It's time for us all to get over the fact that technology is going to end practical privacy. It's a done deal. Cameras and microphones will get smaller and smaller. Translation, electronic selectivity (i.e. snoop anybody transferring bombmaking directions) and tapping of all forms of electronic conversation will get more and more sophisticated. I've no doubt the NSA made PGP its bitch a long time ago. IF they hadn't it would be getting fought a lot harder. Assuming you can get real privacy from something on the scale of the government is just foolish.
I'm not, incidentally, saying just live with it. I'm saying, you can't stop the technology, you have to fight it on the level of policy and practice. Get interested in the work of privacy advocates, work for a consitutional amendment guaranteeing privacy in the same manner as freedom of expression, protest egregious violations of privacy (basically, be against John Ashcroft).
Very well said. This seems to be Cringely's primary misunderstanding - the law is not some word game logic puzzle but a set of (often vague) guidelines that are interpreted by people - some smart, some not so smart, good or bad or ugly - but eventually the system will nix this kind of thing. This one, though, is such an egregious violation of copyright law so far outside the provisions of fair use it would never see the light of day. It would start getting sued to smithereens as soon as it went public and I doubt it would even merit an appeal.
As you note, the personal copies and format-shifting things are defined by precedent, not codified in the actual law. The reason they are allowed is they fit on the balance within the fair use guidelines - they are not commercial, and not likely to affect the market of the items themselves (because you have already bought your copy). I'm sort of surprised anyone believes this could remotely work.
But what do you mean when you talk about "this is the word of the LORD"? The only full text in the bible that are presented as the literally transcribed word of God is the Torah scroll, the five books of Moses. The Old Testament as we find it is a selective and synthetic document derived from the Jewish Bible (which itself was not canonized until 100 AD, and so represents a parallel development of scripture with the Christian church), and there are differences in what is included in Christian versions (primarily the inclusion of the Apocrypha in the Roman Catholic text) to this very day.
The New Testament likewise represents four versions of the Gospels, selected from among the twenty-odd better known versions of the Gospel renditions that still exist from among the fifty to a hundred that appeared in the second and third centuries. The Christ and Gospel message presented in some of these Gospels is quite radically different from the canonical four gospels we're accostomed to.
The Epistles, meanwhile, are a selection of commentaries by various early Christians, and to argue that they were selected in exact accordance with some selection process suggested by some portion of the bible itself is stretching credulity. These decisions were contentious, political, and made over long periods.
Consider: (source: http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/bible/canon2.stm [my notes in brackets])
Some canons are smaller than the Protestant Bible; others are larger:
The smallest Bible is claimed by the Samaritans, who recognize only the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch). The largest Bible is that of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, which has 81 books
New Testament
Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Greek Orthodox Christians agree on the same 27 books for the composition of the New Testament; however some smaller groups of Christians do not. The Nestorian, or Syrian church, recognizes only 22 books, excluding 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation. [Note - as a Lutheran I'll note that Martin Luther himself believed some of the books that are included in the canonical 27 should have been excluded, a fact that the Lutheran church generally glosses over rather than embrace some unorthodox cannon].
On the other hand, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes the same 27 books in its "narrower" canon but adds 8 books to its "broader" canon: "four sections of church order from a compilation called Sinodos, two sections from the Ethiopic Books of Covenant, Ethiopic Clement, and Ethiopic Didascalia."
Old Testament
The Jewish Bible and the Protestant Old Testament contain the same books but they are arranged in a different order. Additionally, books that Protestant Christians divide into two parts (Kings, Chronicles, Samuel, and Ezra-Nehemiah) are only one book in the Hebrew Bible.
In terms of the Old Testament, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, and other Eastern Christians claim more "inside books".
The books of the "second canon" are considered "inside" by Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Ethiopic Christians; the latter group adds even more books beyond the deuterocanonicals. Protestants consider the same books "outside" however they give the Apocrypha high status, considering them valuable for instruction and spiritual edification. [Note they may have high status in academic circles but most Christians have never read them]
The Ethiopian Orthodox church's narrower Old Testament canon includes the books of the Hebrew Bible, all of the Apocrypha, and "Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and Joseph ben Gurion's (Josippon's) medieval history of the Jews and other nations."
(End of the quotation from the cited source) This is to say nothing of more recently discovered textual references such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and texts like the Book of Jasher which are quoted in the Canonical Bible but have been lost.
