One of the side effects of not having commercial drivers and applications that use the features is that you can usually get at least two channels off of a 5.1 soundcard. The front pair of speakers and the rear pair of speakers are generally treated as seperate DSPs by the audio driver. Look around for audio drivers that treat the cards this way, and when you find one get 3 cards for a total of 6 outputs. (You're looking for a card thats supported in linux, but not too-well supported. Don't forget to check alsa's list of cards)
After that, just figure out how you're going to get the controls to work.
And no, the answers to all the world's problems are not necessarily in space, unless Tang and pens that can write upside down can stop war and famine.
Well, I don't know about stopping war, but the solution to (peace-time) famine easily lies in space. When you send people up there, you have to feed them somehow. Imagine the advances in hydroponic gardening that could happen in space, if the space station was allowed to grow to the point of needing its own food sources. Or what we could learn from colonizing and eventually terraforming Mars. We could use that knowledge to reclaim some of the wasteland produced by clearcutting rainforests on Earth, or to stop the growth of the Sahara Desert. On the stopping-war front, international cooperation with many countries (not just a couple of cash-strapped buddies like Russia) to produce a unified space program with the goal of leaving this planet might become a show of goodwill to all people.
Besides, do you think the $10-$20 billion NASA runs on would actually be spent on anything useful? I can see it now "HR5132: Disbands NASA and Gives Us All 25% Raises In Reward for Saving The Government Money". Why don't you attack the DoD spending instead. That might actually be effective in your goal of stopping war.
Depends on how big a spike we're talking about here...
Most good MTAs can deal with mail surges. Most competent high-traffic MTA admins have setup extra servers to deal with large mail surges.
The ISP our company uses, has two windows NT mail servers, each email spools on the first server to go through spam processing, then spools on the second server. Under normal operation it used to take an hour to send an email to my coworker. We've long since set up our own mailserver.
As another poster mentioned: switch to the old style control panel.
I used XP for a while, but I spent 90% of that time switching the theme to classic, the windows to classic, the file manager to classic, the control panel to classic, the start menu to classic, the mouse control to classic, the font to classic, the desktop to classic, the sounds to classic, the...
You get the picture right? I suppose it would have made the little girl who created the UI with their crayons cry if they made it easy to turn all that crap off.
Re:Looks like an interesting book.
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 1
It doesn't seem logical that we shouldn't be able to modify hardware that we buy, but from the business perspective these consoles are being sold at a loss
So? Microsoft chose to sell them for the price they do. If thats too low of a price, they should not have sold them for that low of a price. Case closed.
The reason that it doesn't infringe on the treaty is that you're not registering or paying for the copyright, its that you're registering and paying for the extension of the copyright. Essentially this makes copyright "50 years 6 months, extended by 10 years every 10 years thereafter, until whatever Bono's great great granddaughter sets as the maximum.
Whoops, I knew I was forgetting something somewhere. Add in "compulsory implementation" for patents (note, not necessarially licensing) If the patent holder is not going to implement patent X, then the holder must license patent X to at least one interested entity. (If no-one is interested, then who cares?). I'm still out on whether or not this should allow exclusive licensing contracts. On one hand, the standard argument of "the purpose of patent law is to provide a monopoly" says that an exclusive contract would be just fine. On the other hand, I'd rather see no monopoly, but the inventor getting royalties from the competing sources. Perhaps some sort of RAND licensing requirement as well, but then someone would have to legislate what RAND actually means.
Anyway, the purpose of this is to prevent, say, Exxon from patenting an engine that can run hundreds of miles on a cup of gasoline, and then prevent everyone from implementing it, since it would hurt their oil business.
First, lets start with "Patent Office employees get paid a flat salary". This will prevent them from signing patents into law just for the bonuses they receive. (They receive no commission for rejecting a patent). If this is just soooo unbearable an idea, how about anyone who grants a patent that is later overturned due to prior art loses their bonuses for a year.
