They're just going after stores where RIAA reps have found and purchased unlicensed compilations (BEST OF LATIN HITS!, etc.) or counterfeit copies of commercial releases. It's really not significantly different from the bootleg raids they do now and then. Billboard has a more detailed article.
Not to mention product comercials before a movie you have paid for...
Not just commercials...commercials that are shot on video and blown up to 35mm so that even if they're vaguely creative or entertaining they still look like complete shit!
I don't think it's necessary to call this out; the word "skipping" implies a complete lack of interaction with the thing being skipped (Merriam-Webster Collegiate: "to pass over without notice or mention"). E.g., skipping tracks on a CD, skipping pages in a book, skipping class at school. "Commercial removal", on the other hand, implies that the commercials are being excised from the copyrighted work; e.g., removing pages from a book, etc. ReplayTV does not remove commercials embedded in the work, it merely ignores them.
Even if ReplayTV removed the commercials completely from the copy on disk, I know of no provision of copyright law that would prohibit it. Once you have a legal copy of a copyrighted work, you have the right to mangle it as you see fit. (This situation might be different somehow in that the copies in question are "fair-use" copies, however.)
The plaintiffs are on shakier ground when dealing with redistribution of the copies.
I think this suit is a fantastic idea. If the court issues a declaratory judgement (rather than throwing the suit out), there'll be a foundation to stand on for supporting or fighting the current state of copyright law whatever the judgement holds. The uncertainty around what's legit and what isn't needs to be cleared up.
Remove the need to be commercially competitive, and the quality of the programmes goes up - the incentive is to make something that people want to listen to.
Mark my words, the Winblows platform will be emulating this behavior within their usual UI 5 year lag.
This is probably one of the drivers behind Microsoft's OFS initiative. Mac files carry around their own metadata, while Windows uses the Registry. By abstracting the filesystem out a level, MS makes it easier to add this kind of functionality. (It also makes it easier for them to enforce DRM schemes through the OS, but I'm sure that's just an unintended side effect.;-)
Per my (IANAL) reading of 18 USC 842(p) they would have to prove his intent and or knowledge in publishing the information; that can be tricky to prove in court and may be part of why they dropped the charges.
(2) Prohibition. - It shall be unlawful for any person -
(A) to teach or demonstrate the making or use of an explosive, a destructive device, or a weapon of mass destruction, or to distribute by any means information pertaining to, in whole or in part, the manufacture or use of an explosive, destructive device, or weapon of mass destruction,
with the intent that the teaching, demonstration, or information be used for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence; or
(B) to teach or demonstrate to any person the making or use of an explosive, a destructive device, or a weapon of mass destruction, or to distribute to any person, by any means, information pertaining to, in whole or in part, the manufacture or use of an explosive, destructive device, or weapon of mass destruction, knowing that such person intends to use the teaching, demonstration, or information for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence.
It's always interesting to read the actual law when it gets cited in cases like this -- it really strips away the media bullshit. http://uscode.house.gov/usc.htm is a good online resource...
Obviously it has a lot of potential, but is it going to live up to it? Personally I don't care about getting dedicated channels for the genres I like if all they're going to do is play the fifteen most obvious tracks from that genre over and over 24 hours a day. From the overviews on their web site it looks like they're programming for casual listeners who don't want to be startled by anything unfamiliar. You're going to hear the Eagles and Bee Gees on the '70s channel, "Rhapsody In Blue" and "The Rite Of Spring" on the Classical channel, "Take 5" and "So What" on the Jazz channel. If you have any particular interest in a kind of music you're going to be bored out of your skull after two or three hours of listening, just like regular radio...same shit, different frequency!
Give me an "all-80s" station programmed by Ira Robbins and I might think about shelling out cash money to hear it...
This is step 1: establish a "copy protection scheme" on CDs. Step 2 will be the real killer: going after each and every application that's capable of defeating it, using the DMCA as the Big Stick.
I find it curious that the article was exclusively "comic books vs internet comics", and ignored any comparison to comic STRIPS. Are the newspaper comics strips simply not considered an art form?
