but the word 'pirate' has been strongly associated with lawbreaking
That's not exactly a new thing in politics. Snipped from Wikipedia:
Tories: The word derives from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe; modern Irish tóraí: outlaw, robber, from the Irish word tóir, meaning "pursuit", since outlaws were "pursued men".[1][2] It was originally used to refer to an Irish outlaw and later applied to Confederates or Royalists in arms.[3] The term was thus originally a term of abuse, "an Irish rebel", before being adopted as a political label in the same way as Whig.
You're using google wrong. If you've got spaces you have to quote it, which gives about 1750 hits on "iphone 4". Otherwise you get pages with iphone and 4 on them, not necessarily in that order or in any proximity.
Indeed. And if all holders are represented, that should be a nice bonus for open source authors. If we're applying blanket transfer taxes, then it would be reasonable that all producers got compensated and incentivized. Hey, maybe even us commenters could get our cut.
so I know which flavor I downloaded the most.
If you're an average internet dweller, from what I've read it's probably the pink pr0n bar. Which of course means that any 'fair' distribution of royalties will never be implemented; it'd become one huge porn-financing scheme.
Money that sits around represents value saved and future security for the person storing that money. Apart from the actual currency, the abstract concepts can be stored in other media, but you need to separate the concepts. If you want to spend the actual value 'now' and promise to return it in the future, then you somehow need to guarantee that. Saying it won't be worth anything in the future (inflation) or saying someone else is gonna pay so you don't need to save (pensions) are alternatives, but people still want the abstract function and just sink their value into another asset (and you will likely get a bubble in that asset, as measured in the depreciating currency).
loans become hard to afford over long periods of time
Loans are always hard to afford over long periods of time, the only question is who will pay for them.
The taker of the loan? The holder of the currency or recipients of value denominated in that currency? The savers who thought their stored value was safe? The banks when the loans default? The taxpayers when the loans default?
To return a positive interest in actual value, the payment will be exacted in one of those places and it will be as painful wherever you decide to take the money. So who should be paying for the loan? The answer seems to be 'anyone who didn't profit from the deal gets to pay'.
simply by not loaning the money.
At market controlled interest rates, lent value can and will still accrue a positive interest to balance the risk and the unavailability of the capital over the time frame of the loan. You can still pool them into bond funds and a vast amount of other constructs, so there is little practical problem with managing them. You would have to have appropriate reserves to redeem deposits and such on non-fixed term pools, but most of the current system would be implementable even without fractional reserve driven inflation.
That being the case, a small amount of controlled inflation is by far a better choice than swings back and forth.
Really? The dotcom boom and wipeout didn't seem that good of a choice. Neither does the property crisis.
You're simply not getting a 'small amount of controlled inflation' either way, you get massive asset inflation in various bubbles to accommodate the influx of currency in the system (as large segments of the economy are not measured in inflation numbers), and then you get an implosion once the malinvestments are repriced to market against other assets, and most likely you get the accompanying massive annihilation of currency as the FRB money is delevered.
You still have the exact same thing happening that happened before, you're just confusing the measurements by changing the units. And while I'm sure some economist will suggest redefining gallons and grams every year to make inflation less obvious, that won't really change the fundamental results. Altho it will probably make some look better on paper.
First, perhaps one shouldn't take out bank loans to purchase seed. Second, inflation to help farmers pay those loans is basically just a form of subsidy; better to have an actual subsidy if that's really a problem (disregarding the fact that banks will most likely compensate themselves for inflation by increasing the spread anyway).
Because of deflation, you pay the bank much more in constant dollars.
No, you pay the same amount of dollars, but those dollars can buy more. We see deflation all around in industrial segments all the time; usually that simply means that things are getting cheaper. A natural effect, as things often do get cheaper to produce.
I'm also not sure why massive deflation is a solution to people not knowing how to save or invest money.
Because in an inflationary economy everyone is basically forced to malinvest (do it, or your money will get inflated away). It doesn't matter if you know how to invest, the game is rigged and the only trick is finding the correct bubble to ride until it implodes, because today the print-leverage-invest money cycle with artificially set interest rates leads to asset inflation rather than the measured, largely wage related, inflation. You end up with lots of people knowing it's a bubble and an idiotic investment with no ROI and little non-investment demand, but those vast amounts of fresh minted fractional reserve dollars have to go somewhere if you want to save the actual value of them.
