I think you have a good perspective on things. There is more to life than making as much money as you can, and from what I gather, if you can make someone's life better through your art even for a few minutes, you've been paid enough.
However, I think that you're a little off the mark in saying that you wish to fight the system through "piracy". Like it or not, we live in a capitalist country, and the almighty dollar will dictate most of our big decisions. Up until now, it had dictated that art has value only when its distribution is carefully controlled, and circumventing that system is illegal.
I think massive civil disobedience on this issue won't get us anythere: nobody will say "since most people are making illegal copies of music, we should make it legal". The only thing that will work is to show that there is value in art that is distributed as widely as possible. When people realize that they can become musicians without signing away their rights, and possibly even make a living selling their own music if they distribute their music themselves, on their terms, the RIAA will become irrelevant.
The key thing is not to circumvent copyright, but show that the big copyright cartels are not where the value in art lies anymore. Thus, mass copying of other people's work will not accomplish as much as opening up the distribution of your own work. This is what the Free Software movement does: it uses copyright (which was designed to limit distribution) as a tool to distribute information as widely as possible. Perhaps it's time for a Free Music movement?
Re:They aren't so worried about $5 synthetics
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 1
The real reason why DeBeers is sweating is the $1.5 billion worth of diamonds sitting in Israel which, if released into the market, could send diamond prices spiralling down.
That was a good article, but do you realise it was written in 1982? Were you even alive then? I imagine the dynamics of the diamond industry have changes a lot since then...
I think things like that episode in NY where they were trying to give out traffic tickets to ezpass users foreshadow things to come/
Link, please? I've only heard about this from rumor, not from actual fact (or news reports..) If there is some factual basis behind this I might change my view on EZ-pass.
I've used my EZ-Pass on the NYS thruway and on NYC bridges lots of times, and never gotten a ticket in the mail. And I always do 75 in a 65. For that matter, I've blown by speed traps doing 75 in a 65, or 70 in a 55, and never got pulled over... I can guarantee that if you look at my EZ-Pass statement, you can find instances where the math says I must have been doing more than 65...
Well at least they are coming out and saying it. Here in the US they trick us into using EZ-Pass because without it, some of these highways are brutal to navigate. Sure, it only pays your tolls, for now. Sure, it's only optional, for now.
People will never get traffic tickets based on EZ-PASS in the US, for a few reasons:
People will drop the service like a hot potato. Remember, not all roads in the US are toll roads...
And there will always be the option to use cash -- requiring only EZ-pass on a bridge or road built with public money is a lawsuit waiting to happen, since not everyone has good enough credit to get one without a deposit.
I'm not sure what it's like in the UK, but in the US we're innocent until proven guilty. And for traffic enfractions, that usually means getting caught in the act by a live human being. If there's not a human being available to testify to what you did, even for minor enfractions, it's a lot easier to get away scot-free. (Even those red-light cameras are on shaky ground...)
I imagine that the number of voters that drive is quite high. And if the polititians allow the EZ-pass system to be manipulated to collect more fines, then their opponents will get a lot of mileage (pun intended) over the issue in the next election.
Plus, since we have several levels of government here (Federal, State, Local) all with their own powers and money for roads, mandating that all people going over a bridge or on a toll road have EZ-pass would require so much cooperation that it will never happen. Is the UK government structured like this?
I think I'm gonna patent my own shopping method - Buy It Later - You click it and it charges your credit card on a random date and sends you the merchandise whenever the seller feels like it!
I think someone beat you to it. At least, this is what happened the last time I ordered something from buy.com...
The parent post is right on the money. I got a TiVo a little over a year ago (Old Series 1 without the new bells and whistles), and it really does change the way I watch TV. But when the modem went south on it a few weeks after purchasing it, and I sent it in for service (luckily still under warranty), I tried out the Time Warner DVR.
It absolutely sucked compared with the TiVo. The interface was garbage, and searching for a new show to record was an excrutiating process. The equivalent of TiVo's "Season Pass"es didn't work right at all. The only things that the TW DVR had that the TiVo didn't were two tuners (which I'd still love to have), and a bigger hard drive (which I upgraded the next time Circuit City had a Hard Drive rebate going...)
Then again, I never really liked the menu interface on any of those Sci-A boxes, and I love the fact that I can mod my TiVo -- in addition to the hard drive upgrade, it has ethernet, and telnet and a web server!
TiVo, while more expensive, is much more useful and definitely has a higher "geek factor". Which, as a/. reader, is all you should be concerned about!
