Apparently, so we are told, copyright is restricting the flow of information. Since when? Surely you wouldn't say locks prevent the free exchange of stuff from shops?
You seem to be capable of forming cogent sentences, so I'll assume you're not actually dumb enough to make a direct comparison between information and goods. I guess that makes you a troll then.
Let's talk mp3's. If I leech a song, what has the property owner (OmniGlobalHyperMegaCorp, not Joe Artist) actually lost? Do they have fewer songs to sell? No, they do not. They have the same number of songs, but one less customer. And guess what: I wasn't a potential customer, as I've never, ever bought music. It's too expensive, and even back when I couldn't get it with a button click, I just didn't care enough to do it the old fashioned way and dub tapes. So, once again: what has the owner lost?
They failed to gain, I'll admit that. But that's all. Information is not a limited resource, they've still got all the information they ever have, they just need to drop the price to make some money off of it.
Incidentally, I'm an author. And I understand that success comes from selling property at the right price, not trying to sell information at the wrong price. That's why I'd never put the words that comprise a novel on the net unless it bounced off of every slush pile of every paper publisher in the known world first. I pragmatically accept that if you make information too easy to share, and too hard to buy, it will be shared for free and you'll never see one red cent. I expect that eventually the RIAA and MPAA will see that too and start offering carrots as well as sticks.
right
Function: noun
2 : something to which one has a just claim
3 : something that one may properly claim as due
Yes, there was once a legal right to own slaves under US law, but that law was not just, proper, or moral
Oh dear. Go look up the roots of those words you just used, except for "moral" which you just shoehorned in. Just and justice and judiciary (legal) and proper and proprietary and property (ownership), both of which were accurate with respect to slave ownership in the USA. Please don't enter into a semantics battle armed only with a single m-w quote.
Except of course in Mississippi, where the last legal indentured servitude contract was signed in 1995, if there's any more need to demonstrate that rights are highly local, transient and ephemeral concepts.
That's just too precious. I'm picturing you shaking your fist as you type that, which is apt as rights are exactly and only those things that you and your friends assert and defend until other people get tired of fighting you.
Being constantly watched makes life better and makes us more tolerant of differences. This argument was powerfully and effectively rebutted in George Orwell's 1984
Yes, thanks for quoting a work of fiction as an incontrovertible counter to a completely different point. Go back a few posts, we're talking about public surveillance, the people watching the people, not Them watching Us.
The transparent society idea is based on the flawed premise that The People have equal power with The Government. Not so. The only country that comes CLOSE to this ideal is the US
How about New Zealand where they're so lasse faire about politics that the mayor of Aukland hosted a spoof radio show called "That's Fairly Interesting"?
Or Italy, where governments change more frequently than hemlines, and the notion of firm central control by an elected government over the people (as represented by grass roots organised crime) is laughable?
Or how about (bless 'em) Switzerland, where everyone (politicians to street sweepers) is a military veteran, and gun ownership is mandatory?
Or Japan, where politicians and corporate heads resign and make grovelling apologies to their public or shareholders over the slightest transgression or errors?
It's a big world out there, with a lot of different solutions to politics. The USA is by no means the worst, but it's not the best either.
and politicos and big-shots, by being big-shots, would be able to suppress evidence
Why would they suppress anything, when they can just use the "so what?" approach? Like politicians who advocate taking guns away from citizens, while they themselves enjoy the protection of armed bodyguards, gated communities, and fortress homes.
Crime would greatly decrease. We can see this already in Britain with CCTV systems.
Bzzzt. Overall violent and property crime is rising in England and Wales, and it's rising most sharply in rural areas. CCTV just moves the problem around.
I do take your point (being a student of history), but I think it's an optimistic view. At the moment, we're being watched not by our peers, family or neighbours, but by law enforcement, government and corporations, who view us as statistics to be controlled or manipulated, not as individuals.
Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly against our new fangled idea of privacy, and in favour of full disclosure, but the scrutiny has to be public, as you say. Instead of CCTV, we need PCTV, that's Public circuit TV, and I don't mean commercial news feeds, I mean web enabled cameras on every street corner. Society watching society. When I get a beer bottle smashed against my wall by the local teens on a Friday night, I want to be able to watch them stagger home, then go round and have a quiet word with their parents the next day, possibly accompanied by my neighbours. That's a much more sensible solution than having an anonymous force of paid strangers swooping in and make arbitrary decisions about who needs protecting and in what way.
Exhorting Americans to work harder is a trully cheap shot at the expense of this overworked nation
Taking a stand and trying to shift your corporate culture away from blackmailing you into working insance hours is damn hard work. Don't get so hung up on expostulating your pet theories that you piss off people who fundamentally agree with you.
Guess what - the [odds] are stacked against [life]
Certainly against complex and intelligent life sending out radio signals in the correct time frame for us to receive them. We have an extraordinarily gentle planet that's given us a long time to get our cortexen convoluted, but we're never getting off of it. We'll always be the dominant species, but within the next couple of thousand years (tops) we'll be back to living a low tech sustainable agrarian lifestyle, not through tree hugger lobbying, but through bare necessity.
The good news is that we won't even have to wait for the next planet killer rock. The next ice age or supervolcano will knock us back far enough that we'll never recover, what with having already raped all the easily accessible fossil and mineral resources.
Of course, we could get off Earth and colonise other planets right now. It would take a New World Order and a diversion of all spare resources to building a fleet of colony ships and just punting them out there. OK, that's stupid and pointless and not economically justifiable, and the colonists would almost certainly be doomed. But there's a small, a tiny chance, and really, what's our alternative? The ISS? Don't make me laugh. I keep hearing that described as a "first step". I'm still waiting to hear what the second step is.
"long-term damage is very likely. This is not "true" memory because the cell is not subjected to repeated charge/discharge cycles that the cell eventually remembers. It's simply a decrease in capacity due to overcharging."
Uh huh. Call it what you want, but when my NiCad laptop gives up 10 minute into a presentation after reporting 100% full, the effect is much the same. NiCads have to be nursemaided to keep them in a usable state; I have to run my laptop on a constant charge/discharge cycle to keep the NiCad usable, and often it'll flatten just enough overnight (after reporting 100% full) that the laptop hibernates immediately after boot in the morning. Next time I'll be going for LiIon rather than arse about with a spare NiCad and a deep discharger.
Please mod this comment up, because it's important to remember that this issue effects more than just 1337 linux geeks. The people you're currently sharing mp3's with, guess what, all their box are belong to Microsoft. If Son of Napster (whatever it happens to be) supports wma out of the box (and it will) then what do you think you'll be sucking down in a couple of years time? Hint: it's an anagram of "awm".
MS is playign catchup by bundling a half assed mp3 player into XP
Please engage brain before typing. They are bundling a pretty darn good mp3 player and a good wma ripper. The aim isn't to stop you playing mp3's, it's to stop you ripping them. How many users do you think will know or even care if it's mp3's or wma's they're playing or leeching from Son of Napster?
They'll only care when a future update brings them a popup saying they now need to pay to copy Britney Spear's "Cumback 2002" album. And it'll say "Click OK to pay a small amount to confirm that you are a god fearing patriot, or click cancel and have to figure out how to actually use your computer, you child molesting commie hacker thief."
Guess what. Corporate Karl and Grandma Jones will be clicking OK. Hell, Microsoft Passport's already got their credit card numbers, right? It's got to be easier than actually getting a clue.
they could be REAL technical pioneers and make something that's widely used even better
How could they make proprietary format mp3's better other than by deviating from the spec and making them non compatible? Which they've done, only they call it.wma. Would you prefer that they called.wma files.mp4 instead? (or more likely mp5, bearing in mind the DirectX verion history)
Consumers (as opposed to me and thee) clearly want whatever gives them the best experience. Look at video cards.
