CD. So the resource scarcity is a 6 minute period. Everybody can wait 6 minutes to get something for free. If you have a party and invite 10 people over and half of them walk away with a copy of the CD, that's 5 copies in the space of an evening. Then if they go home and make copies for their acquaintances (let's say at a 1:1 ratio), there are now 10 copies spawned of 1 CD. If it goes beyond that (let's just assume it's a Britney Spears album), there's the possibility (though not necessarily the reality) of an exponential growth in copies that *could not happen* with a physical, analog media like text on pages. With the CD, it is possible that 4 million copies could be spawned from 1 CD - with none of the copying having been for profit.
Now, it is possible to scan the book. Or to photocopy the book. But the time investment in doing either well is significantly prohibitive enough to prevent it from happening in a similarly exponential fashion. Whereas with the CD, you pop it in and, 6 minutes later, you have a copy with no need for labor on your part aside from the purchase of equipment (one time deal) and a few mouse clicks.
But none of this should detract from the point you made that we've been sharing information for centuries. That's true. But I don't know that we've ever profited from information quite as much as we do these days, or, at least, we haven't traded in a pure information space until recently. We've shared stories and songs and jokes while trading primarily in other physical goods like lumber, glass, and rubber. It wasn't too long ago that information was traded only among the rich because they were the only people who had enough time to amuse themselves with knowledge. Their riches, however, came from physical goods, not from anything distributed as knowledge.
So, while sharing ideas is part of the human experience, we have been changing the labor portion of the human experience more into ideas. We now compensate ideas without requiring any kind of attachment to physical production.
And that's what a CD is, really. It's a small platter that holds the ideas of an artist, and those ideas are easily copied and distributed. But now that artists are depending upon being rewarded for the individual consumption of their ideas, the thought that those ideas could be mass-consumed in very little time poses a problem.
The same will be true for books someday. There has been movement for a few years now to get libraries on a pay-per-read system, and when books go digital, if they go digital, that system will become a reality if the current atmosphere is what we use as a context to judge forward development.
And I think that's awful. But I also don't know what the solution is. Should a musician just not record their music and instead only perform it live? Should governments pay musicians for their work and then release everything to the public domain? Should society be snapped back a bit and have its expectations regarding intellectual property re-adjusted (I vote for this one)?
What system will work? Because unless we are going to change this commoditization of ideas, we're going to run into problems where a person's survival is based upon their ability to sell their ideas, but in a world where their ideas can be copied instantly and uncontrollably.
Now the gains bit... First off, please don't assume I'm going to object to your liberal use of the word "gained"? I used it liberally myself, so why should I object?
While their is a gain of mindshare and publicity, of what value is that mindshare/publicity if the public at large finds it acceptable to mass copy the work of that musician?
There was another post that said fame and fortune go hand in hand, but unless one is writing a tell all book about how they didn't make any money at their profession because people didn't respect their copyrights, I'm not sure where the money comes from.
Is the RIAA bilking artists? Hell yes. That's not what the article was addressing. The article and the quote, I believe, were meant to address the fact that people feel perfectly fine ignoring copyrights. I feel that the quote and the sentiment stands in that context, that in the current system of copyright and industry (note I did not say artist) compensation, the flagrant wholesale skirting of copyright is misunderstood by the very perpetrators of it.
Does that mean the system is right? No. Does that mean that Rosen hasn't been hypocritical in the past? No. But those items seemed outside the scope of the attack launched on this quote.
Rosen is asking kids to understand the feeling behind having your work taken and copied and used, and she is doing it from the perspective of an industry that depends upon the sale of creative (no jokes about N'Sync) works to consumers.
My intent was not to troll, and I appreciate the variety of insight into my initial post. My post was perhaps a little too confrontational with the quip "Stretch your minds a little", because it seems that the respondents all think me an RIAA shill.
Okay, so money matters. If somebody makes a killing off your work, you want a piece. But if they enjoy it simply for enjoying it, that's okay.