Some amateurs got ahold of it and held it up as 'proof' that tachyons existed and that the physicists were trying to cover it up.
And if you'd covered the data up, that would have been actual 'proof' that you were covering something up.
That is the frustrations with releasing raw data.
Documenting error rates isn't really that hard, nor that difficult for most people to understand.
Personally I'd tend to ascribe failure to disclose raw data to fudging of results and academic dishonesty, probably for the sake of publications or grants rather than a specific agenda in most cases. Which frankly smears far more than any joker misreading that data could ever do.
the real damage is done in works which are never created in the first place due to the perception that piracy would make them financially irrelevant.
The number of works made financially irrelevant by piracy are dwarfed by the number of works made financially irrelevant by the industry structure. Compared to the effects of channel lockup, payola and marketing bombcarpets, most projects are marginalized out of far more of their level playing field 'fair share' than they lose to any piracy.
struggle to make a profit
Most protected IP never makes any profit, or even revenue, at all. Which rather demonstrates how flawed the concept is, and how little relevancy it has to what actually gets or produced or not.
A simpler, more effective and infinitely more measurable method of encouraging creative production would be to simply replace patents and copyrights with usage connected payouts from the actual system itself to the producers of the original works and shift large segments of those industries out into free market competition. The current efficiency levels of IPR that range between 5-20 percent of funding going towards the intended purpose make most other tax/benefit schemes look like paragons of financial efficiency.
Imagine how many of those currently un-funded works would get produced if even 40% (8 times as efficient as the music business or twice as efficient as pharma patents) of the financing it costs the economy actually went to the production of new works, rather than got lost on the way...
It is faster and easier, plus I really do like doing the right thing.
The problem is, with the industry behaving as it is, handing them money no longer is 'the right thing'. I'd rather spend more effort and more money if I can be sure no money goes to the socially harmful IP industries. Much like shopping ecologically, it's worth a bit more to shop socially responsibly and lobbyist free.
Which leaves only verifiably unassociated independents as the ethically payable choice.
In about the same sense that Fedora 11 or Ubuntu 8.10 have been 'abandoned', and the hardware I have that ran them is now 'obsolete'.
It's an open Linux. It's a dist version. Updates, ports and evolution will go on for as long as the community has any interest in the hardware and haven't yet all migrated to newer releases. You're not dependent on the fickle nature of corporate politics for the continued evolution of your gadget.
Personally, I'll have to say it's one of the very few PDA/phones I've been satisfied with, and due to the open nature, 'abandonment' simply isn't a realistic problem.
you'll see a lot less flaming, trolling, and defacing.... and instead you'll see a lot more IRL settings-on-fire, beatings and defecating in mailboxes.
People I believe will be less quick to turn a discussion into an argument and more...... interested in turning it into a fist fight.
Most non-anonymous meetings of people of widely differing opinion, such as demonstrations/counter demonstrations, sports events or even your average contested parking space have a much higher chance of ending up vastly more unpleasant than an internet flame war.
Most of the times I see various people arguing against anonymity I strongly suspect it's because they actually do want to engage in off-line retaliation against people who annoy them in some way, rather than any concern over the level of discourse in various forums.
Doing what you wish with your property is generally considered a right. Arranging it in patterns that someone else may or may not have done before falls within that exercise.
Taking someone else's work or property is not a right and loss can be demonstrated in the absence of law, but copying it does not affect the original work. I lose nothing when someone copies something I have made, whether it is a chair, a text or a piece of music. Without the existence of the legal framework there has been no demonstrable loss, only enrichment of the community as a whole.
copying someone else's work... is still a bad thing
Except it's demonstrably a good thing. The total wealth (as in existence of things people value to some degree) of the socio-economic system increases without anyone facing any loss. It is hard to find a more fundamentally 'good' thing.
In general I support the rights of an individual or a company to protect the copyrights of their works.
