Why did companies write software until software patents were allowed? Oh yeah, because they made money doing it.
Why do people write books when they can't patent the idea of a story pitting a man against nature? Oh yeah, copyright...
Patents these days are broken. You used to have actually patent a specific device. Now you can patent the idea of doing something, regardless of how it's done.
(Well, technically you have to describe how to do it, but apparently "Common task Foo, OVER A NETWORK" is all it needs.)
Pointing out that the Bush administration appointed the management is not only a Bush/Clinton distinction, but also informs the reader as to which set of politicians appoints the PTO management.
And also, pointing out that Bush is festeringly stupid doesn't say that Clinton was a genius. Instead you might consider that they're both unfit to govern their own backyard. Your whole republican/democrat distinction has blinded you to the fact that they're all bribe-taking thieves.
Then we get to your broken views on the functioning of the PTO. They certainly do have an obligation to make sure that they don't hand out completely bogus patents because each of those bogus patents can be used to blackmail companies for up to the expected court costs. Every bad patents you hand out is a government granted right to steal from companies who actually do research and produce valid products, many of whom can't afford $10M+ for pointless legal battles.
If the PTO can't be very sure that a patent is warranted, they shouldn't issue the damn thing. Either that, or the administration should be personally liable for the complete court costs for every battle that results in a patent being thrown out as absurd.
Don't be a shithead. If the product requires a license server, and the developer wants to work anywhere, it'll probably require the license server to be on the laptop. Huh? Does that make sense or do you need shorter words?
When your friend kicks you in the nuts repeatedly, then stops, but doesn't promise not to, saying only that he's decided to stop for now, do you forgive him?
The more we can hurt Intuit, the better. If we raise hell, a little; bitch like crazy, for a day or two; declare we'll never use it again, until maybe next year, we're tell them that we're fed up, but will continue to take it because it's too much trouble to change.
I don't owe Intuit anything. At this point they're right back where they were before selling the DRMed software, except that we've all seen how little they care about an individual (see all the posts about people who called for help and were ignored).
Why not try another company? Do other companies not deserve your business? Should you not try to make friends who have never kicked you in the nuts?
There are a lot of options to Intuit and I'll go through all of them before I try Intuit again. The industry as a whole can learn from this. It's up to us to teach them the right lesson. I want them to treat consumers well, not kick us in the nuts repeatedly, but slightly less than the competition would.
The normal functionality for programs that let you enter and manipulate data, for which a paper copy makes sense, is to let you save and print any number of times. How about if MS-Word only gave you four chances to get a file "right" and it became read-only after four saves?
If they want to go against all expectations of a working product they should do much more than "say on the box". They should have a banner an inch high somewhere describing the broken functionality. Hell, if they declare it properly they can sell an empty CD for all I care. The problem is that they decide what you need to do, don't bother informing anyone, and don't let you return the product for any reason.
You know this, but you decided to be a jackass. You couldn't possibly equate opening binary files in MS-Word to the printing of a tax return. I can't figure you could be so stupid and still breathe so it only leaves me able to assume you're just a jerk.
How about just tossing execs in jail if their company breaks the law? And fining them and the company an ammount based on their wealth and expected gain. (Or maybe, based on the ratio between the harm they caused by breaking the law and their competitors wealth. If you ruin a competitor the fine should ruin you.)
Microsoft has continually broken the law and yet nothing comes from it.
DRDos might have been a competitor but microsoft's actions made it look broken. That's misrepresentation at least. Conspiracy to defraud perhaps.
You need the courts to ensure that the market remains free and market forces can function.
If Microsoft merely charged too much for a product that was buggy, people would find alternatives.
But Microsoft rigs their product to make it look like competitors' products are buggy (DRDos, Office on the Mac, etc, etc). They unfairly tie access to their products to a requirement to buy the products. They lie in court, fake evidence, bully supplies to not deal with competitors. You need to prevent the crimes before the market has a real choice.
The next year or so is critical for MS. They'll either get Open Source software declared illegal somehow and bury it with spurious patents, or they'll have a competitor they can't get rid of and their position of market dominance will go away. (Not to say they won't be huge. IBM no longer rules the market, but they're insanely big still.)
