its important to actually read the opinions of the court. its far FAR more complex than simple First Sale Doctrine.
There are multiple sections of the United Staes Code related to first sale, copyright, and importation, that are all at odds here, or at least not compeltely in agreement.
Some of these sections have a geographical limitation/interpretation, which is why the fact these books were manufactured outside the country was relevant. some of the sections relating to first sale imply it only applied within the country, to things made in the country, though the court has seemingly said it should be interpretted universally.
In the dissenting opinion, theres other considerations that come out. such as, that one of the intents of the copyright act of 1976 (the main law affecting the decision) was to protect american manufacturers against the importation of cheap knockoffs made by someone else. Now its key to note that in this case, the books were still made by the same company, or one of its subsidieries. But the decision does seem to open the door for copyright knockoff/imitations made by other people. its not specifically or concretely addressed (that i can see), so its still a gray market area, but the door is now wider than before.
Im not arguing for or against, I'm just saying, its actualy a really complicated case, and the justices set out to clarify a great many things, as you can see if you read the opinions, both Concurring and Dissenting.
Yes, but evenw hen they dissent its almost rarely because they believe "Corporation GOOD!" or at least not transparently. it's couched in an interpretation of the law. they are still doing their jobs, but the law is a complex thing, and it can be interpretted many ways. its not like mathmatics where an expression can only be avulated one way. in law, priority of evaluation can shift.
when theymade that personhood decision many years ago, they had no way of forseeing the world we live in today where the corporations (rather than daddy warbucks who owns a company) are the biggest campaign contributors and buying/selling laws willy nilly in the Congress. they couldnt forsee how Citizens United decision would come along and interact with that previous decision and unleash holy hell.
the court's job is to interpret and validate the law as written, not rewrite it to meet our ideas of what it should be. the job of rewriting it belongs to the legislature. and that's why the law needs adjustment to reflect that while corporations must abide their contracts (the reason for personhood status in the first place), corporations need not be given ALL rights attributed to actual persons.
Superstition? You've obviously never been to downtown Atlanta or Memphis. He could have ben eating babies instead of kissing them, and still gotten all the votes.
Course, what do we expect...this is the guy writing for Gears of War, one of the most unimpressive stories (and game franchises) I've yet encountered. Oh ya. I went there.
This quote right here proved the author was dumb beyond belief: "At the same time, though, pure storytelling is never going to be the thing that games do better than anything."
Similar was said about movies, about TV shows. hell, I'll bet if we go back far enough they even said it about books when storytelling still meant sitting around the fireplace listening to Grandfather.
Some games tell very weak stories. So do many books and films. Some games tell very powerful stories. Also like many books and films.
The medium itself neither imparts nor removes any special storytelling ability. It never has.
The ability to tell a story has always been strictly in the hands of the storyteller himself, and his ability to use the medium to effectively communicate the story and impart emotions and perceptions to the listener/viewer.
you completely missed hte oint of the article. it's saying that the neilsen is dead precisely because it cant accurately measure the viewership of shows. not when people are watching them on Hulu (who shows pretty much the same adds the broadcast station does BTW, including for the same two bit hot dog shop), or Tivo, or on an HTPC, or simply downloading them.
"TV" is o longer just the broadcast signal. Yet that is still the only metric Nielsen actually measures for viewership, completely ignoring all the rest. And then networks make decisions based off that "viewership", when its error rate is astronomically high nowadays.
Nielsen can still be relevant, but they seriously need to update their methodlogy
Unethical? Dishonest? How? For pointing out the pointlessness of symbolic gestures? You either act on something you believe in, or you dont.
It's equivalent to thinking you're going to Heaven cause you go to church on sunday, and are a straight up arsehat the rest of the week. Or saying "ugh, I'm too fat and out of shape, I need to workout"...and then grabbing another bag of cheetos and plopping onto the couch. People want these gestures because they want to believe they can change....they just dont actually want to change.
Unethical? Dishonest? No, quite hte opposite. I dont do these symbolic things precisely because they are dishonest. I do those common sense, every day "things" that are within my ability. I dont need a symbolic thing to make myself feel better. Just like try to be a good Christian every day, not just on Sunday.