There are a lot of absurd patents out there. Three that I can think of off the top of my head are:
A patent on swinging sideways on a swing
A patent on entertaining a cat with a laser pointer
A patent on... um... entertaining a lady in a hottub. This one I believe is owned by Penn Jilette, of Penn and Teller fame.
These are all things that should be obvious to anyone with a pulse, and yet they all got patented. The system seems broken, doesn't it?
These are all bona-fide US patents. I would look up the information, but I'm at work, I'm an engineer, and we're not allowed to search for patents over the Internet at work (seriously)!
Buy Music has no Weird Al (at least when I looked on my work PC this morning).
iTunes didn't use to have any, but they recently added the album with the Amish rap song on it. Which I will be buying once I get a spare moment at home.
What truer test of iTunes worth to society (and buymusic's worthlessness) can there possibly be?
To be fair, the page you linked to about iTMS is just for dealing with computer authorization problems. So, if your laptop with all your tunes gets stolen, you can de-authorize it without having the physical unit. But if you didn't make a backup of your purchased tunes before losing them, they're lost for good.
Luckily, you can rather easily back up your songs on CD. Remember that Apple not only lets you make unencumbered CD-Audio copies, but anyone with a recent Mac has at least a CD-RW built in. So, there's really no excuse if someone loses their songs without having a backup...
> They will claim that since it is a work-alike, then it is a derivative work. ... and will subsequently be laughed out of court.
Don't be so sure about that. It seems to me that many recent legal decisions and new laws regarding the treatment of IP - the Bono Copyright Act, the DMCA, the DeCSS case, and the validity of Business Method patents, to name a few - strenghten the rights of IP owners at the expense of other parties. Each involves a slightly different interpretation of IP rights from what was standard before the age of electronic distribution.
Given this chain of events, I wouldn't be suprised if the courts discover a "new interpretation" of IP law that includes a broader interpretation of derivative works. It would be going with the general trend of things lately.
This is the only situation in which I see SCO winning: if a court determines that Linux (and other free unixes) are all derivative works of Unix by their nature, and that the entirety of the code bases are infringing, whether or not the code originally came from SCO's code base. I think it's a longshot given what happened in the BSD case, but it is possible. And if this happens, there simply is no such thing as free software anymore, since most useful applications have at least one commercial implementation, and every free implementation would be considered derivative.
If any manager or businessman begins an assertion with "There's no question", "Clearly", or "It's obvious", that assertion is nothing of the sort. It's a wild-assed guess at best, and a lie at worst. They say these things to give their statement a false measure of authority, and because they can't stand not appearing to know everything all the time. These are the phrases that shift my BS meter into overdrive...
Here's my beef with DRM -- it's trying to solve a social problem through technology. Whether or not thousands of people don't want to pay for their music, I do want to pay. What DRM really does is put restrictions on how I, as a paying customer, can use the media I bought. Restrictions that (by law) I can't circumvent, even if it's to use that piece of media in a lawful manner that the content owner just doesn't approve of, but can't prevent through normal copyright law.
Meanwhile, since no DRM scheme is perfect, the people who don't feel the need to pay to stay in compliance with the law can just go on not paying. It harms the rights of the paying customer, while doing absolutely nothing to actually solve the piracy problem.
Is the problem really the face that unencumered media is availalble? Or is it the fact that many people don't want to "pay their fair share"? The only way to solve the piracy problem is to make people honest again. DRM only takes away the freedoms of law-abiding citizens, and does nothing to make the dishonest people more honest.
A lot of the "Apple Apologists" you seem to find here are actually just realists. I think I fall into this category -- I don't like DRM, but I'll grant that Apple's DRM scheme is the least restrictive out of the entire universe of DRM strategies. I'd like to be able to buy unencumbered MP3's of all the bands in the universe, but it simply won't happen in the current business climate. Apple's DRM is something I can work with, unlike the DRM that Sony puts on its' portable devices. (when a friend told me that he has to convert his MP3's to a proprietary format to go on his Clie, and that the software wouldn't let him play anything on his computer that was also on the Clie, I gained a new appreciation for Apple's approach.)
If anything, what this story illustrates is that when you "buy" a tune from iTunes, you haven't really bought a thing, in spite of what Steve has said in the past.
It's a simple thing to fix, too: start authorizing people who bought their music in the U.S. but moved overseas solely to play the music they have bought, and not to buy more. This keeps everyone happy, and we get back the comfortable illusion that we actually own the data on our hard drive.