That's what struck me as strange about one of Groth's points (as quoted by Salon -- I haven't read his original essay). Groth and the Journal treat comic strips as seriously as they treat comic books, so why is Groth using the similarity between web comics and newspaper strips as a reason to dismiss web comics? He doesn't dismiss Krazy Kat or Pogo or Peanuts as being inherently inferior to Love and Rockets or Eightball. At least, I don't remember having seen him do that, and until recently I read the Journal religiously.
A big part of Groth's personality is his willingness to be in-your-face with "extreme" opinions about things that nobody outside the world of hardcore comics geekdom really even knows (let alone cares) about. I don't think that a blanket dismissal of the entire form is a good launching point for a serious discussion about the future of online comics -- it's like opening a conversation about the future of television syndication by insisting that any sitcom shot on video instead of film is inherently worthless...
Of the states involved in the suit, New Mexico is by far the poorest. If any state was a candidate for a "buyout", NM was.
(They're also the state whose withdrawal is least likely to affect the eventual outcome.)
Re:Canadian version alive and kickin'
on
Webvan Out Of Gas
·
· Score: 1
It makes me wonder what the Webvan experience was like. Not enough repeat customers? What did they charge anyway?
The Webvan experience was very customer-service focused, at least at first. We started using Webvan on Oakland in fall '99 or so and loved it; we got near-perfect fill rates, they were almost always on time with deliveries and absolutely always let us know when they were going to run late, etc. Towards the middle of last year, though, they started to mispull items and miss their delivery windows. Then they went from half-hour to one-hour devliery windows and stopped delivering on weekends. We finally stopped using them after they not only failed to deliver an order (it was never even pulled for delivery!) but they didn't even CALL US to let us know what was happening. Some other folks at work had similar problems with them that weekend; I assumed that they has some kind of system meltdown; whatever the cause, though, they completely lost our trust at that point.
All Webvan really had to offer was service; compared to the grocery stores in our area Webvan cost a little more and had a more limited selection, but the small premium was worth it for the time and effort it saved us. Once the service level dropped there was no longer any point in using Webvan.
The delivery people were always friendly and helpful and the meats and produce stayed first-rate until we went back to conventional grocery shopping, so we do miss the experience. I hope someone else moves into the grocery-delivery space someday, 'cause I'd be happy to cut those annoying store visits out of my life again.
A significant chunk of this functionality is implemented in the Nokia Media Terminal. It doesn't have some of the hardware (no tray for CDs/DVDs) but there are certainly enough interfaces that you could plug in your own...and if they really open-source the software, the sky is the limit from there.
My Ph.D. thesis is there. I'm going write them a note telling them they cannot sell it.
They may not be selling it. UMI makes available abstracts for papers they can't (and don't) sell.
UMI is at http://www.umi.com. They have answers on their site to a lot of questions that are coming up here. It might be worth peoples' time to do a little research before flying off the handle...
Yes, but you're not supposed to throw away the keepcase! You keep the CD-ROM in it, just like you do with the (plastic) jewel case most CD-ROMs come in now. Yes, it will probably hit landfill eventually, but you know the outer box and inner cardboard insert of most software packaging goes straight to the landfill most of the time.
There are also multidisc DVD-style keep cases available as there are more multidisc DVD sets out there (The Abyss, etc.).
I think we'll see pretty much all entertainment software sold in keepcases in a few years. The retailers will push for it as soon as they realize that software sold that way will fit in the same plastic security holders as DVDs.
Notice he was using a video transmitter, which uses a lot of the frequency spectrum. It's probably simply covering most of the band continuously.
Indeed it was. I had the exact same video transmitter he did -- the X10 one -- and was very happy with it until I set up a Proxim Symphony wireless network. Symphony frequency-hops and several of the frequencies it hopped through were used by the X10 transmitter. So every few seconds, fft-fft-fft-fft-fft went the TV audio as a bar of noise walked down the screen. The wireless network didn't seem to be affected by the A/V transmitter, though.
I ended up hard-wiring the A/V connection, which was more fun anyway (and a good excuse to upgrade a component or two) but it certainly made me think harder about 2.4GHz as a "general" wireless solution.