Second, the attacker is required to pay in order to file a claim against a patent. You can have all the prior art in the world, but if you can't get the money to hire a patent attorney and all the associated fees with filing against the patent, the patent still stands. As someone else posted here said, the fees for cancelling a patent can top $500k, if the patent holder appeals. Since the patent office screwed up, why not have the Patent Office pay these fees if the patent they granted is found to be invalid.
Next, a "narrowing scope" rule. If you apply for a patent and it is found to be too broad, any subsequent appeals must not add any functionality to the original patent. If you wish to add a claim that did not appear on the original patent, you start over with a new patent application, from the beginning. (This will prevent people from modifying their claims list to include features of other peoples' products during the application phase, thus having new technology under an older filing date.)
A three-strikes rule of some kind: If you can't write a patent that will be accepted in N tries or maybe Y years, its not patentable. Find something else to build. This will prevent people from intentionally keeping their patent pending until someone else implements it for them.
Finally, bite the bullet and create the dreaded Software Patent class. To prevent crazy amounts of abuse, this class has the following restrictions: A 6-month development lead time (normal patents have a 1 year lead time... the inventor is assumed to have invented their product within a year of the filing date, so prior art within that year isn't acceptable for overturning the patent). A 3 year life, renewable for 3 more for a maximum of 6. (better reflects the speed of tech development). Existing "Business Method" patents must be moved to the "Software" class in order to litigate against a software program. In doing so, the patent will live for a minimum of three years from the transfer date, renewable until a maximum of 6 years from the original filing (thus a 20 year old patent gets 3 years and no renewal). Software patents cannot be used against non-software implementations, and cannot be patented in more than one category or transferred back to the business method category. [Honestly, abolishing the business method patents would be the real winner, but do you think the greed-soaked government would do such a thing?]
From what *I've* heard the reason for the weird numbers wasn't necessarially to keep the cashiers from stealing, but to keep the stores from doing their sales under the counter (so to speak) and not reporting the sales tax. To get the drawer to open to get that nickel (actually, after taxes it would be more like 83 cents or something), you have to ring it up in the cash register, where the sale is recorded.
Where I used to live, the volunteer fire department did something like that. People had to pay the fire department either a low yearly fee to be a member, or $200 per truck that responded to their fire if they weren't a member. Plus, members received preference while dispatching, so if you were not a member, and were unlucky enough to have a fire the same time as a member did, you would have to wait until the member's fire was assessed to see how many trucks would be needed before a truck was dispatched to you (if there were any who weren't needed for the member's fire).
Basically you're saying that its ok that filter companies are underhanded losers, since after all, everyone knows every useful site in existance and can generate a list of them on demand for inclusion into the white list.
Oh wait, they dont. Thats why whitelists don't work!
I don't suppose its too much to ask of my tax dollars for government-mandated technology to not possess a bias? I fail to see how this cannot be a first amendment conflict, but I guess all the justices thought about was "wow, these filters must just block porn, so its OK, because porn isn't a free speech issue" while ignoring the fact that the filters fail at that task.
The supreme court overturns its decisions all the time. This is why anti-abortion people try to get them to hear another roe vs. wade type case all the time, to see if they'll overturn that decision.
I'll tell you what, I haven't seen X2. Or the second Lord of the Rings movie, or the new Matrix movie, or anything else in a while. Not even the second harry potter movie. Thats "haven't seen it at all" not "downloaded some camcorder rip from the net".
Sure, I think I'm missing out on something, but thats ok with me.
Related reading "The Ones who Walk Away From Omelas", Ursula LeGuin short story. Think about that when you talk about boycotting something. Some people feel that the benefits are worth any atrocity, and will just not care about the boycott.
Because 20-30 years ago, back before there was an online to sell music on, artists signed contracts to give the labels the right to distribute their music. Then recently, the online market appeared, and a couple of musicians wanted to sell online, but they were smacked down. A lawsuit over contract law proceeded (did the artists sign away rights/distribution channels that didn't exist at the time of the contract?) and then people quit caring about 20-30 year old songs anyway.
Feeding ignorant trolls is fun, its just like a petting zoo, only stupider!
violate a company's copyright.