Symbolic gestures are meaningless. It falls into one of two categories: preaching to the choir, or hypocrisy. More usually hypocrisy from what I seen.
you completely missed the point. the point being, i question the notion of whether google has enough $$$ to do it, because these are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world.
So why just do it symbolicly? Why not do it all the time?
that right there is the self-contained hypocrisy of the entire notion of hte symbolic hour of non-use.
You only want to do the symbolic gesture, cause you dont actually want to give up your A/C, your furnace, your comfortable house outside the city the requires a commute, your high tech toys.
In order words, you dont REALLY care. You just want to feel good for a minute or two, tell yourself you're not such a bad person, tell yourself "i can quit if i want to"...
keep in mind, digging equipment is big and heavy on earth because it has to be; it has to support its weight and the weight of material. but on the moon, that weight is much less. an earth mover that could support a 40ton load on earth could support ~240tons on the moon.
And a 15ft tunnel borer could fit in the shuttle bay. For simplicity though, probably just put it on a heavy lifter and inside an aero shell. Once boosted to orbit, fit it with robotic guidance and rocket package to get it to the moon. Once initial tunnels are cleared out and end caps in place, ordinary human and robotic labor can mine out chambers by hand, or with such equipment as is needed.
And there's also always that most classic of mining tools, from the time before big machinery: Dynamite.
Leaving aside that there are much permanant human life in the desert, arctic, and mountain monestaries...humans also have a vast capability to bring supplies with them. Subs stay submerged for as many as 9 months at a time. 500 people, tiny metal tube, enough food for 9 months.
You're only helping make my point: these are solved engineering problems. and while i made no mention of cost, like it or not, the cost of not doing it on the moon (such as say, in orbit, or on earth's surface) is far greater.
One of those members now includes Comcast. Comcast, the company that went, cash in hand, and tried to buy Disney outright a few years ago. all of it. the studio, the subsidieries, the parks. All of it. Cash. In. Hand.
Disney said no. So they bought NBC instead. Disney meanwhile bought Marvel outright. And that oncluded their movies too.
So ya, sure, they can be bought, these RIAA and MPAA members....But I'm not so sure google has the money to do so.
And if they did have that much, it's like tying an anchor around your neck, in the sense they then become beholden to the means and methods those members have been using to make that much money.
The desert was hostile too. So was the arctic. And the ocean. And beneath it. And atmosphere above 15k feet. Hostility to human life is simply an engineering problem, and each of these, including space, has been solved.
Moon base construction 101: First off, large facilities on the surface are out the window, unless absolutely needed. Good for TV, bad for actual use.
Everything that can be gets built/housed under the surface. Companies and engineers with experience building pressure tight subsurface/subsea tunnels could make a killing bringing that experience to the moon. Again, it's a solved engineering problem. This solves the multiple problems of pressure vessel, habitat, dominant construction material, meteorite impact, and so on.
Main objective of the base? If it's not science, then it must be industry. Which makes perfect sense actually. There are vast resources in the solar system to be exploited, but returning them to Earth to be refined is problematic. We can't really get them down to the surface easily...and if they're destined to go back into space, thats rather hard to do on a large scale too. And refining in orbit is problematic because of multiple factors: some processes require gravity, orbital stations need to be protected from debris, large enough to do meaningful refinement, yet small enough to be launched into orbit.... But the moon simplifies a lot of these. You dont need to build the large space station or launch it (re, first apragraph stuff). Still has gravity, which keeps many existing refining processes practical (ie, no need develope new special process that may not yeild results that conform to known engineering..such as steel alloy design/use). Yet not nearly as big of a gravity well, so getting on and off the surface is much easier.
Do the refining there, and then send the finished material back to Earth (if that's its destination). Much more useful to send 6 tons (let's say) of finished steel (again, let's say) back to earth, than 6 tons of unprocessed iron ore that would only yeild say 2-3 tons of finished steel. Or if its destined to be used in space, good news, cause it's already there. Nearly. Certainly far easier than climbing back out of earth's gravity well. Long duration mission to Mars, sending more than a handful of folks on a scientific journey? Need a fairly large, comfortable, transport for them, more than a traditional capsule? Build it on the moon!