I think adding any sort of token to the voting process just complicates it. Votes are supposed to be specific to a person, not specific to a token representing a person.
As you mention, it will create a new problem of tokens being stolen, sold, or otherwise separated from the person who the token was intended for. Should that person be barred from voting because they lost the token? Clearly, not. So now, you still have the process of manually verifying the person's eligibility, while adding the additional problem of trying to make sure the invalid token isn't used.
Keep in mind also that the notion of a secret ballot might preclude keeping track of the votes cast under a particular token, since that could be traced back to the voter. So if you were hunting for a invalid token, the best you could do is try to stop the person with the token from voting. If the loss is reported after the invalid vote is cast, there's likely not a thing that can be done about it.
I'd put in all the whiz-bang effects that seem to be pervasive in voting machines nowadays -- electronic touch screens, review of your votes before they are committed, heck, it can even sing and dance for all I care.
But when the voter says that he or she is done voting and pulls the lever (there needs to be a lever for the curtain, since we have a secret ballot), the voting machine spits out a punch card with all the choices neatly punched by computer, which you physically put in the box. Or, it keeps a paper tape tally of each person's votes inside the machine.
You get just as much security as the current system (it really is just the current system, with a different front-end), and virtually eliminate the "hanging chad" problem. The different front-end will reduce voter confusion also (as long as it's well deisgned), and eliminate the "I couldn't understand the ballot" problem.
You'd still have the human element in keeping the integrity of the ballot boxes, and human beings will still be checking the lists to make sure someone isn't listed twice, but I view this as a good thing. Widespread human involvement on a local level is much to hard to hack on a large scale... you might be able to control a district or two, but it would take a lot of work to fix the election of an entire state. If voting machines become pervasive without a human element to check them, then a single flaw could affect every district that uses that particular machine at the same time.... now, that's the way to fix an election!
I agree with you, I think Simplicity should be a priority when looking at these things. But when I recently went around looking at a replacement for my venerable Palm V (2mb was getting kind of cozy), I was amazed at how bloated a lot of these PIM's had become.
The Sony Clie's had way too much eye candy for my tastes. It also uses those infernal Memory Sticks for expansion. The Pocket PC's were simply too bloated also. (I have no need to drive a display for a Powerpoint Presentation from my handheld...) And I was suprised to see a keyboard and no graffiti area on the higher-end Tungstens. Does anyone actually use those tiny keyboards?
The only conclusion that I can come to is that the ideal PIM should be simple, but the best-selling PIM will have lots of unnecessary bells and whistles, because that's what the sheeple want.
Ultimately, I ended up getting a Tungsten T last week (for a song, since resellers were clearing them out last week -- with Palm and Amazon rebates, the final price is $220.) Compared with 2MB, 16MB is plenty! and Bluetooth simply rocks. I think that Bluetooth alone is worth the difference in the price I paid for this model compared to the Palms in the $100-$200 range.
Re:Bringing it all together
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 1
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Everything that's wrong with the world can ultimately be traced bact to either lawyers or the Fox Network. In fact, I'll think I'll go and make that my new.sig...
If I wanted political nastiness, I'd go to a political site. I DON'T. I want actual news for nerds and stuff that matters, not Michael Sims making jokes about Reagan's Alzheimer's. HA HA MICHAEL YUO = TEH FUNNEYMAN!!!!!
The joke was pretty lame, I admit, but I believe that the "no-memory-of-these-events dept." has more to do with Iran-Contra than Reagan's alzheimers. My memory is hazy about the whole affair, but I think that Reagan did his fair share of "selective recall" of events...
Slashdot Mirror
However, I think that you're a little off the mark in saying that you wish to fight the system through "piracy". Like it or not, we live in a capitalist country, and the almighty dollar will dictate most of our big decisions. Up until now, it had dictated that art has value only when its distribution is carefully controlled, and circumventing that system is illegal.
I think massive civil disobedience on this issue won't get us anythere: nobody will say "since most people are making illegal copies of music, we should make it legal". The only thing that will work is to show that there is value in art that is distributed as widely as possible. When people realize that they can become musicians without signing away their rights, and possibly even make a living selling their own music if they distribute their music themselves, on their terms, the RIAA will become irrelevant.
The key thing is not to circumvent copyright, but show that the big copyright cartels are not where the value in art lies anymore. Thus, mass copying of other people's work will not accomplish as much as opening up the distribution of your own work. This is what the Free Software movement does: it uses copyright (which was designed to limit distribution) as a tool to distribute information as widely as possible. Perhaps it's time for a Free Music movement?
