...and if the human body was immune to germs, we'd never get sick. If food didn't go bad, we wouldn't need refrigerators. If we all had unicorns, we wouldn't need cars. If glass didn't break, we could all throw stones.
Why? Because the top programmers will no longer program, if they don't get paid.
riiiiiiight. just like how writers will stop writing books when people can read them at the library for free. just look at how cd sales have dropped since people can download mp3s. what a shame it was when the whole porn industry died with the creation of jpegs!
obviously, nobody ever does anything without being paid! creative impetus, p'shaw! all the great creative works in the history of the human race were done for a salary, right?
They could make it very tough though. Just because my ear can successfully hear the music does not mean that it can be digitised as easy. Our ears work difeerently.
The thing is, in order to play a sound file on a computer, it must be decoded to a form the sound card can output, namely.wav data. Even if they can manage to prevent me getting my hands on the unencrypted bitstream until it gets to the sound card, I can just write a cute little piece of code that masquerades as a sound card, and dumps all the data sent to it to disk. Watermarked or not, weird data or not, I can then take whatever data the sound card will output and compress to.mp3, and it will come out the same regardless of where it's decoded...
The DMCA is a law. Anyone posting DeCSS is in direct violation of that law. It's really really simple.
Allow me to provide a grounding in a 3 branch government, and the concept of checks and balances.
The 3 branches exist so that if one of them gets out of hand, say...does something blatantly unconstitutional (the DMCA for example), one of the others can put a stop to it.
In this case, the Legislative branch (read: the people who make the laws) took it up the ass from the corporate scumfucks who run the motion picture industry, and conveniently whited-out some bits of the constitution that weren't in their financial interest.
Now, it's up for the Judicial branch to notice that the Legislative branch was huffing rock up on capital hill, and declare this unconstitutional.
This is how the legal system works. It's "really that simple" as you say.
I know it's going out of style these days, but let's see what the consitution has to say on the matter of intellectual property.
This clause is varyingly known as the "copyright clause" or the "patent clause" depending on what kind of a lawyer you are. Either way, this is the exact wording in the Constitution (section 8) that provides for the creation of Intellectual Property.
It says:
The Congress shall have Power...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
It seems that the authors of the consitution had not intended in any way for Intellectual Property to be a financial protection in the way that it is currently interpreted. Seemingly in direct contradiction, the judge says:
Plaintiffs have invested huge sums over the years in producing motion pictures in reliance upon a legal framework that, through the law of copyright, has ensured that they will have the exclusive right to copy and distribute those motion pictures for economic gain.
It is also interesting to say that the current framework is one that protects and harbors a monopoly.
<sarcasm>
So, wait a second. Are you daring to suggest that the court system, or politicians for that matter, would base their decisions on who's got the money rather than rational, legal, or common-sensical reasons?
The audiacity! Here? In the land of the free? The home of the brave? How could you suggest such a thing?:)
Regardless, Napster could just filter and stop transmission of copyrighted works via their system (unless they have permission to distribute the works).
er, and just exactly how would they go about doing such a thing? nothing differentiates a copyrighted string of bytes from a non-copyrighted string of bytes.
you couldn't even use the file name, because i can still misname them, or give them names like "m3t4ll1c4 - f4d3 t0 bl4ck.mp3"
IANAL, but unless the law is very different than where I come from, I seriously doubt that the school has the legal authority to act "in loco parentis" (literally "in place of the parents").
"in loco parentis" is typically only granted to boarding schools, esp. when those are state-funded (i.e. math/science magnet-type schools that have an admissions process but are still paid for with public funds).
The whole reason for granting "in loco parentis" is to provide legal rights to a body that will be literally that, "in place of the parents," and needs the authority of a parent/guardian.
Either way, regular school districts can not arbitrarily decide to act "in loco parentis", it must be specifically granted to a particular body for a specific reason, and most schools do not have this advantage...
Listening to you people drone on about how Napster does not affect cd sales is sickening!
I said it before, I meant it, and I'll now say it again: Napster does not affect CD Sales, nor will it destroy the music industry. This is the same piracy FUD they spread with the advent of casette tapes, and VHS, and both ended up being a benefit for their respective industries rather than the bane they attempted to paint them as.
One need only look at the fact that CD sales have skyrocketed over the last few years. The article itself says CD sales are up 20%. Are you aware of how significant a chunk of change that 20% constitutes? Hell, if we want to be as statistically and scientifically shoddy as the people who conducted the study, we can correlate those two facts and discern that Napster is responsible for a 20% rise in CD sales...
I did it kinda deliberately because I had another one to make;) Nothing personal.
because these same students will eventually make money and are potentil lifelong fans.
I couldn't agree with you more. The RIAA is really shooting itself in the foot here, they've forgotten the age-old rule that there is no such thing as bad press (here come the replies...).