Just because accountants are stupid enough to believe their own games doesn't mean anything.
A friend's company did something I thought only happened in Dilbert. They layed him off and hired him back, as a consultant, at a high enough wage he could make his own medical/etc payments and still make more. Salaries are a specific budget, consultants come out of the operations budget, of which they had lots. Or rather, or which they were allowed to go into debt in, because operations costs aren't supposed to be ongoing.
The only thing keeping them from Enroning is that they're smaller. Nobody notices when a medium tech company dies.
DRM is irrelevant. Simply signing the video as it was produced would be sufficient. All you get from DRM is a police officer with a useless PC. The video is already protected.
That relies on the assumption that you can always page in the memory containing the subroutine. If you're writing paging code this might not be possible.
It was a lot harder in real-mode programming, where you couldn't jump to distant code because you had to change segment registers and you had to make sure you backed them up first. Hard to guarantee with C, easy with ASM.
Besides, there are many optimizations that a compiler has to guess about. It's very hard for it to know if you're relying on the side effects of an operation. If you're looping and not doing anything, are you touching volatile memory each time (where the reads could be controlling memory-mapped hardware) or doing something else similar. That's the most obvious example. There are a ton of pages about compiler optimization. It's really quite fascinating.
Id's test with Q3 for Linux didn't prove anything. Even my Linux-gaming friends bought the windows version. They didn't want to be two or more weeks behind everyone else. Put both boxes on shelves at the same time and the numbers might mean something.
But really, why not skip the test? Put both executables on the CD and look at server logs a month later to judge the market share.
When you receive a *lot* of mail the post office starts to sort it for you. If nothing else, you can get it bagged by envelope dimensions (catalogs seperated from letters, seperated from 9x12 envelopes, etc) and by payment class (bulk mail, first class, etc).
Which means, if you want to cause the most problems you need to get envelopes that look like bills and business mail sent to the victim. Catalogs and such will probably be caught at the post office, at least once you notify them that they're unwanted.
The USPS is pretty hard to DoS. They get paid for every piece of mail they deliver and they can bring in off-duty mailmen, then temps (the people who work the christmas season) and so on. DoS them, they'll love it. They'll make a ton of money and all the workers who get the opportunity for 2.5x overtime pay will love it.
Besides, I remember watching a program (similar to "How'd they do that?") that talked about the USPS and their procedures for sudden unexpected loads of up to twenty times normal. This happens when companies offer mail rebates for popular products, when radio stations have contests, when a rock star gets fan mail, etc.
It basically ammounts to telling the automated sorting machines to pull out the mail to the specific receiver that's being mass-mailed and they send it in seperate bags. It doesn't usually need extra sorting so the branches that collect the mail can send it, ready for delivery, to the delivering branch. The spam-a-neighborhood thing is a bit different but they could probably cope.
Apple should care for business reasons. If you can play mpeg4 on Linux, but can't play anything in a.qt file format you're not going to use quicktime.
And, as Linux is quite big in the server field, the same people who can't play Quicktime on their home computers are going to influence their bosses to host other types of media files.
In one way I count for only a single desktop user, in another way I count for five (desktops I own or admin for family) and an office of users. If Quicktime gets to be a pain for me to play I'm going to find alternatives and Apple will miss out on a fairly large number of end users because of it.
This almost happened with Quicktime v4 (?) where their interface got really bad and installing it was a pain.
So yes, I do think Apple should care about geeks on Linux wanting to watch Quicktime trailers of the Matrix. Adobe brought out a Linux version of Acrobat to broaden the platform, not for the total number of users gained.
I had a similar experience. I coasted through high school, doing very little because it didn't seem to matter. Come grade 12 I realized I needed a diploma instead of a GED so I made sure I passed, but that was simply a matter of being there 60% of the days, my school using a system where your mark could not be better than your attendance, excepting doctor-approved absences.
