Industry shills are constantly trying to convince the public that piracy = theft, but punishments like this make it seem more like piracy = murder. In my home state, anyway, "a person convicted of the offense of retail theft of merchandise having a retail value not in excess of $100.00 shall be punished by a fine of not more than $300.00 or imprisonment for not more than six months, or both." Torrent the same CD, however, and you're out $150,000 ($10,000/song, assuming 15 songs on a CD).
Note to potential downloaders: just steal the goods you want. You'll get off a lot lighter that way.
but I have worked in intellectual property for quite some time, and have seen many patents on both facial recognition and using biometrics to authenticate computer sessions. I would be really curious to see the paperwork with the USPTO from filing to allowance – I have a hard time believing that this isn't something that a person of ordinary skill in the art could arrive at by combining some sort of existing facial recognition technique with an existing biometric authentication technique, so it would be interesting to see what was going on inside the examiner's head.
For my part I don't really know who to trust. How do I know that PrivateInternetAccess is a legit service, and that they are really doing what they say they do? If I'm going to pay for a VPN service, I definitely want to be sure that they are solid.
"But the latest textbook enhancements, which require individual access codes to get to bonus materials online..."
Yeah, just like you can get your "enhanced" DRM-crippled DVDs or e-books with "bonus" content. Throw in a little extra crap to take peoples' attention away from the fact that they're paying more for a crippled version of the same old product.
...I never buy digital content anymore -- because in most cases I'm not "buying" it. Regardless of what the fine print says on a CD or a print book, there is still no way, short of the cops busting down my door and taking my stuff from me by force, for someone to prevent me from pretty much doing what I please with those articles.
Still, what now passes for "ownership" (and "privacy", while I'm at it) are starting to shock me as I take a step back and look at what is going on with digital content distribution, social media and networking, and so on. The newer generations seem generally accepting of the new paradigm, but it's slowly driving me into digital hermithood.
I am a parent. Holding my newborn daughter in the hospital room, singing to her some of the songs we had played for her when she was in my wife's belly, trying unsuccessfully to choke back the tears of joy and amazement as I gazed into her eyes -- it was without a doubt the most amazing experience of my life. The idea of subjecting that beautiful, fragile, and innocent baby to the kind of trauma and pain that circumcision entails is something I could never dream of doing. Honestly, I'd rather walk into traffic or jump off a building.
And that's not even touching the logical arguments against circumcision, which are pretty much airtight.
A lot of people would tar and feather him, figuratively. Countless more would accept the judgment as the new way things are done. I don't know if you've had a chat with the regular (i.e. non-geek) people around you, but I'll be dollars to donuts that they are alarmingly ignorant of the finer details of copyright, piracy, big content's lobbying measures, and so on. And even if one terrible judgment blew up and was thrown out, big content is unrelenting, and they'll get three more rammed through while people are still celebrating about the first being tossed.
Not to be a wet blanket, but I just don't have that much faith in a critical mass of people having what it takes to prevent their lives from slowly but surely sliding down the toilet.
See the comment below re: circumvention for reasons why big content will probably win eventually, and why the citizenry will lose in the process. It's all about creating such restrictive legislation that people have no wiggle room. Somewhere there is some bought-and-paid-for judge who will happily rule that, say, having a Bittorrent client installed on your computer is equivalent to conspiracy to commit copyright fraud. All big content needs is for the legislative framework to be in place, and then they will go about slashing and burning the remnants of digital freedom with glee, and since there are already scores of elected representatives that are a toxic combination of a) clueless about how tech really works and b) bought and paid for by lobbyists, that's not much of a problem, either.
Yeah, I understand that, but some of my clueless clients still use it and are too computer illiterate to understand the complexities of advanced programs like 7zip and Winrar, and I'm having a hell of a time getting folders I encrypted through Winrar/7zip in Win 7 to open properly with the Windows XP default extraction tool. Not the end of the world, but a bit of a pain nonetheless.
