Wow, what a dark and insightful post. You must be very popular at the gothic coffehouse with ideas like that.
Riddle me this: what other political system is there that is as stable, prosperous and as helpful to the general populace as the democratic republic? And second, why aren't we using it?
Incidentally, the government also does the bidding of the poor and downtrodden. Like when they posted an officer in front on my co-worker's house when her ex-husband called saying he would murder her. Or when they helped fund my other coworker's adoption.
In fact, each of those incidents was worth far more of each person's share of taxation than this raid was to the taxes paid by the whole of the music industry. You might say these people got more for their tax dollars than the RIAA did. But in order to say that, you'd have to be more than an anti-corporate clown unable to realize that corporations have the same rights as small businesses -- and if somebody was hosting $250k of our company's software on a DC hub, I'd fucking want to know what the DOJ was gonna do about it, too.
Actually, widespread copyright infringement IS a crime if the value is about $3000 (this certainly applies) and you can display an intent to profit. In some software piracy cases I've seen, the exchange of software was considered an intent to profit. Essentially, the trade of pirated software was its own profit, and I've experienced exactly that...you used to get one sought after game or program and leverage that to get whatever else you needed.
Jaysus, yet another fucking "Digital Property Is Somehow Different" troll.
Yes, downloading a digital file is different from stealing a CD. And grifting an old woman out of her pension funds is different from punching her in the stomach and taking it. And shooting a man in the neck is quite different from paying somebody else to do it.
But that doesn't make it right. It doesn't absolve the criminal. And as much as you want to quibble about infringement not being theft, it appears that a lot of people disagree with you. Not all of these people have anything to do with the RIAA. I don't have anything to do with the RIAA, but I think it takes major hubris to say there's nothing ethically wrong with casual copyright infrinigement just because there's no money involved.
Oh, and just to put that definitional quibble to rest: "to steal" is defined as "to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully." To appropriate without right with intent to make use of wrongfully. That sounds EXACTLY like copyright infringement. And since "theft" is "the act of stealing," it certainly does apply here. Maybe you don't want people to use the word theft because it makes casual copyright infringement sound bad. Maybe that's because it IS bad, and you don't want to admit it because it's so fun and so easy.
I dunno. Seems his one sentance argument is pretty compelling to me. But then again, I create things. I want a nice, firm delineation as to what control I have over those things.
Maybe if you saw the field from the other side of the fence, you might find more cadence in his argument. But if you think "oh this law helps out large corporations who MUST be monopolys and MUST be rich and therefore I am justified in doing WHATEVER I want..." you're obviously not involved with any smaller creative activities. My buddy runs a tiny little graphic design shop, and has had clients refuse to pay for what things actually cost to work on them. My buddy's response is to kindly inform them that until he transfers the copyright of the logo to them, using it is illegal and the damages are far greater than what he's asking. Generally, this gets the checkbooks open.
Anyhow, I don't see where this artificial argument about scarcity comes from in reference to music. There are many, many different artists and many, many different labels. CD prices range from $5 to $20. If you aren't willing to pay $20, you can get a CD from somebody else. In other markets, this is quite common. Don't want to pay $7 for a six pack of Heineken? A sixer of Bud is only $4. This is not evidence that Heineken has state-sponsored temporary monopoly that creates a scarcity which does not correspond to any state in reality and the recipe for Heineken should be given to many small companies who could then directly compete on a beer that tastes exactly like Heineken. If that's how you think economies should work, your commie ass should go back to Adam Smith and square one. If you have a fixed demand, you create just enough supply to match the price that maximizes profits. This isn't artifical scarcity. It's good planning.
Uh, duh. Most of the laws we have are created with input from those they would most directly affect. Would you want it any other way -- having laws about agriculture written by IT professionals or laws to protect copyrights written by schoolteachers? Of course, this means that a lot of the laws are self serving.
If you don't like that government is being run by corporations, you have an option: start a political watchdog group, get funding, inform voters and congressmen about what's really going on in the world. Lobbiests serve two purposes: swaying and informing. If all Congressman Spiff hears is how great it would be to extend copyrights to 70 years, what do you think he's gonna vote for?
