You seriously think the USA has no allies in the EU?
They don't have that many friends either! Apart from the UK and even thats restricted to Mr Blair. The population / Media here in the UK are very critical of Tony Blair and Gerorgy Bush's close "Relationship". Often it's the butt of jokes. America would find it very hard to embargo (blockade) Sweden because it's illegal to prevent free trade between EU member nations. Sweden will just import goods via another EU country. America would have to cut trade with the whole of the EU. I don't see that winning many friends.
Nonsense. He was no longer invading other countries and his military capability was utterly decimated.
Yes and now Iraq is in turmoil to the point of near civil war. Al-Qaeda now has a new base of operation (Saddam as brutal as he was, was no friend of Osama). The Muslim world is enraged at the West making the world a far more dangerous place and the US has left itself impotent in the face of Iran's Weapons program.
Either you are totally ignorant; or you are one of those Americans with a persecution complex; or you are trolling.
Either you are ignorant of world affairs. A Republican with a Nationalist complex or I've just fed a troll. Either way your statements are so far from reality they can't even see it.
Sadly I have to agree that you are correct. Governments everywhere, not just China now uphold the privilege of the IP Monopoly that is Copyright and Patents over Human Rights like freedom of expression. Copyrights and Patents are now being abused to stifle the culture they were meant to protect.
The more the IP fascists buy new law's to persecute those who they deem to be infringing the more people will begin to resent the persecution. When enough peoples Children have been imprisoned or executed civil unrest will follow. Government will soon strip away these IP laws when enough people get angry enough. Remember governments only listen to those who can keep them in power.
Ironic that the biggest IP fascists are the entertainment industry. It is said that entertainment is the opiate of the masses. Lets see what happens when DRM and these IP laws prevent the masses from getting their fix.
StepMania seems to be a very popular game. There's an active modding community and a multiplayer add-on. Haven't played it myself but looking at some of the clips on youtube.com it looks very polished.
It seems your anti Apple stance has got you modded down. You do however have a vaild point.
Unfortunately, I can't play the music that I legally bought. I have to download music from BitTorrent, harming the artists and the record companies. If I had a choice, I'd pay for music, but I don't have that option anymore. CDs aren't an option, since I only want one song.
You say that while you wish to pay the artist and the record companies you cannot, you are being forced to piracy because of the anti consumer measures built into the product you legally purchased.
This is how Digital Restrictions Management is fuelling piracy and reducing the income of the artists.
Personally I couldn't give a stuff about the record companies. They've had their day, it's over.
Their function was the recording and distribution of other peoples music. In the analogue physical world this is expensive but In the digital world anyone can record and distribute music, be it their own or anyone else's. Now the record companies only function are to take money from both the artist and consumer. DRM is their way of artificially imposing the restrictions of the physical world on digital media ensuring their continuation buy enabling them to buy at below market value from the artists and sell at an inflated price to you the consumer. The RIAA represents the rights of the artist like a Pimp represents the rights of prostitutes.
There are a lot of fair trade 'DRM-free' legal music sites appearing now and I hope they will prove the downfall of the majors or at least make them sit up and take notice that DRM is a foolish policy. Fair Trade Music can only work if people are willing to buy it and this where piracy hurts truly free music.
On the other side I can see that people really like a particular artist or track but they are affiliated to the music fascists. In this case you must make the choice between giving money to a corrupt cartel or piracy. IMO the major labels are stifling music. I would rather see more artists producing music at a lower salary rather than a limited number of 'lucky' ones who are getting all of the money. If you don't think it's fair then you don't love music so get out! Given this I feel that obtaining music through piracy is the lesser evil but that those who choose this path must remember that it is only a lesser evil and not the true solution that open fair trade music is.
I don't know about you but i just don't have that kind of money lying around.
Remember that these laws are bought. Their not here because "we the people" wanted them.
The government passed these laws regardless of what people think. The only response to oppressive laws is civil disobedience and if you get caught you will be Persecuted.
Yes I too am alarmed at the increasing violations of civil liberties not just in the US but in the UK too. It seems certain the Bush / Blair regime are knowingly conspiring to undermine democracy and freedom. The apathy of the general public is also very frightening. People too easily forget the sacrifices and the lives lost in-order to give us the freedoms that we have. I feel that that it is the duty of the citizen to protect these hard won freedoms by resisting any fascistic government tendency's, peacefully whenever possible or violently when necessary. This is why there is a second amendment, in-order for you to protect the first.