In the beginning, there was OpenGL, and it was expensive, or the boards were slow, and the consumer did not want. And D3D was spake of, but not seen. Then came Voodoo and Glide, and the people saw that it was good, and wanted it, they wanted it bad. And the boards came, and supported Glide and all was well, and none cared that they supported D3D as well, for it did suck ass. Then other boards came, and they said "Verily, OpenGL is good too. And D3D still sucks, but we fear Microsoft with a great fear." And so came the boards that had Glide and OpenGL and D3D, and the people bought them in great numbers and all was well. And then time passed. And Voodoo passed and Glide passed, and OpenGL is passe, and DX8 is the future, on the X box and the PC, for ever and ever, oh my.
Not if WMA is hampered by "intellectual property management" bits that make it difficult to copy, move, and share your information
I'm sure it'll be very easy. I dare say that it'll be transparent after you click through a new EULA as part of an update. After all, Microsoft probably already has your credit card number as part of Microsoft Passport. And the fee per copy will be very small. At first.
Consumer: This is user friendly? Fsck it. Where's that [Redhat SuSe Debian Slackware *BSD] CD my geek friend was pushing on me?
Installer:
Warning! Installer must repartition your hard drive.
Warning! This may cause permanent loss of data and/or require a complete repartition and reformat leading to loss of all data and existing operating systems.
Warning! Installer has detected data in the proposed partition; this data will be lost and may destroy your existing operating system.
Warning! Installer must create multiple boot sectors. Performing this incorrectly may result in loss of access to your existing operating system, or entire hard drive.
Those that forget history are condemmed to repeat it
Those that dwell on history are condemned to have their horse machine gunned out from under them.
Perhaps Microsoft have noticed that the majority of their market now is either corporate or Joe User. The clued up computer geek of the past is using Linux now. What the fuck does MS care if they lose another 5% share off the geek end, if they add 10% penetration at the Joe User end by making an idiot proof box for idiots?
Who the hell uses Windows' built-in applications anyway
95% of the people who (the hell) use Windows?
I reckon wma has already won and is eating mp3 away from the inside, it's just that it hasn't hatched yet (yes, like in Alien). I don't like it, but I'm not seeing an alternative that can match it technically and in marketing muscle and in consumer electronic support. But rather than hair pull over a speculation, how about we schedule a crow eating session for five years time and see what we're all listening to on our wristwatch players?;)
ripping with WMP8 at 56k I can get twice the music in my pocket and it sounds better
Which will be a great comfort when in six months you update, hit rip, and run into the popup saying "Microsoft regrets that due to persisent abuse of fair use laws by evil commie child molesting pirates, the copyright owner of this track has instructed us to levy a token licensing charge on this copy. Searching Microsoft Passport for your credit card number. Found. Purchased. Click OK to continue, or Cancel to confirm that you are a child molesting communist thief (no refunds)."
Just because it costs nothing doesn't mean you won't have to pay.
You have no rights other than those you take and defend yourself. Griping on slashdot doesn't count, and apparently our political masters have given up even pretending to represent public interest, so by all means contact them but don't expect anything but rhetoric.
The most positive thing that you can do is to make an informed decision to defy DMCA and the EU directives, continue to use DeCSS et all, and be prepared to defend your personal action in a court of law.
Last time I checked Americans haven't relovted against the DMCA... with or without guns. What's your point
Hey! That's not the point, the point is that US citizens could rise up, any time they wanted.
All it would take would be one incident of their Consitition being stomped on. No, wait... they've let that happen again and again.
But surely if politicians with armed guards told citizens what guns they could have, or made them license them, or just took them away... no, hang on, that's happening right now.
But they wouldn't stand for unidentifiable black clad riot police carrying out brutal political suppression of citizens, using military tactics and chemical weapons that are illegal under international law. Ooh, my mistake.
Well, at least if the gubmint besieged a small religious community while blinding the press by screaming "Child abuse! Child abuse!" then massacred all of the witnesses and burned or "lost" all the evidence, that'd be sure to cause a revolt. No, no, hang on a minute...