That was a good article, but do you realise it was written in 1982? Were you even alive then? I imagine the dynamics of the diamond industry have changes a lot since then...
Link, please? I've only heard about this from rumor, not from actual fact (or news reports..) If there is some factual basis behind this I might change my view on EZ-pass.
I've used my EZ-Pass on the NYS thruway and on NYC bridges lots of times, and never gotten a ticket in the mail. And I always do 75 in a 65. For that matter, I've blown by speed traps doing 75 in a 65, or 70 in a 55, and never got pulled over... I can guarantee that if you look at my EZ-Pass statement, you can find instances where the math says I must have been doing more than 65...
People will never get traffic tickets based on EZ-PASS in the US, for a few reasons:
People will drop the service like a hot potato. Remember, not all roads in the US are toll roads...
And there will always be the option to use cash -- requiring only EZ-pass on a bridge or road built with public money is a lawsuit waiting to happen, since not everyone has good enough credit to get one without a deposit.
I'm not sure what it's like in the UK, but in the US we're innocent until proven guilty. And for traffic enfractions, that usually means getting caught in the act by a live human being. If there's not a human being available to testify to what you did, even for minor enfractions, it's a lot easier to get away scot-free. (Even those red-light cameras are on shaky ground...)
I imagine that the number of voters that drive is quite high. And if the polititians allow the EZ-pass system to be manipulated to collect more fines, then their opponents will get a lot of mileage (pun intended) over the issue in the next election.
Plus, since we have several levels of government here (Federal, State, Local) all with their own powers and money for roads, mandating that all people going over a bridge or on a toll road have EZ-pass would require so much cooperation that it will never happen. Is the UK government structured like this?
Don't forget Artistic License, Fake Driver's License, License to Kill, Liquor License, or CowboyNeal Fanclub License!
I suspect you will find that all three of those are considered equal in the eyes of Congress...
but some are more equal than others.
I think you mis-spelled "corporation" at the end of that sentence...
I prefer Irish Whiskey myself, but if you're going to have a Vodka while administering OpenBSD, I'm not gonna stop ya...
- You click it and it charges your credit card on a random date and sends you the merchandise whenever the seller feels like it!
I think someone beat you to it. At least, this is what happened the last time I ordered something from buy.com ...
For that matter, my company has already paid by my reading all the /. articles about this frivolous suit by SCO on company time...
It absolutely sucked compared with the TiVo. The interface was garbage, and searching for a new show to record was an excrutiating process. The equivalent of TiVo's "Season Pass"es didn't work right at all. The only things that the TW DVR had that the TiVo didn't were two tuners (which I'd still love to have), and a bigger hard drive (which I upgraded the next time Circuit City had a Hard Drive rebate going...)
Then again, I never really liked the menu interface on any of those Sci-A boxes, and I love the fact that I can mod my TiVo -- in addition to the hard drive upgrade, it has ethernet, and telnet and a web server!
TiVo, while more expensive, is much more useful and definitely has a higher "geek factor". Which, as a /. reader, is all you should be concerned about!
These are all things that should be obvious to anyone with a pulse, and yet they all got patented. The system seems broken, doesn't it?
These are all bona-fide US patents. I would look up the information, but I'm at work, I'm an engineer, and we're not allowed to search for patents over the Internet at work (seriously)!
iTunes didn't use to have any, but they recently added the album with the Amish rap song on it. Which I will be buying once I get a spare moment at home.
What truer test of iTunes worth to society (and buymusic's worthlessness) can there possibly be?
Luckily, you can rather easily back up your songs on CD. Remember that Apple not only lets you make unencumbered CD-Audio copies, but anyone with a recent Mac has at least a CD-RW built in. So, there's really no excuse if someone loses their songs without having a backup...
Don't be so sure about that. It seems to me that many recent legal decisions and new laws regarding the treatment of IP - the Bono Copyright Act, the DMCA, the DeCSS case, and the validity of Business Method patents, to name a few - strenghten the rights of IP owners at the expense of other parties. Each involves a slightly different interpretation of IP rights from what was standard before the age of electronic distribution.
Given this chain of events, I wouldn't be suprised if the courts discover a "new interpretation" of IP law that includes a broader interpretation of derivative works. It would be going with the general trend of things lately.