Well put. I'm a practicing Christian and a member of a denomination that experienced a profound rift over the concept of the bible being the "inerrant" word of God. While one might be able to (however foolishly it might seem to me) sustain this text-worship attitude with relatively monolithic documents like the Torah scrolls or the Q'uran (both said to be dictated directly and exactly by God by their respective authors), the fact that some Christians carry the attitude forwards to the synthetic and selective documents that comprise various versions of the Old and New Testaments of "the Bible" strikes me as missing the point of the Gospel entirely, and most frequently held by people who have virtually no historical knowledge of how the book we call the Bible was assembled over the two thousand year history of the Christian church.
"The Bible" remains the primary text at the center of my personal religious practice. I find the attitudes of some atheists who might agree with the sentiment that it is nothing more than "nauseating, historically inaccurate, [and] replete with the ravings of madmen" represent as simplistic a view as adherence to the literalistic inerrant word viewpoint.
I also find a diversity religious texts from a variety of traditions to be fascinating, instructive, and of great value, but I believe this endless desire to be able to quantify in static text a complete and universal "truth" comes from exactly the legalistic mindset that Christ is so frequently described confronting in the written versions of the oral tradition that we Christians refer to as the Gospels. But the Gospel itself, to my mind, is not a particular piece of text but rather a message.
O fer crying out loud, where's mod points when I need them. The original point was pretty pointless, this response even more so. My school is great! Ahh, it's okay. Interesting? Insightful? My ass. Valar, glad you like your school. Shamashmuddamiq, sounds like YOU got some issues with Texas.
Gotta agree. Went there. Looked. $4.00 per album. Sorry, too much. I can go to my local used shop, Cheapos, and find indie CDs used for $4.00. An MP3 album is a value diminished product. You do not have a physical archive product, you do not have cover art unless you make it yourself, and the sound quality, no matter what anyone says, is unquestionably degraded. I can't see myself paying more than $2.50 for an album of MP3s. I might pay $4.00 for a download of full CD WAV files.
I also say NO to Paypal because they suck. I'm very happy with my Bitpass account but they need a lot more artists to sign on.
http://www.bitpass.com/learn/
Re:Illegal versus unethical
on
All The Rave
·
· Score: 1
I think this raises some interesting points. Napster in and of itself was not the cultural icon the book reviewer claims. The majority of people using it either didn't know or didn't care about the legality of what they were doing. What Napster did do was force the system to take a hard look at distinctions that had previously been allowed to hang in limbo.
It's easy to discount your standard of legal versus ethical as a self-serving copout. Your basic argument is that intent and scale should be taken into account in judging the violation of copyright. Precedent shows us that the common sense and practice of the law used to agree. There is no legal difference between what most people did with Napster and what most people did with cassette tapes. Mix tapes that are not kept solely for personal use are, in fact, illegal. That is an unauthorized duplication of someone's copyrighted material and if you read the label you will find that duplication of any kind is prohibited by law (though the conventional judicial interpretation of fair use suggests it is okay to duplicate something you own license to for personal purposes).
The industry accepted that stopping home taping was impossible to stop and get congress to throw a tax on blank media to compensate for it.
And nary a word was heard from Bowser the Copyright-Respecting dog about how making mix tapes for your friends was a crime. Scale. Intent.
The problem is, the legislative answer to the brave new world of digital copies and the internet did nothing to address and somehow try to creatively manage these cussed issue of scale and intent. Instead they just slapped a wholly extraneous and useless layer of digital rights management restrictions on top of existing copyright laws.
My point being, nothing was accomplished by taking this hard-line attitude that a violation is a violation is a violation. People who didn't know or care about copyright infringement in the Napster era will not know or care about DMCA infringement today. And people like s20451 just have that much more justification to apply their own ethical standards to their behavior, as the law is incapable of presenting any rational lines between violation of the "mix tape" variety and full-scale, market-harming bootlegging.
Yeah, don't forget that John Poindexter is in charge... he's an old hand at, um, unconventional funding of "special" government projects. Maybe his old buddies in the CIA can help him move a little ultra-pure heroin from our new buddies, the warlords of Afghanistan.
Go ahead and mod it funny... I wish it was more of a joke.
The data remarkably concur with the brutal observation made by Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1942: "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so."