Democracy's not perfect, but it is the best system ever invented for doing what's best for the country as a whole rather then what's best for a handful of politicians. But there's a secret to democracy: we're all foxes in the chicken coop, if we ACT like foxes. If you act like a chicken, expect to get eaten buddy.
Of course the media spin is to make it look like its more than it really is.
Not just media spin. If one guy downloads 250 songs, that's the same as 250 people downloading one song in terms of infringement. So being at the hub of 500 terabytes is bad regardless of how many of those terabytes are repeated.
100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs
Ah, I see Ashcroft is using the world famous iPod scale of data density, which will some day eclipse the byte as the standard metric measurement of all data lengths and capacities.
"Hey ted, I'm going to attach pictures of the baby to this email."
"How big are the files?"
"1.25 songs."
"That's a no go, man. My mail server only allows up to.95 of a song before charging me for the soundwidth."
Actually, some of the biggest problems with DVD quality -- specifically, the reduction in chromatic information and the subsequent tendency towards color bleed -- could be solved quite easily with more bits per pixel or block. That RGBCMY pixel TV wouldn't have to interpolate the halftones if they were IN the datastream already.
There are other great uses for this technology, such as putting the regular and directors cuts, wide and fullscreen versions all on the same disk with the same resolution, MULTIPLE resolutions on one disc to promote future higher definition technologies along with lower power small form factor playback devices and, of course, the nefarious possibility of putting a whole BUNCH of films on one disk and then selling the "keys" to play them. DivXL.
That's because most people have been buying home theatres, which sound terrible for anything but the trick they were designed for. Poor directional bass response (what do you expect from a 3.5 inch woofer) bolstered by overpowered unidirectional subwoofers creating an unnatural thump at the crossover point and 4 or more speakers to create positional audio without true staging...all because they can say, "look, 5.1! 6.1! 7.1! DOLBY, THX, WOOT."
Positional audio is a trick designed to make up for poor speaker placement in unusually shaped rooms and cheaper electronics. You can achieve the same effect along with great clarity with a nice set of stereo speakers and a good, discrete, linear analog amp. I like to break it down like this for my friends:
How many ears do you have, and how many of those ears can detect bass?
If you have $1000 and the option of buying 2 speakers or 7 speakers, which set up will have higher quality speakers and by how much?
I've been watching DVDs on a pair of Event studio monitors (with McIntosh silk dome tweeters) for the past two months and I will take my setup over positional audio any day of the week. It's more subtle, the sound is more accurate, and you can actually tell the difference between digital audio and analog audio. Plus I don't have to run wires all over my goddamn living room.
Whoa. The problem is there are plenty of people in the world who don't understand or conveniently ignore the ethics involved. Heck, even here on Slashdot, where people should understand that digital content has value attached to it, there was a general consensus that pro-copyright morality shouldn't be taught in schools (spun as "we don't want the BSA lying to our kids").
You should never attack a problem on only one front. A combination of ethical debate to discourage pirating as a lifestyle, positive reinforcement through quality products and negative reinforcement through legal damages brought against copyright infringers is the most effective plan. It is not "sanction of the victim" or appeasement to change a policy which is obviously troublesome in the wake of a crisis. If somebody stole a stereo from an unlocked car, I'd start fucking locking my car. I wouldn't leave it unlocked with a sign that said "stealing stereos is a crime!"
As for "added-value" being a kludge...well, let's look at a few of the added value solutions that seem to be working pretty well. Cable television, bottled water, cellular phones, women's lingerie...all have taken a basic desire and created an industry around enhancing it in subtle ways. You can still watch tv, drink, talk on the phone, or wear underwear on a budget -- this hasn't buried any of these industries. In fact, the very suggestion that added value is a "kludge" is laughable, it flies in the face of reason, reflecting on the success of such industries over the past 150 years. They've beat the hell out of agriculture, steel and manufacturing.
Liquid measure is an unusual thing in the States, we're sort of schizophrenic about it. Milk, paint, gasoline and blood are all measured in "English" -- gallons, pints, quarts, ounces and the like. Soda pop, cooking oil and liquor are generally measured in metric. I say generally, because it's not so easy. Soda comes in 12oz, 16 oz, 1 litre, 32 oz (which is a bit less than a liter), 2 liter and 3 liter containers. Beer comes in 12 and 16oz bottles but hard liquor generally comes in 750 ml, 1 liter, 1.5 liter bottles.