Let's say that your paper is the basis for your career. This is how you make a living. It comes out, everybody loves it, and they want to use it to further humanity. That's great! But instead of buying the copies you've made available so as to keep yourself fed, one person buys it and runs it through a printing press and gives all the copies away, saturating your market with free copies, and effectively eliminating your chances at revenue.
This is, typically, a bad situation for you unless you are depending upon ancillary methods of sustenance (free donuts at the Today Show when they invite you on, money from speaking engagements, et cetera).
And I think that's the key thing - when people are not upset about their work being passed around, is that work what they depend upon for their primary source of financial gain? My guess is that your paper would not make you money whether distributed or not, so having it distributed for free is a nice form of recognition.
But what if you charged for that paper because you dependend upon it and the same thing happened?
Again, there is an inability of people to think in the abstract. My point had nothing to do with pretending you created content that wasn't yours. The point is purely to do with deriving benefit from the work of somebody else at that person's cost.
In Rosen's analogy, the cost was time and effort put into a paper. In the music industry, the cost is creative effort and production/marketing. In Open Source, the cost is recognition for contributions.
I think the problem here is that a lot of people are projecting their compiled hatred of the RIAA onto this quote from Rosen and twisting it beyond its meaning.
I've seen plenty of outrage from people who have had their code appropriated and used without credit. I've seen Slashdot become a firestorm of protest over such topics. While you might not feel at all bad about it, please do not pretend that it doesn't happen at all.
It doesn't surprise me that people are actually willing to help others by offering their time and talents with no expectation of compensation. Not at all. I rather like that aspect of Open Source and the GPL. And I do grasp the concept quite well.
But that concept and the reality of the usual response of the Slashdot community do not always go hand in hand.
It occurred to me after posting this that I should have tailored the response more for the/. crowd.
Rosen's statement, as it would apply best to this audience, would be changed thusly:
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote some code or found a flaw in zlib. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote some code, and it was good? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that code and not put your name in the README? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people."
And if I get pleasure out of stealing cars, that's okay, right? I mean, I'm not selling them to anybody. I just like to take them, drive them around a while, and give them to my friends.
Yep, that argument fell apart pretty fast.
The difference between stealing cars and burning CDs? Degrees of separation. If you steal a car, you are directly affecting somebody in close proximity to you, and since they know their car, they might just catch you. But burning a CD... you have no way to know the artist, and they have no way to know you. So it's safe, and it's disconnected, and it's distant. So since you don't see any direct, noticeable negative impact, it's okay.
This is not to say that I agree with the tactics of the RIAA. I still think Napster was an excellent vehicle for previewing music and accessing long out of print music, but I also saw a 12 year old girl buy 100 CD-R's at Wal-Mart last night, and I'm pretty sure they weren't going to be used for system backups.
Wow, you people really jumped on the Rosen quote, didn't ya?
Metaphor, peeps. Not a literal representation of the situation. Just metaphor.
She's saying, "Wouldn't you be pissed if somebody else gained from your hard work without you getting a damn thing?" And she's hoping people will say, "Yes."
Okay, counter-point time... I used the word "gained", and that, in Slashworld, implies profit. But that's not necessarily so. If somebody burns a CD, they've "gained" the benefit of not having a negative impact on their wallets, which surely would have happened had they paid for the music legally.
So the metaphor stands: somebody else using your work for their benefit without consideration for the investment of your time and energy is *similar* to somebody copying a CD without consideration for the machinery, both creative and economic, that went into its creation.
I guess it depends on your age when exposed to Eliza. When I got my first chance to muck with Eliza on a TRS-80, I was 13, so I spent the whole time trying to make her use the word 'fuck'.
I'm not exactly sure at what age one starts using her as a therapeutic device.
Hilary Rosen is a mixed bag, that's for sure. She has done an incredibly admirable job of keeping the government from censoring artists, but then she turns around and sticks it to the consumer every chance she gets.
Unfortunately, Slashdot doesn't report on the Free Speech Hilary Rosen. They only report on the "fair use must die" Hilary Rosen.
Yes, I watch too much C-Span. It's the only unbiased news channel left.
