What the states should do is encrypt the "do not call list" with something like ROT13 and then they could go after anyone that had any of these numbers on their "call list" as DMCA violations because of their flagrant encryption circumvention! Then again...maybe not.:)
I don't know that it is illegal for me to make you a copy of a cassette. More likely, it is a gray area of the law. I know the record companies didn't exactly support cassette players...but everyone knows what was going on with those dual-cassette decks you could get off the shelf at Wal-Mart. Personally, I think you would be hard pressed to find any person ever prosecuted for duplicating a cassette and giving it to a friend...and I highly doubt any jury would convict on this charge if it actually made it to trial.
The thing is, there does appear to be a double standard between analog and digital media. In the past this gray area didn't seem to matter as much because the copies degraded with each generation.
The thing is, entire generations grew up making copies of cassettes for their friends and/or borrowing cassettes and making copies of them.
Free music has been around for a long time. The real problem is that it just got a lot easier and the quality has improved.
But you can't get a news story going on here that doesn't come from Wired, News.com, or the NYT!
Usurper_ii
Hoping to do what MTV did for music -- man I hope NOT -- Blackbelt TV hopes to launch a 24-hour martial arts channel. Offering nearly 15,000 hours of popular martial-arts films, fights to be hosted by gorgeous female fight jocks, and rumors of having anime in their line-up...this sounds like if you have an ass, this channel will kick it. Maybe we could put Slashdot to good use here and let everyone know to be sure and request this channel from their local cable company, DirecTV, and Dish network!
A guy came in the store where I work at and was trying to sell a "mix tape" CD to a customer...to which the customer started handing over cash to the guy for them.
And then the lights come on for me, as I thought about my huge 400-plus CD collection, my new 40x cd burner, and that 50-pack of CD-Rs I have sitting around! Can you say KA-F@UCKING-CHING?
I used to live in a town with some really good used CD stores. 99.9 % of the used CDs were legit CDs, but you could find rare bootlegs on CD from time to time. These were pressed CDs, not stupid CD-Rs with a cover printed out on an ink-jet printer, and I think they were probably imported at some point before they wound up in the used CD stores.
Think about the RIAA throwing a big stink over these CDs enough to get some type of settlement out of the stores even though the biggest bulk of the material was totally *legit*.
Given the state of the market for everything, something like this could force mom & pop stores to close, which is exactly what the RIAA wants.
Of course, I submitted the Blackbelt TV channel as a news story but it was rejected. So a new channel that says it will show anime is not news, but stupid Adult Swim adding more cut-up anime is news? Sometimes I just don't get/.
But I do feel better about getting that off my chest.
Hoping to do what MTV did for music -- man I hope NOT -- Blackbelt TV hopes to launch a 24-hour martial arts channel. Offering nearly 15,000 hours of popular martial-arts films, fights to be hosted by "gorgeous female fight jocks," and rumors of having anime in their line-up...this sounds like if you have an ass, this channel will kick it. Maybe we could put Slashdot to good use here and let everyone know to be sure and request this channel from their local cable company, DirecTV, and Dish network!
Actually, I was. Now I feel kind of stupid. I work for a Pegasus dealer, which is a company licensed to sell DirecTV in certain markets...so I keep up with DirecTV stuff to some degree. And I have never heard of them offering anything except satellite-based Net.
We had a demo of Pegasus Direct (Powered by DirecPC) going for a short period of time. It sucked bad, in my opinion, and it was 70.00 a month.
They will only let you reveiew items that they sell. It worries me that they could influence reviews based on how it is going to affect its sales. Think about it, if you are trying to sell this widget, do you want people saying bad things about it?
Unless they have changed that policy lately, that has always bothered me.
Now Epinions that would let you review anything you wanted to review, that would be cool.
I work for a dealer and we tested DirecPC through Pegasus (Pegasus Express was the offical name). It sucked. When talking to people that had satellite Net...about four out of five hated it. (I never could figure out why that one person said theirs was working so good when the other people had nothing but trouble). In the end, we never sold it because we were afraid it would make more people mad than anything else.
By all means, though, Mac usuers should be able to get pissed off just like us PC users...
Well, thinking about it for a minute more, the one thing that is going to hold AOL back from doing this is DRM. At some point someone up top at Time-Warner is not going to like that their AOL Linux distro lets people bypass all the new DRM software being built into Windows. AOL Linux would then become a "circumvention device," and the jack-booted thugs would have to start spending a lot of time stomping on all those free disks.
What I think would really help Linux is an AOL version of something like Lindows. This would be an easy to install CD that would be given away with computer magazines and mailed out for free, and, unlike Lindows, it is all free. AOL gets to benefit because it boots up ready to log on to AOL...but it is not a requirement to use the system, so everyone benefits.