I believe the schizophrenia stems from a desire for package uniformity in beverages that are also marketted overseas. But it does create wierd situations like going out for a gallon of milk and 2 liters of coke, or drinking 2 ounces of whiskey from a 750 ml bottle.
Incidentally, how many mililiters are there in a swig? Or, let's say, a metric shotglass? Do you get more liquor from a 2 oz shot or the metric equivalent -- and does the variance explain US policy with reference to the rest of the world?
The Supreme Court ruled that the transcoding of music to mp3s is covered by fair use 5 years ago. They ruled that people have the right to make archival copies of their software and their movies. It is only a matter of time before they rule against the DMCA in the case of DVDs and other media that require you to break the law to flex your rights. In the meantime, I will assume that the previous rulings still apply to me, as history is on my side -- and if Studio Ghibli or Toho want to sue me for copying their films so I can watch them, so be it. They have my email address.
And if you actually spent time counting your DVDs, that means that you were thinking about our argument and reconsidering your position. That's the best I can hope for. The morality of copyright violation is something that most people don't discuss -- and it took me YEARS to realize that just because it was easy and cheap to copy Summer Games using Renegade didn't mean it was right.
Shit man, you ever try carrying a 2 liter bottle around NYC? You wind up looking like this guy ! It's worth paying an extra $.11 and getting half as much to not look like an idiot. If it weren't, we'd all buy our clothes at Wal-Mart. Value is not simply a matter of material per dollar...there's the quality of the material and its applicability to your needs that must be considered.
Heck, most of the time generalizing something -- adding more material and/or features to it -- DECREASES its overall value. You hope to make it up in volume, but it's entirely possible that the generalization process will kill your product. If you've got X hours to spend on the creation of set of features, and you increase the size of the set, you decrease the time per feature. If a person only cares about three of the features -- and somebody spent their X hours on only those features -- your product will probably be inferior for their needs. Or soda in a machine -- $1.25 for 16 oz of Coke seems like a really big rip off until it's 2am and you're in the middle of nowhere, thirsty as hell.
Back to DVDs: the goal of the motion picture industry should be concentrating on what people WANT from a movie. It seems -- based completely unscientifically on what my friends tell me when THEY get new DVDS -- that people want high quality pictures with accurate multichannel sound, tons of interesting content (e.g. deleted scenes and backstage videos of the stars goofing off), attractive packaging (I know four guys who bought the Two Towers Ultimate set just because it came with a Gollum bookend) and early release, while the movie's still in the back of your mind. So-called copy protection isn't selling DVDs, isn't stopping illegal copies and isn't making it easier to pursue damages from infringement, so why bother?
As somebody who loves the public domain (all of my photos are public domain, as is any software I release to newsgroups, etc), I'd like to take this a step further. I'd like to see more artists taking the public domain seriously and VOLUNTARILY dropping their copyrights the way many older software companies are releasing their old software under the GPL.
I don't think the current state of copyright would seem so bad if only there were more artists who didn't treat copyright as a tiger cage. Exclusive copyright for 70 years past the owner's death doesn't make sense for most things -- they lose relevancy and thus their market value -- so let them go when they start becoming unprofitable. There are hundreds of Bob Dylan songs and not all of them are worth paying for...but I'd use them if they were free. I mean, where's the demand for "Talking John Birch Blues" or "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" for any use other than satire?
Artists are moving to independent labels at record rates. They need promotion and open access to their back catalogs could help provide that. It would also make the artistic community that much better.
There are many people in this country who seem to believe that military service should also be lip service. To them, serving a near invisible career like Bush did is far better than being decorated in battle, and then speaking out against the senselessness of the battle in the first place.
This is bullshit. A soldier does what he's told, it's true, but he doesn't have to like it. Mindlessly following orders leads to the recent prison abuses and the atrocities of the second World War. My buddy's a marine in Iraq -- about George Bush, he says "I can't believe I work for that asshole." Ex-Amnesty chapter president, this guy quotes freely from Siddhartha and used to love reading about communism and the IRA -- but if you're an insurgent with a weapon pointed at his platoon, he will shoot you in the head.