In August 2001, the RIAA sent IIS a letter asking that they immediately cease and desist from this practice and notified them that they could face legal and monetary penalties. Soon after, IIS entered into negotiations with the RIAA and agreed to settle the case out of court for $1 million.
Once a cease and desist is sent and followed, isn't that usually where it ends? Why would IIS stop using the repository and then call up the RIAA and say, "So, how much can we pay you in damages?"
The usual IANAL applies. Rip me a new one if I'm an idiot. Also... August 2001? Damn. Sure does take a LONG time to agree to a settlement these days.
They have a couple of good systems coming out this fall.
First up is their Lightweight And Battery Infused Apparatus, model 2250, a portable computing solution designed to go up against Dell's Inspiron line. And for the enterprise market, their new Corporate Linux Terminal, model 3100.
But from what I hear, the enterprise machine is going to be VERY hard to find.
During a company wide meeting in Santa Monica, a group of consultants swept the stage and told us all how we were going to be a billion dollar company in no time at all (with their help, of course). Part of getting there, however, was having a defined corporate image and a honed sense of purpose.
Intro the guitar player.
According to Head Consultant #1, the guitar player who now graced the stage went through some pretty horrific times, notably a throat cancer that threatened his vocal chords. As he was a singer by trade, this would mean the collapse of his entire world. But, with faith and determination, he got through it and emerged on the other side of the ordeal with chords intact. Mr. Guitar Player, then, was to be an inspiration to us all.
And how did they choose to inspire us? By playing the most GOD AWFUL song I have ever heard - the CyberMedia Theme Song. After the song was played (during which my coworkers and I tried heartily to stifle our laughter while one of us was actually so enraged at the idiocy of it all to be visibly red and shaking), we were all handed copies of the song on cassettes. You know, so we could go home and use it as a depressant.
After arriving back at our branch office in Tigard, Oregon, our small group set to encoding the song into an MP3 so we could unleash it on the world and MAKE SURE that everybody knew what CyberMedia was all about.
That song sucked. And it did such a good job at lifting our spirits that the company was sold to Network Associates not long afterwards.
As one of our group was heard to say during the performance of the song by Mr. Guitar Player: "Too bad he recovered."
That's interesting. I think we can then say that we are no longer allowed to bitch about Microsoft proposing mandates regarding the same kind of behavior. When Microsoft wants to hide an exploit, we all cry foul.
When OSS vendors do it, it's cooperation for the sake of security.
Here's a tip for would be beta testers who want a piece of the pie... DON'T BETA TEST!
If you are a volunteer beta tester and the product you worked on goes gangbusters, can't you just be content knowing you made the product better? And if you volunteered, doesn't that mean you had some interest in the product anyway, apart from any dreams of compensation?
I've done beta testing for other software companies for years (Microsoft, Activision, and Disney chief among them), but I never really asked for anything in return. In some cases, it was just cool to have that kind of input into a game or an OS. In other cases, when the test was over, I got a free copy of the software. Hooray for me.
Of course, some times you get some real duds. My name is in the credits of more than one edition of Big Game Hunter, and I'm not proud of that fact.:) But you know, I didn't test the duds as thoroughly as the software I was excited about, so I was actively choosing which projects got the lion's share of my time, leaving me really no reason to sue anybody. I had fun, they got a tester. Sounds like a good trade to me.
The confusion I think is that people who volunteer are suddenly feeling entitled to something more. That, to me, negates the spirit of 'volunteer'.
Now thanks to Red Flag Linux, filtering the thoughts of your citizens is cheaper and more reliable than ever!
Back in the day, you'd have to pay Microsoft big bucks to squelch dissenting opinions and always had to worry that radicals spreading Western ideals would be able to exploit OS vulnerabilities and cause trouble. Not any more!
I wonder if China will GPL their filtering software?
(By the way, I'm not being down on Linux. I'm just dismayed at the irony of a government using one of the most free [as in liberty] operating systems to actually reduce freedom.)
After watching Tron, I had to stop and think about the program I was derezzing every time I typed 'NEW'.