Plus doing it for the first time on the moon, getting the experience, learning the engineering lessons that ALWAYS result from these sorts of endeavors, relatively safe and near to home, instead of doing it for the first time a billion miles and 3 years away.
Back then there also wasnt enough power and speed behind the internet to allow it to do anything it does today, let alone the myriad tracking techniques. when it took multiple seconds just to transfer and load a text only page, there was no room to also be sending back to the server information about your history; it would have eaten up far too much bandwidth.
now, all that stuff happens in the blink of an eye...and doesnt even interupt the latest Netflix instant play.
you say there werent a lot of trackers back then. you're right. the internet couldnt support them. but it also wasnt anywhere near what it is today either.
the "grown up" analogy is very apt. As a kid, you know very little of the world around you. You jsut want to go outside and play, explore, whatever. The thought of losing a job and not being able to eat never even occurs to you. Those realities dont come til later. As a grownup, you know about bills, being able to afford food/medical/whatever, loss, etc etc.
The loss of innocence is a real thing, and it's occuring to the internet. Trying to go back to the gold old days is like wanting to go back to being a kid who knows nothing about war, loss, stress, etc. The best we can do is learn how to cope with the realities, adapt to them, and not let them overwhelm us.
We want free content on the internet? We want good prices? That means advertisers. And that means tracking. Companies dont want to waste time serving you ads that wont be effective, or showcasing you a sale you wont use. Part of being a good salesmen is reading your customer, and figuring out what else you can get him to buy. And on the internet, that reading is done by tracking. This is the internet as it exists today, and there is no way it would have ever happened any differently. If it had, it wouldnt be the internet we have today: -there would be no Facebook; people would still chat over the back fence -no Google; people would be buying Brittanica still instead -no movies/content on demand; Blockbuster wouldnt be bankrupt -no instant information an anything anywhere; people would still be going to libraries for knowledge/research -no instant dissemination of news/events; people would still be using wire services and newspapers to know about events, -no buying of some obscure/custom part from across the world quickly and easily (wouldnt even know they exist!); be limited to who you could find out about via word of mouth or the research open to you (no hundreds of google results)
And as a result, no one would be using it. It would still be a very relatively small, cloistered group of people talking in an echo chamber. Each of the things the internet allows us to do, we could already do before. The internet just makes it far, FAR easier. A vastly bigger network of points of contacts for the gathering/dissemination of information.
This is the internet as it exists today. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And it could never have gotten to where it is today, in any other way.
Because of what precisely insurance is, they -SHOULD- be charging you higher premiums when you're in a higher risk group. That's how insurance works. Being a means of sharing costs by sharings risks, they effectively do need to know that you're drinking your liver to death, or smoking 10 packs a day, or committing suicide via Big MacGulp. If you're more likely to get sick and need care, and thus use more of the shared funds, then you logically should be contributing more to the shared pool. That's the price of playing that particular game (and now you no longer get a choice about it).
Now I'll agree about *some* inferrences because of your neighbors or location being dumb (some make sense, such as not leaving your house across the street from Fukishima, or a white guy living in Harlem).
Did you know it used to be impossible for military personel to even get health or life insurance? That, afterall, is how USAA came to be.
No, what happens is people whine and moan about the DRM, but buy the game anyway, fully expecting for these hacks and cracks to be created.
Everyone wins. The customers get to whine and moan...and after waiting for a week, get to play anyway. The hackers get to "stick it to EA". In theory. And EA still moves units, because now that there is a way around the onerous "feature", there no real reason to not buy and enjoy the game.
Slashdot Mirror
Link to opinions: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-697_d1o2.pdf
Main opinion is first.
Concurring opinion begins at 38.
Dissenting (written by Ginsburg) begins on page 42.
its important to actually read the opinions of the court. its far FAR more complex than simple First Sale Doctrine.
There are multiple sections of the United Staes Code related to first sale, copyright, and importation, that are all at odds here, or at least not compeltely in agreement.