Whew. I can stop worrying about doing THAT one now. On to writing the great Armenian Novel, or something...
I think there is something to be said for the principle of the matter. When the constitution and bill of rights were created the U.S.A. was in a hell of a lot more danger of being destroyed by huge, powerful, imperialistic and militarily superior governments than it is now from anyone or anything. Yet it was not felt necessary to water down the protection against illegal search and seizure. I believe in the principle that one has a fundmantal right to freedom from having their personal information examined by the government without a justifiable cause that has undergone judicial review.
Furthermore, the pragmatic reality is that corruption and gross incompetence are a reality, and I don't think that this reality is unrelated to my basic argument. If powerful entities did not routinely abuse their powers then we probably never would have bothered to create the bill of rights. Although based on idealistic principles the constitution was made to address pragmatic injustices.
If you don't think that a federal agency, snooping for terrorist activity, will start a file on you for completely legal but (by their definition) "anti-American" sentiments and activities then you are hopelessly naive.
Finally, with regards to "castrating" the government - don't make me laugh. Since P.A.T.R.I.O.T. was passed the government has hung itself like a freaking Clydesdale in terms of their right to invade our privacy. There is a simple way to balance the need for an effective federal executive with personal liberties which is sound legislation defining reasonable restraints and conditions with judicial review.
I'm sorry, but that is a piss-poor excuse for not standing up to the current administration's land-grab on our civil liberties, and congress' spineless acquiescence to the same. This is tantamount to saying, if you don't have anything to hide, why do you have a problem with the police searching your house/car/person?
There are reasons why issues of civil liberties and constitutional rights tend to get publicized, exposed and worked out in cases involving people who (probably) did something wrong, and it isn't just because people are never wrongly investigated, accused or prosecuted. The reason we are less likely to hear about the innocent people who should have been protected by the law but were not is that the authorities have a vested interest in keeping them quiet. The victims often accept freedom from further persecution in exchange for dropping the matter, and more often than not noone in authority is punished for THEIR violation of the law.
As long as the government can't control what we think...
Yeah, tell that to Reverend Accelyne Williams. Oh, sorry, you can't - he's dead. Google his name and you'll end up learning about a whole lot of other people who were killed or otherwise violated when the Constitution let them down. But don't blame the constitution - it's hard to maintain your integrity when politicians keep pissing on you all the time.
I don't understand how fair use got so screwed up like this.
My opinion is that it got so screwed up because it was never that well-defined in the first place. My reading of the core copyright legislation revealed a definition of fair use (such as it existed) that was very limited and very vague.
For the most part the pratical parameters of Fair Use were defined by judicial precedent, and were more about what you couldn't be stopped from doing. You couldn't be stopped from videotaping television, ripping CDs to your computer, etc. But it was never really established that copyright owners HAD to make sure these options were available to you.
Along comes the DMCA, the other thing that happened to fair use, such as it is. The DMCA says, it's illegal to disable tools designed to protect content. It doesn't make fair use per se illegal... for example, I can still make an analog copy of a DRM CD (if I bought such things) with my cassette recorder. And I could rip it to my hard drive... that would be legal... except, oops! I can't legally get to the information to do so.
I think that what is primarily wrong with this is that it violates a constitutional principle called prior restraint. Prior restraint says, you cannot reasonably prevent someone from doing something that is itself legal because you believe it is leading to an illegal activity. A man drives to a bar and gets drunk. You can't arrest him at the door with his car keys in hand because it is legal to get drunk and even though you assume he will drive home he hasn't done anything illegal until he gets in the car.
The DMCA gets around this principle by making the formerly legal action (breaking encryption etc) illegal. This is a fine line - it shouldn't be allowed unless there is no significant legal justification for the activity. As the 2600 case showed, at least in that limited case the court was not ready to accept that people had a justification to break CSS on DVDs, which is an unfortunate precedent. Eventually I think a DMCA case must go to the Supreme Court and then we'll see.
Maybe the future of arcades is to provide instant LAN setups... Replacing low income games with banks of gaming setups with boxes, monitors and comfy gaming setups. Random groups get together and Doom out, or whatever it is you kids do these days.
Replace the GC memory card with the USB RAM keychain...
Funny, but I hope your public library system doesn't really suck that badly. A decent library will have up to date references and people who know how to use them. A lot of people fail to take advantage of reference librarians. These people have specialized degree in data archiving and retreival, okay, they can help you get to real, valuable, timely information.