Anyway, as for the negatives listed above, I understand the problem with upgrade costs. Personally I held onto my XP machine until it was time to upgrade and then bought a 7 machine, so the cost wasn't an issue. I'm not a programmer so I can't speak to the guts of the OS, but it took me all of one afternoon to figure out what was different in terms of the UI, and I was up to full productivity pretty much right away. More, actually, because everything runs a hell of a lot faster. (Oh, and the built-in speech recognition is as good, if not better, than Dragon Naturally Speaking, so if you use voice recognition Windows 7 almost pays for itself right there.)
I just don't get what inspires the Windows 7 hate. I can't think of anything that overtly sucks about it, anyway.
Nobody NEEDS the RIAA or the major labels anymore.
Which is exactly why the RIAA and the major labels are spending all this lobbying money: to legislate themselves into relevance. What consumers need won't matter once every alternative channel has been demolished by our elected representatives just going along with the RIAA bullshit.
Is Windows 7 really that bad? I spent about 10 minutes customizing it and find it to be a much better experience than XP. The only thing that chews my balls is the lack of an included utility to password-protect.zip files, but aside from that, I can't think of anything I really dislike about it.
I'd like to agree, but look at how widespread Steam (which is basically glorified DRM) is now. Even physical copies of games are linked uniquely to your Steam account. The current gaming demographic will age, and soon the younger generations will never have known anything different.
You can download a pirated version of a game that just works, or you can buy a legit copy that is crippled by design. Hard fucking choice. Haven't these companies learned *anything* from the music DRM fiascos a few years back?
On the one hand, you could find tons of people who would have no problem looking at "objectionable content." On the other hand, probably very few of them would find the content objectionable in the first place.
...are required, so why not GMO labeling? It strikes me as the same thing. Why *wouldn't* you want to know exactly what is in the food you are eating?
What's more is that labeling GMO foods as such actually increases consumer access to information, which is one of the fundamental tenets of competition in the free market economy. The pseudo-conservative horde is always up in arms about labeling as being anti-free market when in fact the opposite is true.
You seem to underestimate the whole "marketing" thing. It plays hand-in-hand with products that cannot be upgraded -- which is the case for every single piece of Apple hardware, save the highest-end Mac Pro. A product cycle of 1-2 years designed to make you feel like your perfectly good hardware sucks combined with the inability to un-suckify your hardware is huge.
That's the basic message these industry groups have sent again and again. I'm sick and tired of being guilt-tripped by anti-piracy campaigns when it's the producers of those same campaigns that have been giving the artists they claim to represent the short end of the stick for decades now.
Frankly, it astonishes me that this is even a question in this day and age, and that an idea of a "sexual harassment jar" is even being floated. Stiff penalties like no vacations days? Are you kidding? You do realize that SOP has people *terminated* from their jobs for sexual harassment, right?
I've never been sexually harassed but I worked in an office in Japan, where the laws are much more lax and sexual harassment is far more prevalent. There were many instances of sexual harassment and the effect it had on a couple of coworkers was devastating and terrible to watch, and was one of the main reasons I left that workplace very quickly. People have already given you the legal reasons for taking this stuff seriously; you should consider the moral reasons as well.
You need to look beyond the bare economics for the consumer to see what all the hidden costs are. Wal-mart stuff is cheaper, but it's also of far inferior quality, which means you need to replace the stuff far more frequently, which means more and more needs to be produced, which ends up costing the consumer the same amount in the end and meanwhile is polluting the shit out of the Asian countryside. Food is cheaper because it comes from massive corporations who are up to their necks in government subsidies. And so on and so forth. It's *never* as simple as "good products for low prices."