This is the only situation in which I see SCO winning: if a court determines that Linux (and other free unixes) are all derivative works of Unix by their nature, and that the entirety of the code bases are infringing, whether or not the code originally came from SCO's code base. I think it's a longshot given what happened in the BSD case, but it is possible. And if this happens, there simply is no such thing as free software anymore, since most useful applications have at least one commercial implementation, and every free implementation would be considered derivative.
Scary, huh?
If any manager or businessman begins an assertion with "There's no question", "Clearly", or "It's obvious", that assertion is nothing of the sort. It's a wild-assed guess at best, and a lie at worst. They say these things to give their statement a false measure of authority, and because they can't stand not appearing to know everything all the time. These are the phrases that shift my BS meter into overdrive...
Meanwhile, since no DRM scheme is perfect, the people who don't feel the need to pay to stay in compliance with the law can just go on not paying. It harms the rights of the paying customer, while doing absolutely nothing to actually solve the piracy problem.
Is the problem really the face that unencumered media is availalble? Or is it the fact that many people don't want to "pay their fair share"? The only way to solve the piracy problem is to make people honest again. DRM only takes away the freedoms of law-abiding citizens, and does nothing to make the dishonest people more honest.
If anything, what this story illustrates is that when you "buy" a tune from iTunes, you haven't really bought a thing, in spite of what Steve has said in the past.
It's a simple thing to fix, too: start authorizing people who bought their music in the U.S. but moved overseas solely to play the music they have bought, and not to buy more. This keeps everyone happy, and we get back the comfortable illusion that we actually own the data on our hard drive.
As you mention, it will create a new problem of tokens being stolen, sold, or otherwise separated from the person who the token was intended for. Should that person be barred from voting because they lost the token? Clearly, not. So now, you still have the process of manually verifying the person's eligibility, while adding the additional problem of trying to make sure the invalid token isn't used.
Keep in mind also that the notion of a secret ballot might preclude keeping track of the votes cast under a particular token, since that could be traced back to the voter. So if you were hunting for a invalid token, the best you could do is try to stop the person with the token from voting. If the loss is reported after the invalid vote is cast, there's likely not a thing that can be done about it.
But when the voter says that he or she is done voting and pulls the lever (there needs to be a lever for the curtain, since we have a secret ballot), the voting machine spits out a punch card with all the choices neatly punched by computer, which you physically put in the box. Or, it keeps a paper tape tally of each person's votes inside the machine.
You get just as much security as the current system (it really is just the current system, with a different front-end), and virtually eliminate the "hanging chad" problem. The different front-end will reduce voter confusion also (as long as it's well deisgned), and eliminate the "I couldn't understand the ballot" problem.
You'd still have the human element in keeping the integrity of the ballot boxes, and human beings will still be checking the lists to make sure someone isn't listed twice, but I view this as a good thing. Widespread human involvement on a local level is much to hard to hack on a large scale... you might be able to control a district or two, but it would take a lot of work to fix the election of an entire state. If voting machines become pervasive without a human element to check them, then a single flaw could affect every district that uses that particular machine at the same time.... now, that's the way to fix an election!
I prefer Lubrication to Medication or Meditation. Guinness works best. ;)
The Sony Clie's had way too much eye candy for my tastes. It also uses those infernal Memory Sticks for expansion. The Pocket PC's were simply too bloated also. (I have no need to drive a display for a Powerpoint Presentation from my handheld...) And I was suprised to see a keyboard and no graffiti area on the higher-end Tungstens. Does anyone actually use those tiny keyboards?
The only conclusion that I can come to is that the ideal PIM should be simple, but the best-selling PIM will have lots of unnecessary bells and whistles, because that's what the sheeple want.
Ultimately, I ended up getting a Tungsten T last week (for a song, since resellers were clearing them out last week -- with Palm and Amazon rebates, the final price is $220.) Compared with 2MB, 16MB is plenty! and Bluetooth simply rocks. I think that Bluetooth alone is worth the difference in the price I paid for this model compared to the Palms in the $100-$200 range.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Everything that's wrong with the world can ultimately be traced bact to either lawyers or the Fox Network. In fact, I'll think I'll go and make that my new .sig ...
I've decided that everything that's wrong with the world can ultimately be traced back to either Lawyers or the Fox Network...
The joke was pretty lame, I admit, but I believe that the "no-memory-of-these-events dept." has more to do with Iran-Contra than Reagan's alzheimers. My memory is hazy about the whole affair, but I think that Reagan did his fair share of "selective recall" of events...