Re:Six simple steps to win the lawsuit
on
RIAA to Sue You Now
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
1. Notified of lawsuit against you
2. Drive to local music store
3. Buy CDs of songs downloaded
4. Show up to court
5. Laugh in face of RIAA as they accuse you of stealing what you already own
6. Yawn.
7. Countersue for court costs (including the costs for all the CD's you had to go out and buy) 8. Point pinky to edge of mouth 9. Laugh evily.
Will the first 5% of drives with this new interface be the only ones without build in Digital 'Rights Management' (DRM) features?
I don't think that will happen. Consumers are getting more and more savy every month. Since the whole Napster/MP3/peer-to-peer fiasco, the general public is becoming more informed about DRM and everything that it entails.
Now don't get me wrong, there will never be a time when 100% of the population using computers is up to speed on stuff like that (at least not for the forseeable future) but to the people it matters to, the word is getting out. My father, a complete computer idiot, called me the other day and talked to me about some of the issues coming up. He's seen some of the Windows Media Player security creeping up on him and he doesn't like it. I never once mentioned it to him, but as more people get informed, they tell others about it. I do not ever expect to hear that stuff from my grandmother since she will probably never download an mp3 or movie file from the internet, but like I said... to the people it matters to the word is spreading.
I'll use the oft-cited reference of Divx. People found out that they would basically have to rent the movie every time they chose to watch it, which pissed off just about everyone. What was the response? Noone bought the technology. I have very little fear about hardware DRM creeping up in all technology (but maybe a few devices which people will choose not to buy). The market will dictate what is successful and what is not, so if hard drives start coming out with DRM in them I can see a huge disaster waiting to happen. Entire stockpiles of these devices will sit unsold until finally the maker takes them back and re-tools them to be non-DRM.
Hell, think back to the whole Intel processor serial number fiasco. It took Intel how long to give people an option to turn it off? Like 2 months I believe. Have faith in the population, people won't just lay over and accept stuff like that.
A nice p2p-program without spyware is WinMX [winmx.com], too bad there are no Linux clients for it.
Maybe it doesn't have any spyware (even though I oculd have sworn it did), but WinMX did a pretty good job of pissing me off up until the latest version. I installed it and decided it wasn't for me, and when I went to hit the uninstall button there was a big X over the icon. When I clicked on it a message would pop up about uninstalling the program, then it would just exit. I had to wait until the newest version that just came out a few weeks ago was released, install that, and then procede to uninstall the program. Definitely soured me on the whole WinMX experience.
Ask me if I care when I wake up sprawled on the kitchen floor with my head pounding. When all I want to do is get food into me NOW, not 5 minutes from now. Microwave = god right then.
Who in the world microwaves pizza? It gets very soggy and loses almost any redeeming qualities.
I don't know about you, but when I wake up after a hard night of drinking and I can barely see straight... microwaved pizza is heaven on earth. Actually, any food that can be made in less than 3 minutes and doesn't cause too much loud noise is heaven.
How does this bode for CD's with a "secret track" on them? I'm talking about the CD's where on the last track, after the main song is finished, there is about 6 minutes of silence and then some more music or a clip of the band talking and hanging out. Do all these CD's infringe on the copyright?
Best thing I've heard from people is to backup your movies and pictures onto a CD... and put a copy of the decoder and codec onto the CD also. That way even if the codec gets banished to the depths of hell you still have a copy that you are able to use to open the material.
BONUS: Back it up with a codec and player that are without DRM built in and you don't have to worry about not being able to play the stuff in the future.
This is exactly what I was expecting, although I was actually expecting it a few days sooner. When will corporations learn that you can't kill a good idea? Anytime people are getting a service that is deemed illegal, there will be at least one person who finds a way to circumvent the law and make it harder to shut down.
