I agree. There is one little problem - how do people figure out what shows they want to watch? People choose what shows they want to watch by sampling them and seeing advertisements, just like they choose which movies to watch via attached trailers and TV Ads. Word of mouth and critical reviews play a role, but it's minor and unreliable. Same goes for the premium channels and pay-per-view!
I think if ppv TV does come about, there will be a number of free channels/distributions that do nothing BUT run ads and sample episodes/pilots for other shows. Carefully chosen episodes would be offered for free for every show. Even so, when nobody is flipping channels, how will they come across them? Word of mouth will play a bigger role, but it will have to be agressively pursued.
Unconventional tactics will have to be invented. For instance, watching the preview channel or commercials may give you the chance to win a subscription to a show or channel. Studios may turn to patronage to make new shows based on consumer demand for pre-existing concepts (More Star Trek!), studio reputations (Gainax can do no wrong!), and talent (Sandra Bullock is hot!) The expectations would be much higher for such shows, though, and failure to deliver would be ugly.
There's one other problem too - viewing clubs will flourish. The more expensive, the more popular, the younger and poorer the audience, and the more cult favorite something is, the more people will be watching it together for the price of one. Even if prices are kept low, the number of subscriptions sold won't be directly proportional to the number of people watching (unless it's something really anti-social like porn), since you can't charge at the door. It's the law of diminishing returns, and they'll have to take it into account with all seriousness, because there will be an asymtotic limit to the the money that can be made.
The vast majority of the viewers out there (i.e. "The rest of us") want to WATCH THE SHOW more than they want high quality video and audio. While we certainly wouldn't turn down nicer quality and will pick it over lesser, how much more money/trouble we're willing to put into better quality ranges from zero to small. I'm more than willing to put up with a little digital or analog signal degradation if it means it costs less or is easier to come by, so long as the viewing quality is acceptable.
With PVR, it's the ease of use that makes all the difference, not the quality. Videophiles (along with all other snobs) just don't seem to understand this.
The only time that really matters when you watch a show is the first time, yet the Industry expects to profit off repeat viewership anyway. This is seriously impacting the assimilation of these new technologies. If they were to move to a purchase-once, watch as many times as you like model things would go much smoother for everyone involved, but the industry is too dependent to put the crack pipe of repeat-viewer-profits down voluntarily.
It started with TV. Shows were limited, and viewers often missed them at their first showing. So they started rerunning them so they could catch them later and to fill up time. And that's when they figured out that people would watch these shows more than once, sometimes even over and over. Advertising became deliberately more ambiguous, so people would start watching just to make sure it wasn't a new episode. Pretty soon the whole TV model depended on it. The same happened with the birth of VHS for movies, and with the soaring cost of "blockbuster" movies some first-run releases actually NEEDED people to watch more than once just to turn a profit.
Don't count the current advertiser-supported TV paradigm out yet. Commercials will still persist in live feeds like news and sports. The standard commercial in entertainment may be a dying breed, but there's plenty of other opportunities that are much harder to avoid. Watermarks, pop-ups, and on-screen banners could become more prevalent. Most significantly, product placement will surge. New methods even allow you to digitally insert products where they weren't before. Advertising will never go away completely - it'll just get more insidious and harder to avoid.
I for one don't think that a commercial-free future in which all TV either costs money (via pay-per-view, channel subscription, and show subscription) or is publicly/privately supported is such a bad thing. There's the obvious lack of commercials (yay). The direct relationship between content producer and consumer will allow more flexible dynamics of how much money will go into making a show or channel, and how much it will cost, even more flexible than theatrical films. Consumers will be much more picky about how much they're willing to spend and where they do, forcing quality to rise and less shows to be made. If channel subscription models prevail, a relative few networks will dominate with exclusive, tailored content, and syndication will boom amongst the players to reach as wide an audience as possible with lesser shows. Show formats, freed from the restraints of commercial breaks and standard lengths, will diverge. The big media players will force expensive package deals on the consumer rather than cheap individual channels... oh wait. They already do that.
You're absolutely right - this will make a huge difference for compressed video by separating out the layers of the image. Motion prediction (or rather background prediction) will become trivial. The potential for this goes well beyond the existing MPEG4 codecs - indeed I expect it to spawn a whole new generation of codecs based on RGBD colorspace. Not only that, it will allow you to easily build up a detailed 3 dimensional representation of the static objects in your video, which is a whole new technological potential.