I thought the whole point of freedom of speech was to protect minority opinions. But I'm having kind of a bad day politically, anyway...I just found out that Cheney and I share an opinion on the subject of gay marriage, and therefore I should probably stop referring to him as "that fucking gargoyle."
Go man, go! I wish more people realized patriotism wasn't all magnetic ribbons and flag t-shirts. There is no country in the world I'd rather be in than the United States of America, even when I'm not proud of our policies.
My motto is "America: Love it or Change it." Because you goddamn can. Most of the pride I feel in America is due to the fact that we all have the right to argue and fight for whatever we believe in, not in the fact that we're inherently "better" than everybody else. We'll see America's superiority fall in our lifetime, and I'll still be damned proud of it.
No, but it is a solution to increasing the value of the product. And value is the reason people buy things.
I mean, there are lots of people who buy DVDs of content freely available on the internet. Atom films and many of the Flash animation sites generate healthy profit from DVD sales and I'm surely gonna buy that Strong Bad's 100th Email DVD when it comes out, even though I have all 111 flash files on a DVD already...
Why? Because the quality is better and the format is more attractive and convenient. Making the assumption that it is going to be rather difficult to stop piracy, one way for the industry to encourage people to buy films is to create formats that have even HIGHER quality with even MORE convenience and to release them SOONER in even nicer packages.
DVD is a first good step towards that goal...tape sales used to be sort of an afterthought, just another use for movies that were intended to make money during their theatre run. Now, DVD sales might bring in a substantial percentage of a film's take, and some media (especially TV series and indie films) make MORE money on DVD then they did first run. As a result, the industry is releasing movies earlier and with more extras than you'll find in a 700 meg XVid file.
There will always be people who are satisfied with shite quality willing to pirate. The goal of the industry should be to fight the pirates the only way they can (through lawsuits) while simultaneously making it easier and more worthwhile for people not to become pirates in the first damned place.
You're a guy who steals children's movies because he's too cheap to buy them.
I'm a guy who exploits his legal right to back up content for archival purposes.
See a slight difference? If not, then maybe you can understand why I scorn you so deeply. I have maintained a three digit monthly budget for buying books, music and movies since I was 19, because I love art and want to experience it but also to support the people who create it. I am putting files I ripped from media I own on to DVD, because if it were lost, damaged or stolen, it would be prohibitively expensive to replace it. My friend lost his whole CD collection in a break-in, $3k worth of music in a single binder. That sucks and I don't want to have to worry about it, so I'm backing it up. Even the shitty stuff like my Damn Yankees records. I also backup all the stuff I get from iTunes...hard drives are fickle things and Apple only lets you download them once.
On the other hand, you have stolen films for little kids because you feel that paying for it is beneath you. It's not the same thing, is it?
Can you? Last I checked, there were three or four different levels of Ritek/Ridata discs and the highest grade was "pert' near" the top of the line. I ordered a 25 pack of those and a 25 pack of Taiyo Yudens expecting to use the former for crap discs (like stripping region coding from samurai films) and the latter for archiving my voluminous MP3 collection. I saw no difference in quality whatsoever, they both had very sturdy builds and the only coaster (if you can call it that, the whole disk is accessible except 100 meg at the end of the platter and that's probably my fault) I got was actually a Taiyo.
Of course, I'm sure Ritek makes some crap disks too in the lower grades. I don't know that this is what Amazon is selling, but I do know my spindles didn't look like the ones on their site.
Cigarettes are also pleasant to smoke. People don't do it just because they're addicted. I smoke a pack every month or two, I'm not addicted and have never had a non psychological craving. I just like smoking. So does my wife.
Guns were designed to kill things quickly and efficiently, thus they are more useful as a deterrant. Only a slim percentage of the guns produced have ever been used for this purpose.
And these media players DO play media...they just don't play media they aren't designed for. Your DVD won't play Region 2 DVDs, so what? It also won't play 8mm filmstrips.
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So answer this question:
Is it ethical to make a copy of someone else's creative or inventive ideas when their livelihood relies on the sale of those ideas -- and if so, why?