We went from Usenet/website mp3's and warez to Napster mp3's and warez (with a.mp3 added onto the end) to the anonymous p2p programs like Kazaa and the gnutella network. What has this gained the RIAA or any other industry pushing for the shutdown of these services? Instead of keeping the road open for them to make money in the future the companies have succeeded in pushing the services farther away from profitable in their current form. Now that we're not going to a central server or main website to get our things there really is no way to track individuals. Using Kazaa as an example, everytime I connect to a network I'm connecting to a different computer. Same with the gnutella network. I may stumble onto a specific computer once, but once I disconnect that computer will likely never see me again unless I'm looking for a file on their server... and even then I'll be untraceable. Stupid move for your company trying to make money.
...Which brings us to this. In the beginning it would have been possible to track user stats, total listeners, and all that good stuff. Now what can you see? You'll notice 2 people connected to your computer, and each of those 2 computers will be connected to 2 or 3 other computers. But you don't know that, you don't know that there are others listening to the rebroadcasted stream. Efectively, you're killing your own market for ad revenue (hell, you're killing the possibility of even having ads on the air). How can you demand lots of money for ads on the air when all you can show is that 5 people are connecting to your computer? Granted, with rebroadcasting that could add up to 100's of users, but you don't know that and definitely can't prove it. Sucks to be you, I hope you're happy with the fruits of your lawsuits.
Re:Doesn't avoid the ruling
on
P2P Streaming Radio
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This doesn't avoid "broadcasting" over the internet at all. Think about it, under this system, EVERYONE is broadcasting/webcasting and each USER would be required to pay the RIAA fee.
No, it really does avoid that fee. The RIAA would probably be getting a stream from another user who is only streaming it to a few people. And since the rebroadcaster is only relaying data and not keeping track of their connection they can't say how many people are on at any given time. For all they know they are only broadcasting to the RIAA's computer and therefore should not have to pay (why should they have to pay the RIAA for broadcasting their data back to them?)
Yes the Miranda Rights do apply, but if the defendant should be called to the witness stand, can it be imprisoned for being in contempt of court when it doesn't answer questions?
The record companies don't have that much influence on who becomes a star or not when all is said and done, they just have the ability to put it on the shelves and see who buys what. You need to start looking at companies like BMG, Geffen, and Sony as nothing more than gigantic venture capital groups for musicians.
Yes, but the problem is that the record labels get to choose what is played on the radio in the first place. If all you hear on your radio thanks to Clearchannel is britney spears, when you go to Best Buy and see either her CD which is bad but not TOO bad, and your other choice is a CD that you have never heard of and have not heard any of the music from, you'll probably choose the spears CD.
And I'm talking about the majority of people that fund crap like britney spears and the backdoor boys, not the informed people out there that know to sample their music before they buy;)
Yes, I think it's clear to everyone by now that if a page is hosted on the NYTimes website that you need to register. We know, there's no need to point it out in EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE. If you don't like it, you know by now not to go there. It's not too difficult, at least to the crowd that reads/, to figure out.
JESUS! It's just putting in a stpid email address, it takes all of 2 seconds to do. Or you can use that site that DOES IT FOR YOU. I'm getting so tired of seeing "(free registration required, NYT sucks ass, we should all crap in a bag and mail it to them until they stop making people register)" in every story that has a NYT article. They offer a service. A FREE service. If you don't want to register then just scroll down into the comments and find the post that has the link to the article without registration. Or find the post that has the login/pass that someone registered for this particular article.
I'll even do you a favor. Use: SpecialEds as a login and suckass for a password. Yes, I really did register it for the people that don't want to make up a fake email address and click on a few menus.
Imagine the possibilities that this will open up for us! Go from clicking on the keyboard to actually using a writing utensil, some kind of light based pen. I know many people that hate the layout of a keyboard and they would love to be able to write instead of typing. Besides, you have more control that way, you can add in comments, cross things out, and do all sorts of things (write in the margins) a lot easier than on a normal computer keyboard.