So, you're saying that someone stole blizzard's code and put it into FreeCraft? Maybe you mean Trademark, but then again, FreeCraft isn't the name of any of Blizzard's games. Or maybe you mean patent? Are there even patents on games now? I don't see a "business process" going on when I blow up someone's base.
Libel/slander/defamation of character is almost always easier for a private individual to prove than for a public figure. Take, for instance, the mention of the bankruptcy. (This was true, so it wouldn't really count in this case, but let me use it anyway.) Lets say I tell everyone that you've filed for bankruptcy and its not true. Given that you are a private individual, there is minimal amount of information available about you, your finances, etc. It is reasonable to believe that someone may actually believe me, and either now or at a future time, cause damage (what if a future prospective boss heard this, and denied you a job based on this lie, believing that you were not responsible enough for the position?)
Now, imagine that I tell everyone I know that Wal-Mart filed for bankruptcy. This would be the same lie, but because of the public face that walmart carries, it would be irrational for anyone to believe that wal-mart had actually gone bankrupt. Thus, it would be more difficult for walmart to show that I had managed to damage them in any way.
Either way, it generally takes a court to decide if damages had occurred.
You cannot steal what is FREELY AVAILABLE! You cannot patent what has already been published!
I'm looking over the BSD license right now, and I see nothing in there that would stop, say, SCO from patenting something, then putting it into the code, then suing everyone who tries to use it.
Of course, this is the UK we're talking about, so patents are different there than on this side of the puddle.
As long as people like Senator Hatch are around, there will no doubt be plenty of psychos to take the helm and try to steer the RIAA against the winds of change.
Somehow, the crew of the ship just doesn't understand that its about to capsize. Or they're too afraid to break their contracts and mutiny.
Well, I assume I mean that the MIT-SHM extension allows it to use whatever shared memory resources the host can provide, whether its SysV IPC, or whatever the OS you're using has for it. In SHM, you allocate a block of memory that is within the X server's address space as well as within its own address space, and fill it with your pixel map or whatever, and the X server transmits it to the display adapter.
which has to then go through a network aware display system
If your network-aware display system is using the network for local display, you've screwed up your configuration (try making sure your $DISPLAY is ":0" with no hostname). X uses shared memory for local work, and has done so for years and years.
They never intended for people to play them on their multi-function brown box of mass entertainment that makes things like MP3 trading possible.
Too bad that everything else from steros to dvd players now use similar hardware to the ones used in the multi-function brown box of mass entertainment. Many DVD players use either a standard IDE dvd drive, or an ide dvd drive with a different connector. High end steros with cd-text support and extra features like mp3 playback also use "smarter" drives than the standard issue discman.
You didn't buy the music, you bought the disc.
If I bought the disc, why can I not return the disc except to exchange for an identical disc?
They have lost the opportunity to sell you the same music in the mp3 format.
They lost that opportunity when they sat down in their conference rooms and decided amongst themselves "We will not sell music in mp3 format".
But, the same would be true if this was AAC (like Apple Music uses). Thats because the publishers are in a bind: Are they selling plastic discs with a certain arrangement of pits on them? If so, then the purchasers have the right to do whatever they want with those discs. Are they selling a license to their intellectual property that just happens to be on the disc? If so, then the purchasers hold that right (which isn't codified in a physical license but could be reasonably assumed to be "The right for the purchaser to listen to songs X, Y, and Z) regardless of whether they are using the disc, or a smartmedia card, or whatever.
What revenue were they losing when Johnny rips his CD to play on his mp3 player? Until recently, the publishing companies haven't even recognized portable non-cd-based music devices as a market.
Clearly illegal trading is costing publishers money, but copying alone isn't. Why don't the publishers jump on kazaa and grab a batch of IP addresses of people hosting mp3s and use the DMCA? Oh wait, that would be a legit application of the DMCA, and its apparently illegal to actually use it for its intended use instead of using it to bully people around for making competing products like remote controls and dvd playing software for unsupported platforms.
That, or the publishers don't think enough money is being lost to make it worth their time for them to actually do any work.
