Nobody cares about Napster! I've gone back to borrowing CDs from my friends (yes I know it's illegal lending) and going to friend's homes to listen to their CDs (yes I know it's illegal public performance) and humming tunes in the shower (yes I know it's illegal to create derivative works without permission). So can we please just not hear about Napster any more? In fact, can/. filter out articles based on words in the title? Hmm.
I suppose you think that educating young people about what rape is, and offering any opinion about, say, forcing non-consensual sex on a drunken teenage girl would be wrong too.
That's a good idea, compare copyright infringement to rape, the record labels would be proud! After all, most pirates on the high seas were rapists as well, let's not forget that.
Remember kids, as soon as you hit that "Burn CD" button, you've commited RAPE!
'...DMCA self-help allows us to reduce to a fraction the losses we would suffer if limited only to court-imposed process and remedies. These efforts are made much less effective with the burdensome restrictions of the Fourth Amendement, such as the restricted access we would have to pirate's homes, including their unauthorized CD-Rs and illegally photocopied magazine articles.' -- Stevan D. Mitchell, Vice President, Intellectual Property Policy Interactive Digital Software Association
I remember Moby had a remix contest like 6 years ago with Everytime You Touch Me (I think). Not on the internet but he put the pieces of the track on a CD single and people sent in tapes. They all sucked. The original sucked for that matter. But I can't believe nobody else has done this yet (nobody else big at least).
On another note, I remember seeing PE live once a while back.. I'll never forget Flav's intro: "THIS AIN'T GONNA BE THE BEST MUTHAFUCKIN SHOW YOU EVER SEEN, BUT IT'S GONNA BE THE LONGEST!"
publishers don't really have much of a leg to stand on shy of changing U.S. Copyright law outright.
In other words, NO PROBLEM BABY! Where's my checkbook? Helloooo Mr. Congresspersons! Your check is in the mail, wink wink, nudge nudge! That's right, we wrote up a little bill for you, all you have to do is sign it. Anybody doesn't like it, send them to us, we'll throw as little party, dancing girls, all kinds of shit, no problem, they'll vote for it in no time!
Since when does the first amendment give the right to anonymous speech?
The courts have often written about "prior restraint" when it comes to free speech. Is there something that will prevent otherwise legal and protected speech from being said? For instance, if a new DMCA-like law comes into affect saying that whenever an ISP receives notice of defamation, it must immediately turn over names and addresses, that will keep MANY people from speaking (posting), even if what they are saying is not defamatory.
The best way to do things, and the way this New Jersey court is writing their guidelines, is that you have to show defamation, or infringement, or whatever, FIRST, and then you can try and get the names of the anonymous posters. That way, innocent people can post without fear of prior restraint.
I don't think it should be illegal or againsty SEC regulations to "talk a stock down" as long as it's not defamatory or a blatant lie. People on CNBC, etc, are ALWAYS talking stocks up, usually right after their company bought a bunch of it for their inventory to sell to clients through their brokers or something like that. Sometimes they do the opposite too (trying to bring a stock down). It's a big dishonest mess and I always wonder why it's any different when someone does it on a Yahoo board.
An another note, doesn't this quote from a lawyer interviewed in the article make you bristle a little:
It might tip the balance too far towards First Amendment rights.
It will be funny.. in a few years you probably won't be able to actually download any MP3s at MP3.com.. just proprietary file formats and streaming audio.
web filtering is good for children and america
on
Congress@Work
·
· Score: 5
You/. libertarian freaks don't see what's happening to our nation's children. Slowly, little by little, we are seeing moral decay in this society. And it can be stopped so easily. The solution is right in front of us.
You see, communist web sites have been created, and are ensnaring our nation's children, in order to subvert and impurify their precious bodily fluids. Through the use of aggressive web filtering like the one proposed by this red-blooded congressman, we can keep this evil communist plot at bay and reclaim our nation's children.
I fully support any laws, or militia-led infiltrations, that will protect our children's precious bodily fluids.
The boring folks out there will bitch that there are patents involved but they just want to complain or get off their one track minds.