"Rampant Music Piracy Bankrupts US Economy" is the spectre they're trying to raise here, and if you look at what they're trying to say in such simple terms, it becomes obvious how ridiculous these studies are...
The article mentions that album sales had been on a downturn since 1998 - *a full year before Napster's release*.
One has to wonder how up-to-date the data used in the study was. Napster has only (really) become a big enough thing to show up on their radar or make any kind of an impact in the last 6 months or so.
Knowing how far behind the business world runs in terms of bookkeeping, how recent do you think the data used in this study was? In all probability, they're analyzing data from before their supposed cause became a relevant factor...
Napster hurts album sales especially among poor college students.
10 years ago the RIAA claimed that CDRs would destroy record sales, they didn't. 10 years before that they claimed that audio casettes would destroy record sales. They didn't. Around the same time, the movie industry claimed that VHS bootlegging would destroy the movie industry, it didn't.
Poor college students are going to bootleg music no matter what. They're poor college students, that's what they do, that's what they've always done, it's nothing new. If napster wasn't there, they'd be dubbing casettes or CDs.
Coincident with the arrival of MP3 and Napster, these sales take a pretty severe dip downwards.
The majority of people are so easily mislead by statements like this because they lack a simple understanding of the basic rules of logic. In this case, for example, correlation is not causation. There is a direct, frighteningly statistically accurate, correlation between the number of priests in a given town, and the number of alcoholics. Both are functions of population...
I suggest consulting this page for a brief summary of common logical fallacies.
This study is so vague it's almost silly. While they determine that CD stores with physical proximity to universities have slightly declining CD sales, they make no attempt whatsoever to determine the actual cause of said decline, and simply *decide* that it is the result of.mp3 and the RIAA's boogeyman, Napster. One has to wonder who commissioned the study...
FUD. This is the real-world equivalent of trolling:) Shoddy science passed off as fact to an ignorant audience (for the most part).
Technically, I have to concede this point. I do not, however, agree with them. Their efforts in this regard indicate such a lack of understanding of the current state of technology that i wonder if they're still using 4-tracks to record their work.
i like their music too, but if i intentionally illegally copy their work then i must suffer the consequences.
i don't like their music any more. your masochistic overtones indicate that you are a troll, whether you know it or not. fuck it, i'll bite.
if i intentionally copy their work it will be solely as an act of civil disobedience to demonstrate the sheer stupidity of attempting to treat information as physicaly property given the ease of duplication. people argue over whether or not "information wants to be free." information already is free. there is no room for argument on this point. anyone trying to treat it any other way is living in the past, denying reality, and will be appropriately left behind as the revolution moves forward.
that's odd, i think my cookie expired while that was submitting or something, i didn't check the 'post anonymously box'. either way, that's me, not meaning to be an ac;)
go on, click the link, click it, you know you want to:)
the article (go ahead, click on it) agrees with you largely, to quote it:
Physicists generally concede that the task is so formidable that a practical quantum computer won't exist for decades.
The forces of evolution, he claims, may have solved the problem of quantum computing several billion years ago. It's a startling idea--but if true, it could explain a puzzle at the core of biology.
Essentially they're trying to figure out why information in DNA is encoded using 4 base pairs, when binary is way more efficient, and therefore should have won out in an evolutionary context. Apparently, if quantum computing is used at a couple points in DNA replication, 4 becomes more efficient than two, which isn't to say that it *does* it, but only that it might...
and we simply don't have star trek level technology to support them
Had you actually read the article, you would have discovered that some biologists suspect that mother nature may have already solved half these problems for us, as cells (esp in DNA replication) appear to use some pretty advanced quantum computing techniques already, and they do it at body temperature.
Read it:) Interesting stuff, not the usual "well, if we somehow figure out how to break every existant law of physics, i can search databases in nlogn/x tries" quantum computing jibberish.
I do:) You seen their source? Neither have I. You seen how amazingly shoddy, unreliable, and *fundamentally* unstable (unstable in that "there's a still a couple serious pointer errors in the pre-1990 code" way) their software is? What do you imagine their code looks like? How easy do you think it is for a bunch of people motivated only by salary to fix something obscure in a couple million lines of badly maintained code? How long you think that takes?
Slashdot Mirror
...and if the human body was immune to germs, we'd never get sick. If food didn't go bad, we wouldn't need refrigerators. If we all had unicorns, we wouldn't need cars. If glass didn't break, we could all throw stones.
Seriously, what?
Here, start with this simple formula - "In Soviet Russia, [direct object] [transitive verb]s YOU!"
Insert words relevant to evolution or intelligent design. Bam! Instant humor. Be the envy of your friends and coworkers.
want to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?
So pr0n is the result of creative impetus? Heh.