The first term I got 98%+ in all classes and was in the top five in the school (dunno precisely where). It was the only semester I got on the honor roll. But, they didn't apply attendence-based grading in the first term, only to the over-all mark at the end of the year. At the end I got Cs in some classes, Ps in the rest. My work hadn't changed. I aced every test, etc. But because I didn't put in the hours they said I didn't know the material. Feh.
And before anyone drivels on about how school is really to prepare you for 9-5 life, I've never had a boss who would let you get away without doing anything provided you had perfect attendance. Instead, most of my bosses seemed quite happy with giving me a flexible schedule and using performance-based milestones. They cared a lot more about the final result than "perfect attendance". School may prepare people for life, but only the busted down life of a gas-station attendant.
But, as another saying goes, you can have an infinite number of apples and no oranges. In other words, just because you have an infinite number of things, you don't necessarily have everything that could happen.
If you read the article, you'd see that the artist in question *DID* recreate the sound sample. He's accused of violating the copyright on the specific string of notes.
Beyond that though, what is with some people thinking that we need to ask permission for every little action? Everything which is not expressly forbidden is allowed. If you say something in public, why shouldn't I be able to record a snippet of that and use it as part of my speech? And then, why is music different than speech?
This isn't an issue of someone taking a whole speech or song, copying it exactly, and then passing it off as their own. This is about using a small piece of one song to reference it in another. It's a perfectly valid thing that musicians have been doing since our ancestors first discovered song. Without this borrowing we'd never have accomplished anything, we'd all be grubbing in the dirt because nobody could ever build on anything developed by anyone else. Without this borrowing we'd also be unable to ever talk about ideas created by someone else. "Bob's idea is bad, and will ruin the company, but I'm not legally allowed to tell you what his idea was because his speech is copyrighted."
And of course we're supposed to understand that your example means Jesse Jackson could use material from the KKK but not vice versa. Ideas like that are always selectively applied against unpopular groups.
This issue isn't at all releated to copying of music as done on Kazza, or in misrepresenting the work of someone else as your own. It's like giving a speech on economics and quoting "A few billion here. A few billion there, and soon we're talking about real money", or giving a talk about astronomy and using carl sagan's "billions and billions" as a tribute or reference, or even if you wished, as a derogatory reference.
I don't think sampling a small piece of a speech or song is stealing. It's pretty pathetic that our society does. I think you should be able to build on what other people have created. This isn't an issue of copying some great new musical riff or speech sample because of inability to create your own, it's about using pieces of our shared culture that have meaning only because we all share them. Sampling Richard Nixon saying "I am not a crook" means something different than the words alone. Using a Queen riff in your song is both a tribute and a comment, depending on the context.
Nobody is saying that sampling sizable portions of a work should be allowed but if you aren't allowed to copy or use aanything it really inhibits your ability to comment, or add to the common culture. And frankly, having to ask for everything is ridiculous. I'm sure Richard Nixon wouldn't give (have given) his permission to be quoted by someone he feels would insult him but that doesn't mean society wouldn't benefit from it.
It's pretty far from stealing $100 bills and frankly I think you're an ass for even trying to suggest a similarity. Argue sensibly or don't even bother.
No, you shouldn't get any say in who uses fair-use copies of your work.
Creating derivative copies is different, it involves using much more of your work. Sampling implies tiny pieces.
Copying a riff or a sample of you saying a single word or short phrase in a public appearance or performance seems to be a valid and necessary part of other people's rights to comment on your work and opinions. Also, there's the moral right of society to use the art in the public concsiousness to create new art. We build on the work of those who came before us.
The Rolling Stones didn't create their music in a vacumm so why should Dr. Dre be forced to?
Someone who preaches equality can use samples of hateful speech in part of a work speaking out against this. Why should hate mongers be denied the same rights?
It'll happen. Movies used to be shot in 4x3, the industry changed to widescreen largely to produce something that couldn't be properly shown on TV, as a way to keep their high-profit viewing (theatres) in business.
If we all buy widescreen TVs they'll "discover" that true art requires a square screen, or maybe vertical, and suprise, our equipment will be obsolete.
Actually, many filmmmakers have said that square aspect ratio lets them be the most creative. There are slightly less wide horizon shots, but it lets them show more of another view. They can zoom in close to show two people together, without distracting elements at the sides.