Perhaps some movies slip through into profitibility based on effects alone, and there are plenty of movies with good stories that get ignored. But those are they exceptions. Certainly a moderate weakness in one department can be compensated by strength in the other, to some degree, but that only goes so far, and that's not how making a film should be approached. True, if you throw enough money at promotion, any movie can have a good opening weekend, but you can't expect more than that. Because movies fail based on their weakest link - be it story or effects or acting or whatever. If you're going to spend boatloads of cash on a movie for incredible special effects, hire hundreds of people and work for years at a time, and ignore the relatively cheap but essential matter of a decent script and delivery, you're stupid. Simple as that. You've failed for the most obvious of reasons, and blew millions of dollars in the process. What other possible explanation could you have?
I did read the article - which is why I'm asking the question they didn't answer. Sure it could be any port, but if you're in the market for a cell phone what options will you have? Will it be a standard feature, to drive adoption of the service, or only available on pricier models of phones? What kind of dongle will you include to connect it? If they use USB, will they bother to write drivers for linux or mac? How will you make those drivers available to the user if you do? What if the laptop doesn't have an ethernet port? What about PDAs? 802.11b so you don't need a dongle at all?
This isn't a question for the manufacturers - it's a question for the end users, phone manufacturers, and service providers.
I wish the film industry would get through its tiny skulls that spending mad money on effects, locales, and star power do not a good movie make. A good movie is usually at its heart a well-told story. Everything else is just icing on the cake. I don't understand how with all that money flying around they can't see fit to find a decent, coherent script. It can't possibly be that hard. Maybe if they cut back on the coke and whores they could do a better job.
I think this is an excellent idea, but it runs into the inherent problem of the proliferation of slightly different open source/content licenses, each with their own particular quirks. The biggest one that comes to mind is the difference between the GPL license, and the less restricted BSD license. Both have their advantages, but I wouldn't put them under the same symbol.
Therefore I would suggest that the open source/content "industry" should exercise some compromise and come up with a standard set of licenses based on the existing pantheon - as few as possible - and then seek to enshrine them in law alongside the more conventional copyright. The resulting copyright and various OC rights should have an easily recognizable and distinguishable family of symbols (letters in circles I imagine). This tactic also invites the re-examination of the purpose and implementation of copyright law, which as we've all been griping about has been steadily eroded in favor of corporations lately. Sounds like a job for EFF and openlaw to me. Who in congress is sympathetic to this cause?
Ah, the huge storage capacity of FMDs may be great for the hard-core videophile, but I think for the vast majority of consumers the FMC is the better option.
Everyone knows the advantages of optical discs over magnetic tapes (instant seek, no stretching, no magnetic degradation), but few have considered the advantages tapes have over discs. Picking up where you left off is a trivial matter with tape, wheras with disc your player has to be configured to store that data, and you can't transfer it. Tapes are also much more durable mechanically because they're encased - there's no delicate surface to avoid scratching, you don't have to worry about them breaking if you flex them too much or accidentally step on them, instead of delicately handling it by the edges to place in the tray you just pop it in the slot, and you can leave them lying around without worrying about dust.
In other words, tapes are very kid-friendly, while CDs, DVDs, and FMDs most certainly are not. I don't know what the ratio of kid's DVD titles to VHS titles are, but I'll bet it's low relative to the regular market. It's too bad no one considered that. But FMCs are cards - so long as you protect the media (sliding window? scratch resistant?) they can be as durable as tapes, plus they would be smaller and you could seek quickly through them. If you included some way to record small amounts of data on the card (like a magnetic stripe) you could also store small variables like the time index of where you left off last time, or user preferences for languages, etc. So long as FMCs could store the 15-30gb of data needed for a 2hr movie at HDTV quality (initial versions are expected to be 10gb, but can be pushed much higher) you could have a video player option suitable for the whole family and for the forseeable future of TV technology.
Supposedly they're rolling out in 2003. I don't know how long they've been around. I presume they've encountered some obstacles along the way, probably involving bleaching of the dyes.
There is nothing thermodynamically or theoretically impossible about cold fusion. Nuclear fusion is well understood and experimentally verified. It just naturally happens under extremely hot/high energy environments, i.e. hydrogen bombs or the sun. Cold fusion is just the idea of doing regular fusion at low temperatures, which would require either an extremely slow cold "burn" with high enough local energy for the reactants but low energy overall, or a nuclear catalyst of some sort which lowers the Energy of Activation, like the CNO cycle (which enhances the reaction but only at high temperatures and thus wouldn't be good candidate for cold fusion).