This is an example of the government passing bad laws which have no real effect on terrorism, it's just posturing. It'll be impossible to prove that a person really knows the encryption key or if the key that was coerced from them is the real key.
These days encryption software like truecrypt have multiple levels of "plausible deniability" so even if a key was coerced out of someone you don't know if the data that is decrypted is the real deal or just another decoy.
These so called government security advisers really don't know anything about security. The UK Government can't even remember to deport foreign criminals after they server their sentence. The country will be a lot safer if the Government fixed their own incompetence rather than pass TROLL laws which deprive the real law abiding citizens of their liberties whilst allowing the terrorists to carry on business as usual.
£120 is probably a lot for the people who have a television and don't use any BBC services. I'm not one of them, but consider that perhaps it is unfair to charge £120 a year to someone who just wants to watch the Movies on Sky. I'm not one of these people (I only use Freeview), but the blanket £120 sum is unfair.
At £34 per month (£408 year) for Sky Moves the £120 per year doesn't seem too bad + you don't get any advertising on the BBC channels. The TV tax only has to be paid if you are able to receive the BBC channels. As Sky and Cable carry the BBC channels then the license fee has to be paid. If you had a TV which isn't connected to any form of tuner then you don't have to pay the fee. So if you just want to watch DVD's and use your TV to play console games then you don't need to pay. A premium subscription to an online DVD rental club will also be a lot cheaper than the $KY subscription anyway.
Also consider, people sharing a residence (read:students) have to pay the tv licence per head. Four people in one residence means £480 a year; and everyone in the residence has to pay it (saying 2 of the four don't watch tv doesn't save you paying for all four).
Just have a TV in the communal area then you can all share the cost of license. It only applies for TV's intended for your sole use e.g your private room.
I expect a lot of students these days leech TV episodes off Bittorent and watch them on their computer screens so they don't have to pay the license fee. I know that's what I'd do!
All this because the country is filled with baby boomers, many of whom were given state grants for their entire further education, and who don't give a damn about young people; they just want tax cuts on medium incomes, and this just means that poorer people pick up the bill.
The baby boomers are spoilt, but in reality it's the middle income hard working people who are picking up the bill for supporting the idle. Single mothers / Asylum seekers who have never done an honest day work in their lives living in a council house rent free and driving BMW / Audi's courtesy of Mr and Mrs tax payer.
But what is it that the consumer really wants? By your argument what the consumer really wants is the DVD for free, months before the legitimate release, with the ability to pass it on for free to as many of their friends they like.
No that isn't my argument at all, that's your belief which is totally separate. What the consumer wants is a value for money product and a good quality of service. Neither of which is being offered by this farcical scheme.
People want to watch movies on their TV, portable player, have the ability to make backup copies of their media and have the convenient delivery service of near instant electronic downloads without being charged both arms and both legs. Not too much too ask for is it? Unfortunately the movie studios think it is.
Are you seriously saying that any industry should be expected to compete competitively in a market against their own product being given away for nothing?.
That's just the kind of thinking which will doom the entertainment industry.
Google, Red Hat, MySQL and a host of Open Source Software houses seem to be doing ok. You weren't brought up in Redmond by any chance? Of course those companies sell services to their customers not serve lawsuits to their consumers.
By "potential customers," do you mean "slashdot users?" Because the normal general public doesn't know or care about this stuff.
Yes the people who are going to be interested in downloading movies are going to be more confortable with technology and arn't going to be fooled by this DRM nonsense. The normal general public are still going to buy DVD's.
Maybe a few Joe Six Packs / Suzi SUV's will try to download, then get upset when they can't play it on their new High Def 50" LCD. This will be good as it will raise hostility towards DRM and the MPAA in general.
Exactly!. How do they expect a DRM encumbered download which costs as much as the DVD to succeed against a superior quality free download which you can play in your standard DVD player and came out months earlier.
This is a token gesture which offers nothing of value and is designed to fail. Hollywood just wants to crow about being able to offer legal alternatives, their not at all interested in giving the consumer what they really want.