Wow, what a dark and insightful post. You must be very popular at the gothic coffehouse with ideas like that.
Riddle me this: what other political system is there that is as stable, prosperous and as helpful to the general populace as the democratic republic? And second, why aren't we using it?
Incidentally, the government also does the bidding of the poor and downtrodden. Like when they posted an officer in front on my co-worker's house when her ex-husband called saying he would murder her. Or when they helped fund my other coworker's adoption.
In fact, each of those incidents was worth far more of each person's share of taxation than this raid was to the taxes paid by the whole of the music industry. You might say these people got more for their tax dollars than the RIAA did. But in order to say that, you'd have to be more than an anti-corporate clown unable to realize that corporations have the same rights as small businesses -- and if somebody was hosting $250k of our company's software on a DC hub, I'd fucking want to know what the DOJ was gonna do about it, too.
Hey, don't mess with his argument man. Simple minded plans can't be complicated with logic or rational thought. It destroys their appeal.
Incidentally, I intend to buy a new camera and won't be paying any of my bills until I can afford one. That sounds like a plan, heh?
Actually, widespread copyright infringement IS a crime if the value is about $3000 (this certainly applies) and you can display an intent to profit. In some software piracy cases I've seen, the exchange of software was considered an intent to profit. Essentially, the trade of pirated software was its own profit, and I've experienced exactly that...you used to get one sought after game or program and leverage that to get whatever else you needed.
Jaysus, yet another fucking "Digital Property Is Somehow Different" troll.
Yes, downloading a digital file is different from stealing a CD. And grifting an old woman out of her pension funds is different from punching her in the stomach and taking it. And shooting a man in the neck is quite different from paying somebody else to do it.
But that doesn't make it right. It doesn't absolve the criminal. And as much as you want to quibble about infringement not being theft, it appears that a lot of people disagree with you. Not all of these people have anything to do with the RIAA. I don't have anything to do with the RIAA, but I think it takes major hubris to say there's nothing ethically wrong with casual copyright infrinigement just because there's no money involved.
Oh, and just to put that definitional quibble to rest: "to steal" is defined as "to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully." To appropriate without right with intent to make use of wrongfully. That sounds EXACTLY like copyright infringement. And since "theft" is "the act of stealing," it certainly does apply here. Maybe you don't want people to use the word theft because it makes casual copyright infringement sound bad. Maybe that's because it IS bad, and you don't want to admit it because it's so fun and so easy.
I dunno. Seems his one sentance argument is pretty compelling to me. But then again, I create things. I want a nice, firm delineation as to what control I have over those things.
Maybe if you saw the field from the other side of the fence, you might find more cadence in his argument. But if you think "oh this law helps out large corporations who MUST be monopolys and MUST be rich and therefore I am justified in doing WHATEVER I want..." you're obviously not involved with any smaller creative activities. My buddy runs a tiny little graphic design shop, and has had clients refuse to pay for what things actually cost to work on them. My buddy's response is to kindly inform them that until he transfers the copyright of the logo to them, using it is illegal and the damages are far greater than what he's asking. Generally, this gets the checkbooks open.
Anyhow, I don't see where this artificial argument about scarcity comes from in reference to music. There are many, many different artists and many, many different labels. CD prices range from $5 to $20. If you aren't willing to pay $20, you can get a CD from somebody else. In other markets, this is quite common. Don't want to pay $7 for a six pack of Heineken? A sixer of Bud is only $4. This is not evidence that Heineken has state-sponsored temporary monopoly that creates a scarcity which does not correspond to any state in reality and the recipe for Heineken should be given to many small companies who could then directly compete on a beer that tastes exactly like Heineken. If that's how you think economies should work, your commie ass should go back to Adam Smith and square one. If you have a fixed demand, you create just enough supply to match the price that maximizes profits. This isn't artifical scarcity. It's good planning.
Uh, duh. Most of the laws we have are created with input from those they would most directly affect. Would you want it any other way -- having laws about agriculture written by IT professionals or laws to protect copyrights written by schoolteachers? Of course, this means that a lot of the laws are self serving.