In other words, theoretically possible, but damned if anyone actually knows how to do it.
Not everyone has bought an Xbox yet. If they retain the same game architecture/make it backwards-compatible, but add the new functionality and modify the interface some, they should have no problem attracting new users. I predict we could see it by Christmas (Game Box Special Edition?). IIRC, the hottest selling game box last christmas was the PS2, which had already been around for a year.
American Browsing vs. European/Japanese Messaging
on
Browsing Alone
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· Score: 2
I haven't read the book, but it seems to me that it's coming from an American perspective, which may not be enough. I agree with his basic precept - that using the net takes attention away from interacting in the real world - but that is but one way to use the net. Here in America we use email and the web extensively since our digital lifestyle is based around a non-portable computer, but in Europe and Japan the digital lifestyle is centered around the mobile phone and text messaging. I'll wager this actually helps people interact, and while it's not strictly the internet (iMode notwithstanding) it is and can be the same sort of thing. The simple fact is, if you are dealing within a "global village" paradigm, you may have the option of different lifestyles but you probably won't use them and you'll rarely meet anyone you interact with online... but if your network is community based you'll have no problem meeting people but you won't find people outside of it.
The hardware developers are moving to the Xbox organization. This doesn't mean they are going to put some addon onto the Xbox. It almost certainly means this functionality will be lumped into the Xbox's successor, which is fully in line with everything we've heard about that box so far. They may have had trouble selling ultimateTV on it's own, but by putting PVR in an Xbox it will have no trouble at all becoming widespread, and offer some real competition to MS's competitors in the games and PVR arenas. And real opportunities for their investors and allies in the media.
The thing about Cartoon Network is that their budget is too low to actually make any sort of complicated animated show (at the moment anyway). The only moderate exception to this is Justice League. For blocks like Adult Swim the budget is even tighter. But their budget is not so small that they can't pick up canceled/finished series from other networks/countries and reshow them. Baby Blues, for instance, is clearly too expensive per episode for them to make the show, but they can still show the existing ones however long they want to. And in the case of anime, virtually all of the shows out there are self-contained series of 26 episodes or less. We don't expect season after season of these, we expect new material - which is the better policy, IMHO. All that matters is that it's new to you.
I don't blame them for getting while the getting's good - I'd be surprised if they didn't. If there's a way for money to be made off of something, people inevitably find it. That isn't the same as generating something valuable. Artists starve because anyone can create art, but few create anything of value. But they do it anyway, because they want to create something of value. I wouldn't have it any other way.
It's fine by me if I have no say in the arrangement between an artist and a distributor - but why should I abide by their agreements? If they find a way to make profit (and even under my scenario there are still many ways to do so) that's fine, but not if it is through self-serving artificial government protection laws. We citizens have a say in whether those laws are fair and necessary, and I say they're not.
Because nothing comes close to Photoshop, of course. Gimp doesn't support color management because of - guess who - Adobe's and other's patents on the matters. Not to mention a number of other features.
1. If nuclear technology is so well known, then why are we so worried about nutcases like Osama bin Laden acquiring the knowledge of how to build them? (Note: this applies to all weapons of mass destruction.)
2. Those pictures of you being sodomized as a child won't hurt you at all after they're used to capture the felon, who cares if they're spread all over the net with your name on them. I'm sure nobody will use them for bad purposes, especially if you're famous.
In both cases you missed the point - things that are dangerous to people's lives and honest reputations (and music trading is not one of them, it's only dangerous to an industry) are and ought to be restricted. Snuff films per se do not exist (although there are images of death). Surveillance photos are subject to restriction - where do you think the blur spots and black bars came from.
They spy on us, we spy on them, and generally it's not a bad thing because it gives insight into whether those you are spying on are posing a real threat or just being belligerent, and prevents either side from preparing surprise attacks. The diplomats know this, which is why you rarely hear of spying - it's just business.
The question you should be asking is, why is China making such a big deal out of this now, when they haven't before? Why were they so aggressive towards that EP-3, and more recently the P-3? What might they have up their sleeve - an actual push on Taiwan, or a military challenge to the US in the Pacific? You should read Jane's and Stratfor's reports on the subject before you go crying on how unfair this is, particularly when the US has strong alliances with South Korea, Taiwan, and the Phillipines, and an obligation to defend Japan.
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I agree. There is one little problem - how do people figure out what shows they want to watch? People choose what shows they want to watch by sampling them and seeing advertisements, just like they choose which movies to watch via attached trailers and TV Ads. Word of mouth and critical reviews play a role, but it's minor and unreliable. Same goes for the premium channels and pay-per-view!