EFF or some other organisation that is trying to fight for the rights of US citizens need to get a good amount of airtime and marketing
I agree but the problem is the people who own the airtime are the big media cartels. The very people the EFF oppose. There is no way Big Media Tm is going to give airtime to the EFF.
I've actually watched a BBC News Night interview where the EFF was talking about the ElcomSoft / Sklyarov DMCA fiasco. The interview was cut short after someone killed the satalite feed to the EFF.
Unlike in the states where you subscribe to broadband directly through your Incumbent telco or Cable co. The majority of people in the UK buy their broadband connection through a retail ISP who in turn buy their bandwidth through the wholesale provider namely British Telecom. This has the advantage of much greater competition so people can switch from one provider to another.
If you don't like the service that you are getting from your ISP or Cable Company you can always switch to another ISP who offers a better service though maybe at a higher price.
Given that DSL subscribers in the UK have recently been given the choice to upgrade to an 8Mbit service at no extra cost, an all you can eat service model is not going to be sustainable as the few bandwidth hogs will saturate their connections and leech all the bandwidth. There has to be some sort of fair use policy and this differs between the ISP's
PlusNet has taken to use traffic shaping to effectively block all p2p traffic once a user had gone over a rather small usage limit. This has resulted in a large migration of users away from PlusNet and onto my ISP Nildram. Nildram do not traffic shape and they give a generous 50gig per month download limit which only applied during peak times. After 12am to 8am it's all you can eat. They also role your previous months unused allowance over to the next month.
It remains to be seen if my ISP can cope with the extra demand but the point is this is a good example of the free market and capitalism. If a provider gives bad service or poor value for money their customers will simply migrate to another provider.
It's unfortunate the people in the U.S don't have such a free market for broadband.
You have to ask who really profits from these lawsuits. It's not the RIAA and it's certainly not the artists. It's always the lawyers. When the RIAA want something they always go to their lawyers first. They don't know any other way.
This is why the lawsuits keep continuing and we get stuck with things like DRM. Despite independent opinion polls indicating that these tactics only alienate their customers and ultimately encourage piracy.
They have stated that they are using a "Carrot and Stick" approach. This sums up the mindset of the RIAA perfectly. No other industry gets away with treating their customers like donkeys. With fat cat execs riding on their backs beating them with lawsuits when they don't do as their told. Of course there is the Carrot of legal downloads but it's attached to the stick by a piece a string called DRM which means the Carrot is always out of reach of the customer.
In reality the lawyers only serve their own interests not the RIAA or the artists.
If the RIAA / MPAA allowed DRM free downloads at a price which reflects the value of the content then piracy will decline. It'll never disappear but it'll be a lot lower than it is today. Until they realize this and start treating the buying public as individual valued "Customers" instead of "Consumer" donkeys piracy will continue to grow. But this isn't in the Lawyers interest is it!
How the hell is OSX a good example. The 'hacking community' patched OSX to run on generic PC's as a challenge. Not so they could get OSX for free. Everyone knows OSX is designed to run on Apple hardware not off the shelf PC parts.
If you run a w4r3z3d OSX on a PC don't blame Apple when it goes Pete Tong.
DRM will be in force to prevent copying the movies to DVD.
Joe six pack will soon discover the evils of DRM when they can't burn the film they legally paid for onto DVD to watch on their new HD TV or their HDD / Computer fails and they have to buy all their movies again. Unlike the pirates who can happily burn / backup their W4r3z.
A lot of people, especially the tech savvy ones will still choose to get the pirate downloads. Remove the DRM and let people burn their own DVD's.
Let me spell it out for the MPAA! Will you pay for a product which is inferior to one you can get for free?
They are storing the creative work that resulted from several man years of effort and the tremendous financial risk the producers took to produce a film.
Wow my public library's been doing that! Row upon row of Books, DVD's and Music. I really should call the RIAA / MPAA / Team America World Police. Distributing the creative works of man to a wider society it's like Murdering and Raping..... Those poor record exec's all alone and unloved in their Ivory Towers. Booo hoooo hooooo whhaaaa..
Though seriously how exactly is the P.B storing all this? They need donations for servers and bandwidth. Distributing a DVD, CD to 3000 people every second?! Ultimately it's the users that are the ones "infringing". If they want infringe and advertise it on a public web site shouldn't they be the ones to answer for it?