Personally I don't consider copyright legitimate. But I do support systems of paying creators beyond actual market value for the efforts in producing widely used works, as long as the payments are separated from the control of duplication. Basically any system would be better than copyright; at 5% efficiency, it's worse than pretty much any other tax/benefit scheme, which means that it'd be trivial to reform the system to pay several times as many creators more money than they're getting today at less cost to the economy as a whole.
They willingly supply personal information, and have the expectation that it will be spread about.
They willingly supply inane shallow one liners, as that's the only thing they trust facebook with. The level of 'social networking' that I see there, at least, is about what you overhear if you sit down in the middle of a bus.
Most people are quite happy with the privacy expectations of a public space; you don't have any. On the other hand, that rather severely limits its utility as a communication medium.
Facebook is mostly a problem for those that don't use it.
I'd say it's more a problem for those that would like to use it for something more worthwhile.
You seem to be a rarity; even plain p2p traffic seems to be increasing in volume if not in percentage, and at least in my anecdotal experience there's been a fairly significant increase in darknet/vpn usage.
It is not because I don't want to give my money to such jerks
Money not going to the jerks is certainly a selling point tho; I'd sooner pay for pirated copies than hand money to the anti-democratic terrorists of the MPAA/RIAA.
What's wrong with them expressing dominance over their property?
They're not expressing dominance over their own property, they're doing it over other peoples property. IP rights are fundamentally taxation and control rights on copying. Copying is something that people are generally allowed to do with any other property they hold (and which is intrinsic to the fundamental creation of wealth in the economy).
Actually, badcaps failure modes are so often so nasty that they can certainly cause data loss. They computer won't just 'fail' at once, but will probably begin with silent corruption as power availability teeters on the edge of tolerances, then move into crashes as memory and other components gets more significantly underpowered during load, then go on to many crashes per day, into crashes during recovery and then eventually death.
If you identify the problem during the first phase, after a few random software crashes, then you probably won't have significant data loss. But if you get to the point where you've had a dozen crashes during recovery attempts, then you may end up with partially corrupt file systems and certainly a few missing files.
don't be lured into thinking your communication is secure.
Which rather applies to signed certificates as well, considering that a large percentage of entities willing and capable of MITM'ing you are entirely capable of leaning on/infiltrating/bribing any of the bazillion 'trusted' CA's.
For a 'trust root' scheme to be trustworthy you need certificates to be signed by multiple independent entities so you can discover broken trust. Otherwise you're better off caching and checking for changed certificates.
That's about equivalent to saying Redhat should dump their distribution and try to sell Android instead.
Android may have a place on the Meego/Maemo platforms, but that would be as a port of the vm so it can run Android apps as well as, and alongside, everything else.
Ironically, and somewhat amusingly, there also appears to exist burqa fetishists. One may fleetingly wonder if there are any Amsterdam window shops catering to that kink; the cultural crossover would be quite mind boggling.
Somehow it's still smugly satisfying to note both the failure of such rules and the implications of such attractions; porn is mostly in the mind of the observer.
someone would have to break/steal the keys used to sign the records, in order to cause trouble
Or lean on the registrar. It's going to be a bit interesting to see how this will affect the DNS based government filters that are implemented on ISP level in a lot of countries.
These guys on the other hand, are directly profiting from someone else's work.
Which differs from the RIAA/MPAA corps... how?
This is exactly the sort of thing copyright law was intended to prevent.
Copyright law was intended to prevent free speech and cheap publishing in general, by creating a mutual dependency between publishers and state (the king, originally). With a quid-pro-quo; protection from competition in exchange or censorship services. It's never been about the actual creators, or the actual creators would have been given a position where they would have a negotiating advantage.
It's a system that has worked reasonably well
In fact, it's never worked reasonably well, from the start when the stationers company pretty much appropriated what they felt like, to todays contracts that are abusive on the border of slavery.
I'm surprised there's so much sympathy for criminals.
With the current state of affairs you're more likely to get violated by the MAFIAA corps than you are by the mafia. The industry is more corrupt and corrosive to democracy than even organized crime; it basically _is_ organized crime, except it's got higher officials on its payroll.