I think if ppv TV does come about, there will be a number of free channels/distributions that do nothing BUT run ads and sample episodes/pilots for other shows. Carefully chosen episodes would be offered for free for every show. Even so, when nobody is flipping channels, how will they come across them? Word of mouth will play a bigger role, but it will have to be agressively pursued.
Unconventional tactics will have to be invented. For instance, watching the preview channel or commercials may give you the chance to win a subscription to a show or channel. Studios may turn to patronage to make new shows based on consumer demand for pre-existing concepts (More Star Trek!), studio reputations (Gainax can do no wrong!), and talent (Sandra Bullock is hot!) The expectations would be much higher for such shows, though, and failure to deliver would be ugly.
There's one other problem too - viewing clubs will flourish. The more expensive, the more popular, the younger and poorer the audience, and the more cult favorite something is, the more people will be watching it together for the price of one. Even if prices are kept low, the number of subscriptions sold won't be directly proportional to the number of people watching (unless it's something really anti-social like porn), since you can't charge at the door. It's the law of diminishing returns, and they'll have to take it into account with all seriousness, because there will be an asymtotic limit to the the money that can be made.
The vast majority of the viewers out there (i.e. "The rest of us") want to WATCH THE SHOW more than they want high quality video and audio. While we certainly wouldn't turn down nicer quality and will pick it over lesser, how much more money/trouble we're willing to put into better quality ranges from zero to small. I'm more than willing to put up with a little digital or analog signal degradation if it means it costs less or is easier to come by, so long as the viewing quality is acceptable.
With PVR, it's the ease of use that makes all the difference, not the quality. Videophiles (along with all other snobs) just don't seem to understand this.
The only time that really matters when you watch a show is the first time, yet the Industry expects to profit off repeat viewership anyway. This is seriously impacting the assimilation of these new technologies. If they were to move to a purchase-once, watch as many times as you like model things would go much smoother for everyone involved, but the industry is too dependent to put the crack pipe of repeat-viewer-profits down voluntarily.
It started with TV. Shows were limited, and viewers often missed them at their first showing. So they started rerunning them so they could catch them later and to fill up time. And that's when they figured out that people would watch these shows more than once, sometimes even over and over. Advertising became deliberately more ambiguous, so people would start watching just to make sure it wasn't a new episode. Pretty soon the whole TV model depended on it. The same happened with the birth of VHS for movies, and with the soaring cost of "blockbuster" movies some first-run releases actually NEEDED people to watch more than once just to turn a profit.
Don't count the current advertiser-supported TV paradigm out yet. Commercials will still persist in live feeds like news and sports. The standard commercial in entertainment may be a dying breed, but there's plenty of other opportunities that are much harder to avoid. Watermarks, pop-ups, and on-screen banners could become more prevalent. Most significantly, product placement will surge. New methods even allow you to digitally insert products where they weren't before. Advertising will never go away completely - it'll just get more insidious and harder to avoid.
I for one don't think that a commercial-free future in which all TV either costs money (via pay-per-view, channel subscription, and show subscription) or is publicly/privately supported is such a bad thing. There's the obvious lack of commercials (yay). The direct relationship between content producer and consumer will allow more flexible dynamics of how much money will go into making a show or channel, and how much it will cost, even more flexible than theatrical films. Consumers will be much more picky about how much they're willing to spend and where they do, forcing quality to rise and less shows to be made. If channel subscription models prevail, a relative few networks will dominate with exclusive, tailored content, and syndication will boom amongst the players to reach as wide an audience as possible with lesser shows. Show formats, freed from the restraints of commercial breaks and standard lengths, will diverge. The big media players will force expensive package deals on the consumer rather than cheap individual channels... oh wait. They already do that.
You're absolutely right - this will make a huge difference for compressed video by separating out the layers of the image. Motion prediction (or rather background prediction) will become trivial. The potential for this goes well beyond the existing MPEG4 codecs - indeed I expect it to spawn a whole new generation of codecs based on RGBD colorspace. Not only that, it will allow you to easily build up a detailed 3 dimensional representation of the static objects in your video, which is a whole new technological potential.
You spelled Jeremy two different ways in the discussion. Hint: The first one is wrong.
Why should I care? Well, his name is my name too, and I get pretty sick of people misspelling it.
