If a is true, in a sense, those looped tracks just became public property. Sure, you can't legally 'copy' them, but giving something out for free tends to seriously reduce it's value in court. And, of course, you could just download fifty copies or so and sell them. (Yes, sell them.)
I think you're on to something really interesting here. Had I the talent, I would hunt some of these tracks down, sample and mix them into something listenable, and publish it to force the issue. Hopefully someone else will.
They were, after all, voluntarily published by the copyright owners without any copyright notice or indication of ownership/licensing terms. The lack of copyright notice could not be blamed on naïveté, because music publishers are well aware of the rules.
It will be interesting to see what technological counter-measures the community as a whole would be able to come up with.
(As a preface, I'll just say that in my view the RIAA has squandered the last of its moral capital and as of earlier this year, I've reversed my position and now enthusiastically support widespread piracy of music under their control. If there were decent P2P tools for my preferred platform, I'd probably do it myself.)
I think that the solution to this sort of thing is going to come in the form of trust networks using reputation/cred as currency. People will vouch for other people, and the higher the ratings of those who have vouched for them, the more seriously their uploaded files - as well as requests for downloads - will be taken.
This kills the fake files pretty much immediately, since the fake stuff they're uploading is mainstream N'sync crud, and there are plenty of alternate sources for that. If they were uploading fake versions of obscure hard-to-find stuff, that'd be another thing.
The period of illegal mp3s starting around 1997 and the illegals movies online is why in 10 years we're all going to have to use simultaneous DNA, retina, and fingerprint scans to get our computers to boot. Thanks. I hate you all.
Neighborhood kids keep walking across Old Man Wilson's yard, ignoring "Keep off my damn lawn" sign.
Old Man Wilson gets tired of it, freaks out, and firebombs the neighborhood, killing 42.
Yes, we drive on the left, just like Australia, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonisia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa and all these countries [ferrari-forsale.com].
So, that would be five of the top ten most densely populated countries on earth that must also be "silly".
Ah, whatever a lot of people do must be correct.
Should we also take our sanitation policy from Bangladesh, our religion/governance policy from Pakistan, our race relations from South Africa, and our classy accents from Australia?
I may be wrong, but AFAIK, the only Engish speaking countries that compels people to drive on the right are Canada & the US. Maybe it is us North Americans who are the uncivilised ones?
Offhand: Gibraltar, Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia, Gambia, Belize, and all those former US colonies (Palau, Micronesia, etc.) are English-speaking countries (okay, not Gibraltar, but it's a UK territory which is all the more poignant) that drive on the correct side of the road. I'm sure there are others I haven't been to.
Use PPPoE if you are not tring to setup anonymous network access.
That seems like a pretty user-hostile approach. Most of the people (those not running OSX or XP) would have to install big bad software just to talk to the network. Who wants to do that, and who wants to put people through it, when there are so many other better solutions available?
I really don't see why 'the netizen would be upset'. A lot of the resident in big city, espeically like Beijing, have interenet access at home, even broad ban if you are lucky enough to stay in a modern building. The so-called internet cafe are really for teenagers to enjoy networked gameing (LAN), and sometimes to view pornographic content on the web, which is illegal anyway. It is ridiculous to judge that this is a way the goverment use to stop the 'netizen' to access the internet.
Another thing that people use internet cafes for is to disagree with the government, or to read information that disagrees with the government's official position, without the act being tracked to them.
Once that's no longer an issue, I'll accept that home internet access is as useful to society as netcafes.
Until then, you're just an apologist for those who are so pathetically insecure about the righteousness of their weak moral and intellectual positions that they have to use force to keep people from seeing alternative viewpoints.
I'm sure that you are wrong, if you live in the US. Anyplace that I've lived since I was old enough to notice required that all businesses be licensed. Probably so that they could be taxed.
I think you're addressing two different issues. In the US you do not need an "internet cafe license". You can file the paperwork to open a pet food store and fill it with computer terminals and not stock any pet food and you will be perfectly legal, so long as you pay your taxes properly and follow rules about occupancy levels (appropriate number of fire escapes, etc.) and food safety.
In China you need to explicitly declare that you are opening a net cafe. You face extra reporting requirements and will in many cases be under increased scrutiny from the authorities.
So the keys are hidden. What if he DOES get hit by a bus in the next week? THEN what happens???? This is NOT a good situation.
Then ICANN keeps things going by designating a successor or appointing a caretaker. What's so confusing about that? I don't trust ICANN very far, but I trust them a whole lot more than I trust the South African government, given their track record on communications technology to date. They've done whatever they could to derail the internet in the country; from all appearances this seems to be them just upping the pace.
That the South African government "does a good job" with its domain in the eyes of us geeks is NOT a prerequisite for sovereignty.
