Its not property, if I have property and you take it, I no longer have it.
Its a mechanism to earn money built on other peoples previous money making mechanisms.
If copyright existed forever then it become a pyramid scheme, the first people into the copyright pyramid would extract copyright fees from everyone further down, leaving less and less for the people lower down the pyramid.
Eventually there is no incentive to create new work because of the pyramid royalties it would entail.
This is why they didn't use MP3...MP3 doesn't support DRM.
They are on a boil the frog slowly strategy, You can't boil the frog slowly if it won't get in the pan. So the pan starts cold.
In this case cold means DRM doesn't impose any limits.
They need to you buy stuff that plays DRM'd files. So they provide it in a DRM'd formats, even though the copy limit is set high and you can freely burn as many copies as you like.
Once the pan starts the heat up you'll find your WMA music has copy limits.
MP3 is the format everything plays, they should have provided it in MP3 format.
$1 a song = $10 an album (remember this in just the music, the consumer pays for the download/CDR aswell).
Better to sell the albums as a collection at $5 and pass the wholesale and retail margins onto the consumer. Or add the videos, Interviews, live version etc. and take the price back up to $9.95, but sell it as an enhancement over the straight music.
Lets face it if you're competing with Internet, Video games etc., you need to reassess the price of your product. Here they have the retail, wholesale, printing and shipping costs to play with. If they hand the bulk of those margins back to the consumer, they can undercut the incentive to pirate without affecting their own margins.
Well now that you've made it sound naughty....
on
Root Zone Changed
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I wasn't going to click the link, but you make it sound soooooo naughty...;)
"What Palladium does is kind of the reverse: it lets the remote server check that you are running 'kosher' software. A remote server could refuse to stream content to anything other than Windows Media Player, for example."
So I run a ripper hacked sound driver that captures the playback from Windows Media Player to an MP3 file. Now we have a problem, unless you prevent me running my ripper your media can be compromised.
Hence they MUST DISABLE software that would break the protection, hence MS gave themselves the right to break software as part of the DRM EULA.
The scheme cannot work unless they disable software. So at some point they must go that route.
I read Rusty's comment, but its playing with words. If the royalties have a minimum payment and a maximum payment then they favour the big guys over the little guys. It does not matter how you count the number of radio stations, all that matters is there will be many more big guys than little guys in the years to come.
Next, this was a bait and switch move. Nothing you said changes that. They put one bill forward, got public approval for it, then switched it for another. The fact you are among the ones who gained from the changes alters nothing.
What the RIAA did was split you guys in two, they pull a quick switch, and split the opposition in two. You turned your back on the little guys.
Also yet again the RIAA has shown that Congress is a little puppydog whose chain it can yank.
"They keep on doing this until they find a way to lock it down to the point were nobody can hack it. "
It costs them big money (or rather NVIDIA in this case - Microsoft is trying to stick them with the bill) to change the locks. break it often enough and MS look like idiots.
Even if they finally solve this, nobody will buy copyprotection from idiots.
"At the moment, Microsoft aren't trying to make money...Basically they're trying the gain a monopoly in the market. Once they have this control, _then_ they can begin to make money."
I don't think this is true. They cannot create a monopoly on games consoles because there is nothing stopping me owning 2 or 3 or 4 of them.
Most hardcore gamers own multiple consoles, the consoles are small enough that I can have many.
The consoles are cheap enough that I don't have an investment of $000's in them. So I can afford more than one. You don't play the same game over and over again for years, so its not like the software ties you in.
So there isn't a mechanism for anyone to hold a monopoly in consoles.
The problem with all of these pre-fab big block development environments is they only work if the blocks assemble into the thing you're trying to make.
They give you blocks:
ABCDE FGJK LMNOPQR
If you want to make ABCDEFGJKLMNOPQR then its great.
If you want to make EFH from that you end up with abcdEFgjk with H patched on and all the unwanted functionality ABCDGJK masked or partially masked off.
Why would you do that when optimal implementations of E F and H are available already?