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, so we are told, copyright is restricting the flow of information. Since when? Surely you wouldn't say locks prevent the free exchange of stuff from shops?
You seem to be capable of forming cogent sentences, so I'll assume you're not actually dumb enough to make a direct comparison between information and goods. I guess that makes you a troll then.
Let's talk mp3's. If I leech a song, what has the property owner (OmniGlobalHyperMegaCorp, not Joe Artist) actually lost? Do they have fewer songs to sell? No, they do not. They have the same number of songs, but one less customer. And guess what: I wasn't a potential customer, as I've never, ever bought music. It's too expensive, and even back when I couldn't get it with a button click, I just didn't care enough to do it the old fashioned way and dub tapes. So, once again: what has the owner lost?
They failed to gain, I'll admit that. But that's all. Information is not a limited resource, they've still got all the information they ever have, they just need to drop the price to make some money off of it.
Incidentally, I'm an author. And I understand that success comes from selling property at the right price, not trying to sell information at the wrong price. That's why I'd never put the words that comprise a novel on the net unless it bounced off of every slush pile of every paper publisher in the known world first. I pragmatically accept that if you make information too easy to share, and too hard to buy, it will be shared for free and you'll never see one red cent. I expect that eventually the RIAA and MPAA will see that too and start offering carrots as well as sticks.
Function: noun
2 : something to which one has a just claim
3 : something that one may properly claim as due
Yes, there was once a legal right to own slaves under US law, but that law was not just, proper, or moral
Oh dear. Go look up the roots of those words you just used, except for "moral" which you just shoehorned in. Just and justice and judiciary (legal) and proper and proprietary and property (ownership), both of which were accurate with respect to slave ownership in the USA. Please don't enter into a semantics battle armed only with a single m-w quote.
right to own slaves in the USA -- 1776-1866
Except of course in Mississippi, where the last legal indentured servitude contract was signed in 1995, if there's any more need to demonstrate that rights are highly local, transient and ephemeral concepts.
Rights exist; they are not invented
That's just too precious. I'm picturing you shaking your fist as you type that, which is apt as rights are exactly and only those things that you and your friends assert and defend until other people get tired of fighting you.
Being constantly watched makes life better and makes us more tolerant of differences. This argument was powerfully and effectively rebutted in George Orwell's 1984
Yes, thanks for quoting a work of fiction as an incontrovertible counter to a completely different point. Go back a few posts, we're talking about public surveillance, the people watching the people, not Them watching Us.
The transparent society idea is based on the flawed premise that The People have equal power with The Government. Not so. The only country that comes CLOSE to this ideal is the US
How about New Zealand where they're so lasse faire about politics that the mayor of Aukland hosted a spoof radio show called "That's Fairly Interesting"?
Or Italy, where governments change more frequently than hemlines, and the notion of firm central control by an elected government over the people (as represented by grass roots organised crime) is laughable?
Or how about (bless 'em) Switzerland, where everyone (politicians to street sweepers) is a military veteran, and gun ownership is mandatory?
Or Japan, where politicians and corporate heads resign and make grovelling apologies to their public or shareholders over the slightest transgression or errors?
It's a big world out there, with a lot of different solutions to politics. The USA is by no means the worst, but it's not the best either.
and politicos and big-shots, by being big-shots, would be able to suppress evidence
Why would they suppress anything, when they can just use the "so what?" approach? Like politicians who advocate taking guns away from citizens, while they themselves enjoy the protection of armed bodyguards, gated communities, and fortress homes.
Crime would greatly decrease. We can see this already in Britain with CCTV systems.
Bzzzt. Overall violent and property crime is rising in England and Wales, and it's rising most sharply in rural areas. CCTV just moves the problem around.
I do take your point (being a student of history), but I think it's an optimistic view. At the moment, we're being watched not by our peers, family or neighbours, but by law enforcement, government and corporations, who view us as statistics to be controlled or manipulated, not as individuals.
Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly against our new fangled idea of privacy, and in favour of full disclosure, but the scrutiny has to be public, as you say. Instead of CCTV, we need PCTV, that's Public circuit TV, and I don't mean commercial news feeds, I mean web enabled cameras on every street corner. Society watching society. When I get a beer bottle smashed against my wall by the local teens on a Friday night, I want to be able to watch them stagger home, then go round and have a quiet word with their parents the next day, possibly accompanied by my neighbours. That's a much more sensible solution than having an anonymous force of paid strangers swooping in and make arbitrary decisions about who needs protecting and in what way.
Exhorting Americans to work harder is a trully cheap shot at the expense of this overworked nation
Taking a stand and trying to shift your corporate culture away from blackmailing you into working insance hours is damn hard work. Don't get so hung up on expostulating your pet theories that you piss off people who fundamentally agree with you.
Care to support that with an RFC?
Guess what - the [odds] are stacked against [life]
Certainly against complex and intelligent life sending out radio signals in the correct time frame for us to receive them. We have an extraordinarily gentle planet that's given us a long time to get our cortexen convoluted, but we're never getting off of it. We'll always be the dominant species, but within the next couple of thousand years (tops) we'll be back to living a low tech sustainable agrarian lifestyle, not through tree hugger lobbying, but through bare necessity.
The good news is that we won't even have to wait for the next planet killer rock. The next ice age or supervolcano will knock us back far enough that we'll never recover, what with having already raped all the easily accessible fossil and mineral resources.
Of course, we could get off Earth and colonise other planets right now. It would take a New World Order and a diversion of all spare resources to building a fleet of colony ships and just punting them out there. OK, that's stupid and pointless and not economically justifiable, and the colonists would almost certainly be doomed. But there's a small, a tiny chance, and really, what's our alternative? The ISS? Don't make me laugh. I keep hearing that described as a "first step". I'm still waiting to hear what the second step is.
"long-term damage is very likely. This is not "true" memory because the cell is not subjected to repeated charge/discharge cycles that the cell eventually remembers. It's simply a decrease in capacity due to overcharging."
Uh huh. Call it what you want, but when my NiCad laptop gives up 10 minute into a presentation after reporting 100% full, the effect is much the same. NiCads have to be nursemaided to keep them in a usable state; I have to run my laptop on a constant charge/discharge cycle to keep the NiCad usable, and often it'll flatten just enough overnight (after reporting 100% full) that the laptop hibernates immediately after boot in the morning. Next time I'll be going for LiIon rather than arse about with a spare NiCad and a deep discharger.
Please mod this comment up, because it's important to remember that this issue effects more than just 1337 linux geeks. The people you're currently sharing mp3's with, guess what, all their box are belong to Microsoft. If Son of Napster (whatever it happens to be) supports wma out of the box (and it will) then what do you think you'll be sucking down in a couple of years time? Hint: it's an anagram of "awm".
MS is playign catchup by bundling a half assed mp3 player into XP
Please engage brain before typing. They are bundling a pretty darn good mp3 player and a good wma ripper. The aim isn't to stop you playing mp3's, it's to stop you ripping them. How many users do you think will know or even care if it's mp3's or wma's they're playing or leeching from Son of Napster?
They'll only care when a future update brings them a popup saying they now need to pay to copy Britney Spear's "Cumback 2002" album. And it'll say "Click OK to pay a small amount to confirm that you are a god fearing patriot, or click cancel and have to figure out how to actually use your computer, you child molesting commie hacker thief."
Guess what. Corporate Karl and Grandma Jones will be clicking OK. Hell, Microsoft Passport's already got their credit card numbers, right? It's got to be easier than actually getting a clue.
they could be REAL technical pioneers and make something that's widely used even better
How could they make proprietary format mp3's better other than by deviating from the spec and making them non compatible? Which they've done, only they call it .wma. Would you prefer that they called .wma files .mp4 instead? (or more likely mp5, bearing in mind the DirectX verion history)
Consumers (as opposed to me and thee) clearly want whatever gives them the best experience. Look at video cards.