Now go to http:// www.bigcharts.com/intchart/frames/frames.asp?symb= MSOF&time=8&freq=1 and check out what MSOF did around that time. On November 30, it opens at 1/16th. Closes at 1/8th. Dec 1, closes at 3/16. Dec 2, 3/8. Dec 3, 7/16. So in three days of trading, anyone with MSOF has septupled the value of their holdings.
It gets better. People take profits over the next few sessions and the stock troughs a bit. But in the second half of the week it starts really charging. It closes the next Monday, Dec 13, at well over a point. And if you bought in at 1/16ths and sold with perfect timing when MSOF peaked at 1 1/4, you would have turned a $1000 investment into $20k in under two weeks.
I interviewed at C|Net last year and was 32 at the time. One of the people who interviewed me actually asked me how well I thought I could deal with the fact that so many people who worked there were younger than me -- at 32, for Christ's sake! Talk about your Logan's Run effect!
As far as the management thing is concerned -- good programmers who refuse to go into management should keep in mind that they're perpetuating the problem of management that doesn't understand or appreciate programming. The only way to fix that particular problem is to colonize the management chain.
"Do we have people maliciously jamming up freeways with their cars 'just because they can'? Because there aren't any 'safeguards' to stop their traffic?"
Nope...
Clearly you've never been in downtown SF at rush hour on the last Friday of the month, when gazillions of bicyclists get together to intentionally foul up traffic.
The idea of a DVD that will degrade to an unplayable state does look stupid, but the thing that killed DIVX was the implied erosion of privacy. At least these guys pay very strong attention to bolstering the DVD rental industry while explicitly respecting people's privacy.
Well, except that this doesn't bolster the rental industry at all -- it completely bypasses it. Blockbuster and Hollywood Video aren't going to want to sell the things:
Rental DVD
Customer pays $3-4/rental
Every rental past initial $10-$15 wholesale cost is pure profit
Significant percentage of customers return DVDs late, raising per-customer-visit revenue further
Sooner or later customer has to return to store to return DVD, and will probably leave with another one.
Self-destructing DVDs
Customer pays $3-4 for disc
No "pure profit" point
No chance of late fee income
No automatic opportunity for return business
I can see this making it to market, but it would be playing to a completely different audience than "conventional" DVDs. Kind of like those bins of grade-Z tapes and CDs you see at drug stores and gas stations. These aren't any threat to anyone.
I seem to remember several attempts to do this with VHS tapes back in the day. Some kind of gizmo that wouldn't let you rewind the tape more than X times comes to mind, as well as something that would slap a magnet against the tape after X plays. You can see how far those got!
Plus, as you say, when you buy a CD you get more than the bits on the disc; you also get the lyrics, liner notes, etc. that (to me at least) contribute to the whole musical experience.
I'm not looking forward to the first time I have to file an insurance claim on $5000 worth of MP3s destroyed in a fire.
Slashdot Mirror
Penn & Teller's new Showtime series Penn & Teller: Bullshit! is going to cover some of this ground as well.
They're just going after stores where RIAA reps have found and purchased unlicensed compilations (BEST OF LATIN HITS!, etc.) or counterfeit copies of commercial releases. It's really not significantly different from the bootleg raids they do now and then. Billboard has a more detailed article.
Not to mention product comercials before a movie you have paid for...
Not just commercials...commercials that are shot on video and blown up to 35mm so that even if they're vaguely creative or entertaining they still look like complete shit!
I don't think it's necessary to call this out; the word "skipping" implies a complete lack of interaction with the thing being skipped (Merriam-Webster Collegiate: "to pass over without notice or mention"). E.g., skipping tracks on a CD, skipping pages in a book, skipping class at school. "Commercial removal", on the other hand, implies that the commercials are being excised from the copyrighted work; e.g., removing pages from a book, etc. ReplayTV does not remove commercials embedded in the work, it merely ignores them.
Even if ReplayTV removed the commercials completely from the copy on disk, I know of no provision of copyright law that would prohibit it. Once you have a legal copy of a copyrighted work, you have the right to mangle it as you see fit. (This situation might be different somehow in that the copies in question are "fair-use" copies, however.)