Was this necessary? It's not "patents" that cause problems, it's many business method patents, software patents, patents on games (like the patented tennis move), and maybe even drug patents and genetic engineering patents, that cause problems, because average (or slightly above average) people can end up infringing them with little effort. If a high school student can discover, implement, and distribute a computer program that infringes a patent, with no knowledge of the patent, how novel can the patent be? Etc.
I personally don't think all patents are evil, and when I see "patent pending" on my box of zip-loc bags I don't get all freaked out about it.
This is nice, but I still wish someone would make a license or social contract that emphasizes voluntary payments, rather than just saying in a footnote, oh yeah, we don't actually prevent you from making money, we just care about other people's freedoms. What we need is both the freedom to share music and computer programs, and the philosophy that if something adds value to your life, you should pay for it. If you don't, shame on you, but you can still enjoy the music/software/art. Kind of like public radio or public TV. Or like tipping your waiter or service giver. Or paying for your gas after filling your car up instead of zooming away.
I believe many people are willing to pay for something, even if it is easy to copy. Imagine a world where CDs could be copied for any purpose legally. Would CD sales drop to zero? I don't think so. I for one would continue to buy them. In fact, much of the music I listen to (mostly electronic/IDM stuff) is available on artist web sites and Napster, but I still shell out for the shiny disc. If artists would put donation buttons on their web pages, I would be willing to donate if they didn't have a CD.
I've ALWAYS used checksums to do that kind of stuff. Unfortunately in scripts that aren't distributed publicly, but cripes, any damn fool could come up with that idea!
Another trick I've used is in scripts that generate static.html pages from a database: take the data used in the page (not the page itself), and make an md5 of the concatenation. Since most md5 routines can take data in chunks, you can generate it as you're getting the data. Then save the md5sum in a comment at the top. Then in the future you can compare with md5sum of the page with the md5sum of the data. If there is a "last modified" date on the page or something this will only update it when the data changes.
I also use this trick for an automatic DNS updating script that creates zone files from a master data file. Can't just update the zone files every time because then the serial numbers would be updated constantly.
So if anybody patents this silly idea (maybe they already have?), I've been using it for like eight years!! I'm publicly announcing it here on/.!!
Blah.
Besides I don't use NetMind anymore, I use SpyOnIt.
I bought a 100MB ZIP a few years ago and it did the clicking thing but I didn't think much of it. The literally within a week after the warranty ended, I ejected a disk and the read/write heads came out with the disk like the guts from a squashed bug. But last year I bought a 250MB internal and it has been working flawlessly for backups every week.
I feel kinda sorry for Iomega sometimes though. There really isn't any use for ZIP drives these days. You can't use them like throw-away floppies because the disks are expensive and the drives aren't universal. You can't archive your extra files on them, because they're magnetically sensitive and CD-ROM's are better and cheaper. They don't have enough capacity for multimedia, etc., etc.
I use the ZIP with an rsync script to backup work in progress, that's about it. I did get that settlement letter and maybe I'll buy something and then immediately sell it on eBay.
Europe's creators, artists and copyright industries can now look forward with renewed confidence to the challenges posed by electronic commerce. At the same time, the Directive secures the legitimate interests of users, consumers and society at large.
I think that says it all.. creators come first, society comes last. Of course, the framers of the US Constitution had it the other way around and it still doesn't make a difference..
One other mistake he made was using percentage of downloads paid as the benchmark. He should've used his profit margin as the benchmark (i.e., I want to make fifty cents of profit for every dollar spent on web hosting and bandwidth, or something), or absolute profit (I want to make one million on this ebook or I won't do another one). If he reaches his goal, who cares how many people have copies of the story? And he should've put something in the PDF itself reminding people to pay if their friend gave them a copy, just on the first page or something. If 1 out of 1000 pays like this, that's pretty good considering copies between friends doesn't cost him a penny.
But I still hope other authors follow his lead and continue the experiment.
No it certainly wan't a dumb idea (the story wasn't so hot, but what else could he use for an experiment outside of his publishing contracts?).
If you go to his web site you can see the expense report for The Plant. He made a fairly nice profit (half a million) considering 1) it was a first-time experiment, 2) it was overpriced, 3) he botched up the mailing list that was supposed to announce new installments, so nobody knew to get the next installment, and 4) the story was a leftover.