:)
Yes! Although for a slightly different definition of 'creative'
heh
a
Why? Because the top programmers will no longer program, if they don't get paid.
riiiiiiight. just like how writers will stop writing books when people can read them at the library for free. just look at how cd sales have dropped since people can download mp3s. what a shame it was when the whole porn industry died with the creation of jpegs!
obviously, nobody ever does anything without being paid! creative impetus, p'shaw! all the great creative works in the history of the human race were done for a salary, right?
oh my people, what have i done unto thee?
a
Um, basics of logic? Correlation is not causation? Aren't scientists of all people supposed to know these things?
Maybe it is?
a
They could make it very tough though. Just because my ear can successfully hear the music does not mean that it can be digitised as easy. Our ears work difeerently.
.wav data. Even if they can manage to prevent me getting my hands on the unencrypted bitstream until it gets to the sound card, I can just write a cute little piece of code that masquerades as a sound card, and dumps all the data sent to it to disk. Watermarked or not, weird data or not, I can then take whatever data the sound card will output and compress to .mp3, and it will come out the same regardless of where it's decoded...
The thing is, in order to play a sound file on a computer, it must be decoded to a form the sound card can output, namely
Oh say does that star spangled banner still wave
O'er the land of the free
and the home of the brave?
shaking in my boots.
Anthony
The DMCA is a law. Anyone posting DeCSS is in direct violation of that law. It's really really simple.
Allow me to provide a grounding in a 3 branch government, and the concept of checks and balances.
The 3 branches exist so that if one of them gets out of hand, say...does something blatantly unconstitutional (the DMCA for example), one of the others can put a stop to it.
In this case, the Legislative branch (read: the people who make the laws) took it up the ass from the corporate scumfucks who run the motion picture industry, and conveniently whited-out some bits of the constitution that weren't in their financial interest.
Now, it's up for the Judicial branch to notice that the Legislative branch was huffing rock up on capital hill, and declare this unconstitutional.
This is how the legal system works. It's "really that simple" as you say.
Very simple...
anthony
I know it's going out of style these days, but let's see what the consitution has to say on the matter of intellectual property.
This clause is varyingly known as the "copyright clause" or the "patent clause" depending on what kind of a lawyer you are. Either way, this is the exact wording in the Constitution (section 8) that provides for the creation of Intellectual Property.
It says:
The Congress shall have Power...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
It seems that the authors of the consitution had not intended in any way for Intellectual Property to be a financial protection in the way that it is currently interpreted. Seemingly in direct contradiction, the judge says:
Plaintiffs have invested huge sums over the years in producing motion pictures in reliance upon a legal framework that, through the law of copyright, has ensured that they will have the exclusive right to copy and distribute those motion pictures for economic gain.
(emphasis in both cases rather obviously mine)
Something smells fishy here...
Anthony
It is also interesting to say that the current framework is one that protects and harbors a monopoly.
:)
<sarcasm>
So, wait a second. Are you daring to suggest that the court system, or politicians for that matter, would base their decisions on who's got the money rather than rational, legal, or common-sensical reasons?
The audiacity! Here? In the land of the free? The home of the brave? How could you suggest such a thing?
</sarcasm>
Anthony
This comment is quoted verbatim from an RIAA website. The original page can be found here.
;)
Frankly, this is a big load of shit, and doesn't deserve a +2 insightful
Anthony
Regardless, Napster could just filter and stop transmission of copyrighted works via their system (unless they have permission to distribute the works).
er, and just exactly how would they go about doing such a thing? nothing differentiates a copyrighted string of bytes from a non-copyrighted string of bytes.
you couldn't even use the file name, because i can still misname them, or give them names like "m3t4ll1c4 - f4d3 t0 bl4ck.mp3"
not that easy.
anthony
IANAL, but unless the law is very different than where I come from, I seriously doubt that the school has the legal authority to act "in loco parentis" (literally "in place of the parents").
"in loco parentis" is typically only granted to boarding schools, esp. when those are state-funded (i.e. math/science magnet-type schools that have an admissions process but are still paid for with public funds).
The whole reason for granting "in loco parentis" is to provide legal rights to a body that will be literally that, "in place of the parents," and needs the authority of a parent/guardian.
Either way, regular school districts can not arbitrarily decide to act "in loco parentis", it must be specifically granted to a particular body for a specific reason, and most schools do not have this advantage...
Anthony
Listening to you people drone on about how Napster does not affect cd sales is sickening!
I said it before, I meant it, and I'll now say it again: Napster does not affect CD Sales, nor will it destroy the music industry. This is the same piracy FUD they spread with the advent of casette tapes, and VHS, and both ended up being a benefit for their respective industries rather than the bane they attempted to paint them as.
One need only look at the fact that CD sales have skyrocketed over the last few years. The article itself says CD sales are up 20%. Are you aware of how significant a chunk of change that 20% constitutes? Hell, if we want to be as statistically and scientifically shoddy as the people who conducted the study, we can correlate those two facts and discern that Napster is responsible for a 20% rise in CD sales...