And hey, instead of looking at things on a bright computer monitor that hurts your eyes, how bout we get some of that new epaper that will display things you're writing. You can have a stack of it sitting on your desk ready anytime you need to write something.
And hey, instead of having that bulky mouse to move things around your computer (where files and folders are so easy to lose in the maze of your hard drive) we could have a large group of drawers organized in a certain way... we'll use alphabetically for now. Anytime I get finished with a piece of epaper I can put it by hand into those "file cabinets" (trademark pending biotches) exactly where I want to put it. I'll never lose a note again, since everything will be in one place and I don't even have to worry about losing everything to a hard drive crash.
The future is now! Lets get people working on this project! I can see the end of the tunnel already! We need funding!!!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Tags Trance got me through the entire last school year! That station introduced me to so much more electronic music than I could have ever found or heard on my own!
Why, exactly, does Apple maintain this line of machines instead of starting fresh or at least introducing something new with fresh legs. The Mac has become the AS/400 of desktop computing, except for the fact that it's prettier. Of course, if Apple never moves forward, what happens to the copycat Windows platform?
For people who read the article, they'll notice that what I quoted is the intro paragraph. That's all I had to read to realize that the author is full of it. Macs aren't ready to die. On the contrary, they are blooming. Macs are one of the few computer brands that are actually profitable right now. Look at the computers that are being sold. Most people buying systems want to spend $800 or less. People will then go ahead and drop $1500 on a Mac system. Why is this? Because a Mac is a niche market system. There is special hardware and software that people are paying for. It's never going to explode onto the desktop (again) and take over the Windows community, even though the Mac zealots would really like it to.
The Mac exists for a small group of people, and also in my opinion as a testing ground for new technology. Would your PC have a USB port on it right now if it wern't put onto a Mac first for B. Gates to notice and snap up? How bout IEEE 1394? In a year or two you'll have a DVD burner on your system (many people already do). What systems did they originate on? The Mac.
Apple never moves forward? Riiiiight. On the contrary... Apple moves EVERYONE ELSE forward. Linux/Unix/BSD can't move the market. On the X86 systems there is not enough pull from those communities to get hardware like USB or IEEE put in as standard, so the job falls to the Mac systems to get the attention of the rest of the world when newer technology comes out.
I'm not a Mac person. I have many P3 and P4 systems in my house and like it that way. I'm also one of the few/.'ers that will actually admit that I like WinXP. It does everything I need it to, and is rather stable. In fact I don't even know how to use linux very well. Anyways, I'm not a Mac person... but I can see that it has a place in the market and will have a place for a very long time to come.
I know I shouldn't be replying to my own post, but whatever. I figured I should clarify and there's no "edit post" button
The majority of people did not actually sit down and play the game itself. The programmers made a hasty developer build and were showing people diferent levels. The game was being played (by one of the developers), so people could see. The programmers would open up a map, drop in the enemies that are supposed to be in the level, and run around and let people see how the game is coming along. There were VERY few people that actually sat down at the keyboard themselves, but over the course of E3 about 5-10 people were allowed to play instead of just watching.
I don't see how they can give an award called "Best Action Game" to something that doesn't exist as a playable game, but then again looking at the past awards I see Neverwinter Nights won in 2000... in 2001... and in 2002
ID was approached by some of the people giving the awards during E3 concerning the awards ceremony. They were told that the game could not qualify unless it was in playable form during the show. ID saw this as a really good PR opportunity and DID let the game be shown in playable form... behind closed doors and your entry was based on a lottery system. Look on Kazaa, there's about a 10 minute video that someone took when they smuggled a camcorder into the room (against ID's wishes)
You mean in a similar fashion to the way hard drive sales exploded when they started taxing CD-R media....? Or the way compact car sales exploded when they started adding a "Gas Guzzler" tax to SUVs?
I know it's a bit late to be replying to this but I still think it should be said...