And then, to make up for all the horrible deaths, I would let my Little Computer Person run for days on end until he was green and sick in bed, at which point I would remind him of the role of the Users and CTRL-F him some food to the front door.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed how mismatched this story is with Huxley's "Brave New World." If Magic Lantern were a program to genetically engineer and instill class structures from birth, then I could see the comparison...
Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Lucas, it's tough to celebrate the story the way it is if you keep changing it.
While I don't agree with the logic on this, if it were to happen, could we do the same thing for the military?
Anybody who buys GI Joe's gets taxed. Anything camo. Man, they could have made a mint back in the 70s/80s off sales of "Better dead than red" shirts alone!
Don't know what money from Spawn figures would go to. Occult organizations?
I couldn't agree more. Really.
You have received commodity goods at no cost that you would not otherwise have had access to. That's not a gain?
:) But that makes your friend a commercial pirate, and, thus, an outlaw. Most of the discussion here has been assuming that people are giving copies gratis to their friends.
Where once you had nothing, you now have something, without the requirement that you give something in return.
0 + 1 = 1
Though your last sentence is equally valid.
Excellent points. I am especially enamored of the final paragraph because it touches upon why I defended Rosen's statement as valid: in the current model, what she says is valid. That's not an endorsement of the model, by any means.
:)
Also, it should be noted that compensation in the current model is not as simple as a consumer to artist connection. There really are several layers deep of people who work to make sure an artist is represented publicly, because that is how the current model works. To reflect that, however, Rosen's statement would have to be modified to ask the students if they would be upset if the library assistant who helped them find the books to research the paper was not compensated for their contribution.
Thus, Rosen's statement is misleading, as has been most of her comments about how all this anti-piracy business is for the benefit of the artists. But taken to its simplest form, "Should somebody be compensated for work they do?" (which is the heart of Rosen's statement), the statement stands. We can argue about the form, method, or amount of compensation, but it seemed to me she was asking kids that if the shoe were on the other foot, if their work was being distributed and others were "unfairly" benefitting from it, would they like it? That's a leading question, certainly, because there are parameters missing (Would the benefit negatively affect me? Do I make money from my paper? Are there other repercussions from the appropriation of my work? Will its core meaning be changed but still attributed to me?), but...
Well, actually, I think I just argued myself into a corner.
So, in the context of the model and acknowleding the limited scope of the analogy, it's valid. But given a few tweaks, the answers could vary wildly. Rosen's assumption, though, can easily be seen to be "You would lose something if this happened.", without defining what that "something" would be. And the answers would differ dependant upon it.
Is that a fair statement?
And these are excellent points. I agree with them all.
But there's a scarcity element in there that has an effect on the rapidity of distribution. Libraries get a limited number of copies for a book. In smaller community libraries (like the ones around me), you can wait upwards of 4 months to read a popular book which, by then, will no longer be popular. Many opt to simply purchase the book instead of waiting in order to get around the resource scarcity.
Same for borrowing a book from a friend. If one person buys a book and lends it out, the lending period is sequential: friend 1 borrows it, then friend 2, then friend 3. This process could put friend 3 at the same four month waiting period as the library, and they may opt just to buy it. But even if they wait, by the end of a few months time, only 3 people other than the buyer have been exposed to the book. So, in order for 4 million people to read a book in 4 months time, 1 million have to buy it.
Now let's move to CDs. It takes 6 minutes to copy a CD. So the resource scarcity is a 6 minute period. Everybody can wait 6 minutes to get something for free. If you have a party and invite 10 people over and half of them walk away with a copy of the CD, that's 5 copies in the space of an evening. Then if they go home and make copies for their acquaintances (let's say at a 1:1 ratio), there are now 10 copies spawned of 1 CD. If it goes beyond that (let's just assume it's a Britney Spears album), there's the possibility (though not necessarily the reality) of an exponential growth in copies that *could not happen* with a physical, analog media like text on pages. With the CD, it is possible that 4 million copies could be spawned from 1 CD - with none of the copying having been for profit.