I think.NET is largely just marketing.
This ISN'T DRM
on
"Squishy" DRM?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Its a WATERMARK. I like this.
The other DRM solutions had bits of code deciding I could do X, Y but not Z.
This one says, I can do X, Y AND Z, but if Z turns out to be illegal, I can be punished.
Fine - thats innocent until proven guilty. Exactly the principle what these new RIAA and MPAA rules forget.
Now give me all that nice digital media, in this unprotected digital format, to use how I wish and I promise not to distribute it.
If I do, it will have a watermark that can track it to my account.
Fine. There's no code managing my rights, if I do something illegal, I get to argue my case infront of a human.
"ABC Nightline segment on a 15-year-old named Benjamin who used his personal computer to go online and download the movie Men of Honor and an episode of Seinfeld, minus the ads"
Let me guess, they showed him start the download, then a smooth cut to hey presto here is the movie, cutting out the days or weeks between.
For a control, they should have had him download "men of Honor" and "Seinfeld" from a legitimate site he could buy it from.
Oh wait, despite the promise to do Video on Demand they never have. So there is NO "control" to compare this with and they have no idea if people would buy the product for a couple of $$ a download if they could get it legitimately from fast download servers.
All that shows is there is big demand, not that people wouldn't pay for downloads if they were available.
I have mine on now, its a little Nokia number with the changeable facia. Today its got its light blue facia, but maybe I'll switch to the tiger stripe facia tomorrow. Don't you just hate people who wear tiger stripes and leopard skin clothes? Its not the fur problem, even when the fur is fake it just looks sooo tacky. Speaking of which I spilled some curry on my desk and its still tacky, I'm hoping it will dry tomorrow. Maybe it will rain like today.
Even simpler than all these attack strategies. Simply produce the produce the way customers want it.
Enough people will defect to the faster, more direct, legitimate servers. Where they can get the whole album and a movie in 2 hours instead of 2 weeks. The price should be good enough to encourage this.
The P2P networks relies on enough users mirroring enough copies of enough products. Reduce the user base and the number of nodes drops until it just doesn't work anymore. You can see this on the unpopular P2P networks now.
So either you will end up with:
1. a few users sharing lots of files (which can be picked off with civil copyright laws).
2. a few users sharing few files (which means they can't find the files they want on the network, so are less likely to be running a P2P just to support other users, so the number of people spirals down).
The one thing I don't think you will end up with is many people legitimately downloading and then sharing the files. Quite simply, you would eat up your bandwidth using P2P which you need to do the downloading.
Another factor is the charging, many ISPs are moving to a download limit, e.g. TOnline is moving to 5GB limit per month, then pay 1.5 cents per MB.
So a movie would cost $7 to download after you've used up the first 5GB. Or for that matter to upload to another user! So you could pull maybe 7 movies a month on the flat fee. A lot of users on P2P systems will disappear as this becomes the norm.
So P2P is really just a temporary problem for copyright holders, just as long as they get their legitimate sales systems in place and don't go pissing off the consumers with DRM, funny licenses etc.
"The entertainment industry's greatest concern is that the proliferation of digital technology and high-speed Internet access may let consumers download a movie, for example, and send it to thousands of users before it even exits the theaters."
2002 is expected to be the biggest movie attendence figures ever I heard this morning announce on the radio by the UK cinema chains.
When you record video it is normally compressed by hardware or a DSP. They are compressed for a damn good reason.
Uncompressed, say just 1600x1200x24bit is about 6Mb per frame. At say 70 frames/sec is about 420Mb a second to store to disk.
So what exactly are you going to do with that much data? If you had 512Mb of ram you could hold 1 seconds worth. Forget a hard disk, even a 3 disk raid doesn't have that sustained IO rate.
If you object, write a nice letter complaining to your local newspapers. Can I suggest you pick on one of those Congressmen that is making all this law against consumer interests while receiving large amounts of lobby cash from IP interests.
"No he's come to the conclusion that when it comes to politics geeks are dumb. Their petitions and letters are counter productive and inflamitory"
You made that statement, his story didn't.