In the beginning, there was OpenGL, and it was expensive, or the boards were slow, and the consumer did not want. And D3D was spake of, but not seen. Then came Voodoo and Glide, and the people saw that it was good, and wanted it, they wanted it bad. And the boards came, and supported Glide and all was well, and none cared that they supported D3D as well, for it did suck ass. Then other boards came, and they said "Verily, OpenGL is good too. And D3D still sucks, but we fear Microsoft with a great fear." And so came the boards that had Glide and OpenGL and D3D, and the people bought them in great numbers and all was well. And then time passed. And Voodoo passed and Glide passed, and OpenGL is passe, and DX8 is the future, on the X box and the PC, for ever and ever, oh my.
Not if WMA is hampered by "intellectual property management" bits that make it difficult to copy, move, and share your information
I'm sure it'll be very easy. I dare say that it'll be transparent after you click through a new EULA as part of an update. After all, Microsoft probably already has your credit card number as part of Microsoft Passport. And the fee per copy will be very small. At first.
Consumer: This is user friendly? Fsck it. Where's that [Redhat SuSe Debian Slackware *BSD] CD my geek friend was pushing on me?
Installer:
Consumer: Terrified... beyond... capacity... for... rational... thought. Must... reach... slowly... for... 'n'... key.
Those that forget history are condemmed to repeat it
Those that dwell on history are condemned to have their horse machine gunned out from under them.
Perhaps Microsoft have noticed that the majority of their market now is either corporate or Joe User. The clued up computer geek of the past is using Linux now. What the fuck does MS care if they lose another 5% share off the geek end, if they add 10% penetration at the Joe User end by making an idiot proof box for idiots?
Uh...anyone heard of this little standard for audio [Ogg Vorbis]
Wow, that looks great! I'll rush out and buy a Vorbis enabled pocket player right now! No... wait a minute...
Who the hell uses Windows' built-in applications anyway
95% of the people who (the hell) use Windows?
I reckon wma has already won and is eating mp3 away from the inside, it's just that it hasn't hatched yet (yes, like in Alien). I don't like it, but I'm not seeing an alternative that can match it technically and in marketing muscle and in consumer electronic support. But rather than hair pull over a speculation, how about we schedule a crow eating session for five years time and see what we're all listening to on our wristwatch players? ;)
ripping with WMP8 at 56k I can get twice the music in my pocket and it sounds better
Which will be a great comfort when in six months you update, hit rip, and run into the popup saying "Microsoft regrets that due to persisent abuse of fair use laws by evil commie child molesting pirates, the copyright owner of this track has instructed us to levy a token licensing charge on this copy. Searching Microsoft Passport for your credit card number. Found. Purchased. Click OK to continue, or Cancel to confirm that you are a child molesting communist thief (no refunds)."
Just because it costs nothing doesn't mean you won't have to pay.
You have no rights other than those you take and defend yourself. Griping on slashdot doesn't count, and apparently our political masters have given up even pretending to represent public interest, so by all means contact them but don't expect anything but rhetoric.
The most positive thing that you can do is to make an informed decision to defy DMCA and the EU directives, continue to use DeCSS et all, and be prepared to defend your personal action in a court of law.
Wow. That's nicely worded, thanks.
Pop quiz. How far are we along this list, and how far will we go?
Last time I checked Americans haven't relovted against the DMCA... with or without guns. What's your point
Hey! That's not the point, the point is that US citizens could rise up, any time they wanted.
All it would take would be one incident of their Consitition being stomped on. No, wait... they've let that happen again and again.
But surely if politicians with armed guards told citizens what guns they could have, or made them license them, or just took them away... no, hang on, that's happening right now.
But they wouldn't stand for unidentifiable black clad riot police carrying out brutal political suppression of citizens, using military tactics and chemical weapons that are illegal under international law. Ooh, my mistake.
Well, at least if the gubmint besieged a small religious community while blinding the press by screaming "Child abuse! Child abuse!" then massacred all of the witnesses and burned or "lost" all the evidence, that'd be sure to cause a revolt. No, no, hang on a minute...