Personally I believe the copyright balance has tilted too far in favor of the multinationals. Copyright was only ever meant to be a temporary monopoly to allow creators to recover the cost of development. Now copyrights are effectively permanent. This is counter to why we have copyrights in the first place, to encourage innovation and creativity.
This is why people download eps off Bittorent / Usenet. Of course by inducing people to download and by uploading copyrighted material (in this case plotlines) the parent is guilty of both direct and contributory infringment.
As we speak the MPAA are deploying a crack team of ninja lawers armed with DMCA take down notices.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't have that many friends either! Apart from the UK and even thats restricted to Mr Blair. The population / Media here in the UK are very critical of Tony Blair and Gerorgy Bush's close "Relationship". Often it's the butt of jokes.
America would find it very hard to embargo (blockade) Sweden because it's illegal to prevent free trade between EU member nations. Sweden will just import goods via another EU country. America would have to cut trade with the whole of the EU. I don't see that winning many friends.
Yes and now Iraq is in turmoil to the point of near civil war. Al-Qaeda now has a new base of operation (Saddam as brutal as he was, was no friend of Osama). The Muslim world is enraged at the West making the world a far more dangerous place and the US has left itself impotent in the face of Iran's Weapons program.
Either you are ignorant of world affairs. A Republican with a Nationalist complex or I've just fed a troll. Either way your statements are so far from reality they can't even see it.
Sadly I have to agree that you are correct. Governments everywhere, not just China now uphold the privilege of the IP Monopoly that is Copyright and Patents over Human Rights like freedom of expression. Copyrights and Patents are now being abused to stifle the culture they were meant to protect.
The more the IP fascists buy new law's to persecute those who they deem to be infringing the more people will begin to resent the persecution. When enough peoples Children have been imprisoned or executed civil unrest will follow. Government will soon strip away these IP laws when enough people get angry enough. Remember governments only listen to those who can keep them in power.
Ironic that the biggest IP fascists are the entertainment industry. It is said that entertainment is the opiate of the masses. Lets see what happens when DRM and these IP laws prevent the masses from getting their fix.
StepMania seems to be a very popular game. There's an active modding community and a multiplayer add-on. Haven't played it myself but looking at some of the clips on youtube.com it looks very polished.
Must be great fun at a party.
You say that while you wish to pay the artist and the record companies you cannot, you are being forced to piracy because of the anti consumer measures built into the product you legally purchased.
This is how Digital Restrictions Management is fuelling piracy and reducing the income of the artists.
Personally I couldn't give a stuff about the record companies. They've had their day, it's over.
Their function was the recording and distribution of other peoples music. In the analogue physical world this is expensive but In the digital world anyone can record and distribute music, be it their own or anyone else's. Now the record companies only function are to take money from both the artist and consumer. DRM is their way of artificially imposing the restrictions of the physical world on digital media ensuring their continuation buy enabling them to buy at below market value from the artists and sell at an inflated price to you the consumer. The RIAA represents the rights of the artist like a Pimp represents the rights of prostitutes.
There are a lot of fair trade 'DRM-free' legal music sites appearing now and I hope they will prove the downfall of the majors or at least make them sit up and take notice that DRM is a foolish policy. Fair Trade Music can only work if people are willing to buy it and this where piracy hurts truly free music.
On the other side I can see that people really like a particular artist or track but they are affiliated to the music fascists. In this case you must make the choice between giving money to a corrupt cartel or piracy. IMO the major labels are stifling music. I would rather see more artists producing music at a lower salary rather than a limited number of 'lucky' ones who are getting all of the money. If you don't think it's fair then you don't love music so get out! Given this I feel that obtaining music through piracy is the lesser evil but that those who choose this path must remember that it is only a lesser evil and not the true solution that open fair trade music is.
I don't know about you but i just don't have that kind of money lying around.
Remember that these laws are bought. Their not here because "we the people" wanted them.
The government passed these laws regardless of what people think. The only response to oppressive laws is civil disobedience and if you get caught you will be Persecuted.
Yes I too am alarmed at the increasing violations of civil liberties not just in the US but in the UK too. It seems certain the Bush / Blair regime are knowingly conspiring to undermine democracy and freedom. The apathy of the general public is also very frightening. People too easily forget the sacrifices and the lives lost in-order to give us the freedoms that we have. I feel that that it is the duty of the citizen to protect these hard won freedoms by resisting any fascistic government tendency's, peacefully whenever possible or violently when necessary. This is why there is a second amendment, in-order for you to protect the first.