So you may in fact be wrong; people may in fact prefer to pay to non-industry sites. At least that won't support organizations hellbent on destroying freedom in the western civilization.
IF they can get it to $7, $10, or even $15, it's even better.
If? They, like every other person on the internet, have full control over how much data gets sent to you. If they want you over your limit they can put you over your limit. Basically, transfer caps with overcharge gives them a revenue source that is completely in their control.
If they advertise their service honestly, I'm perfectly fine with that.
Honest, in a 1GB/month capped service, means something like '3kb/s sustained speed service with burst capability' (disregarding possible calculation mistakes on my side).
But if they advertise a certain bandwidth for a certain price, then that's it, you should be able to use it fully and not be constrained by artificial intentional limitations that make it impossible to use the advertised bandwidth or change the price if you do.
We could solve todays patent problems in more or less the same way; stick all the patents in a pool, assign what you think is an appropriate incentive for the economy as a whole to pay for it all, and let the parties in the system divide the available capital fairly.
Patents and other IPR laws seem so enticing when their costs are hidden; one never points out that when they get their hundred billion incomes those hundreds of billions are taken from elsewhere. More reasonably, both their gathering and distributing ends should be within the government, just like any other taxation scheme.
There's a fair case to be made that media consolidation started long ago with news cooperatives such as AP and other news agencies, and they've got at least 150 years on their neck. The fact that the internet has made it fairly obvious that we might not exactly need several hundred thousand papers worldwide printing pretty much the same merged newsfeeds with a few opinion pieces and local interest items tagged on doesn't mean the redundancy and content consolidation didn't exist before.
And even beyond that there's a vast overproduction of news in general, far more every day than any avid newsconsumer could assimilate in a week or a month. So much of it needs to die off if the 'paper' model is kept.
A more desirable model moving forward would be to provide services for tuning newfeeds for customers, down to the article level personalized newsfeeds. That I'd pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
but the word 'pirate' has been strongly associated with lawbreaking
That's not exactly a new thing in politics. Snipped from Wikipedia:
Tories: The word derives from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe; modern Irish tóraí: outlaw, robber, from the Irish word tóir, meaning "pursuit", since outlaws were "pursued men".[1][2] It was originally used to refer to an Irish outlaw and later applied to Confederates or Royalists in arms.[3] The term was thus originally a term of abuse, "an Irish rebel", before being adopted as a political label in the same way as Whig.
And they're hardly rare either...
There's 5,200 of iPhone 4
You're using google wrong. If you've got spaces you have to quote it, which gives about 1750 hits on "iphone 4". Otherwise you get pages with iphone and 4 on them, not necessarily in that order or in any proximity.
Indeed. And if all holders are represented, that should be a nice bonus for open source authors. If we're applying blanket transfer taxes, then it would be reasonable that all producers got compensated and incentivized. Hey, maybe even us commenters could get our cut.
so I know which flavor I downloaded the most.
If you're an average internet dweller, from what I've read it's probably the pink pr0n bar. Which of course means that any 'fair' distribution of royalties will never be implemented; it'd become one huge porn-financing scheme.
If it sits around, it does nobody any good.
Money that sits around represents value saved and future security for the person storing that money. Apart from the actual currency, the abstract concepts can be stored in other media, but you need to separate the concepts. If you want to spend the actual value 'now' and promise to return it in the future, then you somehow need to guarantee that. Saying it won't be worth anything in the future (inflation) or saying someone else is gonna pay so you don't need to save (pensions) are alternatives, but people still want the abstract function and just sink their value into another asset (and you will likely get a bubble in that asset, as measured in the depreciating currency).
loans become hard to afford over long periods of time
Loans are always hard to afford over long periods of time, the only question is who will pay for them.
The taker of the loan? The holder of the currency or recipients of value denominated in that currency? The savers who thought their stored value was safe? The banks when the loans default? The taxpayers when the loans default?
To return a positive interest in actual value, the payment will be exacted in one of those places and it will be as painful wherever you decide to take the money. So who should be paying for the loan? The answer seems to be 'anyone who didn't profit from the deal gets to pay'.
simply by not loaning the money.