I'd rather have cheap products that sometimes don't work on 10 year old players (and protects rights for a creator of art) than expensive ones that can be pirated but work on all players.
So you consider it piracy if you buy a CD and rip it for the purpose of playing it on your iPod? Did they make you sign a contract indicating that you would only listen to the music using the original CD?
As for "sometimes don't work on a 10 year old player", you do realize that the goal of copy protection is to not work on a computer cdrom drive of any generation? This is why we have discs with garbled TOC tracks, this is a scheme targeted directly at computer drives which read the TOC to determine if the drive is audio or data.
I consider it piracy when a publisher takes my money and gives me a round shiny disc which fails to meet my expectation of being useful (that is, playing in my player which is fully capable of playing other round shiny discs). Companies who wish to break this expectation must either 1) accept returns for defective products which fail to meet consumer expectations or 2) clearly indicate that the round shiny disc is not a standard round shiny disc. Simple absense of a "CD" trademark is not clear indication.
People keep posting "Why whine? Just don't buy it!" but which products am I to not buy? I have to wait until someone else buys a cd and determines that it is copyprotected and posts that information to a tracking board somewhere. Even in cases where the CD trademark is missing, which copyprotection scheme was used? Perhaps it is one which is still compatible with my player and my expectation for the music. Not only that, but I have noticed that several of my non-copyprotected round shiny discs do not bear the CD trademark. Is this an intentional attempt by companies to confuse the issue? If no round shiny discs bear the CD trademark, how do I tell the protected and the playable discs apart?
Imagine the outrage that would happen if one in 10 hamburgers served by mcdonalds was actually made from horsemeat, and was served as a beef hamburger with nothing to tell it apart from the rest of the hamburgers. Now imagine everyone knew this, and nobody did anything about it because mcdonalds made money this way. This is what the publishing companies and their guardian the RIAA is doing to us all, only the ratio of horseburgers is going to increase without you being notified.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the side effects of not having commercial drivers and applications that use the features is that you can usually get at least two channels off of a 5.1 soundcard. The front pair of speakers and the rear pair of speakers are generally treated as seperate DSPs by the audio driver. Look around for audio drivers that treat the cards this way, and when you find one get 3 cards for a total of 6 outputs. (You're looking for a card thats supported in linux, but not too-well supported. Don't forget to check alsa's list of cards)
After that, just figure out how you're going to get the controls to work.
And no, the answers to all the world's problems are not necessarily in space, unless Tang and pens that can write upside down can stop war and famine.
Well, I don't know about stopping war, but the solution to (peace-time) famine easily lies in space. When you send people up there, you have to feed them somehow. Imagine the advances in hydroponic gardening that could happen in space, if the space station was allowed to grow to the point of needing its own food sources. Or what we could learn from colonizing and eventually terraforming Mars. We could use that knowledge to reclaim some of the wasteland produced by clearcutting rainforests on Earth, or to stop the growth of the Sahara Desert. On the stopping-war front, international cooperation with many countries (not just a couple of cash-strapped buddies like Russia) to produce a unified space program with the goal of leaving this planet might become a show of goodwill to all people.
Besides, do you think the $10-$20 billion NASA runs on would actually be spent on anything useful? I can see it now "HR5132: Disbands NASA and Gives Us All 25% Raises In Reward for Saving The Government Money". Why don't you attack the DoD spending instead. That might actually be effective in your goal of stopping war.
Depends on how big a spike we're talking about here...
Most good MTAs can deal with mail surges. Most competent high-traffic MTA admins have setup extra servers to deal with large mail surges.
The ISP our company uses, has two windows NT mail servers, each email spools on the first server to go through spam processing, then spools on the second server. Under normal operation it used to take an hour to send an email to my coworker. We've long since set up our own mailserver.
As another poster mentioned: switch to the old style control panel.
I used XP for a while, but I spent 90% of that time switching the theme to classic, the windows to classic, the file manager to classic, the control panel to classic, the start menu to classic, the mouse control to classic, the font to classic, the desktop to classic, the sounds to classic, the...