The ".za" domain name is neither a person nor is it land. Therefore I don't see what sovereignty has to do with anything. If I write a book called "South Africa", does the South African government get to decide who around the world can read it?
Top-level domains are not national property; they are a logical construct brought into and maintained in existence by whoever runs the root servers, for the convenience of internet users. Those who run the root servers have pledged no allegiance or subordination to the South African government.
Satellites are great for one-way transmissions (TV, GPS, etc.) but, yes, they royally suck for anything with real-time two-way requirements (phone calls, TCP, etc.). Ever make an international call across a satellite link? These days, you'd have to call somewhere in Africa, a remote part of Asia, or an isolated island, but if you ever get one of these links, you'll know it - there's such a delay that the conversation gets all messed up with people talking through each other.
The only solution would be to fill the skies with enough satellites so that the signal didn't have to travel thousands of miles to reach one.
You raise money for that; I'll be here wiring at ground level.
The Post Office is HEAVILY subsidized by tax dollars, even though they say they are self sufficient.
Let's have a cite for that. Otherwise I say you're blowing smoke. The only thing that could even vaguely be termed a subsidy would be existing depreciated assets that were not funded from revenues at the time of purchase. That's not an ongoing subsidy and the only "cost" is the opportunity cost of not retroactively remunerating the treasury.
There is a law that says that NO ONE can compete with the Post Office offering 1st class mail. There used to be a law that said no one can offer next day service, and when that law was overturned, look at how many companies popped up, and are employing people off the government dole.
There's a specific reason for that. The USPS is able to provide flat-rate service nationwide because money-losing rural routes are subsidized by highly efficient metropolitan deliveries (i.e., all the mail within New York City that costs the same to send as a letter from the Aleutians to the Bayou).
This situation is maintained as a policy choice; the government has (wisely) decided that a baseline communications infrastructure is essential to running a country.
Open it up to the market, and companies will move in to the profitable areas, ignoring the rest. FedEx can't make money delivering 35-cent letters once a week to Zeke in his mountain cabin. Nobody can. But if we want to keep Zeke within the fabric of our society, we have to accommodate his choice to live there.
I made just over 75K(took home less than half that after taxes, 401K, ESPP, etc) last year in my Technical Analyst Position, between my house mortgage, car payments, food, heat, and just the basics of living(I spend vitually no m oney on myself that doesn't absolutley need to be spent otther than my cable Modem, and the ocassional DVD). If I became unemployeed now I would last probably about 2 months at most without a paycheck, and that would be on the proceeds of selling my now worthless stock short.
How does that work? I earn less than you, live in a desirable neighborhood in one of the most expensive and highest income-tax cities in the USA, eat out four nights a week, and take several 2, 3, or 4-week international vacations (Europe, Asia, Africa, etc.) a year. From a zero bank balance a few years ago, at this point if I lost my job I'd be able to coast for two years without having to move.
There are only 3 servers handling.us whereas there are 13 for.com, etc.
Yeah, but there are about 10 people a month looking up.us domains, vs 10,000,000 a day looking up.com domains.
All 3 servers are in the same netblock, and this suggests maybe even the same physical location.
Suggests, to the naïve, but certainly does not require. Traceroute to 4.2.49.1 and then to 4.2.49.2. Same subnet (unless you use mask 255.255.255.255), and yet they're 3000 miles apart.
But, if you want something similarly cool, check out Vonage [vonage.com]. $39 a month for unlimited long distance, you choose your area code, and it routes all of your calls over your broadband connection. Someone I work with has had it for a month, and it works flawlessly.
My neighbor has Vonage, and it's okay. It's on a 384K Speakeasy DSL line with a Netopia R7200.
The main problem is that any other network traffic just kills the phone call - people on both sides suddenly sound like robots and there's lots of dropouts. Just calling up a smallish web page (yahoo.com) is enough to do it for several seconds. So it's sort of a one-or-the-other proposition: Use the computer OR use the phone. Maybe that works in a one-person household, but not otherwise.
I assume that with a higher-bandwidth connection this would be less of a problem, but having more than 384K upstream is not that common in consumer-world.
I don't think the problem is with Speakeasy, as they get rock-solid 20ms pings to Vonage.
For example, right now, in less than 10mins, you can go to www.denwa.com, give them your credit card info, and get a SIP dialtone.
In right about 10 minutes, you can go to www.denwa.com and become more frustrated than you've been in a long time.
The site is horrible. It takes forever to figure out how to get anything out of them, and I never did manage to find out the rates for their service. I am surprised myself at how thoroughly the site pissed me off with its inscrutability - and I make a living at dealing with bad info design, so I'd expect to be inured to it. If they expect to deal with average consumers, and that's the best they can do, they're screwed from the start, no matter how fabulous the technology may or may not be.