I know quite a few people that stocked up on hundreds of CD's when the news of the CDR tax came around. As for the gas guzzler tax on SUV's, that kind of car was and still is in style. People like the big, obnoxious cars, and the minivan is quickly being replaced by the SUV. That kind of vehicle actually has a benefit that cannot be added to a smaller car. What I can see happening with the PVR's is that a person will walk into a store and see that the price difference between the recorders will become much, much larger than before. Whatever markup was on the 40GB larger Tivo before, add another $40 on top of that. That's making much more of a difference. Maybe the person will not buy the lower priced one planning to hack it themselves, but when there are percieved rip offs people bitch. Bob the 50 year old may be hosting a party and ends up showing off his new toy to some of the people there. The conversation may move to him bitching about how it was $100 more just for another few hours of recording time. John the sometimes-hacker may overhear and mention that the hack can be done rather cheaply, easily, and quickly. The next day Bob might call up John and have him do the replacement for him.
Slashdot Mirror
8. Point pinky to edge of mouth
9. Laugh evily.
Now don't get me wrong, there will never be a time when 100% of the population using computers is up to speed on stuff like that (at least not for the forseeable future) but to the people it matters to, the word is getting out. My father, a complete computer idiot, called me the other day and talked to me about some of the issues coming up. He's seen some of the Windows Media Player security creeping up on him and he doesn't like it. I never once mentioned it to him, but as more people get informed, they tell others about it. I do not ever expect to hear that stuff from my grandmother since she will probably never download an mp3 or movie file from the internet, but like I said... to the people it matters to the word is spreading.
I'll use the oft-cited reference of Divx. People found out that they would basically have to rent the movie every time they chose to watch it, which pissed off just about everyone. What was the response? Noone bought the technology. I have very little fear about hardware DRM creeping up in all technology (but maybe a few devices which people will choose not to buy). The market will dictate what is successful and what is not, so if hard drives start coming out with DRM in them I can see a huge disaster waiting to happen. Entire stockpiles of these devices will sit unsold until finally the maker takes them back and re-tools them to be non-DRM.
Hell, think back to the whole Intel processor serial number fiasco. It took Intel how long to give people an option to turn it off? Like 2 months I believe. Have faith in the population, people won't just lay over and accept stuff like that.
And probably soon to be gone completely.
I accidentally clicked on the link to Komag Incorporated's stock prices... Hoooooooo boy.
Open $ 0.01
High $ 0.01
Low $ 0.00
How do you get a low of $0.00??? How come my stock broker didn't call me that second and have me buy ten million shares? He's fired!
Fixed link
For those too lazy to cut and paste
Maybe it doesn't have any spyware (even though I oculd have sworn it did), but WinMX did a pretty good job of pissing me off up until the latest version. I installed it and decided it wasn't for me, and when I went to hit the uninstall button there was a big X over the icon. When I clicked on it a message would pop up about uninstalling the program, then it would just exit. I had to wait until the newest version that just came out a few weeks ago was released, install that, and then procede to uninstall the program. Definitely soured me on the whole WinMX experience.
Ask me if I care when I wake up sprawled on the kitchen floor with my head pounding. When all I want to do is get food into me NOW, not 5 minutes from now. Microwave = god right then.
I don't know about you, but when I wake up after a hard night of drinking and I can barely see straight... microwaved pizza is heaven on earth. Actually, any food that can be made in less than 3 minutes and doesn't cause too much loud noise is heaven.
How does this bode for CD's with a "secret track" on them? I'm talking about the CD's where on the last track, after the main song is finished, there is about 6 minutes of silence and then some more music or a clip of the band talking and hanging out. Do all these CD's infringe on the copyright?
Best thing I've heard from people is to backup your movies and pictures onto a CD... and put a copy of the decoder and codec onto the CD also. That way even if the codec gets banished to the depths of hell you still have a copy that you are able to use to open the material.
BONUS: Back it up with a codec and player that are without DRM built in and you don't have to worry about not being able to play the stuff in the future.