But you've also made the mistake of talking as though Politicians are Borg. They are not, THEY DO NOT THINK AS ONE.
There is as much embarrassed by the few industry stooges in Congress and the Senate as there is anger among Geeks at their behaviour. Attacking those stooges is not counter productive. ESPECIALLY WHEN ELECTIONS COMING UP.
Now Howard Coble is so tainted by this, that he can't even open his mouth without people automatically assuming he will say something rabid and pro-RIAA/MPAA.
I'm starting to read geeks comments in Newpaper, reflected in politicians speeches, discussed even on TV (the TV piece had Shakira in the background as illustration of the low value of music).
So No, the geeks attack isn't counter productive, its very very productive. Those few politicians are shitting themselves. So when a Washington insider journalist tells us to shut up you know you are winning.
Photons can't be subdivided. Light travels at a constants velocity The earth is flat Particles can be in more than one place at once, until you look at them.
All the same stuff, people will convince themselves of the most ludicrous things with ever more complicated theories.
This (Quantum Physics) is no different from Geology prior to Plate Tectonics, or World modelling in 'flat earth' times.
You don't need to decode DVD to copy it, only to play it.
1. To play back the DVD the player decodes it internally. If he is guilty because he wrote DeCSS, then since every player also has a decoder built in then every DVD player company is guilty too.
2. The decoding makes it easier to PLAY not to COPY. It is no more difficult or easy to copy the data encoded or unencoded.
Slashdot Mirror
"The author owns his property"
Its not property, if I have property and you take it, I no longer have it.
Its a mechanism to earn money built on other peoples previous money making mechanisms.
If copyright existed forever then it become a pyramid scheme, the first people into the copyright pyramid would extract copyright fees from everyone further down, leaving less and less for the people lower down the pyramid.
Eventually there is no incentive to create new work because of the pyramid royalties it would entail.
This is why they didn't use MP3...MP3 doesn't support DRM.
They are on a boil the frog slowly strategy, You can't boil the frog slowly if it won't get in the pan. So the pan starts cold.
In this case cold means DRM doesn't impose any limits.
They need to you buy stuff that plays DRM'd files. So they provide it in a DRM'd formats, even though the copy limit is set high and you can freely burn as many copies as you like.
Once the pan starts the heat up you'll find your WMA music has copy limits.
MP3 is the format everything plays, they should have provided it in MP3 format.
ECMA doesn't enforce the standard, it cannot force Microsoft to comply with the definition they print.
.NET engine and a compiler, and tomorrow .NET gets extended, and the Linux crowd play catch up.
Internet Explorer doesn't comply with web standards, why do you think that Microsoft would suddenly stick to standards from the ECMA?
So sure they can make a
They're very foolish to play the Microsoft game.
$1 a song = $10 an album (remember this in just the music, the consumer pays for the download/CDR aswell).
Better to sell the albums as a collection at $5 and pass the wholesale and retail margins onto the consumer.
Or add the videos, Interviews, live version etc. and take the price back up to $9.95, but sell it as an enhancement over the straight music.
Lets face it if you're competing with Internet, Video games etc., you need to reassess the price of your product. Here they have the retail, wholesale, printing and shipping costs to play with. If they hand the bulk of those margins back to the consumer, they can undercut the incentive to pirate without affecting their own margins.
I wasn't going to click the link, but you make it sound soooooo naughty... ;)
Sounds like your trying to split the opposition to these bills.
Several of the European tax systems do this.
Germany for example, if you sell within a year you pay capital gains tax, after a year its free.
"What Palladium does is kind of the reverse: it lets the remote server check that you are running 'kosher' software. A remote server could refuse to stream content to anything other than Windows Media Player, for example."
So I run a ripper hacked sound driver that captures the playback from Windows Media Player to an MP3 file.
Now we have a problem, unless you prevent me running my ripper your media can be compromised.
Hence they MUST DISABLE software that would break the protection, hence MS gave themselves the right to break software as part of the DRM EULA.