At market controlled interest rates, lent value can and will still accrue a positive interest to balance the risk and the unavailability of the capital over the time frame of the loan. You can still pool them into bond funds and a vast amount of other constructs, so there is little practical problem with managing them. You would have to have appropriate reserves to redeem deposits and such on non-fixed term pools, but most of the current system would be implementable even without fractional reserve driven inflation.
That being the case, a small amount of controlled inflation is by far a better choice than swings back and forth.
Really? The dotcom boom and wipeout didn't seem that good of a choice. Neither does the property crisis.
You're simply not getting a 'small amount of controlled inflation' either way, you get massive asset inflation in various bubbles to accommodate the influx of currency in the system (as large segments of the economy are not measured in inflation numbers), and then you get an implosion once the malinvestments are repriced to market against other assets, and most likely you get the accompanying massive annihilation of currency as the FRB money is delevered.
You still have the exact same thing happening that happened before, you're just confusing the measurements by changing the units. And while I'm sure some economist will suggest redefining gallons and grams every year to make inflation less obvious, that won't really change the fundamental results. Altho it will probably make some look better on paper.
You had to take out a bank loan to purchase seed
First, perhaps one shouldn't take out bank loans to purchase seed. Second, inflation to help farmers pay those loans is basically just a form of subsidy; better to have an actual subsidy if that's really a problem (disregarding the fact that banks will most likely compensate themselves for inflation by increasing the spread anyway).
Because of deflation, you pay the bank much more in constant dollars.
No, you pay the same amount of dollars, but those dollars can buy more. We see deflation all around in industrial segments all the time; usually that simply means that things are getting cheaper. A natural effect, as things often do get cheaper to produce.
I'm also not sure why massive deflation is a solution to people not knowing how to save or invest money.
Because in an inflationary economy everyone is basically forced to malinvest (do it, or your money will get inflated away). It doesn't matter if you know how to invest, the game is rigged and the only trick is finding the correct bubble to ride until it implodes, because today the print-leverage-invest money cycle with artificially set interest rates leads to asset inflation rather than the measured, largely wage related, inflation. You end up with lots of people knowing it's a bubble and an idiotic investment with no ROI and little non-investment demand, but those vast amounts of fresh minted fractional reserve dollars have to go somewhere if you want to save the actual value of them.
Some amateurs got ahold of it and held it up as 'proof' that tachyons existed and that the physicists were trying to cover it up.
And if you'd covered the data up, that would have been actual 'proof' that you were covering something up.
That is the frustrations with releasing raw data.
Documenting error rates isn't really that hard, nor that difficult for most people to understand.
Personally I'd tend to ascribe failure to disclose raw data to fudging of results and academic dishonesty, probably for the sake of publications or grants rather than a specific agenda in most cases. Which frankly smears far more than any joker misreading that data could ever do.
the real damage is done in works which are never created in the first place due to the perception that piracy would make them financially irrelevant.
The number of works made financially irrelevant by piracy are dwarfed by the number of works made financially irrelevant by the industry structure. Compared to the effects of channel lockup, payola and marketing bombcarpets, most projects are marginalized out of far more of their level playing field 'fair share' than they lose to any piracy.
struggle to make a profit
Most protected IP never makes any profit, or even revenue, at all. Which rather demonstrates how flawed the concept is, and how little relevancy it has to what actually gets or produced or not.
A simpler, more effective and infinitely more measurable method of encouraging creative production would be to simply replace patents and copyrights with usage connected payouts from the actual system itself to the producers of the original works and shift large segments of those industries out into free market competition. The current efficiency levels of IPR that range between 5-20 percent of funding going towards the intended purpose make most other tax/benefit schemes look like paragons of financial efficiency.
Imagine how many of those currently un-funded works would get produced if even 40% (8 times as efficient as the music business or twice as efficient as pharma patents) of the financing it costs the economy actually went to the production of new works, rather than got lost on the way...
It is faster and easier, plus I really do like doing the right thing.
The problem is, with the industry behaving as it is, handing them money no longer is 'the right thing'. I'd rather spend more effort and more money if I can be sure no money goes to the socially harmful IP industries. Much like shopping ecologically, it's worth a bit more to shop socially responsibly and lobbyist free.