This is an example of the government passing bad laws which have no real effect on terrorism, it's just posturing. It'll be impossible to prove that a person really knows the encryption key or if the key that was coerced from them is the real key.
These days encryption software like truecrypt have multiple levels of "plausible deniability" so even if a key was coerced out of someone you don't know if the data that is decrypted is the real deal or just another decoy.
These so called government security advisers really don't know anything about security. The UK Government can't even remember to deport foreign criminals after they server their sentence. The country will be a lot safer if the Government fixed their own incompetence rather than pass TROLL laws which deprive the real law abiding citizens of their liberties whilst allowing the terrorists to carry on business as usual.
Apparently they've been offline since last friday.
AllofMp3 Shutdown.
The IFPI has denied responsibility.
Seriously though. I wonder whats up with them?
At £34 per month (£408 year) for Sky Moves the £120 per year doesn't seem too bad + you don't get any advertising on the BBC channels. The TV tax only has to be paid if you are able to receive the BBC channels. As Sky and Cable carry the BBC channels then the license fee has to be paid. If you had a TV which isn't connected to any form of tuner then you don't have to pay the fee. So if you just want to watch DVD's and use your TV to play console games then you don't need to pay. A premium subscription to an online DVD rental club will also be a lot cheaper than the $KY subscription anyway.
Just have a TV in the communal area then you can all share the cost of license. It only applies for TV's intended for your sole use e.g your private room.
I expect a lot of students these days leech TV episodes off Bittorent and watch them on their computer screens so they don't have to pay the license fee. I know that's what I'd do!
The baby boomers are spoilt, but in reality it's the middle income hard working people who are picking up the bill for supporting the idle. Single mothers / Asylum seekers who have never done an honest day work in their lives living in a council house rent free and driving BMW / Audi's courtesy of Mr and Mrs tax payer.
No that isn't my argument at all, that's your belief which is totally separate. What the consumer wants is a value for money product and a good quality of service. Neither of which is being offered by this farcical scheme.
People want to watch movies on their TV, portable player, have the ability to make backup copies of their media and have the convenient delivery service of near instant electronic downloads without being charged both arms and both legs. Not too much too ask for is it? Unfortunately the movie studios think it is.
That's just the kind of thinking which will doom the entertainment industry.
Google, Red Hat, MySQL and a host of Open Source Software houses seem to be doing ok. You weren't brought up in Redmond by any chance? Of course those companies sell services to their customers not serve lawsuits to their consumers.
Yes the people who are going to be interested in downloading movies are going to be more confortable with technology and arn't going to be fooled by this DRM nonsense. The normal general public are still going to buy DVD's.
Maybe a few Joe Six Packs / Suzi SUV's will try to download, then get upset when they can't play it on their new High Def 50" LCD. This will be good as it will raise hostility towards DRM and the MPAA in general.
Exactly!. How do they expect a DRM encumbered download which costs as much as the DVD to succeed against a superior quality free download which you can play in your standard DVD player and came out months earlier.
This is a token gesture which offers nothing of value and is designed to fail. Hollywood just wants to crow about being able to offer legal alternatives, their not at all interested in giving the consumer what they really want.
I agree but the problem is the people who own the airtime are the big media cartels. The very people the EFF oppose. There is no way Big Media Tm is going to give airtime to the EFF.
I've actually watched a BBC News Night interview where the EFF was talking about the ElcomSoft / Sklyarov DMCA fiasco. The interview was cut short after someone killed the satalite feed to the EFF.
Since when has AJAX ever been a language?
Asynchronous JavaScript And XML
It's simply a method of requesting and displaying data without haveing to refresh the page, hence the asynchronous part.
Lol No he's definatly English. He was blatantly referring to the French!
Unlike in the states where you subscribe to broadband directly through your Incumbent telco or Cable co. The majority of people in the UK buy their broadband connection through a retail ISP who in turn buy their bandwidth through the wholesale provider namely British Telecom. This has the advantage of much greater competition so people can switch from one provider to another.