The scheme cannot work unless they disable software. So at some point they must go that route.
I read Rusty's comment, but its playing with words. If the royalties have a minimum payment and a maximum payment then they favour the big guys over the little guys.
It does not matter how you count the number of radio stations, all that matters is there will be many more big guys than little guys in the years to come.
Next, this was a bait and switch move. Nothing you said changes that. They put one bill forward, got public approval for it, then switched it for another.
The fact you are among the ones who gained from the changes alters nothing.
What the RIAA did was split you guys in two, they pull a quick switch, and split the opposition in two. You turned your back on the little guys.
Also yet again the RIAA has shown that Congress is a little puppydog whose chain it can yank.
This is a nasty sellout.
Seen a friend of mine use it. Paint over the wart and renew it whenever it wears off.
"They keep on doing this until they find a way to lock it down to the point were nobody can hack it. "
It costs them big money (or rather NVIDIA in this case - Microsoft is trying to stick them with the bill) to change the locks. break it often enough and MS look like idiots.
Even if they finally solve this, nobody will buy copyprotection from idiots.
"At the moment, Microsoft aren't trying to make money...Basically they're trying the gain a monopoly in the market. Once they have this control, _then_ they can begin to make money."
I don't think this is true. They cannot create a monopoly on games consoles because there is nothing stopping me owning 2 or 3 or 4 of them.
Most hardcore gamers own multiple consoles, the consoles are small enough that I can have many.
The consoles are cheap enough that I don't have an investment of $000's in them. So I can afford more than one.
You don't play the same game over and over again for years, so its not like the software ties you in.
So there isn't a mechanism for anyone to hold a monopoly in consoles.
The problem with all of these pre-fab big block development environments is they only work if the blocks assemble into the thing you're trying to make.
.NET is largely just marketing.
They give you blocks:
ABCDE FGJK LMNOPQR
If you want to make ABCDEFGJKLMNOPQR then its great.
If you want to make EFH from that you end up with abcdEFgjk with H patched on and all the unwanted functionality ABCDGJK masked or partially masked off.
Why would you do that when optimal implementations of E F and H are available already?
I think
Its a WATERMARK. I like this.
The other DRM solutions had bits of code deciding I could do X, Y but not Z.
This one says, I can do X, Y AND Z, but if Z turns out to be illegal, I can be punished.
Fine - thats innocent until proven guilty. Exactly the principle what these new RIAA and MPAA rules forget.
Now give me all that nice digital media, in this unprotected digital format, to use how I wish and I promise not to distribute it.
If I do, it will have a watermark that can track it to my account.
Fine. There's no code managing my rights, if I do something illegal, I get to argue my case infront of a human.
...Oh wait.
"ABC Nightline segment on a 15-year-old named Benjamin who used his personal computer to go online and download the movie Men of Honor and an episode of Seinfeld, minus the ads"
Let me guess, they showed him start the download, then a smooth cut to hey presto here is the movie, cutting out the days or weeks between.
For a control, they should have had him download "men of Honor" and "Seinfeld" from a legitimate site he could buy it from.
Oh wait, despite the promise to do Video on Demand they never have. So there is NO "control" to compare this with and they have no idea if people would buy the product for a couple of $$ a download if they could get it legitimately from fast download servers.
All that shows is there is big demand, not that people wouldn't pay for downloads if they were available.
They do, I swear, affect short term memory.
I have mine on now, its a little Nokia number with the changeable facia. Today its got its light blue facia, but maybe I'll switch to the tiger stripe facia tomorrow. Don't you just hate people who wear tiger stripes and leopard skin clothes? Its not the fur problem, even when the fur is fake it just looks sooo tacky. Speaking of which I spilled some curry on my desk and its still tacky, I'm hoping it will dry tomorrow. Maybe it will rain like today.
Oh, sorry, what were we talking about again?
Even simpler than all these attack strategies. Simply produce the produce the way customers want it.