Which leaves only verifiably unassociated independents as the ethically payable choice.
Instead Maemo has been abandoned.
In about the same sense that Fedora 11 or Ubuntu 8.10 have been 'abandoned', and the hardware I have that ran them is now 'obsolete'.
It's an open Linux. It's a dist version. Updates, ports and evolution will go on for as long as the community has any interest in the hardware and haven't yet all migrated to newer releases. You're not dependent on the fickle nature of corporate politics for the continued evolution of your gadget.
Personally, I'll have to say it's one of the very few PDA/phones I've been satisfied with, and due to the open nature, 'abandonment' simply isn't a realistic problem.
you'll see a lot less flaming, trolling, and defacing. ... and instead you'll see a lot more IRL settings-on-fire, beatings and defecating in mailboxes.
People I believe will be less quick to turn a discussion into an argument and more ... ... interested in turning it into a fist fight.
Most non-anonymous meetings of people of widely differing opinion, such as demonstrations/counter demonstrations, sports events or even your average contested parking space have a much higher chance of ending up vastly more unpleasant than an internet flame war.
Most of the times I see various people arguing against anonymity I strongly suspect it's because they actually do want to engage in off-line retaliation against people who annoy them in some way, rather than any concern over the level of discourse in various forums.
Copying someone else's work is not a right
Doing what you wish with your property is generally considered a right. Arranging it in patterns that someone else may or may not have done before falls within that exercise.
Taking someone else's work or property is not a right and loss can be demonstrated in the absence of law, but copying it does not affect the original work. I lose nothing when someone copies something I have made, whether it is a chair, a text or a piece of music. Without the existence of the legal framework there has been no demonstrable loss, only enrichment of the community as a whole.
copying someone else's work ... is still a bad thing
Except it's demonstrably a good thing. The total wealth (as in existence of things people value to some degree) of the socio-economic system increases without anyone facing any loss. It is hard to find a more fundamentally 'good' thing.
In general I support the rights of an individual or a company to protect the copyrights of their works.
Personally I don't consider copyright legitimate. But I do support systems of paying creators beyond actual market value for the efforts in producing widely used works, as long as the payments are separated from the control of duplication. Basically any system would be better than copyright; at 5% efficiency, it's worse than pretty much any other tax/benefit scheme, which means that it'd be trivial to reform the system to pay several times as many creators more money than they're getting today at less cost to the economy as a whole.
They willingly supply personal information, and have the expectation that it will be spread about.
They willingly supply inane shallow one liners, as that's the only thing they trust facebook with. The level of 'social networking' that I see there, at least, is about what you overhear if you sit down in the middle of a bus.
Most people are quite happy with the privacy expectations of a public space; you don't have any. On the other hand, that rather severely limits its utility as a communication medium.
Facebook is mostly a problem for those that don't use it.
I'd say it's more a problem for those that would like to use it for something more worthwhile.
I have decreased the amount that I do it
You seem to be a rarity; even plain p2p traffic seems to be increasing in volume if not in percentage, and at least in my anecdotal experience there's been a fairly significant increase in darknet/vpn usage.
It is not because I don't want to give my money to such jerks
Money not going to the jerks is certainly a selling point tho; I'd sooner pay for pirated copies than hand money to the anti-democratic terrorists of the MPAA/RIAA.
What's wrong with them expressing dominance over their property?
They're not expressing dominance over their own property, they're doing it over other peoples property. IP rights are fundamentally taxation and control rights on copying. Copying is something that people are generally allowed to do with any other property they hold (and which is intrinsic to the fundamental creation of wealth in the economy).
Actually, badcaps failure modes are so often so nasty that they can certainly cause data loss. They computer won't just 'fail' at once, but will probably begin with silent corruption as power availability teeters on the edge of tolerances, then move into crashes as memory and other components gets more significantly underpowered during load, then go on to many crashes per day, into crashes during recovery and then eventually death.
If you identify the problem during the first phase, after a few random software crashes, then you probably won't have significant data loss. But if you get to the point where you've had a dozen crashes during recovery attempts, then you may end up with partially corrupt file systems and certainly a few missing files.
don't be lured into thinking your communication is secure.