Some of these sections have a geographical limitation/interpretation, which is why the fact these books were manufactured outside the country was relevant. some of the sections relating to first sale imply it only applied within the country, to things made in the country, though the court has seemingly said it should be interpretted universally.
In the dissenting opinion, theres other considerations that come out. such as, that one of the intents of the copyright act of 1976 (the main law affecting the decision) was to protect american manufacturers against the importation of cheap knockoffs made by someone else. Now its key to note that in this case, the books were still made by the same company, or one of its subsidieries. But the decision does seem to open the door for copyright knockoff/imitations made by other people. its not specifically or concretely addressed (that i can see), so its still a gray market area, but the door is now wider than before.
Im not arguing for or against, I'm just saying, its actualy a really complicated case, and the justices set out to clarify a great many things, as you can see if you read the opinions, both Concurring and Dissenting.
Yes, but evenw hen they dissent its almost rarely because they believe "Corporation GOOD!" or at least not transparently. it's couched in an interpretation of the law. they are still doing their jobs, but the law is a complex thing, and it can be interpretted many ways. its not like mathmatics where an expression can only be avulated one way. in law, priority of evaluation can shift.
when theymade that personhood decision many years ago, they had no way of forseeing the world we live in today where the corporations (rather than daddy warbucks who owns a company) are the biggest campaign contributors and buying/selling laws willy nilly in the Congress. they couldnt forsee how Citizens United decision would come along and interact with that previous decision and unleash holy hell.
the court's job is to interpret and validate the law as written, not rewrite it to meet our ideas of what it should be. the job of rewriting it belongs to the legislature. and that's why the law needs adjustment to reflect that while corporations must abide their contracts (the reason for personhood status in the first place), corporations need not be given ALL rights attributed to actual persons.
Superstition? You've obviously never been to downtown Atlanta or Memphis. He could have ben eating babies instead of kissing them, and still gotten all the votes.
I would also through into the "Great Story" list:
Zork (all of them)
Planescape Tormet
Baldurs Gate 1/2
Diablo 1/2Warcraft
Starcraft
Xenogears
Anachronox
Most of the Zeldas
Ultima 3/4
Full Throttle
actually man, theres so many as i keep digging in my memory.
Course, what do we expect...this is the guy writing for Gears of War, one of the most unimpressive stories (and game franchises) I've yet encountered.
Oh ya. I went there.
This quote right here proved the author was dumb beyond belief: "At the same time, though, pure storytelling is never going to be the thing that games do better than anything."
Similar was said about movies, about TV shows. hell, I'll bet if we go back far enough they even said it about books when storytelling still meant sitting around the fireplace listening to Grandfather.
Some games tell very weak stories. So do many books and films.
Some games tell very powerful stories. Also like many books and films.
The medium itself neither imparts nor removes any special storytelling ability. It never has.
The ability to tell a story has always been strictly in the hands of the storyteller himself, and his ability to use the medium to effectively communicate the story and impart emotions and perceptions to the listener/viewer.
Someone needs to tell Fox about this stuff, so they'll stop canceling all the good shows in favor of more unreality garbage.
you completely missed hte oint of the article. it's saying that the neilsen is dead precisely because it cant accurately measure the viewership of shows. not when people are watching them on Hulu (who shows pretty much the same adds the broadcast station does BTW, including for the same two bit hot dog shop), or Tivo, or on an HTPC, or simply downloading them.
"TV" is o longer just the broadcast signal. Yet that is still the only metric Nielsen actually measures for viewership, completely ignoring all the rest. And then networks make decisions based off that "viewership", when its error rate is astronomically high nowadays.
Nielsen can still be relevant, but they seriously need to update their methodlogy
Unethical? Dishonest? How? For pointing out the pointlessness of symbolic gestures? You either act on something you believe in, or you dont.
It's equivalent to thinking you're going to Heaven cause you go to church on sunday, and are a straight up arsehat the rest of the week.
Or saying "ugh, I'm too fat and out of shape, I need to workout"...and then grabbing another bag of cheetos and plopping onto the couch.
People want these gestures because they want to believe they can change....they just dont actually want to change.