Enough people will defect to the faster, more direct, legitimate servers. Where they can get the whole album and a movie in 2 hours instead of 2 weeks. The price should be good enough to encourage this.
The P2P networks relies on enough users mirroring enough copies of enough products. Reduce the user base and the number of nodes drops until it just doesn't work anymore.
You can see this on the unpopular P2P networks now.
So either you will end up with:
1. a few users sharing lots of files (which can be picked off with civil copyright laws).
2. a few users sharing few files (which means they can't find the files they want on the network, so are less likely to be running a P2P just to support other users, so the number of people spirals down).
The one thing I don't think you will end up with is many people legitimately downloading and then sharing the files. Quite simply, you would eat up your bandwidth using P2P which you need to do the downloading.
Another factor is the charging, many ISPs are moving to a download limit, e.g. TOnline is moving to 5GB limit per month, then pay 1.5 cents per MB.
So a movie would cost $7 to download after you've used up the first 5GB. Or for that matter to upload to another user!
So you could pull maybe 7 movies a month on the flat fee.
A lot of users on P2P systems will disappear as this becomes the norm.
So P2P is really just a temporary problem for copyright holders, just as long as they get their legitimate sales systems in place and don't go pissing off the consumers with DRM, funny licenses etc.
"The entertainment industry's greatest concern is that the proliferation of digital technology and high-speed Internet access may let consumers download a movie, for example, and send it to thousands of users before it even exits the theaters."
2002 is expected to be the biggest movie attendence figures ever I heard this morning announce on the radio by the UK cinema chains.
When you record video it is normally compressed by hardware or a DSP. They are compressed for a damn good reason.
Uncompressed, say just 1600x1200x24bit is about 6Mb per frame. At say 70 frames/sec is about 420Mb a second to store to disk.
So what exactly are you going to do with that much data? If you had 512Mb of ram you could hold 1 seconds worth.
Forget a hard disk, even a 3 disk raid doesn't have that sustained IO rate.
If you object, write a nice letter complaining to your local newspapers.
Can I suggest you pick on one of those Congressmen that is making all this law against consumer interests while receiving large amounts of lobby cash from IP interests.
Howard *, Fritz Hollins etc.
"No he's come to the conclusion that when it comes to politics geeks are dumb. Their petitions and letters are counter productive and inflamitory"
You made that statement, his story didn't.
But you've also made the mistake of talking as though Politicians are Borg. They are not, THEY DO NOT THINK AS ONE.
There is as much embarrassed by the few industry stooges in Congress and the Senate as there is anger among Geeks at their behaviour. Attacking those stooges is not counter productive.
ESPECIALLY WHEN ELECTIONS COMING UP.
Now Howard Coble is so tainted by this, that he can't even open his mouth without people automatically assuming he will say something rabid and pro-RIAA/MPAA.
I'm starting to read geeks comments in Newpaper, reflected in politicians speeches, discussed even on TV (the TV piece had Shakira in the background as illustration of the low value of music).
So No, the geeks attack isn't counter productive, its very very productive. Those few politicians are shitting themselves. So when a Washington insider journalist tells us to shut up you know you are winning.
Photons can't be subdivided.
Light travels at a constants velocity
The earth is flat
Particles can be in more than one place at once, until you look at them.
All the same stuff, people will convince themselves of the most ludicrous things with ever more complicated theories.
This (Quantum Physics) is no different from Geology prior to Plate Tectonics, or World modelling in 'flat earth' times.
Thats the problem, this stuff is licensed, the licenses dictates what the terms are.
So they could offer music for free today, get the technology in place, then charge arm+leg tomorrow once all the suckers have their DRM in place.
Why the hell should we allow them to put DRM in place at all!
My suggestions for arguments:
You don't need to decode DVD to copy it, only to play it.
1. To play back the DVD the player decodes it internally.
If he is guilty because he wrote DeCSS, then since every player also has a decoder built in then every DVD player company is guilty too.
2. The decoding makes it easier to PLAY not to COPY. It is no more difficult or easy to copy the data encoded or unencoded.