If you don't like the service that you are getting from your ISP or Cable Company you can always switch to another ISP who offers a better service though maybe at a higher price.
Given that DSL subscribers in the UK have recently been given the choice to upgrade to an 8Mbit service at no extra cost, an all you can eat service model is not going to be sustainable as the few bandwidth hogs will saturate their connections and leech all the bandwidth. There has to be some sort of fair use policy and this differs between the ISP's
PlusNet has taken to use traffic shaping to effectively block all p2p traffic once a user had gone over a rather small usage limit. This has resulted in a large migration of users away from PlusNet and onto my ISP Nildram. Nildram do not traffic shape and they give a generous 50gig per month download limit which only applied during peak times. After 12am to 8am it's all you can eat. They also role your previous months unused allowance over to the next month.
It remains to be seen if my ISP can cope with the extra demand but the point is this is a good example of the free market and capitalism. If a provider gives bad service or poor value for money their customers will simply migrate to another provider.
It's unfortunate the people in the U.S don't have such a free market for broadband.
You have to ask who really profits from these lawsuits. It's not the RIAA and it's certainly not the artists. It's always the lawyers. When the RIAA want something they always go to their lawyers first. They don't know any other way.
This is why the lawsuits keep continuing and we get stuck with things like DRM. Despite independent opinion polls indicating that these tactics only alienate their customers and ultimately encourage piracy.
They have stated that they are using a "Carrot and Stick" approach. This sums up the mindset of the RIAA perfectly. No other industry gets away with treating their customers like donkeys. With fat cat execs riding on their backs beating them with lawsuits when they don't do as their told. Of course there is the Carrot of legal downloads but it's attached to the stick by a piece a string called DRM which means the Carrot is always out of reach of the customer.
In reality the lawyers only serve their own interests not the RIAA or the artists.
If the RIAA / MPAA allowed DRM free downloads at a price which reflects the value of the content then piracy will decline. It'll never disappear but it'll be a lot lower than it is today. Until they realize this and start treating the buying public as individual valued "Customers" instead of "Consumer" donkeys piracy will continue to grow. But this isn't in the Lawyers interest is it!
And the act of passing such laws which criminalize a large section of the population is usually called "Oppression"
How the hell is OSX a good example. The 'hacking community' patched OSX to run on generic PC's as a challenge. Not so they could get OSX for free. Everyone knows OSX is designed to run on Apple hardware not off the shelf PC parts.
If you run a w4r3z3d OSX on a PC don't blame Apple when it goes Pete Tong.
Joe six pack will soon discover the evils of DRM when they can't burn the film they legally paid for onto DVD to watch on their new HD TV or their HDD / Computer fails and they have to buy all their movies again. Unlike the pirates who can happily burn / backup their W4r3z.
A lot of people, especially the tech savvy ones will still choose to get the pirate downloads. Remove the DRM and let people burn their own DVD's.
Let me spell it out for the MPAA! Will you pay for a product which is inferior to one you can get for free?
Unfortunately you're preaching to the choir here. Tell it to Joe Six Pack, Suzy Soccer Mom and their SUV full of kids.
Wow my public library's been doing that! Row upon row of Books, DVD's and Music. I really should call the RIAA / MPAA / Team America World Police. Distributing the creative works of man to a wider society it's like Murdering and Raping..... Those poor record exec's all alone and unloved in their Ivory Towers. Booo hoooo hooooo whhaaaa..
Though seriously how exactly is the P.B storing all this? They need donations for servers and bandwidth. Distributing a DVD, CD to 3000 people every second?! Ultimately it's the users that are the ones "infringing". If they want infringe and advertise it on a public web site shouldn't they be the ones to answer for it?
Personally I believe the copyright balance has tilted too far in favor of the multinationals. Copyright was only ever meant to be a temporary monopoly to allow creators to recover the cost of development. Now copyrights are effectively permanent. This is counter to why we have copyrights in the first place, to encourage innovation and creativity.
Good luck Pirate bay.
This is why people download eps off Bittorent / Usenet. Of course by inducing people to download and by uploading copyrighted material (in this case plotlines) the parent is guilty of both direct and contributory infringment.
As we speak the MPAA are deploying a crack team of ninja lawers armed with DMCA take down notices.
Also explains why Bush hears voices in his head telling him to invade Iraq.