You get the picture right? I suppose it would have made the little girl who created the UI with their crayons cry if they made it easy to turn all that crap off.
It doesn't seem logical that we shouldn't be able to modify hardware that we buy, but from the business perspective these consoles are being sold at a loss
So? Microsoft chose to sell them for the price they do. If thats too low of a price, they should not have sold them for that low of a price. Case closed.
The reason that it doesn't infringe on the treaty is that you're not registering or paying for the copyright, its that you're registering and paying for the extension of the copyright. Essentially this makes copyright "50 years 6 months, extended by 10 years every 10 years thereafter, until whatever Bono's great great granddaughter sets as the maximum.
Whoops, I knew I was forgetting something somewhere. Add in "compulsory implementation" for patents (note, not necessarially licensing) If the patent holder is not going to implement patent X, then the holder must license patent X to at least one interested entity. (If no-one is interested, then who cares?). I'm still out on whether or not this should allow exclusive licensing contracts. On one hand, the standard argument of "the purpose of patent law is to provide a monopoly" says that an exclusive contract would be just fine. On the other hand, I'd rather see no monopoly, but the inventor getting royalties from the competing sources. Perhaps some sort of RAND licensing requirement as well, but then someone would have to legislate what RAND actually means.
Anyway, the purpose of this is to prevent, say, Exxon from patenting an engine that can run hundreds of miles on a cup of gasoline, and then prevent everyone from implementing it, since it would hurt their oil business.
What should be done about it?
First, lets start with "Patent Office employees get paid a flat salary". This will prevent them from signing patents into law just for the bonuses they receive. (They receive no commission for rejecting a patent). If this is just soooo unbearable an idea, how about anyone who grants a patent that is later overturned due to prior art loses their bonuses for a year.
Second, the attacker is required to pay in order to file a claim against a patent. You can have all the prior art in the world, but if you can't get the money to hire a patent attorney and all the associated fees with filing against the patent, the patent still stands. As someone else posted here said, the fees for cancelling a patent can top $500k, if the patent holder appeals. Since the patent office screwed up, why not have the Patent Office pay these fees if the patent they granted is found to be invalid.
Next, a "narrowing scope" rule. If you apply for a patent and it is found to be too broad, any subsequent appeals must not add any functionality to the original patent. If you wish to add a claim that did not appear on the original patent, you start over with a new patent application, from the beginning. (This will prevent people from modifying their claims list to include features of other peoples' products during the application phase, thus having new technology under an older filing date.)
A three-strikes rule of some kind: If you can't write a patent that will be accepted in N tries or maybe Y years, its not patentable. Find something else to build. This will prevent people from intentionally keeping their patent pending until someone else implements it for them.
Finally, bite the bullet and create the dreaded Software Patent class. To prevent crazy amounts of abuse, this class has the following restrictions: A 6-month development lead time (normal patents have a 1 year lead time... the inventor is assumed to have invented their product within a year of the filing date, so prior art within that year isn't acceptable for overturning the patent). A 3 year life, renewable for 3 more for a maximum of 6. (better reflects the speed of tech development). Existing "Business Method" patents must be moved to the "Software" class in order to litigate against a software program. In doing so, the patent will live for a minimum of three years from the transfer date, renewable until a maximum of 6 years from the original filing (thus a 20 year old patent gets 3 years and no renewal). Software patents cannot be used against non-software implementations, and cannot be patented in more than one category or transferred back to the business method category.
[Honestly, abolishing the business method patents would be the real winner, but do you think the greed-soaked government would do such a thing?]
From what *I've* heard the reason for the weird numbers wasn't necessarially to keep the cashiers from stealing, but to keep the stores from doing their sales under the counter (so to speak) and not reporting the sales tax. To get the drawer to open to get that nickel (actually, after taxes it would be more like 83 cents or something), you have to ring it up in the cash register, where the sale is recorded.