He even wrote letters (used to be on his website someplace) to major publications that called it a "failure" saying that it actually wasn't a failure, he made half a million on a book that never even existed on paper! But of course the publishers declined to publish those letters. Wonder why?
I would definitely call it a successful first attempt. Imagine if he works out the wrinkles, gets some better marketing, and tries it with a better book (or in parallel with a regular paper book).
"No matter what you do for a living you should get paid for your work, whether you're washing dishes or recording songs."
-- Bif Naked
Salon, March 25, 2000
Holy shit! I've been washing my dishes every day for YEARS and I never got a STINKING PENNY! This NAP-STIR program has got to be SHUT DOWN immediately! I demand my dishwashing payments!
Who is Bif Naked anyway? Never heard of the chap. Is he really naked?
...the institution of the V-Chip will allow parents more freedom in allowing their children to watch shows, giving the kids control of their TV time and helping them learn independence that much sooner.
That's just one of those statements you have to read a couple of times, slowly and carefully, to fully appreciate. Like a fine wine.
I think it is vital to consider the idea of getting paid for Free software (or music, or whatever). It costs very little to put a "tip jar" or a splash screen on a web site to take payments for downloads, and even if only a few people pay, it's a good start. Since so many people aren't getting paid at all for work they do in free software, what do they have to lose?
RMS and the FSF have done a good job of talking about freedom, and that's important, but someone should stand up and preach the value of paying for things that add value to your life.
Just like the GPL is mostly a social contract at this point, and hasn't been enforced by the courts, we should collectively endorse the idea of paying for Free products (heh that reads kinda funny don't it). For solidarity, if for no other reason.
I think this is the best way to battle the nascent War on Copying (just wait folks, it's coming).
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody cares about Napster! I've gone back to borrowing CDs from my friends (yes I know it's illegal lending) and going to friend's homes to listen to their CDs (yes I know it's illegal public performance) and humming tunes in the shower (yes I know it's illegal to create derivative works without permission). So can we please just not hear about Napster any more? In fact, can /. filter out articles based on words in the title? Hmm.
I suppose you think that educating young people about what rape is, and offering any opinion about, say, forcing non-consensual sex on a drunken teenage girl would be wrong too.
That's a good idea, compare copyright infringement to rape, the record labels would be proud! After all, most pirates on the high seas were rapists as well, let's not forget that.
Remember kids, as soon as you hit that "Burn CD" button, you've commited RAPE!
'...DMCA self-help allows us to reduce to a fraction the losses we would suffer if limited only to court-imposed process and remedies. These efforts are made much less effective with the burdensome restrictions of the Fourth Amendement, such as the restricted access we would have to pirate's homes, including their unauthorized CD-Rs and illegally photocopied magazine articles.' -- Stevan D. Mitchell, Vice President, Intellectual Property Policy Interactive Digital Software Association
I remember Moby had a remix contest like 6 years ago with Everytime You Touch Me (I think). Not on the internet but he put the pieces of the track on a CD single and people sent in tapes. They all sucked. The original sucked for that matter. But I can't believe nobody else has done this yet (nobody else big at least).
On another note, I remember seeing PE live once a while back.. I'll never forget Flav's intro: "THIS AIN'T GONNA BE THE BEST MUTHAFUCKIN SHOW YOU EVER SEEN, BUT IT'S GONNA BE THE LONGEST!"
publishers don't really have much of a leg to stand on shy of changing U.S. Copyright law outright.
In other words, NO PROBLEM BABY! Where's my checkbook? Helloooo Mr. Congresspersons! Your check is in the mail, wink wink, nudge nudge! That's right, we wrote up a little bill for you, all you have to do is sign it. Anybody doesn't like it, send them to us, we'll throw as little party, dancing girls, all kinds of shit, no problem, they'll vote for it in no time!
Since when does the first amendment give the right to anonymous speech?
The courts have often written about "prior restraint" when it comes to free speech. Is there something that will prevent otherwise legal and protected speech from being said? For instance, if a new DMCA-like law comes into affect saying that whenever an ISP receives notice of defamation, it must immediately turn over names and addresses, that will keep MANY people from speaking (posting), even if what they are saying is not defamatory.