Anthony
You've missed the point.
;) Nothing personal.
I did it kinda deliberately because I had another one to make
because these same students will eventually make money and are potentil lifelong fans.
I couldn't agree with you more. The RIAA is really shooting itself in the foot here, they've forgotten the age-old rule that there is no such thing as bad press (here come the replies...).
"Rampant Music Piracy Bankrupts US Economy" is the spectre they're trying to raise here, and if you look at what they're trying to say in such simple terms, it becomes obvious how ridiculous these studies are...
Anthony
The article mentions that album sales had been on a downturn since 1998 - *a full year before Napster's release*.
One has to wonder how up-to-date the data used in the study was. Napster has only (really) become a big enough thing to show up on their radar or make any kind of an impact in the last 6 months or so.
Knowing how far behind the business world runs in terms of bookkeeping, how recent do you think the data used in this study was? In all probability, they're analyzing data from before their supposed cause became a relevant factor...
Anthony
Napster hurts album sales especially among poor college students.
10 years ago the RIAA claimed that CDRs would destroy record sales, they didn't. 10 years before that they claimed that audio casettes would destroy record sales. They didn't. Around the same time, the movie industry claimed that VHS bootlegging would destroy the movie industry, it didn't.
Poor college students are going to bootleg music no matter what. They're poor college students, that's what they do, that's what they've always done, it's nothing new. If napster wasn't there, they'd be dubbing casettes or CDs.
Anthony
Coincident with the arrival of MP3 and Napster, these sales take a pretty severe dip downwards.
.mp3 and the RIAA's boogeyman, Napster. One has to wonder who commissioned the study...
:) Shoddy science passed off as fact to an ignorant audience (for the most part).
The majority of people are so easily mislead by statements like this because they lack a simple understanding of the basic rules of logic. In this case, for example, correlation is not causation. There is a direct, frighteningly statistically accurate, correlation between the number of priests in a given town, and the number of alcoholics. Both are functions of population...
I suggest consulting this page for a brief summary of common logical fallacies.
This study is so vague it's almost silly. While they determine that CD stores with physical proximity to universities have slightly declining CD sales, they make no attempt whatsoever to determine the actual cause of said decline, and simply *decide* that it is the result of
FUD. This is the real-world equivalent of trolling
Anthony
Metallica are well within their right
Technically, I have to concede this point. I do not, however, agree with them. Their efforts in this regard indicate such a lack of understanding of the current state of technology that i wonder if they're still using 4-tracks to record their work.
i like their music too, but if i intentionally illegally copy their work then i must suffer the consequences.
i don't like their music any more. your masochistic overtones indicate that you are a troll, whether you know it or not. fuck it, i'll bite.
if i intentionally copy their work it will be solely as an act of civil disobedience to demonstrate the sheer stupidity of attempting to treat information as physicaly property given the ease of duplication. people argue over whether or not "information wants to be free." information already is free. there is no room for argument on this point. anyone trying to treat it any other way is living in the past, denying reality, and will be appropriately left behind as the revolution moves forward.
</rant>
Anthony
that's odd, i think my cookie expired while that was submitting or something, i didn't check the 'post anonymously box'. either way, that's me, not meaning to be an ac
anthony
go on, click the link, click it, you know you want to :)
the article (go ahead, click on it) agrees with you largely, to quote it:
Physicists generally concede that the task is so formidable that a practical quantum computer won't exist for decades.
The forces of evolution, he claims, may have solved the problem of quantum computing several billion years ago. It's a startling idea--but if true, it could explain a puzzle at the core of biology.
Essentially they're trying to figure out why information in DNA is encoded using 4 base pairs, when binary is way more efficient, and therefore should have won out in an evolutionary context. Apparently, if quantum computing is used at a couple points in DNA replication, 4 becomes more efficient than two, which isn't to say that it *does* it, but only that it might...
Anthony
What a pity you didn't even read the article.
and we simply don't have star trek level technology to support them
Had you actually read the article, you would have discovered that some biologists suspect that mother nature may have already solved half these problems for us, as cells (esp in DNA replication) appear to use some pretty advanced quantum computing techniques already, and they do it at body temperature.
Read it
Anthony
Odd timing for this one, I just finished reading this article over at New Scientist on how DNA may use quantum computing techniques...
Anthony
I don't see why they didn't release a fixed dll
:) You seen their source? Neither have I. You seen how amazingly shoddy, unreliable, and *fundamentally* unstable (unstable in that "there's a still a couple serious pointer errors in the pre-1990 code" way) their software is? What do you imagine their code looks like? How easy do you think it is for a bunch of people motivated only by salary to fix something obscure in a couple million lines of badly maintained code? How long you think that takes?
.dll
I do
I see why they don't just release a fixed
Anthony