If you don't like that government is being run by corporations, you have an option: start a political watchdog group, get funding, inform voters and congressmen about what's really going on in the world. Lobbiests serve two purposes: swaying and informing. If all Congressman Spiff hears is how great it would be to extend copyrights to 70 years, what do you think he's gonna vote for?
Democracy's not perfect, but it is the best system ever invented for doing what's best for the country as a whole rather then what's best for a handful of politicians. But there's a secret to democracy: we're all foxes in the chicken coop, if we ACT like foxes. If you act like a chicken, expect to get eaten buddy.
Of course the media spin is to make it look like its more than it really is.
Not just media spin. If one guy downloads 250 songs, that's the same as 250 people downloading one song in terms of infringement. So being at the hub of 500 terabytes is bad regardless of how many of those terabytes are repeated.
100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs
.95 of a song before charging me for the soundwidth."
Ah, I see Ashcroft is using the world famous iPod scale of data density, which will some day eclipse the byte as the standard metric measurement of all data lengths and capacities.
"Hey ted, I'm going to attach pictures of the baby to this email."
"How big are the files?"
"1.25 songs."
"That's a no go, man. My mail server only allows up to
A picobit is measured as the smallest amount of significant information needed to enrage a conservative radio pundit.
Actually, some of the biggest problems with DVD quality -- specifically, the reduction in chromatic information and the subsequent tendency towards color bleed -- could be solved quite easily with more bits per pixel or block. That RGBCMY pixel TV wouldn't have to interpolate the halftones if they were IN the datastream already.
There are other great uses for this technology, such as putting the regular and directors cuts, wide and fullscreen versions all on the same disk with the same resolution, MULTIPLE resolutions on one disc to promote future higher definition technologies along with lower power small form factor playback devices and, of course, the nefarious possibility of putting a whole BUNCH of films on one disk and then selling the "keys" to play them. DivXL.
Positional audio is a trick designed to make up for poor speaker placement in unusually shaped rooms and cheaper electronics. You can achieve the same effect along with great clarity with a nice set of stereo speakers and a good, discrete, linear analog amp. I like to break it down like this for my friends:
How many ears do you have, and how many of those ears can detect bass?
If you have $1000 and the option of buying 2 speakers or 7 speakers, which set up will have higher quality speakers and by how much?
I've been watching DVDs on a pair of Event studio monitors (with McIntosh silk dome tweeters) for the past two months and I will take my setup over positional audio any day of the week. It's more subtle, the sound is more accurate, and you can actually tell the difference between digital audio and analog audio. Plus I don't have to run wires all over my goddamn living room.
Whoa. The problem is there are plenty of people in the world who don't understand or conveniently ignore the ethics involved. Heck, even here on Slashdot, where people should understand that digital content has value attached to it, there was a general consensus that pro-copyright morality shouldn't be taught in schools (spun as "we don't want the BSA lying to our kids").
You should never attack a problem on only one front. A combination of ethical debate to discourage pirating as a lifestyle, positive reinforcement through quality products and negative reinforcement through legal damages brought against copyright infringers is the most effective plan. It is not "sanction of the victim" or appeasement to change a policy which is obviously troublesome in the wake of a crisis. If somebody stole a stereo from an unlocked car, I'd start fucking locking my car. I wouldn't leave it unlocked with a sign that said "stealing stereos is a crime!"
As for "added-value" being a kludge...well, let's look at a few of the added value solutions that seem to be working pretty well. Cable television, bottled water, cellular phones, women's lingerie...all have taken a basic desire and created an industry around enhancing it in subtle ways. You can still watch tv, drink, talk on the phone, or wear underwear on a budget -- this hasn't buried any of these industries. In fact, the very suggestion that added value is a "kludge" is laughable, it flies in the face of reason, reflecting on the success of such industries over the past 150 years. They've beat the hell out of agriculture, steel and manufacturing.
Liquid measure is an unusual thing in the States, we're sort of schizophrenic about it. Milk, paint, gasoline and blood are all measured in "English" -- gallons, pints, quarts, ounces and the like. Soda pop, cooking oil and liquor are generally measured in metric. I say generally, because it's not so easy. Soda comes in 12oz, 16 oz, 1 litre, 32 oz (which is a bit less than a liter), 2 liter and 3 liter containers. Beer comes in 12 and 16oz bottles but hard liquor generally comes in 750 ml, 1 liter, 1.5 liter bottles.