Not a compelling argument for switching, but it goes to show that films aren't magically better because they're at 2.35x1, they're better because you're watching them the way they were composed by the director. If he did 1x1 you'd be best off watching it that way.
Hello!? How about new technology? What new technology did Amazon develop?
Patents require, or used to before they started letting everything through, that the technological measures weren't obvious to the average professional in that field. Nothing about the business model is relevant here. Patents are about technology.
Amazon patented selling ice of eskimos. The only reason nobody else implemented 1-button shopping is because they didn't think anyone would want it. When they saw that it was popular a skilled web programmer could have implemented it in ten minutes. There wasn't any prior art in the ice-to-eskimos areas, but a ton of prior art in the cookies-used-to-identify-people area.
Cookies were developed specifically to allow this!
It's pretty much as if Amazon picked a page out of the W3C spec and said, hey, we've got a cool idea based on this tech, let's patent the tech described in this page so that nobody else can use our idea.
I hope the DDoS people keep hitting them. It's only fair, considering they're trying to use fake patents to destroy the livelihoods of everyone else.
Will you buy a whole CD if it's available track-by-track?
Usually, no. Therefore, this lowers the cost to the consumer. (It also breaks the RIAA's business model, serving as the last nail in their coffin, but that's another story.)
It only means this if the fans don't agree with the artist about how the music is best appreciated. It does mean the end of albums, but I think you'd still have collections of song that flow from one to the other. If you don't I think it's the public saying that they don't think it improves the experience.
I think the marketing push would almost be stronger. If you don't tie your music like this, the Britneys of the world, pop music producers, would sell whatever is playing on the radio (or whatever radio replacement we use) and not sell anything else. If you package your music so that the radio-played piece is a perfect lead into another set, you'll have people who appreciate this buying both.
Speaking of which, we need a music player that recognizes mini-playlists, so you can play certain tracks in order, within a global random. It should also hide the tracks as singles if they're in one of these playlists.
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Why did companies write software until software patents were allowed? Oh yeah, because they made money doing it.
Why do people write books when they can't patent the idea of a story pitting a man against nature? Oh yeah, copyright...
Patents these days are broken. You used to have actually patent a specific device. Now you can patent the idea of doing something, regardless of how it's done.
(Well, technically you have to describe how to do it, but apparently "Common task Foo, OVER A NETWORK" is all it needs.)
Don't go off like an idiot.
Pointing out that the Bush administration appointed the management is not only a Bush/Clinton distinction, but also informs the reader as to which set of politicians appoints the PTO management.
And also, pointing out that Bush is festeringly stupid doesn't say that Clinton was a genius. Instead you might consider that they're both unfit to govern their own backyard. Your whole republican/democrat distinction has blinded you to the fact that they're all bribe-taking thieves.
Then we get to your broken views on the functioning of the PTO. They certainly do have an obligation to make sure that they don't hand out completely bogus patents because each of those bogus patents can be used to blackmail companies for up to the expected court costs. Every bad patents you hand out is a government granted right to steal from companies who actually do research and produce valid products, many of whom can't afford $10M+ for pointless legal battles.
If the PTO can't be very sure that a patent is warranted, they shouldn't issue the damn thing. Either that, or the administration should be personally liable for the complete court costs for every battle that results in a patent being thrown out as absurd.
Don't be a shithead. If the product requires a license server, and the developer wants to work anywhere, it'll probably require the license server to be on the laptop. Huh? Does that make sense or do you need shorter words?
When your friend kicks you in the nuts repeatedly, then stops, but doesn't promise not to, saying only that he's decided to stop for now, do you forgive him?
The more we can hurt Intuit, the better. If we raise hell, a little; bitch like crazy, for a day or two; declare we'll never use it again, until maybe next year, we're tell them that we're fed up, but will continue to take it because it's too much trouble to change.
I don't owe Intuit anything. At this point they're right back where they were before selling the DRMed software, except that we've all seen how little they care about an individual (see all the posts about people who called for help and were ignored).