Imagine how easy it would be to get people to at least try Linux if they already had a CD-ROM of it attached to some magazine they just bought. Heck, if it goes out like AOL's current junk...everyone would be able to dig up at least five of these disks in a matter of minutes.
No actually, I think the evelope thing does work with copyright, despite what you think. There are places for writers that will PGP timestamp things for writers. Same principle as the envelope trick.
What the difference is here is that you are talking about patent IP and I am talking about copyright IP.
You could have all the proof in the world that you thought of some invention first, but if you didn't have the money to patent it and somebody else got to it first, well boo hoo.
In copyright law, however, proving you wrote it first will stand up in a court of law. Again, because you don't have to get something copyrighted. If you write something you are automatically covered by copyright laws. The burden on you becomes showing that you wrote it first, not who got to some blasted government office first.
IF this were not the case, why would there be services for writers that date and time stamp what they have written?
Here is someone else saying the same thing I am saying:
I don't understand why they would fight this so much. They aren't losing creativity here, they are gaing another sell to someone that probably wouldn't have bought the movie to begin with otherwise. Hell, what I'm surprised at is that, seeing that someone is making money doing this, that they haven't come up with their own clean versions to put these places out of business. After all, we all know it is really about money.
What Clean Flix should do is offer the directors a couple of points out of the profit made from cleaning the movies. Then we could all sit back and watch the directors whore out their "creative vision" for a quick buck!
I think the envelope thing has to do with copyright, not patents. Seriously, I think this is valid with copyrights, because you don't actually have to get a copyright from some government office to be covered by copyright laws. But you do actually have to be granted a patent...so what good would it do to show you had the idea before someone else had it? Whoever gets the patent first is the one who is going to have the patent.
> I love the idea, but not educating new > users about what exactly they are > buying seems very misleading. I can > see the mindless drones going: > > "Windows computer, $899" > > "Lindows computer, $399" > > Lindows says it runs some >"Microsoft Windows Compatible" > software, and it is cheaper... > I'll go for that one.
Yeah, but after you figure out that Lindows sucks, you can format the drive and install Win 98 SE on it. Your total savings: $500.00.
And yes, that savings price did figure in the price of Windows, too.:)
But MP3 was never "free" to begin with. If it was free, nobody would have had to go to work on.ogg. The whole point of.ogg was to get rid of the crap that came along with MP3.
The way I see it, if this makes people have to pay $5.00 for WinAmp instead of getting it free, boo hoo. What is a one-time 5.00 fee when it lets you play thousands of dollars worth of free music?
I have one of the early Apex players that you can access a hidden menu on. I'm not sure about the others where you can turn off the region coding...but I can also turn off DCSS and Macrovision. One of the main reasons I purchased this Apex was because, with Macrovision off, I could run it through the inputs of a VCR, because my older TV doesn't have RCA jacks in it. (This means I can also record from DVD to video. And this is feature which I hardly ever use).
I have never ran into a region incoding problem, but I have ran into a lot of people who only have RCA-in jacks on their VCR. Being able to turn off Macrovision is the feature that would help the biggest majority of people.
One thing I didn't get is what format was created when the guy copied music from his CDs. Was it.wma or mp3 or what?
Here is what I don't understand. I have about 30 gig of MP3s. Most of this came from the 250 - 300 CDs I have. But a small percentage of it came from emusic.com and mp3.com...and a very small amount from Napster or Napigator.
I don't understand how they could make any of these files stop working, considering I paid money for 100% legal MP3s from emusic.com and downloaded 100% legal MP3s from MP3.com (personally, I consider MP3s made from my personal CDs as legal, too).
Considering the volume of legal mpeg content out there, isn't there some way we could sue someone if it suddenly stops working?
Again, I understand watermarking, what I don't understand is how they can make legal non-watermarked material not play at some point in the future?
The issue here is not should we be thankful for our country or should we give honor to those to whom honor is due -- clearly we should. The issue is not the legitimacy of individuals "pledging allegiance" to a nation -- under proper circumstances this may be appropriate.
The issue is should the Church, which is made up of folk from every people, tongue, tribe, and nation (a truly trans-national and multi-cultural institution -- in the right sense of the term), pledge its "allegiance" to one particular nation? It wasn't that long ago that such a thought would have been abhorrent to God's people. Not because they were unthankful for God's blessings upon their country and not because they didn't love their country, but because they would have viewed such an activity as a compromise of the spiritual integrity of the Church -- which does not belong to any nation and is not beholden to any government. This distinction is lost on most modern Americans. Most, I'm afraid, view the Church as indebted to the State, existing for the good of the State, and established to promote loyalty to the State.