I believe the schizophrenia stems from a desire for package uniformity in beverages that are also marketted overseas. But it does create wierd situations like going out for a gallon of milk and 2 liters of coke, or drinking 2 ounces of whiskey from a 750 ml bottle.
Incidentally, how many mililiters are there in a swig? Or, let's say, a metric shotglass? Do you get more liquor from a 2 oz shot or the metric equivalent -- and does the variance explain US policy with reference to the rest of the world?
The Supreme Court ruled that the transcoding of music to mp3s is covered by fair use 5 years ago. They ruled that people have the right to make archival copies of their software and their movies. It is only a matter of time before they rule against the DMCA in the case of DVDs and other media that require you to break the law to flex your rights. In the meantime, I will assume that the previous rulings still apply to me, as history is on my side -- and if Studio Ghibli or Toho want to sue me for copying their films so I can watch them, so be it. They have my email address.
And if you actually spent time counting your DVDs, that means that you were thinking about our argument and reconsidering your position. That's the best I can hope for. The morality of copyright violation is something that most people don't discuss -- and it took me YEARS to realize that just because it was easy and cheap to copy Summer Games using Renegade didn't mean it was right.
Shit man, you ever try carrying a 2 liter bottle around NYC? You wind up looking like this guy ! It's worth paying an extra $.11 and getting half as much to not look like an idiot. If it weren't, we'd all buy our clothes at Wal-Mart. Value is not simply a matter of material per dollar...there's the quality of the material and its applicability to your needs that must be considered.
Heck, most of the time generalizing something -- adding more material and/or features to it -- DECREASES its overall value. You hope to make it up in volume, but it's entirely possible that the generalization process will kill your product. If you've got X hours to spend on the creation of set of features, and you increase the size of the set, you decrease the time per feature. If a person only cares about three of the features -- and somebody spent their X hours on only those features -- your product will probably be inferior for their needs. Or soda in a machine -- $1.25 for 16 oz of Coke seems like a really big rip off until it's 2am and you're in the middle of nowhere, thirsty as hell.
Back to DVDs: the goal of the motion picture industry should be concentrating on what people WANT from a movie. It seems -- based completely unscientifically on what my friends tell me when THEY get new DVDS -- that people want high quality pictures with accurate multichannel sound, tons of interesting content (e.g. deleted scenes and backstage videos of the stars goofing off), attractive packaging (I know four guys who bought the Two Towers Ultimate set just because it came with a Gollum bookend) and early release, while the movie's still in the back of your mind. So-called copy protection isn't selling DVDs, isn't stopping illegal copies and isn't making it easier to pursue damages from infringement, so why bother?
As somebody who loves the public domain (all of my photos are public domain, as is any software I release to newsgroups, etc), I'd like to take this a step further. I'd like to see more artists taking the public domain seriously and VOLUNTARILY dropping their copyrights the way many older software companies are releasing their old software under the GPL.
I don't think the current state of copyright would seem so bad if only there were more artists who didn't treat copyright as a tiger cage. Exclusive copyright for 70 years past the owner's death doesn't make sense for most things -- they lose relevancy and thus their market value -- so let them go when they start becoming unprofitable. There are hundreds of Bob Dylan songs and not all of them are worth paying for...but I'd use them if they were free. I mean, where's the demand for "Talking John Birch Blues" or "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" for any use other than satire?
Artists are moving to independent labels at record rates. They need promotion and open access to their back catalogs could help provide that. It would also make the artistic community that much better.
There are many people in this country who seem to believe that military service should also be lip service. To them, serving a near invisible career like Bush did is far better than being decorated in battle, and then speaking out against the senselessness of the battle in the first place.
This is bullshit. A soldier does what he's told, it's true, but he doesn't have to like it. Mindlessly following orders leads to the recent prison abuses and the atrocities of the second World War. My buddy's a marine in Iraq -- about George Bush, he says "I can't believe I work for that asshole." Ex-Amnesty chapter president, this guy quotes freely from Siddhartha and used to love reading about communism and the IRA -- but if you're an insurgent with a weapon pointed at his platoon, he will shoot you in the head.