;)
Either way, its a pretty good explanation
Where I used to live, the volunteer fire department did something like that. People had to pay the fire department either a low yearly fee to be a member, or $200 per truck that responded to their fire if they weren't a member. Plus, members received preference while dispatching, so if you were not a member, and were unlucky enough to have a fire the same time as a member did, you would have to wait until the member's fire was assessed to see how many trucks would be needed before a truck was dispatched to you (if there were any who weren't needed for the member's fire).
Basically you're saying that its ok that filter companies are underhanded losers, since after all, everyone knows every useful site in existance and can generate a list of them on demand for inclusion into the white list.
Oh wait, they dont. Thats why whitelists don't work!
I don't suppose its too much to ask of my tax dollars for government-mandated technology to not possess a bias? I fail to see how this cannot be a first amendment conflict, but I guess all the justices thought about was "wow, these filters must just block porn, so its OK, because porn isn't a free speech issue" while ignoring the fact that the filters fail at that task.
The supreme court overturns its decisions all the time. This is why anti-abortion people try to get them to hear another roe vs. wade type case all the time, to see if they'll overturn that decision.
I'll tell you what, I haven't seen X2. Or the second Lord of the Rings movie, or the new Matrix movie, or anything else in a while. Not even the second harry potter movie. Thats "haven't seen it at all" not "downloaded some camcorder rip from the net".
Sure, I think I'm missing out on something, but thats ok with me.
Related reading "The Ones who Walk Away From Omelas", Ursula LeGuin short story. Think about that when you talk about boycotting something. Some people feel that the benefits are worth any atrocity, and will just not care about the boycott.
Because 20-30 years ago, back before there was an online to sell music on, artists signed contracts to give the labels the right to distribute their music. Then recently, the online market appeared, and a couple of musicians wanted to sell online, but they were smacked down. A lawsuit over contract law proceeded (did the artists sign away rights/distribution channels that didn't exist at the time of the contract?) and then people quit caring about 20-30 year old songs anyway.
Feeding ignorant trolls is fun, its just like a petting zoo, only stupider!
violate a company's copyright.
So, you're saying that someone stole blizzard's code and put it into FreeCraft? Maybe you mean Trademark, but then again, FreeCraft isn't the name of any of Blizzard's games. Or maybe you mean patent? Are there even patents on games now? I don't see a "business process" going on when I blow up someone's base.
Libel/slander/defamation of character is almost always easier for a private individual to prove than for a public figure. Take, for instance, the mention of the bankruptcy. (This was true, so it wouldn't really count in this case, but let me use it anyway.) Lets say I tell everyone that you've filed for bankruptcy and its not true. Given that you are a private individual, there is minimal amount of information available about you, your finances, etc. It is reasonable to believe that someone may actually believe me, and either now or at a future time, cause damage (what if a future prospective boss heard this, and denied you a job based on this lie, believing that you were not responsible enough for the position?)
Now, imagine that I tell everyone I know that Wal-Mart filed for bankruptcy. This would be the same lie, but because of the public face that walmart carries, it would be irrational for anyone to believe that wal-mart had actually gone bankrupt. Thus, it would be more difficult for walmart to show that I had managed to damage them in any way.
Either way, it generally takes a court to decide if damages had occurred.
You cannot steal what is FREELY AVAILABLE! You cannot patent what has already been published!
I'm looking over the BSD license right now, and I see nothing in there that would stop, say, SCO from patenting something, then putting it into the code, then suing everyone who tries to use it.
Of course, this is the UK we're talking about, so patents are different there than on this side of the puddle.
As long as people like Senator Hatch are around, there will no doubt be plenty of psychos to take the helm and try to steer the RIAA against the winds of change.
Somehow, the crew of the ship just doesn't understand that its about to capsize. Or they're too afraid to break their contracts and mutiny.
Well, I assume I mean that the MIT-SHM extension allows it to use whatever shared memory resources the host can provide, whether its SysV IPC, or whatever the OS you're using has for it. In SHM, you allocate a block of memory that is within the X server's address space as well as within its own address space, and fill it with your pixel map or whatever, and the X server transmits it to the display adapter.
I used to do theater ... To have someone take something I worked on, censor it, and then try to pass it off makes me sick.