I suggested the library (which for most includes internet access) rather than just the internet, because, you know, catch 22 if you're shopping for a computer.
If you don't know what a gigabyte is, it's hard to know how large of a hard drive you need.
This information isn't exactly difficult to find. If you're planning on investing $.5-2K, it seems like a few hours research at the local library would be in order.
I think this issue parallels a related question that's very unresolved at this point: what is addiction? What is the differnece between a mental pathology and what is merely a state of mind or style of thinking?
I tend to define addiction very narrowly and confine it to substances, i.e. the user experiences physical cravings for the substance and prolonged abstinence results in physical withdrawal. I feel like the application of addicition to a whole class of behaviors dilutes the term to the point of meaninglessness and is far too easily exploited with political motivations.
BUT... of course at the heart of it we've come to the old mind-body division issue. When you start getting into dopamine squirts and such the line between a behavior and a chemical condition of the mind blurs. It gets messy. Personally I think the term "compulsive" covers the territory of behaviors a lot better than "addiction."
Micropayments can only be seen as an experiment. I think Tycho is right - it is a chicken/egg thing. McCloud is doing the right thing - just lay the damn egg and see what happens.
an interesting point about micropayments: they can only keep you afloat if you get lots of them
But isn't this true of any model? With the cost of printing and distribution, at 25 cents a pop and most of the money going to the producer, this is a good deal for the artist and consumer both. I hate ads (and ad revenue has proven to be an iffy model on the internet). I liked McCloud's comics on comics Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics but I'm not sure if I want a Scott McCloud subscription. I'd much rather pay a few dozen micropayments and decide from there. I like having this option alongside being hassled by ads or risking a subscription I might decide isn't worth it.
The PA cartoon was funny and raised a reasonable point - Scott McCloud likes to talk about fantastic possibilities but can be low on pragmatic logistics. Well, this experiment is his answer. An available product using a working micropayment system.
What will make or break this, though, is whether Bitpass can accumulate a decent body of artists. Right now they feature three providers. I risked a $20 prepay account on faith, and to promote the experiment. But obviously, unless they get a good body and variety of content providers signed on within the next year, it just won't fly. As others have pointed out, this has been tried and failed before - but that doesn't mean it can't work. I imagine the first charge cards were a tough sell...
Agreed, but the barriers to entry on distributing prepaid cards is a lot higher than the online account model. Perhaps operations like bitpass could get it on with Visa/MC to offer a "PG" account along with those stored cash value cards they were pushing a while back.
I'm far from affluent but I figure, twenty bucks is a reasonable risk considering how exciting I think the possibilities of a working micropayment system on the internet is.
So I went and signed up and it was very, very quick and easy. I was reading the comic in less than two minutes. I tried getting out of it, getting back in (with the cookie intact) was a matter of seconds. Since I wipe my cookies every day I'll soon see how a cold start is on something I've already paid, but from this experience I doubt it will take even half a minute to get back in. A very fair deal as far as I'm concerned. You just select a bank amount and enter the minimal credit card info.
You can risk as little as a few bucks, so even if you are a skeptic, if you think having micropayments be available might be cool and useful, I say take a tiny risk and sign up. We can argue all day about whether it will ever fly, but if you believe it could and should, then make the most compelling argument and get your own account.
If you don't have a credit card then no, you can't buy stuff on the internet. What the hell do you want, a bill changer on your PC? How is this different from e-bay, amazon, or anything else for sale on the 'net?
this was reported a while ago and I cancelled my eBay account immediately with a terse note on why. Sure it sucks but such as it is; stand on principles or lie down and let them roll over you. eBay has no legal obligation to maintain my privacy. They SHOULD do so for the sake of customer care and good corporate citizenship (encouraging law enforcement to expect information about private transactions to be treated like public information is totally against what the Constitution of the U.S.A. used to be about pre-P.A.T.R.I.O.T.). They failed me so I am no longer a customer, and no, I don't expect they are losing much sleep about it. The rest of the sheep can just keep trading - remember, you have nothing to worry about if you haven't done anything wrong!
A strange side effect I can't explain, since then my budget has been much easier to manage...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not, incidentally, saying just live with it. I'm saying, you can't stop the technology, you have to fight it on the level of policy and practice. Get interested in the work of privacy advocates, work for a consitutional amendment guaranteeing privacy in the same manner as freedom of expression, protest egregious violations of privacy (basically, be against John Ashcroft).