The best way to do things, and the way this New Jersey court is writing their guidelines, is that you have to show defamation, or infringement, or whatever, FIRST, and then you can try and get the names of the anonymous posters. That way, innocent people can post without fear of prior restraint.
That's how I see it, anyway.
I don't think it should be illegal or againsty SEC regulations to "talk a stock down" as long as it's not defamatory or a blatant lie. People on CNBC, etc, are ALWAYS talking stocks up, usually right after their company bought a bunch of it for their inventory to sell to clients through their brokers or something like that. Sometimes they do the opposite too (trying to bring a stock down). It's a big dishonest mess and I always wonder why it's any different when someone does it on a Yahoo board.
An another note, doesn't this quote from a lawyer interviewed in the article make you bristle a little:
Eh, too much First Amendment rights?
Wouldn't it be nice to change the settings on your TV so your 4-year-old isn't getting the Victoria's Secret ads?
Uh, we're protecting 4-year-olds from lingerie ads now? They must be pretty damn fragile.
Though I have to wonder, what is the 4-year-old watching that would have those ads in the first place? Teletubbies?
.... Amensty ....
I think an AMEN-STY is a place were pigs pray?
HA HA HA now go back to sleep
It will be funny.. in a few years you probably won't be able to actually download any MP3s at MP3.com.. just proprietary file formats and streaming audio.
You /. libertarian freaks don't see what's happening to our nation's children. Slowly, little by little, we are seeing moral decay in this society. And it can be stopped so easily. The solution is right in front of us.
You see, communist web sites have been created, and are ensnaring our nation's children, in order to subvert and impurify their precious bodily fluids. Through the use of aggressive web filtering like the one proposed by this red-blooded congressman, we can keep this evil communist plot at bay and reclaim our nation's children.
I fully support any laws, or militia-led infiltrations, that will protect our children's precious bodily fluids.
Thank you for your time.
Hey, I bet this kid isn't going to break into any more computers! See, zero thought--er, tolerance works! Ashcroft is right!!
The boring folks out there will bitch that there are patents involved but they just want to complain or get off their one track minds.
Was this necessary? It's not "patents" that cause problems, it's many business method patents, software patents, patents on games (like the patented tennis move), and maybe even drug patents and genetic engineering patents, that cause problems, because average (or slightly above average) people can end up infringing them with little effort. If a high school student can discover, implement, and distribute a computer program that infringes a patent, with no knowledge of the patent, how novel can the patent be? Etc.
I personally don't think all patents are evil, and when I see "patent pending" on my box of zip-loc bags I don't get all freaked out about it.
This is nice, but I still wish someone would make a license or social contract that emphasizes voluntary payments, rather than just saying in a footnote, oh yeah, we don't actually prevent you from making money, we just care about other people's freedoms. What we need is both the freedom to share music and computer programs, and the philosophy that if something adds value to your life, you should pay for it. If you don't, shame on you, but you can still enjoy the music/software/art. Kind of like public radio or public TV. Or like tipping your waiter or service giver. Or paying for your gas after filling your car up instead of zooming away.
I believe many people are willing to pay for something, even if it is easy to copy. Imagine a world where CDs could be copied for any purpose legally. Would CD sales drop to zero? I don't think so. I for one would continue to buy them. In fact, much of the music I listen to (mostly electronic/IDM stuff) is available on artist web sites and Napster, but I still shell out for the shiny disc. If artists would put donation buttons on their web pages, I would be willing to donate if they didn't have a CD.
I've ALWAYS used checksums to do that kind of stuff. Unfortunately in scripts that aren't distributed publicly, but cripes, any damn fool could come up with that idea!
Another trick I've used is in scripts that generate static .html pages from a database: take the data used in the page (not the page itself), and make an md5 of the concatenation. Since most md5 routines can take data in chunks, you can generate it as you're getting the data. Then save the md5sum in a comment at the top. Then in the future you can compare with md5sum of the page with the md5sum of the data. If there is a "last modified" date on the page or something this will only update it when the data changes.
I also use this trick for an automatic DNS updating script that creates zone files from a master data file. Can't just update the zone files every time because then the serial numbers would be updated constantly.