Slashdot Mirror
Industry shills are constantly trying to convince the public that piracy = theft, but punishments like this make it seem more like piracy = murder. In my home state, anyway, "a person convicted of the offense of retail theft of merchandise having a retail value not in excess of $100.00 shall be punished by a fine of not more than $300.00 or imprisonment for not more than six months, or both." Torrent the same CD, however, and you're out $150,000 ($10,000/song, assuming 15 songs on a CD).
Note to potential downloaders: just steal the goods you want. You'll get off a lot lighter that way.
Are office actions and all the related documentation publicized? I didn't know that.
but I have worked in intellectual property for quite some time, and have seen many patents on both facial recognition and using biometrics to authenticate computer sessions. I would be really curious to see the paperwork with the USPTO from filing to allowance – I have a hard time believing that this isn't something that a person of ordinary skill in the art could arrive at by combining some sort of existing facial recognition technique with an existing biometric authentication technique, so it would be interesting to see what was going on inside the examiner's head.
For my part I don't really know who to trust. How do I know that PrivateInternetAccess is a legit service, and that they are really doing what they say they do? If I'm going to pay for a VPN service, I definitely want to be sure that they are solid.
"But the latest textbook enhancements, which require individual access codes to get to bonus materials online..."
Yeah, just like you can get your "enhanced" DRM-crippled DVDs or e-books with "bonus" content. Throw in a little extra crap to take peoples' attention away from the fact that they're paying more for a crippled version of the same old product.
...I never buy digital content anymore -- because in most cases I'm not "buying" it. Regardless of what the fine print says on a CD or a print book, there is still no way, short of the cops busting down my door and taking my stuff from me by force, for someone to prevent me from pretty much doing what I please with those articles.
Still, what now passes for "ownership" (and "privacy", while I'm at it) are starting to shock me as I take a step back and look at what is going on with digital content distribution, social media and networking, and so on. The newer generations seem generally accepting of the new paradigm, but it's slowly driving me into digital hermithood.
Hackman, depending on your age. Likely not Simmons (he's pretty misogynistic).
I am a parent. Holding my newborn daughter in the hospital room, singing to her some of the songs we had played for her when she was in my wife's belly, trying unsuccessfully to choke back the tears of joy and amazement as I gazed into her eyes -- it was without a doubt the most amazing experience of my life. The idea of subjecting that beautiful, fragile, and innocent baby to the kind of trauma and pain that circumcision entails is something I could never dream of doing. Honestly, I'd rather walk into traffic or jump off a building.
And that's not even touching the logical arguments against circumcision, which are pretty much airtight.
A lot of people would tar and feather him, figuratively. Countless more would accept the judgment as the new way things are done. I don't know if you've had a chat with the regular (i.e. non-geek) people around you, but I'll be dollars to donuts that they are alarmingly ignorant of the finer details of copyright, piracy, big content's lobbying measures, and so on. And even if one terrible judgment blew up and was thrown out, big content is unrelenting, and they'll get three more rammed through while people are still celebrating about the first being tossed.
Not to be a wet blanket, but I just don't have that much faith in a critical mass of people having what it takes to prevent their lives from slowly but surely sliding down the toilet.
See the comment below re: circumvention for reasons why big content will probably win eventually, and why the citizenry will lose in the process. It's all about creating such restrictive legislation that people have no wiggle room. Somewhere there is some bought-and-paid-for judge who will happily rule that, say, having a Bittorrent client installed on your computer is equivalent to conspiracy to commit copyright fraud. All big content needs is for the legislative framework to be in place, and then they will go about slashing and burning the remnants of digital freedom with glee, and since there are already scores of elected representatives that are a toxic combination of a) clueless about how tech really works and b) bought and paid for by lobbyists, that's not much of a problem, either.
Hindi for "far more money than 95% of the population will see in their lifetime".
Yeah, I understand that, but some of my clueless clients still use it and are too computer illiterate to understand the complexities of advanced programs like 7zip and Winrar, and I'm having a hell of a time getting folders I encrypted through Winrar/7zip in Win 7 to open properly with the Windows XP default extraction tool. Not the end of the world, but a bit of a pain nonetheless.