As you note, the personal copies and format-shifting things are defined by precedent, not codified in the actual law. The reason they are allowed is they fit on the balance within the fair use guidelines - they are not commercial, and not likely to affect the market of the items themselves (because you have already bought your copy). I'm sort of surprised anyone believes this could remotely work.
The New Testament likewise represents four versions of the Gospels, selected from among the twenty-odd better known versions of the Gospel renditions that still exist from among the fifty to a hundred that appeared in the second and third centuries. The Christ and Gospel message presented in some of these Gospels is quite radically different from the canonical four gospels we're accostomed to.
The Epistles, meanwhile, are a selection of commentaries by various early Christians, and to argue that they were selected in exact accordance with some selection process suggested by some portion of the bible itself is stretching credulity. These decisions were contentious, political, and made over long periods.
Consider: (source: http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/bible/canon2.stm [my notes in brackets])
Some canons are smaller than the Protestant Bible; others are larger:
The smallest Bible is claimed by the Samaritans, who recognize only the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch). The largest Bible is that of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, which has 81 books
New Testament
Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Greek Orthodox Christians agree on the same 27 books for the composition of the New Testament; however some smaller groups of Christians do not. The Nestorian, or Syrian church, recognizes only 22 books, excluding 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation. [Note - as a Lutheran I'll note that Martin Luther himself believed some of the books that are included in the canonical 27 should have been excluded, a fact that the Lutheran church generally glosses over rather than embrace some unorthodox cannon].
On the other hand, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes the same 27 books in its "narrower" canon but adds 8 books to its "broader" canon: "four sections of church order from a compilation called Sinodos, two sections from the Ethiopic Books of Covenant, Ethiopic Clement, and Ethiopic Didascalia."
Old Testament
The Jewish Bible and the Protestant Old Testament contain the same books but they are arranged in a different order. Additionally, books that Protestant Christians divide into two parts (Kings, Chronicles, Samuel, and Ezra-Nehemiah) are only one book in the Hebrew Bible.
In terms of the Old Testament, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, and other Eastern Christians claim more "inside books".
The books of the "second canon" are considered "inside" by Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Ethiopic Christians; the latter group adds even more books beyond the deuterocanonicals. Protestants consider the same books "outside" however they give the Apocrypha high status, considering them valuable for instruction and spiritual edification. [Note they may have high status in academic circles but most Christians have never read them]
The Ethiopian Orthodox church's narrower Old Testament canon includes the books of the Hebrew Bible, all of the Apocrypha, and "Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and Joseph ben Gurion's (Josippon's) medieval history of the Jews and other nations."
(End of the quotation from the cited source) This is to say nothing of more recently discovered textual references such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and texts like the Book of Jasher which are quoted in the Canonical Bible but have been lost.
My p
"The Bible" remains the primary text at the center of my personal religious practice. I find the attitudes of some atheists who might agree with the sentiment that it is nothing more than "nauseating, historically inaccurate, [and] replete with the ravings of madmen" represent as simplistic a view as adherence to the literalistic inerrant word viewpoint.
I also find a diversity religious texts from a variety of traditions to be fascinating, instructive, and of great value, but I believe this endless desire to be able to quantify in static text a complete and universal "truth" comes from exactly the legalistic mindset that Christ is so frequently described confronting in the written versions of the oral tradition that we Christians refer to as the Gospels. But the Gospel itself, to my mind, is not a particular piece of text but rather a message.
O fer crying out loud, where's mod points when I need them. The original point was pretty pointless, this response even more so. My school is great! Ahh, it's okay. Interesting? Insightful? My ass. Valar, glad you like your school. Shamashmuddamiq, sounds like YOU got some issues with Texas.
I also say NO to Paypal because they suck. I'm very happy with my Bitpass account but they need a lot more artists to sign on.
http://www.bitpass.com/learn/
It's easy to discount your standard of legal versus ethical as a self-serving copout. Your basic argument is that intent and scale should be taken into account in judging the violation of copyright. Precedent shows us that the common sense and practice of the law used to agree. There is no legal difference between what most people did with Napster and what most people did with cassette tapes. Mix tapes that are not kept solely for personal use are, in fact, illegal. That is an unauthorized duplication of someone's copyrighted material and if you read the label you will find that duplication of any kind is prohibited by law (though the conventional judicial interpretation of fair use suggests it is okay to duplicate something you own license to for personal purposes).