Now, it is possible to scan the book. Or to photocopy the book. But the time investment in doing either well is significantly prohibitive enough to prevent it from happening in a similarly exponential fashion. Whereas with the CD, you pop it in and, 6 minutes later, you have a copy with no need for labor on your part aside from the purchase of equipment (one time deal) and a few mouse clicks.
But none of this should detract from the point you made that we've been sharing information for centuries. That's true. But I don't know that we've ever profited from information quite as much as we do these days, or, at least, we haven't traded in a pure information space until recently. We've shared stories and songs and jokes while trading primarily in other physical goods like lumber, glass, and rubber. It wasn't too long ago that information was traded only among the rich because they were the only people who had enough time to amuse themselves with knowledge. Their riches, however, came from physical goods, not from anything distributed as knowledge.
So, while sharing ideas is part of the human experience, we have been changing the labor portion of the human experience more into ideas. We now compensate ideas without requiring any kind of attachment to physical production.
And that's what a CD is, really. It's a small platter that holds the ideas of an artist, and those ideas are easily copied and distributed. But now that artists are depending upon being rewarded for the individual consumption of their ideas, the thought that those ideas could be mass-consumed in very little time poses a problem.
The same will be true for books someday. There has been movement for a few years now to get libraries on a pay-per-read system, and when books go digital, if they go digital, that system will become a reality if the current atmosphere is what we use as a context to judge forward development.
And I think that's awful. But I also don't know what the solution is. Should a musician just not record their music and instead only perform it live? Should governments pay musicians for their work and then release everything to the public domain? Should society be snapped back a bit and have its expectations regarding intellectual property re-adjusted (I vote for this one)?
What system will work? Because unless we are going to change this commoditization of ideas, we're going to run into problems where a person's survival is based upon their ability to sell their ideas, but in a world where their ideas can be copied instantly and uncontrollably.
Yeah, I was wrong about the metaphor thing.
Now the gains bit... First off, please don't assume I'm going to object to your liberal use of the word "gained"? I used it liberally myself, so why should I object?
While their is a gain of mindshare and publicity, of what value is that mindshare/publicity if the public at large finds it acceptable to mass copy the work of that musician?
There was another post that said fame and fortune go hand in hand, but unless one is writing a tell all book about how they didn't make any money at their profession because people didn't respect their copyrights, I'm not sure where the money comes from.
Is the RIAA bilking artists? Hell yes. That's not what the article was addressing. The article and the quote, I believe, were meant to address the fact that people feel perfectly fine ignoring copyrights. I feel that the quote and the sentiment stands in that context, that in the current system of copyright and industry (note I did not say artist) compensation, the flagrant wholesale skirting of copyright is misunderstood by the very perpetrators of it.
Does that mean the system is right? No. Does that mean that Rosen hasn't been hypocritical in the past? No. But those items seemed outside the scope of the attack launched on this quote.
Rosen is asking kids to understand the feeling behind having your work taken and copied and used, and she is doing it from the perspective of an industry that depends upon the sale of creative (no jokes about N'Sync) works to consumers.
To that end, the analogy works.
My intent was not to troll, and I appreciate the variety of insight into my initial post. My post was perhaps a little too confrontational with the quip "Stretch your minds a little", because it seems that the respondents all think me an RIAA shill.
Okay, so money matters. If somebody makes a killing off your work, you want a piece. But if they enjoy it simply for enjoying it, that's okay.
Let's say that your paper is the basis for your career. This is how you make a living. It comes out, everybody loves it, and they want to use it to further humanity. That's great! But instead of buying the copies you've made available so as to keep yourself fed, one person buys it and runs it through a printing press and gives all the copies away, saturating your market with free copies, and effectively eliminating your chances at revenue.
This is, typically, a bad situation for you unless you are depending upon ancillary methods of sustenance (free donuts at the Today Show when they invite you on, money from speaking engagements, et cetera).
And I think that's the key thing - when people are not upset about their work being passed around, is that work what they depend upon for their primary source of financial gain? My guess is that your paper would not make you money whether distributed or not, so having it distributed for free is a nice form of recognition.