Why not try another company? Do other companies not deserve your business? Should you not try to make friends who have never kicked you in the nuts?
There are a lot of options to Intuit and I'll go through all of them before I try Intuit again. The industry as a whole can learn from this. It's up to us to teach them the right lesson. I want them to treat consumers well, not kick us in the nuts repeatedly, but slightly less than the competition would.
The normal functionality for programs that let you enter and manipulate data, for which a paper copy makes sense, is to let you save and print any number of times. How about if MS-Word only gave you four chances to get a file "right" and it became read-only after four saves?
If they want to go against all expectations of a working product they should do much more than "say on the box". They should have a banner an inch high somewhere describing the broken functionality. Hell, if they declare it properly they can sell an empty CD for all I care. The problem is that they decide what you need to do, don't bother informing anyone, and don't let you return the product for any reason.
You know this, but you decided to be a jackass. You couldn't possibly equate opening binary files in MS-Word to the printing of a tax return. I can't figure you could be so stupid and still breathe so it only leaves me able to assume you're just a jerk.
How about just tossing execs in jail if their company breaks the law? And fining them and the company an ammount based on their wealth and expected gain. (Or maybe, based on the ratio between the harm they caused by breaking the law and their competitors wealth. If you ruin a competitor the fine should ruin you.)
Microsoft has continually broken the law and yet nothing comes from it.
DRDos might have been a competitor but microsoft's actions made it look broken. That's misrepresentation at least. Conspiracy to defraud perhaps.
You need the courts to ensure that the market remains free and market forces can function.
If Microsoft merely charged too much for a product that was buggy, people would find alternatives.
But Microsoft rigs their product to make it look like competitors' products are buggy (DRDos, Office on the Mac, etc, etc). They unfairly tie access to their products to a requirement to buy the products. They lie in court, fake evidence, bully supplies to not deal with competitors. You need to prevent the crimes before the market has a real choice.
The next year or so is critical for MS. They'll either get Open Source software declared illegal somehow and bury it with spurious patents, or they'll have a competitor they can't get rid of and their position of market dominance will go away. (Not to say they won't be huge. IBM no longer rules the market, but they're insanely big still.)
Just because accountants are stupid enough to believe their own games doesn't mean anything.
A friend's company did something I thought only happened in Dilbert. They layed him off and hired him back, as a consultant, at a high enough wage he could make his own medical/etc payments and still make more. Salaries are a specific budget, consultants come out of the operations budget, of which they had lots. Or rather, or which they were allowed to go into debt in, because operations costs aren't supposed to be ongoing.
The only thing keeping them from Enroning is that they're smaller. Nobody notices when a medium tech company dies.
DRM is irrelevant. Simply signing the video as it was produced would be sufficient. All you get from DRM is a police officer with a useless PC. The video is already protected.
That relies on the assumption that you can always page in the memory containing the subroutine. If you're writing paging code this might not be possible.
It was a lot harder in real-mode programming, where you couldn't jump to distant code because you had to change segment registers and you had to make sure you backed them up first. Hard to guarantee with C, easy with ASM.
Besides, there are many optimizations that a compiler has to guess about. It's very hard for it to know if you're relying on the side effects of an operation. If you're looping and not doing anything, are you touching volatile memory each time (where the reads could be controlling memory-mapped hardware) or doing something else similar. That's the most obvious example. There are a ton of pages about compiler optimization. It's really quite fascinating.
Id's test with Q3 for Linux didn't prove anything. Even my Linux-gaming friends bought the windows version. They didn't want to be two or more weeks behind everyone else. Put both boxes on shelves at the same time and the numbers might mean something.
But really, why not skip the test? Put both executables on the CD and look at server logs a month later to judge the market share.
When you receive a *lot* of mail the post office starts to sort it for you. If nothing else, you can get it bagged by envelope dimensions (catalogs seperated from letters, seperated from 9x12 envelopes, etc) and by payment class (bulk mail, first class, etc).
Which means, if you want to cause the most problems you need to get envelopes that look like bills and business mail sent to the victim. Catalogs and such will probably be caught at the post office, at least once you notify them that they're unwanted.