You forgot rule #5: Talk on the phone while sitting on the crapper, drop phone in toilet, curse loudly.
This is exactly what I was expecting, although I was actually expecting it a few days sooner. When will corporations learn that you can't kill a good idea? Anytime people are getting a service that is deemed illegal, there will be at least one person who finds a way to circumvent the law and make it harder to shut down.
.mp3 added onto the end) to the anonymous p2p programs like Kazaa and the gnutella network. What has this gained the RIAA or any other industry pushing for the shutdown of these services? Instead of keeping the road open for them to make money in the future the companies have succeeded in pushing the services farther away from profitable in their current form. Now that we're not going to a central server or main website to get our things there really is no way to track individuals. Using Kazaa as an example, everytime I connect to a network I'm connecting to a different computer. Same with the gnutella network. I may stumble onto a specific computer once, but once I disconnect that computer will likely never see me again unless I'm looking for a file on their server... and even then I'll be untraceable. Stupid move for your company trying to make money.
We went from Usenet/website mp3's and warez to Napster mp3's and warez (with a
...Which brings us to this. In the beginning it would have been possible to track user stats, total listeners, and all that good stuff. Now what can you see? You'll notice 2 people connected to your computer, and each of those 2 computers will be connected to 2 or 3 other computers. But you don't know that, you don't know that there are others listening to the rebroadcasted stream. Efectively, you're killing your own market for ad revenue (hell, you're killing the possibility of even having ads on the air). How can you demand lots of money for ads on the air when all you can show is that 5 people are connecting to your computer? Granted, with rebroadcasting that could add up to 100's of users, but you don't know that and definitely can't prove it. Sucks to be you, I hope you're happy with the fruits of your lawsuits.
No, it really does avoid that fee. The RIAA would probably be getting a stream from another user who is only streaming it to a few people. And since the rebroadcaster is only relaying data and not keeping track of their connection they can't say how many people are on at any given time. For all they know they are only broadcasting to the RIAA's computer and therefore should not have to pay (why should they have to pay the RIAA for broadcasting their data back to them?)
No obligatory link to NY Times? People are starting to get lazy ;)
Yes the Miranda Rights do apply, but if the defendant should be called to the witness stand, can it be imprisoned for being in contempt of court when it doesn't answer questions?
whoops, I don't know how I messed up that formatting... What is indented is what I wrote, what was not indented was what I was trying to quote.
Um... for the last few years just about any program for windows installs itself into the
Yes, I think it's clear to everyone by now that if a page is hosted on the NYTimes website that you need to register. We know, there's no need to point it out in EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE. If you don't like it, you know by now not to go there. It's not too difficult, at least to the crowd that reads /, to figure out.
:
JESUS! It's just putting in a stpid email address, it takes all of 2 seconds to do. Or you can use that site that DOES IT FOR YOU. I'm getting so tired of seeing "(free registration required, NYT sucks ass, we should all crap in a bag and mail it to them until they stop making people register)" in every story that has a NYT article. They offer a service. A FREE service. If you don't want to register then just scroll down into the comments and find the post that has the link to the article without registration. Or find the post that has the login/pass that someone registered for this particular article.
I'll even do you a favor. Use
SpecialEds as a login and
suckass for a password.
Yes, I really did register it for the people that don't want to make up a fake email address and click on a few menus.
Jesus people are fucking lazy sometimes.
Imagine the possibilities that this will open up for us! Go from clicking on the keyboard to actually using a writing utensil, some kind of light based pen. I know many people that hate the layout of a keyboard and they would love to be able to write instead of typing. Besides, you have more control that way, you can add in comments, cross things out, and do all sorts of things (write in the margins) a lot easier than on a normal computer keyboard.
And hey, instead of looking at things on a bright computer monitor that hurts your eyes, how bout we get some of that new epaper that will display things you're writing. You can have a stack of it sitting on your desk ready anytime you need to write something.