The industry accepted that stopping home taping was impossible to stop and get congress to throw a tax on blank media to compensate for it.
And nary a word was heard from Bowser the Copyright-Respecting dog about how making mix tapes for your friends was a crime. Scale. Intent.
The problem is, the legislative answer to the brave new world of digital copies and the internet did nothing to address and somehow try to creatively manage these cussed issue of scale and intent. Instead they just slapped a wholly extraneous and useless layer of digital rights management restrictions on top of existing copyright laws.
My point being, nothing was accomplished by taking this hard-line attitude that a violation is a violation is a violation. People who didn't know or care about copyright infringement in the Napster era will not know or care about DMCA infringement today. And people like s20451 just have that much more justification to apply their own ethical standards to their behavior, as the law is incapable of presenting any rational lines between violation of the "mix tape" variety and full-scale, market-harming bootlegging.
Go ahead and mod it funny... I wish it was more of a joke.
Thank you, good catch and good point. Anyone who thinks either major party is our "buddy" on this one is delusional.
The data remarkably concur with the brutal observation made by Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1942: "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so."
Whew. I can stop worrying about doing THAT one now. On to writing the great Armenian Novel, or something...
I think there is something to be said for the principle of the matter. When the constitution and bill of rights were created the U.S.A. was in a hell of a lot more danger of being destroyed by huge, powerful, imperialistic and militarily superior governments than it is now from anyone or anything. Yet it was not felt necessary to water down the protection against illegal search and seizure. I believe in the principle that one has a fundmantal right to freedom from having their personal information examined by the government without a justifiable cause that has undergone judicial review.
Furthermore, the pragmatic reality is that corruption and gross incompetence are a reality, and I don't think that this reality is unrelated to my basic argument. If powerful entities did not routinely abuse their powers then we probably never would have bothered to create the bill of rights. Although based on idealistic principles the constitution was made to address pragmatic injustices.
If you don't think that a federal agency, snooping for terrorist activity, will start a file on you for completely legal but (by their definition) "anti-American" sentiments and activities then you are hopelessly naive.
Finally, with regards to "castrating" the government - don't make me laugh. Since P.A.T.R.I.O.T. was passed the government has hung itself like a freaking Clydesdale in terms of their right to invade our privacy. There is a simple way to balance the need for an effective federal executive with personal liberties which is sound legislation defining reasonable restraints and conditions with judicial review.
I'm sorry, but that is a piss-poor excuse for not standing up to the current administration's land-grab on our civil liberties, and congress' spineless acquiescence to the same. This is tantamount to saying, if you don't have anything to hide, why do you have a problem with the police searching your house/car/person?
There are reasons why issues of civil liberties and constitutional rights tend to get publicized, exposed and worked out in cases involving people who (probably) did something wrong, and it isn't just because people are never wrongly investigated, accused or prosecuted. The reason we are less likely to hear about the innocent people who should have been protected by the law but were not is that the authorities have a vested interest in keeping them quiet. The victims often accept freedom from further persecution in exchange for dropping the matter, and more often than not noone in authority is punished for THEIR violation of the law.
As long as the government can't control what we think...
Yeah, tell that to Reverend Accelyne Williams. Oh, sorry, you can't - he's dead. Google his name and you'll end up learning about a whole lot of other people who were killed or otherwise violated when the Constitution let them down. But don't blame the constitution - it's hard to maintain your integrity when politicians keep pissing on you all the time.
My opinion is that it got so screwed up because it was never that well-defined in the first place. My reading of the core copyright legislation revealed a definition of fair use (such as it existed) that was very limited and very vague.
For the most part the pratical parameters of Fair Use were defined by judicial precedent, and were more about what you couldn't be stopped from doing. You couldn't be stopped from videotaping television, ripping CDs to your computer, etc. But it was never really established that copyright owners HAD to make sure these options were available to you.
Along comes the DMCA, the other thing that happened to fair use, such as it is. The DMCA says, it's illegal to disable tools designed to protect content. It doesn't make fair use per se illegal... for example, I can still make an analog copy of a DRM CD (if I bought such things) with my cassette recorder. And I could rip it to my hard drive... that would be legal... except, oops! I can't legally get to the information to do so.