Good thing you weren't a movie star. You'd be in the hospital from all the adaptations of your movies for TV.
which has to then go through a network aware display system
If your network-aware display system is using the network for local display, you've screwed up your configuration (try making sure your $DISPLAY is ":0" with no hostname). X uses shared memory for local work, and has done so for years and years.
They never intended for people to play them on their multi-function brown box of mass entertainment that makes things like MP3 trading possible.
Too bad that everything else from steros to dvd players now use similar hardware to the ones used in the multi-function brown box of mass entertainment. Many DVD players use either a standard IDE dvd drive, or an ide dvd drive with a different connector. High end steros with cd-text support and extra features like mp3 playback also use "smarter" drives than the standard issue discman.
You didn't buy the music, you bought the disc.
If I bought the disc, why can I not return the disc except to exchange for an identical disc?
They have lost the opportunity to sell you the same music in the mp3 format.
They lost that opportunity when they sat down in their conference rooms and decided amongst themselves "We will not sell music in mp3 format".
But, the same would be true if this was AAC (like Apple Music uses). Thats because the publishers are in a bind: Are they selling plastic discs with a certain arrangement of pits on them? If so, then the purchasers have the right to do whatever they want with those discs. Are they selling a license to their intellectual property that just happens to be on the disc? If so, then the purchasers hold that right (which isn't codified in a physical license but could be reasonably assumed to be "The right for the purchaser to listen to songs X, Y, and Z) regardless of whether they are using the disc, or a smartmedia card, or whatever.
What revenue were they losing when Johnny rips his CD to play on his mp3 player? Until recently, the publishing companies haven't even recognized portable non-cd-based music devices as a market.
Clearly illegal trading is costing publishers money, but copying alone isn't. Why don't the publishers jump on kazaa and grab a batch of IP addresses of people hosting mp3s and use the DMCA? Oh wait, that would be a legit application of the DMCA, and its apparently illegal to actually use it for its intended use instead of using it to bully people around for making competing products like remote controls and dvd playing software for unsupported platforms.
That, or the publishers don't think enough money is being lost to make it worth their time for them to actually do any work.
I'd rather have cheap products that sometimes don't work on 10 year old players (and protects rights for a creator of art) than expensive ones that can be pirated but work on all players.
So you consider it piracy if you buy a CD and rip it for the purpose of playing it on your iPod? Did they make you sign a contract indicating that you would only listen to the music using the original CD?
As for "sometimes don't work on a 10 year old player", you do realize that the goal of copy protection is to not work on a computer cdrom drive of any generation? This is why we have discs with garbled TOC tracks, this is a scheme targeted directly at computer drives which read the TOC to determine if the drive is audio or data.
I consider it piracy when a publisher takes my money and gives me a round shiny disc which fails to meet my expectation of being useful (that is, playing in my player which is fully capable of playing other round shiny discs). Companies who wish to break this expectation must either 1) accept returns for defective products which fail to meet consumer expectations or 2) clearly indicate that the round shiny disc is not a standard round shiny disc. Simple absense of a "CD" trademark is not clear indication.
People keep posting "Why whine? Just don't buy it!" but which products am I to not buy? I have to wait until someone else buys a cd and determines that it is copyprotected and posts that information to a tracking board somewhere. Even in cases where the CD trademark is missing, which copyprotection scheme was used? Perhaps it is one which is still compatible with my player and my expectation for the music. Not only that, but I have noticed that several of my non-copyprotected round shiny discs do not bear the CD trademark. Is this an intentional attempt by companies to confuse the issue? If no round shiny discs bear the CD trademark, how do I tell the protected and the playable discs apart?
Imagine the outrage that would happen if one in 10 hamburgers served by mcdonalds was actually made from horsemeat, and was served as a beef hamburger with nothing to tell it apart from the rest of the hamburgers. Now imagine everyone knew this, and nobody did anything about it because mcdonalds made money this way. This is what the publishing companies and their guardian the RIAA is doing to us all, only the ratio of horseburgers is going to increase without you being notified.