Which rather applies to signed certificates as well, considering that a large percentage of entities willing and capable of MITM'ing you are entirely capable of leaning on/infiltrating/bribing any of the bazillion 'trusted' CA's.
For a 'trust root' scheme to be trustworthy you need certificates to be signed by multiple independent entities so you can discover broken trust. Otherwise you're better off caching and checking for changed certificates.
That's about equivalent to saying Redhat should dump their distribution and try to sell Android instead.
Android may have a place on the Meego/Maemo platforms, but that would be as a port of the vm so it can run Android apps as well as, and alongside, everything else.
where women must be covered from head-to-toe
Ironically, and somewhat amusingly, there also appears to exist burqa fetishists. One may fleetingly wonder if there are any Amsterdam window shops catering to that kink; the cultural crossover would be quite mind boggling.
Somehow it's still smugly satisfying to note both the failure of such rules and the implications of such attractions; porn is mostly in the mind of the observer.
someone would have to break/steal the keys used to sign the records, in order to cause trouble
Or lean on the registrar. It's going to be a bit interesting to see how this will affect the DNS based government filters that are implemented on ISP level in a lot of countries.
These guys on the other hand, are directly profiting from someone else's work.
Which differs from the RIAA/MPAA corps... how?
This is exactly the sort of thing copyright law was intended to prevent.
Copyright law was intended to prevent free speech and cheap publishing in general, by creating a mutual dependency between publishers and state (the king, originally). With a quid-pro-quo; protection from competition in exchange or censorship services. It's never been about the actual creators, or the actual creators would have been given a position where they would have a negotiating advantage.
It's a system that has worked reasonably well
In fact, it's never worked reasonably well, from the start when the stationers company pretty much appropriated what they felt like, to todays contracts that are abusive on the border of slavery.
I'm surprised there's so much sympathy for criminals.
With the current state of affairs you're more likely to get violated by the MAFIAA corps than you are by the mafia. The industry is more corrupt and corrosive to democracy than even organized crime; it basically _is_ organized crime, except it's got higher officials on its payroll.
So you may in fact be wrong; people may in fact prefer to pay to non-industry sites. At least that won't support organizations hellbent on destroying freedom in the western civilization.
IF they can get it to $7, $10, or even $15, it's even better.
If? They, like every other person on the internet, have full control over how much data gets sent to you. If they want you over your limit they can put you over your limit. Basically, transfer caps with overcharge gives them a revenue source that is completely in their control.
announced today
I believe your clock is running about a year behind.
If they advertise their service honestly, I'm perfectly fine with that.
Honest, in a 1GB/month capped service, means something like '3kb/s sustained speed service with burst capability' (disregarding possible calculation mistakes on my side).
But if they advertise a certain bandwidth for a certain price, then that's it, you should be able to use it fully and not be constrained by artificial intentional limitations that make it impossible to use the advertised bandwidth or change the price if you do.
We could solve todays patent problems in more or less the same way; stick all the patents in a pool, assign what you think is an appropriate incentive for the economy as a whole to pay for it all, and let the parties in the system divide the available capital fairly.
Patents and other IPR laws seem so enticing when their costs are hidden; one never points out that when they get their hundred billion incomes those hundreds of billions are taken from elsewhere. More reasonably, both their gathering and distributing ends should be within the government, just like any other taxation scheme.
There's a fair case to be made that media consolidation started long ago with news cooperatives such as AP and other news agencies, and they've got at least 150 years on their neck. The fact that the internet has made it fairly obvious that we might not exactly need several hundred thousand papers worldwide printing pretty much the same merged newsfeeds with a few opinion pieces and local interest items tagged on doesn't mean the redundancy and content consolidation didn't exist before.
And even beyond that there's a vast overproduction of news in general, far more every day than any avid newsconsumer could assimilate in a week or a month. So much of it needs to die off if the 'paper' model is kept.
A more desirable model moving forward would be to provide services for tuning newfeeds for customers, down to the article level personalized newsfeeds. That I'd pay for.