Unethical? Dishonest? No, quite hte opposite. I dont do these symbolic things precisely because they are dishonest. I do those common sense, every day "things" that are within my ability. I dont need a symbolic thing to make myself feel better. Just like try to be a good Christian every day, not just on Sunday.
Symbolic gestures are meaningless. It falls into one of two categories: preaching to the choir, or hypocrisy. More usually hypocrisy from what I seen.
you completely missed the point. the point being, i question the notion of whether google has enough $$$ to do it, because these are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world.
So why just do it symbolicly? Why not do it all the time?
that right there is the self-contained hypocrisy of the entire notion of hte symbolic hour of non-use.
You only want to do the symbolic gesture, cause you dont actually want to give up your A/C, your furnace, your comfortable house outside the city the requires a commute, your high tech toys.
In order words, you dont REALLY care.
You just want to feel good for a minute or two, tell yourself you're not such a bad person, tell yourself "i can quit if i want to"...
keep in mind, digging equipment is big and heavy on earth because it has to be; it has to support its weight and the weight of material. but on the moon, that weight is much less. an earth mover that could support a 40ton load on earth could support ~240tons on the moon.
And a 15ft tunnel borer could fit in the shuttle bay. For simplicity though, probably just put it on a heavy lifter and inside an aero shell. Once boosted to orbit, fit it with robotic guidance and rocket package to get it to the moon. Once initial tunnels are cleared out and end caps in place, ordinary human and robotic labor can mine out chambers by hand, or with such equipment as is needed.
And there's also always that most classic of mining tools, from the time before big machinery: Dynamite.
Leaving aside that there are much permanant human life in the desert, arctic, and mountain monestaries...humans also have a vast capability to bring supplies with them. Subs stay submerged for as many as 9 months at a time. 500 people, tiny metal tube, enough food for 9 months.
You're only helping make my point: these are solved engineering problems. and while i made no mention of cost, like it or not, the cost of not doing it on the moon (such as say, in orbit, or on earth's surface) is far greater.
One of those members now includes Comcast. Comcast, the company that went, cash in hand, and tried to buy Disney outright a few years ago. all of it. the studio, the subsidieries, the parks. All of it. Cash. In. Hand.
Disney said no.
So they bought NBC instead.
Disney meanwhile bought Marvel outright. And that oncluded their movies too.
So ya, sure, they can be bought, these RIAA and MPAA members....But I'm not so sure google has the money to do so.
And if they did have that much, it's like tying an anchor around your neck, in the sense they then become beholden to the means and methods those members have been using to make that much money.
The desert was hostile too.
So was the arctic.
And the ocean.
And beneath it.
And atmosphere above 15k feet.
Hostility to human life is simply an engineering problem, and each of these, including space, has been solved.
Moon base construction 101:
First off, large facilities on the surface are out the window, unless absolutely needed. Good for TV, bad for actual use.
Everything that can be gets built/housed under the surface. Companies and engineers with experience building pressure tight subsurface/subsea tunnels could make a killing bringing that experience to the moon. Again, it's a solved engineering problem. This solves the multiple problems of pressure vessel, habitat, dominant construction material, meteorite impact, and so on.
Main objective of the base? If it's not science, then it must be industry. Which makes perfect sense actually. There are vast resources in the solar system to be exploited, but returning them to Earth to be refined is problematic. We can't really get them down to the surface easily...and if they're destined to go back into space, thats rather hard to do on a large scale too. And refining in orbit is problematic because of multiple factors: some processes require gravity, orbital stations need to be protected from debris, large enough to do meaningful refinement, yet small enough to be launched into orbit.... But the moon simplifies a lot of these. You dont need to build the large space station or launch it (re, first apragraph stuff). Still has gravity, which keeps many existing refining processes practical (ie, no need develope new special process that may not yeild results that conform to known engineering..such as steel alloy design/use). Yet not nearly as big of a gravity well, so getting on and off the surface is much easier.