I thought the whole point of freedom of speech was to protect minority opinions. But I'm having kind of a bad day politically, anyway...I just found out that Cheney and I share an opinion on the subject of gay marriage, and therefore I should probably stop referring to him as "that fucking gargoyle."
Go man, go! I wish more people realized patriotism wasn't all magnetic ribbons and flag t-shirts. There is no country in the world I'd rather be in than the United States of America, even when I'm not proud of our policies.
My motto is "America: Love it or Change it." Because you goddamn can. Most of the pride I feel in America is due to the fact that we all have the right to argue and fight for whatever we believe in, not in the fact that we're inherently "better" than everybody else. We'll see America's superiority fall in our lifetime, and I'll still be damned proud of it.
No, but it is a solution to increasing the value of the product. And value is the reason people buy things.
I mean, there are lots of people who buy DVDs of content freely available on the internet. Atom films and many of the Flash animation sites generate healthy profit from DVD sales and I'm surely gonna buy that Strong Bad's 100th Email DVD when it comes out, even though I have all 111 flash files on a DVD already...
Why? Because the quality is better and the format is more attractive and convenient. Making the assumption that it is going to be rather difficult to stop piracy, one way for the industry to encourage people to buy films is to create formats that have even HIGHER quality with even MORE convenience and to release them SOONER in even nicer packages.
DVD is a first good step towards that goal...tape sales used to be sort of an afterthought, just another use for movies that were intended to make money during their theatre run. Now, DVD sales might bring in a substantial percentage of a film's take, and some media (especially TV series and indie films) make MORE money on DVD then they did first run. As a result, the industry is releasing movies earlier and with more extras than you'll find in a 700 meg XVid file.
There will always be people who are satisfied with shite quality willing to pirate. The goal of the industry should be to fight the pirates the only way they can (through lawsuits) while simultaneously making it easier and more worthwhile for people not to become pirates in the first damned place.
You're a guy who steals children's movies because he's too cheap to buy them.
I'm a guy who exploits his legal right to back up content for archival purposes.
See a slight difference? If not, then maybe you can understand why I scorn you so deeply. I have maintained a three digit monthly budget for buying books, music and movies since I was 19, because I love art and want to experience it but also to support the people who create it. I am putting files I ripped from media I own on to DVD, because if it were lost, damaged or stolen, it would be prohibitively expensive to replace it. My friend lost his whole CD collection in a break-in, $3k worth of music in a single binder. That sucks and I don't want to have to worry about it, so I'm backing it up. Even the shitty stuff like my Damn Yankees records. I also backup all the stuff I get from iTunes...hard drives are fickle things and Apple only lets you download them once.
On the other hand, you have stolen films for little kids because you feel that paying for it is beneath you. It's not the same thing, is it?
Can you? Last I checked, there were three or four different levels of Ritek/Ridata discs and the highest grade was "pert' near" the top of the line. I ordered a 25 pack of those and a 25 pack of Taiyo Yudens expecting to use the former for crap discs (like stripping region coding from samurai films) and the latter for archiving my voluminous MP3 collection. I saw no difference in quality whatsoever, they both had very sturdy builds and the only coaster (if you can call it that, the whole disk is accessible except 100 meg at the end of the platter and that's probably my fault) I got was actually a Taiyo.
Of course, I'm sure Ritek makes some crap disks too in the lower grades. I don't know that this is what Amazon is selling, but I do know my spindles didn't look like the ones on their site.
Wow, those Truth commercials got to you, too, huh?
Incidentally, medicare coverage for cancer drugs is notoriously fowl. Taxpayers aren't paying for shit.
Cigarettes are also pleasant to smoke. People don't do it just because they're addicted. I smoke a pack every month or two, I'm not addicted and have never had a non psychological craving. I just like smoking. So does my wife.
Guns were designed to kill things quickly and efficiently, thus they are more useful as a deterrant. Only a slim percentage of the guns produced have ever been used for this purpose.
And these media players DO play media...they just don't play media they aren't designed for. Your DVD won't play Region 2 DVDs, so what? It also won't play 8mm filmstrips.