Perhaps some movies slip through into profitibility based on effects alone, and there are plenty of movies with good stories that get ignored. But those are they exceptions. Certainly a moderate weakness in one department can be compensated by strength in the other, to some degree, but that only goes so far, and that's not how making a film should be approached. True, if you throw enough money at promotion, any movie can have a good opening weekend, but you can't expect more than that. Because movies fail based on their weakest link - be it story or effects or acting or whatever. If you're going to spend boatloads of cash on a movie for incredible special effects, hire hundreds of people and work for years at a time, and ignore the relatively cheap but essential matter of a decent script and delivery, you're stupid. Simple as that. You've failed for the most obvious of reasons, and blew millions of dollars in the process. What other possible explanation could you have?
I did read the article - which is why I'm asking the question they didn't answer. Sure it could be any port, but if you're in the market for a cell phone what options will you have? Will it be a standard feature, to drive adoption of the service, or only available on pricier models of phones? What kind of dongle will you include to connect it? If they use USB, will they bother to write drivers for linux or mac? How will you make those drivers available to the user if you do? What if the laptop doesn't have an ethernet port? What about PDAs? 802.11b so you don't need a dongle at all?
This isn't a question for the manufacturers - it's a question for the end users, phone manufacturers, and service providers.
SELECT first_name,phone_number FROM women WHERE easy='very' AND looks='good'
Will this come with an Cat5-10bT ethernet adapter, or a usb connection, or what? Depending on your laptop you might have trouble hooking up.
I wish the film industry would get through its tiny skulls that spending mad money on effects, locales, and star power do not a good movie make. A good movie is usually at its heart a well-told story. Everything else is just icing on the cake. I don't understand how with all that money flying around they can't see fit to find a decent, coherent script. It can't possibly be that hard. Maybe if they cut back on the coke and whores they could do a better job.
I think this is an excellent idea, but it runs into the inherent problem of the proliferation of slightly different open source/content licenses, each with their own particular quirks. The biggest one that comes to mind is the difference between the GPL license, and the less restricted BSD license. Both have their advantages, but I wouldn't put them under the same symbol.
Therefore I would suggest that the open source/content "industry" should exercise some compromise and come up with a standard set of licenses based on the existing pantheon - as few as possible - and then seek to enshrine them in law alongside the more conventional copyright. The resulting copyright and various OC rights should have an easily recognizable and distinguishable family of symbols (letters in circles I imagine). This tactic also invites the re-examination of the purpose and implementation of copyright law, which as we've all been griping about has been steadily eroded in favor of corporations lately. Sounds like a job for EFF and openlaw to me. Who in congress is sympathetic to this cause?
Ah, the huge storage capacity of FMDs may be great for the hard-core videophile, but I think for the vast majority of consumers the FMC is the better option.
Everyone knows the advantages of optical discs over magnetic tapes (instant seek, no stretching, no magnetic degradation), but few have considered the advantages tapes have over discs. Picking up where you left off is a trivial matter with tape, wheras with disc your player has to be configured to store that data, and you can't transfer it. Tapes are also much more durable mechanically because they're encased - there's no delicate surface to avoid scratching, you don't have to worry about them breaking if you flex them too much or accidentally step on them, instead of delicately handling it by the edges to place in the tray you just pop it in the slot, and you can leave them lying around without worrying about dust.
In other words, tapes are very kid-friendly, while CDs, DVDs, and FMDs most certainly are not. I don't know what the ratio of kid's DVD titles to VHS titles are, but I'll bet it's low relative to the regular market. It's too bad no one considered that. But FMCs are cards - so long as you protect the media (sliding window? scratch resistant?) they can be as durable as tapes, plus they would be smaller and you could seek quickly through them. If you included some way to record small amounts of data on the card (like a magnetic stripe) you could also store small variables like the time index of where you left off last time, or user preferences for languages, etc. So long as FMCs could store the 15-30gb of data needed for a 2hr movie at HDTV quality (initial versions are expected to be 10gb, but can be pushed much higher) you could have a video player option suitable for the whole family and for the forseeable future of TV technology.
Supposedly they're rolling out in 2003. I don't know how long they've been around. I presume they've encountered some obstacles along the way, probably involving bleaching of the dyes.
What a crock. Don't waste your money investing in this one - FMDs and especially FMCs from Constellation 3D are the real future.
There is nothing thermodynamically or theoretically impossible about cold fusion. Nuclear fusion is well understood and experimentally verified. It just naturally happens under extremely hot/high energy environments, i.e. hydrogen bombs or the sun. Cold fusion is just the idea of doing regular fusion at low temperatures, which would require either an extremely slow cold "burn" with high enough local energy for the reactants but low energy overall, or a nuclear catalyst of some sort which lowers the Energy of Activation, like the CNO cycle (which enhances the reaction but only at high temperatures and thus wouldn't be good candidate for cold fusion).