The USPS is pretty hard to DoS. They get paid for every piece of mail they deliver and they can bring in off-duty mailmen, then temps (the people who work the christmas season) and so on. DoS them, they'll love it. They'll make a ton of money and all the workers who get the opportunity for 2.5x overtime pay will love it.
Besides, I remember watching a program (similar to "How'd they do that?") that talked about the USPS and their procedures for sudden unexpected loads of up to twenty times normal. This happens when companies offer mail rebates for popular products, when radio stations have contests, when a rock star gets fan mail, etc.
It basically ammounts to telling the automated sorting machines to pull out the mail to the specific receiver that's being mass-mailed and they send it in seperate bags. It doesn't usually need extra sorting so the branches that collect the mail can send it, ready for delivery, to the delivering branch. The spam-a-neighborhood thing is a bit different but they could probably cope.
Apple should care for business reasons. If you can play mpeg4 on Linux, but can't play anything in a .qt file format you're not going to use quicktime.
And, as Linux is quite big in the server field, the same people who can't play Quicktime on their home computers are going to influence their bosses to host other types of media files.
In one way I count for only a single desktop user, in another way I count for five (desktops I own or admin for family) and an office of users. If Quicktime gets to be a pain for me to play I'm going to find alternatives and Apple will miss out on a fairly large number of end users because of it.
This almost happened with Quicktime v4 (?) where their interface got really bad and installing it was a pain.
So yes, I do think Apple should care about geeks on Linux wanting to watch Quicktime trailers of the Matrix. Adobe brought out a Linux version of Acrobat to broaden the platform, not for the total number of users gained.
I had a similar experience. I coasted through high school, doing very little because it didn't seem to matter. Come grade 12 I realized I needed a diploma instead of a GED so I made sure I passed, but that was simply a matter of being there 60% of the days, my school using a system where your mark could not be better than your attendance, excepting doctor-approved absences.
The first term I got 98%+ in all classes and was in the top five in the school (dunno precisely where). It was the only semester I got on the honor roll. But, they didn't apply attendence-based grading in the first term, only to the over-all mark at the end of the year. At the end I got Cs in some classes, Ps in the rest. My work hadn't changed. I aced every test, etc. But because I didn't put in the hours they said I didn't know the material. Feh.
And before anyone drivels on about how school is really to prepare you for 9-5 life, I've never had a boss who would let you get away without doing anything provided you had perfect attendance. Instead, most of my bosses seemed quite happy with giving me a flexible schedule and using performance-based milestones. They cared a lot more about the final result than "perfect attendance". School may prepare people for life, but only the busted down life of a gas-station attendant.
But, as another saying goes, you can have an infinite number of apples and no oranges. In other words, just because you have an infinite number of things, you don't necessarily have everything that could happen.
If you read the article, you'd see that the artist in question *DID* recreate the sound sample. He's accused of violating the copyright on the specific string of notes.
Beyond that though, what is with some people thinking that we need to ask permission for every little action? Everything which is not expressly forbidden is allowed. If you say something in public, why shouldn't I be able to record a snippet of that and use it as part of my speech? And then, why is music different than speech?
This isn't an issue of someone taking a whole speech or song, copying it exactly, and then passing it off as their own. This is about using a small piece of one song to reference it in another. It's a perfectly valid thing that musicians have been doing since our ancestors first discovered song. Without this borrowing we'd never have accomplished anything, we'd all be grubbing in the dirt because nobody could ever build on anything developed by anyone else. Without this borrowing we'd also be unable to ever talk about ideas created by someone else. "Bob's idea is bad, and will ruin the company, but I'm not legally allowed to tell you what his idea was because his speech is copyrighted."
And of course we're supposed to understand that your example means Jesse Jackson could use material from the KKK but not vice versa. Ideas like that are always selectively applied against unpopular groups.
This issue isn't at all releated to copying of music as done on Kazza, or in misrepresenting the work of someone else as your own. It's like giving a speech on economics and quoting "A few billion here. A few billion there, and soon we're talking about real money", or giving a talk about astronomy and using carl sagan's "billions and billions" as a tribute or reference, or even if you wished, as a derogatory reference.