But what if you charged for that paper because you dependend upon it and the same thing happened?
Again, there is an inability of people to think in the abstract. My point had nothing to do with pretending you created content that wasn't yours. The point is purely to do with deriving benefit from the work of somebody else at that person's cost.
In Rosen's analogy, the cost was time and effort put into a paper. In the music industry, the cost is creative effort and production/marketing. In Open Source, the cost is recognition for contributions.
I think the problem here is that a lot of people are projecting their compiled hatred of the RIAA onto this quote from Rosen and twisting it beyond its meaning.
That's great... for you.
I've seen plenty of outrage from people who have had their code appropriated and used without credit. I've seen Slashdot become a firestorm of protest over such topics. While you might not feel at all bad about it, please do not pretend that it doesn't happen at all.
It doesn't surprise me that people are actually willing to help others by offering their time and talents with no expectation of compensation. Not at all. I rather like that aspect of Open Source and the GPL. And I do grasp the concept quite well.
But that concept and the reality of the usual response of the Slashdot community do not always go hand in hand.
It occurred to me after posting this that I should have tailored the response more for the /. crowd.
Rosen's statement, as it would apply best to this audience, would be changed thusly:
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote some code or found a flaw in zlib. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote some code, and it was good? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that code and not put your name in the README? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people."
And if I get pleasure out of stealing cars, that's okay, right? I mean, I'm not selling them to anybody. I just like to take them, drive them around a while, and give them to my friends.
Yep, that argument fell apart pretty fast.
The difference between stealing cars and burning CDs? Degrees of separation. If you steal a car, you are directly affecting somebody in close proximity to you, and since they know their car, they might just catch you. But burning a CD... you have no way to know the artist, and they have no way to know you. So it's safe, and it's disconnected, and it's distant. So since you don't see any direct, noticeable negative impact, it's okay.
This is not to say that I agree with the tactics of the RIAA. I still think Napster was an excellent vehicle for previewing music and accessing long out of print music, but I also saw a 12 year old girl buy 100 CD-R's at Wal-Mart last night, and I'm pretty sure they weren't going to be used for system backups.
Wow, you people really jumped on the Rosen quote, didn't ya?
Metaphor, peeps. Not a literal representation of the situation. Just metaphor.
She's saying, "Wouldn't you be pissed if somebody else gained from your hard work without you getting a damn thing?" And she's hoping people will say, "Yes."
Okay, counter-point time... I used the word "gained", and that, in Slashworld, implies profit. But that's not necessarily so. If somebody burns a CD, they've "gained" the benefit of not having a negative impact on their wallets, which surely would have happened had they paid for the music legally.
So the metaphor stands: somebody else using your work for their benefit without consideration for the investment of your time and energy is *similar* to somebody copying a CD without consideration for the machinery, both creative and economic, that went into its creation.
Jesus, people... Stretch your brains a little.
I guess it depends on your age when exposed to Eliza. When I got my first chance to muck with Eliza on a TRS-80, I was 13, so I spent the whole time trying to make her use the word 'fuck'.
I'm not exactly sure at what age one starts using her as a therapeutic device.
Speech given to Senate Government Affairs Committee
RIAA's summation of anti-censorship stuff - obviously biased, but hey
Response to hearings in '98
First-hand account of Senate sub-committee testimony in '97
And while not artist related, there's also that little matter of helping found Rock the Vote
She's also active in gay rights circles, but Google wasn't as helpful in digging up stuff about that.
Hilary Rosen is a mixed bag, that's for sure. She has done an incredibly admirable job of keeping the government from censoring artists, but then she turns around and sticks it to the consumer every chance she gets.
Unfortunately, Slashdot doesn't report on the Free Speech Hilary Rosen. They only report on the "fair use must die" Hilary Rosen.
Yes, I watch too much C-Span. It's the only unbiased news channel left.
The usual IANAL applies. Rip me a new one if I'm an idiot. Also... August 2001? Damn. Sure does take a LONG time to agree to a settlement these days.