Anyway, as for the negatives listed above, I understand the problem with upgrade costs. Personally I held onto my XP machine until it was time to upgrade and then bought a 7 machine, so the cost wasn't an issue. I'm not a programmer so I can't speak to the guts of the OS, but it took me all of one afternoon to figure out what was different in terms of the UI, and I was up to full productivity pretty much right away. More, actually, because everything runs a hell of a lot faster. (Oh, and the built-in speech recognition is as good, if not better, than Dragon Naturally Speaking, so if you use voice recognition Windows 7 almost pays for itself right there.)
I just don't get what inspires the Windows 7 hate. I can't think of anything that overtly sucks about it, anyway.
So silky smooth, you don't even notice you're being financially raped.
Nobody NEEDS the RIAA or the major labels anymore.
Which is exactly why the RIAA and the major labels are spending all this lobbying money: to legislate themselves into relevance. What consumers need won't matter once every alternative channel has been demolished by our elected representatives just going along with the RIAA bullshit.
Is Windows 7 really that bad? I spent about 10 minutes customizing it and find it to be a much better experience than XP. The only thing that chews my balls is the lack of an included utility to password-protect .zip files, but aside from that, I can't think of anything I really dislike about it.
I'd like to agree, but look at how widespread Steam (which is basically glorified DRM) is now. Even physical copies of games are linked uniquely to your Steam account. The current gaming demographic will age, and soon the younger generations will never have known anything different.
You can download a pirated version of a game that just works, or you can buy a legit copy that is crippled by design. Hard fucking choice. Haven't these companies learned *anything* from the music DRM fiascos a few years back?
On the one hand, you could find tons of people who would have no problem looking at "objectionable content." On the other hand, probably very few of them would find the content objectionable in the first place.
Sure, but at least they have the basic information necessary to make a semi-informed choice, and that's the real point here.
...are required, so why not GMO labeling? It strikes me as the same thing. Why *wouldn't* you want to know exactly what is in the food you are eating?
What's more is that labeling GMO foods as such actually increases consumer access to information, which is one of the fundamental tenets of competition in the free market economy. The pseudo-conservative horde is always up in arms about labeling as being anti-free market when in fact the opposite is true.
You seem to underestimate the whole "marketing" thing. It plays hand-in-hand with products that cannot be upgraded -- which is the case for every single piece of Apple hardware, save the highest-end Mac Pro. A product cycle of 1-2 years designed to make you feel like your perfectly good hardware sucks combined with the inability to un-suckify your hardware is huge.
that they went after Rapidshare instead of Megaupload.
That's the basic message these industry groups have sent again and again. I'm sick and tired of being guilt-tripped by anti-piracy campaigns when it's the producers of those same campaigns that have been giving the artists they claim to represent the short end of the stick for decades now.
Frankly, it astonishes me that this is even a question in this day and age, and that an idea of a "sexual harassment jar" is even being floated. Stiff penalties like no vacations days? Are you kidding? You do realize that SOP has people *terminated* from their jobs for sexual harassment, right?
I've never been sexually harassed but I worked in an office in Japan, where the laws are much more lax and sexual harassment is far more prevalent. There were many instances of sexual harassment and the effect it had on a couple of coworkers was devastating and terrible to watch, and was one of the main reasons I left that workplace very quickly. People have already given you the legal reasons for taking this stuff seriously; you should consider the moral reasons as well.
You need to look beyond the bare economics for the consumer to see what all the hidden costs are. Wal-mart stuff is cheaper, but it's also of far inferior quality, which means you need to replace the stuff far more frequently, which means more and more needs to be produced, which ends up costing the consumer the same amount in the end and meanwhile is polluting the shit out of the Asian countryside. Food is cheaper because it comes from massive corporations who are up to their necks in government subsidies. And so on and so forth. It's *never* as simple as "good products for low prices."