Sadly, this is just the sort of thing the "Pledge of Allegiance" was designed to instill in the people of this country. It was originally written by Francis Bellamy (of the famous Bellamy family). The Bellamys were prominent socialists (Edward Bellamy, cousin to Francis, wrote the famous 19th century work of socialist fiction Looking Backward). Francis wrote this pledge in connection with the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. It was first recited at the National School Convention in 1892. Francis' plan was to have the school children recite this as a form of indoctrination (much like the tactics Hitler later used to indoctrinate German youth). [It was originally recited with the arm outstretched, hand pointed, palm down -- identical to what the world would later recognize as the Nazi salute]
By this means (Francis hoped) the children would learn to think of the nation (in its new, post Civil War form -- i.e. "indivisible") as the proper recipient of their ultimate allegiance. They would give reverence to the nation and never again think of it as a "voluntary union." The nation began to be viewed like unto God Himself (i.e. "indivisible", worthy of our deepest trust and highest commitment). We would become one people who would all be devoted to promoting the one nation as opposed to our individual, familial, or religious interests. [btw, the phrase "under God" was not in the original -- that was added in 1954 during the Eisenhower administration -- Francis did not believe in God]
We have indeed become such a people. The vast majority of our fellow citizens view the Government as the one indispensable institution. They believe in it, trust in it, and depend upon it. There is no longer any analogous loyalty to the family or the Church (neither of which is viewed as important to our well-being) -- only the State holds that revered position in the minds of most Americans.
Now even the Church views it as part of its duty to "pledge allegiance" to the nation. Methinks something is badly amiss.
DVD is the solution to the content industries problems. Instead of forcing copy protection on every format, all content should be released on DVD, which is secure and built from the ground up to prevent copying. No wait...
Slashdot Mirror
but maybe this one is for real. :)
What the states should do is encrypt the "do not call list" with something like ROT13 and then they could go after anyone that had any of these numbers on their "call list" as DMCA violations because of their flagrant encryption circumvention! Then again...maybe not. :)
Live in your world; stay out of mine.
I don't know that it is illegal for me to make you a copy of a cassette. More likely, it is a gray area of the law. I know the record companies didn't exactly support cassette players...but everyone knows what was going on with those dual-cassette decks you could get off the shelf at Wal-Mart. Personally, I think you would be hard pressed to find any person ever prosecuted for duplicating a cassette and giving it to a friend...and I highly doubt any jury would convict on this charge if it actually made it to trial.
The thing is, there does appear to be a double standard between analog and digital media. In the past this gray area didn't seem to matter as much because the copies degraded with each generation.
The thing is, entire generations grew up making copies of cassettes for their friends and/or borrowing cassettes and making copies of them.
Free music has been around for a long time. The real problem is that it just got a lot easier and the quality has improved.
Usurper_ii
Usurper_ii
Hoping to do what MTV did for music -- man I hope NOT -- Blackbelt ...this sounds like if you have an ass, this channel will kick it. Maybe we could put Slashdot to good use here and let everyone know to be sure and request this channel from their local cable company, DirecTV, and Dish network!
TV hopes to launch a 24-hour martial arts channel. Offering nearly 15,000 hours of popular martial-arts films, fights to be hosted by gorgeous female fight jocks, and rumors of having anime in their line-up
A guy came in the store where I work at and was trying to sell a "mix tape" CD to a customer...to which the customer started handing over cash to the guy for them.
And then the lights come on for me, as I thought about my huge 400-plus CD collection, my new 40x cd burner, and that 50-pack of CD-Rs I have sitting around! Can you say KA-F@UCKING-CHING?
Usurper_ii
I used to live in a town with some really good used CD stores. 99.9 % of the used CDs were legit CDs, but you could find rare bootlegs on CD from time to time. These were pressed CDs, not stupid CD-Rs with a cover printed out on an ink-jet printer, and I think they were probably imported at some point before they wound up in the used CD stores.
Think about the RIAA throwing a big stink over these CDs enough to get some type of settlement out of the stores even though the biggest bulk of the material was totally *legit*.
Given the state of the market for everything, something like this could force mom & pop stores to close, which is exactly what the RIAA wants.
Usurper_ii
Of course, I submitted the Blackbelt TV channel as a news story but it was rejected. So a new channel that says it will show anime is not news, but stupid Adult Swim adding more cut-up anime is news? Sometimes I just don't get /.
But I do feel better about getting that off my chest.