Only it's not. Piracy prevention, that is. All it takes is one person on a file sharing network to get past the protection, and the cat's out of the bag; the other thousands of listeners don't have to know how to get past it to just get it off of Kazaa or whatever.
Yup.
Moreover, it seems like this copy protection would result in lower sales than normal CDs.
Ordinarily, after finding some music that I liked on a P2P service (which, in the absence of decent radio, is pretty much the only way to find out about interesting music these days), I'd just go buy the CD so I can listen to it in high quality and have the liner notes, etc.
However, if I find out that the CD won't play in my preferred playback device (i.e., the computer - my stereo's CD player skips like crazy), then I'm much more likely to just download the whole thing and listen to it that way.
I wonder if this means they'll start going after people who are posting lists of copy-protected CDs on the web.
Security isn't what I'd be worrying about for this sort of application -- you have to assume that packets going out over Cable modems and DSL links are going to be sniffed by everyone and their little brother anyway.
I think you slightly under estimate the difficulty of building a system that can withstand real world demands. It's just like saying that because you can setup a POP3 server on a Linux box in 20 minutes you could implement and deploy Hotmail in the same length of time.
Unlike Hotmail, where authentication and storage servers require complex interactions, the RealNames task scales linearly with the hardware you throw at it. Periodically replicating a near-static (i.e., daily updates) database across the machines is trivial and remains so no matter what the aggregate query volume.
Slashdot Mirror
OSX.
I think you're on to something really interesting here. Had I the talent, I would hunt some of these tracks down, sample and mix them into something listenable, and publish it to force the issue. Hopefully someone else will.
They were, after all, voluntarily published by the copyright owners without any copyright notice or indication of ownership/licensing terms. The lack of copyright notice could not be blamed on naïveté, because music publishers are well aware of the rules.
(As a preface, I'll just say that in my view the RIAA has squandered the last of its moral capital and as of earlier this year, I've reversed my position and now enthusiastically support widespread piracy of music under their control. If there were decent P2P tools for my preferred platform, I'd probably do it myself.)
I think that the solution to this sort of thing is going to come in the form of trust networks using reputation/cred as currency. People will vouch for other people, and the higher the ratings of those who have vouched for them, the more seriously their uploaded files - as well as requests for downloads - will be taken.
This kills the fake files pretty much immediately, since the fake stuff they're uploading is mainstream N'sync crud, and there are plenty of alternate sources for that. If they were uploading fake versions of obscure hard-to-find stuff, that'd be another thing.
Neighborhood kids keep walking across Old Man Wilson's yard, ignoring "Keep off my damn lawn" sign.
Old Man Wilson gets tired of it, freaks out, and firebombs the neighborhood, killing 42.
You blame the deaths on neighborhood kids.
Ah, whatever a lot of people do must be correct.
Should we also take our sanitation policy from Bangladesh, our religion/governance policy from Pakistan, our race relations from South Africa, and our classy accents from Australia?
Offhand: Gibraltar, Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia, Gambia, Belize, and all those former US colonies (Palau, Micronesia, etc.) are English-speaking countries (okay, not Gibraltar, but it's a UK territory which is all the more poignant) that drive on the correct side of the road. I'm sure there are others I haven't been to.
That seems like a pretty user-hostile approach. Most of the people (those not running OSX or XP) would have to install big bad software just to talk to the network. Who wants to do that, and who wants to put people through it, when there are so many other better solutions available?
Another thing that people use internet cafes for is to disagree with the government, or to read information that disagrees with the government's official position, without the act being tracked to them.
Once that's no longer an issue, I'll accept that home internet access is as useful to society as netcafes.
Until then, you're just an apologist for those who are so pathetically insecure about the righteousness of their weak moral and intellectual positions that they have to use force to keep people from seeing alternative viewpoints.
I think you're addressing two different issues. In the US you do not need an "internet cafe license". You can file the paperwork to open a pet food store and fill it with computer terminals and not stock any pet food and you will be perfectly legal, so long as you pay your taxes properly and follow rules about occupancy levels (appropriate number of fire escapes, etc.) and food safety.
In China you need to explicitly declare that you are opening a net cafe. You face extra reporting requirements and will in many cases be under increased scrutiny from the authorities.
Then ICANN keeps things going by designating a successor or appointing a caretaker. What's so confusing about that? I don't trust ICANN very far, but I trust them a whole lot more than I trust the South African government, given their track record on communications technology to date. They've done whatever they could to derail the internet in the country; from all appearances this seems to be them just upping the pace.
The ".za" domain name is neither a person nor is it land. Therefore I don't see what sovereignty has to do with anything. If I write a book called "South Africa", does the South African government get to decide who around the world can read it?