Do the refining there, and then send the finished material back to Earth (if that's its destination). Much more useful to send 6 tons (let's say) of finished steel (again, let's say) back to earth, than 6 tons of unprocessed iron ore that would only yeild say 2-3 tons of finished steel. Or if its destined to be used in space, good news, cause it's already there. Nearly. Certainly far easier than climbing back out of earth's gravity well. Long duration mission to Mars, sending more than a handful of folks on a scientific journey? Need a fairly large, comfortable, transport for them, more than a traditional capsule? Build it on the moon!
Plus doing it for the first time on the moon, getting the experience, learning the engineering lessons that ALWAYS result from these sorts of endeavors, relatively safe and near to home, instead of doing it for the first time a billion miles and 3 years away.
Translation: get off my lawn! Damn kids.
Back then there also wasnt enough power and speed behind the internet to allow it to do anything it does today, let alone the myriad tracking techniques.
when it took multiple seconds just to transfer and load a text only page, there was no room to also be sending back to the server information about your history; it would have eaten up far too much bandwidth.
now, all that stuff happens in the blink of an eye...and doesnt even interupt the latest Netflix instant play.
you say there werent a lot of trackers back then. you're right. the internet couldnt support them. but it also wasnt anywhere near what it is today either.
the "grown up" analogy is very apt. As a kid, you know very little of the world around you. You jsut want to go outside and play, explore, whatever. The thought of losing a job and not being able to eat never even occurs to you. Those realities dont come til later. As a grownup, you know about bills, being able to afford food/medical/whatever, loss, etc etc.
The loss of innocence is a real thing, and it's occuring to the internet. Trying to go back to the gold old days is like wanting to go back to being a kid who knows nothing about war, loss, stress, etc. The best we can do is learn how to cope with the realities, adapt to them, and not let them overwhelm us.
We want free content on the internet? We want good prices? That means advertisers. And that means tracking. Companies dont want to waste time serving you ads that wont be effective, or showcasing you a sale you wont use. Part of being a good salesmen is reading your customer, and figuring out what else you can get him to buy. And on the internet, that reading is done by tracking. This is the internet as it exists today, and there is no way it would have ever happened any differently. If it had, it wouldnt be the internet we have today:
-there would be no Facebook; people would still chat over the back fence
-no Google; people would be buying Brittanica still instead
-no movies/content on demand; Blockbuster wouldnt be bankrupt
-no instant information an anything anywhere; people would still be going to libraries for knowledge/research
-no instant dissemination of news/events; people would still be using wire services and newspapers to know about events,
-no buying of some obscure/custom part from across the world quickly and easily (wouldnt even know they exist!); be limited to who you could find out about via word of mouth or the research open to you (no hundreds of google results)
And as a result, no one would be using it. It would still be a very relatively small, cloistered group of people talking in an echo chamber. Each of the things the internet allows us to do, we could already do before. The internet just makes it far, FAR easier. A vastly bigger network of points of contacts for the gathering/dissemination of information.
This is the internet as it exists today. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
And it could never have gotten to where it is today, in any other way.
Because of what precisely insurance is, they -SHOULD- be charging you higher premiums when you're in a higher risk group. That's how insurance works. Being a means of sharing costs by sharings risks, they effectively do need to know that you're drinking your liver to death, or smoking 10 packs a day, or committing suicide via Big MacGulp. If you're more likely to get sick and need care, and thus use more of the shared funds, then you logically should be contributing more to the shared pool. That's the price of playing that particular game (and now you no longer get a choice about it).
Now I'll agree about *some* inferrences because of your neighbors or location being dumb (some make sense, such as not leaving your house across the street from Fukishima, or a white guy living in Harlem).
Did you know it used to be impossible for military personel to even get health or life insurance? That, afterall, is how USAA came to be.
You boys know what makes this bird go up? FUNDING makes this bird go up. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
I declare you the winner of the internets for today
should read some of the replies to your link, also very informative. Such as http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3038505&cid=40946013
HEY HEY HEY!
Get that common sense out of here!
No, what happens is people whine and moan about the DRM, but buy the game anyway, fully expecting for these hacks and cracks to be created.
Everyone wins.
The customers get to whine and moan...and after waiting for a week, get to play anyway.
The hackers get to "stick it to EA". In theory.
And EA still moves units, because now that there is a way around the onerous "feature", there no real reason to not buy and enjoy the game.