And hey, instead of having that bulky mouse to move things around your computer (where files and folders are so easy to lose in the maze of your hard drive) we could have a large group of drawers organized in a certain way... we'll use alphabetically for now. Anytime I get finished with a piece of epaper I can put it by hand into those "file cabinets" (trademark pending biotches) exactly where I want to put it. I'll never lose a note again, since everything will be in one place and I don't even have to worry about losing everything to a hard drive crash.
The future is now! Lets get people working on this project! I can see the end of the tunnel already! We need funding!!!
oh wait...
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Tags Trance got me through the entire last school year! That station introduced me to so much more electronic music than I could have ever found or heard on my own!
For people who read the article, they'll notice that what I quoted is the intro paragraph. That's all I had to read to realize that the author is full of it. Macs aren't ready to die. On the contrary, they are blooming. Macs are one of the few computer brands that are actually profitable right now. Look at the computers that are being sold. Most people buying systems want to spend $800 or less. People will then go ahead and drop $1500 on a Mac system. Why is this? Because a Mac is a niche market system. There is special hardware and software that people are paying for. It's never going to explode onto the desktop (again) and take over the Windows community, even though the Mac zealots would really like it to.
The Mac exists for a small group of people, and also in my opinion as a testing ground for new technology. Would your PC have a USB port on it right now if it wern't put onto a Mac first for B. Gates to notice and snap up? How bout IEEE 1394? In a year or two you'll have a DVD burner on your system (many people already do). What systems did they originate on? The Mac.
Apple never moves forward? Riiiiight. On the contrary... Apple moves EVERYONE ELSE forward. Linux/Unix/BSD can't move the market. On the X86 systems there is not enough pull from those communities to get hardware like USB or IEEE put in as standard, so the job falls to the Mac systems to get the attention of the rest of the world when newer technology comes out.
I'm not a Mac person. I have many P3 and P4 systems in my house and like it that way. I'm also one of the few
I know I shouldn't be replying to my own post, but whatever. I figured I should clarify and there's no "edit post" button
The majority of people did not actually sit down and play the game itself. The programmers made a hasty developer build and were showing people diferent levels. The game was being played (by one of the developers), so people could see. The programmers would open up a map, drop in the enemies that are supposed to be in the level, and run around and let people see how the game is coming along. There were VERY few people that actually sat down at the keyboard themselves, but over the course of E3 about 5-10 people were allowed to play instead of just watching.
ID was approached by some of the people giving the awards during E3 concerning the awards ceremony. They were told that the game could not qualify unless it was in playable form during the show. ID saw this as a really good PR opportunity and DID let the game be shown in playable form... behind closed doors and your entry was based on a lottery system. Look on Kazaa, there's about a 10 minute video that someone took when they smuggled a camcorder into the room (against ID's wishes)
Um... the XBOX has been able to do that since the first person pulled one out of a box.
I know it's a bit late to be replying to this but I still think it should be said...
I know quite a few people that stocked up on hundreds of CD's when the news of the CDR tax came around. As for the gas guzzler tax on SUV's, that kind of car was and still is in style. People like the big, obnoxious cars, and the minivan is quickly being replaced by the SUV. That kind of vehicle actually has a benefit that cannot be added to a smaller car. What I can see happening with the PVR's is that a person will walk into a store and see that the price difference between the recorders will become much, much larger than before. Whatever markup was on the 40GB larger Tivo before, add another $40 on top of that. That's making much more of a difference. Maybe the person will not buy the lower priced one planning to hack it themselves, but when there are percieved rip offs people bitch. Bob the 50 year old may be hosting a party and ends up showing off his new toy to some of the people there. The conversation may move to him bitching about how it was $100 more just for another few hours of recording time. John the sometimes-hacker may overhear and mention that the hack can be done rather cheaply, easily, and quickly. The next day Bob might call up John and have him do the replacement for him.