Top-level domains are not national property; they are a logical construct brought into and maintained in existence by whoever runs the root servers, for the convenience of internet users. Those who run the root servers have pledged no allegiance or subordination to the South African government.
Did they have three-way for $105?
Satellites are great for one-way transmissions (TV, GPS, etc.) but, yes, they royally suck for anything with real-time two-way requirements (phone calls, TCP, etc.). Ever make an international call across a satellite link? These days, you'd have to call somewhere in Africa, a remote part of Asia, or an isolated island, but if you ever get one of these links, you'll know it - there's such a delay that the conversation gets all messed up with people talking through each other.
The only solution would be to fill the skies with enough satellites so that the signal didn't have to travel thousands of miles to reach one.
You raise money for that; I'll be here wiring at ground level.
I thought his point was that a French engineer was more predisposed to complain than a normal (i.e., nonfrench) person.
Apparently the schools aren't as efficient as the Post Office. Pay attention much in math class? Ever hear of something called inflation?
The price of a stamp has remained pretty much exactly constant over the past 30 years.
In 1971, a first class stamp cost $0.08. Plug that into the Inflation Calculator and see what you get.
Let's have a cite for that. Otherwise I say you're blowing smoke. The only thing that could even vaguely be termed a subsidy would be existing depreciated assets that were not funded from revenues at the time of purchase. That's not an ongoing subsidy and the only "cost" is the opportunity cost of not retroactively remunerating the treasury.
There's a specific reason for that. The USPS is able to provide flat-rate service nationwide because money-losing rural routes are subsidized by highly efficient metropolitan deliveries (i.e., all the mail within New York City that costs the same to send as a letter from the Aleutians to the Bayou).
This situation is maintained as a policy choice; the government has (wisely) decided that a baseline communications infrastructure is essential to running a country.
Open it up to the market, and companies will move in to the profitable areas, ignoring the rest. FedEx can't make money delivering 35-cent letters once a week to Zeke in his mountain cabin. Nobody can. But if we want to keep Zeke within the fabric of our society, we have to accommodate his choice to live there.
Tinpot anarchists amuse me.
How does that work? I earn less than you, live in a desirable neighborhood in one of the most expensive and highest income-tax cities in the USA, eat out four nights a week, and take several 2, 3, or 4-week international vacations (Europe, Asia, Africa, etc.) a year. From a zero bank balance a few years ago, at this point if I lost my job I'd be able to coast for two years without having to move.
Must be a lot of DVDs...
Yeah, but there are about 10 people a month looking up .us domains, vs 10,000,000 a day looking up .com domains.
Suggests, to the naïve, but certainly does not require. Traceroute to 4.2.49.1 and then to 4.2.49.2. Same subnet (unless you use mask 255.255.255.255), and yet they're 3000 miles apart.
My neighbor has Vonage, and it's okay. It's on a 384K Speakeasy DSL line with a Netopia R7200.
The main problem is that any other network traffic just kills the phone call - people on both sides suddenly sound like robots and there's lots of dropouts. Just calling up a smallish web page (yahoo.com) is enough to do it for several seconds. So it's sort of a one-or-the-other proposition: Use the computer OR use the phone. Maybe that works in a one-person household, but not otherwise.
I assume that with a higher-bandwidth connection this would be less of a problem, but having more than 384K upstream is not that common in consumer-world.
I don't think the problem is with Speakeasy, as they get rock-solid 20ms pings to Vonage.
In right about 10 minutes, you can go to www.denwa.com and become more frustrated than you've been in a long time.
The site is horrible. It takes forever to figure out how to get anything out of them, and I never did manage to find out the rates for their service. I am surprised myself at how thoroughly the site pissed me off with its inscrutability - and I make a living at dealing with bad info design, so I'd expect to be inured to it. If they expect to deal with average consumers, and that's the best they can do, they're screwed from the start, no matter how fabulous the technology may or may not be.
Yup.
Moreover, it seems like this copy protection would result in lower sales than normal CDs.
Ordinarily, after finding some music that I liked on a P2P service (which, in the absence of decent radio, is pretty much the only way to find out about interesting music these days), I'd just go buy the CD so I can listen to it in high quality and have the liner notes, etc.
However, if I find out that the CD won't play in my preferred playback device (i.e., the computer - my stereo's CD player skips like crazy), then I'm much more likely to just download the whole thing and listen to it that way.
I wonder if this means they'll start going after people who are posting lists of copy-protected CDs on the web.
How's sniffing DSL any easier than sniffing a T1?
Unlike Hotmail, where authentication and storage servers require complex interactions, the RealNames task scales linearly with the hardware you throw at it. Periodically replicating a near-static (i.e., daily updates) database across the machines is trivial and remains so no matter what the aggregate query volume.
Um, you mean like SRV records?