They have a couple of good systems coming out this fall.
First up is their Lightweight And Battery Infused Apparatus, model 2250, a portable computing solution designed to go up against Dell's Inspiron line. And for the enterprise market, their new Corporate Linux Terminal, model 3100.
But from what I hear, the enterprise machine is going to be VERY hard to find.
... and it wasn't pretty.
During a company wide meeting in Santa Monica, a group of consultants swept the stage and told us all how we were going to be a billion dollar company in no time at all (with their help, of course). Part of getting there, however, was having a defined corporate image and a honed sense of purpose.
Intro the guitar player.
According to Head Consultant #1, the guitar player who now graced the stage went through some pretty horrific times, notably a throat cancer that threatened his vocal chords. As he was a singer by trade, this would mean the collapse of his entire world. But, with faith and determination, he got through it and emerged on the other side of the ordeal with chords intact. Mr. Guitar Player, then, was to be an inspiration to us all.
And how did they choose to inspire us? By playing the most GOD AWFUL song I have ever heard - the CyberMedia Theme Song. After the song was played (during which my coworkers and I tried heartily to stifle our laughter while one of us was actually so enraged at the idiocy of it all to be visibly red and shaking), we were all handed copies of the song on cassettes. You know, so we could go home and use it as a depressant.
After arriving back at our branch office in Tigard, Oregon, our small group set to encoding the song into an MP3 so we could unleash it on the world and MAKE SURE that everybody knew what CyberMedia was all about.
That song sucked. And it did such a good job at lifting our spirits that the company was sold to Network Associates not long afterwards.
As one of our group was heard to say during the performance of the song by Mr. Guitar Player: "Too bad he recovered."
That's interesting. I think we can then say that we are no longer allowed to bitch about Microsoft proposing mandates regarding the same kind of behavior. When Microsoft wants to hide an exploit, we all cry foul.
When OSS vendors do it, it's cooperation for the sake of security.
Double standard?
Here's a tip for would be beta testers who want a piece of the pie... DON'T BETA TEST!
:) But you know, I didn't test the duds as thoroughly as the software I was excited about, so I was actively choosing which projects got the lion's share of my time, leaving me really no reason to sue anybody. I had fun, they got a tester. Sounds like a good trade to me.
If you are a volunteer beta tester and the product you worked on goes gangbusters, can't you just be content knowing you made the product better? And if you volunteered, doesn't that mean you had some interest in the product anyway, apart from any dreams of compensation?
I've done beta testing for other software companies for years (Microsoft, Activision, and Disney chief among them), but I never really asked for anything in return. In some cases, it was just cool to have that kind of input into a game or an OS. In other cases, when the test was over, I got a free copy of the software. Hooray for me.
Of course, some times you get some real duds. My name is in the credits of more than one edition of Big Game Hunter, and I'm not proud of that fact.
The confusion I think is that people who volunteer are suddenly feeling entitled to something more. That, to me, negates the spirit of 'volunteer'.
Now thanks to Red Flag Linux, filtering the thoughts of your citizens is cheaper and more reliable than ever!
Back in the day, you'd have to pay Microsoft big bucks to squelch dissenting opinions and always had to worry that radicals spreading Western ideals would be able to exploit OS vulnerabilities and cause trouble. Not any more!
I wonder if China will GPL their filtering software?
(By the way, I'm not being down on Linux. I'm just dismayed at the irony of a government using one of the most free [as in liberty] operating systems to actually reduce freedom.)
After watching Tron, I had to stop and think about the program I was derezzing every time I typed 'NEW'.
And then, to make up for all the horrible deaths, I would let my Little Computer Person run for days on end until he was green and sick in bed, at which point I would remind him of the role of the Users and CTRL-F him some food to the front door.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed how mismatched this story is with Huxley's "Brave New World." If Magic Lantern were a program to genetically engineer and instill class structures from birth, then I could see the comparison...
But, it's not.
By accident.
They didn't mean to release it, it just happened. So, go ahead and bash Red Hat. They're just as guilty as anybody else.