The plaintiffs are on shakier ground when dealing with redistribution of the copies.
I think this suit is a fantastic idea. If the court issues a declaratory judgement (rather than throwing the suit out), there'll be a foundation to stand on for supporting or fighting the current state of copyright law whatever the judgement holds. The uncertainty around what's legit and what isn't needs to be cleared up.
Remove the need to be commercially competitive, and the quality of the programmes goes up - the incentive is to make something that people want to listen to.
In the States, we call this "HBO".
(showing age). The 15 minute entertainment show - Max + videos (zoolookology anyone?) was much sharper than anything that came later.
Fondly remembered for airing the first Martini Ranch video...still the only place I ever saw it.
Mark my words, the Winblows platform will be emulating this behavior within their usual UI 5 year lag.
This is probably one of the drivers behind Microsoft's OFS initiative. Mac files carry around their own metadata, while Windows uses the Registry. By abstracting the filesystem out a level, MS makes it easier to add this kind of functionality. (It also makes it easier for them to enforce DRM schemes through the OS, but I'm sure that's just an unintended side effect. ;-)
Per my (IANAL) reading of 18 USC 842(p) they would have to prove his intent and or knowledge in publishing the information; that can be tricky to prove in court and may be part of why they dropped the charges.
It's always interesting to read the actual law when it gets cited in cases like this -- it really strips away the media bullshit. http://uscode.house.gov/usc.htm is a good online resource...
How about a case study book? A series of case study books?
A case study book on Open Source tools/applications in enterprise environments would be really helpful.
Obviously it has a lot of potential, but is it going to live up to it? Personally I don't care about getting dedicated channels for the genres I like if all they're going to do is play the fifteen most obvious tracks from that genre over and over 24 hours a day. From the overviews on their web site it looks like they're programming for casual listeners who don't want to be startled by anything unfamiliar. You're going to hear the Eagles and Bee Gees on the '70s channel, "Rhapsody In Blue" and "The Rite Of Spring" on the Classical channel, "Take 5" and "So What" on the Jazz channel. If you have any particular interest in a kind of music you're going to be bored out of your skull after two or three hours of listening, just like regular radio...same shit, different frequency!
Give me an "all-80s" station programmed by Ira Robbins and I might think about shelling out cash money to hear it...
This is step 1: establish a "copy protection scheme" on CDs. Step 2 will be the real killer: going after each and every application that's capable of defeating it, using the DMCA as the Big Stick.
I find it curious that the article was exclusively "comic books vs internet comics", and ignored any comparison to comic STRIPS. Are the newspaper comics strips simply not considered an art form?
That's what struck me as strange about one of Groth's points (as quoted by Salon -- I haven't read his original essay). Groth and the Journal treat comic strips as seriously as they treat comic books, so why is Groth using the similarity between web comics and newspaper strips as a reason to dismiss web comics? He doesn't dismiss Krazy Kat or Pogo or Peanuts as being inherently inferior to Love and Rockets or Eightball. At least, I don't remember having seen him do that, and until recently I read the Journal religiously.
A big part of Groth's personality is his willingness to be in-your-face with "extreme" opinions about things that nobody outside the world of hardcore comics geekdom really even knows (let alone cares) about. I don't think that a blanket dismissal of the entire form is a good launching point for a serious discussion about the future of online comics -- it's like opening a conversation about the future of television syndication by insisting that any sitcom shot on video instead of film is inherently worthless...
Of the states involved in the suit, New Mexico is by far the poorest. If any state was a candidate for a "buyout", NM was.
(They're also the state whose withdrawal is least likely to affect the eventual outcome.)
The Webvan experience was very customer-service focused, at least at first. We started using Webvan on Oakland in fall '99 or so and loved it; we got near-perfect fill rates, they were almost always on time with deliveries and absolutely always let us know when they were going to run late, etc. Towards the middle of last year, though, they started to mispull items and miss their delivery windows. Then they went from half-hour to one-hour devliery windows and stopped delivering on weekends. We finally stopped using them after they not only failed to deliver an order (it was never even pulled for delivery!) but they didn't even CALL US to let us know what was happening. Some other folks at work had similar problems with them that weekend; I assumed that they has some kind of system meltdown; whatever the cause, though, they completely lost our trust at that point.