In other words, theoretically possible, but damned if anyone actually knows how to do it.
Not everyone has bought an Xbox yet. If they retain the same game architecture/make it backwards-compatible, but add the new functionality and modify the interface some, they should have no problem attracting new users. I predict we could see it by Christmas (Game Box Special Edition?). IIRC, the hottest selling game box last christmas was the PS2, which had already been around for a year.
I haven't read the book, but it seems to me that it's coming from an American perspective, which may not be enough. I agree with his basic precept - that using the net takes attention away from interacting in the real world - but that is but one way to use the net. Here in America we use email and the web extensively since our digital lifestyle is based around a non-portable computer, but in Europe and Japan the digital lifestyle is centered around the mobile phone and text messaging. I'll wager this actually helps people interact, and while it's not strictly the internet (iMode notwithstanding) it is and can be the same sort of thing. The simple fact is, if you are dealing within a "global village" paradigm, you may have the option of different lifestyles but you probably won't use them and you'll rarely meet anyone you interact with online... but if your network is community based you'll have no problem meeting people but you won't find people outside of it.
The hardware developers are moving to the Xbox organization. This doesn't mean they are going to put some addon onto the Xbox. It almost certainly means this functionality will be lumped into the Xbox's successor, which is fully in line with everything we've heard about that box so far. They may have had trouble selling ultimateTV on it's own, but by putting PVR in an Xbox it will have no trouble at all becoming widespread, and offer some real competition to MS's competitors in the games and PVR arenas. And real opportunities for their investors and allies in the media.
The thing about Cartoon Network is that their budget is too low to actually make any sort of complicated animated show (at the moment anyway). The only moderate exception to this is Justice League. For blocks like Adult Swim the budget is even tighter. But their budget is not so small that they can't pick up canceled/finished series from other networks/countries and reshow them. Baby Blues, for instance, is clearly too expensive per episode for them to make the show, but they can still show the existing ones however long they want to. And in the case of anime, virtually all of the shows out there are self-contained series of 26 episodes or less. We don't expect season after season of these, we expect new material - which is the better policy, IMHO. All that matters is that it's new to you.
I don't blame them for getting while the getting's good - I'd be surprised if they didn't. If there's a way for money to be made off of something, people inevitably find it. That isn't the same as generating something valuable. Artists starve because anyone can create art, but few create anything of value. But they do it anyway, because they want to create something of value. I wouldn't have it any other way.
It's fine by me if I have no say in the arrangement between an artist and a distributor - but why should I abide by their agreements? If they find a way to make profit (and even under my scenario there are still many ways to do so) that's fine, but not if it is through self-serving artificial government protection laws. We citizens have a say in whether those laws are fair and necessary, and I say they're not.
Because nothing comes close to Photoshop, of course. Gimp doesn't support color management because of - guess who - Adobe's and other's patents on the matters. Not to mention a number of other features.
1. If nuclear technology is so well known, then why are we so worried about nutcases like Osama bin Laden acquiring the knowledge of how to build them? (Note: this applies to all weapons of mass destruction.)
2. Those pictures of you being sodomized as a child won't hurt you at all after they're used to capture the felon, who cares if they're spread all over the net with your name on them. I'm sure nobody will use them for bad purposes, especially if you're famous.
In both cases you missed the point - things that are dangerous to people's lives and honest reputations (and music trading is not one of them, it's only dangerous to an industry) are and ought to be restricted. Snuff films per se do not exist (although there are images of death). Surveillance photos are subject to restriction - where do you think the blur spots and black bars came from.
They spy on us, we spy on them, and generally it's not a bad thing because it gives insight into whether those you are spying on are posing a real threat or just being belligerent, and prevents either side from preparing surprise attacks. The diplomats know this, which is why you rarely hear of spying - it's just business.
The question you should be asking is, why is China making such a big deal out of this now, when they haven't before? Why were they so aggressive towards that EP-3, and more recently the P-3? What might they have up their sleeve - an actual push on Taiwan, or a military challenge to the US in the Pacific? You should read Jane's and Stratfor's reports on the subject before you go crying on how unfair this is, particularly when the US has strong alliances with South Korea, Taiwan, and the Phillipines, and an obligation to defend Japan.
You and your sister don't get along well do you?