So if anybody patents this silly idea (maybe they already have?), I've been using it for like eight years!! I'm publicly announcing it here on /.!!
Blah.
Besides I don't use NetMind anymore, I use SpyOnIt.
I bought a 100MB ZIP a few years ago and it did the clicking thing but I didn't think much of it. The literally within a week after the warranty ended, I ejected a disk and the read/write heads came out with the disk like the guts from a squashed bug. But last year I bought a 250MB internal and it has been working flawlessly for backups every week.
I feel kinda sorry for Iomega sometimes though. There really isn't any use for ZIP drives these days. You can't use them like throw-away floppies because the disks are expensive and the drives aren't universal. You can't archive your extra files on them, because they're magnetically sensitive and CD-ROM's are better and cheaper. They don't have enough capacity for multimedia, etc., etc.
I use the ZIP with an rsync script to backup work in progress, that's about it. I did get that settlement letter and maybe I'll buy something and then immediately sell it on eBay.
Europe's creators, artists and copyright industries can now look forward with renewed confidence to the challenges posed by electronic commerce. At the same time, the Directive secures the legitimate interests of users, consumers and society at large.
I think that says it all .. creators come first, society comes last. Of course, the framers of the US Constitution had it the other way around and it still doesn't make a difference..
One other mistake he made was using percentage of downloads paid as the benchmark. He should've used his profit margin as the benchmark (i.e., I want to make fifty cents of profit for every dollar spent on web hosting and bandwidth, or something), or absolute profit (I want to make one million on this ebook or I won't do another one). If he reaches his goal, who cares how many people have copies of the story? And he should've put something in the PDF itself reminding people to pay if their friend gave them a copy, just on the first page or something. If 1 out of 1000 pays like this, that's pretty good considering copies between friends doesn't cost him a penny.
But I still hope other authors follow his lead and continue the experiment.
No it certainly wan't a dumb idea (the story wasn't so hot, but what else could he use for an experiment outside of his publishing contracts?).
If you go to his web site you can see the expense report for The Plant. He made a fairly nice profit (half a million) considering 1) it was a first-time experiment, 2) it was overpriced, 3) he botched up the mailing list that was supposed to announce new installments, so nobody knew to get the next installment, and 4) the story was a leftover.
He even wrote letters (used to be on his website someplace) to major publications that called it a "failure" saying that it actually wasn't a failure, he made half a million on a book that never even existed on paper! But of course the publishers declined to publish those letters. Wonder why?
I would definitely call it a successful first attempt. Imagine if he works out the wrinkles, gets some better marketing, and tries it with a better book (or in parallel with a regular paper book).
"No matter what you do for a living you should get paid for your work, whether you're washing dishes or recording songs."
-- Bif Naked
Salon, March 25, 2000
Holy shit! I've been washing my dishes every day for YEARS and I never got a STINKING PENNY! This NAP-STIR program has got to be SHUT DOWN immediately! I demand my dishwashing payments!
Who is Bif Naked anyway? Never heard of the chap. Is he really naked?
That's just one of those statements you have to read a couple of times, slowly and carefully, to fully appreciate. Like a fine wine.
Either dinner was really short, or something else was.
Nah, she charged by the hour and he didn't want to run up the cc bill too high.
click here
(Rudy Park is a mildly amusing cartoon in Infoworld magazine)
Are you kidding? If I want to hack this disc I'll buy it on eBay and then put it back there when I'm done!
I think it is vital to consider the idea of getting paid for Free software (or music, or whatever). It costs very little to put a "tip jar" or a splash screen on a web site to take payments for downloads, and even if only a few people pay, it's a good start. Since so many people aren't getting paid at all for work they do in free software, what do they have to lose?
RMS and the FSF have done a good job of talking about freedom, and that's important, but someone should stand up and preach the value of paying for things that add value to your life.
Just like the GPL is mostly a social contract at this point, and hasn't been enforced by the courts, we should collectively endorse the idea of paying for Free products (heh that reads kinda funny don't it). For solidarity, if for no other reason.
I think this is the best way to battle the nascent War on Copying (just wait folks, it's coming).