You can mod me down, now, you $%^#*
Usurper_ii
Hoping to do what MTV did for music -- man I hope NOT -- Blackbelt TV hopes to launch a 24-hour martial arts channel. Offering nearly 15,000 hours of popular martial-arts films, fights to be hosted by "gorgeous female fight jocks," and rumors ...this sounds like if you have an ass, this channel will kick it. Maybe we could put Slashdot to good use here and let everyone know to be sure and request this channel from their local cable company, DirecTV, and Dish network!
of having anime in their line-up
Actually, I was. Now I feel kind of stupid. I work for a Pegasus dealer, which is a company licensed to sell DirecTV in certain markets...so I keep up with DirecTV stuff to some degree. And I have never heard of them offering anything except satellite-based Net.
We had a demo of Pegasus Direct (Powered by DirecPC) going for a short period of time. It sucked bad, in my opinion, and it was 70.00 a month.
1. billed as broadband
2. crappy service. Dial-up faster...
3. 70.00 a month = no customers
4. profit ???
= F*cked Company poster boy
They will only let you reveiew items that they sell. It worries me that they could influence reviews based on how it is going to affect its sales. Think about it, if you are trying to sell this widget, do you want people saying bad things about it?
Unless they have changed that policy lately, that has always bothered me.
Now Epinions that would let you review anything you wanted to review, that would be cool.
Crap, I think I'll patent that idea!
I work for a dealer and we tested DirecPC through Pegasus (Pegasus Express was the offical name). It sucked. When talking to people that had satellite Net...about four out of five hated it. (I never could figure out why that one person said theirs was working so good when the other people had nothing but trouble). In the end, we never sold it because we were afraid it would make more people mad than anything else.
By all means, though, Mac usuers should be able to get pissed off just like us PC users...
Usurper_ii
Well, thinking about it for a minute more, the one thing that is going to hold AOL back from doing this is DRM. At some point someone up top at Time-Warner is not going to like that their AOL Linux distro lets people bypass all the new DRM software being built into Windows. AOL Linux would then become a "circumvention device," and the jack-booted thugs would have to start spending a lot of time stomping on all those free disks.
Usurper_ii
What I think would really help Linux is an AOL version of something like Lindows. This would be an easy to install CD that would be given away with computer magazines and mailed out for free, and, unlike Lindows, it is all free. AOL gets to benefit because it boots up ready to log on to AOL...but it is not a requirement to use the system, so everyone benefits.
Imagine how easy it would be to get people to at least try Linux if they already had a CD-ROM of it attached to some magazine they just bought. Heck, if it goes out like AOL's current junk...everyone would be able to dig up at least five of these disks in a matter of minutes.
Usurper_ii
No actually, I think the evelope thing does work with copyright, despite what you think. There are places for writers that will PGP timestamp things for writers. Same principle as the envelope trick.
0 /S eptember/msg00051.html
What the difference is here is that you are talking about patent IP and I am talking about copyright IP.
You could have all the proof in the world that you thought of some invention first, but if you didn't have the money to patent it and somebody else got to it first, well boo hoo.
In copyright law, however, proving you wrote it first will stand up in a court of law. Again, because you don't have to get something copyrighted. If you write something you are automatically covered by copyright laws. The burden on you becomes showing that you wrote it first, not who got to some blasted government office first.
IF this were not the case, why would there be services for writers that date and time stamp what they have written?
Here is someone else saying the same thing I am saying:
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/lists/progsoc/200
Usurper_ii
I don't understand why they would fight this so much. They aren't losing creativity here, they are gaing another sell to someone that probably wouldn't have bought the movie to begin with otherwise. Hell, what I'm surprised at is that, seeing that someone is making money doing this, that they haven't come up with their own clean versions to put these places out of business. After all, we all know it is really about money.
What Clean Flix should do is offer the directors a couple of points out of the profit made from cleaning the movies. Then we could all sit back and watch the directors whore out their "creative vision" for a quick buck!
Usurper_ii
That would be redundant, since DVDs already have darn good encryption on them to begin with. ;)
I think the envelope thing has to do with copyright, not patents. Seriously, I think this is valid with copyrights, because you don't actually have to get a copyright from some government office to be covered by copyright laws. But you do actually have to be granted a patent...so what good would it do to show you had the idea before someone else had it? Whoever gets the patent first is the one who is going to have the patent.
> I love the idea, but not educating new
:)
> users about what exactly they are
> buying seems very misleading. I can
> see the mindless drones going:
>
> "Windows computer, $899"
>
> "Lindows computer, $399"
>
> Lindows says it runs some
>"Microsoft Windows Compatible"
> software, and it is cheaper...