I don't think sampling a small piece of a speech or song is stealing. It's pretty pathetic that our society does. I think you should be able to build on what other people have created. This isn't an issue of copying some great new musical riff or speech sample because of inability to create your own, it's about using pieces of our shared culture that have meaning only because we all share them. Sampling Richard Nixon saying "I am not a crook" means something different than the words alone. Using a Queen riff in your song is both a tribute and a comment, depending on the context.
Nobody is saying that sampling sizable portions of a work should be allowed but if you aren't allowed to copy or use aanything it really inhibits your ability to comment, or add to the common culture. And frankly, having to ask for everything is ridiculous. I'm sure Richard Nixon wouldn't give (have given) his permission to be quoted by someone he feels would insult him but that doesn't mean society wouldn't benefit from it.
It's pretty far from stealing $100 bills and frankly I think you're an ass for even trying to suggest a similarity. Argue sensibly or don't even bother.
No, you shouldn't get any say in who uses fair-use copies of your work.
Creating derivative copies is different, it involves using much more of your work. Sampling implies tiny pieces.
Copying a riff or a sample of you saying a single word or short phrase in a public appearance or performance seems to be a valid and necessary part of other people's rights to comment on your work and opinions. Also, there's the moral right of society to use the art in the public concsiousness to create new art. We build on the work of those who came before us.
The Rolling Stones didn't create their music in a vacumm so why should Dr. Dre be forced to?
Someone who preaches equality can use samples of hateful speech in part of a work speaking out against this. Why should hate mongers be denied the same rights?
Great artists and directors... Who? We're talking about Lucas, etc.
It'll happen. Movies used to be shot in 4x3, the industry changed to widescreen largely to produce something that couldn't be properly shown on TV, as a way to keep their high-profit viewing (theatres) in business.
If we all buy widescreen TVs they'll "discover" that true art requires a square screen, or maybe vertical, and suprise, our equipment will be obsolete.
Actually, many filmmmakers have said that square aspect ratio lets them be the most creative. There are slightly less wide horizon shots, but it lets them show more of another view. They can zoom in close to show two people together, without distracting elements at the sides.
Not a compelling argument for switching, but it goes to show that films aren't magically better because they're at 2.35x1, they're better because you're watching them the way they were composed by the director. If he did 1x1 you'd be best off watching it that way.
Hello!? How about new technology? What new technology did Amazon develop?
Patents require, or used to before they started letting everything through, that the technological measures weren't obvious to the average professional in that field. Nothing about the business model is relevant here. Patents are about technology.
Amazon patented selling ice of eskimos. The only reason nobody else implemented 1-button shopping is because they didn't think anyone would want it. When they saw that it was popular a skilled web programmer could have implemented it in ten minutes. There wasn't any prior art in the ice-to-eskimos areas, but a ton of prior art in the cookies-used-to-identify-people area.
Cookies were developed specifically to allow this!
It's pretty much as if Amazon picked a page out of the W3C spec and said, hey, we've got a cool idea based on this tech, let's patent the tech described in this page so that nobody else can use our idea.
I hope the DDoS people keep hitting them. It's only fair, considering they're trying to use fake patents to destroy the livelihoods of everyone else.
Will you buy a whole CD if it's available track-by-track?
Usually, no. Therefore, this lowers the cost to the consumer. (It also breaks the RIAA's business model, serving as the last nail in their coffin, but that's another story.)
It only means this if the fans don't agree with the artist about how the music is best appreciated. It does mean the end of albums, but I think you'd still have collections of song that flow from one to the other. If you don't I think it's the public saying that they don't think it improves the experience.
I think the marketing push would almost be stronger. If you don't tie your music like this, the Britneys of the world, pop music producers, would sell whatever is playing on the radio (or whatever radio replacement we use) and not sell anything else. If you package your music so that the radio-played piece is a perfect lead into another set, you'll have people who appreciate this buying both.
Speaking of which, we need a music player that recognizes mini-playlists, so you can play certain tracks in order, within a global random. It should also hide the tracks as singles if they're in one of these playlists.