I think that what is primarily wrong with this is that it violates a constitutional principle called prior restraint. Prior restraint says, you cannot reasonably prevent someone from doing something that is itself legal because you believe it is leading to an illegal activity. A man drives to a bar and gets drunk. You can't arrest him at the door with his car keys in hand because it is legal to get drunk and even though you assume he will drive home he hasn't done anything illegal until he gets in the car.
The DMCA gets around this principle by making the formerly legal action (breaking encryption etc) illegal. This is a fine line - it shouldn't be allowed unless there is no significant legal justification for the activity. As the 2600 case showed, at least in that limited case the court was not ready to accept that people had a justification to break CSS on DVDs, which is an unfortunate precedent. Eventually I think a DMCA case must go to the Supreme Court and then we'll see.
And that's what's happened to fair use.
Maybe the future of arcades is to provide instant LAN setups... Replacing low income games with banks of gaming setups with boxes, monitors and comfy gaming setups. Random groups get together and Doom out, or whatever it is you kids do these days.
Replace the GC memory card with the USB RAM keychain...
I suggested the library (which for most includes internet access) rather than just the internet, because, you know, catch 22 if you're shopping for a computer.
This information isn't exactly difficult to find. If you're planning on investing $.5-2K, it seems like a few hours research at the local library would be in order.
And they STILL haven't closed this loophole.
= 74
Fun insight into interpreting the focus group.
http://www.autoidcenter.org/AbstractTest.asp?ID
As reported by wo1verin3
I tend to define addiction very narrowly and confine it to substances, i.e. the user experiences physical cravings for the substance and prolonged abstinence results in physical withdrawal. I feel like the application of addicition to a whole class of behaviors dilutes the term to the point of meaninglessness and is far too easily exploited with political motivations.
BUT... of course at the heart of it we've come to the old mind-body division issue. When you start getting into dopamine squirts and such the line between a behavior and a chemical condition of the mind blurs. It gets messy. Personally I think the term "compulsive" covers the territory of behaviors a lot better than "addiction."
an interesting point about micropayments: they can only keep you afloat if you get lots of them
But isn't this true of any model? With the cost of printing and distribution, at 25 cents a pop and most of the money going to the producer, this is a good deal for the artist and consumer both. I hate ads (and ad revenue has proven to be an iffy model on the internet). I liked McCloud's comics on comics Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics but I'm not sure if I want a Scott McCloud subscription. I'd much rather pay a few dozen micropayments and decide from there. I like having this option alongside being hassled by ads or risking a subscription I might decide isn't worth it.
The PA cartoon was funny and raised a reasonable point - Scott McCloud likes to talk about fantastic possibilities but can be low on pragmatic logistics. Well, this experiment is his answer. An available product using a working micropayment system.
What will make or break this, though, is whether Bitpass can accumulate a decent body of artists. Right now they feature three providers. I risked a $20 prepay account on faith, and to promote the experiment. But obviously, unless they get a good body and variety of content providers signed on within the next year, it just won't fly. As others have pointed out, this has been tried and failed before - but that doesn't mean it can't work. I imagine the first charge cards were a tough sell...
Agreed, but the barriers to entry on distributing prepaid cards is a lot higher than the online account model. Perhaps operations like bitpass could get it on with Visa/MC to offer a "PG" account along with those stored cash value cards they were pushing a while back.
I'll be checking into the "Share" Link on the Bitpass.com site frequently to support other vendors that sign on to this.
So I went and signed up and it was very, very quick and easy. I was reading the comic in less than two minutes. I tried getting out of it, getting back in (with the cookie intact) was a matter of seconds. Since I wipe my cookies every day I'll soon see how a cold start is on something I've already paid, but from this experience I doubt it will take even half a minute to get back in. A very fair deal as far as I'm concerned. You just select a bank amount and enter the minimal credit card info.
You can risk as little as a few bucks, so even if you are a skeptic, if you think having micropayments be available might be cool and useful, I say take a tiny risk and sign up. We can argue all day about whether it will ever fly, but if you believe it could and should, then make the most compelling argument and get your own account.
If you don't have a credit card then no, you can't buy stuff on the internet. What the hell do you want, a bill changer on your PC? How is this different from e-bay, amazon, or anything else for sale on the 'net?
A strange side effect I can't explain, since then my budget has been much easier to manage...