It's worth checking out this page just for some of the comments, like "I have recently become a stockholder in your company and am proud to have done so..."
In August 2001, the RIAA sent IIS a letter asking that they immediately cease and desist from this practice and notified them that they could face legal and monetary penalties. Soon after, IIS entered into negotiations with the RIAA and agreed to settle the case out of court for $1 million.
Everything about this sounds fishy:
RIAA asked IIS to cease and desist. They didn't show up with sherrif's deputies to confiscate the equipment, they just sent a goddamn letter.
If IIS had wanted to make a case of this, we (Slashdot) would have heard something about it. But they didn't, we didn't, and it seems logical to conclude IIS just shut down the server. No big deal.
All of a sudden after all this is done there's a giant lawsuit?
There's something else going on here. I think dattaway was right; this was either a set-up or a win-win opportunity. I wouldn't be surprised to see IIS's DRM software magically appear in some new RIAA-sponsored copy-protection scheme. The $1M will never change hands.
I'd sure love to hear someone from IIS post to this forum...
Copyright is a bargain between the public and authors; you produce something and I'll grant you a limited monopoly on that thing so you'll do it again. The key word here is "bargain". As soon as one side of the bargain feels they are getting screwed they will ignore the bargain.
That's what's happening right now. Copyright law has moved so in favor of copyright holders that these days the entertainment industry requires a great deal of legislation to protect itself from its customers.
I know it sounds obvious, but this won't work. No matter how much money you spend in Washington, once you've broken your side of the bargain, everyone loses, including you. This is a shame, because copyright is a valuable concept, and we're worse off if we lose it.
Tim O'Reilly was talking about a different subject, but he put it best in his "pissing in the well" letter. Break the copyright bargain at your peril.
Mistake #1: everyone needs to be able to sit down at any machine within an organization and get right to work.
True in something like a call center or a bank branch, but for the most part in those situations you're interacting with an application on which you've had some level of training, some of which is about how to use the interface in the first place.
But for most of us the set of machines we deal with from day to day doesn't change much, and we're free to set them up the way we like. In situations where more than one person uses a particular machine, I find that people are pretty rational about keeping customization to a minimum.
Mistake #2: the science of user interface design can predict what works for me.
Wrong. It is very useful for predicting interface needs of a group of users about whom your knowledge is incomplete, but it can tell you nothing about the needs of a particular user. You can make assumptions, and if that particular user is similar to your hypothetical user, you may even be right. But you don't know for sure.
The only person who knows for sure if an interface works is the person using it. And that knowledge doesn't apply to anyone else. That's the whole point of customization, or skinning, or whatever--an interface, good or bad, can be made better (or worse) by a user for that user.
Now, here's the kicker - how are these two things relevant/related??? Well, I personally feel Apple's adoption of BSD is a 'poison pill', encouraged and supported by MS, against GNU/Linux.
I dunno. In "Just for Fun" Torvalds writes about meeting at Apple where Jobs tried his damnedest to get him on board with Linux. As I recall, Linus wasn't real impressed with microkernels and had no interest in where Apple was going with BSD.
It sounded to me like Apple would have gone with Linux, but without not without Torvalds on the payroll.
This is the best idea I've heard for handling copyright of digital material so far.
And it will never happen.
Why would the publishing industry give up what their lobbying dollars bought them in 1997? They *know* they're never going to have a secure copy-protection scheme, and it doesn't make any difference. Because they have the DMCA behind them, *any* copy protection scheme (even one as lame as this) has the force of law and the corresponding penalties for circumvention. The only reason they put any effort at all into trying to develop a copy-protection scheme with some level of technial merit is to weed out the average bozos so they don't have to file so many lawsuits.
Like I said, great idea, but you're about 5 years too late.
It's one thing when a user interface is frustrating, it's another when it's deadly.
The horizontal handles with the latch built in are called crash bars for a reason: when there's a fire in a building and that crowd of screaming people hit those exit doors, you want them opening out, not in.
Slashdot Mirror
here (sunncomm.com)
It's worth checking out this page just for some of the comments, like "I have recently become a stockholder in your company and am proud to have done so..."
One born every minute...
From the RIAA's press release:
Everything about this sounds fishy:
There's something else going on here. I think dattaway was right; this was either a set-up or a win-win opportunity. I wouldn't be surprised to see IIS's DRM software magically appear in some new RIAA-sponsored copy-protection scheme. The $1M will never change hands.
I'd sure love to hear someone from IIS post to this forum...
Copyright is a bargain between the public and authors; you produce something and I'll grant you a limited monopoly on that thing so you'll do it again. The key word here is "bargain". As soon as one side of the bargain feels they are getting screwed they will ignore the bargain.
That's what's happening right now. Copyright law has moved so in favor of copyright holders that these days the entertainment industry requires a great deal of legislation to protect itself from its customers.
I know it sounds obvious, but this won't work. No matter how much money you spend in Washington, once you've broken your side of the bargain, everyone loses, including you. This is a shame, because copyright is a valuable concept, and we're worse off if we lose it.
Tim O'Reilly was talking about a different subject, but he put it best in his "pissing in the well" letter. Break the copyright bargain at your peril.
Mistake #1: everyone needs to be able to sit down at any machine within an organization and get right to work.
True in something like a call center or a bank branch, but for the most part in those situations you're interacting with an application on which you've had some level of training, some of which is about how to use the interface in the first place.
But for most of us the set of machines we deal with from day to day doesn't change much, and we're free to set them up the way we like. In situations where more than one person uses a particular machine, I find that people are pretty rational about keeping customization to a minimum.
Mistake #2: the science of user interface design can predict what works for me.
Wrong. It is very useful for predicting interface needs of a group of users about whom your knowledge is incomplete, but it can tell you nothing about the needs of a particular user. You can make assumptions, and if that particular user is similar to your hypothetical user, you may even be right. But you don't know for sure.
The only person who knows for sure if an interface works is the person using it. And that knowledge doesn't apply to anyone else. That's the whole point of customization, or skinning, or whatever--an interface, good or bad, can be made better (or worse) by a user for that user.
I dunno. In "Just for Fun" Torvalds writes about meeting at Apple where Jobs tried his damnedest to get him on board with Linux. As I recall, Linus wasn't real impressed with microkernels and had no interest in where Apple was going with BSD.
It sounded to me like Apple would have gone with Linux, but without not without Torvalds on the payroll.
You said:
This is the best idea I've heard for handling copyright of digital material so far.
And it will never happen.
Why would the publishing industry give up what their lobbying dollars bought them in 1997? They *know* they're never going to have a secure copy-protection scheme, and it doesn't make any difference. Because they have the DMCA behind them, *any* copy protection scheme (even one as lame as this) has the force of law and the corresponding penalties for circumvention. The only reason they put any effort at all into trying to develop a copy-protection scheme with some level of technial merit is to weed out the average bozos so they don't have to file so many lawsuits.
Like I said, great idea, but you're about 5 years too late.
It's one thing when a user interface is frustrating, it's another when it's deadly.
The horizontal handles with the latch built in are called crash bars for a reason: when there's a fire in a building and that crowd of screaming people hit those exit doors, you want them opening out, not in.
Amazing how often this is ignored.