> I'll go for that one.
Yeah, but after you figure out that Lindows sucks, you can format the drive and install Win 98 SE on it. Your total savings: $500.00.
And yes, that savings price did figure in the price of Windows, too.
Usurper_ii
But MP3 was never "free" to begin with. If it was free, nobody would have had to go to work on .ogg. The whole point of .ogg was to get rid of the crap that came along with MP3.
The way I see it, if this makes people have to pay $5.00 for WinAmp instead of getting it free, boo hoo. What is a one-time 5.00 fee when it lets you play thousands of dollars worth of free music?
usurper_ii
I have one of the early Apex players that you can access a hidden menu on. I'm not sure about the others where you can turn off the region coding...but I can also turn off DCSS and Macrovision. One of the main reasons I purchased this Apex was because, with Macrovision off, I could run it through the inputs of a VCR, because my older TV doesn't have RCA jacks in it. (This means I can also record from DVD to video. And this is feature which I hardly ever use).
I have never ran into a region incoding problem, but I have ran into a lot of people who only have RCA-in jacks on their VCR. Being able to turn off Macrovision is the feature that would help the biggest majority of people.
I can't wait to see the virus that makes it mow down all the people in my address book!
One thing I didn't get is what format was created when the guy copied music from his CDs. Was it .wma or mp3 or what?
Here is what I don't understand. I have about 30 gig of MP3s. Most of this came from the 250 - 300 CDs I have. But a small percentage of it came from emusic.com and mp3.com...and a very small amount from Napster or Napigator.
I don't understand how they could make any of these files stop working, considering I paid money for 100% legal MP3s from emusic.com and downloaded 100% legal MP3s from MP3.com (personally, I consider MP3s made from my personal CDs as legal, too).
Considering the volume of legal mpeg content out there, isn't there some way we could sue someone if it suddenly stops working?
Again, I understand watermarking, what I don't understand is how they can make legal non-watermarked material not play at some point in the future?
usurper_ii
The issue here is not should we be thankful for our country or should we give honor to those to whom honor is due -- clearly we should. The issue is not the legitimacy of individuals "pledging allegiance" to a nation -- under proper circumstances this may be appropriate.
The issue is should the Church, which is made up of folk from every people, tongue, tribe, and nation (a truly trans-national and multi-cultural institution -- in the right sense of the term), pledge its "allegiance" to one particular nation? It wasn't that long ago that such a thought would have been abhorrent to God's people. Not because they were unthankful for God's blessings upon their country and not because they didn't love their country, but because they would have viewed such an activity as a compromise of the spiritual integrity of the Church -- which does not belong to any nation and is not beholden to any government. This distinction is lost on most modern Americans. Most, I'm afraid, view the Church as indebted to the State, existing for the good of the State, and established to promote loyalty to the State.
Sadly, this is just the sort of thing the "Pledge of Allegiance" was designed to instill in the people of this country. It was originally written by Francis Bellamy (of the famous Bellamy family). The Bellamys were prominent socialists (Edward Bellamy, cousin to Francis, wrote the famous 19th century work of socialist fiction Looking Backward). Francis wrote this pledge in connection with the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. It was first recited at the National School Convention in 1892. Francis' plan was to have the school children recite this as a form of indoctrination (much like the tactics Hitler later used to indoctrinate German youth). [It was originally recited with the arm outstretched, hand pointed, palm down -- identical to what the world would later recognize as the Nazi salute]
By this means (Francis hoped) the children would learn to think of the nation (in its new, post Civil War form -- i.e. "indivisible") as the proper recipient of their ultimate allegiance. They would give reverence to the nation and never again think of it as a "voluntary union." The nation began to be viewed like unto God Himself (i.e. "indivisible", worthy of our deepest trust and highest commitment). We would become one people who would all be devoted to promoting the one nation as opposed to our individual, familial, or religious interests. [btw, the phrase "under God" was not in the original -- that was added in 1954 during the Eisenhower administration -- Francis did not believe in God]
We have indeed become such a people. The vast majority of our fellow citizens view the Government as the one indispensable institution. They believe in it, trust in it, and depend upon it. There is no longer any analogous loyalty to the family or the Church (neither of which is viewed as important to our well-being) -- only the State holds that revered position in the minds of most Americans.
Now even the Church views it as part of its duty to "pledge allegiance" to the nation. Methinks something is badly amiss.
-- J. Steven Wilkins
DVD is the solution to the content industries problems. Instead of forcing copy protection on every format, all content should be released on DVD, which is secure and built from the ground up to prevent copying. No wait...
Usurper_ii
-=-=-=-
Success is the journey...
not the destination