All Webvan really had to offer was service; compared to the grocery stores in our area Webvan cost a little more and had a more limited selection, but the small premium was worth it for the time and effort it saved us. Once the service level dropped there was no longer any point in using Webvan.
The delivery people were always friendly and helpful and the meats and produce stayed first-rate until we went back to conventional grocery shopping, so we do miss the experience. I hope someone else moves into the grocery-delivery space someday, 'cause I'd be happy to cut those annoying store visits out of my life again.
A significant chunk of this functionality is implemented in the Nokia Media Terminal. It doesn't have some of the hardware (no tray for CDs/DVDs) but there are certainly enough interfaces that you could plug in your own...and if they really open-source the software, the sky is the limit from there.
My Ph.D. thesis is there. I'm going write them a note telling them they cannot sell it.
They may not be selling it. UMI makes available abstracts for papers they can't (and don't) sell.
UMI is at http://www.umi.com. They have answers on their site to a lot of questions that are coming up here. It might be worth peoples' time to do a little research before flying off the handle...
There are also multidisc DVD-style keep cases available as there are more multidisc DVD sets out there (The Abyss, etc.).
I think we'll see pretty much all entertainment software sold in keepcases in a few years. The retailers will push for it as soon as they realize that software sold that way will fit in the same plastic security holders as DVDs.
Indeed it was. I had the exact same video transmitter he did -- the X10 one -- and was very happy with it until I set up a Proxim Symphony wireless network. Symphony frequency-hops and several of the frequencies it hopped through were used by the X10 transmitter. So every few seconds, fft-fft-fft-fft-fft went the TV audio as a bar of noise walked down the screen. The wireless network didn't seem to be affected by the A/V transmitter, though.
I ended up hard-wiring the A/V connection, which was more fun anyway (and a good excuse to upgrade a component or two) but it certainly made me think harder about 2.4GHz as a "general" wireless solution.
Now go to http:// www.bigcharts.com/intchart/frames/frames.asp?symb= MSOF&time=8&freq=1 and check out what MSOF did around that time. On November 30, it opens at 1/16th. Closes at 1/8th. Dec 1, closes at 3/16. Dec 2, 3/8. Dec 3, 7/16. So in three days of trading, anyone with MSOF has septupled the value of their holdings.
It gets better. People take profits over the next few sessions and the stock troughs a bit. But in the second half of the week it starts really charging. It closes the next Monday, Dec 13, at well over a point. And if you bought in at 1/16ths and sold with perfect timing when MSOF peaked at 1 1/4, you would have turned a $1000 investment into $20k in under two weeks.
As far as the management thing is concerned -- good programmers who refuse to go into management should keep in mind that they're perpetuating the problem of management that doesn't understand or appreciate programming. The only way to fix that particular problem is to colonize the management chain.
They would probably use it as an adjunct to the "up/down" buttons. Makes sense for scrolling.
Nope...
Clearly you've never been in downtown SF at rush hour on the last Friday of the month, when gazillions of bicyclists get together to intentionally foul up traffic.
Well, except that this doesn't bolster the rental industry at all -- it completely bypasses it. Blockbuster and Hollywood Video aren't going to want to sell the things:
Rental DVD
Self-destructing DVDs
I can see this making it to market, but it would be playing to a completely different audience than "conventional" DVDs. Kind of like those bins of grade-Z tapes and CDs you see at drug stores and gas stations. These aren't any threat to anyone.
I seem to remember several attempts to do this with VHS tapes back in the day. Some kind of gizmo that wouldn't let you rewind the tape more than X times comes to mind, as well as something that would slap a magnet against the tape after X plays. You can see how far those got!
(BTW, I'm a Netflix Marquee man myself.)
I believe GemStar (the VCR+ people -- they also own TVGuide) have the patent on interactive program guides.
I'm not looking forward to the first time I have to file an insurance claim on $5000 worth of MP3s destroyed in a fire.